Just like earning badges, getting things done involves breaking big goals down into doable steps.
One of my children joined the Cub Scouts this fall, a decision that's made me quite nostalgic for my own Girl Scouts days. He's taken with the camping, but I realized the part I liked most was earning Girl Scouts badges. It probably sparked my lifelong interest in time management and productivity.
Getting things done involves breaking big, nebulous concepts into actionable steps. Badge earning taps into the same mind-set, and by giving evidence of progress, it is immensely satisfying—perhaps as much, I would argue, as digging into a stack of Thin Mints.
Talk to managers about their productivity woes, and you'll hear that people, particularly new young hires, frequently don't know how to get started on big projects. They don't know how to pace themselves toward deadlines. When the path forward is uncertain, this can lead to much wheel spinning and emergencies. Or things just don't get done.
Scouting, which tries to teach children about the world and how it works, faces a similar dilemma. How do you know if a child understands First Aid, or healthy eating, or how to be an "active citizen," or "Ms. Fix-It," or appreciate "local lore" (to list some badge names)? People could spend decades learning about any of these topics and still face unanswerable questions. The point is not certainty. It's to have enough working knowledge and practical experience to make progress to incorporate these things into one's life.
I recently dug up a copy of Girl Scout Badges and Signs, the handbook I used as a Junior Girl Scout in the 1980s. One forward-looking (for the time) badge I remember earning was "Computer Fun." This was illustrated by a patch with "00111 10011" on it. You needed to complete six of 12 possible activities.
Examples:
"Look through books, newspapers, or magazines, watch television, and/or go in person to find computers being used for at least five different purposes. Share what you find with your troop members."
"Find out the names of at least three computer languages. In one of these, learn the symbols you would use to get the computer to add, subtract, multiply, and divide."
"Find a place, such as a high school or business that has a keypunch machine for punching computer cards. Watch someone punch information on the card or punch one yourself with your name, address, and phone number on it. Find out how the letters and numbers are related to the positions of the holes on the card."
At the end of these and other activities, you would have figured out that the code on the badge itself: 00111 10011 in the binary system is 7 and 19, when mapped onto the order of the alphabet stands for G S, the Girl Scouts. Of course. Earning the badge meant a scout could make enough sense of those concepts to feel comfortable.
Along the way, the scout would also tap into one of the most powerful forces in human psychology.
Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile famously analyzed thousands of diary entries from workers about their moods. She found that people were happiest when they felt a sense of progress in their work. Checking off badge requirements will do that. And securing that patch onto your vest or sash is the ultimate satisfying moment.
Much of life can be approached the same way. Perhaps you want to get your finances in order. That seems complicated and difficult, and possibly not worth trying. But what if you pretended to be the designer of a Personal Finance badge? You might create potential activities such as tracking your spending for a month, setting up automatic deposits in a retirement account, seeing what people doing similar work are paid and creating a case for a raise, rebalancing a brokerage account (if you have one, or opening one if you don't), trying to negotiate better deals on recurring payments, and the like. You'd go through these one by one and check them off. At the end, you wouldn't be Warren Buffet, but you'd be in much better financial shape than before.
At work, perhaps, you want to land a new big client. There is an element of luck to this, but a badge designer could also come up with plenty of steps to try in the pursuit. You call current clients and ask for referrals. You research the best networking events and send people to each one with a mission. You publish a white paper showing your expertise, and include information on how to contact you. All this activity will likely generate something positive for the organization, and people will feel happy as they undertake each step. They are getting stuff done. Just like a Girl Scout with her eye on a shiny new badge.
As menswear spending increases, a new generation of startups hopes to dress the modern male.
As men increasingly rival women in the amount of money they spend on clothes, the tech scene is accommodating the man who wants to dress like Kanye, Bieber, or even President Barack Obama—but on a millennial's budget.
Menswear sales grew 13% from 2010 to 2015, versus 9% in womenswear for the same period in the U.S., according to Euromonitor International. By 2020, worldwide annual menswear sales are predicted to reach $457 billion and womenswear, $698 billion.
It would seem that men are more fashion-conscious than ever before, but when it comes to the tech side of the market, menswear has traditionally lagged behind womenswear. For years, women have enjoyed a wide range of apps, e-commerce sites, and wearable tech lines. Now dudes are catching up.
A recent success story is Combatant Gentlemen, an online retailer targeting young professionals on a budget. These millennials want to dress like Entourage's Ari Gold but find themselves in a bind: They can't afford Hugo Boss and feel out of place hitting up Men's Wearhouse. Combatant Gentlemen solves this dilemma by selling custom-made 100% Italian wool suits starting at just $160.
The startup is a hybrid of fashion and apparel essentials (like shirts and ties), almost like a "Uniqlo for suits" but with stronger roots in the higher end of the business. The design-to-delivery brand uses a Netflix-like algorithm to recommend curated looks based on customers' preferences and previous shopping behavior. Launched in 2012, Combatant Gentlemen grew from $4 million to $10 million in revenue between 2013 and 2014. The company controls prices by producing clothing in-house, with it its own factories and cotton plantations in Italy. They even have their own sheep.
Cofounder and CEO Vishaal Melwani recalls that pitching his startup in 2012 in Silicon Valley was a "very difficult" experience. He's since witnessed a surge in industry interest. "It's been exciting to see other menswear startups come about, whether it be accessories or luggage," he says. "The space is really wide open."
Menlo Ventures' Pravin Vazirani, an investor in companies like The Black Tux, Warby Parker, and Poshmark, has also seen a significant increase in menswear startups. In fact, one company in his portfolio—Stance, a luxury menswear sock e-retailer—is projected to make $100 million in revenue this year.
"The way men shop makes it more conducive to online. Men are a little bit more utilitarian, they focus on convenience and price as some of the main criteria," Vazirani says, noting that this differs from women's typically more social and interactive shopping habits. "It makes more sense for men's fashion to move online, but it's still underinvested in terms of startup activity—which is exactly why we think it's interesting."
The market has been wildly receptive to several online retailers, and the wealth is spreading. Online menswear sales grew 17.4% between 2010 and 2015, outpacing all other categories, IbisWorld reports. The market research firm predicts online menswear will grow more, with an annual average of 14.2% between 2015 and 2020.
There's Bonobos, the menswear e-retail startup that subverted the shop-in-store experience. It's now added brick-and-mortar stores to its model, allowing shoppers to browse merchandise in person and have purchases shipped to them free of charge. You don't leave with anything in your bag.
Mr Porter, meanwhile, has become a booming business that translated the luxury shopping experience for men onto mobile. Mr Porter has become so synonymous with men's fashion that it even made its way into an A$AP Rocky rap song. Their premiere service offers same-day delivery, and just last month, the company announced a shoppable Apple TV app.
"The ability to create a dynamic digital shopping experience broadens the appeal of shopping to reach over to men," says Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, whose portfolio includes Bonobos. Men prefer the simplicity of shopping online, particularly on their phones. They value functional, Green says, yet at the same time are now more in tune with fashion due to our image-driven culture. Men, like women, are bombarded with fashion on Instagram, Tumblr, and their Facebook accounts.
Some insiders think there's still plenty of room to grow in elevating menswear to the same digital status as womenswear. "There really hasn't been a killer app yet," says Jian DeLeon, senior menswear editor of trend forecasting firm WGSN. He doesn't foresee major innovation in menswear clothing per se—or how they wear clothing—but rather changes in logistics: how the industry distributes products, controls price points, and improves quality. Companies such as Warby Parker and Everlane reimagined the process of obtaining high-quality style, but The Next Big Thing for men has yet to be created.
And because of that, DeLeon dismisses the idea that the industry has experienced any true earthquakes of innovation in recent years. "[The term] 'disruption' is often abused in the fashion space because oftentimes they're not really disrupting anything—they're just entering the market, especially in menswear," said DeLeon.
Celebrity fashion is playing a bigger part in menswear—just think of the styles on display during the locker room walk in NBA games.
As DeLeon sees it, men want to emulate celebrities who dress according to their own style, or at least look like they do. They don't want to know about stylists and all the work that goes into designing a consistent and unique personal aesthetic.
"Men's BS detector is at an all-time high. It's not about 'getting the look' of a certain celebrity," says DeLeon. "That Kanye and John Mayer know their fashion—that's what guys identify with. They might not like John Mayer's music, but no other celebrity has a Rolex collection and is super nerdy about it. I think that's his appeal. They respect that realness in how he dresses."
That's exactly the philosophy behind Looklive, a Y Combinator-backed startup that harnesses the power of sartorial stars. The site and its app use both image search technology and a human editorial team to mine the best of men's fashion, then match it to corresponding brands and similar looks for sale.
Looklive accurately identifies products worn by the world's most influential men in fashion. Top influencers include Scott Disick, The Weeknd, and even Jack Dorsey.
Founders Cedric Rogers, Paul Judge, and Greg Selkoe noticed a hole in the market when it came to translating celebrity men's fashion into e-commerce, whereas womenswear has sites like Polyvore and Project September. They were cognizant of what happens when a celebrity wears a piece of clothing, and how household names drive consumer purchases.
"Men are especially influenced by athletes as well as entertainers, so we wanted to leverage that," says Rogers, who pointed to LeBron James and David Beckham, who both possess a near saintly status with fans.
Cofounder Greg Selkoe previously ran Karmaloop, a streetwear e-commerce site that saw a billion-dollar revenue, with 80% from male customers. "There is this need now to provide more fashion guidance, more apps, more websites...things that hit this [male] demographic" he says.
Looklive identifies products worn by influential men in fashion, including Scott Disick, The Weeknd, and even Jack Dorsey.
Looklive specifically targets men 18-35, an audience that is looking for a different type of shopping experience than what's offered by traditional box retailers. "They really want to have a genuine experience with the brands that they're identifying with, as well social influencers," Rogers says, noting that their company provides all of that in a quick, simple format. For example, their newest app update features Siri integration, so when you ask, "What did Drake wear to the VMAs?" you get an answer. (It was Tom Ford.)
"Authenticity has a real value still," says DeLeon. He believes that designer fashion "feels real" next to the hordes of fast-fashion knock-offs and purely practical apparel options. Style-conscious men, he says, want "something that cultivates a sense of desire in an age where clothing is leaning more towards problem-solving and filling gaps in a man's wardrobe." Brands like Uniqlo, for instance, are better known for selling pragmatic, on-trend garments than showstopping fashion pieces—despite the company's many successful partnerings with well-known designers. Uniqlo fleece might not necessarily inspire you, but it will probably keep you warm.
Men's interest in investing in designer fashion explains the rise of "re-commerce" companies like Grailed, which offers a curated retail experience featuring secondhand high-end clothing from such brands as Raf Simons, Rick Owens, and Saint Laurent.
Three years ago, Grailed cofounder Arun Gupta started frequenting menswear forums on Reddit, where he witnessed an increasing interest in men's luxury fashion. He interacted daily with men who saw few options to buy labels they admired. "There was a clear void," he says. "Now it's heating up and men are seeing more and more services being provided to them."
Describing the genesis of the trend, Grailed's brand director, Lawrence Schlossman, says, "It started with the forums then migrated to the blogosphere with independent, non-industry voices. Then from blogging it went to independent shops, pop-ups. You see this ripple effect."
Grailed's App
Grailed is more than just a resale site. It also promises customers a sense of discovery as it introduces them to new, noteworthy designers. The company targets both fashion enthusiasts and the more casual consumer. According to Gupta, this is what separates Grailed from competitors like Poshmark or TheRealReal or even eBay. The number of visitors to the site quadrupled in the last year, and items posted grew from 10,000 in 2015 to 350,000 in 2016.
"We have a brand," Gupta says. "While eBay doesn't really have a brand or a voice."
It wasn't easy getting Silicon Valley on board. Raising money for a fashion startup is hard enough. Pitch a company that caters to men—who are widely (and incorrectly) presumed to be indifferent to fashion—and it becomes even more challenging. As Gupta recalls, VCs were "generally dismissive" because they wanted the next Amazon, not something targeting a niche audience.
Gupta points to the market trends to refute the idea that men aren't as into fashion as women. If the menswear market is a third the size of the womenswear market, there should be more startups in that space, right? "The market is massive: There's 10 women's [resale] sites, and we're the only men's site," he says. "It makes you wonder why there aren't more."
WGSN's DeLeon acknowledges that a few innovative startups have come on the scene in recent years. This includes Gustin, which crowdsources every single item in their menswear catalog, like a Kickstarter campaign for a complete clothing line, ranging from sneakers to jackets. There's also Google's Project Jacquard, the touch-sensitive fabric technology that now has a partnership with Levi's.
And accelerators are starting to pay more attention to these fashion-forward startups. Manufacture NY is an incubator for independent designers working on bold initiatives such as wearable tech. Dropel Fabrics, for example, is a menswear line of water and stain-resistant clothing (for the fashionable, yet clumsy, man).
No matter the level of innovation genius, Manufacture NY CEO Bob Bland says it's important for new brands to recognize how menswear differs from womenswear. Men, for example, might not be as mindful of seasonal trends as women.
"It is imperative for menswear brands to not follow the traditional wholesale calendar, seasonal approach… They must offer their customers enduring, timeless styles and rely on direct sales to survive in the luxury space," Bland says via email. "I see men's wearable tech as a big growth opportunity, especially in the performance category and niche areas like custom (bespoke) sizing, mass customization, and IoT [connected devices]."
On the West Coast, Grid110 is an economic and community development organization working to activate the fashion startup ecosystem in downtown L.A. Close to one-third of their applicants are focused on menswear. One of their recent startups is Lumenus, a smart-clothing brand that produces outdoor apparel with industrial wearable light, such as jackets with embedded LEDs that interface with Google Maps.
Lumenus started with menswear because they see men becoming more receptive to boundary-pushing designs. "In the tech product market, early adopters are almost always male," said Jeremy Wall, founder of Lumenus, in an email. "For this reason, Lumenus will target men with the launch of our first line of technology-enhanced cycling apparel—also because athletic wear for men is a bit more 'forgiving' in terms of product design."
Grid110 is only in its second fundraising cycle, but the founders are confident it will see more menswear startups attempt to take on the fashion industry. "As social media surges, we're seeing more and more direct-to-consumer brands pop up," says Megan Sette, cofounder and a member of the board of directors at Grid110. "And as shopping technology evolves, one can only imagine that there could be an uptick in the development of new men's product lines, considering how easy it's becoming to access the consumer and for them to shop from home or on demand."
These innovations are exciting in terms of pushing the industry forward, but will they resonate with customers who value function as well as fashion?
"There will always be the early adopters who wear envelope-pushing styles and labels," DeLeon says. "Guys just want to look presentable and look like themselves, just better-dressed versions."
Let's just say things got a lot better after that.
It's 2001. Steve Jobs is back at Apple trying to right the ship and re-energize the company. He did. And it all started on a day 15 years ago when Jobs took the stage to announce a new product that was a departure from everything the company had done. It was the first iPod. And it was the iPod that gave Apple a hit (eventually) and helped helped bring back the company's mojo.
That's why it's funny to watch the video of the event. It's far from the huge, masterfully presented press extravaganzas we attend today. I recognize a few long-time Apple reporters in the audience. The room is very small, and the seats aren't even completely filled up. The attendees look only mildly interested in the presentation. A slide projector is shooting some really sketchy-looking slides up behind Jobs. The bad graphics. The goofy font.
"To have your whole CD library with you at all times is a quantum leap when it comes to music," Jobs told the audience. "You can fit your whole music library in your pocket." Here's the MacWorld news story about the event.
The $399 iPod went on sale November 10 and by the end of the year had sold a grand total of 125,000 units. Of course, that first iPod spawned numerous versions, which together sold millions around the world.
By 2004 Apple was selling almost 40 million iPods a year. Sales peaked in 2008 when Apple shipped 54.8 million units. After sales of the iPhone (which launched in 2007) started to take off, iPod sales began to decline rapidly. The smartphone had swallowed the music player.
Tusk has been called the "Uber lobbyist" and "Silicon Valley's favorite political fixer." Does he want something more?
In 2011, Uber was a tiny transportation startup that, according to its blog, was "#superpumped" to have "officially gone multi-city." And, though he didn't know it yet, Bradley Tusk was about to become one very lucky political consultant.
The manager of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's successful 2009 reelection bid, Tusk had just left the administration and started his own firm. As a favor to a friend, he agreed to meet with an unknown transportation startup that had just received a cease-and-desist from the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC). "The founder comes in, it's Travis [Kalanick]," Tusk remembers. "I'd never heard of him or Uber."
Tusk has an unbridled, matter-of-fact style of speaking, and when he recounts a story, even as its sole narrator, it often unfolds like a ping-pong match. "We have this conversation. He says, 'Can I hire you?' I say, 'Sure, our minimum would be $25,000 per month.' He comes back, 'You know what? I can't do $25,000 per month. Can we do some equity?'" Tusk said yes—which turned out to be the deal of a lifetime. His stake in Uber is now rumored to be worth around $100 million.
After helping the company win the TLC's blessing in New York City, Tusk moved on to cities including Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Denver, and Washington, D.C. It was his first brush with the startup world.
Meanwhile, a bevy of well-funded, future-thinking startups began to encounter regulatory hurdles. Last week, Airbnb lost a campaign in New York to fight a law that makes listing entire homes on the site illegal. The daily fantasy sports site Fanduel has hired lobbyists in more than 30 states with hopes of protecting its business from charges that it constitutes illegal gambling. A burst of startups that aimed to sell homemade food had been shut down by health departments. And startups that want to "revolutionize" everything from garbage disposal to parking meters are trying to sell their products to municipalities.
Tusk saw an opportunity to position himself as Silicon Valley's political maneuvering expert.
Tusk stakes out his positions via guest-written articles for publications like Techonomy, VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and Forbes; posts ideas about how to fix everything from the Olympics to income inequality on his Medium blog; has hosted a dinner with reporters; and uses speaking gigs at tech conferences such as TechCrunch Disrupt to amplify his messages.
He says his efforts to establish himself at the intersection of technology and government are in service of Tusk Ventures, which works differently than most firms because startups pay in equity rather than cash. "It's about deal flow," Tusk says. "If [an entrepreneur] is giving me 6% of her company, and I don't give her a dollar in return, she has to walk in with a pretty high opinion of me. We need press to do all of that."
Another possible reason for Tusk to raise his public profile, one that several of his peers in the political world offered, is that he's setting himself up to run for office. A source with political expertise says if that were his plan, he would want to build a public persona around his values in advance of any personal campaign. That way he avoids being seen as a rich dilettante. As the New York-based political consultant put it, "If you were running for office, this makes total sense in that context."
Tusk denies that he's planning to run for office: "I don't think I'm electable," he tells me. But his unique brand of tech-savvy political chutzpah could certainly be used to sway an election.
"If you open your Uber on primary day, and there was a 'vote no De Blasio' button, and it would take you either to the polling place for free or from the polling place for free, would you do it?" he asks me, referring to the current New York City mayor, who he very publicly despises.
I probably would.
"My theory is that most people who are Uber users are not [New York City Mayor Bill] De Blasio supporters." Tusk says. "I might pay for free rides to and from the polls to anyone who wants to vote on Election Day under the theory that I'm going to win 90% of those votes for the anti-De Blasio campaign."
Government regulators have the power to make or break new companies, but technology startups can also, Tusk believes, influence politics. He has coined the term "Uber voter" to describe the new constituency made up of tech companies and their users.
Tusk grew up in a village in Long Island, about 20 miles from his current home in the Gramercy neighborhood of Manhattan. Before working for the Bloomberg campaign, he worked as the deputy governor of Illinois (under Rod Blagojevich, who Tusk later testified against when the governor was tried on corruption charges), and as a communications director for U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer.
Friends and enemies alike describe Tusk as a machine of intense efficiency and ambition. On most days, according to one of his own blog posts, he rises at 5 a.m. and then planks, prays, journals in a gratitude notebook, works out, meditates, reads four newspapers, takes vitamins, and makes a smoothie. Within the last five years, Tusk has launched two businesses in addition to his consulting firm: Kronos, which builds bespoke digital archives, and Ivory gaming, a traditional casino management company that has recently begun experimenting with virtual games inside brick-and-mortar casinos. During his downtime, he works on a script for a television pilot. He also runs an anti-hunger foundation with his wife. "You're here once, right?" he figures. "So fuck it, do as much as you can."
Tusk has built his reputation in the startup world around work he did for Uber in 2015, when it faced a proposal in New York City that would have capped the company's growth while the city studied congestion. In crafting its public message, Uber followed advice that Tusk now gives to all startups: Figure out the larger public policy benefit provided by your company, and that will put regulators on the defensive. Through direct mail, television advertising, and relentless publicity, the campaign for Uber argued that the company was good for the city, providing jobs and transportation for less affluent residents in the outer boroughs. It wasn't all about the message. It was also about who Uber wanted to hear it. The idea that Uber could reduce inequality intentionally coincided with the platform on which democratic Mayor De Blasio had campaigned, a move Tusk likes to call "attacking left-wing politicians from the left."
While Tusk was instrumental to the Uberization of New York City, he's sometimes been given more credit than he deserves. There were other talented advisers at Uber during that time, including David Plouffe, who managed President Obama's 2008 campaign. Uber's internal team included the former press secretary to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Matthew Wing—and the internal team contributed some of the most interesting ideas, like a feature in the Uber app that mobilized its users with a "De Blasio's Uber" screen that showed long wait times and asked them to email the mayor and city council members. In 500 pages of emails between Uber employees or representatives and New York's city hall, obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request, Tusk's name does not appear once. Tusk's firm says that its role was in coordinating the campaign and keeping all the pieces moving. As Josh Mohrer, Uber's general manager, put it to me: "Bradley was the coach of a very good team."
Less than two weeks after the New York City Uber campaign ended, Tusk launched Tusk Ventures.
In more than two dozen interviews with people who have interacted with Tusk, I find he has a reputation for a scorched earth approach to government relations. "The people who want to work with him are people who are ready to go to war," one prominent member of the tech community says. A political consultant echoes: "It's sort of like hiring the best criminal defense attorney. It says something. It says you're afraid and ready for a fight."
Tusk's consulting business doesn't fit into a box that most young startups would recognize: It's not exactly a lobbying firm, though it hires lobbyists. It's not exactly a PR firm, though it has its own PR staff (which handles some of its client startups' entire PR efforts). And it's not an advertising firm, though it works with them. "Our competition doesn't exist," Tusk says. "We say to Walmart, you're going to hire us. You're going to pay us three times what you're paying anybody else involved with this. And you still have to hire everyone else you need. But it's going to work out for you, because you're going to win." (Political consulting firms such as Global Strategy Group and FP1 Strategies would argue that the competition does indeed exist.)
Fanduel hired Tusk Ventures last October, and by then it was a fully fed unicorn ready for an Uber-sized fight. It had raised more than $360 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation and had already begun its lobbying efforts across the country. When news broke that employees at Fanduel and DraftKings—both fantasy sports companies that allow players to bet real money on players' daily performance—were winning big by playing on their competitors' platforms. The New York Times compared the setup to insider trading, and the next month, New York's attorney general declared the games illegal. Illinois and Texas' attorney generals followed his example soon after.
Tusk Ventures helped create a website that nudges DFS fans toward asking their government representatives "to protect the rights of all Americans who play fantasy sports." In New York, Fanduel says its users sent 116,000 emails to legislators in support of a bill that protects its product, and in August, New York's governor signed the bill into law. (Tusk's PR firm blasted a statement from Fanduel CEO Nigel Eccles, noting that "Bradley Tusk, CEO of Tusk Ventures and regulatory man behind highly regulated startups including Uber, Handy, Eaze, and FanDuel, would love to chat and provide coloring if you're interested.") Seven states have passed similar bills this year. But there are now at least nine states with attorney generals who have determined fantasy sports to be illegal.
Though Tusk is known for high-profile startup battles, most of the companies that have given equity to Tusk Ventures are much smaller and trying to avoid conflict with government. They have agendas that look more like subleasing marketplace Flip, which hired the firm this July. Flip's public benefit message is that it helps millennials and empty-nesters who want to go between cities and neighborhoods to find housing that fits with what's going on their lives and is affordable.
Susannah Vila, CEO of Flip, and Roger D. Graham III, CTO
Its less overt message is that it's less threatening to cities than Airbnb. "What Airbnb has done and will do is say they help people stay in their homes," I hear Tusk tell a city official at a meeting in his office. "Now, there are platforms that let people do that within the law. It's the perfect answer for anyone who supports Airbnb." Around the same time he began working with Flip, he began publiclycriticizing Airbnb's political efforts.
Is it worth it for startups without a regulatory war on their hands to hire Tusk? His firm's equity fees are steep, the equivalent of between $50,000 and $125,000 per month—which for early-stage startups typically results in an equity stake on par with what the startup accelerator Y Combinator takes from its companies.
"You're promised the world," is a sentiment I hear over and over again while reporting this story. Sometimes it's from startups who feel duped by high expectations. "The pitch was, 'Here's what we've been able to do for these guys [Uber] and we can definitely do it for you," says one person associated with a company that worked with Tusk Ventures. "But that didn't seem to be the case." In at least three cases since Tusk Ventures started last year, relationships it has had with startups have ended. Many startup investors have told me they think that a startup's resources should go into building products and pleasing customers, and that working on government relations at an early stage can be a distraction.
But plenty of Tusk's clients say the tradeoff was worth it. Jim Gibbs, the CEO of Meter Feeder, a Pittsburgh-area startup that makes an app-based parking payment system says Tusk helped create a sales strategy. "They helped us look at the big picture," Gibbs says. "We're targeting these cities because this makes sense. Versus us starting in Albuquerque and working our way down to whatever town starts with Z." He calls Tusk's services "worth every penny of equity."
Tusk helped AltSchool, a network of private schools that uses technology-enhanced customized lesson plans for each student, to understand communities and legislative environments in which it's considering opening or has opened new locations. "It's that we don't have the in-house capacity to be sophisticated strategizers and communicators and knowers of the right people in every community we would consider, but Tusk somehow manages to be," says Eve Wachtell, the company's general council.
As more early-stage startups come to see government relations as important, Tusk faces competition from venture capital firms that are increasingly providing a wide range of support services to insure that their investments pay off. In 2012, Andreessen Horowitz hired Adrian Fenty, the former mayor of Washington, D.C., to be a "special adviser" to its startups. More recently, it hired former Facebook General Counsel Ted Ullyot to help companies navigate gray legal territory. Steve Case, the CEO and chairman at the venture capital firm Revolution, has made a point of hiring executives with experience in politics and public policy. "We are happy to be helpful on these policy issues," he says. "We do not ask for or expect equity in addition to what we paid for."
One obvious way for Tusk to take on this threat: Become a VC himself. "I wouldn't be surprised if Tusk didn't decide to raise a fund so they can have a bigger stake in the company," Case says. Two sources, who asked not to be named, say that Tusk is indeed raising this fund to invest cash in Tusk Ventures companies.
In addition to his campaign at the intersection of tech and government, Tusk runs a more traditional political operation called "NYC Deserves Better." It's an ongoing campaign arguing that current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio should not be reelected in 2017. The first video posted by the NYC Deserves Better YouTube account details De Blasio's "failures of the week." Its first podcast is entitled "public corruption." And in interviews about the effort, Tusk has called the mayor "lazy" and "inept." Almost every New York City publication has covered Tusk's anti-De Blasio work, though it is not clear what, if any, impact it has had. (A de Blasio spokesperson called Tusk a "gadfly.") Meanwhile, bashing the current mayor has further ostracized Tusk from the city hall with which many of his clients would like to negotiate.
He lost clients when he started NYC Deserves Better. As one startup founder who has considered paying Tusk Ventures in equity put it: "How does this help any of the startups he's supposed to work for?"
Tusk insists the anti-mayoral campaign is driven by his principles. "Everyone bitches and moans about [the mayor], but nobody does anything," he says. "My view is that if I can do all of this, and I truly believe he's a horrible mayor, then it's morally incumbent on me to do it. So I did it. Aren't I like a lot of the people you cover in that, even though I'm not a tech founder, it's the same view of, 'I can and therefore I will?'"
This is not so different from the messaging Tusk helped come up with for Bloomberg's potential presidential run, which in one rough-cut campaign ad promised Bloomberg "will be totally independent to take on the special interests and push both parties to get things done."
The challenge with Tusk's quasi-libertarian stance is pinning down exactly what he does stand for on any given issue. "My wife hates that I have all these gambling businesses. I see no problem with it," says Tusk, launching into another ping-pong narrative. "At the same time, PAX, which is a great company—they make a high-end vaporizer—I was like, I can't do it. I won't be in a tobacco company. I won't do guns. There are things that I don't believe in. We turned down Chick-fil-A recently. They were like, 'We want to be in New York, how do we do it?' I was like, 'Change all of your positions on gays.' They're like, 'No.' Then I was like, 'Well, we're not for you.'"
At a conference his firm put together last summer, Tusk said that one thing stopping government officials from working better with startups were "too much willingness to do the bidding of entrenched interests and campaign donors."
But the companies whose interests Tusk promotes also pay him, whether in cash or equity. Technology innovation is just as much a special interest as anything else. Fanduel, looked at from one angle, is a hobby. From another, it's an illegal gambling company that preys on addiction. Handy's public good message is that it wants to give its workers benefits without locking them into full-time jobs they don't want because they prefer the flexibility of the gig economy. Others argue the new type of worker classification that the company wants to create, which would offer fewer protections than an employee classification, could set a dangerous precedent that makes it easier for companies to avoid following labor laws.
Tusk describes these clashes as a consequence of innovation bumping into archaic legislation. But his client Flip positions itself as a city-friendly alternative Airbnb, which also claims to be battling archaic legislation. So which side is he on?
Business has always influenced politics. And we're still in the early stages of technology companies upending the assumptions and traditions that have guided politicians in the past. Which means that the messages and influence of startups who hire Tusk and others like him will continue being amplified, and it will sometimes be difficult to pick the morally righteous side.
But it will be easy to tell who is winning.
After tagging along with Tusk during a day of back-to-back meetings, I interview him at a fancy cocktail bar, the kind where a waitress appears when you push a doorbell on the wall. He hasn't checked his phone in almost an hour, and, he tells me shortly before excusing himself for a moment, "it's fucking killing me." When he comes back, he's in a celebratory mood. One of his clients, a company called Lemonade that has been called ("the Uber of insurance"), has just been approved for a license to operate in New York. "We won," he says.
A recent Accountemps survey found a that offbeat questions are still alive and well. Some notable questions include:
What kind of animal would you be?
If you could have all the ice cream in the world, how many different flavors would you take to make a sundae and how many toppings would you pick?
Use an ad slogan to describe yourself.
Of course, these types of questions are meant to get past the well-rehearsed answers to more traditional questions like, "Tell me about yourself," or "What are your strengths and weaknesses," says career coach Marie G. McIntyre. But what are they really telling you about the candidate?
On one hand, the more rigorous (read: offbeat, in this case) the interview process, the better the chance of landing a candidate who will stick around. Research by Glassdoor indicates that there's actually a statistical link between a tough interview process and greater employee satisfaction in six countries, including the U.S. and Canada.
On the other: "The problem with crazy questions is that they're just crazy questions," McIntyre says. But by using strategic questions and tactics in your interviews, you can get a better sense of who the candidate really is.
Before you begin crafting questions, McIntyre says it's important to know what you're trying to find out. She points to an attorney she knows who was so focused on hiring a receptionist who would put his clients at ease that he forgot to ask about office and administrative skills. His new hire was "a disaster," she says.
When you're clear about what you're trying to find out, you can use the right types of questions, she says. If you're trying to see how creative someone is, or how fast they think on their feet, unexpected, zany questions might give you some insight. But if you're trying to gauge the depth of a candidate's experience, you might ask more personalized questions about the candidate's experience; e.g., tell me about a time you had do something you disliked—and then ask probing questions to get more detail.
Instead of going for the more outrageous questions, try tinkering with a more traditional inquiry and personalizing it so that it relates to the job, says employee retention expert Jeff Kortes. If you're looking for someone with leadership skills to take charge of a team, don't say, "Tell me about your leadership style," he says. That's just going to get a pat answer. Instead, try something like, "Tell me about a boss you had who you admire and why."
"That will tell me how they like to be led, or how they lead," he says.
When McIntyre was the human resources director for a tech company, engineers would try to outsmart candidates by asking them increasingly difficult engineering questions. "Their goal became not to learn as much about the applicant as possible, but to see if they could trip them up with tricky engineering questions," she says. That's not the point of the interview, she says, and it could end up alienating good candidates.
At industrial design firm PENSA, cofounder and partner Kathy Larchian says it's the stories that matter to her. She asks questions designed to get people sharing anecdotes and memories so that she can get a better sense of who they are, what matters to them, and how they interact with other people, she says. Some of the inquiries she uses include:
Tell me about a time a colleague gave you advice and what you did.
Tell me about times you "managed up"—managed your bosses and their bosses?
If I asked you to do something you didn't agree with, how would you handle that?
"You can observe a great deal through their response. You can see their attitude in the way they tell the story. You can see the things that make them uncomfortable when you ask the question," she says.
Dave Collins is an actor and coach whose company Oak and Reeds trains employees in improvisation—"improv"—techniques as a way of building soft skills and being better active listeners. Improv techniques can also help the interview process.
Brainstorm the questions you need to ask to get the information you need about the candidate beforehand. Have those ready, but also be prepared to go off-script if the opportunity arises. Collins uses a "question-asking funnel," where the interview starts with very broad questions, then more specific, probing questions are used as various lines of discussion develop. The key is to keep the conversation fluid, listen intently, and to be ready to follow an interesting thread when it emerges, he says.
"What I like to teach in improv is called 'color and advance,'" he says. Use an open-ended question to get the color that the person will share in the story, then use an "advance" question to drill down into the specific skills about which you need to know.
To gauge whether prospective employees are the right fit for the job, Keren Kang, CEO of digital marketing agency Native Commerce employs an unusual hiring strategy that involves food products. In group interviews, Kang divides the candidates into teams and gives them bags of dry spaghetti and marshmallows and instructs them to build a 12-inch tower, writing down their plan for doing so.
During the exercise, she asks one person in each group to rotate to a different team to complete the tower. It's a fun exercise, and she says it tells her a great deal about how collaborative candidates are, as well as whether they can handle the stresses of the job. For example, one candidate was so flustered after being asked to change roles, he had trouble functioning. That was a sign that he wasn't a good fit for the company, where change and shifting from project to project happen every day, Kang says.
If you're going to use such exercises or tests, McIntyre cautions, it's a good idea to run it by your legal counsel so you're not inadvertently creating a biased interview setting or running afoul of federal, state, or local employment laws.
This company sits down with every employee who's stayed for three years to plan their career options—within the firm and without.
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Superbosses author Sydney Finkelstein argues that some of the most successful leaders encourage their top-performing talent to leave. He also observes that some of the most transformative executives have the shortest tenures at the companies they reshape.
The reason, Finkelstein says, is simple: It's difficult to acquire and hold onto outsize talent, but far better to house it within your organization for a short time than not at all. Rather than fight turnover, companies may do better to embrace it—and instead focus on improving the quality of the people who cycle through its doors, as opposed to reducing the quantity of those who do.
This a concept my own company is taking to heart. After all, more money and bigger titles can only go so far, particularly for talented employees who aren't primarily motivated by extrinsic incentives like those. Sometimes the next level up simply doesn't match an employee's aspirations, skills, or career timetable.
So the best thing for an employer to do is to help them find another great opportunity, instead of pouring time and resources into trying (and failing) to get them to stay. The companies that succeed will build reputations for launching leaders' careers, which can help them attract the next wave of promising talent.
That's the theory, anyway, that recently led us to formalize the exit route as a key part of our staffing plan. The way it works is this: Throughout their tenures, we ask our employees to consider (and reconsider) their desired career goals for the next five to 10 years. We discuss possible paths to help them achieve those goals, and the skills and experiences they'll need to acquire along the way.
Because we hire many younger professionals with limited work experience, we often have to invest heavily in developing their skills and expertise. Generally speaking, we hope that all high performers will stay with us for at least three years, both so our investment will pay off and so they'll have time to thoughtfully consider what they want next in their careers. After that period, though, we work with them on advancement opportunities—inside the company and out.
To do that, we work with our employees to define three potential paths: two within the firm and one beyond it. If they choose the exit route, we make introductions to potential employers, serve as references, write LinkedIn recommendations, and even coach employees through the search process. Sure, these are resources we could be putting into retention efforts instead, but the preliminary results suggest we're doing the right thing.
Here are a few of the benefits we've already begun to see.
Increased employee engagement and retention. Being able to openly discuss career routes is a great relief for many employees, and this openness contributes to a supportive, transparent culture. The program also encourages managers to think more like career coaches than micromanagers preoccupied by short-term needs. Managers learn how to engage with team members in thoughtful, authentic ways, building trust and loyalty and improving overall employee engagement.
And since managers actually understand their employees' career objectives, we're better equipped to assign meatier projects—even if they're not directly tied to employees' roles—to help them build their desired skills. This can help increase the odds that our most talented employees stick around longer, because they feel valued and see tangible advantages to doing so.
More predictable succession planning and smoother transitions. When exit paths are discussed forthrightly, managers can gain more time to plan employees' departures. There's plenty of runway to document all their projects and processes. There's also more time to think carefully about contact changes for customers and partners, making the handover smoother and more thoughtfully carried out.
Outgoing employees benefit as well, getting to leave the company on a high note, feeling celebrated, appreciated, and grateful to the company for helping them land their next big role. Nobody's blindsided or left feeling bitter.
Employer branding and recruiting benefits. In the age of Glassdoor, Yelp, and Quora, it's more important than ever that employees leave feeling like their time with an employer was well spent. Companies that have built reputations not just for hiring well but for supporting talented people can get a major recruiting boost. Former employees are potentially some of your most powerful assets—people you can leverage for referrals or even consider rehiring later in their careers.
It's far from intuitive for most companies to invest heavily in recruiting and professional development, only to actively facilitate employees' departures. But after years of thoughtfully considering our employees' needs as well as our own, we've come to the conclusion that sometimes the best path forward is out.
Mathilde Pribula is a partner at the HR executive search firm Frederickson Pribula Li, where she leads the search practice for high-growth startup, tech unicorn, and Fortune 100 clients.
After suffering a heartbreaking loss, one woman learns how hard it can be to ask for support—and how crucial it is.
"Nick's in a coma," is all I can remember my sister saying on the phone. A few hours later, I was on a panicked, cross-country, red-eye flight home. I tried to calm my thoughts with an inflight movie, which happened to be about a girl's brother who went into a coma and lived.
Life is, sadly, not like the movies.
Sometimes when I'm on the subway, I'll remember the stark white hospital walls. Or when I'm walking down the street, I'll have a flashback to my mother crying in the waiting room. And sometimes when I can't sleep, I'll remember touching my twin brother's hand for the last time.
This past year has has been a storm of emotions, often hidden behind my bedroom door or concealed by waterproof mascara. The week after my brother died, I did the only thing I knew how: I boarded a plane back to New York, showed up for work, and tried to pretend everything was normal.
In school, I had learned how to solve complex math problems and how to write a cover letter—things that would help me advance my career. But when it came to grief, I've found myself at a loss as to how to cope, much less at work. "I think the biggest challenge in our culture is our fear about losing our jobs if we aren't 'on' 24/7," says Glenda Sullentrup, a St. Louis–based career counselor. Often, that fear (or some of it, anyhow) is self-imposed, and simply learning to ask for support is one of the best yet most difficult ways of grappling with it. Here's how I've learned to do that so far, even though I'm still working at it every day.
Returning to work a week after my brother's passing was tough. Even though my employer told me to take as much time as I needed, I thought that if I could get back to work, it would distract me from the pain I was feeling.
So my first day back, I plugged in my headphones and prayed no one would talk to me. Immediately, my manager asked if we could catch up. Walking to the conference room, I repeated to myself, "Don't cry, don't cry," not wanting to appear weak or incapable.
"How are you doing?" he asked. My plan to suppress tears failed instantly. Unable to form a coherent sentence, I sat in front of him and sobbed.
He asked me empathetically, "Is there anything we can do?" and sent me home—something I knew I needed, but was too proud to ask for. Simply knowing my boss cared about me made the transition back to work more manageable and created an atmosphere where I knew my feelings wouldn't be pushed aside.
If you're working at a company that provides health care benefits, you likely have access to an employee assistance program (EAP). "I was blindsided by grief after my father-in-law died," recalls freelance marketer Allison Durazzi. "I tried calling in sick. My boss knew what was going on, but she needed me to phone in for a meeting—which I was in no position to do. I just started crying. I hung up and called my EAP. I was paired with a counselor that helped me balance working and grieving."
If you don't know what resources your employer may offer, your HR manager probably does. Or if you'd prefer to speak to your direct supervisor first, they can find out for you. The important thing is just to ask.
"How does one just go back to a normal routine when the most abnormal experience just occurred? Well, probably clumsily," says Gina Moffa, a private-practice psychotherapist and Clinical Director of the Addiction Institute of New York at Mt. Sinai Hospital. "There is no time after a loss that people will feel 100% ready to go back to work, but there is an irony there: The distraction can be very therapeutic. Having structure can temporarily take you out of a sticky tarpit of grief and keep your mind working and occupied."
Asking for mental health days or work-from-home opportunities can provide a safe environment while you ease back into your daily tasks. Having emotions at work doesn't make you weak. It makes you human.
Coming back, I immediately tried to fall back into my fast-paced life, pretending everything was more or less fine. I went to brunches. I dated. I went out on Friday nights with my friends. On the outside, things were "normal." On the inside, I was a mess.
"You seem like you're holding up well," was something I heard countless times on my return. It was a well-intentioned comment, but many didn't know that my poker face was a facade I kept up just until I could find a moment to muffle my crying under the shower head. Not only did I feel pain about my loss, I also felt guilty that I wasn't grieving the "right way." The most helpful advice I received during my hardest months was from a friend who told me, "it's okay to grieve in any way that feels right."
Whether it's a counselor or a friend, Sabrina Osso, a consultant at Osso Safe, which counsels working professionals who are experiencing home violence, advises people to talk openly about grief. "Don't keep it inside. If you have to scream, scream. If you have to cry, cry."
For some, grieving might mean going to a counselor to talk through their feelings. For me, it meant going for a run to silently process the pain, or calling up a close friend I knew would understand.
"How many siblings do you have?" an acquaintance asked. I felt as if he'd punched me in the face. "I have to use the bathroom," I replied.
Excusing myself, I found my way to the restroom and stared at my soggy makeup. Never in my life did I imagine having to respond to such a question with "three" instead of "four." I blinked away my red eyes, returned to the table, and changed the subject to the weather, a technique that soon became my coping mechanism for the next few months. When anyone asked about my brother's death, I quickly changed the subject, not wanting to burden them with my emotions.
It wasn't until more recently that I've learned to talk about those feelings. Not only have I been met with overwhelming compassion, it's created an opportunity to connect more deeply with people who care about me. Being transparent isn't easy to do, especially at first, but it lets others share in your loss. Societal pressure often forces us to carry grief within without verbalizing our feelings, and many people, wanting to be deferential, are glad to follow our lead.
"Grief takes time, and we often aren't encouraged to take time to just 'feel'," says Sullentrup, the career counselor. "Grief will sneak up and grab you if you push it away—and usually at the most inopportune times, like when you're about to give that big presentation."
Lately, I've still had days when my emotions overwhelm my ability to complete the simplest of tasks. But now I know to reach out to a friend to ask for what I need. And I feel immense gratitude for the support I've been given from friends, coworkers, and family members.
The most important thing I learned is that, while everyone deals with grief in different ways, it's okay to share what you're going through with those around you, both in your personal and professional lives. It may even be essential to coping. How, what, and when you share is up to you, though. There's no single or correct way to do that. What's more, grief isn't something you overcome. You just have to learn to live with it as best you can.
But it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to break down. It's okay to be human. Grief is human—and you're a human first, a professional second.
Arianna O'Dell is the founder of Airlink Marketing, a digital agency that helps hotels, restaurants, and travel destinations attract and retain clientele.
Though sales of the iPhone were down this quarter (as were revenue and profit), there's reason to believe happier times are coming.
With Apple it's very easy to get hung up on the details, especially the incremental improvements or declines from quarter to quarter. But Apple is the most profitable U.S. company, and even in what's being seen as a down quarter, the company made $9 billion on $46.9 billion in revenue in its fiscal Q4.
Apple makes more than 60% of its profit on the iPhone, so earnings are tightly linked to release schedules for the device. The key takeaway is that iPhone sales were down, both year-over-year and sequentially, but we're not talking about crisis-level declines.
And there's lots of light ahead. The new iPhone 7 and 7 Plus have just made the scene. Tim Cook says he's seeing strong acceptance in the market, and that supply is still trying to catch up to demand (especially iPhone 7 Plus).
"Demand continues to outstrip supply but were working on getting them into customers' hands as soon as possible," Cook said in a call with analysts Tuesday afternoon. He later added: "It's very hard to gauge demand when you're selling everything you're making."
That bodes well for a strong holiday quarter and beyond. Apple believes it'll see as big a bump in phone sales as it saw last year with the popular iPhone 6s. Remember, too, that Apple has scaled back the size of its orders from suppliers after the company overestimated demand of the iPhone 6s.
Apple's CFO Luca Maestri said the company will return to growth in the holiday quarter with revenues between $76 billion and $78 billion. Apple's holiday quarter set a revenue record, Maestri said.
As iPhone sales cool off, Apple has been working hard on its services business to fill the earnings gap. Cook and company had some good news there, too. The services business has doubled over the past four years. One service, Apple Music, grew 22% year-over-year in the September quarter.
In terms of international sales, Tim Cook said iPhone sales in India were up 50% over the last fiscal year, pushed by LTE cellular service gradually taking hold in the country. The same process is taking place in China, Cook said.
Investors and others are expecting a much brighter quarter for Apple over the holidays, and chances are good they'll get it.
"We were both working for Nicole Miller, and we actually got the franchise rights to open stores in Boca Raton and Miami," Landau told Fast Company. "And we nearly killed each other."
If, like me, you can't fathom the idea of working harmoniously with your sibling, this might sound like a cautionary tale. Alli and Michael thought the same and went their separate ways. But over a decade later, after finding success with an at-home blowout service, Alli approached Michael with a pitch for a hair salon that trafficked exclusively in blowouts. Once she got Michael on board ("What? You want to open a blow-drying place?"), the siblings decided to chance it and make another go of it, perhaps against their better judgment.
"When we told our parents that we were going into business together again, they literally freaked out," Landau said. "But Alli and I, we had both matured. I realized the mistakes I had made. We both realized what buttons we couldn't push and what lines we couldn't cross in terms of a partnership."
Seven years later, Drybar has raised $71 million in funding, boasts upwards of 3,000 employees, and operates more than 60 stores nationwide (with another 15-20 locations in the works). But keeping things in the family doesn't guarantee a favorable outcome in business, as the brothers and cofounders behind Gravity Payments can surely attest to. So how do you build a thriving, sibling-led business—and what does it take to forge a professional working relationship from an entrenched sibling dynamic? Here's what I learned from Alli and Michael, and other sibling duos who started their own companies.
One recurring theme among the founders I spoke to was that choosing to go into business with a sibling involved—and sometimes stemmed from—recognizing how their professional backgrounds or personalities diverged. When Alli asked Michael to help her open the first Drybar salon, she understood the value of what he could bring to the table, with his background in management and experience starting businesses.
"More than anything, we have, had, and will always have very different skill sets," Alli said. "Michael is really good at the business side of things and a lot of things that I'm just not. And he didn't understand the hair business and the salon industry, so I had to teach him about that. It was great coming together—being very respectful of the other's strengths."
"She kind of defers to me when it comes to business, and I defer to her when it comes to the creative and the hair side of it," Michael said. "Not to say we don't each have opinions on the other and it's been really important that I'm not cavalier about business decisions and don't include her. We like to joke that I know way more than any straight guy should about hair."
As with Drybar, online invitation startup Paperless Post came to fruition when CEO James Hirschfeld turned to his sister Alexa with an idea. The two had long wanted to work together, and James felt Alexa possessed certain qualities that he lacked.
"Communication and inspiring people is actually quite difficult for me; it takes a ton of energy out of me and is something I can only do with people I'm very comfortable with. But Alexa is an incredibly charismatic and intuitive communicator and leader. I was able to make her see this vision I had, and then work with her to build a team and inspire the people who actually built the product in the beginning to work with us, even though we were first-time entrepreneurs with very little money and no product or tech background."
Alexander Tibbets says the decision to help his brother Linden build IFTTT—the popular productivity tool that enables apps to talk to each other—was less deliberate. But much like other sibling cofounders, Alex served as a foil to Linden in terms of the roles he took on at the company.
"When we started off, I was on programming and design, and Alex was on community and support," Linden said. "As we started to grow the business and hire other people, it became operations and marketing and business development. Pretty much everything that wasn't product and design, Alex was handling. I stepped into the CEO role. Alex continued to wear lots and lots of different hats over time."
This divvying up of power, so to speak, is arguably more important when the siblings in question are the same sex.
"One of the things that is both an advantage and a disadvantage is that [same-sex] siblings, whether they're brother-brother or sister-sister—they're naturally more competitive than when they're a brother and sister," Linden said. "We come from a family of three brothers, so we're incredibly competitive. I think in many ways, that's awesome. That kind of pushes us—pushes the business. What's competition if not a startup? But if you let some of that competitiveness seep into your conversations in ways that are not positive, it can be really damaging."
"I think you take a lot of the competition out of the situation when you're different genders and you can appreciate each other," James said of his working relationship with Alexa. "We have a brother, and I would have found it very difficult to do the same thing with him."
Choosing someone to be the public face of the company, for example, can be a more fraught decision with same-sex siblings. But for the Tibbets brothers, there was never much hand wringing over who would act as the "face" of IFTTT and field interviews and press—perhaps, in part, because Linden was the one with a technical background.
"It was really easy to let Linden soak up all the face time in front of the camera," Alex said. "I was always way more comfortable behind the scenes, behind the camera, so it was actually excellent that Linden has not only wanted to, but has taken on being the face of the company in his role as CEO."
The initial decision to work with a sibling is not all that different from the decision to start a company with anyone else: You want to choose someone whose skill set compliments yours and whose vision for the company aligns with yours. The part where things get trickier is how you communicate once the work begins, in front of employees and management. Siblings can't simply transplant their existing dynamic into the workplace without making some adjustments.
"Even behind closed doors, the type of fights we can have, or arguments, are faster and more productive—and also more animated," James said. "If I had those type of fights with anyone else I worked with, they would be scarring."
"There's so much history there, with being sisters," Danielle Snyder, who started the Beyoncé-approved jewelry company Dannijo with her sister Jodie, told Fast Company. "It's the good and the bad. In some ways, it's beautiful because you can finish each other's sentences—you leave a business meeting and know exactly what the other is thinking. You're almost telepathic. But on the other hand, it can be much more emotional, and you're much more sensitive when it comes to how your sister and your best friend and your business partner addresses something."
For most people, the relationship they have with a sibling is the longest they will ever have: You grow up together and will know a sibling longer than you do your parents, partner, or children. With that level of closeness comes both an intimate understanding of what makes your sibling tick—and how to get under their skin.
That's exactly why sibling relationships can be intense and complicated. Psychologists and professors who have studied this note that the dynamic that exists between siblings when they're younger often does not change much over the years. The emotional baggage you might carry if you feel like your parents favored your sibling growing up, for example, can hang over your relationship even as adults.
So for the people looking in, the sibling relationship can seem impenetrable and a risky thing to bet on.
"One of the disadvantages of working with a sibling is it's a hard dynamic for people on the outside to peer into," James said. "And I mean that on the level of, they might not understand the dynamic when we fight, and that we're fighting because that's a way of communicating. We're arguing. And we don't need to wear kid gloves. Also, when you think about other people on our management team, or people who are looking at the company as a place to grow their career, we've really made an effort to communicate that we're not some sort of a cabal."
When Michael was shopping around for investors, he found that many were hesitant to bankroll a startup helmed by a brother-sister duo. He sometimes found that people interviewing for senior executive roles had similar concerns. "As we have grown and raised money from institutional investors and big private equity firms, and also hired a professional CEO, there's always that reluctance because everybody has a war story about how family businesses have imploded," Michael said. "I can definitely tell you that I've had numerous conversations over the years getting people comfortable."
It is, of course, inevitable that siblings will fight or get into heated arguments, even—perhaps especially—in a work setting. At Drybar, CEO John Heffner sometimes acts as a buffer between Alli and Michael.
"Michael and I have had our, like, five really bad fights," Alli said. "Sometimes it's like—it's your brother. Your stupid brother. I get really mad at him, and I can't control it. I got really mad at him one day and we got into a really big, loud fight . . . [our CEO] John came into our office and was like, 'You guys, get it together, you can't fight right now!'"
"Listen, both Alli and I—I'm sure it doesn't surprise you—we're both a little assertive and we both have strong opinions," Michael said. "One of the many awesome things about our CEO is that he can and has often played mediator between the two of us."
But not every company has an effective middleman. The IFTTT brothers opted to use code words, at least initially, to pull themselves out of unproductive bickering and stay on track.
"If things started to get out of hand, and it was clear that we were now arguing with each other rather than trying to address the path forward or make the right decision, one of us would say, 'You know, I'm just trying to build something great here,'" Linden said. "That was a thing you could say in front of other people. It was kind of a trigger word that would tell the person, 'Hey, we're starting to get off track, we need to bring it back." We only ended up having to use it probably 10-15 times total before we both kind of quickly forgot it."
For sibling cofounders who are also CEOs, the role is doubly complicated because they may be tasked with not only dictating their work but also evaluating their sibling's performance. It can be difficult not to take negative feedback personally if it's coming from a sibling.
"When I get feedback for Alexa—I'm her manager, I'm doing her reviews right now—I give it to her directly," James said. "That's where you become a professional and not a sibling. And you have to realize that you have been hired for a job. It's your career."
"We had to make a clear distinction between what was personal and what was in the realm of the brother, and what was professional and in the realm of us trying to build this business," Linden said. "It's that line you constantly have to adjust and reconfirm and make sure we're on the same page. If you don't set that line early on, you're pretty much setting yourself up for a nightmare. Imagine doing the sibling performance review and not having that line."
Some of these challenges aren't unique to sibling cofounders. (Surely a performance review is also uncomfortable for cofounders who are friends.) Though being siblings may keep a business together for longer, it certainly doesn't secure the success of a business if there is little compatibility between the people in charge.
"Being siblings is not enough to be good business partners. But if you work well together, being siblings can make it that much better," James said.
The greatest boon of working with a sibling may be the implicit trust that is already baked into your relationship. In business, this can be invaluable, according to Michael. "The ability to bring on a business partner who isn't on the creative side is a tough thing for some entrepreneurs, and I imagine it's because you really have to trust somebody to hand off the business side of things because that's the money," he said.
"One day James is working really hard and I'm exhausted, physically or emotionally," Alexa said. "And the opposite happens, too. But you trust that the person has your back. And when they go into a room to sign a paper for fundraising or whatever, it's like you signing that paper."
That faith also helps move disagreements along: More often than not, one sibling will acquiesce to the other, according to Michael and Alli.
"This is such a silly thing, but when we were first developing the concept for Drybar, Michael didn't want us to have the hairstyles named after drinks," Alli said. "He thought it was kind of cheesy. And I was like no, it's such a good idea! It wasn't a big fight, but it was just one of those things, where he said okay, you think it's a good idea because it was more in my wheelhouse than his."
"Jodie and I handle things differently—we're a bit of a yin and yang," Danielle said. "There's definitely been times where, with or without the team, whether it was in a business meeting or in an internal meeting, where one of us said, 'Well, I would have handled it differently.' After eight years, you learn how to respect the other even though you might see something differently. So absolutely there's been times where there was some tension, but nothing that wasn't solved within 10 minutes."
Every cofounder I spoke to stressed the importance of candor, which can take time to cultivate in a regular business partnership. A sibling might be the only person, aside from a parent or maybe spouse, with whom you are completely transparent.
"We're never passive aggressive," Jodie said. "There's never things that you don't say to the other person. For us, we have the same goals in business, but I think if it's not your sibling, sometimes people dance around issues or wait until things get too big to deal with them." Danielle added that it's just a "more efficient relationship."
For someone like Alli, who does not have a business background, Michael has been a translator of sorts who fields questions that she "couldn't ask anybody else."
"For the first couple years, I kind of felt intimidated and really relied on Michael," Alli said. "I would ask Michael a question to ask everybody else because I was afraid I would sound silly or something . . . I can lean on Michael and feel really safe to ask him something that I might not be comfortable asking a big room full of people, and know that I'm not going to be judged and that he'll explain it to me."
"We've been in many board meetings where Alli sent me a text—where she's been nodding at what everyone's saying—and she's like, 'You're going to have to explain this to me later,'" Michael said.
Something that should embolden investors is that siblings automatically have a more vested interest in the success of their partnership. There's more at stake: A cofounder is far less likely to leave a business if it would mean disappointing their sibling or damaging the relationship.
"There have been times when for personal reasons, it would have been nice to, say, move to another country," James said. "We've both been doing this for a long time. If there were a different relationship between us, I think there would have been a million opportunities along the way for one of us to give up on the other, or say, 'I've got to think about myself here.' Obviously we have free will, but you're really considering a partnership that's more fundamental. When we looked our first investor in the eyes as a 21- and 23-year-old—when we had never proven ourselves—and asked for a really big check, I think he probably thought that we weren't going to dump each other."
Michael says there's no comparison between his experience working with Alli at Drybar and previous partnerships he has forged. "I've had lots of other business partners and really great relationships, but there's a difference between how you trust a business partner, no matter how close you are, versus how you trust your sister or your brother. She knows at the end of the day there's just no way in the world I'm going to screw her over."
If there's one thing to be learned from these siblings, it is that working with one of the few people you can be completely honest with is a good foundation on which to build a business. I, for one, came away feeling like I would consider working with my brother down the road because he's one of the few people with whom I can speak freely.
But the best part of starting a company with a sibling? It can be hard to make time for each other once you no longer live under the same roof or get married and start your own families. When you work with a sibling, you get to spend countless hours together.
"I don't have children yet, but Alli does, and we talk about the fact that her heart would just burst with joy if her two sons had the partnership that we have," Michael said. "And we just know it's made our parents so unbelievably proud and happy that we're so close, and that we have this business together. We derive a lot of joy and gratification out of that."
It's a large display and new software that enables collaboration with other Jamboards (across the building or across the country) and also on iOS or Android tablets or phones.
The display can attach to a wall, but Google has also built a large stand with four legs and wheels for the device.
People in participating in a "jam" can pull in Google text documents and spreadsheets, images, PDFs, and slides from Google Drive and then post them to the board. No video as of right now.
Jamboard offers users who are in the room tools like sticky notes and stencils to help shape ideas. One feature turns handwriting on the board into text. Another turns inexactly drawn shapes into perfect squares and circles.
Users can write on the board using large pens that contain no active electronics. So the handwriting experience isn't perfect but the pens need no batteries or charging.
Google says a small group of enterprise customers—Netflix, Spotify, and Instrument—have been beta testing the product for the past few months. About 30 teams across Google have also been using Jamboard.
The phone app can search nearby for any boards, and if it finds one, it can save a screenshot of what's on the display. Users of the mobile app can dictate their additions to the whiteboard.
There's also a video-conferencing element. You can present to a meeting, send a copy, and broadcast or join a Jamboard. You can also present the board to a Google Hangout.
The device itself looks like a 60-inch HDTV. There's a toolbar at the left side of the screen—calendar, web browser, maps. These features open in a panel at the left margin of the screen. You can easily capture grabs from maps or web pages and post them to the whiteboard.
Objects on the screen are easily sized with multitouch gestures, and users can write notes and annotate around the content on the board.
Google says more enterprises will begin using the product today as part of an "early adoption" program.
A typical entrepreneur, Grimmer was determined to do more than get a gym membership and eat more broccoli. He made an appointment with a functional medicine specialist, who ordered a battery of tests. Grimmer was informed by the doctor in no uncertain terms that he was overweight, at risk for a heart attack, and verging on pre-diabetic; the doctor prescribed a meal plan to help Grimmer get in shape. "Through nutrition and behavior change, I was able to get a lot of that back in line," he says.
Grimmer's new startup, called Habit, aims to help others achieve their goals, whether it's to lose weight or sleep more soundly. The company, which is launching in January, offers a $299 blood test to screen for 60 biomarkers, including amino acids, vitamin levels, and blood sugar, as well as some genetic variants that may play a role in how an individual responds to diet. The company is also attempting to test a users' metabolic rate through a "challenge," which involves drinking a milkshake-like beverage to understand how they respond to fats, carbs and sugars, and then sending in another set of blood tests.
Those who sign up will take their own blood at home, granted they're not squeamish (the company has a network of doctors it is working with that authorize these tests). After sending back the sample, they are offered a 30-minute virtual consultation with a registered dietitian who makes nutrition recommendations, but will not diagnose a disease. "If there's something in the data that suggests an illness that needs to be addressed, someone on our team will tell the patient to see a physician," says Grimmer. Users have the option to download the data in a raw format to take it to a doctor, he adds.
Habit places users in one of seven buckets, or types, based on their results, such as a "Protein Seeker." These types were created by Habit, and are accompanied with a caloric breakdown of how many carbs, fats, and proteins to eat on any given day. From there, they have the option to buy Habit meals customized to their category for between $12 and $15 apiece.
Habit's Protein Seeker
Believing that people will opt to purchase a meal plan is the crux of the company's business model: The market for meal-delivery services is now valued at $210 billion, according to Morgan Stanley Research, while the margins for this kind of blood testing are thin. The company is hoping that it will stand out in a crowded space, which includes Blue Apron and Nutrisystem, as it doesn't take a one-size-fits-all approach to nutrition.
"We aren't in the business of fad diets and suggesting that a food is good or bad and should be avoided," says Joshua Anthony, a scientific advisor to Habit and the vice president of global nutrition at the Campbell Soup Company. "It's about tailored advice like whether an individual has an increased need for carbs, for instance, or might not be managing glucose well."
Beta users of the service, such as Mike Minium, a former corporate technologist who opened the CrossFit Oakland gym more than a decade ago, say the recommendations did prove helpful. After sending in a blood sample, Minium was advised to eat more carbohydrates later in the evening to reach his goals of sleeping better and maintaining a consistent weight during the tennis season. "Going into it, I was skeptical," says Minium. "But going through the process and implementing the differences, I did make some changes in some key areas."
It remains to be seen whether the service will have an impact on patients in the long term; thus far, only about 100 people enrolled in the beta. Habit says it is working on a study with Stanford to demonstrate the efficacy of these interventions, including a randomized, double-blind study slated for 2017.
Some scientists are skeptical about any companies that offer health tests to healthy people. Many studies have found that screening those who have no real complaints or symptoms isn't an effective way to improve health and wellness. For that reason, some in the scientific community reacted strongly to investor Mark Cuban's suggestion on Twitter than everyone who can afford to should have their "blood tested for everything available."
"There are like 12 things you could do without taking blood," adds Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at New York University's Langone Medical Center. "Lose weight, exercise, wear a helmet, and don't abuse opiate drugs."
[Photo: Felicia Kieselhorst, courtesy of Habit]
Some recent studies have shown that personalized advice is more effective in helping people make changes to their lifestyle than more general edicts: Eat less salt, more vegetables. What remains to be seen is whether health tests are necessary, as well as prepared meals. As Jordan Shlain, a a Bay Area-based primary care doctor and entrepreneur, puts it: "I could take an honest look at a person's diet and make recommendations without a single test."
Others defend Habit's approach, making the case that even those who appear to be generally well can still learn something by getting tested. Some might find that they're not as healthy as they might think, says Cyrus Khambatta, a nutritionist who consults with Bay Area clients, with a focus on those with type 1 diabetes. "Even if you think you're healthy, you could still adopt better practices based on evidence-based research."
A firm proponent of this brand of thinking is the well-known biologist Leroy Hood, who serves as a scientific advisor to Habit. Hood has a theory he calls "scientific wellness," which he describes as "assessing biological data to make appropriate recommendations that include wellness." It's distinct from the traditional wellness category in Silicon Valley—think Fitbit and Jawbone—because of the scientifically validated metrics, says Hood. And the insights are intended to be actionable.
Hood says he is currently working on several longitudinal research studies to prove the efficacy of scientific wellness through his work at the Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology, an affiliate of Providence Health. He also views this category as a huge potential moneymaker in the future, and is advising another company in this space: Seattle-based Arivale, which charges $3,500 to aggregate health information through a range of tests, and assigns each member a coach to make health recommendations by phone.
None of these services come cheap, which raises the question of whether startups like Arivale and Habit will make a dent in overall health. As is the case with many Silicon Valley health startups, the focus is on those who are tech-savvy, health-conscious, curious about data, and (most importantly) can afford to spend on both tests and healthy food.
In the United States, one third of people are obese and another third are overweight. People who live in poverty are the most prone to obesity, with many lacking access to sufficient fresh ingredients, which increases the risk of chronic diseases like heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Those who have one or more of these diseases are responsible for 86% of overall health care spending, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Can scientific wellness help these individuals?
Grimmer says he can't "cheap out on the science of food," but sees it as a goal to make sure that he can bring down the price through scale. "I've set up the company so we have our benefit baked into the bylaws," he says. "We want to make it available to at-risk populations, whether it's to manage hunger, obesity, or any other condition."
"Being informed" and being a news junkie are two very different things.
Raise your hand if you are sick of all the election coverage. Or constantly hearing about potential terror threats, the latest e.coli outbreak at that chain restaurant, or even Kim Kardashian. Chances are, your hand is up. Yet if you're anything like me, you're probably still a bit of a news junkie.
As a journalist, news gathering is an inescapable part of my job. But those outside of the news business who follow the news almost as much as I do may put this down to "staying informed." Some may even see it as a civic duty to know what's going on in their local area, or on a national or global level. For others, constantly checking the news may be just another way to fill up our ever-shortening attention spans with another quick hit of stimulation.
No matter what your reasons for being a news junkie, researchers are finding that consuming news on an hourly or even daily basis is bad for your brain. Studies have shown that an overabundance of news can make you depressed, anxious, and, for the most part, doesn't usually provide you with the ability to actually change or influence anything being reported.
During the first 48 hours of giving up the news, my anxiety increased because I felt like I was "missing out" on what was going on in the world for every minute that was going by. But by midweek I found I didn't miss "being informed" and my anxiousness subsided. By the end of the week I noticed my daily mood was actually more positive, and I was generally happier than I normally am.
"Your brain creates mental models or assumptions about the world based on the information you take in," explains Pamela B. Rutledge, PhD, director of the Media Psychology Research Center and faculty in media psychology at Fielding Graduate University. "Thus when you are inundated with news, it triggers an instinctive survival response." And because of the "if it bleeds, it leads" mentality ingrained in the media, most news is negative, depressing, or fear inducing (fear of terrorism, fear of loss, fear of others), which inaccurately colors how we view the world as a whole.
There's actually a phrase for this. "Mean World Syndrome describes the phenomenon where you feel your immediate world is much more dangerous than it actually is because of the input you have received," says Rutledge. Indeed, by the end of the week, due to my lack of negative news input, I actually felt safer, or less worried about potentially harmful incidents, such as a terrorist attack (something the media always keeps at the forefront of people's minds—especially those who live in a big city like me).
A frequent reason news junkies will give for constantly following every latest development is that they feel it gives them a competitive edge in life. Short of a news alert announcing the impending arrival of a storm or some other potential disaster, constantly monitoring the news usually doesn't give you any real-world advantage.
Despite giving up the news for a week, I didn't experience any kind of personal disadvantages compared to my neighbors or family who continued to follow the news. They didn't surpass me in wealth, happiness, or opportunities.
When I mention this to Rutledge, she agrees with my assessment, at least over the short term. But she notes that completely swearing off the news for the rest of your days could affect other things in your life that you may not think it would.
"Stepping away from the news would not necessarily detract from your social capital in many groups—certainly not in a week," says Rutledge. But, she continues:
If, however, you were very interested in politics, policy, social issues, social advocacy, economic growth, individual rights, education, sports, or a zillion other topics where the news reflects what's happening there, you might, over time, find that your group of friends would shift to include less of those who care about those things and more of those who care about things where the news isn't central, i.e. bike riding, cooking, or woodworking.
Perhaps the most surprising impact my news blackout had on me was that I actually felt more creative and focused by the end of the week. As a journalist and novelist, I need to constantly come up with story ideas, and the news is a goldmine. But by the end of the week, it was as if not constantly stuffing my mind with passive news stories and quick-hit tidbits and breaking news alerts allowed my brain to find its true imagination again.
Rutledge says this increased creativity is actually related to stepping away from the mostly negative stories the news reports:
When we are afraid or depressed, it constrains our cognitions. Our bodies marshal resources to protect us and prepare us for fight or flight–-even if it's just in response to news stories we hear on the TV. Thus stepping away from negative thinking [and news] would improve mood and by extension enhance creativity and open-mindedness–-a necessary precursor of creativity.
An added benefit to my increased creativity: I had more time to explore my thoughts and ideas because I wasn't wasting so much of it on following the news.
Perhaps the most important takeaway from my news blackout is that "being informed" and being a "news junkie" are not the same thing. This is something that Rutledge stresses is an important distinction to make in our world of media overload.
Rutledge says the inherent problems to news consumption are twofold. The first involves how you curate the news you choose to take in, how much you focus on a specific type of news, and how much time you devote to it. The second is that it's important to understand that there is a lot of conflict in the world, whether it's the fear-based political fighting over the U.S. presidential campaign or the U.K.'s Brexit. Constantly choosing to read and focus on those fears is emotional engagement, not cognitive engagement. For most people, following the news is done on an emotional engagement level, not on a cognitive engagement one.
"What you have learned is the power of mindlessness versus mindfulness," says Rutledge. "Intentionality is key to the positive consumption of information. Intentionality allows you to frame the news so that it doesn't amorphously change your life and leak into your thoughts unbidden."
Mindful consumption of news means that we learn how to maintain an awareness of what and how much we are choosing to consume—not just intellectually, but somatically, Rutledge notes. Through increased awareness we can learn to feel in our bodies when the news is too much.
In order to maintain a healthy relationship to the news, Rutledge says it's a good idea to take some time to step away from it every once in a while. "It's important to leave mental 'spaces' instead of filling up every minute of your thoughts with news," says Rutledge. "I always think of management guru Peter Drucker who said that every year you have to quit doing about 25% of your job so you can figure out what new stuff needs doing. It's like that with news, too."
Underemployment remains high as nearly half of all American employers are struggling to fill jobs.
As unemployment continues to hover around 5% this year, nearly half of all U.S. employers are struggling with talent shortages.
According to a recent survey of 42,300 employers around the world by The Manpower Group, a Milwaukee-based human resource consulting firm, 46% of American employers are having difficulty filling jobs, surpassing global averages. This is the highest percentage in the U.S. since 2012.
Unemployment levels for college graduates sits slightly higher at 5.6%, and jumps to 17.9% for high school graduates. Furthermore, underemployment in 2016 is a whopping 33.7%, compared with only 26.8% in 2007, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute. And though 87% of college graduates feel prepared to enter the workforce, a recent study found that only half of hiring managers agree.
[Screenshots: Manpower Group]
Though it may seem paradoxical, the struggles faced by both employers and employees simultaneously is a result of a wide variety of recent changes in the labor market, explains Sunny Ackerman, the vice president and general manager of Manpower U.S.
"Technology, shorter product cycles, shifting consumer demand, and new ways of working all mean that the jobs employers need done are evolving, and they need people with different skills to do them," she says.
Another major cause of the talent shortage is an overall shift in the needs of businesses, and the desirable skills that result.
"We've found that even where there is a ready supply of labor, there isn't always a ready supply of skills," explains Ackerman. "In many ways the growing talent shortage reflects an issue of quality versus quantity. The challenge is finding people with the right skills and experience to do the work."
As the workforce shifts toward more technical and skills-based jobs, businesses are becoming more efficient and eliminating older roles while creating new ones. As a result, employers are struggling to keep up with their changing skills needs.
To cope with these changes, on-the-job training has skyrocketed in the past 12 months. The Manpower study found that while only 12% of U.S. employers were training their employees a year ago, 48% reported up-skilling their staff in 2016.
"Employability—the ability to gain and maintain a desired job—no longer depends on what you already know, but on what you are likely to learn," says Ackerman.
Companies like Coursera, which provides online courses from major universities, are responding to this demand, pivoting from an open learning platform toward job-specific training.
But mass on-the-job training could have some unintended consequences, suggests Ackerman. "Employers are tending to focus their up-skilling efforts on mid- to high-level roles, which still leaves a gap of skills development for people in entry-level positions," she says.
Instead, Ackerman believes that organizations need to get more creative and flexible in their recruitment strategies. She recommends that they consider untapped talent pools, candidates who can be trained for the skills they may be lacking, and exploring different ways of filling roles, such as employing two part-time staff instead of filling one full time role. "It just takes a bit of creativity," she says.
For better or worse—or a little of both—the news could help clarify Twitter's future.
On Thursday morning—bright and early at 7 a.m. EDT—Twitter is announcing its financial results for the third quarter, with a conference call an hour later. Even more than usual, the company is toughing out a period of investor discontent and bad press. Here are some of the factors that will be in play as it releases numbers and answers questions:
1. Growth. Investors instinctively compare Twitter to Facebook, which is adding new users at a faster clip despite already having far more of them. Even if Twitter has no hope of getting to a billion-plus members, it'll be an encouraging sign if it manages to boost its 313 million monthly active users by a meaningful enough amount to suggest that it's still capable of attracting newbies.
2. Shrinkage. Bloomberg's Sarah Frier reports that Twitter could cut costs by laying off as many as 300 employees in the immediate future. The company might choose to share such bad news during its conference call.
3. Independence. With potential acquirers such as Disney and Salesforce opting out of bids, the chatter about Twitter being subject to imminent sale has died down. But if the company has actively decided it wants to boldly continue on as an independent entity pursuing its current vision, it might want to say so.
4. Civility. The service's reputation as a haven for trolls, anti-semites, and other undesirables was reportedly a factor in Disney's decision not to pursue an acquisition. Twitter always says it takes the issue seriously and is working on new solutions, but expressions of concern and promises of future fixes are wearing thin.
5. Streaming. Twitter is pouring effort into a new initiative to stream live events—most notably NFL games—in part to lure new users who it's had trouble bonding with in the past. If there's evidence this strategy is working, the company is sure to share it on Thursday.
6. Aftermath. Twitter's stock often takes a bruising after its quarterly announcements, and its low price is one big factor in the persistent rumors involving the company being acquired or going private. If its price dips after Thursday's figures are released, expect more chatter about the company seeking the dreaded "strategic alternatives" than if it manages to hold up.
The restaurant chain's third-quarter earnings show it has not fully recovered from last year's devastating food-safety issues.
Today, Chipotle reported its much anticipated third-quarter earnings. The big takeaway: After a string of food-safety issues, the restaurant chain is not out of the woods yet.
The company reported revenue of $1 billion, down 14.8% year-over-year. Same-store sales, a key metric of restaurant health, decreased 21.9%. Analysts had expected quarterly revenue of $1.09 billion and comparable restaurant sales to decline roughly 18%. In the first and second quarter of 2016, Chipotle's same-store sales dropped 29.7% and 23.6%, respectively, suggesting slight improvement in the third quarter compared with these previous quarters, but not as much as Wall Street had anticipated.
As we charted in our new feature on Chipotle, which explores the company's ups and downs following a series of devastating food-safety incidents it experienced in late 2015, the chain has struggled to rebuild consumer trust. Restaurant sales plummeted in the first half of this year, leading co-CEOs Steve Ells and Monty Moran to rethink the company's approach to its menu, supply chain, marketing, and, of course, food safety. But with Chipotle's stock continuing to hover around 45% below its peak before the outbreaks, observers were looking to this afternoon's earnings as an indicator of whether more radical change is needed to win back customers as well as investors.
Despite the earnings miss, after-hours trading fluctuated and initially jumped higher on the news, likely reacting to Chipotle's guidance for future quarters, including estimates that 2017 comparable restaurant sales would increase to the high single digits. But those gains have since been eliminated as shares have slumped.
The media is more likely to scrutinize the decision to hire a female CEO, blame them for a crisis, and talk about their family life.
The CEO gender gap is very gradually closing at major public companies, but the way in which the media covers female CEOs may not help speed it up.
According to a recent study by the Rockefeller Foundation, articles about female CEOs are more likely to mention gender, discuss their personal life, and place the brunt of the blame on them during times of crises.
The small study analyzed 100 news articles from 37 top-tier media outlets that covered 20 Fortune 1000 and major tech company CEOs. The reporting on these executives was observed in four scenarios: when they were hired, stepped down, retired, or were involved in a crisis. The study also utilized IBM Watson's tone analyzer to measure the differences in language used when describing CEOs of different genders.
According to the report, 16% of the articles that covered female CEOs mentioned their personal life and discussed their family 78% of the time. When male CEOs are in the news, however, only 8% of the coverage mentions their personal life, and none discuss their children or family. The focus instead was on their background, retirement plans, or social life. Furthermore, 49% of articles written about female CEOs mention gender, compared with only 4% of articles written about male CEOs.
Although it was a small sample of media coverage, the findings are significant, because the way in which CEOs are covered often has a direct impact on their success in office. A recent study by the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University found that female CEOs are more likely to be targeted by shareholder activism, which the study's authors believe is directly impacted by the way in which they're covered in the media.
"Historically, female CEOs garner far more media attention than their male counterparts, and not for corporate performance and policy decisions alone," wrote the Arizona State University study's author, Christine Shropshire. "For example, as Silicon Valley's most prominent woman in a male-dominated profession, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's appearance, pregnancy, and parenting are frequently discussed—yet these topics rarely surface for male CEOs."
As a result of this discrepancy, the public perception of a CEO will differ significantly based on gender. The Rockefeller Foundation study found that 80% of stories written about female CEOs involved in a crisis put the blame on them, compared with 31% of male CEOs. Male CEOs' responses to crises were also viewed more positively, with 25% receiving positive coverage for their responses compared with 20% of female CEOs.
The study also found that female CEOs are targeted by the press from the very beginning, with 33% of articles and press releases mentioning the search process when announcing a new female CEO, compared with only 23% that explained the search process that resulted in the hiring of a male CEO.
A similar study by Cambridge University Press found that female athletes are commonly described using words like "aged," "older," "pregnant," and "married" or "unmarried," while descriptions of male athletes more commonly use words like "fastest," "strong," "big," "real," and "great."
The Rockefeller Foundation study points to a bias that is consistent in the coverage of successful women. Other reports have indicated that such media attention has adverse affects on the public perception of female executives' compensation and their ability to maintain their position without being ousted by their boards.
IBM is entering into the race to develop "smart" inhalers and software systems for asthma patients.
Some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies, including Astra Zeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, are investing big in the development of "smart" asthma inhalers that use sensors to track how patients are faring and if they're using these devices properly. To achieve their goal of improving medical outcomes, these firms have announced partnerships with technology vendors ranging from startups like Propeller Health to big brands like Qualcomm. Today, IBM Watson announced that it is throwing its hat into the ring by teaming up with Teva Pharmaceuticals, a drug maker with a large respiratory portfolio including a "smart" inhaler it acquired last year.
"Despite decades of availability of a variety of different types of medications, and inhalers, it is well documented that many people living with asthma still experience uncontrolled symptoms and frequent attacks," says a Teva spokesperson, adding that much of that is due to the behavioral aspects of managing the disease, such as patients using their inhalers improperly.
For this reason, industry experts say the challenging part isn't just the connected hardware. "The greatest advances will come from the software systems that use the data to improve patient outcomes and experience," says Chris Hogg, chief operating officer at Propeller Health, a startup that is developing mobile tools for patients with chronic respiratory disease. Hogg says the holy grail is to use this data to drive "drive personalized, adaptive dosing of medications." In other words, ensuring that patients are taking the right dose of meds, at the right time.
The idea behind this partnership is to connect a Bluetooth-connected inhaler to Watson's cloud-based app for analysis. To get a better sense of a patient's health, the app incorporates population-level health information, coupled with data gleaned from the individual patient's inhaler, explains IBM Watson Health chief health officer Kyu Rhee.
And Watson is also incorporating information from The Weather Company, the hyperlocal weather forecaster, which IBM acquired in 2015. Some of the major triggers for patients with asthma and chronic lung disease are weather-related. Companies like Propeller Health have also been experimenting in the past few years with incorporating data about air quality, temperature, pollen levels, and humidity, and are now using that data to predict asthma risk.
According to IBM, this is just the first of a series of partnerships with The Weather Company, which will be aimed at helping those with respiratory conditions.
The ultimate goal for the partnership is to demarcate the patients that are at higher risk of an asthma attack, and make recommendations that might help. These might include nudging a patient to notify their physician to potentially increase the medication amount, or take an emergency inhaler once they leave the house if there's a lot of pollen in the air.
"These cognitive insights will be connected to the patient's health care team, so that they can be aware, and make appropriate health care decisions," says Rhee.
Why Chipotle, long renowned for its simplicity, is hoping new menu items and new burger and pizza restaurants are the key to its future.
Will you soon be ordering churros from Chipotle? What about a breakfast burrito?
On Tuesday, Chipotle posted its third-quarter earnings—and announced a big shift in its direction, as the "Food with Integrity" restaurant chain continues its struggle to regain sales and customer faith following a series of damaging food-safety incidents last year. The company reported that same-store restaurant sales dropped 21.9% for the quarter, lower than analysts' expectations, as revenue sunk 14.8% year-over-year and net income fell 94.6%. In an earnings call, Chipotle co-CEOs Steve Ells and Monty Moran, along with their executive team, talked up a number of new changes intended to spur a faster recovery, including the potential for new menu items (dessert!) and the end of future ShopHouse restaurants, its concept noodle joint. Reacting to the news, the company's stock dropped Wednesday morning to its lowest levels since 2013.
Having spent the past seven months reporting on Chipotle for our new feature profiling the company and its struggles that hit newsstands this week, I was surprised by some of these announcements. It's healthy that Chipotle is working to address concerns and turn its business around—investors have long called for more menu innovation, after all. But some of these decisions seem reactive, at odds with what Ells and his leadership team conveyed to me mere months ago.
When I met with Ells in mid-July, for instance, he hadn't changed his tone on expanding Chipotle's meal offerings, despite the introduction of chorizo, only the second new item in the company's 23-year history. Chipotle has resisted cries for new menu items centrally because Ells, a classically trained chef, preferred to keep his menu simple and focused. Chorizo seemed to be an exception, added to refresh customer interest following the company's food-safety woes.
So it was surprising to hear Ells on Tuesday announce, "We're also currently testing two different desserts, and we hope to select one to offer in the near future." He indicated the company was actively exploring "thoughtful menu development" to attract new and lapsed customers. This may sound like a small change, but in Ells's world, it represents a substantial departure from his food philosophy. The idea of desserts was something Ells joked with me about in particular when we met. "People from the very beginning said that I would have to expand the menu—that it was far too limited with burritos and tacos," he explained. "They said I needed desserts. And I needed coffee. And I needed chimichangas! I argued instead [that we should] just focus on making our existing offering better, not only through better cooking techniques and better training of our crew, [but also] better hospitality and more efficient equipment."
In other words, dessert, coffee, and chimichangas? Not a chance. What's more, on the earnings call Tuesday, Ells also seemed to suggest that breakfast might now be on the table. "There have been suggestions that we add breakfast," he said, before clarifying to analysts that to do so would require more in-restaurant efficiencies. But he continued, "I'm not saying that we won't add breakfast."
This development also came as a surprise, since Chipotle had explored a breakfast option years ago, when it spent around 18 months cycling through various egg-cooker prototypes before giving up on the effort. "We chased that to no avail and spent who knows how much money," a former executive says. Ells even told me the breakfast burritos Chipotle tested in select markets, such as at Dulles International Airport, failed to resonate with customers. "We had a breakfast burrito with scrambled eggs and crispy potatoes," Ells recalled. "But people were like, 'Oh yeah, that looks good. Can I just have a chicken burrito though?' I'm like, 'But it's 7 a.m.! Don't you want eggs?' So we started offering our regular menu, and the other [breakfast] stuff just sat there."
So why the sudden about-face, especially if Ells was skeptical of meal items like dessert and breakfast burritos before? Because chorizo appears to be seeing some success in the market—Chipotle revealed that chorizo now represents 7% of entree sales, roughly the share that carnitas have traditionally owned—and the company is in dire need of more wins. (When Taco Bell added breakfast in 2014, the chain grew overall sales 6% in its first year.) It also means Ells is rapidly becoming less dogmatic in his belief in keeping Chipotle's menu stripped down. "That stuff works when people say, 'Oh, something new, I want to try that,'" Chipotle's chief creative officer Mark Crumpacker told me. "That's a page we pulled out of the traditional fast-food playbook."
Since the announcements, some have wondered whether Chipotle is losing its once-sharp focus. "One of the hallmarks of the Chipotle business is how simple you've kept the operation and how focused you've been," said Robert W. Baird analyst David Tarantino, who asked Ells on the earnings call why Chipotle doesn't just get "back to the basics."
Ells's response? Chipotle, he said, would do both: "Focus on the fundamentals" and "try new things." But when he tried to explain how the company would pull this off, his answer seemed to confuse Tarantino. "It's important that when you add something to the restaurant, you take something away," Ells said, "although with the addition of new menu items, we are not going to take away other menu items."
Instead, he continued, Chipotle would make this all work by creating more efficiencies at the restaurant level. Crumpacker jumped in to clarify Ells's position. "I wouldn't worry that we're going to slip into the traditional fast-food model of introducing multiple new menu items," he said, stressing that Chipotle would only add new items "every now and then."
Also on the earnings call, Chipotle announced that it was ceasing further investment in Shophouse, its Southeast Asian-inspired restaurant concept, though the company stopped short of saying it would shut down the chain's 15 locations altogether. Shophouse's cuisine, Ells said, was not able to "attract sufficient customer loyalty." Instead, Ells touted the potential of Chipotle's pizza and burger concepts, Pizzeria Locale and Tasty Made.
On the one hand, this demonstrates a measure of discipline: If the Shophouse brand isn't working for Chipotle, it makes sense to explore "strategic alternatives," as Ells put it, which suggests a sale might be in that five-year-old chain's future. But it feels a bit backward to indicate at the same time, in the context of avoiding distractions, that the company will instead turn its attention to selling pizza and burgers (in addition to Chipotle's own new menu items).
When I asked Ells about Shophouse and the pressure on Chipotle's other restaurant concepts over the summer, he seemed to gravitate more toward the "back to the basics" mentality that Tarantino referenced. "First, the No. 1 priority is to get Chipotle back on track," he immediately responded. Shifting Chipotle's development focus to newer, unproven concepts—especially ones in saturated markets—seems to be a shift away from this thinking, at least before Chipotle has progressed more in its recovery.
And that's only the start of what's coming for Chipotle. Executives on the call also promoted a slew of other initiatives, such as new mobile ordering technology, expanded delivery and catering options, national TV advertising, and overseas expansion.
Ultimately, pinning the future success of these new initiatives on more in-restaurant efficiencies feels like a fraught strategy. Among restaurant-level workers, it's commonly understood that the more responsibilities that corporate adds, the more the burden falls on their shoulders. This is especially true for general managers, who are not only still absorbing additional food-safety protocols, but will also soon be expected to roll out new menu items, train staff to handle the new mobile ordering technology, and seamlessly incorporate these new delivery and pickup options—all while still selling Chipotle burritos as quickly as ever.
This approach seems to represent Ells's current philosophy about fast food. As he told me back in July, "I want to have my cake and eat it too!"
Muslim women who choose to wear hijab are rarely heard in the American workplace. These professionals aim to change that.
Noor Tagouri knew she wanted to be on television since she was 8 years old, but a career as a newscaster seemed incompatible with her hijab, or head scarf. "How can you do that on TV?" said the naysaying voice in her head. She assumed that, when she was old enough to make her own choices, her hijab would go out the window.
Instead, fresh out of college, Tagouri became a local TV news reporter in the Maryland/D.C. area, head scarf and all. At age 22, she now anchors and produces stories around the world for Newsy—and is on the way to achieving her dream of becoming the first hijabi anchor on U.S. television.
American Muslim women who wear hijab are one minority whose ideas are rarely heard. Though often invoked symbolically as the face of their religion (a 2011 survey from Pew Research reported that about six out of 10 American Muslim women are hijabi, of about 3.3 million Muslims in total now), they are seldom seen in positions of leadership. But when they do break the glass ceiling—battle-tested by the constant struggle against stereotypes and the pressure to fit into norms—hijabi women exhibit some of the qualities most essential to success: fearless drive, creative thinking, empathy, and the ability to not to sweat the small stuff.
Yet women like Tagouri and minorities are often underrepresented in key creative or decision-making roles. According to a 2016 report from the Women's Media Center, for example, less than two-thirds of news organizations had at least one woman among their top three editors, and only 15% had at least one person of color among the top three. Newsrooms are similarly homogenous. In 2014, women of color made up only 6% of staff (both print and online), compared to 56% white men and 32% white women.
This despite the fact that we know that different perspectives impact the bottom line.
A 2015 report from McKinsey & Company found that leadership teams with a range of problem-solving approaches, perspectives, and ideas make better decisions and are more innovative. And diversity correlates with better performance: McKinsey's survey of 366 companies showed that gender, racial, and ethnic diversity tracked with bigger financial returns—15% and 35% above the national average, respectively.
Female hires are increasing, the chair of the American Society of News Editor's Diversity Committee reports, but more needs to be done to achieve full representation.
For Tagouri, finding the confidence to put her hijab-clad self in front of the camera—without regard for what others might say or think—required wrestling with her identity "as a woman, as a feminist, as a Muslim," she says. The paradox of wearing the veil in the U.S. is that there's nowhere to hide; it takes courage to stand out. This hard-fought process of reclaiming her difference and learning to wear it with pride has made Tagouri "fearless and unapologetic."
"It helped me find my own voice and power," she says. "I don't need to conform to what anyone deems beautiful, perfect, or worthy enough." In a field where appearances matter and the best-known anchors have a predictable coiffure and look, Tagouri's hijab serves as a reminder to herself that she has more to offer. "It's a symbol of my growth, of how far I've come," she says. "It empowers me to carry myself a certain way and make more of an effort to be a leader." As an artifact of her personal strength, she says it prompts her to speak up for her ideas and work hard to bring something unique to the table.
Other hijabis agree. Wardah Khalid, a foreign policy analyst regularly consulted on Middle East issues by members of the government and media outlets, says, "Putting myself out there as a result of wearing the hijab has definitely made me more confident in who I am. Like it or not, when I put it on, I represent a lot of different things. The best thing to do is to own that."
Wardah Khalid
The onus of representing a whole community to Main Street and Capitol Hill alike motivates Khalid to excel. She has challenged Texas Senator Ted Cruz on his stance on "radical Islamic terrorism," provided policy recommendations on ISIS to the White House and Congress, consulted for the U.N. on lone wolf terrorism, and explained geopolitical issues in numerous columns and TV appearances.
Even negative feedback like hateful comments on a blog post make her more determined. She works hard to define her own narrative before anyone else can. "Walking into the halls of Congress, it's very white-male dominated. I definitely felt that I stood out," she says. But that feeling evaporates as she takes charge. "Once I open my mouth, show that I'm competent, and know what I'm talking about," she explains, "any issues I might have go away."
Layla Shaikley's resume is full of accomplishments. The L.A.-born alum of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning is a tech entrepreneur, winner of a prestigious NASA internship, coproducer of the viral video "Muslim Hipsters: #mipsterz," cofounder of TedxBaghdad, and cofounder of software startup Wise Systems. Her ability to innovate is, according to Shaikley, inseparable from her experiences as a "visibly Muslim woman."
Shaikley explains that her creativity and communication skills are a result of "all the explaining and learning how to pitch and sell myself" she did as a teenager growing up after 9/11. She resented the "false narratives" and Islamophobic stereotypes that proliferated. "My identity and beliefs as a Muslim woman are far from that," she says. "I am adventurous, stylish. I love travel, I love science, and I am an independent thinker." Despite Shaikley's many facets, "ultimately, as a Muslim-American, I had to live in and constantly fight against an identity that I was completely unaffiliated with."
Layla Shaikley
She turned to fashion and style as "a tangible form of expressing my mixed identity." This attentiveness to "design as messaging" is a hallmark of her work, whether she is designing software, social housing strategies, architectural plans for a Baghdad War Archive, or styling a video. "What else can I add to represent the things that I care about, or believe in, or both?" she asks herself.
"If any woman chooses to wear the hijab, she's definitely expressing her independent thinking and her ability to make decisions for herself," Shaikley says. Bold moves are par for the course. "There are parallels between being really super creative and facing these kinds of constructs," she contends. "Any kind of conflict or challenge usually makes me a better designer."
Tagouri says that the hardest part of being a reporter is getting people to trust you. As an American hijabi, she understands the wariness. "I have an empathy for communities that have been misrepresented because I know what that's like," she says. For an investigative report on an abandoned housing facility for the mentally disabled in the D.C. area, former staff and residents were initially reluctant to open up to her. Sharing her own struggles helped win them over.
"It took time to gain their trust," she says. "People with disabilities in the black communities don't always have their narratives communicated in the best of light." Repeat visits to someone's house, or hours spent on the phone in frank personal conversations resulted in a show of compassion and commitment to honoring that person's story. An iconic New York City graffiti artist who is notoriously press shy recently agreed to grant Tagouri a live interview after speaking to her off the record for two hours. Finally, he told Tagouri, "I know what reporters are like. They just take the story and run with it. But I know you're not going to do that."
Caring about "getting the cultural nuances right" and "sharing in the vulnerability" of those she talks to matters because she's experienced the stigma that results when mainstream narratives get it wrong.
Shaikley, Khalid, and Tagouri all say they've been fortunate to be surrounded by supportive peers and mentors. At the same time, in the wider professional world, occasional comments or questions can demoralize them. But it's not always worth it to engage.
"Honestly, that's energy, that's human capital being expended on beating a dead horse, rather than being channeled into other activities," Shaikley says. "Other peers may be doing something to better themselves, to strengthen their futures or their minds; you're sitting there fighting about what you're not."
Khalid describes receiving two mildly offensive comments about her appearance at an Iran policy meeting. But she felt both came from a place of ignorance. "For something that is so little, I'm not going to ruin a relationship by calling them out," Khalid says. "I knew it didn't come from a bad place."
All three women boast creative side projects that educate and challenge assumptions about Muslim identity so that other aspiring young Muslims like themselves don't have to. Shaikley's Mipsterz video celebrates the daily lives of a group of Muslim women in hijab, eschewing "burqas, bombs, or other symbols ignorantly associated with the hijab on our heads" for "skateboards, sunshine, and good times." Tagouri tours as a motivational speaker for girls and, this October, became the first hijabi woman to appear, fully clothed, in Playboy for their "Renegades" issue. Trojan horse-like, she used Playboy's platform to offer a vibrant, humanizing portrait of a millennial Muslim woman that shatters stereotypes. After deciding to wear the hijab post-college, Khalid began the Houston Chronicle's Young American Muslim column to give her "old coworkers and classmates and neighbors who probably didn't understand the hijab a glimpse of my life as hijabi woman."
Each believes that embracing the hijab has helped them focus on what matters to them most. As Shaikley says, "There are a lot of feminist undertones with the decision to veil parts of yourself in order to make other parts of yourself shine."
Although few women ascend to the C-suite, those who have follow a similar path. The good news: Anyone can take it.
If you believe the forecasts of the presidential election, another glass ceiling will soon be broken. While this is great news for women, the road to equality has been long and slow. Less than 20% of C-suite offices have a woman in them, and only 4.2% of companies in the Standard & Poor 500 Index have a female at the helm.
Fewer women are on the path to leadership because they're less likely to receive the first critical promotion to manager, according to the Women in the Workplace 2016 study conducted by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company. Those who do rise to CEO are more likely to be targeted by activist shareholders.
On the flip side, "These powerful women often reached the apex of companies because they figured out that effective leaders need a complicated but nuanced set of professional experiences and relationships," says Joann Lublin. The journeys of high-achieving women are detailed in her new book, Earning It: Hard-Won Lessons from Trailblazing Women at the Top of the Business World.
Women who get on the CEO career track blaze a trail that can be followed, says Lublin. "Thanks to them, you'll know what to do when you confront the challenges of the workplace—and equally important, what not to do."
Your choice of industries can increase your chance of becoming a CEO. A number of the CEOs Lublin interviewed had a background in technology, math, or engineering. There's a good reason: "Do the stuff that can be measured," she says. "It's hard to be discriminated against if you have a clear metric."
For example, Diane Bryant became the highest-ranking woman at Intel after going into engineering. Her path there, however, was accidental. "A male student told her that she could make $30,000 a year," says Lublin. "When she went to the career office at the junior college, the adviser asked her what she wanted to major in and she said, 'I want to be engineer.' The counselor asked, 'Software or hardware?' She didn't know the difference, but thought that software sounded like something a woman could do.'"
Bryant became an electrical engineer, worked hard to rise through the ranks, and is now an executive vice president. Going into tech, math, or engineering comes with a caveat: "You are going to be the only woman in the room half the time," former FirstRain CEO Penny Herscher told Lublin, adding that women "need to work harder, be smarter, and be more professional than the men."
Be one of the guys, Bryant advises. "To be successful, you have to embrace the majority."
Women who become CEOs have extensive experience in line management, the roles responsible for profit and loss functions, says Lublin.
"Women often get sidelined into staff roles," she says. "Those who were able to get cross-functional experience and could migrate back and forth became more well-rounded."
The Women in the Workplace study found that at senior levels women shift from line to staff roles, while the percentage of men in line roles remains about the same. "By the time women reach the SVP level, they hold a mere 20% of line roles, which hurts their odds of getting the top job because the vast majority of CEOs come from line positions," the study says.
"Boards want a CEO with a range of experiences, such as functional work abroad," says Lublin. "Winning the highest job now requires a journey with more twists and turns."
To move to the top, you cannot be a shrinking violet, says Lublin. Raising your hand can give you experience on a cross-functional team, but it might be out of your comfort zone.
Former Xerox CEO Ann Mulcahy, for example, got her first managerial role by taking the region of Maine, a largely rural region that no one else wanted. She had interviewed for several sales management jobs without being chosen. Rather than feel defeated, she got mad and continued to raise her hand until she got the role. By Mulcahy's second year on the job, Maine was one of Xerox's top-three regions.
"Sales had the purity of quantitative results," Mulcahy told Lublin.
"Don't be afraid of making people aware of the things you are doing," Lublin says. "If you help the company be more successful, make sure people know who you are and what you do. This is different from bragging. No one will follow you if they don't think you're a winner."
Several of the CEOs that Lublin interviewed were willing to take the jobs nobody else wanted, which gave them exposure.
"It often was something that needed fixing or the creation of a new business idea that no one thought would be successful," she says. "They did it with an eye on making sure the risk wasn't too great."
For example, Ellen Kullman, former DuPont CEO, was asked to help start a new business for the company. "It was so risky that she was not promised money, staff, or budget," says Lublin. "People told her to reject the offer. She couldn't sleep. She knew it was a new direction and a chance to blaze a new territory."
Kullman took the position but hedged her bets. "She asked for a get-out-of-jail-free card," says Lublin. "She negotiated with her boss that she'd get a different position in six months if the business didn't work out. It was DuPont's safety consulting business, and it was a flaming success."
General Motors' CEO Mary Barra rose through the ranks because she had a male vice president who was privately lobbying on her behalf.
"The GM executive found her to be a rising star, and she got a lot of operational experience and a broader perspective as a result," says Lublin. "She had no idea what her sponsor was doing. When she got a message to interview for a new position, she thought someone was playing a joke."
Finding a sponsor is your responsibility, says Lublin. "You can't go up to someone and say, 'Hi. Will you be my sponsor?'" she says. "You have to be a high performer, and have something you can bring to them, such as helping them or having something to strategize around. It's a two-way relationship."
Gain exposure by taking on various responsibilities, including those profit and loss duties. "Men who decided a woman had high potential," Lublin says, "are willing to help because she will make them look better, and because she had their trajectory and guidance."
