Taking on management duties can be great for your career but—if you aren't careful—potentially terrible for your sanity.
People think the company boss has it made. And they're right—well, sort of. As the boss, you enjoy pretty great pay, added benefits and the personal satisfaction of achieving career goals you've spent years working toward. But there's a tradeoff.
Climbing the ladder comes with added responsibilities, a packed schedule, and the pressure of needing to set the tone for your entire organization.
Not sleeping well? No kidding. Suddenly, the office intern looks like she's the one who has it made.
Follow these practical tips to help you manage your sleep and sanity, when you're also responsible for managing others.
Being the boss means you're in demand, almost all the time, from almost everybody you work with. But this doesn't mean exhaustion is unavoidable.
"The people that are really effective leaders are very good at planning out their time in advance," says Scott Stossel, editor of the Atlantic and author of My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind.
Part of that planning should include establishing—and sticking to—a routine in your week, says Art Pammenter, a San Diego-based executive coach and psychologist. Block out time to accomplish regular tasks—returning phone calls, signing paperwork, clearing your inbox—while also leaving room for flexibility to respond to urgent matters.
Once you've established your main priorities for the day or week, communicate them to your team members, especially your assistant. Hold yourself accountable to maintaining this routine. Do what you said when you said you'd do it, and then stop when you said you'd stop. Then move on to the next thing. Believe it or not, this is actually possible—but only if you're willing to work at it.
Similarly, it might seem like you can't escape email in the evenings, but turning off your phone during set hours each evening can go a long way toward reducing your stress. Set aside a block of nonwork time—for example, that you won't respond to email between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.—and tell your team not to expect an immediate response from you then, Stossel says.
Go ahead and carve out time to go to the gym, get a massage, or decompress during the workweek. Tell your assistant to leave those times open and to only contact you during them if a true crisis arises.
The more you can control how you spend your time, the less stressed you are likely to feel.
"There's a certain amount of social isolation that occurs as you rise through an organization," says James Campbell Quick, a professor of leadership at the University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Manchester in the U.K. "You're not buddies with the people working for you. You might have good relationships with them, but you're responsible for them in a different way."
Just as you're a source of support for your team, you need your own strong support system, both personally and professionally, outside of the office.
"When it comes to complex situations and difficult decisions, getting insight and perspectives from others can help reduce your cognitive load and help you make better decisions," says David Ballard, assistant executive director for organizational excellence at the American Psychological Association.
Build strong professional-peer relationships outside of your organization by joining groups that bring together executives and high-performance leaders, Quick adds. But remember to nurture your nonwork persona as well. Hanging out and catching up with friends can help you feel, for lack of a better word, like a normal human being—and not just a human extension of your company. You have a life outside of your job—live it!
Sometimes, not being able to shake the demands of a high-power position requires more than just an organized schedule and dinner with pals on the weekend. "If you're struggling with the pressures that come with a senior position, there's no shame in asking for professional help," says Ballard.
Traditional therapy or counseling should be considered if the chronic stress is affecting your health, relationships, and job performance, he says. Psychotherapy can help you cope with life problems; develop healthier, more effective habits; and change your thought and behavior patterns that are interfering with your ability to function day-to-day, both on the job and at home.
If your problems are mainly confined to work, a skilled executive coach can also help you get a better handle on things. An experienced executive coach understands the pressures of being the boss and can give you unbiased, confidential advice on how to manage those stressors effectively and improve your job performance.
All this being said, if you make these attempts to restore the calm, but you still find yourself overworked and overwhelmed, maybe you're not the problem. It could be that you need to find a new employer who wants to see you excel as a boss—and also as a well-adjusted human being.
This article originally appeared on Monster and is reprinted with permission.
As it introduces its next generation of TV sticks and players this fall, the country's most popular enabler of cord cutting is already thinking beyond set-top boxes. Roku today commands 49% of the U.S. streaming-device market, ahead of Google and Amazon. But behind the scenes, the hardware maker is steadily becoming more of a streaming platform, an interesting move considering Roku's origins as a Netflix spin-out in 2008. In the past two years, cable providers, including Time Warner, Charter, and, soon, Comcast, have added their own streaming services, and dozens of new TV shows, on Roku, making the platform even more of a one-stop shop for television. Meanwhile, smart-TV makers such as Sharp, Insignia, and Hisense have installed Roku's in the back ends of their products, giving users access to Amazon Instant Video, Netflix, Hulu, and more. "We believe that the [operating system] phenomenon is now happening with TVs," says Roku CEO Anthony Wood. "Our business is to distribute our system to as many TV screens as we can and then monetize that base." The early results are promising: Just two years into its smart-TV efforts, Roku claims 15% of the market (behind Google's 18%) and has seen its media and licensing sector grow from 20% to 44% of gross profit. And with 10.6 million subscribers across cable, TV, and devices, Roku can sell valuable demographic data to advertisers and marketers eager to reach cord cutters. "One aspect that's an advantage for us is we're a neutral party, we don't make our own content," says Wood. "We're a level playing field for content providers to compete on." —Nikita Richardson
Milestones: In September, Roku landed in Asia, announcing a licensing deal with PLDT, the Philippines' largest telecom company.
Challenges: Google's Chromecast device is growing more powerful, thanks to full integration with its Chrome web browser and the release earlier this fall of a new 4K-enabled version of the device.
Buzz: Positive
Digging deeper: 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki wants scientists to use her genomic database to scale research.
This past August, with backing from Pfizer, researchers from 23andMe and Massachusetts General Hospital sent a ripple through the scientific community with the announcement that they had identified several genetic markers associated with depression, ending years of frustrated efforts to locate the genetic risks for the pervasive mental illness. Just as significant: The study was based on data from more than 120,000 people who had reported a diagnosis of depression to 23andMe, the genetics testing-kit company that has become a hit with people searching for their personal history in their DNA. A study of this size "wouldn't have been possible before," says 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki. "We're hoping to enable a kind of research that has never been done." The Silicon Valley company has come a long way since 2013, when federal regulators ordered Wojcicki and her team to stop marketing its at-home genomics service. Today, it is working closely with the Food and Drug Administration to share select genetic-derived health reports directly with consumers—without a doctor's note. The vast majority of 23andMe's 1.2 million customers, who sign up for an at-home genetic test, agree to participate in research studies and surveys. So far, they've answered more than 350 million survey questions. The company says the scientific community is now waking up to the potential of this database, though 23andMe has been engaging in research projects for years. "Research studies don't normally have hundreds of thousands of people," says Wojcicki. "We can help with that." —Christina Farr
Milestones: 23andMe's new Genotyping Services for Research program has made it possible for scientists to access customer data for their own studies.
Challenges: Some customers are wondering whether they should receive compensation for making their DNA available to researchers.
Milestones: Consumer electronics maker HTC is capitalizing on the success of its Vive virtual-reality device; it recently turned the division into a wholly owned subsidiary and launched a new $100 million VR accelerator.
Challenges: The company faces wider financial issues, and with revenue down 44% year over year, sales of its new HTC 10 phone continue to flag. In August, T-Mobile stopped selling the phone after just two months.
Milestones: In September, the sales software maker announced Einstein, a new suite of AI-enabled products designed to help clients by predicting the most promising sales leads and alerting them when a competitor hones in on their territory.
Challenges: Salesforce hopes to fend off both Oracle and Microsoft, which recently beat out the company to purchase LinkedIn for $26.2 billion.
Milestones: In an effort to build more long-term relationships with clients, coworking-space startup WeWork is experimenting with a yearlong lease option with a significant discount.
Challenges: After cutting its profit forecast by 78%, an internal memo from CEO Adam Neumann recently urged employees to save energy, reduce the number of expensed meals, and take other cost-cutting measures.
Milestones: This month, Sony will release a new 4K- and high-dynamic range-enabled Pro version of its popular PS4 console in a bid to attract players looking for higher-quality gaming experiences.
Challenges: Sony follows in the footsteps of rival Microsoft and its Xbox One S console (released earlier this year) and, with future iterations, promises to feature more powerful graphic-rendering software than the PS4 Pro.
Milestones: In August, Kind became the first snack manufacturer to break out its added sugar numbers, two years ahead of the FDA's deadline to publish such information. Meanwhile, the company is rolling out new fruit bars that contain between 14% and 56% less added sugar than prior recipes.
Challenges: With U.S. sales of energy and nutrition bars hitting $2.5 billion in 2015, big players PepsiCo and Hershey are joining the fray with their own healthy snack brands.
Milestones: Looking to diversify its user base and find new revenue streams, online education site Coursera recently launched Coursera for Business, which companies such as L'Oréal, Axis Bank, and BCG will use to train their employees and enroll new talent.
Challenges: Coursera is still struggling to become profitable, as many people use its online courses for free, and is running up against competitors such as Harvard Business School and Udacity for the same customers.
Milestones: Originally focused on offering short-term, credit-building loans to people in Africa and India, InVenture has taken a new name, Tala, and shifted to mobile banking services, allowing users to make and send payments and track their credit score in real time.
Challenges:Tala is still relatively small and has yet to reach the size or potential of African mobile payments juggernauts like Safaricom's M-Pesa, which currently has more than 20 million users in Kenya.
Milestones:Equinox has hired Four Seasons exec Chris Norton as the first CEO of its forthcoming luxury hotel brand, due in 2019. Earlier this summer, Equinox also tapped Generator Hostels founder Josh Wyatt as the hotel's president.
Challenges: With the first hotel's grand opening still nearly three years away, the gym brand must maintain its momentum to avoid playing catch-up with other wellness-themed brands, including Barry Sternlicht's growing 1 Hotels, which feature SoulCycle studios.
These tips can help you stick to the point and keep your listeners interested.
"I'm having the absolute worst day," a friend of mine said as she sighed and plopped herself down in the chair across from me at a restaurant where we were meeting for after-work drinks and appetizers.
"Oh, no! What's going on?" I asked her, giving her the prompt she needed to launch into her long-winded venting session about her no-good, terrible, absolutely horrible day.
"It all started this morning," she began. "I slept through my alarm. I normally get up at 6:30, but today I didn't make it out of bed until 7. No, maybe it was closer to 7:10. Actually, no, it was definitely 7:15 because I remember thinking, 'Wow, I'm so late!' So, I finally get out of bed at 7:15—actually, let's say 7:20 just to be safe . . ."
I took a deep breath and braced myself for at least another five minutes of rambling through totally unnecessary details. Why? Well, to be brutally honest, because I know that my friend isn't exactly the most engaging storyteller I've ever met—meaning it was going to take all of my attention and willpower to make it through her seemingly endless and impossible-to-follow tale of woe.
You've been there before, right? We've all experienced those moments when we've had to do our best to actively listen while someone's droning his or her way through a story more long-winded than Moby-Dick. And, what's even worse than that? Being the person who's rambling incessantly.
Let's face it—we're not all natural-born storytellers. But that doesn't mean we don't run into a ton of different situations where we need to do just that. Whether you need to explain a time you overcame a challenge in a job interview or share a catchy personal anecdote at a networking event, we all run into those instances in which we need to craft a compelling narrative—preferably without our audience's eyes glazing over.
So, how can you tell a story that's interesting and engaging? Well, these five tips are a great place to start.
Regardless of whether you're writing or speaking, an attention-grabbing introduction is the first key to making sure you've hooked your audience—and this doesn't mean starting with a cliché "Once upon a time," or "Well, it was a rainy Tuesday . . . "
So what sorts of tactics can you employ for your introduction? The best thing to do is to start your story with something that'll shock or intrigue your conversational partner.
For example, perhaps an interviewer has asked you about the biggest challenge you've faced and the steps you took to overcome it. Rather than beginning with the expected repetition of, "The biggest challenge I've ever faced is . . . ", you could jump right into the meat and potatoes by saying something like, "At my previous job, we experienced a major malfunction and our entire office lost access to all of our files on the very same afternoon."
Not only does this approach give you the opportunity to answer the question right away—without getting caught up in the meaningless details—but it also likely hooked your interviewer. Now she's left wondering how it happened, why it happened, and what exactly you did to fix it.
See how much impact a powerful introduction can have?
Have you ever listened to someone's story only to be left thinking, "Umm, and . . . ?" That person likely just told a narrative without a clear arc—meaning you were left with no resolution or conclusion, and instead felt as if you wasted minutes of your life listening to a completely pointless tale.
Needless to say, you don't want to be that person who leaves people hanging. So before launching into an anecdote that you're so convinced is interesting, take a moment to confirm that your story has an actual beginning, middle, and—perhaps most importantly—an end.
I know, it seems painfully simple. But it's a crucial step that's often missed.
I can't blame you if your eyes tripped over this tip and you immediately thought, "Wait, what?" But you'd be surprised at how easy a trap this is to fall into.
More often than not—particularly for job interviews or professional functions—we commit our stories to memory. We have canned anecdotes ready to whip out of our back pockets at a moment's notice.
And while this is helpful for ensuring that you're always armed and ready with a somewhat interesting narrative, it can have dire consequences on your delivery. Instead of seeming involved and engaged in your own story, you resemble a robot just mechanically reciting your way through it.
So, as obvious as it might seem, make an effort to actually appear excited about what you're sharing. A little animation can go a long way. And, if you don't appear to be interested in your story, why should anyone else?
Here's a little writer's trick you can use to make your anecdotes that much more engaging: Use present tense.
No, it doesn't matter if you're recounting a tale of something that happened years ago. You can set the scene, and then use present language to give your story a greater sense of relevance and immediacy—which will keep your audience that much more interested.
Not convinced? Which one of these sounds more compelling: "A few years ago, I was walking on my college campus . . . " or, "It's my sophomore year in college, and I'm walking from my afternoon class back to my dorm room . . . "?
It's a little tweak. But it can have a pretty large impact.
This is going to sound pretty bad, but do your best to stay with me. As humans, we're all pretty selfish and self-absorbed—meaning it can be tough for us to be interested in things that don't directly or personally involve us.
Think about the last time you had to sit through a friend scrolling through and narrating her endless chain of vacation photos, and you'll quickly realize that I'm right.
So unless you're recounting the time you tamed a wild lion or shook hands with the Dalai Lama, most people aren't going to be as actively interested in your story as you are—which means brevity is important.
I know—you may think that all of those minor details are what really gives your narrative some extra oomph and some added context, but you're usually better off dropping them entirely to keep your story as concise as possible.
We're not all natural storytellers. But that doesn't mean we don't frequently come across occasions when we need to share an engaging anecdote.
If you're tired of watching people's eyes glaze over while they mentally create their grocery lists during your spiel, these five key tips are for you. Give them a try, and you're sure to have your audience's full and undivided attention.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
Meetup isn't the only tech company getting people to connect in person. Here are four others that are leveraging digital networking for real-world meetings.
Recent updates let users browse upcoming events by date and category, while Featured Events, curated by real humans, surfaces activities in major cities.
In March, the women-focused, Tinder-ish dating site launched a feature called BFF, which lets users swipe for local platonic buddies. Early popularity has encouraged the release of BumbleBizz, for professional networking, this fall.
The workplace messaging app is increasingly being used by people to connect, online and offline, to discuss specific interests. The expat community on the Nomad List uses Slack to share advice and meet one another, while #BlackMenInTech hosts educational brunches.
Recently ranked a "top mobile app for millennials" by comScore, MeetMe helps its 3.5 million monthly active users find people to chat with based on location and interests, and in July struck a deal to acquire the dating app Skout, which helps users connect with people in cities they plan to visit.
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Giving a powerful presentation is both an art and a science. Here's a look at the science.
I see you, checking your smartphone under the table in the middle of the presentation. I've done it, too. In fact, during many presentations, no one in the audience is really paying attention.
Blame it on our "culture of distraction" if you like, but our supposedly diminishing attention spans don't change the fact that many presentations are just badly constructed. Perfectly arranged graphics, careful wording, and polished visuals may not be enough to capture an audience's attention. Truly engaging an audience is about finding the right blend of art and science.
Here's a look at some of the common presentation pitfalls, backed by the science behind how humans process information, so you can perfect the art of presenting.
Their message aside, speakers need to make sure that all the attention is on them. That isn't easy. It means being present in a way that not only informs and entertains but also demonstrates an understanding of how an audience learns—all before deciding how to deliver their information accordingly. While that may sound like a tall order, consider this: Research suggests that up to 80% to 90% of the information that our brains process is visual, so we are hardwired to think and remember in pictures.
When you're building a presentation, the key is to select not just the right visuals, but also storylines to support those visuals. That way, you'll maintain your audience's attention while ensuring they'll walk away actually remembering it. By focusing on illuminating visual ideas—by telling a story visually—you'll create a more memorable and compelling presentation every time.
Many presentations are full of text- or data-heavy slides that an audience has to read and interpret while listening to what you're saying.
This doesn't usually work. What many consider to be multitasking is actually a rapid transition between tasks, so an audience that's both reading and listening is simply gleaning disconnected bits and pieces rather than absorbing a comprehensive message.
A good presentation doesn't split an audience's focus but directs attention toward a key message the whole time. By trading out those beloved bullet points—even if you think they're really concise—in favor of visuals that aid and support what you're saying, you'll help your audience focus, absorb, and remember.
In order to remember things, our brains naturally develop associations between one concept and the next. Metaphors, descriptive words, and images all help build correlations that activate the brain's sensory cortices. In other words, these imaginative elements help people engage on a deeper, more complete cognitive level.
When you deliver a presentation in the form of a story, it becomes more relatable and helps your audience develop an emotional connection with the material. This in turn coaxes memory into action. What's more, using images to metaphorically support the story you're telling can reinforce that effect even further. When your listeners feel connected, they're not only more likely to remember, they're more likely to take action.
Many speakers tend to talk at their audiences rather than simply weaving their points of view into the presentation. But your talk needs to feel inclusive, and that means offering opportunities for collaboration.
Two-way conversations help sync our brains in a process called "neural coupling," which refers the cognitive process of two people's minds finding common ground on a concept. This synergy helps build rapport and trust; if you can generate it, you'll capture and hold an audience's attention. You can't do that by talking through bullet points on a screen. So ask questions, gauge audience responses, and don't be afraid to dive into the topics that pique their interest, even it means going off script.
Creating an engaging presentation isn't exactly rocket (or brain) science, but it's science nonetheless—meaning there's more to the challenge than just a cultural inability to concentrate. We need to deliver information in the natural way that humans learn, process, and engage. Visuals, narrative, and dialogue all play a role in getting folks to stop peeking at their phones and train all their attention on you.
Peter Arvai is the CEO and founder of Prezi. Follow him on Twitter at @peterarvai.
Ellevest CEO Sallie Krawcheck learned that design is a data-gathering process, not just making things look nice.
I'm not a designer. Neither is my company's cofounder, Charlie Kroll, but when he suggested hiring a chief design officer for Ellevest, the digital investment platform for women that we launched this year, I listened.
I'd spent a career in the corporate world before turning entrepreneur, whereas Charlie has a startup background. I had always thought of good design as making things look nice, but have learned it's much more than that—especially if you're starting a business that aims to change individuals' behaviors, not just capitalize on their existing ones. (And ours does.)
Charlie's instincts have since proved right. What's more, I've learned how crucial it is to bring a design head into your startup as early as possible. Here's why.
The challenge we've set for ourselves at Ellevest is simple: to get women to invest more. Achieving it is difficult. It involves real behavioral change in our potential users; this isn't comfortable stuff for them, or they'd already be doing it. Most of the large investing firms—with a lot more money and resources than we have—have tried to solve this issue and failed.
So I understood from the beginning that we couldn't innovate along just one dimension, like through changes to our investing product or by reaching women online instead of in person. Instead, we'd need to open up multiple avenues for building our user base all at once. And design had to be one of them.
Ellevest's chief design officer is Melissa Cullens. She helped redesign Vogue.com and Sirius radio, and she was part of the team behind the great James Beard Award finalist PieLab, a bakery with a social mission. Melissa quickly helped me understand that good design can be the difference between a good product and a great product—between a user's intention ("I'll get to it later") and action ("I've got to do this right away"), and a company's success and failure.
But as any designer can tell you, design is a lot of hard work, with few shortcuts. It starts with getting to know your subject well—really well, not just "we conducted a survey" well. The way we've worked design into our process involved hundreds of hours of product testing with women, starting before we even wrote a single line of code.
To understand women's relationships with money, it wasn't just asking them questions, but having them bring in financial statements and walking through them together. It was spending time with women to work through how they manage their money, in practical terms.
And only then was it asking women to check out our initial designs on Usertesting.com and in our offices—followed by me sending personal emails to everyone who has been invited to become a client, asking for their feedback (and receiving paragraphs and paragraphs in response). These may not sound like design challenges, but they are; all this grunt work was essential for us to understand what the hell it was that our users needed designed in the first place.
Even after all that, there were still countless back-to-the-drawing-board moments. But that's simply what the design process involves if you're using it to understand your users better, not just make an already-built product look flashy—when you're using it from the very outset to solve the problems that will make or break your startup.
That's why it's so crucial to involve a designer in the earliest stages of conceptualizing. It means you'll be designing for the problem at hand—not the one you believe exists. And trust me, there's a difference.
In my case, I thought women would embrace investing after we helped them go on "an emotional journey" that addressed their feelings about money (think: Cosmo quiz to find your perfect boyfriend, just about investing . . . I know, it sounded a lot better in my head than when I see it on my computer screen). But after all, I'd spent my career on Wall Street, where I had a front-row seat to "women's investing initiatives" that involved discussions (led by men) of how women were "too scared" to invest or "too risk-averse" to invest. I pretty much took it as fact, because, well, women really don't invest as much.
I shared this hypothesis with the team, and Melissa got to work, spending time with women in our target market to understand what tools they use in other aspects of their lives, how they access their retirement accounts, how they think about money—you name it. She mapped out behavioral patterns and determined from our research that women are practical and want a practical investing solution, not an emotional experience. But even after that, since I was the boss and had a strongly held hypothesis, she then designed the emotional journey I'd asked for.
And it fell flat—worse, actually: Women pretty much gave us the finger. Which wasn't at all surprising given the research Melissa collected to design her iteration of the site. This taught me something that we non-designers often overlook: Design is as much a method of sifting out a business problem as it is a method of execution.
Melissa's design research was crucial to the business model—not just determining a font and color palette. And by including her in the product process early on, rather than bringing her in at the last minute to realize a vision she had no connection to, we were able to adjust before it was too late.
As an entrepreneur, it's easy to feel ownership over every aspect of your business because you're putting your reputation, your money, and other people's money on the line. Oh, and you're sleeping, breathing, and eating your passion project—that, too. But if you try to do it all yourself, you're almost certain to fail. I had to remind myself that you hire people because of the skills and ideas they bring to the table, which means giving them the space to work through problems on their own.
This meant we got caught in some ratholes. There was the idea we had of displaying a user's money today and tomorrow's projected money as a string of concentric circles. It doesn't make much sense when you read it; and, believe me, it didn't when you saw it, either. But we spent weeks trying to make it work. Then there was the concept of projecting out our client's probability of reaching her goals into the future through some sort of visual element. Yeah, that didn't work either.
And then there were the ideas that hit the bull's-eye—those that came straight from the design research but still took Melissa some time to bring to life. These included an easy onboarding process, in which the client fills in a Mad-Libs–style questionnaire (in real human language, unlike the dense questionnaires so many investing firms use). There was the design to show our clients the reasonable worst cases for their investment portfolio performance, to address their questions of how much money they might lose in a tough market. (No, women are not too "risk averse" to invest; our research shows they simply want to understand risk better than existing services allow them to.)
Finally, there was the overall design sensibility that was more similar to Vogue.com than to MyMerrill.com. Our users told us that existing offerings were off-putting. They wanted a site that respected (and celebrated) the commitment they were making in investing—one that focused on their real-life goals, as opposed to investing jargon. That took a while to nail, too, but was worth fine tuning.
Taking a step back as CEO isn't the same as checking out, but there's no point in being involved with every step of the design process if you aren't a designer. Instead, we created a culture of communication with regular check-ins, where the senior team could weigh in periodically on the design process without getting in the way.
A closing insight: Everyone seems to think they have a great design idea. As a startup founder, no doubt you do, too. This may be the best argument in favor of hiring a design head from the very outset: It simply lessens your risk of self-sabotage over your own misguided and inexpert design ideas. Instead, it's your job as a founder to make sure your senior team members have room to do their own jobs—which means not every design idea is going to be tested or adopted, including your own.
Technically, your boss's age relative to your own shouldn't matter. Realistically, it might. Here's how to get over it.
Among the evolving workplace dynamics we've come to love—like flexible work arrangements and casual Fridays—comes a shift that rattles almost everyone affected by it: One-third of employees report to someone younger than them. A few years ago, a study by CareerBuilder had that number at 34%, to be precise. It's likely that even more managers today are younger than their employees.
Are you one of them? Maybe you re-entered the workforce after taking some extended time off, or you switched careers to finally break into the industry you've always wanted to be in, which is great except you had to accept a lower-level position than you're used to.
So here you are, answering to a manager who's both qualified and competent—and also a lot younger than you. The dynamic is not one you're fond of; frankly, you can't help feeling a little embarrassed.
But before you start questioning yourself and your capabilities and how on earth you're ever going to develop a strong boss-employee relationship, you've got to stop lamenting the age difference, and you've got to start thinking with the years of experience you bring to the role.
Here are five ways to help you navigate this situation.
A lot has been written on how different generations can work together and support one another. Instead of fighting against the theory that gen Y is tech-savvy and gen X is self-reliant, use this information and plan to learn what you can from your boss. Be prepared to teach him the knowledge you've gained throughout the years as well.
You may not have as much industry-specific knowledge, but you've probably got plenty of experience dealing with interpersonal issues and the inevitable bureaucracy that no office can seem to avoid. Consider how your past can help your manager as she grows into her role.
A lot of the issues subordinates have with reporting to someone younger than them have less to do with age, and more to do with perception. You feel awkward that you just celebrated your 40th birthday, and you're pretty certain your boss isn't even 30 yet. You assume the rest of the team is fixated on this age difference and wondering how they can prevent themselves from experiencing the same fate. You fear the leadership team views you as inferior because your title doesn't exactly coincide with your age.
These are, of course, ridiculous thoughts. It's imposter syndrome and self-doubt and paranoia all bumping heads, making it darn difficult for you to do your job and do it well.
Get out of your head, and trust that your career path will progress in a way that makes sense for you and where you've been, regardless of how old you or your boss are.
No matter how much more "official" work experience you have, there will be things your younger manager does better than you do. A great way to ensure your skills remain up-to-date though is to regularly assess the trends in your industry against what you know, and then get the appropriate training where needed.
Whether that means brushing up on Excel, social media posting, or presentation skills, make a point to keep up with the trends and don't be afraid to ask questions if you don't know how to do something that your manager is assuming you've done before.
The tendency to want to guide and teach those younger than you are is not only a natural response but a useful one—even when the younger person we're talking about here is your boss. All employees (managers included) work better in open environments where collaboration is welcome.
Instead of keeping your head down and just "doing your job," become the type of employee your manager can use as a sounding board and rely on for valuable advice. You obviously don't want to come off as overbearing or condescending, and you should let your supervisor take the lead on when and how this unofficial mentorship relationship progresses.
Every meeting you've attended, project you've completed, and decision you've made in your career has led to where you are now and informs your actions at work every day. It's critical that you see these experiences as valuable steps on your professional journey and are self-assured in how they've shaped who you are.
No matter the reason you're now reporting to someone younger than you, you've got to remember that you're in the exact place you need to be in at this time in your career. Be proud of all your accomplishments thus far and focus on your unique strengths and how they can positively impact your team.
It's perfectly normal to feel some resentment over the fact that you're reporting to someone much younger than you. The mix of emotions can be overwhelming from dealing with feelings of smug superiority toward your manager because you're older, or absolute insecurity over the fact that your boss has this prestigious title and you don't. You just report to her.
But, again, you've got to stop these feelings and worries from festering. Instead of mentally highlighting what bothers you about having a younger supervisor, focus on working together to accomplish the team's goals. This will be key for you to thrive in your position and advance.
This story originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
Conventional wisdom says that a string of short-term, entry-level positions is bad for your career. What if it's just the opposite?
Despite what some hiring managers might tell you, many entry-level jobs simply don't come with real opportunities for learning and growth. That makes it hard to stay interested in a position when you've learned everything there is to know about the role after two months.
As a result, many recent grads spend their first few months or years in the workforce job-hopping from one full-time role to the next, but only staying in each one for a short while. In the process, the conventional wisdom goes, they do serious damage to their resumes right when it's supposedly crucial to start their careers off on the right foot.
But what if the conventional wisdom is dead wrong?
Six months after graduating from college, when I moved to New York City to do freelance work in the film industry, I took any job I could get. For a few months I worked as a production assistant (or "PA") on several different films. For one gig, my job was to sit on the back of the grip and electric truck, and make sure no one who wasn't part of the crew took anything (like lights or cables) from the truck.
For 12 hours a day, six days straight, in 20-degree weather, I sat on the back of that truck near Bryant Park and froze my butt off for $100 a day. Since the truck was a few blocks away from the set, I didn't learn anything about film production. I just sat there. I barely interacted with anyone, except for a few grips who chain-smoked all day and a few tourists who wandered by, asking if anyone famous was in the movie.
On my next gig, I worked for just $50 a day as a PA on a small, independent film but told the line producer I didn't want to watch a truck, I wanted to be on set. Because the film was a low-budget project, they were highly understaffed, and I ended becoming the assistant location manager, helping the location manager and the line producer scout new locations and manage on-set logistics for the film. I saw firsthand how involved making a movie really is.
While I got paid half as much, the experience of being an apprentice on set taught me infinitely more than making $100 a day guarding a truck. Two months later, my location manager brought me onto another gig as her assistant location manager and paid me $200 a day. After that, I worked for nearly two years doing freelance location work. I learned so much that after two years of freelancing, I produced a short film about a day in the life of two Iraq War veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. Taking the skills I'd learned on various film sets, I managed a cast and crew of over 40 people, something I never would have been able to do had I not turned the experience of getting frostbite on my toes into an opportunity for an apprenticeship.
The whole point of entry-level work is to offer you experience you can build on—in other words, mentorship and apprenticeship. You need to learn from someone with expertise, someone with at least five more years of experience than you. You don't want day 154 of your job to be the exact same as day one; you want to learn something new every day. And if a full-time role doesn't offer you that, it probably isn't worth taking.
The alternative may actually prove better for your early career. Short-term entry-level experiences allow you to quickly test assumptions about your career interests. In the same way companies use rapid prototyping to test new products and gain immediate user feedback, you can challenge your assumptions about how you might spend your days.
One of the pioneers of rapid prototyping in Silicon Valley is Tom Chi, who served as head of experience at Google X, and previously worked for Yahoo and Microsoft. Tom and his colleagues came up with the first working prototype for the Google Glass using a coat hanger and a sheet protector that fourth graders use for book reports. It took them only one day—actually, 45 minutes. Tom believes corporate cultures often stifle innovation. Decisions are not made by actually testing assumptions, but rather on ego. The person with the highest salary in the room usually gets to make all the decisions, even if that person doesn't have the best ideas.
Tom has been an astrophysics researcher (starting at the age of 15) and a Fortune 500 consultant, and he's also built software and hardware used by millions of people and has scaled social enterprises in the developing world. Rather than guess what his life purpose might be, he is more focused on being a lifelong learner. Tom's mantra is to "maximize the rate of learning by minimizing the rate of time to try ideas." Rapid prototyping is all about learning as much as possible, as quickly as possible. People often spend days, months, even years talking about the changes they want to make. Stop talking. Start doing.
Treat your career like a lifelong experiment. Don't worry about finding the right answer; spend more time asking the right questions. Try new things, test assumptions, see what works for you, and learn what doesn't. And yes: If that means "job hopping," job hop! Realizing that a specific job or sector or working environment is not the right fit for you is not failure—it's essential data that will help you find meaning and fulfillment in the future.
If you're new to a field, look for short-term, entry-level experiences in the form of apprenticeships, consulting opportunities, internships, or freelance gigs that actually let you learn something. While these experiences may pay less, they are much more valuable than full-time entry-level jobs where you do something you already know how to do (like sit in the freezing cold to watch a truck, answer a phone, or schedule meetings). The best thing about short-term experiences is that if they aren't the right fit, you can easily move on to something else.
You won't find many short-term entry-level experiences like these advertised on websites or job boards, though. You may have to create one for yourself. If you're having trouble coming up with an idea for an apprenticeship, check out the Leap Year Project, created by Victor Saad.
Interested in going to business school but worried about the cost, Victor created a self-directed, multi-city master's degree in design, business development, and social innovation. He developed 12 different experiences in 12 months for himself, apprenticing with places like a leading architecture firm in Seattle, an art and apparel community in Chicago, and a digital agency in San Diego. Inspired by his leap year, he decided to create an actual school for others to learn by doing, called Experience Institute.
Remember, it's possible to create any kind of short-term apprenticeship that makes sense for you. If an opportunity doesn't do more than just let you "get your foot in the door," it's probably not much of an opportunity in the first place.
Networking events give you limited time to meet people. Here's how to (gracefully) avoid letting someone monopolize your time.
Does this sound familiar? You're at a networking event with the sole purpose of meeting as many people as possible, when boom! You get stuck in a corner talking to a terribly nice but not terribly useful person.
You came to this event to build genuine connections with a number of new people who could possibly help your career, but unless you can get out of this conversation, you'll have just lost a major opportunity.
So you need a way out, and stat.
But how? It can feel awkward to exit a conversation, especially when it seems like the other person wants to keep going. You might even be nervous that your partner will think you're rude—and hey, just because this person isn't useful to your career now doesn't mean he might not be one day. So you don't really want to leave him with a bad impression of you, either.
The good news is that it's possible to tactfully end the conversation without ending the relationship. Try these tactics to make a graceful exit.
Saying you are going to go to the restroom, get something to eat, or refill your drink is one of the oldest tricks in the book. So it can sound a little canned. Pamela Weinberg, a New York City–based career coach, instead recommends being honest.
"Wrap up your conversation by thanking the person for their time and letting them know that you enjoyed meeting them," says Weinberg. "Then say something honest like, 'Please excuse me, I want to catch Jim, my former colleague, to say hello before he leaves.'"
Saying you're headed off to connect with someone else is perfectly reasonable since it's a networking event, and the fact that you actually intend to follow through on what you're saying will make you sound more sincere as you make your exit.
Another humane way out is to ask for the person's contact information, and make plans to follow up and continue the conversation later.
"Offer a handshake to your fellow attendee, look the person in the eye, smile, and say something such as, 'Leon, it was great to meet you tonight. I do want to connect with a few other folks while I am here, but can we exchange contact information to stay in touch?'" says Kevin Grubb, executive director of the Villanova University Career Center.
Mentioning the person's name will make them feel recognized and help you remember their name in the future.
Caveat: Don't try this approach unless you actually intend to reach out. You don't want to lead anyone on.
When you're talking to someone one-on-one, a great way to transition out of the conversation is to introduce the person to someone else, says Emily Merrell, founder of the networking group Six Degrees Society. That way, you're not leaving the person to be a lone wolf at the party, and maybe you've even helped her make a useful connection.
"Say something like, 'I want to introduce you to my friend Beth. I think you'll have a lot in common—she also transitioned from a large corporation to a startup,'" Merrell says.
You don't want to treat a networking event like a speed-dating event, so focus on having authentic, impactful conversations before gracefully exiting the conversation to meet someone new.
This article originally appeared on Monster and is reprinted with permission.
Audi: In 2015, started test-driving an AI-laden prototype nicknamed "Jack" that lets drivers easily switch to autonomous mode via buttons on the wheel
BMW: Has promised an entirely autonomous car called iNext by 2021; BMW's ReachNow car-sharing service launched in April in Seattle and expanded to Portland, Oregon, in September
Ford: Announced plans for fully autonomous car with no pedals or steering wheel by 2021; recently invested $75 million in California laser-sensor company Velodyne; bought San Francisco–based private bus service Chariot and plans to expand it
Volvo: Forged partnerships with Microsoft (will incorporate HoloLens augmented-reality technology into its cars) and Uber (which is planning to use Volvos as part of its self-driving test fleet in Pittsburgh); teamed up with safety-system-maker Autoliv to set up a new company focused on autonomous-driving software
Alphabet: Launched self-piloting-car project back in 2009; testing retrofitted Lexus SUVs and its own adorable prototype vehicles in several locations; recently partnered with Fiat Chrysler to build self-driving minivans
Apple: Has invested $1 billion in Chinese ride-share company Didi Chuxing; reportedly rebooting its efforts to develop an Apple car; might also build a system to add autonomous features to preexisting vehicles
Baidu: Chinese search-engine company has teamed up with digital-graphics pioneer Nvidia to create a self-driving-vehicle system that uses 3-D maps in the cloud; is in the testing stage with several different self-driving-car prototypes, including one built with BMW
Tesla: After revolutionizing electric vehicles with the semi-autonomous Model S, will release more-affordable all-electric Model 3, possibly in late 2017; Model S's involved in a pair of high-profile fatal accidents
Comma.ai: Andreessen Horowitz–backed company making an inexpensive kit that turns regular cars into semi-autonomous ones
Mobileye: Israeli software maker that had partnered with Tesla to provide chips and software, but the two companies ended their collaboration in the wake of a fatal accident in May (Tesla cars currently still use Mobileye chips); has teamed up with Delphi Automotive to build a self-driving system by 2019
NextEV: Shanghai-based electric-car innovator headed in the U.S. by former Cisco exec Padmasree Warrior; set to show off a high-performance all-electric sports-car prototype this year
Nutonomy: Born at MIT and backed by Ford, makes self-driving cars, software, and autonomous robots; started testing driverless taxis in Singapore this summer
Quanergy: Silicon Valley–based company developing light- and object-sensing technology for self-driving cars; boasts $1.59 billion valuation thanks to investors Samsung and Delphi
Zoox: Palo Alto startup behind the Boz, a fully autonomous concept vehicle (still in the design phase) with inward-facing seats similar to a train car; company valued at around $1 billion
Hundreds of thousands of cameras, routers, and DVRs have been hijacked by malware for use in massive denial of service attacks.
On Friday, a series of massive distributed denial of service attacks disrupted access to major internet services including GitHub, Twitter, Spotify, and Netflix.
The attackers apparently used tens of thousands of hacked internet of things devices—household appliances such as digital video recorders, security cameras, and internet routers—to generate a massive amount of digital traffic. That digital noise was sent to Dyn, a domain name service provider used by major online companies, disrupting its ability to translate human-readable internet addresses into the IP addresses networks use to route traffic.
The attack came after years of warnings from security experts that the makers of many internet-enabled devices paid too little attention to security, shipping internet-connected hardware with preset passwords, insecure default connections, and other vulnerabilities.
"It is just a matter of time until attackers find a way to profit from attacking IoT devices," a report from security firm Symantec warned last year. "This may lead to connected toasters that mine cryptocurrencies or smart TVs that are held ransom by malware. Unfortunately, the current state of IoT security does not make it difficult for attackers to compromise these devices once they see the benefit of doing so."
Hackers and security researchers have previously exploited vulnerabilities to get access to devices like baby monitors and webcams. Researchers from security company Pen Test Partners even demonstrated earlier this year how hackers could install ransomware on an internet-connected thermostat, leaving victims sweltering or shivering until a ransom is paid.
And in Friday's attack, compromised IoT devices were coordinated as part of a botnet—a network of hacked machines essentially turned into remote-controlled robots by malware—dubbed Mirai. Between 500,000 and 550,000 hacked devices around the world are now part of the Mirai botnet, and about 10% of those were involved in Friday's attack, said Level 3 Communications chief security officer Dale Drew on the internet backbone provider's Periscope channel Friday.
"With a rapidly increasing market for these devices and little attention being paid to security, the threat from these botnets is growing," according to a blog post published by Level 3 just days before the attack.
Mirai-controlled devices were also key components in a September denial of service attack on Krebs on Security, the high-profile blog by security journalist Brian Krebs that's both required reading for many in the industry and a juicy target for the hacking groups Krebs covers. At the time, Krebs reported that the attack was the largest ever seen by content distribution network provider Akamai, nearly twice the size of the existing record holder.
Devices compromised by Mirai have been detected in at least 164 countries, researchers from security firm Imperva reported earlier this month, with the bot programmed essentially to scan wide swaths of the internet looking for more devices with default or easily predictable passwords that it can infect. It's still not known who created the initial Mirai malware, although the source code powering the botnet was released by a hacker using the name Anna_Senpai earlier this month.
It's also unclear whether the botnet's initial creators are directly behind the attack on Dyn or whether they're effectively selling access to the attackers.
"The person who's buying time on that bonnet could be buying time on quite a few other botnets as well," Drew said on the Level3 Periscope channel. The Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation have said they're investigating Friday's attack.
Security experts advise users of IoT devices to take simple steps like changing default passwords and installing any security updates that manufacturers provide, but it can be difficult to make many such devices fully secure against a determined hacker. Some manufactures don't provide updates at all, and some only provide them through an insecure online channel, letting hackers effectively generate their own malicious updates, according to last year's Symantec report.
"Unfortunately, it is difficult for a user to secure their IoT devices themselves, as most devices do not provide a secure mode of operation," says the report, which also urges manufacturers to implement basic security measures on their connected products.
Requiring users to set their own secure passwords when setting up the devices, and disabling unneeded avenues for remote control, would help keep hackers out, according to Level 3's Mirai report.
Users can often also configure the devices to disable remote login to the devices and use free tools to make sure those connections are actually disabled, says Imperva.
"With over a quarter billion CCTV cameras around the world alone, as well as the continued growth of other IoT devices, basic security practices like these should become the new norm," says the company. "Make no mistake; Mirai is neither the first nor the last malware to take advantage of lackluster security practices."
If we want our kids to sleep well, be healthy, and have strong relationships, we need to think beyond "turn it off," writes a pediatrician.
Any time a new technology is introduced, it disrupts values, routines, and behaviors. This goes back well before the printing press replaced oral histories or the telephone replaced face-to-face conversations, but is evident today in our regular habits of checking our smartphones for notifications. Kids are growing up with the expectation of auto-playing streaming videos and having access to our phones when we need them to be quiet.
Human anxieties about these changes can take years to resolve, as we slowly figure out how to control the technology to meet our values and needs, rather than being controlled by it. With the rapid pace at which new digital products and services are being developed, parents report feeling particularly overwhelmed. They fear missing out on what benefits tech might hold for their families, yet don't fully trust that electronic devices and apps are designed or marketed with their child's best interests in mind.
We doctors used to urge parents to discourage media use under age two, and to limit kids' use to two hours a day, at most. But we have now arrived at a more nuanced understanding of the various ways in which children use digital tools. Through review of the updated science, interviews, and focus groups with parents from diverse backgrounds, and our own clinical experience, we are now recommending that parents use media as a teaching tool—a way to connect and create—instead of just to consume.
As a developmental behavioral pediatrician, parent of two young boys, and lead author of the new American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement, "Media and Young Minds," I hope to help parents shape tech use in their homes based on their human ideals and values.
This new policy statement represents the best medical research and academic scholarship about electronic media and health and development of children from birth through age five. Along with the associated family media-use planning website, it focuses on how parents can use electronic media together with their young children to encourage family connection, learning, and digital literacy skills in several ways.
We emphasize teaching children that media use means more than just entertainment. It can also involve connecting with others. Video chatting, for example, is fine at any age, although infants need their parents' help to understand it. Another great use is for creating and learning together—letting the child take photos and record videos or songs, as well as looking up craft ideas. We hope parents will feel comfortable seeing digital media as a tool to meet their parenting needs, and not the thing-in-itself that controls us or our children through the attention economy or gamification.
As far as entertainment, we recommend trusted content producers such as Sesame Workshop and PBS Kids, who design apps with the child's and parent's needs in mind. There is also Common Sense Media, a great site for finding information on digital products and answering any tech-related parenting question you can imagine.
We recommend having unplugged spaces and times of day so that both parent and child can play, be bored, or talk without distraction or feeling a need to multitask.
We ask parents to test apps and watch videos with their children to determine if they are good fits for their child's temperament, rather than letting the child make all of these choices. Parents are the best people to decide whether a particular app or video is appropriate for the child's current stage of development and knowledge.
Parents should not feel pressure to introduce their children to technology early in life for the sake of seeking a competitive advantage. Kids will catch up when they are older or in school. But, if parents want to introduce media early, the youngest age we recommend is 18 months. At that age, it's important to note, parents must play or view along with the child for there to be any educational benefit, such as learning new words. Otherwise, that expensive tablet may just be a portable TV or cause-and-effect toy.
We still recommend time limits (one hour of entertainment media per day—which does not include video chatting, taking pictures, using with parents as a learning tool and the like—and rules, for several reasons. First, pediatricians are trained to be child advocates, making us naturally protective. In our day-to-day experiences with families in clinics, we see children having difficulties with sleep, obesity, school, relationships, or behavior that appear to be intertwined with problematic media habits.
We hear parents asking for concrete guidance from us about the role digital devices might play in their families' lives. They want to know what to let their child watch and how much of it. They ask about how to make sure their child can be tech-savvy without ending up in a position where the child prefers and will choose digital play to the exclusion of other important activities.
Overall, the research still shows that excessive media use is associated with poorer sleep, higher obesity risk, and developmental outcomes such as poor executive function (the "boss" of our brain that helps us focus, control impulses, and plan), so we want parents to prioritize unplugged, social, and unstructured play as much as possible.
Parents have always been interpreters of the world for young children. If kids are to grow up with a healthy concept of what digital tools are and how to use them effectively, creatively, and kindly, we need to teach them. This means both guiding them directly and modeling with our own behavior from the very start. The longer-term goal is to raise kids who see us, their parents, as guides when they encounter weird stuff online or have negative interactions on social media.
We want to raise kids who don't react to negative emotions by spewing out their feelings—sometimes at others' expense—online, or binge on videos or games. We want to raise kids with good sleep habits, healthy bodies, a variety of interests and curiosity about the world, who feel good about their learning and their relationships, both on- and offline. We hope our new guidance can help us all—parents, medical professionals, and children alike—achieve that.
Recipients of the MacArthur Genius Grant reveal what inspires them and keeps them going on their quests for game-changing innovations.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that becoming a world-class expert takes 10,000 hours of practice. Getting to genius status, however, takes more than time; it's a passion that turns into a lifelong quest for more knowledge.
Since 1978 the MacArthur Foundation has been recognizing people who are on that journey with the MacArthur Fellows Program, aka "Genius Grants." In 2016, 23 fellows were chosen to further their work with five-year, $625,000 awards based on their exceptional creativity, track record of significant achievement, and promise for discovering game-changing advances.
In today's over-stimulated world, pursuing a passion takes discipline and hard work. A look at the journey of a few of the 2016 MacArthur Fellows, however, uncovers some similarities among those who are geniuses in their fields.
For Kellie Jones, a love of art turned into a crusade to tell the stories of forgotten or overlooked African-American artists. Jones grew up around artists in New York City and attended what is now the LaGuardia School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. During her art history lessons, she noticed a discrepancy in the books.
"History never reflected people of color," she says. "I knew I didn't want to be an artist, and I realized there was a role for somebody to be a curator and writer, someone who could tell these stories."
For three decades, Jones has been telling the artists' stories through art exhibits and books. Her work prompted a "re-evaluation of the view that African-American art of the period was predominantly figurative or representational," according to the MacArthur Foundation website. For example, "Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980" at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum. And "Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s" at the Brooklyn Museum in 2014 celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.
"People want to know these stories; They want a broader tale about those who have contributed to the world," says Jones, an associate professor of art history and archeology at Columbia University. "The last Witness we held, 75,000 people came, and not all were African-Americans."
Kellie Jones
Motivation comes from the intersection of pleasure and interest, says Jones. "Research is about a certain obsession with a topic and wanting to know the answers," she says. "I wanted to make art history reflect the world we live in, and that's been one of my goals.
"I also believe in the evidence that objects give us," Jones continues. "Sometimes they offer us the most reliable evidence of history. Interesting, beautiful, and full of information, the objects keep pushing me forward."
Jones is also inspired by the artists whose stories she wants to tell. "Lorna Simpson, David Hammons, and Betye Saar never gave up," she says. "They made their objects whether or not they were considered to be in style. They just kept making them. If they can stick around and make art, I can stick around and tell their story."
Anne Basting stumbled onto her genius journey when she found a unique way to connect with older adults who have cognitive impairment. A theater artist and educator, Basting always had an interest in the aging population, often including older characters in her writing. In 1996, she wondered if the improvisation techniques she taught to healthy adults could be beneficial to Alzheimer's and dementia patients.
Working with a group of memory-impaired adults, Basting first tried reminiscence-based techniques. She showed the group a picture of the Marlboro Man, hoping to tap into a deep memory of when this character was used to advertise cigarettes. When no one responded, she asked, "Tell me what you want to call this guy?"
"Someone said 'Fred,'" she recalls. "And I said, 'Fred who?' And they said 'Fred Astaire.' And then a 45-minute story unraveled. And we were laughing and singing, and it was a completely transformative moment. It felt like a miracle."
The discovery prompted Basting to start the nonprofit TimeSlips Creative Storytelling, a therapy protocol that addresses cognitive impairment by shifting from memory to imagination, creating stories and poems in response to cues. Online and in-person programs have helped long-term care facilities and caregivers around the world.
Basting says the shift is simple but profound. "The arts are an emotional and symbolic language," says Basting. "Cocreating [with a group] creates a shared language, crossing differences you wouldn't cross otherwise, such as age, gender, culture, socioeconomics. It's kind of a magic language that allows people to see each other differently."
Anne Basting
After training more than 2,000 facilitators, Basting says she feels she's just getting started, and her goal is to make TimeSlips standard practice and scale it. And she has a good reason. "When I'm working at this intensely one-on-one level, there is a deep human connection," says Basting. "The power comes when it works, and it works every time. You are present for someone and present for each other, gifting imagination. It's a profound experience."
Helping families is another source of strength. "Aging has been seen as this horrible thing; people don't want to do it," says Basting. "Dementia particularly sets off a lot of alarm bells, and it's an epidemic. It's horrifying, and families are in despair," she observes. "When you give them this tool of discovery, it's so beautiful. There is a joy of having people realize the power of the approach. It drives you to keep going."
For Ahilan Arulanantham, the topic of refugees is more than just an election platform. For 16 years, the human rights lawyer has been working to secure the right to due process for individuals facing deportation.
Arulanantham's journey began when he was 10 years old, when members of his family fled the civil war in Sri Lanka and moved to the U.S. "Many of my relatives came to live with us and ended up staying with us for several years," he says. "I had a firsthand look at the pain and difficulty that displacement can cause."
The experience inspired Arulanantham to become an attorney so he could defend the rights of refugees. Through advocacy and successful litigation of a series of landmark cases, Arulanantham and his team have helped immigrant detainees get legal representation and limited the government's power to detain them indefinitely.
Arulanantham, who is director of advocacy and legal director for the ACLU of Southern California, says has seen the detention system change, and not all for the better. "We're now detaining more people than ever—around 38,000 on any given day," he says.
They go to sleep in an immigration detention prison. In theory, it is a civil case rather than criminal, which means you have no right to a lawyer or to ask a judge to release you. There is also no guarantee of a speedy trial. In that sense it's worse.
But some things are better. "There is growing recognition that the harm caused by deportation is severe," he says. For example, the City of New York runs a public defense system to guarantee representation for a detained New Yorker, which Arulanantham calls remarkable. "It's something that would have been unimaginable a decade ago," he says. "We've seen some positive development, but overall, immigration enforcement is more draconian than when I started."
Ahilan Arulanantham
Yet three things keep him going: "The first is winning," he says. "Although we lose a fair amount, we also win a fair amount, and that produces significant change in people's lives. Knowing that by working hard you can see results over time is motivating."
Another source of motivation is the relationships Arulanantham forms with clients. "My last case was two years trying to establish the right to counsel for children going through deportation," he says. "I have had clients such as a 14-year-old girl from El Salvador and a 10-year-old boy whose father was killed by gangs. Knowing that I'm working for such people and trying to make their lives better helps."
Arulanantham also takes time to find balance in his life, such as playing soccer, singing, and goofing off with his family and friends. "You can't be a person who works without any outside interest at all," he says.
As a MacArthur Fellow, Arulanantham hopes to open minds. "My experience of being a child and seeing my own cousins and aunts and uncles go through this has made me understand more clearly the difficulty of what every immigrant and refugee goes through," he says. "Immigration policy is complex, and we are not going to agree on everything. I wish people would approach it with a little less judgment."
This summer, "Page Six" started a rumor that Paltrow would distance herself from the newsletter and e-commerce business she founded eight years ago. "The funniest thing about that is that they've never been more wrong," Paltrow tells me, with a laugh. "This is my heart, my soul, my brain. I'm here all day, every day."
The publication misunderstood a statement that she had made about Goop's future. She had been trying to explain that she wants to create a company that is bigger than she is. "When I think about true scale, the less the brand has to leverage me, the more it can achieve true scale by itself," she says. "Somehow that became that I was leaving."
The fact is, Paltrow has been aggressively growing the business over the last year. Earlier this year, Goop launched a natural skincare line in collaboration with Juice Beauty, which has helped drive overall sales. (Revenues have tripled over the last two years and site visitors have doubled in the last year, her team tells me.) In August, she helped raise a Series B round of over $10 million, which will be used to expand Goop's direct-to-consumer business. Last month, we saw a glimpse of Paltrow's new e-commerce strategy at work with the launch of Goop Label, her first foray into designing apparel.
Gwyneth Paltrow
Creating a clothing collection was a natural next step for Goop, which already curates a selection of fashion, beauty, and home products from other designers. With her new line, she's working with a small team of designers to develop garments from conception to production, based on her own favorite pieces from her wardrobe. These are meant to be staples, like a little black dress or a simple chambray button-down shirt, rather than of-the-moment trend pieces. "They create a template for a uniform," Paltrow explains. "Easy stuff."
There is a strong focus on using the best quality materials and craftsmanship, since the company says the clothes are made in the same Italian factories that manufacture for Proenza Schouler, Dries Van Noten, and Azzedine Alaia. But since they are sold directly to consumers online rather than through retailers, Goop can afford to sell them less expensively than comparable designers. This takes a page from businesses like Everlane and Cuyana that deliver high-quality products without enormous markups. But Goop Label will be hitting the higher end of the market than these other brands, at price points of $1,195 for a coat and $595 for a dress.
Goop coat in navy ($1,195) and Goop October dress in black ($595)
"I find, as a consumer, that the price points of some of my favorite designer clothing is so exorbitantly expensive," Paltrow says. "I wanted to know if there was a way with the direct-to-consumer model. To create an incredible product that is slightly more aspirational, but pass on the savings to the consumer."
Goop has taken a careful and highly curated approach to introducing new products. Her team designs a capsule collection of fewer than five garments that drops each month. "The edit is so clear," Paltrow says. "We've made every choice count."
Women who sign up for the mailing list will get an announcement when it is available for purchases. Paltrow says that Goop produced under 1,000 pieces of each garment for the first two collections, but all available product was snapped up within hours of going live. While the pieces themselves are luxurious, the business approach is very lean. There is no waste: no excess inventory that needs to be marked down, no expensive advertising campaigns or marketing strategies.
This approach has been effective because Goop has a good sense about what its customers will like. After all, the entire brand has been about monetizing Paltrow's personal taste. While many lifestyle brands invest a lot of time, energy, and money on branding consultants to develop their own unique "point of view" in the marketplace, Goop simply relies on Paltrow's instincts about what she likes. In the few times when Paltrow let buyers convince her to sell an item on Goop that she wasn't sure about, Goop customers were also not interested in buying. "It was a great lesson in curation," she remembers.
Ultimately, the secret sauce to Goop's success is having a very clear and distinct identity, which is easy to convey because it is an extension of Paltrow herself. This has allowed Goop to cultivate an audience that appreciates its aesthetic, making it far easier to sell them products they will like. "We know who we are, that's what makes the business resonate," Paltrow says. "You don't have to like our taste, but it's our taste."
Smart thermostat maker Ecobee has grand ideas about its future. But first it'll have to knock out Nest.
For the last nine years, Ecobee hasn't strayed from being a maker of smart thermostats.
Unlike rival Nest, Ecobee never built its own smart home platform, and hasn't expanded into new product categories. The $170 Ecobee3 Lite, announced last week, is the company's first new hardware in two years, and it's just a budget variant of the existing Ecobee3, ditching room sensor support while knocking down the price by $80.
So far, the singular focus has served Toronto-based Ecobee well. Thermostats are the most popular type of self-installed smart home devices, according to The NPD Group, and Ecobee—whose revenues have been doubling every year—is not far behind Nest in sales. Ecobee hopes to reach first place in 2017.
the Ecobee Family of devices and apps
But Ecobee President and CEO Stuart Lombard says the company is also widening its ambitions. Instead of pegging itself as a thermostat maker, Ecobee wants to become a leader in the larger—but still nascent—connected home business. It's a tall order for a company with no platform of its own, working in what might be an overhyped corner of the tech industry. But Lombard is optimistic, setting a goal of $1 billion in revenues by 2020.
Stuart Lombard
"When you think about companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon—those are phenomenal companies. We would like to be considered in the same breath as those companies," Lombard says. "We understand we've got a ways to go."
Lombard and Mark Malchiondo, Ecobee's vice president of software development, founded the company in 2007, with the idea to help people consume less energy and save money. They gravitated toward heating and cooling, which can gobble up more than half of home energy use, and toward thermostats in particular.
"In 2007, if you had a programmable thermostat, they were impossible to use, dumb as a doorknob, not internet-connected," Lombard says.
The original Ecobee Smart thermostat launched in early 2009, promising to save energy while letting users control their home temperature by smartphone. But the device was pricey at $385, and aside from its resistive touch panel, it didn't look like a major departure from the dull white rectangles adorning most walls.
Ecobee's 2009 thermostat
Like the rest of the thermostat industry, Ecobee was caught snoozing by Nest, which arrived in 2011 with a much slicker smart thermostat for just $250. Nest was quickly acquired by Google and became the smart thermostat leader, while Ecobee spent a few years revamping its hardware. (Honeywell, the old guard of the thermostat business, also entered the smart home fray a few years ago with its Lyric devices.)
The Ecobee3, which launched in 2014 for $250, was a major improvement, with a jet black finish, capacitive touch screen, and room sensors that can adjust a home's heat or air conditioning based on occupancy and temperature. Those room sensors—one of which is included in the box—are the Ecobee3's biggest selling point compared to Nest and Honeywell Lyric.
But instead of just competing on features, Ecobee is now trying to undercut its rivals with the Ecobee3 Lite. "We believe that we're going to deliver feature parity with Nest at a $169 price point—$80 less than Nest," Lombard says.
What's to stop Nest and Honeywell from lowering their prices? Nothing, really. But Rahul Raj, Ecobee's vice president of marketing, counters that neither rival has bothered to introduce room sensors, even though focus groups have shown hot and cold zones to be a well-known issue for homeowners. The same goes for demand for an entry-level product. Surely, Raj says, Nest and Honeywell have heard the same customer requests that Ecobee has, yet they haven't responded.
"Everyone always has the option," Raj says, "but not everyone acts."
Meanwhile, Lombard suggests that Ecobee will try to widen the feature gap with its flagship product in the future. "We're going to take that dividend that we got from cost savings and we're going to invest that in all kinds of great new technology that we're going to put back into the product, and have feature superiority to Nest and Honeywell at that $249 price point," he says.
The smart thermostat horse race is pretty close at the moment. Last year, Ecobee told Forbes that it had captured 24% of the U.S. market, citing data from the NPD Group. And while Lombard won't provide an update on market share now, he claims that Ecobee is "closing the gap" with Nest. (NPD also declined to publicize its current market share numbers.)
But even if Ecobee can edge out its rivals, that alone probably won't turn it into a billion-dollar business. For all the hype around smart thermostats and smart homes in general, there's not a lot of evidence that average consumers care.
In surveys of U.S. consumers by NPD, only 10% of respondents said they own one or more smart home products—a percentage that hasn't changed since last year, NPD analyst John Buffone says. Another survey this year from Gartner found that just 9% of respondents in the U.S., U.K., and Australia had adopted a home automation or energy management solution. Only 14% more plan to get on board in the next 12 months, leaving 78% uninterested in the entire smart home proposition.
"One of the single biggest challenges that the broader smart home market is facing is breaking through the early adopter audience that's interested and owns the products today," Buffone says.
Research firm Gartner has also cooled its enthusiasm for smart thermostats in particular. Every year, the research firm releases a hype cycle chart for various emerging technologies, and this year's chart shows thermostats headed from peak hype levels into a "trough of disillusionment."
Gartner analyst Jessica Ekholm says that's because thermostats are no longer the anchor product in a smart home. Instead, they're becoming one piece among many in larger ecosystems such as Google Home, Amazon's Echo, and Apple HomeKit.
"So it is not that they are disappearing, but for sure they are now one part of a bigger ecosystem rather than the connected home product that users need," Ekholm says.
The company also introduced a set of smart home device integrations called Works with Nest, along with a broader home communications platform called Nest Weave.
In the process, Nest seems to have lost its way. The Informationreported in March that management turmoil was the reason many of Nest's initiatives never made it to market, and in June, CEO Tony Fadell stepped down. In a sign of little confidence from corporate parent Alphabet, Google is about to release its own smart home product, the Google Home connected speaker, without Nest's direct involvement. Google reportedly took engineers away from Nest to work on the project, and is now building another smart home platform, separate from Nest's efforts.
All of these issues recently prompted Navigant Research to name Ecobee as the current leader of the smart thermostat market, scored on factors such as strategy and execution. While Ecobee cheerily points out the plaudits in its press releases, analyst Paige Leuschner says the current rankings are more of an indictment of Nest than a ringing endorsement of Ecobee. "I guess what really pushed Ecobee above Nest in these circumstances was Nest's downfall," Leuschner says.
The challenge for Ecobee, then, will be to expand beyond thermostats in a more focused way than Nest did.
"I don't think having one product for 20 years makes a lot of sense for where this is going, but if you look at the things Nest is trying to do, you can't do too much because you will fail at all of them," says Deborah Merril, president and co-CEO of Just Energy. The energy reseller has worked with Ecobee for years on distribution and customer rebates, and Merril is also an Ecobee board member.
"The real nugget, the real strategy," she says, "has to be around sticking to your knitting, but also understanding that the blanket keeps getting bigger and bigger to cover more things."
Lombard seems to be aware of the potential pitfalls.
"If our strategy was to try and copy Nest, or try and copy Honeywell, that would be a losing strategy for us," he says. "So we're really trying to do things that are different from what they're doing."
For one thing, Ecobee says it won't build its own broad connected home platform like Nest has attempted. Instead, Ecobee wants to be a major partner in what it sees as the most important ecosystems right now: Apple HomeKit, Amazon Alexa, Samsung SmartThings, and IFTTT.
"One of the things that's really cool is, because we have a leadership position in the energy space in the connected home, we've helped those platforms define what their thermostat integrations are, and how those platforms work with thermostats," Lombard says.
As an example, one partner—Lombard won't say who—didn't realize that you can't set a single temperature when a thermostat is in auto mode. Thermostats need an upper bound to trigger the air conditioning and a lower bound to trigger the heat, otherwise they'd constantly be switching back and forth.
"Thermostats seem trivial," Lombard says. "There are definitely nuances to them, and doing it properly, and making sure things are reliable and don't break down, is not as trivial as it might seem."
The downside to not having its own platform is that Ecobee's partners aren't obligated to adopt Ecobee-specific features. For instance, the company is still trying to get its partners to support the concept of room sensors, so that users might ask Siri or Alexa about the temperature in a specific area of the house.
Still, Ecobee's approach has literally paid off in one regard: In August, Amazon participated in a $35 million funding round for Ecobee, alongside Thomvest and Relay Ventures. The investment was Amazon's largest yet from its Alexa fund, which pumps money and development resources into companies that are building on Amazon's voice platform.
Douglas Booms, Amazon's vice president of corporate development, says the company has long been impressed with Lombard and with Ecobee, whose engineers helped define how Alexa should interact with smart home devices. The investment was a chance to move the Alexa Fund beyond seed funding and into early stage companies.
"Ecobee was a good growth stage opportunity for us," Booms says. "It had potential to create a new and unique Alexa skill around thermostat controls and home energy, and the company is addressing a clear customer problem, energy costs."
Part of Ecobee's latest cash infusion will go towards an advertising push for the current products. Lombard points to the company's own research showing that Ecobee outsells its competition four to one when people are aware of product's benefits, so it's likely that more Ecobee ads will start showing up on TV and in print media to get the word out.
But longer-term, Ecobee's smart home strategy is still murky. The company isn't trying to build a broad platform like Nest, nor is it using its investments to expand into completely different product categories.
When pressed on the alternatives, Lombard becomes cryptic, repeatedly offering platitudes about "making customers lives simpler and better." Still, he does acknowledge that Ecobee isn't limiting itself to smart thermostats. One fair assumption, he says: Any new Ecobee products will have some energy savings or "planet-positive" angle to them.
"We will continue to be focused on smart home, and our goal is to be a leader in the connected home space, with a focus on that constellation that is energy," Lombard says.
One clue to Ecobee's future might be found in a new Donate Your Data program, which will allow thermostat users to anonymously contribute usage data to universities and government agencies. Lombard notes that research on home energy use tends to be relegated to a small handful of homes. The program could potentially expand the dataset to hundreds of thousands of homes, with the ability to drill down into specific demographics, occupancies, dwelling sizes, and weather patterns.
"Really what we're trying to do is change the way energy-efficiency research is done," Lombard says.
While the data program might be a boon for researchers and public policymakers, Lombard acknowledges that it's not 100% altruistic.
"This is not for individual or commercial gain," he says. "That said, by being at the table with researchers, we see an opportunity to learn from some of the smartest people thinking about how homeowners use energy—which is core to our brand promise."
Ultimately, that ties into Lombard's promise that Ecobee will innovate on both the product side and the data side. Between cheaper hardware, new features, and whatever entirely new products Ecobee is working on, Lombard thinks we're about to see a major transformation in the smart home business.
"Connected home is going through a watershed right now that is not dissimilar to what smartphones went through from 2006 to 2009," Lombard says, alluding to the transformation brought about by the iPhone and Android. "I think over the next 24 months, you're going to see some phenomenal innovation that's just going to change the way that people think about connected home and computing in general."
Chances are you're not the only hard worker, even though your brain makes you feel like you are.
Chances are there was a point—maybe there were several—in the past year when you found yourself sitting angrily at your desk wondering why you had to do so much of the work yourself. You silently cursed your colleagues under your breath as you polished off yet another aspect of that big project. If it weren't for you, you thought, the entire office might collapse under the combined weight of all its slackers.
The same thing might happen at home, too. Spouses and partners routinely fight over who takes care of the chores, and everyone feels like they're doing more than their fair share.
And yes, it's certainly possible that you actually are pulling your own weight and then some. Maybe you're surrounded by freeloaders and are the only halfway responsible person in the bunch. But there's a pretty good chance you aren't, despite your perceptions to the contrary. Here's why.
A likely explanation is that you're suffering from a common phenomenon familiar to psychologists as "egocentric bias." True to its name, it's our tendency to pay more attention to ourselves than to other people.
That's one piece of a large body of research collectively termed "construal level theory," which posits that people think more abstractly about people and objects that are distant from them than the things that feel psychologically closer.
For many, that makes intuitive sense, but it's often hard to tell in the moment when your perception is being shaped by this principle. Our sense of time falls under it, too. When it comes down to making day-to-day choices, we're more likely to focus on the details of how to carry out a given action happening in the near- to midterm, and to think only generally about what it'll take to accomplish something that's further off.
Obviously, people are closer to themselves than they are to anyone else. So you remember the amount of time you had to wait for a document to print, how long it took to search the web for a piece of information, or the hours-long slog to populate that spreadsheet.
But while you may know that someone else compiled reports from everyone on staff, for example, you're less likely to consider how much time they actually spent doing that—sending email reminders, proofreading responses, writing transitions from one person's remarks to another's, and then drawing coherent conclusions from all that feedback.
Some studies have examined people's sense of what is fair compensation for their own work relative to others', and egocentric bias is often found to play a big role; many people pay themselves a comparatively hefty chunk. And when you ask a group of people to estimate what percentage contribution they've made to a group effort, you're likely to find that the total figure far exceeds 100%. Almost everyone has overvalued their own influence.
The problem with overestimates like these is that they prevent you from recognizing how much other people contribute to a project's success. As a result, you may come to believe that your wins are largely the result of your own efforts. You may even begin to resent your colleagues for riding your coattails.
This can have real risks—not just for your team, but for you personally. When people have a false sense of their own roles, they may take on new assignments without putting the right kind of team in place to make sure all the details come together. To guard against this problem, it's important to bring the work that other people are doing closer to you.
That may not mean actually collaborating on the execution. But at least understanding what goes into someone else's execution is key. When you're evaluating the success of a project, don't just think about what your colleagues accomplished, imagine the steps you would've had to take in order to pull off their piece of it. By assuming somebody else's perspective, you can begin to see the overall effort of the team in more accurate proportions.
And if that doesn't work, take a colleague out for coffee and talk to them about their work. Get into the nuts and bolts—ask what steps they had to go through to do what they do. Chances are you're not the only hard worker, even if it often feels that way. Recognizing that will help you feel like less of a martyr—and make you a better leader.
It's getting increasingly cutthroat in the world of subscription collectibles for geeks.
When I ask Loot Crate cofounder Matthew Arevalo how the company stands out from its subscription-box competitors, he almost seems perturbed by the question.
For the last four years, Loot Crate has delivered mystery boxes full of geeky collectibles—T-shirts, vinyl figures, comics, and other assorted tchotchkes—on a subscription basis, like a cheese-of-the-month club for fans of Batman and Doctor Who. Those subscribers propelled Loot Crate to $116 million in revenue in 2015, and a No. 1 ranking on Inc.'s list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. This year, Arevalo expects revenues to reach $200 million. Yet he doesn't describe the company as a subscription-box business.
"We're kind of a different business altogether," he says, pointing to all the things Loot Crate does to enhance its business beyond placing items in boxes. This includes video production, social media outreach, a massive presence at events like Comic-Con, and creative partnerships with entertainment brands. He rejects direct comparisons to other services like Nerd Block and 1UP Box, referring to them as competitors only in the past tense.
"I can tell you, from what Loot Crate was last year, when we were positioned as strictly a subscription-box company, that the closest competitor in our space was at least five to six times smaller than we are and was doing unlicensed kind of products that are not on the same level or engagement as we are doing," he says.
Which doesn't mean life is easy at the top. As Loot Crate's business booms, entertainment brands such as Marvel and collectible makers like Funko are paying closer attention—and in some cases, creating subscription alternatives. Brick-and-mortar retailers have started dabbling in mystery-box sales. And subscribers, spoiled by a glut of options, are expecting better products at lower prices. These are high times for nerd boxes, but the business is becoming cutthroat.
That might explain why Loot Crate raised $18.5 million in venture funding last June—its first outside investment. To keep growing, companies like Loot Crate must become greater than the sum of their geek sundries.
Subscription boxes have been around for decades, but they've become a bigger phenomenon over the past five years as the internet has allowed niche subscription businesses to find devoted audiences. Beyond utilitarian services such as Dollar Shave Club and Blue Apron, there are subscription boxes for socks, snacks, fashion, beauty, and sex toys. Venture capitalists have collectively poured $1.4 billion into subscription box startups since 2010, the Wall Street Journal reports.
What's unique about geek boxes like Loot Crate is how they've tapped people's urge—enabled by the internet and social media—to identify and congregate around fandom.
"Nerd collectibles are something to be celebrated now, not something to be hidden," says Russ Montague, the president and cofounder of subscription-box service Nerd Block. "When I went to school, you kind of kept it to yourself when you were nerd or a geek, and I think we all remember that time. Now, it's a badge of honor that you wear with pride."
Major entertainment companies have caught on, turning fandom into a lucrative business. The steady flow of interconnected superhero films, serial dramas such as The Walking Dead, and game franchises like Halo are all designed to fuel never-ending obsessions. According to a report by analyst firm Piper Jaffray, superfans of a film like Star Wars will consume content on sites like YouTube and AwesomenessTV for five times longer than they spend watching the actual movie.
Those passions, in turn, feed a massive merchandising machine, which allows people to wear their allegiances on their sleeves. It's worth noting that Disney recently announced its full theatrical schedule through 2019, allowing the hype cycle to begin earlier and priming the pump for more merchandising sales.
"When I was growing up, your social badge was whatever you participated in—your sports or your clubs," Piper Jaffray analyst Stephanie Wissink says. "What's happening now is, in order to earn social currency or popularity, you take on an affinity for something that has merit. And I think that's a little bit of what these product-curation companies do is, they help [people find] that sense of a social badge."
All of this has been a huge boon for the geek-box business. Montague notes that when Nerd Block got started in 2013, toy makers and Hollywood studios didn't see the point in lending their products to such a niche market. Now, he says, Nerd Block is overwhelmed with opportunities to create exclusive products.
"We have been surprised ourselves with how fast studios are coming out with new properties, or coming out with sequels, or planning things in advance," Montague says. "From a nerd subscription service perspective, as long as they keep pumping out these great brands, it puts us in a really great position."
Within the greater toy and collectibles industry, the subscription-box business isn't huge: Wissink estimates that it comprises less than 1% of the total market. But entertainment and merchandising companies believe there's more to gain from these services than revenue alone.
For 343 Industries, the Microsoft studio that runs the Halo franchise, subscription boxes are a way to engage with a certain type of superfan who then spreads the word to his or her friends and social media followers. That's why 343 recently teamed with Loot Crate on a bimonthly Halo-themed subscription box packed with figurines, apparel, replicas, and gaming accessories.
"So much of the secret sauce of Loot Crate is that they've created a community where people are excited about what they're receiving. They're excited about the brand, they're posting, they're unboxing, they're filming things," says John Friend, 343 Industries' head of consumer products.
Even at $35 per month, the revenue from the Halo Legendary Crate will barely register as a blip on the franchise's $1.5 billion merchandising business, but Friend sees the effort as worthwhile because of how it keeps fans in tune with the brand over time. He notes that one of the things early subscribers love the most is how Halo crates have a narrative element. (Each subscriber is supposedly inducted into an exclusive squad of Spartan super-soldiers dubbed "Fireteam Apollo.")
"We can actually deliver products that are directly related to key things that are happening in games: entertainment initiatives we're pursuing, all sorts of things," Friend says. "And that, as a fan, is a much bigger experience than just putting on a Halo jersey."
Beyond just engagement, the mystery-box model can be a valuable source of product research. Around 30% of Loot Crate's subscribers respond to the company's feedback forms for each shipment, and Loot Crate employs data scientists to sift through them all. The company also tries to analyze online sentiment outside of surveys and brings in focus groups to talk about the products. For a company like WWE, which is about to launch its own bimonthly crate, those insights have value.
"While WWE has an incredibly rich consumer product team and sells licensed products all around the world, this is a unique mystery-themed subscription that is totally new, that they've never done before, and it's important for them to get information back on how well it's received and what's resonating," Arevalo says.
Funko, a maker of vinyl figures and other collectibles that itself has ridden high on the fandom boom, sees subscription boxes as a way to experiment, according to Mark Robben, the company's director of marketing. While these boxes only make up about 10% of Funko's revenue, having a guaranteed audience allows the company to try out new products with less risk.
"It may be the only time we do it, it may be the beginning of a line, it may be something we're going to test and get some feedback on. But because they're such hardcore fans that participate in subscription boxes, it allows us to try some things and experiment, which was always something we told our fans we would do," Robben says.
For example, as part of a subscription-box service run in conjunction with DC Comics, Funko created vinyl figures of Joker and Harley Quinn as they appeared in Suicide Squad. Both subscribers and DC were thrilled with the result, so Funko decided to expand the line and introduce it to retail stores.
"It wasn't necessarily a thing that we were saying we were going to do or that we were going to roll that out in other places," Robben says. "But the feedback was so positive, it was like, there's something here."
Now that the geek box business has gotten enough traction with entertainment companies and collectible makers, a new trend has emerged: The boxes are unbundling. They're targeting specific properties with a laser focus.
Nerd Block started offering a gaming-specific "Arcade Block" in 2014, and has since added sci-fi, comic, horror, and kids options. Loot Crate followed with a pet-specific offering in 2015, and added gaming and anime boxes earlier this year.
Now the market is fragmenting even more. Beyond just Halo, Loot Crate is making bimonthly boxes for WWE, Marvel, and the cult 2002 TV show Firefly. The company also offers one-off limited-edition boxes for franchises like Gears of War, Call of Duty, and Star Wars. Funko now offers subscription boxes for Marvel, DC, and Star Wars, and plans to launch a Disney-based subscription plan next year. Nerd Block's Montague says his company is working with studios on several brand-specific boxes as well.
This is the logical outcome for an industry whose sales pitch to entertainment companies hinges on stoking superfan obsessions. As Funko's Robben notes, brands like Marvel don't necessarily want to share box space with their competitors or risk not being included at all. They want omnipresence.
"I think the challenge for them is that you're not necessarily going to have something Marvel in every single Loot Crate or Nerd Block box," Robben says. "If the theme is Superman, then Marvel's probably out of luck for that particular box."
On some level, unbundling works out nicely for consumers, retaining a sense of surprise with less risk of being disappointed by what's inside. But it could also have a downside if consumers can't access the best products without multiple subscriptions. That's already happening with Funko, which has stopped supplying Marvel, DC, and Star Wars figures to other subscription boxes such as Loot Crate and Nerd Block.
"We're walking a fine line, and a gray area, I guess, in terms of saying, 'Well, we're obviously not going to compete with ourselves and supply a Loot Crate with Marvel characters anymore,'" Robben says. "But, we don't have a gaming box, and if we're going to send gaming or anime characters to Loot Crate, that's fine."
Speaking to these companies, I get the sense that there's an arms race underway. The big entertainment franchises want exclusive partnerships, which means subscription-box makers need to lock up as many as they can or risk losing the fanbase that creates the unboxing videos and posts their bounties to social media. Without that community, there's little incentive for entertainment franchises to pay attention.
Suddenly it's clear why a company like Loot Crate needs to raise venture capital: Building those partnerships requires manpower and money. Those who can't grow fast enough right now are doomed to whither away.
"Right now, there's a large audience that's willing to try any subscription box. But what you're seeing is, that audience is maturing as well," Nerd Block's Montague says. "They're starting to understand that companies like Nerd Block and Loot Crate and Funko, they mean quality, they mean excellence, they mean exclusives. They're partnered with the celebrities and the big brands, where [smaller subscription providers] are starting to only be able to order out of catalogs."
While Montague does include his own company in that mix, Nerd Block is looking to hedge his bets. The company is now seeking outside funding for new ventures entirely outside the geek arena.
"We've really mastered how the subscription industry as a whole works," he says. "The nerd space is great, and we love it, and we've got new boxes we're launching, and big partnerships with big studios that we're launching. But we're also getting into some unaddressed markets in the subscription box space."
Most people I spoke to for this story believe the subscription nerd box business will continue to grow, if only because there are still new fandoms and demographics to pursue. Funko's Robbens notes that women tend to be underserved, and 343's John Friend said one of the major complaints with the first Halo boxes, now being addressed, was that the apparel didn't come in women's sizes.
But it's also possible that the next step is to undo the subscription model itself. Montague says within the next month or two, Nerd Block will be relaunching its website with a regular online store. He imagines some people will make one-off purchases, while others will look to complete partial sets of collectibles that have arrived through their mystery boxes.
"Not everybody is going to want to subscribe to things all the time," he says.
Traditional retailers are also dipping their toes into the mystery-box business, but without a subscription model attached. During Black Friday last year, Funko offered a mystery box through GameStop, and it sold out within days. The company is now working with both GameStop and Walmart on new mystery boxes, and Robben expects that other retailer partnerships will follow.
"I think that's how physical retail decided they would participate in this model," Robben says. "The way that works best for them was to sell these mystery boxes in their stores. Same form factor, same delivery method, same blind-box aspect to it, but it's not a subscription. They want people coming into their stores, paying there, and leaving with the box."
Retailers and standalone sales, however, would inherently lose some of the things that make the subscription-box business unique. There's no guaranteed audience to experiment on, no recurring engagement with superfans, no feeling that you've embarked on some exclusive journey.
But for a company like Loot Crate, maybe those things are becoming less important. As Arevalo says, the business isn't really about selling subscription boxes. It's about selling fandom, and the company with the biggest entertainment partnerships is the one that stands to sell the most.
You don't need to be a techie to get into the VR/AR space, says this Silicon Valley VC. Here are his tips on getting noticed.
It's impossible to walk 10 feet in Silicon Valley and not run into a VR/AR enthusiast. The space still seemed pretty "fringe" when I first started getting into it five years ago, but it's since exploded. With the upcoming launch of Playstation VR, Oculus Touch controllers, cheaper VR-compatible PCs, and Google Daydream, VR promises to bring immersive entertainment, communication, and education tools to more people than ever before.
To do that, though, the fast-growing sector needs talent. And since it's accelerating faster than universities can add VR/AR coursework, most of the industry's newcomers come in from other fields—not just professionally but geographically, too. VR's global hub is Silicon Valley at the moment, but centers of VR development are popping up rapidly in China, Japan, Switzerland, the U.K., Turkey, and France. Here's how to find a job in one of them, whether you're an experienced techie or not.
If you're new to the VR scene, one good place to start is to check out UploadVR (where in full disclosure I'm an advisor) for an industry primer. It originally started as a news site for all things VR, but quickly evolved to become much more. The Upload Collective in San Francisco (and soon to be in L.A. and other locations globally) is a community and expertise hub for all things VR and AR. The group hosts informal networking happy hours as well as educational workshops on how to build in VR and raise money for a VR startup. There are also classes on developer programs at Oculus or HTC.
Headset manufacturer HTC Vive also has various programs that provide investment capital, VR equipment, developer support, and office space as part of its Vive X incubator program. Vive invests between $50,000 and $350,000 per "incubee," and the program lasts four months. Vive X has beautiful offices and "hangout" space in San Francisco, and it's setting up similar centers in China and Taipei. The organization hosts regular events and outreach efforts for developers and VR entrepreneurs, which are great for getting acquainted with the VR developer community.
Other events to attend (or volunteer at) include SVVR in Silicon Valley and VRLA in Los Angeles. One the West Coast, GDC is a conference for game developers interested in VR, and there's also VRX, the VentureBeat-hosted GamesBeat, VR on the Lot, and of course Siggraph, the leading visual effects and design conference. There are many other events, too, but these are the ones I found most helpful as a newcomer.
It's also useful to follow some of the industry's leaders on Twitter. Friends and co-investors of mine—including Tipatat Chennavasin, Greg Castle, Gavin Teo, and Amitt Mahajan—follow the space closely, so you should also check out their social media feeds for up-to-date comments, blog posts, and curated industry news.
Say you've done your homework and read all the content that's out there. Now you're ready to level up. Fortunately, there are some formal training options for VR professionals beginning to emerge.
At OC3 (the Oculus Connect 3 conference), Oculus announced it would roll out a series of training and educational programs to help developers better understand the platform. Online education platform Udacity will soon offer a six-month "nanodegree" in VR, in partnership with Google Daydream, Unity, and HTC Vive. Then there's the UploadVR Academy, which is a more condensed curriculum offered over eight weeks.
The VR industry is ripe for those with gaming industry experience. Having invested in several gaming companies in the past, my partners and I are often asked about VR game development by friends and colleagues working for mobile, PC, or console game publishers.
All major VR headsets are pushing games first and foremost—above all other forms of content. Oculus announced it's invested $250 million in content for its platforms, presumably with much of it earmarked for game developers. Game studios like Playful in Austin and Insomniac Games (in Burbank, CD and Durham, NC) are hiring talented designers and developers looking to break into VR.
Animators and 3D modelers from the gaming and visual effects worlds are likewise in high demand by VR/AR companies. Getting some experience working with the VR/AR toolsets Unity and Unreal can be really useful, and not just for game development. Unity's big, recent round of funding was largely predicated on the belief that Unity would become the virtual world itself—or in other words, to borrow an analogy from Hollywood, the base layer of the "Matrix."
The new medium needs an influx of UI/UX designers to help optimize the VR/AR interface and experience for the first time. No flow or design template has yet been defined as the industry standard. In the meantime, designers I've spoken to have really been able to let their creativity run wild in defining new interaction archetypes.
For instance, bringing a user's hands into VR through the Oculus Touch controllers ushers in a new category of input gestures and controls—not to mention a whole host of design challenges. Understanding input and interaction spaces for room-scale VR vs. static or 360 video will also be fruitful fodder for UI/X folks to explore.
One longer-term area that's on track to grow is the intersection between artificial intelligence (AI) and AR/VR—giving "bodies to bots" and populating VR and AR worlds with sentient holograms. People with machine (and deep) learning experience are in high demand right now. So are computer-vision experts who can better inform virtual world characters, not to mention help flesh-and-blood users make better sense of the world around us as we're immersed.
What's more, these skill sets will apply to more industries than just AR and VR in the years ahead. For example, as an early investor in Cruise Automation, we saw the impact that computer vision had on autonomous vehicles, with cameras recognizing road markings and street signs more accurately over time. If you're a talented computer-vision engineer, you have a lot of exciting job opportunities ahead of you in this space.
Most open positions are in engineering right now, but there are opportunities in legal, UI/UX, marketing, and business development too, even though they're fewer in number. In legal, for example, imagine all the questions that arise today around privacy and property rights: if Niantic Labs and a future version of Pokémon Go inspires gamers to trespass on physical property while going after a Charmander, is Niantic Labs liable? Or if a graffiti artist tags an augmented-reality digital overlay on your company's building, can he face charges for defacing private property?
For business development roles, opportunities might involve licensing intellectual property in VR environments, or signing corporate customers to develop VR/AR applications for their businesses. In marketing, could you run the launch campaign for a new piece of VR hardware or plan for a new game or VR film. These are just a few examples of how broad the job opportunities go within VR right now—it really isn't just for engineers.
At a big tech company, your role may be more regimented than at a smaller one, but you'll have access to tremendous resources and may have better job security than at an early-stage VR startup.
Because it's still young and changing and expanding so quickly, the VR/AR world really functions like a community—arguably more so than most other tech sectors. So you may find it's unusually welcoming. That's true despite it being so distributed; years ago, just as you didn't have to be in Cupertino or Mountain View to become a mobile app developer, you're no longer obliged to be in Silicon Valley to snag a great job in VR. In fact, Oculus and HTC content development grants aren't restricted to American creators, and international studios like Owlchemy Labs (Austin, Texas) and CCP Games (Reykjavik, Iceland) have created amazing VR titles with Oculus grant support.
Finally, a word to hiring managers and investors, without whom there'd be no hiring spree in the first place: post your job listings where newcomers to the field will be most likely to find them—on SVVR, UploadVR, AngelList, and even in relevant forums on Reddit. And for investors, there aren't yet established channels for "dealflow" in the space, so investing in the nascent community is important —in other words, it's my job to invest in great entrepreneurs looking to refashion existing industries within this new computing revolution. If you're one of them, get in touch!
Sunny Dhillon is a founder and partner at Signia Venture Partners, an early-stage fund in Menlo Park and San Francisco. In invest in VR/AR and consumer tech. Follow Sunny on Twitter at @SunDhillon and Snapchat at @sunnydhillon25.
IDW adapted the quirky comedic thriller—from screenwriter Max Landis and the producers of The Walking Dead—from Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency novels, which it optioned in 2014 and reimagined as a comic book series. Dirk joins IDW's first TV venture, Syfy's Wynonna Earp, a supernatural western based on Beau Smith's IDW comic pitting Wyatt Earp's granddaughter against demons. Wynonna premiered in April and recently renewed for a second season. USA Networks ordered a pilot pick-up for Brooklyn Animal Control for showrunner David Goyer, based on J.T. Petty's organized crime thriller comic.
Other recent achievements include a National Book Award nomination for the final installment of March—Congressman John Lewis's autobiographical graphic novel trilogy from acquired imprint Top Shelf Productions; publishing Pulitzer Prize-winning Berkeley Breathed's first Bloom County collection in 26 years, and a lauded limited edition of Bill Sienkiewicz-illustrated New Mutants comics; and raising $4 million from shareholders for its entertainment division. With a market cap hovering around $220 million, the San Diego firm anticipates grossing some $60 million this year.
"What makes us unique is we're the only public multimedia entertainment company outside of the behemoths, like the Warner Bros. and Disneys of the world," says IDW CEO Ted Adams (no relation to Douglas). "Each of our divisions—publishing, board games, entertainment—feed each other's success. There's no microcap or midcap companies that are doing what we're doing."
In contrast to the entrepreneurial trend of flashy branding and swift results, IDW's gradual expansion and diversification, sprinkled with occasional passion projects, provides an unusual case study in establishing a sustainable and stable media company.
"We've been in business for 17 years and it's been slow, steady growth," says Adams. "We try not to bite off more than we can chew, bring in smart people to run our businesses, and have a diverse product mix. I'm a conservative person by nature and don't take a lot of big, uncalculated risks."
Creatively, Adams is guided by his inner fanboy. A voracious reader who occasionally dabbles in comic writing, he walks a line between hands-on involvement and stepping back.
"What makes me unique as a publisher and CEO of an entertainment company is that I've spent my entire life consuming books, so I understand plot, character development, good writing, and good art," he says. "I rarely get involved once I take on a project, but I am involved in whether we're going to take on a project. This company is built around things I like and is very much a reflection of my taste."
Dominique Provost-Chalkley as Waverly Earp, Melanie Scrofano as Wynonna EarpPhoto: Michelle Faye/Syfy/Wynonna Earp Productions
More formally, Adams is CEO of IDW Media Holdings, and co-founder and operational CEO of its subsidiaries. They include IDW Publishing, which produces comics and graphic novels, and reprints classic American comic strips through its imprint, Library of American Comics; IDW Entertainment, which finances the development and production of TV shows; Top Shelf Productions, the Atlanta boutique publisher acquired last year; IDW Games, which produces board and card games; IDW Limited, which compiles high-end collectable limited editions; CTM Media Group, a travel brochure distributor to 14,000 hotels; Ettractions, a digital listing of travel destinations; and the San Diego Comic Art Gallery, which showcases original comic art, runs children's comics classes, and a comics lending library.
A replica of illustrator Kevin Eastman's office is a gallery centerpiece. Eastman often works from home. [Photo: Susan Karlin]
"The art gallery is more of a labor of love," says Adams. IDW's location in the city's Liberty Station Arts District requires an art space for the public. "We could have accomplished that by putting art on the walls then opening our doors on the first Friday of the month. But we built our business here, and comics are in the DNA of San Diego, because of Comic-Con. So we did it in a much bigger way to give back to the community."
Kevin Eastman, co-creator of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and IDW's artist-in-residence, curates the gallery, and often speaks to visiting students. "Kevin's sort of become the creative presence for the company," says Adams. "I'm not flashy and like to fly under the radar a little bit. We want our products to speak for themselves. It's a big broad team. I don't think it's good to have a company that can't succeed if one particular person is not there."
After nearly a decade working for such comic publishers as Dark Horse and the now-defunct WildStorm, and earning an MBA from Notre Dame University, Adams co-founded Idea and Design Works in 1999 to develop gaming and publishing spin-offs of pop culture properties. (Of the other founders, Robbie Robbins remains as EVP and senior graphic artist of IDW Publishing, while writer Kris Oprisko and illustrator Alex Garner are no longer part of the company.)
In 2007, New Jersey telecommunications firm IDT Corporation purchased a majority interest in IDW, spinning it off years later as its own public company, CTM Media Holdings—this year renamed IDW Media Holdings.
The business has grown steadily each year and now employs a salaried staff of 62 and 250—300 freelancers. It publishes both print and digital versions, and distributes its games beyond comic bookshops to stores like Walmart, Target, and Toys"R"Us.
"Our accounting department is the same size as our editorial department," says Adams. "We go way above and beyond on the royalty reporting and profit and loss statements. We're constantly analyzing what works within each division, each brand, product category from a financial standpoint. We're extremely disciplined about the bottom line, which enables us to have the positive cash flow to grow some of these divisions, or gamble on new products.
Successful TV properties will, in turn, prompt new lines of comics, games, and possibly apps that synch with show plots and characters. "We want to have all these pieces of IP go through every division," says Adams. "We know what we need to do to grow. The challenge is the entertainment division, because so much of it is outside of our control. The linchpin is finding a network to get a show going."
Josh Bertwistle as Vinne in Wynonna Earp[Photo: Syfy/Wynonna Earp Productions]
IDW launched its entertainment division in 2013 with a low-to-mid-seven-figure investment gleaned from earmarked profits over the years. Adams hired veteran TV executive David Ozer, who'd previously worked for Sonar Entertainment, Starz, and Sony, to oversee the division, and enlisted Circle of Confusion, IDW's publishing manager and the producers behind The Walking Dead, to help develop.
"Circle of Confusion makes sure the scripts are good, and David knows who to sell the shows to," says Adams.
Still, the team racked up early successes. In addition to Wynonna Earp, Dirk Gently, and Animal Control, other TV properties in development include the animated Wormwood, voiced by George Lopez from a comic by Ben Templesmith, and live-action dramas Locke & Key, based on the graphic novel series created by Joe Hill, who is also writing the pilot; the Michael Chiklis vehicle, Pantheon, based on a comic he created; and Winterworld, from a Chuck Dixon comic.
IDW's structure offers certain advantages, such as streamlined decision-making and a vast library that can accommodate TV network's changing content needs. It serves as its own studio by deficit-financing its development and production slate alongside equity partners, such as AMC Studios and Malaysia's Ideate Media (Dirk Gently), Calgary's Seven24 Films (Wynonna Earp), and Universal Cable Productions (Brooklyn Animal Control).
"We're working outside of the [traditional] studio system, so we have a direct line of communication with the writers," says Ozer. "We develop and package [a property], create a pilot script and series format, before we try to sell it. It lets us move projects through faster because we're the ones making decisions. Basing shows on comic properties makes them easier to conceptualize, and some bring a huge fan base. But no matter what you bring in, even after landing at a network, there's still work being done."
IDW's film strategy relies on studio optioning. Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment last summer optioned Aleister Arcane, a horror comic from writer Steve Niles and artist Breehn Burns, for Jim Carrey and director Eli Roth. Sony is developing the post-apocalyptic comic Zombies vs Robots from writer and IDW CCO Chris Ryall and artist Ashley Wood. And Warner Bros. is developing the mythic Lore from writer T.P Louise and artist Ashley Wood, for Dwayne Johnson.
"We option content to film companies and take a passive role while the studios develop it," says Adams. "On the TV side, we decided to control our own destiny and put our own money on the table. In the entertainment division, we've mitigated risk by doing a portfolio play. We didn't want to put all of our eggs in one basket, so we developed 10 shows with the idea that we'd get a couple on the air. If we develop one or two shows and they don't go, we've spent all of that money on overhead and it didn't pay off."
For shows that don't get picked up, IDW might build audiences internationally before pitching them Stateside again. It's also considering its own digital channel with original and licensed like-minded content.
"I'd need someone who can put that together for us," says Adams, while Ozer adds, "The volume of people IDW reaches, it makes sense to have some sort of its own platform."
Despite his success, Adams is uncertain how to advise future entrepreneurs interested in this arena. "It's hard to replicate what we're doing, because it's based on a history of building an infrastructure of steady, reliable, positive cash flow, and a big IP catalog," says Adams. "You couldn't start up a publishing division, then a gaming division six months later, then an entertainment division right after, unless you have a giant amount of cash or someone comes in with $50 million, $100 million."
The other component is credibility. "A good TV script might get you attention, but you'd still need a reputable agent to get you in the door," says Adams. Comics are even more mercurial. "Comic bookstores are risk-averse, because they can't return orders. It takes awhile to build a good reputation for books that sell well, so it's very hard for new comic book publishers. When we started, we published one comic book, then two. Three years later, we had five. It took a really long time to build their trust that we could give them something they could sell. There's no get-rich-quick scheme in the world of comic books."
