Co.Labs

The country may feel divided, but a meticulous data analysis reveals that Trump and Clinton supporters aren't as different as they may seem.

As the holidays draw near, many people aren't feeling as warm and fuzzy as usual. This year's bitter—and, at times, gobsmacking—election has left the country feeling more divided than ever. A recent CNN/ORC poll found that 85% of Americans believe that their country is more split on major issues now than in years past. In practice, there's a lot of tension in everyday relationships. Many are experiencing powerful feelings of anger and resentment as they interact with neighbors, coworkers, and relatives who voted differently than they did.

In liberal hubs around the country—New York, San Francisco, Chicago—Hillary Clinton supporters are going through various stages of grief in the wake of their unexpected defeat. And even as emotions gradually become less volatile, people from opposite ends of the political divide feel like they fundamentally can't understand one another. Those on both sides are asking, What could possibly provoke someone to vote for someone so untrustworthy, unqualified, and wrongheaded?

How do we begin to rebuild bridges?

Spencer Greenberg, CEO of Clearer Thinking, a nonpartisan organization that conducts research on decision making, makes the case that it is vital for us to try to understand—and better yet, empathize—with the other half of the country. "The election made it clear that people of all political persuasions are suffering and looking to their candidate to help alleviate their pain," Greenberg says. "There are altruistic reasons to care about people on the other side. But if you want to be more pragmatic, it is also true that understanding their angst can help your side better prepare for the next election."

Since Clearer Thinking is based in New York, where the majority of people are Democrats, Greenberg and his team were specifically focused on trying to learn what makes Trump supporters tick. After all, Greenberg points out, 62 million people voted for Trump.

Social media gives us a warped view of reality, since it makes it easy for us to filter out people who don't share our point of view. But in everyday life, you don't have to go very far to find a smart, thoughtful person who voted for the other candidate. Take Andy Leffler, for instance, an accountant in his late thirties who works at an apparel manufacturing company in New York City. He's a rare Trump supporter in a sea of Democrats, and at times during the election, he felt he had to hide his beliefs. "In an environment like this, it was very hard to be openly 'the other side,'" he says. "Everyone was so disparaging, and they would start putting labels on you."

Although Leffler has an advanced degree, is gainfully employed, and enjoys living in the multicultural atmosphere of New York City, he has seen his hometown of Shamokin in central Pennsylvania fall into hard times over the last two decades. "It's an old coal-mining town that feels a lot like Scranton," he explains. "All the factories have left; poverty rates have gone up and drug use has been prevalent." He's a Republican and was drawn to Trump's slogan—"Make America Great Again"—because it tapped into his nagging feeling that his country is on a downward spiral. That's certainly what he sees every time he heads to his hometown. "It brings you back to a different time in America, to what you might call the golden age in the 40s, right after we won a big war, our factories was booming, and everybody seemed to have money," Leffler says. "People who were peasants became middle class, and they were getting the American Dream."

Greenberg was keen to get into the mind of a person like Leffler. Even though they live in the same city and are exposed to much of the same culture, their political choices make them seem like they're worlds apart. Over the last few months before the election, he and his team at Clearer Thinking laid out a strategy to gather data about the differences between Trump and Clinton supporters. The organization's first step was to go beyond the simple polls and basic demographic data, and do more in-depth qualitative research about the beliefs of Trump supporters.

They did six separate studies in which they surveyed 800 people who identified themselves as either Trump or Clinton supporters. They collected data on 138 variables on each person, from their demographics to their beliefs to their personalities. Whenever there was something they believed required further clarification, they asked follow-up questions to learn about their reasoning. It appears to be the most comprehensive study of its kind.

One caveat: The participants were recruited online, so they were not entirely representative of the country, because they skewed toward people were were more technologically adept. However, the researchers ensured that these participants' characteristics were consistent with as many nationally representative demographics as possible. The Trump supporters they surveyed tended to be more white, male, and rural, for instance, which is consistent with other data on Trump supporters.

Their findings were surprising.

It's Incredibly Difficult To Measure Racism

Many polls have identified Trump supporters as more racist and nationalist than Clinton supporters. But what these polls don't explain is that defining and measuring racism is extremely difficult.

Racism can be defined in many ways, ranging from simply believing that race is a valid social classification to actively denigrating groups of people because of their racial or ethnic makeup. It gets even murkier when you add the issue of immigration. There are some people who are worried about losing jobs to immigrants; some perceive this to be a form of racism, while others see it simply as economic anxiety.

Social scientists have at least four ways to study racism, all of which have well-known flaws, and different methods often result in very different outcomes. "In the mainstream media, pollsters tend to use one simple method of measuring racism, then draw grandiose conclusions based on it," Greenberg says.

Some polls, for instance, ask questions that correlate with racism, such as whether immigrants threaten American customs and values. Researchers generally determine that people who agree with this statement are more racist than those who do not. When Clearer Thinking asked this question, they found that 41% of Trump supporters strongly agreed with the statement, while only 7% of Clinton supporters did. But they wanted to better understand these responses, so they asked a follow-up question, asking participants to explain why they answered the way they did. Their findings were unexpected.

Some people were clearly racist, saying things like, "Muslims . . . hate us and come here to take our welfare dollars. As their numbers grow and we don't speak out against it, there will no longer be a tolerant, loving USA." But there were other people whose follow-up answers did not appear to be racist at all. They said things like, "Immigrants may emphasize their own culture over American culture, but this is not necessarily a bad thing." In this case, the person answering appeared to simply be acknowledging the fact that immigrants would change American culture, not making a value judgment about it. When Clearer Thinking went through the follow-up responses and coded them by how racist they actually were, they found that while on the whole Trump supporters tended to be slightly more racist than Clinton supporters, they were only marginally so.

Greenberg believes that these overall results should be heartening. The websites that claim Trump supporters voted for him because they are racist don't have the data to back this up. It would be fair to assume, then, that the average Trump supporter you meet is not racist. And many Trump supporters feel angry and defensive about being accused of being racist, when they aren't. Leffler is among them. "Racism is more systematic across society than within individuals," he says. "The solution isn't to train individuals, but to train society as a whole to be more tolerant."

Trump And Clinton Supporters Speak Different Languages

Among Clearer Thinking's 138 variables, the biggest predictor of whether someone would vote for Trump was their official party affiliation. But the second biggest predictor of support for Trump was whether they believe there is too much political correctness in this country. This is something that came up repeatedly during the election. One Washington Postwriter pointed out, "If there is one uniting principle the defines Donald Trump's campaign for president—besides, perhaps, winning and being classy—it is that political correctness is bad."

But what exactly does this mean? Clearer Thinking's analysis found that Trump and Clinton supporters have very different relationships to language itself. Clinton supporters said they believe in political correctness because it stops people from hurting other people and is merely another way to ensure that our discourse has a common decency. Trump supporters, on the other hand, believe that political correctness makes people afraid of speaking their minds and prevents properly addressing important problems in society, including government corruption and crime in black communities. "I think most people would admit that it is possible for reasonable people to disagree on this issue," Greenberg says.

Leffler's views on this were pretty consistent with those of other Trump supporters. He explains that when he came to New York, he had to learn how to speak in the vernacular of the liberal New York City environment. "That's how I can talk to you right now without saying 30 wrong things," he says. "Before, I would use the wrong expressions and the wrong terminology for people. It was very un-PC, but all my sentiments were the same."

Different approaches to language may explain why Trump and Clinton supporters had such opposite responses to their candidate's rhetoric. The two groups appear to have fundamentally different understandings of what it means to speak honestly. While Clinton supporters tend to take a very literal view of honesty, that is, getting your facts and numbers correct, Trump supporters believe that honesty has more to do with saying what is actually on your mind rather than filtering it for your audience. Clinton supporters generally value truth and accuracy, while Trump supporters care about authenticity.

This is why Trump and Clinton supporters reacted so differently to Trump's flexible relationship with the truth. "When Trump said that 90 million Americans were unemployed, Clinton supporters said he was lying," Greenberg points out. "But Trump supporters were more concerned about the sentiment underneath, which is that far too many Americans are unemployed. They saw it as Trump honestly expressing his feelings in an unscripted away."

Leffler also points out that there are many ways of using language to harm people. "There are different types of bullying," he explains. "Trump's was a playground-type bully, but on the other side, there's the condescending type of bullying, where you talk over or down to people, where their view doesn't matter because they are too stupid or unintelligent to understand your high view of society."

The U.S. Might Be On The Verge of Economic Collapse . . . Or Not

This seems like an easy one. After all, there are statistics we can track to determine the country's economic health. And yet Trump supporters tend to report that the U.S. is doing much worse economically than Clinton supporters do.

But it turns out that this is a far more complicated question than meets the eye. The U.S. stock market has been doing well over the last few years and unemployment figures have fallen substantially in recent years, suggesting that the country is prospering. But the economic recovery since the Great Recession has been uneven across the country, and real wages have been stagnant for a long time.

Greenberg says that both sides can point to valid evidence to support their point of view that the U.S. is doing well or poorly. "People tend to be judging the economy subjectively, based on what they are seeing around them, in their community, and among their friends and family," he says.

For Clinton supporters who tend to live in regions that are economically prosperous, it can be hard to understand why Trump supporters respond so strongly to Trump's claims that the U.S. is in decline. But for someone like Leffler, whose hometown has been slipping into poverty for some time now, Trump's words resonate. "When I heard 'Make America Great Again,' it meant something to me," he says. "It took me back to a time before heroin had overtaken my town, before all the factories left. It made me feel like there was hope to bring it back to another golden age."

In the days after the election, there was a great deal of anxiety about how the country would change with Trump as president. Would his supporters feel empowered to commit acts of racist violence? Would all social niceties be swept away as political correctness becomes a relic of the past?

Clearer Thinking's research suggests that many of these fears were unfounded. While there are certainly some Trump supporters who have expressed radical views—particularly the vocal ones in the white nationalist movement—it would seem that the vast majority are not really that different from Clinton supporters. They just have very different ideas about how to solve the country's problems.

"We spent hours and hours reading people's responses to these different questions," Greenberg says. "I began to feel that not only could I understand what they were saying, but I could somewhat relate to what they were saying. And this can only be a good thing, because it means you can actually begin to have a conversation with people who think differently from you."

For those on the other side seeking to take the country in a different direction in the next election, having a deep, accurate understanding of what makes Trump supporters tick is the first step to winning them over.

Editor's Note: The article has been modified from a previous version to clarify Greenberg's statement.

Posting a policy and putting a company on autopilot not only doesn't work, it can have serious backlash.

New evidence suggests that diversity programs aren't quite doing as well as they could.

Tessa Dover and Brenda Major of the University of California, Santa Barbara along with Cheryl Kaiser of the University of Washington conducted a series of experiments that revealed how some diversity efforts cause a backlash. The results, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, showed that (perhaps not surprisingly) pro-diversity messages make members of high-status groups (i.e.: white men) feel threatened.

"Compared to white men interviewing at the company that did not mention diversity, white men interviewing for the pro-diversity company expected more unfair treatment and discrimination against whites. They also performed more poorly in the job interview, as judged by independent raters. And their cardiovascular responses during the interview revealed that they were more stressed."

Additionally, the researchers found that some diversity initiatives weren't really convincing underrepresented minorities that their employer will treat them more fairly.

The authors cite a longitudinal study that analyzed the affirmative action and diversity policies of more than 700 U.S. companies. The study found that diversity programs aimed at eliminating bias among managers were least effective at increasing the share of both white and black women, and black men in management.

The problem, they posit in a post for Harvard Business Review, is that most people assume that diversity policies make companies more fair places to work. But just posting a plan can backfire. They write:

"A 2011 Supreme Court class action case, Walmart successfully used the mere presence of its anti-discrimination policy to defend itself against allegations of gender discrimination. And Walmart isn't alone: the "diversity defense" often succeeds, making organizations less accountable for discriminatory practices."

Training That Actually Works

We've reported on how training can go wrong, partly because at some companies it's mandatory and remedial, and partly because it can be cloaked in negative language. Frank Dobbin, sociology professor at Harvard, and Alexandra Kalev, associate professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University, analyzed close to 1,000 studies that have been conducted to measure the effectiveness of training and found that it resulted in a decrease in the number of people of color across the companies studied. "The share of black women actually decreased by 9%, on average, while the ranks of Asian-American men and women shrank by 4% to 5%," Dobbin and Kalev wrote.

That hasn't stopped PwC's chairman Tim Ryan from implementing a sweeping training plan for the company's 49,000 employees. PwC just announced that in order to be promoted or to join the firm as a new hire, an individual must complete its 4REAL (Recognize/Explore/Act/Learn) training.

According to the company, the four-episode video series focuses on one common blind spot as illustrated through fictitious characters and scenarios that tackle ethnic, sexual, or gender biases. The pace of the program is driven by the employee, and there is a way for individuals to track their progress, points which Dobbin and Kalev say are crucial if training programs are going to work to promote diversity. They wrote:

"Voluntary training evokes the opposite response ("I chose to show up, so I must be pro-diversity"), leading to better results: increases of 9% to 13% in black men, Hispanic men, and Asian-American men and women in management five years out (with no decline in white or black women). Research from the University of Toronto reinforces our findings: In one study white subjects read a brochure critiquing prejudice toward blacks. When people felt pressure to agree with it, the reading strengthened their bias against blacks. When they felt the choice was theirs, the reading reduced bias."

Better Diversity Through Transparency

As U.S. companies such as Intuit, Intel, and others are spending millions on diversity initiatives and appointing dedicated executives to oversee them, it's perhaps most important that they continue to be transparent about their progress. Especially if they aren't making it as quickly as they'd hoped.

As Fast Company's Rich Bellis noted on the news that tech companies such as Twitter, Salesforce, and others were taking a step back from reporting diversity stats: "Multiple studies have already shown that you can't properly critique what you don't know, and you can't make it better, either."

Give Yourself More (And Smaller) Projects . . .

Most of the time, people motivate themselves by focusing on a particular goal. Important goals create motivation because people value the outcome of achieving them. They contrast where they are right now with where they'd like to be, and that creates energy to get to work.

It doesn't always last, though. That's because your motivation is project-based—you're engaged in your work mainly because this or that individual project is important. This tends to make you more enthusiastic at the start of a project, because it's new and the reasons for doing it are fresh in mind. But then you hit a wall. Toward the middle, your motivation wanes. It can be hard to see that you're making progress toward the goal, and the goal that once seemed so desirable may feel distant and less important.

This is the period that few productivity strategies successfully address. If you're thinking of your work as projects, you need a technique that doesn't try to pry you out of that mind-set—which usually will only cause more mayhem. Instead, create sub-goals, mini "projects" that can help you track your progress on the bigger one. If you look forward to (and celebrate) the completion of those smaller tasks, you may have better luck keeping your productivity consistent all the way through.

. . . Or Switch To Seeing Process

Sometimes we still think of our work as a string of projects even when what we do requires sustained effort. Writers, for instance, may have particular articles or books they're working on, but their long-term success simply involves a lot of writing—it doesn't just hinge on this or that published piece.

In these cases, you may actually need the opposite strategy: Rather than add smaller goals on your path toward the big one, stop thinking of your work in terms of goals altogether. Instead, reimagine what you do in terms of the processes you follow to do it, with the goals as mere side effects. This process orientation can be valuable, because it helps you focus on the habits that contribute to your success—consistently.

Successful writers don't just start writing when they have a certain story or book to work on. They write regularly. Often, the most innovative people are expert generalists who are constantly seeking opportunities to learn new things. Those habits are actually a productivity strategy in disguise. Take the most important goals in your life and find ways to add activities related to those goals into your daily or weekly schedule, until they're just a part of how you get through the day.

This can also help you appreciate the intrinsic rewards of the task itself. A writer who focuses just on finishing articles may get enjoyment from that, but wind up seeing the writing process as a drag—a difficult slog to get from point A to B. But the same writer who focuses on the process can come to enjoy the small victories of putting together and revising a draft, placing less ultimate satisfaction in finally seeing it published.

It's not necessarily that a process-based approach to your work is categorically better than a project-based attitude. When it comes to sustaining your productivity, both mind-sets have their own upsides and perils. The key to actually sticking with the productivity work strategy that pays off best for you is simply to tailor it what you already do. That's much easier said than done, of course, but it's a simple truth that hints at another reason why so many productivity hacks lose steam over the long term: One size really doesn't fit all.

MailChimp's Jon Smith made tons of folders, then he scrapped them. Both approaches were a mess. Here's what he does now instead.

A lot of people see email as a chore, but for me and many of my colleagues at MailChimp, it's the center of our work universe. But that doesn't mean I spend all day rummaging through my inbox. In fact, I cap the time I devote to managing emails to 90 minutes every day.

It took me a while to get to that point. I tried a few approaches that didn't work for me—at all—before landing on the one that does. But in the process, I learned that if you're overwhelmed by your inbox, a few key adjustments can make a world of difference. For me, it's all about developing simple systems, sticking to them, and keeping on top of my inbound messages.

What Didn't Work

Once upon a time, I made folders for everything. I had color-coded folders for messages from my boss, notes about specific projects, emails I needed to take action on, and several more. I thought this would save time, but in reality I was spending less time working and more time trying to remember my filing system.

If I received an email from my boss about a project I was working on, which I also needed to take action on, where should it go? And would I remember where to look for it later? What did orange mean again? And purple?

My next move was to scrap the folders, but as a result my inbox became a jumbled mess. No system wasn't any better than a cumbersome system. It wasn't long before I decided to overhaul my approach once again, assigning a new overall function to my entire inbox: I'd no longer try to sort emails by subject, but tackle them according to the type of action they each required. Here's how it works.

Keep It Simple

Now, I reserve my inbox only for messages I need to address, marking the most important ones "unread" if I can't deal with them right away.

It may sound counterintuitive to do that—wouldn't you want to read the most urgent stuff right away? Yes, and I often still do. But marking them "unread," as opposed to flagging them with a certain color, or dragging them into this or that folder, is the simplest way I've found to prevent them from getting lost in the shuffle. Plus, I don't have to move those emails—they stay in my main inbox, where I know they'll remain top-of-mind until I can get to them.

I try to have no more than 60–70 emails in my inbox at any given time—that's the number I can comfortably process in one sitting, and I try to get through all of my "unread"-marked emails by the end of each day in order to reduce the load as much as possible for the next day.

Schedule Email Processing

Every morning, I block out an hour on my calendar to weed through my inbox. As I've noted, if I see an urgent message come, I can often avoid taking any action right then—it can stay unread for the moment. Instead, I quickly read newsletters and internal memos and respond to as many non-urgent items as I can in the space of this hour.

When that hour wraps up, I don't turn off my email completely, but I pay much less attention to my inbox. As emails come in, I just quickly scan subject lines and sender names to identify priority items. If there's anything I can handle without much disruption, I'll quickly respond—but I'm not doing major email maintenance.

Close to the end of the day, I block out another 30 minutes for dedicated email time. That's when I address items that need additional action from me—approvals, longer responses, decisions made. This is when those important "unread" emails typically get my attention.

To be sure, these two 60- and 30-minute blocks on either end of my workday are what works with my schedule; I could easily spend more time on email, but having these constraints simply helps me stay focused and productive.

Organize For Action

When I process emails in the morning and again in the evening, I'll file certain messages—those that don't stay put in my main inbox for action that day—into just one of two folders. Items that I need to take action on or that need a response from a teammate (just not necessarily right away) go into a "To-Do" folder. Those are messages about things I can get to tomorrow or later in the week.

Even less time-sensitive messages, like internal memos, go into the "To Read" folder. I also have filters set up that automatically file newsletters into the "To Read" folder; filters take just a few seconds to set up and save me time and effort. All the same, this leaves me with no more than three tiers when it comes to urgency: Whatever's in my main inbox, "to do" notes, and "to read" ones.

Archive For Later

For everything else, I use the "Archive" function to clear out my inbox and mental space. As soon as I've read and acted on an email—whether it's a company update or one of the newsletters I subscribe to—I archive it. If an email contains good information that I want to save for later, I star it in my archive for quicker retrieval. Search functionality on email is pretty good, so I can easily pull up messages when I need them, even if they're swept out of view.

Delete With Caution

I use the delete key only sparingly. I learned the hard way. Once I deleted a message from a colleague that included information I didn't think was important at the time, but when he left the company, I needed the info and found myself in a pickle. Now I only delete emails I know for sure I won't need down the road. No offense to all the cat GIFs my wonderful colleagues send me, but it's the trash bin for you.

I didn't land on my current process until I tried a lot of other approaches that simply didn't work for me. Initially, I tried to replicate systems others were using, but it soon became clear that I needed to try something different. I realized that an organizational system can only work if it fits into the idiosyncrasies of your own workday. Fortunately, I've managed to shrink mine down to around 90 minutes of focused email time each day. With a little trial and error, you may even get yours down further than that.

Jon Smith is VP of customer support at MailChimp.

1. Do Your Homework

Find out who is attending and ask the host if he or she will give you couple of key warm introductions based on your goals, suggests Judy Robinett, author of How to Be a Power Connector. You can also think about people who will be at the party that are natural connectors and try to be their "wingman," she adds.

It's also a good idea to preplan conversation topics, says Walt L. Jones III, principal at SEQ Advisory Group, a strategy and management consulting firm.

"Do your homework on your management team," he says. "Are they golfers or art lovers? Show genuine interest by reading on the subject and spark up conversation."

2. Get There Early

It can be tempting to wait until the party is going before you make your entrance; it can feel awkward to be the first to arrive. But you want to make those great connections and have those great conversations while everyone is still lucid, says Jones.

But avoid the alcohol. "Club soda with lime or Sprite in a cocktail glass are great 'mocktails,'" he says. "If everyone else is drinking, your hand should be full, as well. It's all about the glass."

3. Set a Number of People to Meet

Taking the time to approach people will make a positive impression and can open doors over the coming year, says Stokes. Introduce yourself to people you haven't met in person or who work in other departments.

Introverts might want to ease the difficulty by setting a target number of people, such as five," says Stokes. "An extrovert might connect with 10 or 20," she adds. "This isn't a competition; it's about making meaningful connections and being human."

4. Give Props To The Boss

During the party, find the company president or CEO and personally thank them for hosting the event, says Kolby Goodman, career and networking consultant at The Job Huntr.

"They may not have been the person to set everything up, but they did play a pivotal role in making sure the company was afloat to have the party in the first place," she says.

5. Don't Talk About Work

The holiday party is not the time to discuss your vision or company goals, "hence the word party," says Jones. But be sure to be authentic, adds Robinett.

"All transactions at their core are personal," she says. "People must know you, like you, and trust you. Talk about your pets, family, or a great new book your reading. If business comes up that's okay, but it's not the best starting point."

6. Leave At a Reasonable Time

Don't be the last man standing, says career coach Heather Monahan. "It's great that you attended the party and networked and made a solid impression, now get the hell out of there," she says. "Once you have seen a few people leave, it is time for you to make your excuse known and get out. Nothing good happens at the end of the night."

7. Follow Up

Develop a simple strategy for following up with new connections after the party. "Follow up within 24 hours saying you enjoyed meeting and chatting, and that would like to grab coffee after the holidays," says Robinett.

Also follow up with the people who organized the party, even if you already thanked them at the event, says Goodman. "Email them on Monday and thank them again," she says.

Both companies—one very small, one very big—may have faced some of the same tricky connectivity and manufacturing issues.

Both Doppler Labs and Apple announced new wireless earbuds to ship for this holiday season, and both ended up delaying their products.

Doppler's Here One buds were scheduled to be available in November. But Doppler didn't feel confident that it could ship a product that worked perfectly in the vast majority of cases. On November 22, it announced that it was pushing its launch into early 2017.

Apple announced its AirPods along with the iPhone 7 back in September and originally planned to ship them before the end of October. Then the company postponed that launch, saying only this: "We don't believe in shipping a product before it's ready, and we need a little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers." Today, it announced that the buds were now available at Apple.com and are making their way to customers and select Apple stores.

In general terms, the two companies' engineers have been wrestling with some of the same technical challenges.

Doppler's Here One earbuds occlude—plug up—your ear canals, then use two outward-facing microphones, one internal microphone, and some sophisticated software to amplify certain sounds, such as a specific voice in a noisy restaurant. Or they can selectively suppress sounds like baby cries and jet engine rumbles. All this is controlled through an app, allowing you to "mix your world." The company is also doing deals with partners such as the New York Mets, Coachella, and JetBlue to stream context-sensitive audio that you can hear without blocking out the world around you.

For Doppler, the shipping delay isn't related to all the fancy sound layering and noise cancelling features, but rather to the more basic problem of making sure the user's smartphone connects with both earphones immediately and consistently, even when the phone is tucked in the user's back pocket. Apple, Doppler suspects, has been dealing with the same broad issues.

Doppler CEO Noah Kraft told me that the value of moving from wired earphones to wireless models is obvious and inevitable, but that many people underestimated the technical challenge of making it work well. "The number-one gripe of consumers is Bluetooth connectivity, the connection of the earbuds with your phone," Kraft said.

After getting a demo of the prototype Here One earbuds, I sat down with Kraft, Doppler's director of product Matt Jaffe, and the company's director of software and electrical engineering, Nitin Khanna, to talk through the reasons behind the Here One delay.

Doppler is working with an undisclosed manufacturer in China to produce its earbuds. That involves producing small batches of products, then moving in phases to larger production runs, then finally going to mass production. The Doppler people say they're now entering the final stage before real-deal mass production of shippable devices—known as the "production validation" phase—and will reach full mass production mode in January.

The Latency Problem

Lots of factors can cause too-high failure rates in production, but my conversation with Kraft, Jaffe, and Khanna focused on problems relating to latency—that is, the lag time between the millisecond when audio data leaves a phone or other source device and the millisecond when the sound is heard in the user's ears.

For stereo audio, the left and right stereo audio signals must issue from the earphones' speakers harmoniously and at the same time. I have personally heard another wireless earphone product fail to do this; It sounded like the mix of the music was messed up, with bass parts trapped in the right channel and certain mid-range frequencies far more dominant than they should have been.

For video viewing, the accompanying audio channel must stay perfectly in sync with the moving picture on the display. Khanna told me humans can hear latency above seven milliseconds. If lag time between the device and one or both of the earphones is more than that, the user is exposed to an unsettling sensory experience.

"With Bluetooth streaming, no users are cool with that," Kraft says. "If you release a product with too much latency, you basically scar the product for life."

Getting this timing and synchronization right isn't easy. That's because in many wireless earbuds (including Doppler's Here One and Apple's AirPods) the source device communicates directly with only one of the buds. That master bud must pass the audio signal on to the slave one on the other side of the user's head, making sure the playback is in sync.

The source device's operating system can make allowances for latency between the source device and the master earbud, but it can't do much about the latency in that second hop from the master bud to the slave.

Doppler uses Bluetooth to connect phone to earbud, then a wireless technology borrowed from the hearing aid industry called NFMI (Near Field Magnetic Induction) to connect one bud to the other. "All the frequencies used in Bluetooth are absorbed by water," Khanna told me. "And the space between one's ears is predominantly water."

The NFMI signal is more resistant to absorption by the water within the human skull, Khanna adds. So the signal moves from one bud to the other faster and latency is diminished. NFMI also increases the range such that audio data can travel for people with larger heads.

The company that makes the NFC chips in iPhones for Apple Pay, NXP, also manufactures the NFMI chip used in Here One. "While other technologies utilize a direct link through the wearers head, NFMI creates a body area network, essentially creating a bubble around the wearer," said NXP VP and general manager Asit Goel in an email to Fast Company. "This network leads to better privacy and results in more reliable and higher quality stereo signal." (NXP is now being acquired by Qualcomm, which Doppler sees as a validation of the NFMI technology.)

Contrary to recent reports, Apple's AirPods do not each connect separately to the source device. Rather, they connect with a master AirPod, which then synchronizes the audio signal with the other AirPod. The details of the connection between the two AirPods remain fuzzy, but Apple probably uses a special form of Bluetooth. Part of the job of the new W1 chip in the AirPods is likely to orchestrate the connection between the two buds and the device, and to reduce latency.

Technologies At Odds

The two legs of the journey from host device to ear—phone to master earbud, master earbud to slave earbud—do not work independently of each other. Quite the contrary. The two wireless technologies can end up fighting against each other, Khanna says.

Doppler's engineering team had to do a lot of work to get the Bluetooth and NFMI technology working well together. Part of the problem is a phenomenon called de-sensing, Khanna explains. The Here One buds are very small, only 22 millimeters wide. In such close quarters, one electronic component (like an NFMI radio, for instance) can desensitize the performance of another electronic component (a Bluetooth radio, for example) located nearby.

Doppler's original goal was to build Here One so that one bud could connect to the other across 17 centimeters of head width. In June it upped the goal to 19 centimeters, so that people with larger heads could use the product too, Kraft said.

But just when the engineers were able to increase the range to 19 centimeters, the reliability of the Bluetooth connection from the phone was diminished, Jaffe says. And when the Bluetooth sensitivity was corrected, the NFMI range went back down to 16 centimeters.

Khanna says part of Doppler's secret sauce is an electrical architecture that manages the interworking of the components such that the performance of both is maximized. "Now there is next to no de-sensing," Khanna said.

Jaffe and Khanna are hesitant to divulge the details of how they got there. "There's a certain amount of black magic that goes into making it all work together," Kraft says.

Black Magic At Scale

Making the product work well in the lab is one thing, but replicating such a delicate recipe in millions of units coming off the manufacturing line is very hard. This seems to be the root cause of Doppler's delay, and it is likely the cause of Apple's AirPods delay, too.

"If we were only going to make 50 units this would be no problem," Kraft says, but Doppler hopes that it will need to make millions of them.

Doppler must rely on its Chinese manufacturer partner to hit a better-than-90% yield, meaning that less than 10% of the products coming off the line can fail any of the 60 or so quality-assurance tests performed on the production floor. Those quality-assurance tests involve many different aspects of the product, including radio frequency, battery performance, safety, audio quality, and other factors.

Kraft says that 90% yield number is needed to preserve profit margins; but the main reason for targeting that success rate is so that very few, if any, consumers receive a product that doesn't pair well and perform reliably.

Another challenge to mass-producing Here One while ensuring reliability is that the product's circuit board has to be small enough to fit in an ear and yet must carry around 200 components. The close proximity of the components increases the risk of manufacturing error. If one piece of solder is slightly out of place, the product may not connect to the phone properly, or may not connect at all.

"There are only two fab houses that can build a circuit board of that size and complexity," Khanna says.

The manufacturing process is at once made simpler and more difficult by the fact that unlike other wireless earphones, Doppler's left and right buds are identical. While it obviates the need for two distinct production lines, it also creates a scenario where the engineers must fit the full set of components into one earphone design. More stuff crammed in a tiny space, through a more exacting manufacturing process.

Doppler's Here One buds are somewhat larger than the part of Apple's AirPods that fit in the ear. Apple decided to reduce the size of the in-ear portion of the AirPod by designing in a post that extends down from the user's ear. That post provides ample space for antennas, which no doubt improves connectivity and reliability in that product. The Doppler designers felt that those posts make the AirPods less discreet, less aesthetically appealing, and less wearable.

"You have the aesthetics, the battery, and the computer, and if you give up on one you seriously compromise your product," Kraft said.

So Doppler resisted adding something like the AirPods' posts to the design of the Here products. "They took the easy way out," Khanna says, laughing.

Doppler Labs now says it expects that Here One will go into full mass production in January. The company says it will start shipping pre-orders in mid-February and will start selling through mass retail channels in mid-March.

The most skilled peacemakers know how to talk with the warring parties separately before bringing them to the table.

As the boss, one of your main goals is to create a workplace that fosters collaboration, encouragement, and unity. Sounds simple enough, right? But human beings are far from simple.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts to ensure everyone works well together, there are employees who just can't seem to get along with each other. And if you don't handle the situation, it can wreak havoc on an otherwise solid workplace.

"These days, people leave their jobs because of ineffective leaders and toxic work teams, even more so than for low pay," says Marcia Reynolds, author of The Discomfort Zone: How Leaders Turn Difficult Conversations Into Breakthroughs. "And they will stay with good leaders and teams they enjoy working with, even if they are offered more money elsewhere."

Follow these tips to help your direct reports mend fences and move forward.

Address The Situation

"The fact that people disagree isn't a bad thing," says Amy Gallo, author of the HBR Guide to Managing Conflict at Work. "It's how we manage conflict that can be damaging to productivity."

However, not every little squabble requires you to get involved. For everyday friction that occurs at work, give people space to disagree and work things out. But when a disagreement becomes personal, or when it's affecting the work, then it's time for you to intervene.

The first step to finding peace: Talk to both parties separately, says Lindred Greer, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

Start with one-on-one conversations, Gallo says, and help each person do the important initial work of "seeing the other person's perspective, understanding their own emotions, and preparing for the conversation."

Your job is to make sure you have the complete story and give everyone a chance to voice their grievances. "Often conflicts erupt because one person doesn't feel heard," Gallo says. "Just making someone feel heard can help."

Ask Meaningful Questions

It can be difficult for someone to put into words exactly why they feel slighted. "Most of us have a very limited emotional vocabulary," Gallo explains. To help employees dig deeper and better understand their own feelings about the situation, ask questions that focus on their emotions. For example, "if you're disappointed versus angry, you're going to act very differently," Gallo says.

You also want to ask questions to help each person take the other's perspective. Gallo suggests asking, "What do you think is going on with her?" or, "What's making him act that way?" If your employee is not immediately able to come up with realistic answers, keep pushing: "What else could be going on? What could be an alternate theory?" Help them open their mind to other viewpoints and perspectives that could help foster understanding.

Finally, ask questions to bring out what behavioral psychologists call "efficacy"—show team members that they have the power to solve the problem. Ask them, "What's something you could do to make this situation better?"

Through asking meaningful questions, Gallo says, you're helping the employee understand their own nuanced feelings, see the other person's perspective, and pinpoint something they can do about it. They will walk away feeling heard and empowered.

Look Ahead—Together

Once you've helped each side to gain a bit of clarity, encourage them to talk with each other privately, communicating to each other what they have each separately communicated to you.

Express confidence that they can work out their differences and find resolution on their own. Be careful about acting as a direct mediator between two employees. "Only insert yourself if they ask you to be there," Gallo says.

After the immediate disagreements are addressed, map out a plan to help everybody stay on the same page. Help your employees identify what group success looks like—and how success for the group is different than individual success, says Reynolds.

With a shared mission statement that everyone believes in, you can rally your team to work toward that mission together in harmony.

This article originally appeared on Monster and is reprinted with permission.

The Imbalance Of Paid Parental Leave

This is a big deal, because even though there's been a raft of announcements by companies introducing or extending their paid parental leave programs, the benefits usually only cover birth mothers in higher wage industries like finance (see: AMEX's latest announcement that ups paid leave to 20 weeks).

For example, in contrast to tech companies' policies such as Spotify's and Etsy's of up to six months of paid parental leave, hospitality chain Choice Hotels (parent of Comfort Inn, Econo Lodge, and others) announced in September that it would offer up to four weeks of parental leave for either parent and 12 weeks for new mothers at full pay. A spokesperson for Choice Hotels told me at that time that the policy would only apply to the 400 employees at its Maryland-based headquarters and not the housekeeping or other staff. Polices like that leave out thousands of employees. The chain has more than 6,400 franchised properties in more than 40 countries.

We know that the U.S. lags behind almost all other countries that provide federally mandated paid leave. Some cities and states have implemented their own legislation, but the Department of Labor estimates that only 12% of U.S. employees get paid leave through their employers.

Although these benefits cost companies money, both research and anecdotal reporting from the likes of Google, Change.org, 15Five, and others make a strong case that not offering paid parental leave comes at a higher cost for employers. Now a new report from Visier, a cloud-based workforce intelligence company, extends the implications even further. The findings in Visier's Gender Equity report suggest that offering paternal leave policies like Ikea's could also close the gender pay gap.

A Hidden Factor In The Wage Gap

To reach that conclusion, Visier used aggregated and anonymized workforce data from large U.S.-based employers that collectively employ 165,000 workers. Industries range from health care, technology, financial services and insurance to energy and manufacturing.

Questions for data analysis included, 'What is the salary for women at different ages?' and results were validated by comparing them to publicly available measures, such as those from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

The concern with salaries, the report's authors write, is:

Despite decades of tracking and research, publicly available benchmark data on gender equity is limited: You can get a picture of workforce composition, see how many women compared to men hold various roles, and compare average weekly salaries by gender and occupation, but the ability to examine the data from multiple dimensions to uncover new findings is highly constrained. As a result, there has been limited insight into why the gap exists and persists, which can guide companies and policy makers on how to close the wage gap.

PayScale just released the results of its sweeping analysis of the gender wage gap and the complexity of trying to narrow it down to just one cents-on-the-dollar figure. It found that in their early careers, workers are generally in roles as individual contributors who don't supervise other employees. That changes with age as men are 25% more likely to enter management roles between the ages of 35 and 40 and are 85% more likely to be vice presidents or C-suite executives by mid-career.

The Manager Divide

Visier's report also revealed an age-related gap. Women earned 90¢ on the dollar up until their early 30s, after which the wage gap widened to 82¢ on the dollar by age 40, exposing a direct correlation between the so-called Manager Divide, a growing gap in the percentage of men and women in management positions from age 32 onwards, with a drop in women's wages across education levels and occupations. The report concluded that eliminating the Manager Divide would cut the gender wage gap by nearly one-third.

The authors pointed out that this is not a generational issue, nor does it reflect the hard work and achievements of older generations of women to achieve equity. Why they're sure it's not is because the findings show that women appear to be leaving and rejoining the workforce, and participating at higher rates after age 50 than before age 30. The wage gap actually narrowed among workers over 55.

Furthermore, they note: "We also did not see a bias for men in performance evaluations. In fact, women generally received higher performance evaluations than their male counterparts across all age groups." In fact, women are promoted at the same rate as men during their early 30s, but men are more likely to have direct reports.

As Josie Sutcliffe, vice president of marketing for Visier, tells Fast Company, "The Manager Divide is about a women being underrepresented in positions in which they have responsibility for one or more direct reports and occurs during the years in which women are most likely to have young children. This impacts their earning potential, as managers on average earn twice that of non-managers."

By scaling up the fraction of female workers who are managers to match that of male workers who are managers, and applying the female manager salaries to this artificially generated population of female managers, the gender wage gap between all male and female workers was cut nearly in half for employees over age 32.

How Gender-Neutral Policy Impacts Salaries

But back to Ikea, an oft-cited Swedish study on paid parental leave, and the potential impact on the U.S. gender wage gap. In its home country, Ikea employees get 68 weeks of paid parental leave. The gender-neutral policy was implemented in 1995 when the country introduced a monetized incentive for fathers to take parental leave. Since then, analysis shows that there's been a 7% increase in a mother's future earnings for each additional month of parental leave a father takes.

That's because they're less likely to resign if their partners are available and encouraged to take time off as well. Visier's research found that between the ages of 25 and 40, women experience increased child care demands that correlate with an increase in the number of women resigning. This reduces female representation in manager positions that results in a greater gender wage gap.

Sutcliffe says that Visier's research was not focused specifically on lower-wage or part-time workers, such as those who are now covered by Ikea's new U.S. policy. But she maintains that the Manager Divide is still an important consideration in gender equity, as is paid parental leave that is socially acceptable for both fathers and mothers to take.

"Whether individual women aspire to team lead, supervisor, or management roles or not, or whether they work full- or part-time," she says, "ensuring both men and women have equal opportunity to take on manager roles can reduce the overall gender-wage gap by up to 50%."

Sometimes big projects require one freelancer to cobble together a team of other freelancers. That's where problems can arise.

Randi was feeling desperate. A coaching client of mine, she'd worked hard to build a piece of her business and now worried she was about to lose it. Randi is a freelance writer and was on the verge of sealing a deal with her client, named Chase.

As part of negotiating the deal, she'd offered to bring in another freelance writer with a complementary skill set to help her on the project, thinking it would shore up her own credibility and let them both charge higher rates. But now Chase had expressed some interest in dropping her altogether and giving all the work to her associate.

This happens to freelancers and independent workers more than you might think. There are a few reasons why, and a few things you can do.

Why Work Slips Through Your Fingers

First, the bad news: As an independent doing project-based work for a company, you automatically face a number of disadvantages, where at least a few of these things are likely to hold true:

You don't automatically own the client relationship just because you were first to the party.
It's hard to establish (and get recognition for) a hierarchy within informal work groups put together by independent professionals.
Clients can and will bypass newly created reporting roles hoping to keep management costs low.
Complex projects nevertheless require more formalized reporting structures to keep the job on track.
Companies that routinely work with freelancers often do so to avoid paying management fees.

Randi had been doing piecework on Chase's site for a year in the hopes of eventually getting to revise the whole outdated structure. When Chase inquired about how SEO could drive more traffic, Randi responded that she knew Matt, the perfect SEO guy, and immediately introduced him. Her thinking was that Matt would report—through her—to Chase since it was still ultimately her project.

It worked fine for a while, but then the client began to leave Randi out of emails. Fearing that she'd miss some important details, she reminded Chase to keep her cc'd, and got this response:

Randi, I'm concerned about costs and would prefer to work directly with Matt. What's your role?

Randi wanted to respond with, "I need to manage this project to make it's done right!" But she thought better of it and called me instead.

The Liabilities Of Loosely Affiliated Freelancers

A lot of freelancers find themselves in a loose affiliations—a "distributed team" or "virtual firm," with many individual providers banded together without any official, corporate ties.

This can have some great benefits—fertile minds free to work on their own, with multiple projects, sharing referrals. And these working groups are usually mutually respectful; freelancers recommend friends of theirs and are usually careful not to step on one another's toes.

But sometimes clients' competing demands make that unavoidable. Instead of expanding the original contact's scope of work, a client will simply sideline, or even cut completely, that person's role as soon as another freelancer comes on.

Adding Structure, And Justifying Its Value

What's the best way through this dilemma? For starters, structure. Once a project is expanded beyond a single practitioner, it's essential to establish (first among yourselves and then with the client, in writing) who is responsible for what and whose job it is to keep on top of all the details.

Establishing yourself in that role will expand your own scope of work, deepen your client relationship, and seriously build your resume and LinkedIn profile. Here's how Randi explained it to Chase:

Hi Chase,
I know that you're concerned about costs and don't want to pay for unnecessary management. In my experience, the best way to control costs is by:
—Managing the flow of information from the team to you so you aren't overwhelmed with too much detail on the one hand or feel you don't know what's going on, on the other.
—Implementing changes in a way that's consistent with your new goals and your brand.
—Providing each team member with the background they need to do their jobs when they need it.
—Keeping on top of the project's progress and how it compares to the original schedule and budget, this way there aren't and ugly surprises.
I know you have your own demanding job to do and the last thing you'll want to be doing is translating details to multiple providers, let alone worrying about how those details will impact your brand going forward.
Thanks,
Randi

Notice that Randi focused on what Chase needed with her argument. She acknowledged his concerns about unnecessary expense directly, and she carefully described taking some useful steps that were all in Chase's best interest.

What happened next?

Randi is now completely updating Chase's site with a full team of professionals under her management—and getting paid for it. Chase is thrilled with the progress and recently commented, "I am so glad you agreed to take this whole thing on. I can't thank you enough for the peace of mind you've given me."

Ted Leonhardt is a designer and illustrator, and former global creative director of FITCH Worldwide. His specialized approach to negotiation helps creative workers build on their strengths and own their value in the marketplace. Follow Ted on Twitter at @tedleonhardt.

Share Some Of The Advice You Wish You'd Gotten When You Started As A Leader:

Remember why everyone on your team chose to be there
No one in any industry joined it to create just kind-of-okay stuff. It happens sometimes, but that's never the objective for anyone. Reminding yourself that the people who you're creating with are there because they think they can do something amazing gives you mental license to lean on them to help push the work to be better, more crafted, and more polished. —Brad Soulas, associate creative director, Saatchi & Saatchi New York

**Paul Schlader**, cofounder, Birch Coffee[Photo: Lillian Przedecki C. for Fast Company]

A successful pivot takes an open mind
I wish I had been talked to about pivoting and learning to not fight the changes in my business, especially early on. I had a set mind-set of what [the business] was going to look like, and things very quickly started to change and move in different directions, and I stood a bit with my feet in cement early on. For example, losing our lease for our first space. For me, [that] was like, 'This is going to be a wrap!' It took longer than it needed to for us to really find peace with [losing the lease] and start being aggressive in looking for another space to doing things differently. —Paul Schlader, cofounder, Birch Coffee

LMHQ[Photo: Shravya Kag for Fast Company]

It's all in the delivery
It's rarely [about] what you do but how you do it. My father gave me this advice going into an interview after business school where I was afraid I would get a nosebleed. I did. I also got the job. —Amy Whitaker, LMHQ

Listen carefully
It doesn't matter what other people say, but what you choose to listen to. People will always have an opinion about what you are doing (or not doing), and it's your job to decide if they are valid criticisms that may aid your growth, or unnecessary criticisms meant to break you. —Sage Adams, cofounder, Art Hoe Collective

**Michael Ventura**, founder and CEO, Sub Rosa[Photo: Travis Rix for Fast Company]

Everyone leaves eventually . . .
. . . and that's kind of a hard thing to grapple with, because you build these really close relationships and it's your thing, it's your business, and when people come inside, they become family in many ways. That said, the folder of people who have worked at Sub Rosa is much thicker than the folder of people who work at Sub Rosa, because we've been around for so long, and eventually people move on.

One of the things that I've learned to do is to try to help them do so with grace—and leave them better than they were when they came in the door. I'd like to try to make everyone who leaves an alumni, and not someone who didn't get the attention or the improvement they were hoping to get. So that's really an important aspect that I learned on the battlefield, not necessarily given to me in advance. —Michael Ventura, founder and CEO, Sub Rosa

Find a support system
[Being a leader] can feel lonely. You need to find a peer system outside the company if one does not exist within. At the end of the day, unless you're lucky enough to have a co-president, there is one leader. If you are a figurehead of a company and you're running it, the kind of camaraderie that happens with peers doesn't exist for you. [With Games for Change,] this is my first time being a sole leader of a team or organization. It feels isolated that there isn't a person to do that high-five with when you have that personal win. So having that support system outside the office [lets you] be more human in your role. —Susanna Pollack, president, Games for Change

You will want to quit
Every day there will be a reason to quit—be stronger than that reason. —Jennifer Gefsky, cofounder, Apres

What's The Hardest Thing About Being A Leader?

Finding the time to create
[The] struggle of spending three minutes a day being creative, and the rest [of the time] on stuff that isn't. —Todd Simmons, vice president, brand experience & design, IBM

Grappling with uncertainties
It will always seem like you are jumping off a cliff. There is no stability in leadership because whatever you are leading is always going to be changing. –-Sage Adams, cofounder, Art Hoe Collective

What Are Some Of The Rewards Of Being A Leader?

Watching the next generation rise
Watching young people move on in their career. We have Sam [Arpino], our head of fun [and talent and culture manager]—she was a teacher, then she was on the campaigns team, and now she's found her passion in HR. We have a woman who was the office manager here, and now she's doing our payroll because she wants to have a career in finance. Being able to take young, smart, passionate people and put them on their career path so that when they leave DoSomething, they're doing something amazing, is the best part of being a leader. —Aria Finger, CEO, DoSomething.org

Creating the conditions for success
There's nothing greater than being able to create the conditions under which other people succeed. That's what good management is: Setting the right context, and the right goals, under which people can structure and execute the work in the way that's best for them. If you're leading a company or a team, you get to build the kind of place and culture in which you would want to work. That is super rewarding. I subscribe to the notion that culture is something that needs to be intentionally shaped. Because your company is going to have a culture, and so you may as well make it a good one. —Matt Lieber, cofounder and president, Gimlet Media

Witnessing the success of others
I'm a people person, [so] it's all about empowering younger people to do their best and grow. That's probably one of the biggest rewards I have—to witness other people's success. It's not just about my ideas (although that's certainly great). For me, it's just as rewarding to watch others grow and taking pride in their work. The 'it takes a village' approach makes the day joyful. —Susanna Pollack, president, Games for Change

**Rachel Haot**, managing director, 1776[Photos: Ben Dierckx; courtesy of 1776]

What Do You Look For In Building Your Team?

Low ego, resourceful, communicators
There are a lot of things that I look for, but I would say first: someone who is willing to roll up their sleeves and who can operate in a range of scenarios effectively, whether it is making the morning coffee or meeting with a head of state. You need people who are low-ego and resourceful, [who have] sort of a 'no job too small, no job too big' perspective.

Communication skills are incredibly important, even if [the position you're hiring for] is not a soft-skills role—whether it's a developer, designer, or the other end of the spectrum. If you cannot communicate effectively, it is incredibly hard to work together as a team. So communication is critical, and I find it often goes hand in hand with having a constructive, positive, can-do attitude.

The third thing I always look for is people who have been in positions of responsibility, or where they've been promoted within former roles—and honestly, it doesn't have to have anything to do with the job that they're going for. It could be that you were a manager at a fast food company; it could be that you were training other employees at a vegetable market. If you, in your background, have shown the capacity to lead others, it gives you so much. —Rachel Haot, managing director, 1776

**Trevor O'Brien**, CTO, Deutsch[Photo: Nichole Washington for Fast Company]

Enthusiasm and curiosity
Every member of any team, no matter how senior, needs to be eager to learn and continue to learn. Especially in the technology space, we're constantly exploring new platforms, languages, and areas—enthusiasm and energy are key to excelling in that environment. If this job isn't fun, then something is wrong.

You could be the brightest, most experienced candidate in the world, but to really succeed, you need to constantly ask questions and look for answers. We should be consumers of culture and go out into the world to visit museums or see a show. Ideas and inspiration come at the most unexpected times, and from the most unexpected places. —Trevor O'Brien, CTO, Deutsch

Food52[Photo: Shravya Kag for Fast Company]

People who are smarter than we are
We are firm believers in hiring people who are smarter than we are in all different aspects of the business. We learn from people on our team every day. That's really important to drive things forward. —Merrill Stubbs, cofounder, Food52

**Emily Weiss**, CEO and founder, Glossier[Photos: Michelle S. Palafox for Fast Company]

People with something to prove
We have a really great blend of brains at [Glossier], who are all united by the shared desire to build the company into something amazing. Everyone's motivations are a little bit different, and that's fine. I love someone with something to prove. I don't even need to know—if you have something to prove to your old boss, or your dad, or your third grade teacher, or yourself. It doesn't matter. You need that hustle and that fire, and I don't care where it comes from. –Emily Weiss, CEO and founder, Glossier

A healthy mix of humility and grit
[Beyond] a portfolio that demonstrates solid design skills and craft, we're looking for a healthy mix of systems thinking, humility, and grit. Lone genius designers are so 20th century. If you lack the patience or humility to listen to others and cocreate, you probably wouldn't like it here. [And] part of design's role in business and engineering situations is to be the relentless optimist. We look for people who are likely to say: "Those last 15 ideas didn't work? Well what if we tried this other thing . . . " —Joni Saylor, program director, IBM Design Practices

An internal locus of control
There are two types of people: people who have an internal locus of control, and people who have an external locus of control. Internal means you take responsibility, and you believe that you can shape the outcome of a project and the things that go on around you—that you have an effect, you take responsibility and ownership. External means you believe you are shaped and buffeted by outside forces. One way to find out is to ask someone about a time when they were working on something with a team and they failed. Do they talk about external forces, or do they talk about themselves and what they could have done differently?

Empathy is also a foundational idea at Gimlet in terms of why we do what we do and why we make the kinds of shows that we make, but also foundational in how we work together as a team. Does someone have the ability to put themselves in the shoes of another person they're working with? —Matt Lieber, cofounder and president, Gimlet Media

*[Photo: Adriana C. Sanchez for Fast Company]*

Good collaborators
Of course you can build a culture from the inside, but it's really what you bring in that perhaps sometimes has the biggest impact. We put our candidates through a lot. They meet a whole range of people from different disciplines and levels, so we get a good understanding of the cultural values of the person, and if they align with ours. I often also work through a live problem with candidates in a room. It's a great way to hear from them outside of their prepared answers, and it also gives us a hint of their work style. —Tim Jones, director of strategy, 72andSunny NY

What Are Three Questions You Like To Ask Potential Hires?

Kay Madati, EVP and chief digital officer, BET Networks:

We work at the intersection of technology, entertainment, and innovative consumer experiences—what excites you most about this work?
What's the most interesting or innovative thing going on in our industry? Why?
How you have approached leading, influencing, collaborating, and partnership on a work accomplishment (or failure), and what have you learned from the challenge?

Amy Whitaker, author, Art Thinking:

What is the most you've ever worried, early on, that a project you were working on would fail? Why, and what happened?
If money were no object and you could do anything, but it had to make a contribution of some kind, what would you do?
One of the best questions to ask in an interview is a follow-up question. You can often learn more about a person by getting to the bottom of one thing than skating across the surface of many.

Molly Logan, cofounder, School of Doodle:
We mainly hire girls in their teens and early twenties, so resumes are a bit pointless. But that means there's no hiding behind a list of degrees or embellished job descriptions. I am hiring based on their potential rather than their reality. Therefore, I ask the following:

Who inspires you? (This tells me what sort of person they hope to become.)
What is one thing you absolutely suck at doing? Like, something you are epically bad at. (This tells me how comfortable they are with failing, if they have a sense of humor about it, and where they perceive weakness.)
What do you think about hairless cats? (This tells me how easily they are thrown off. Most are trying to figure out the "correct" answer. The best response I've gotten? "Why, is there one around here?")

Jennifer Gefsky, cofounder, Apres:

Tell me about your greatest strength and your greatest weakness as an employee.
Why are you passionate about [what we're doing]—changing the workforce for women?
Why do you believe gender diversity is a problem, and how do you think we can create change?

Scott Davis, chief growth officer, Prospect:

How would you describe your life's purpose? (Thinking about the answer helps the recruits make the corollary to what we ask our clients, but the answers are also so revealing and help us get underneath the hood.)
Where do you seek inspiration? (I like to hear three or four top-of-mind answers that hit on different sources of inspiration.)
I often ask recruits what they believe their path to partner looks like. This is a little more appropriate with those at an MBA level, but when I interview people, I am looking at them in a long-term way: as a potential executive, shareholder, partner . . . maybe even running the firm. I want to hire leaders. So I fast-forward them and ask them to think about what it might feel like to be a leader at our company.

Could an algorithm create the perfect family photo album? Maybe someday—but this screenless camera and accompanying service need work.

From the second you meet Relonch cofounders Yuri Motin and Sergey Korzhenevich, you can tell they're excited about photography. Moments after I stepped into the two's new store in Palo Alto, they were excitedly showing me photos they had taken and sharing books loaded with aspirational images, one full of candid shots of Barack Obama.

"We believe that the most important parts of our life are between special occasions," says Korzhenevich. He found that the impromptu photos of Obama, for instance, were far more powerful than those taken at events where the subjects were posed.

It's that dream that brought them to the launch of their new camera, the Relonch 291, which they want you to take with you everywhere to snap the moments that make up your own life. Described by its creators as "a camera as a service," the device has the recognizable shape of a chunky point-and-shoot digital camera and packs a large APS-C image sensor of the sort used by serious cameras with removable lenses, such as DSLRs. But the Relonch camera has no controls, no zoom capability, no memory card slot, and no display to review your finished shots. The only thing you can do with it is press the shutter button and snap a picture. You can't even connect the camera to your computer to download pictures once you're done.

**Relonch 291**[Photo: courtesy of Relonch]

While many might consider those facts to be severe limitations, Motin and Korzhenevich believe that they're benefits. Instead of storing pictures to be downloaded later, their camera uses a 4G radio to instantly transfer them to the cloud. Once they're there, an AI program nicknamed Alfred will edit the 20-megapixel photos before sending them back you via the company's app the next day.

That's right: You need to wait until the next morning before you'll be able to see any of the pictures you take. The idea is that what you get back are the best of the best of the photos you took, all with a look that makes them seem more like they were shot by a professional than by an amateur with a point-and-shoot camera.

Relonch debuted back at the Photokina trade show in 2014, with a case for the iPhone 5 that added a larger image sensor and lens to the phone. The company then realized that the issue it was trying to solve was both a hardware and software one, so it scrapped the project. Last year, it launched an app by the same name that used stencils to help you frame the perfect shot. That too has been scrapped in order to make way for the new camera.

The duo, along with their cofounder Nikolay Babich, hope you'll ditch your traditional DSLR for the service. The camera itself is free for users, who pay a monthly fee of $99 for the camera's editing capabilities. They've set up a store in Palo Alto—and plan to open one soon in New York—to show off the camera to prospective buyers and let them take it on a test-drive for three days. The hope is that spending time behind the lens will encourage shutterbugs to sign up as paying customers.

So is it worth it? I took one of the cameras for a spin for a week to see. While the prospect of having my own personal photo editor was intriguing—and the AI service shared some images that looked terrific—the experience was rougher than I expected in multiple ways.

Flashback To Film

While I was initially apprehensive about having to wait until the next day to see photos I took with the camera, I warmed to the concept fairly quickly. In a world where we're used to getting everything now, the idea of taking a photo and just continuing on about my business has its appeal.

My boyfriend and I took the camera along with us to his company's holiday party and casually snapped shots along the way. Whereas I might normally have spent time afterwards crafting the perfect Instagram or Facebook caption for an image, I instead just took a picture and kept going. The experience took me back to the days of film cameras, where I would snap pictures and hope they turned out later. It was also a departure from my current practice of taking a handful of similar shots in order to get the perfect framing and lighting.

Surprisingly, I actually enjoyed not being able to see or do anything with my photos right after I took them. When I got home there was no need to download anything or clear off my memory card, I just had to wait for the images to magically show up.

Based on my conversation with Motin and Korzhenevich, I had anticipated receiving one of each series of photos I took, similar to how the burst mode on a garden-variety camera might select one of the best options. Instead, the camera sent me back just four photos from the entire evening. The AI photo editor had determined all the rest weren't worth sending back.

The party venue was quite dark, so admittedly some of my snapshots might have been a bit too dark to come out well. But it was still exceptionally disappointing to carry around the device all night long and then have some of my photos lost forever. With a conventional camera, I could have edited a bad shot after the fact. But with no way to review images on the Relonch, there was no way to know which photos—if any—needed help.

There's also no way to know why the Relonch service doesn't return a photo. I received a great photo of my boyfriend and I from the party, but another one we took with a friend moments later, seated in the same chairs, didn't make the cut. It's hard for me to believe that the lighting was amazing for the one picture, but so bad the second shot was unusable. The algorithm had essentially edited a friend out of our evening.

Relonch told me via email later that it's working on improving its technology, so you always get the best pictures and you always get one from each series. But the company added "We believe that you won't need every photo from each sequence you take. Think of how many unused and unedited photos you have on your mobile device, memory cards, and computer. There are hundreds of thousands for you to go through." Fair enough. But what about those images you do want?

The Case Of The Missing Photos

Missing photos was unfortunately a theme for my week with the camera. A group of images from a lunch included a few great portraits and a random picture of my sunglasses on the table, but left out the picture of our meal we spent a good deal of time framing perfectly.

The biggest disappointment was a trip a friend and I made through Joshua Tree National Park. We pulled over numerous times throughout the drive, and I meticulously snapped dozens of pictures with Relonch's camera. The next morning, my dreams of a Joshua Tree-themed photo collage on my wall were dashed when I got just four images back.

Russian roulette with casual party photos might be tolerable, but when it comes to vacation pictures, it's unnerving to think that you might not get the pictures back that you take along the way. Luckily, I had opted to take a number of shots with my smartphone on that drive as well.

Throughout my week with the camera, I also ran into issues with just snapping pictures. On a morning walk with my dog, for instance, I could see the photo I was trying to take through the viewfinder, but when I pressed down on the shutter button, nothing happened. Relonch said this was due to a low battery, which certainly may have been the case; however, most other cameras will let you keep snapping until the battery is fully kaput. (With its built-in 4G radio, the Relonch must be charged each night, not casually stowed away like another camera.)

The viewfinder was also problematic. On numerous occasions, both at the dark holiday party and in the bright desert of Joshua Tree, it just stopped working. While the shutter seemed to snap—unlike when the battery was low—I was unable to see what I was taking a picture of. Relonch says that my experience isn't something they've seen with beta testers thus far.

Hardware defects aside, in general, darker situations were a no-go for the device. The camera refused to take photos of friends sitting around a campfire—admittedly a low-light situation, but one that my Samsung Galaxy S7 had no issue with. When a smartphone can outperform a camera with a beefy sensor, carrying a $99/month fee, something is amiss.

Truth be told, at this point the Relonch 291 is more problem than solution. Some of the biggest issues with the camera lie in its AI, which is still a work in progress. Over time, that technology could get smarter. Will it ever be good enough that I want to tote around this camera everywhere I go? My guess is no. While I loved the pictures Relonch's service decided to send back to me, I wouldn't pay $99 a month for that privilege. After just a few days with the device, I had already started to default back to my trusty, much more portable smartphone.

With its AI-infused underpinnings, Relonch could well turn out to be a preview of what the future has in store when it comes to photography. Sadly, that future isn't quite here yet.

A mixture of technical innovation and social incentives could make online comments readable—and even engaging.

For years, it's been a standard piece of advice to anyone reading the news online: "Don't read the comments."

It's no secret that user-submitted comments on news websites are often angry, racist, misogynistic, or simply ill-informed. That's contributed to media organizations from NPR and Reuters to Popular Science and legal news site Above the Law deciding in recent years to eliminate comment sections altogether. Other sites, such as the New York Times, have taken to heavily moderating what readers post and limiting when they can do so.

But many media companies remain committed to providing forums where their readers can pose questions, contribute their wisdom, and even civilly debate with one another. In part, many in the industry see it as important to offer a place where people can discuss current events outside "the friends and family echo chamber" of social media, says Aja Bogdanoff, cofounder and CEO of Portland comment tech startup Civil.

Denying them the opportunity to comment might drive them to other venues where "the conversation" is already taking place—social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, local networks like Nextdoor, or forums like Reddit. While some media groups have reported success with closing their comment sections and connecting with readers through social media, that trend also risks reducing reader engagement with the news outlets themselves, and disperses potentially valuable discussion about an article across the web, where it's harder to find.

More pragmatically, many in the industry have found frequent commenters are often also among sites' most dedicated readers, spending more time reading articles and looking at ads, and among those more likely to purchase paid subscriptions, says Greg Barber, director of digital news projects at the Washington Post.

"By othering this group—by saying these people who come and speak in the comment spaces, they're something else and they're undesirable—that's actually really dangerous for news organizations," says Barber, who is also head of strategy and partnerships at The Coral Project, a collaborative effort of the Post, the New York Times, and Mozilla to improve community engagement on news sites. "They are, in fact, your most loyal readers—these are the people who are paying the bills."

Civil and The Coral Project are among a group of startups, established media companies, and academic projects working to develop ways for news sites to engage active readers. Many are looking to move beyond the troll-friendly environs of a traditional comment box, which can often incentivize attention-seeking commenters to take extreme positions and harass other users.

"The comment's just a tool—it's like walking around your house and trying to take on all your household chores with just a broom," Barber says. "What we've been trying to do as an industry is, we've been tacking this one feature onto every article, and then we're shocked when it doesn't work every time."

Organizations are experimenting with a variety of tools, from streamlined human moderation to automated filtering that can improve the traditional comment experience, as well as looking at other tools like more targeted questionnaires and quizzes that can let readers interact and express themselves without providing an avenue for harassment.

"I think this is a bit of a million-dollar question right now: How can we create a space where members of the public have the opportunity to talk to each other, and it doesn't turn into a terrible cesspool?" asks Talia Stroud, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the Engaging News Project at the university's Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life.

That project offers an embeddable quiz widget that it has found encourages readers to spend more time on articles without the partisan ballot box stuffing and scientifically dubious results of traditional online opinion polls. The quizzes—asking readers to do things like recall numbers presented in articles—can also help readers remember concrete figures better than simply reading a written piece, the project has found. (You can try one at the bottom of this article.)

The Coral Project also offers an embeddable polling tool called Ask that enables publishers to ask readers specific questions. It gathers information they can use for additional reporting and to produce galleries out of interesting responses that can be displayed onsite.

"Using a form where the responses aren't posted immediately creates a different tone," says Barber.

Readers tend to respond a bit more deliberately, he says, than when their posts are immediately dropped onto an existing thread. The project is also working on a sophisticated, highly configurable tool for traditional comments called Talk, slated for a beta release early next year, Barber says.

About nine months ago, Civil released a next-generation comment tool called Civil Comments that is now used by about 50 sites, including the Globe and Mail, among Canada's most widely read newspapers. Civil Comments requires readers to review others' comments before they can submit their own, specifying whether a particular comment is subjectively good and whether it's "civil."

On the back end of the system, the company's algorithms adjust for biased moderation. Civil Comments has reduced flagging of published comments as abusive by 90% to 95% on sites where it's deployed, substantially reducing the requirements for moderators employed by the sites, even as the number of comments submitted has often doubled or tripled, Bogdanoff says.

"In general, what we're seeing is, you get a wider range of voices," she says. "The old approach to commenting on news sites really prevented anybody [from participating] who didn't just want to fight with people all day."

Other organizations are taking a more automated approach to boosting civility. Toronto startup Viafoura provides what it calls an "audience development platform" that monitors user email addresses, avatars, and IP addresses to weed out aggressive spammers and trolls, says Allison Munro, the company's head of marketing and business development. Customers include the Los Angeles Times, TMZ, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp (CBC).

After commenters are vetted, individual comments are filtered by smart algorithms that use a mix of configurable rules and machine learning to avoid publishing unwanted material.

"We'll start from the beginning where we have a basic set of rules, and we can tune those to be either very intense, as in, don't allow anything in that looks like a swear word or looks like spam, or we can adjust the levels," says Munro. "We had one customer in Texas that had 'redneck' as a positive word. In New York, we had another customer that saw that as a personal attack."

For the CBC, Viafoura appeared to lead to users commenting more and spending more time engaging with the site—and a decrease in the number of comments flagged as inappropriate, Munro said in a November blog post.

Disqus, the nine-year-old San Francisco company that says it serves more than 1.8 million comments every day across 750,000 websites, also introduced improved features to fight spam, facilitate moderation, and block trolls this year.

"We've been hearing from Disqus users that they want better blocking controls, and I'm happy that the feature is finally here," Disqus CEO Daniel Ha said in a June statement. "We hope that this makes it easier for people to dive into good discussions, plus we also know that it'll really help out publishers by reducing how much moderating they have to do."

Ultimately, quality comments will likely come as a combination of technology and human effort, says Nicholas Diakopoulos, an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park.

"Commenting platforms are a classic example of a sociotechnical system: They rely not only on technology, but also people like commenters, editors, and moderators operating under a set of norms and policies that influence behavior," he wrote in an email.

Better-quality comments can also benefit media organizations when news breaks: In those moments, thoughtful reader discussion can itself go viral, encouraging yet more discussion (and more traffic), as happened for some British publications after this year's Brexit vote, says the Washington Post's Barber. And they can reduce situations where user-submitted sections of a publication's site don't meet the typical standards of the organization, he says.

"They're pixels on a page, just like all the other pixels on a page that we manage very carefully," Barber says. "By creating these spaces and then ignoring them, we're not mowing the yard and then being angry when the grass grows in a way we didn't expect."

Take a quick quiz we built using the Engaging News Project's quiz tool:

I'm a psychiatrist working with severely mentally ill people incarcerated in jails. Technologists, here's how you can help.

The U.S. correctional system is facing a mental health crisis. Among its prisons and jails, it houses 10 times more people with mental illnesses than all of the country's mental health hospitals combined. The rate of serious mental illnesses in the jail population is between 3 to 6 times higher than the normal population.

Statistics like these are hard to fathom out of context, but I see these challenges firsthand at my clinical practice. For about a week a month I work at a maximum security jail in the Bay Area, where I treat inmates with severe mental illness. I spend the rest of time as a director of digital health at Brain Power, a mental-health focused technology startup. These worlds might seem far apart, but I've often thought about how we can utilize cutting-edge innovations in technology to help some of our most disenfranchised communities, especially those wrapped up in the judicial system.

My major takeaway thus far is that our correctional system has become our mental health system. And our correctional mental health care is for many people their only source of care. I see huge opportunities for technology to help address some key issues in correctional institutions, and more specifically jail mental health. But there are three challenges that are really important to understand before we swoop in with a trendy new telemedicine app or wearable.

The Challenges We Face

Jail administrators and medical personal have their work cut out for them. While delivering mental health and medical care is normally no mean feat, the added restrictions and protocol associated with safety and security within a correctional facility add several layers of complexity. The movement of inmates and personnel is closely regulated (and occasionally halted in an event of a security issue), meaning that running a clinic inside a facility can be much more time-consuming. You must also be careful in what you physically hand to inmates, even pieces of paper can be made into deadly weapons. Lastly, the gang culture in facilities causes some inmates to decline psychiatric help for fear of being judged to be "weak" and risk being ostracized from their gang.

Secondly, when we consider a piece of technology that helps us assess a person's behavior in real time, or predict that person's behavior (including risk of suicide or violence), we must clearly outline to whom that information is available, how it will be used, and whether the incarcerated person needs to consent to that technology being used. Unless court-ordered, people have the right to decline routine medical or psychiatric treatment.

Finally, we need to think bigger about the purpose of our correctional system. Is it aimed at rehabilitating, punishing, or a combination of the two? I think about this when considering the role of technologies such as virtual reality, which could be used for inmates to temporarily escape the harsh physical and sensory environments of the jail or prison. But is that what we're trying to achieve?

Technologies For Data-Gathering

It's a no-brainer, but an area ripe for innovation is the design of communication systems to facilitate the transfer of health information between health care providers inside and outside of the jail. But this is much easier said than done. Many electronic health care record systems are not cross-compatible, and even fewer are specifically designed for use in the correctional environment. Oftentimes fax machines and phone calls are being used to attempt to confirm medication use, a tricky area given that some psychiatric medications are also commonly abused due to their addictive qualities. In some instances, despite considerable detective work, I have found it to be near impossible to piece together a person's recent use of mental or medical services, especially when they themselves cannot remember their medications, physicians, or diagnoses.

As a result, mental health workers like myself who see patients newly incarcerated in a jail may also have very limited information on a patient's behavior, mental health history, and prior suicidal risk factors. The suicide rate in jails is three times greater than our prisons. From a technology standpoint, a number of recent papers have highlighted the ability to accurately identify people at high risk of a suicide attempt by using machine-learning approaches on big data sets. One could conceive that such an approach would be very helpful to supporting the proactive work of correctional mental health services, especially if we could access all this information in one place.

Smartphones are also not an immediately obvious answer. I've found that the "digital divide" between the technology use inside and outside of jail has never been greater. The reduced access to information is an additional source of uncertainty for those who I work with, especially those whose mental health challenges reduce their ability to remember, understand, and navigate the judicial and legal processes that they are involved in. Frequently, patients ask me about the judicial process, their court dates, or if I can help them in obtaining housing or social security assistance. In many situations, the questions are beyond the scope of my medical/psychiatric expertise. I wonder whether a simple piece of technology could be made accessible to inmates to enable them to gather basic information about their legal situation. Is there a role for conversational Siri-like agents, to help address some of the inmates' basic questions about the jail/correctional process and facilities?

Obviously there are a range of safety and security implications that need to be carefully and thoroughly evaluated. One concern I have is that some patients might have a toxic digital environment that gravitates them toward worsening mental health, drug and alcohol use, and repeat involvement with the judicial system.

There could also be an opportunity to use computer vision to analyze audio and video from an incarcerated patient, as well as sensors, in a manner that will aid in the early identification of a potential mental health crisis. Parameters such as physical activity, sleep, and speech and acoustic information could help generate a personal digital mental state assessment for patients. But we have to also ensure such that such technologies are developed in the context of medical/psychiatric care, the collected data are appropriately protected, and incarcerated patients consent to their use.

Getting Silicon Valley On Board

One might also hope that neuroscience-based mental health research would help address some of the challenges we see in the correctional system. In particular, we have seen a range of startling, and sometimes overhyped, reports of the advances in our understanding of mental health and the human brain. Unfortunately, much of this research has focused on recruiting patients with clear-cut symptoms, or those who neatly fit into single categorical diagnoses. Most people in correctional settings who have had a mental illness would seldom meet the eligibility criteria to get into many of these research studies, being excluded because of their multiple diagnoses, unstable housing, legal or drug issues, or an inability to follow up.

As such, many research findings on carefully screened research subjects may simply not be applicable to the needs and challenges that face real-world people with multiple serious mental illnesses, drug addiction, unstable housing and finances, as well as poorly treated medical issues. The same could be said of the rapidly rising number of mental health or wellness startups, which focus on developing products for the general population, leaving niche groups like prison populations unaccounted for.

I fear that technological innovation in our correctional system is being hampered by a lack of interest, understanding, and quite frankly a discomfort in acknowledging the immense social, cultural, and economic chasm that exists in the Bay Area between the haves and have nots. Unfortunately, what happens in the technology hub of Silicon Valley, or in this case, doesn't happen, will be felt nationwide.

Arshya Vahabzadeh M.D. is a subspecialist-trained psychiatrist, and is the director of Digital Health at neurotechnology company Brain Power. He holds faculty positions at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and is an investigator on privately and federally funded research into experimental technologies for mental health and brain conditions. For those who want to get involved, contact him at arshya@brain-power.com or avahabzadeh@mgh.harvard.edu

Women are redefining the American spirits industry by founding artisanal distilleries that are anything but stodgy old boys' clubs.

On a recent Thursday evening in Hollywood, a crowd of painters, dancers, and entrepreneurs are gathered on a rooftop bar. Some guests wear flamboyant homemade costumes, others sport asymmetrical haircuts or mod hats. Members of the predominantly female crowd stand in line for an "altar bar"—a wooden plank adorned with cocktails, candles, and large crystals—while performance artists dance in the background. It's as if Warhol's Factory opened its doors to the Witches of Eastwick.

In truth, the individuals assembled here tonight are celebrating GEM&BOLT, a craft mezcal brand whose founders happen to be women.

For years, if you mentioned the spirits industry, the image that came to mind probably involved some men in suits talking to other men in suits in a roomful of men in suits. But in the flourishing craft distillery movement, that old boys image is being redefined as a more sophisticated, nuanced, and yes, female-friendly phenomenon. While men still overwhelmingly get credit for revitalizing the craft beer industry in the past decade, many women are now staking a claim in craft spirits, launching companies with appealing origin stories that reflect a certain type of lifestyle, social grouping, or cultural leaning. They are looking to leave their stamp on a business that has long been considered the domain of the Don Drapers of the world.

Over the past five years, the craft spirits market has grown at a remarkable rate: It reached $2.4 billion in retail sales in 2015, an annual growth of 27% in volume and 27% in value from 2010, according to consumer research group IWSR. Exports of these artisanal spirits reached 523,000 cases last year, adding more than 10% of additional volume to U.S. craft distiller total sales. At present, there are 1,300 craft spirits distilleries in the U.S., nearly triple the count from 10 years ago. The number of craft distillers is projected to surpass 2,800 by 2020.

One reason for the growth is due to the gradual loosening of regulations on spirits, which are typically bound by much stricter laws regarding sales to consumers than beer and wine. But now states like New York are embracing smaller distillers. "There are a ton of startups and new companies being founded every day," says Alexandra Sklansky, director of communications for the American Craft Spirits Association. "There are tons of leading women within our industry, and I don't think they're getting attention because they're women," she continues. "I think they get attention because they make good products or have unique points of views."

One of them is Maggie Campbell, head distiller of Privateer Rum in Massachusetts. Another is Renee Bemis, co-owner of Driftless Glen in Wisconsin. There's also Courtney McKee, owner of Headframe Spirits, and dozens more enterprising women.

Many of the new distilleries add an artistic touch to spirits through ingredients, packaging, and branding. Like the craft beer movement, these spirits companies aim to distinguish themselves from their more established competitors and entice what Sklansky refers to as the "Food Generation": Consumers who want to know where their food and drink comes from, what's in them, and why.

"Just like the slow food movement, there is a desire to eat locally, to gravitate toward local and interesting ingredients, to support your community," she says. "And that's really extending to the crafts distillery industry as well."

The "cocktail renaissance" that emerged over the last decade has also contributed to a stronger interest in craft distilleries. It's what gave us revered bars such as New York's Milk & Honey, Death & Co, and Pegu Club. As Kevin Gray, editor of Cocktail Enthusiast, explains, "Bartenders played a really big role in popularizing [craft spirits] by putting it on their menus. They helped to bring it out of their shadows." Mezcals, bourbons, and craft whiskeys are now found in bars in pretty much any city in the world.

"Consumers are no longer just going to the bar and ordering rum and coke or vodka soda," says Bridget Firtle, owner of The Noble Experiment distillery in Brooklyn. "They're ordering off of menus that have been curated by people who are really interested in making cocktails. It's given us a platform to get exposure."

Firtle was a hedge fund analyst when she decided to quit Wall Street in 2012 to establish her own distillery. While whiskey and bourbon were hot commodities, Firtle noticed a lack of production for her favorite alcohol, rum. So she set out to produce a "purist, farm-to-table" rum: a light variety without added sugar and artificial or barrel flavoring. It's made with just three ingredients: filtered New York City tap water, non-GMO Florida sugarcane molasses, and a proprietary yeast strain.

**Bridget Firtle**, founder of The Noble Experiment distillery in Brooklyn.Photo: Carolyn Fong/The Noble Experiment

Firtle notes that the internet has brought exposure to distillers like herself who can promote their brand to savvy customers. "Consumers are becoming more sophisticated with their palates and with their food and beverage choices," she says. "Each year, we're getting bigger and stronger… And there seems to be a lot of women who are influential in this space."

The American Craft Spirits Association's Sklansky believes that smaller spirits makers can cultivate brand evangelism that bigger companies can't. The appeal of a niche-market product, plus the fact that customers can visit their local distillery, can foster a certain allegiance that would be harder for, say, Johnny Walker to create.

"There's a sense of creativity and innovation that exists on the craft distillers level that doesn't exist with the major conglomerates and big players," Sklansky says. Because craft distilleries don't need to scale or achieve the same financial bottom lines that many of the big players do, they're able to take more risks. To stand out, they have to offer something distinct and creative—playing with a specific type of agave, for instance.

GEM&BOLT's mezcal is infused with damiana, a traditional Mexican herb with mythological and medicinal properties. While it's produced by a master distiller in Oaxaca, Mexico, it's packaged and distributed in New Jersey and Austin by founders and artist-alchemist duo AdrianAdrina and Elliott Coon. Jody Levy, cofounder of the beverage company WTRMLN WTR, is a partner, and Lisa Derman, who was an exec at Stoli Group USA, is CEO.

GEM&BOLT co-founder **AdrinAdrina**.[Photo: Elliot Coon/GEM&BOLT]

The founders chose mezcal, a smoky member of the tequila family, because it's considered an artisanal spirit, something that would appeal to their health-conscious community of creative types. They wanted to develop a clean, botanical alternative to traditional spirits that could be sold commercially. "The way that mezcal is made—the craft really...resonated with the artists," AdrinAdrina says. (Also helpful for their sales forecasting: U.S. tequila volume has grown 106% since 2002, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States.)

AdrinAdrina and Coon officially founded the company in 2012, and began throwing speakeasies in Oakland and Oaxaca, marketing themselves as an indie brand with a celebratory alternative vibe. Their GEM&BOLT bottles, emblazoned with a modern graphic logo of a diamond and lightning bolt, conveyed their fresh take on an old industry. Business had been strong, but really started booming in June. Over three months, the number of locations that sell the product went from zero to more than 40 in Austin, and to nearly 30 accounts in L.A.

Levy attributes GEM&BOLT's success to what she calls "this huge body of consumers that really want to support brands that have a story, that are giving back, and that have a mission." She says that millennials in particular appreciate the sense of community the brand espouses: They can follow the founders on Instagram, visit the distillery, and get to know the staff at parties. And they would appear to make up a solid customer base: A new study by BMJ reveals that millennial women drink just as much as their male counterparts, closing a two-to-one gap from a century ago. They're breaking stereotypes too: Women now account for 37% of American whiskey customers, according to trend forecasting firm Future Laboratory.

Lightning in a bottle: GEM&BOLT bottles were designed by the company's cofounders.[Photo: Elliot Coon/GEM&BOLT]

AdrinAdrina adds that GEM&BOLT aims to attract people who drink their mezcal the way an oenophile savors a glass of pinot noir. These are not customers who are looking to get black-out drunk. "We're into celebrating and making it an elevated experience," she says.

This past fall, the company partnered with outlets like Soho House Malibu and Neuehouse Los Angeles to service a community of like-minded individuals: creative entrepreneurs. Though they the founders say they did not set out to create a woman-led company, it certainly adds another marketing-friendly thread to their brand's narrative.

For Derman, who has worked in the alcohol beverage industry for 20 years and had almost always reported to male CEOs, the chance to join GEM&BOLT as CEO offered a thrilling change. "It is a unique opportunity in this industry, and I don't know that you see it that often these days," she says.

The GEM&BOLT team is optimistic that the once male-dominated spirits landscape will continue to change for the better. "We haven't felt any barriers," AdrinAdrina says. "The world is ready for women to step into these worlds now."

Melissa Katrincic agrees. She's the founder and CEO of Durham Distillery, which, based in North Carolina, puts a modern-chemistry spin on gin. Cucumbers and honeysuckle flowers are individually vacuum-distilled at room temperature and blended into the gin. The company was just named No. 2 U.S. craft gin distillery by USA Today. (St. Augustine Distillery, housed in what is known as "Florida's oldest ice plant" was No. 1.)

Durham Distillery president and CEO **Melissa Katrincic**.[Photo: Felicia Perry-Trujillo]

Katrincic founded her distillery in 2013 after having worked in the pharmaceutical industry. And other than the occasional condescending reaction from distributors surprised to be dealing with a woman, she says the experience has been positive.

"There have been only handful of obstacles that I felt were because I was a woman pursuing distilling," she says. "I haven't run into anything that was telling me that I made the incorrect choice."

In fact, Katrincic argues that craft spirits is more welcoming to women as an industry than craft beer, if only because there are fewer entrenched clichés to battle. "I don't feel like there's a stereotype associated yet with who the [craft spirits] distiller has to be, whereas when you think about craft beer … I have that vision of who that is," she says, referring to the familiar archetype of a hipster bearded male thirty-something who wears a lot of plaid and most certainly lives in Brooklyn.

What she hopes is that companies like hers will continue to offer tangible proof that women enjoy hard alcohol just as much as men. "It's opening people's eyes," she says. "I have not gotten anyone that comes in for a tour and is surprised that I'm a female distiller. If anything, we get a lot of women who say, 'This is awesome. I'm so thankful to have a woman who just went for it.'

"And then they say, 'I love gin.'"

Rock Health just released its annual report on how consumers are adopting such tools.

Rock Health, a venture fund and research firm dedicated to digital health, has just released its annual survey filled with insights about how consumers are using these new technologies. Previous Rock Health reports have overturned some widely— held assumptions about the digital health ecosystem, such as the notion that only millennials are active users or confirmed others, including the lack of venture-backed female CEOs in digital health.

This year, the survey of more than 4,000 consumers across the United States found that wearable adoption has continued to grow, despite Fitbit's cratering stock performance. It also found that many Americans are willing to participate in medical research by donating their data, despite some nagging privacy concerns. "The underlying motivator isn't money," says Ashlee Adams, vice president of partnership and strategy at Rock Health. "People are willing to share their information to get better care."

Rock Health Consumer Report 2016 Wearables by age

Digital Health Adoption

Consumers are adopting digital health tools at a steadily rising rate, the survey found. Only 12% of Americans haven't used any digital health tools, down from 20% in 2015.

Moreover, Rock Health categorized 56% of its respondents as "active digital health adopters," meaning they've played with three or more categories of digital health tools, such as telemedicine services or wearables. That's up from 19% in 2015. "The technology with one of the biggest jumps (in 2016) is telemedicine, and that probably dovetails with more providers offering it and employers paying for it," explains Adams. Another factor: Health systems have made big investments in virtual visits in the past few years. Kaiser recently reported that more than 50% of its doctor-patients interactions are taking place online. The major use cases for telemedicine involving triaging, meaning determining whether a patient needs to come in to see their doctor or not, as well as dealing with common medical needs. It's also particularly valuable for those in rural areas who lack access to high-quality and affordable medical care.

Online reviews and information continue to be the largest segments for digital adoption, but this year experienced little growth. One explanation is that sites like Wikipedia and WebMD still dominate the category (although, newer entrants like Amino Health and HealthTap are hoping to change that). Among those who turn to the internet for medical information, more than half went to their doctor with a diagnosis in mind and/or suggested a treatment path, which suggests that patients are more empowered than ever before.

About a quarter of respondents (24%) in the survey already own a wearable. Three-quarters bought one on their own, with the rest coming from employers or gifts from friends (the gift segment is down from 2015). Across the United States, many large employers such as Target, IBM, Time Warner, and Bank of America now offer free or discounted wearable devices as part of their corporate wellness programs.

Rock Health Consumer Report 2016 Adoption rates

Not Just The "Worried Well"

The philosophy that it's only the worried well who use wearable devices to track their health is increasingly flawed. About 8% of those who own one of these products classify themselves as unhealthy, the survey found. Overall, about a quarter of those who have been diagnosed with more than one chronic disease own a wearable.

"They (those who put themselves in the unhealthy category) are adopting digital health at a faster rate or are at least more engaged than you might expect," says Adams.

For now, Adams says that the majority of those who classified themselves as unhealthy are buying devices for general wellness, such as the Fitbit or Apple Watch, rather than a device that is specifically geared to a chronic condition. Getting better sleep and losing weight were top priorities for the least healthy survey respondents, as opposed to staying active. Overall, the most popular metrics to track for those who use wearable devices are weight (8%) and activity levels (12%), followed by sleep and food at 6% apiece.

Data-Sharing

Companies like 23andMe and PatientsLikeMe already offer up people's health information for the purposes of medical research with their consent. The survey suggests that there may be further opportunities to share patient-generated data.

More people responded that their primary motivator for sharing health data would be to bolster medical research (62%) rather than a financial reward (42%). Some bio-ethicists believe that they should be able to do both. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those in poor health are more willing to share their health history with all stakeholders than those in good health.

One impediment to the growth of opportunities in this space is trust. While 84% of those aged 55 and older responded that they trusted their physician to keep their health data secure, only 19% said they would trust a technology company to do so.

How did you use digital health tools in 2016? Let me know @chrissyfarr on Twitter

An overloaded calendar can make December feel like the least productive time of year. But with some small shifts, it doesn't have to be.

It may be the most wonderful time of the year, but it's also the busiest. Chances are your social obligations are picking up as well as your off-hours tasks. How do you get everything done without sacrificing productivity at work?

It might not feel like it, but it's possible to meet goals, beat deadlines, and keep your clients happy during the holiday season, says productivity consultant Peggy Duncan. It just takes time and task management. Here are six ideas for being productive at work during the holiday season:

1. Infuse Holiday Spirit Into Your Work

Set a few goals that you want to achieve by the end of the year, then break them down into 25 specific tasks, suggests Lisa Zaslow, founder of Gotham Organizers, a New York-based professional organizing consultant. "Use an advent calendar to reward yourself when you hit your milestones," she says.

Also, take a tip from Santa and make lists, checking them twice, Zaslow says. For example, plan your holiday preparations so you can be fully present and productive while you're working. "If you're constantly Googling for gift ideas while trying to finish your year-end report, you won't be effective at either task," she says.

2. Set Intentions

Decide ahead of time the experience you wish to have during the holiday season, says Peter Bregman, author of Four Seconds: All the Time You Need to Replace Counter-Productive Habits with Ones That Really Work.

"Do you want undistracted time with the family? Do you want to spend just 30 minutes a day checking email and disconnect the rest of the time?" he asks.

Decide the outcome you want and set an intention. Then create the physical environment that makes it more likely that you will follow through on your intention.

"If you want undistracted time with the family, leave your computer and phone [behind]. Or if that's impossible, disconnect your phone from email," says Bregman.

3. Decide What You Don't Want To Do

Just say no to the things that you don't want to do, says Carson Tate, author of Work Simply: Embracing the Power of Your Personal Productivity Style. For example, no holiday parties the week before Christmas, no end-of-the-year business newsletter, no office secret Santa.

"Who says you have to do everything?" she asks. "You do not. Release any guilt about saying no. Every time you say yes to something, you are saying no to something else."

Instead, say yes to the things that bring you joy and no to the things that suck the life right out of you and turn you into Scrooge, says Tate.

4. Maintain Your Pace

Don't get swept up into a manic pace just because it's the holidays, says Andrew Mellen, author of Unstuff Your Life. "I remain focused enough to keep my own pace, regardless of what is happening around me," he says. "That allows me to get work done and still enjoy my downtime, rather than racing around day and night."

5. Take Advantage of Downtime

With more people out on vacation and fewer meetings and calls happening, use the opportunity to catch up on those tasks you never have time to do, such as filing, decluttering your desk, and planning for the new year to come, says Lorie Marrero, author of The Clutter Diet.

"Get even more purposeful by aligning with management to do an entire office clean-out day, with everyone joining in," she suggests. "Wear jeans, order pizza for everyone, get extra shredding and recycling bins delivered, and make it happen."

Or use the slow time to learn something new that could streamline your work going forward, adds Duncan. "This could include learning more about the software you use every day," she says. "That'll help you spend less time working, but get more done in the New Year."

6. Use Holiday Parties As Incentives

Instead of extra activities like holiday parties being a hindrance to productivity, they can be a productivity booster if you use them as incentives, says Elizabeth Grace Saunders, time coach and author of The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment.

"Give yourself certain task goals, like, 'As soon as I finish this presentation, I can head out to the holiday mixer,'" she says. "The excitement about getting to the event as soon as possible can help you have extra focus and boost your speed at getting things done."

Almost a year after publicly apologizing for food-safety lapses, the company announced the departure of its co-CEO Monty Moran on Monday.

Almost a year after Chipotle co-CEO Steve Ells publicly apologized in newspapers and on TV for a series of food-safety outbreaks that sickened hundreds of customers and sent restaurant sales into free-fall, Ells did a conference call with investors on Monday afternoon to offer yet another mea culpa. "I'm not satisfied with the pace of our recovery…but I'm not here to dwell on how dissatisfied I am," he said. "I'm here to accept responsibility for letting our simple business become overly complex."

Chipotle held the unusual call with shareholders after it announced this week that Monty Moran, Chipotle's other co-CEO and a longtime friend of Ells's, will step down from his role and board seat in early 2017. Ells spent much of the call explaining why he's right person to run the company as its sole remaining CEO and that he'll focus his attention on correcting operational inefficiencies.

But the greater significance of the call was Ells's acknowledgement that the challenges facing Chipotle go well beyond issues of food safety, a fact that, until recently, Ells and his executive team seemed unwilling to admit. "Last year, everything changed," Ells told investors. "The [food-safety] events exposed some weaknesses that our momentum in earlier years may have masked."

Ells went on to detail some of the company's problems. Its hiring process? Broken, he said, leading to a loss of talent. Employee training? Not enough of a priority, one reason for the company's high turnover rates. Chipotle's much-vaunted "restaurateur program," the centerpiece of its "people culture" that's designed to give kitchen workers a path to becoming store managers? It has become too "elaborate" and "esoteric," Ells said, before complaining about the company's outmoded metrics for success, which he called "complicated" and "very redundant."

These were jaw-dropping reversals from Ells. Only three months ago, I was on the phone with him and Moran discussing these very topics for our recent profile of the company, and the pair sounded offended that I would even suggest there were issues with its work culture and restaurateur program. "Boy, not true at all," responded Moran, who implied I must've been talking to "disgruntled" former employees. Ells, for his part, accused me of having an agenda when prodded about other Chipotle culture issues. "If you want to be sensationalist about this, you're certainly going to be able to spin it," he said.

Yet multiple sources had told me that Chipotle was plagued with problems. Its restaurants were built on a culture of classifying workers as either "higher performers" or "low performers," a system which made many employees feel disposable; over the years, the company had gutted if not neutered its human resources department, leaving many workers without the ability to voice their concerns; and Chipotle's restaurateur program eventually become rife with bureaucratic headaches. In order to rise from crew member to kitchen manager, for example, workers had to complete a development guide filled with more than a hundred pages of self-reviews and manager evaluations; knowledge and ability check lists; and paragraph-size journal entries.

The food-safety crisis only exacerbated things, burdening these low-paid workers with numerous added responsibilities. Yet both CEOs refused to acknowledge problems with the program, let alone a slew of additional cultural issues I raised. "[The system is] not perfect, but it's very, very healthy, it's very good, and rewards the best people," Moran said. "I spend all of my time working on making this culture the very best it can be."

On the conference call this week, however, Ells seemed to have had a come-to-Jesus moment. Contradicting much of what he and Moran told me, Ells said Chipotle's restaurants have become "more and more complicated," adding that "we created so many distractions for our managers and crews" which "made it increasingly difficult for [them] to focus on customer experience." He promised to focus the next stage of his CEO tenure on simplifying "all aspects of the company's operations."

It's refreshing to hear this measure of candor but it's also troubling. It either means Ells knew of these problems before and apparently decided not to be forthright with the public, the press, and with investors about Chipotle's internal woes, or it means Ells was oblivious to these issues, and only learned of them sometime between now and late September, when we had our last conversation. Neither scenario looks good for Ells, who is, after all, Chipotle's founder, CEO, and chairman.

Worse, Ells promised investors on the conference call that these issues could be fixed "immediately...this is not a case where we have to reinvent the way we do things, and then implement a new system and expect it to take years. We can have very immediate impact on our restaurants." Having spent more than seven months reporting on the company, I'm deeply skeptical of this claim. As we concluded in our November feature, Chipotle's internal struggles are more systemic than Ells seems ready to admit; they can't simply be resolved overnight.

Nevertheless, Ells's apparent move toward more transparency is at least a step in the right direction (and undoubtedly a part of Chipotle's revised PR strategy). But the more truthful Ells is about Chipotle's struggles going forward, the more awkward revelations that might result. It wasn't too long ago, for instance, that Ells told me he's more confident than ever in his restaurant teams, operations leaders, and Chipotle's food quality, yet last week he told a crowd of investors that roughly half of the company's locations were failing to live up to his standards, grading their customer experiences a "C" or worse. Why did it take so long for Ells to have this epiphany? A spokesperson for Chipotle declined to make Ells available for comment.

It thus shouldn't come as a surprise that some observers are skeptical of Ells's newfound appetite for change. In the eyes of some investors, this is all too little, too late. As CtW Invest Group, a vocal critic of the company, wrote in a note published Tuesday, "Despite yesterday's announcement...we remain troubled by the company's trajectory."

The standard networking mixer doesn't exactly bring out the best in most of us. Here are some alternatives that do.

If you're a normal professional, you may just feel at least a smidge of apprehension or resentment when it comes time to drag yourself to (or get dragged to) a professional networking event. Sure, sure, the crab puffs might be killer, but there are so many things to not love about these shindigs that I'd be here for hours if I tried to highlight each one.

Because that doesn't sound fun for either of us, let's start with four common reasons why you don't enjoy them—even when you know (or suspect) they're important to attend. And then let's find a better option for every stinking one of them.

1. It's More Stressful Than Fun

Especially if you're not a natural extrovert, or if you aren't terribly practiced in the art of small talk, walking into a room of strangers can create all kinds of anxiety and tension. They often seem formulaic to the point of being comical, just without the funny ha-ha part. And this typically nets out to a fairly unenjoyable, stressful, and overtly corporate-feeling session.

A Better Option: Have you heard the news? Many, many professional groups (both the formal ones and informal ones) are realizing that we humans actually enjoy mixing business with pleasure when it comes to networking—especially when doing so lowers our stress levels while still enabling us to meet influential people, gather information that may be beneficial to our careers, or grow professionally.

If you cringe at the thought of the "traditional networking mixer," consider heading over to Meetup.com or LinkedIn groups to see if you can find events in your area that pertain to your area of expertise or professional interest while combining a social or recreational element.

In the Portland market alone, you'll find gatherings like these: Coffee & Copy (a gathering for writers), Wonder Women in Business, and a Tech + Pong hangout (for developers and other IT people). There are hundreds of these types of events, in pretty much every urban market. Go find a couple that suit you.

2. You're Afraid To Approach People

Here's the thing: We're all afraid to approach people we don't know, just at varying levels of terror. It's human nature to fear rejection or looking awkward or stupid, it really is. And networking events are often just teeming with scary strangers that we dread approaching.

Given this, a lot of us tend to completely underperform in these environments. We go through the motions and survive, but we end the evening with very little to show for the agony we've just endured. And that's not at all what our goal is here.

The Better Option: First, recognize that we're all scared. All of us. That may ease your feelings of "I'm all alone in this." Next, if the event has genuine potential (and, really, most of them do), try constructing a game plan in advance, which will make it less intimidating to walk in the doors and approach new people. Consider bringing someone who's a natural connector, or who knows a lot of people in your industry. And ask that person to make introductions on your behalf.

(See? Less terrifying already.)

Or, you might create a game out the entire event. Challenge yourself to see how many people you can meet or what specific goals you can achieve before the end of the evening. And, if you can get your hands on an attendee list in advance, be sure and do so. This will make pre-planning much easier, as you will know who your "target connections" are beforehand.

3. The Events Feel So Forced And Fake

The events I most despise are the ones in which everyone just stands around shoving their cards at one another while trying to juggle appetizers, cocktails, and handshakes. I often feel like I'm in some bad 1991 movie scene, one that's overtly making fun of how corny and fake so many of these professional mixers are.

Seriously, does anyone ever forge genuine, lasting connections in these awful environments? I probably can't say, because I've admittedly exited stage left in the middle of many of these types of deals before even giving them a chance.

A Better Option: If the fakeness of "classic networking" really doesn't work for you, choose non-networking networking opportunities. This isn't an oxymoron at all. Sleuth out (and get your rear end over to) events that allow you to actually contribute, do, or achieve something while you meet like-minded people.

Raise your hand to volunteer at an event or for a cause tied to your area of expertise or interest. Organize a fitness group or book club specifically designed for people in your field. Join a committee within your own company, with the specific intent to get to know new people within the organization. You get the theme here.

4. You Have No Time To Attend Networking Events

I'm absolutely not one of those people who says (in a judging tone), "It's never that you have no time, it's that you choose to not make the time." Oh, God, spare us all. Hi, I'm a married business owner with multiple children—who are in multiple extracurricular activities. I actually "get" what it is to have almost no extra time to be flitting about town talking shop over mediocre wine.

However, I also actually "get" how important it is to forge and maintain strong professional relationships throughout one's career. I have personally and professionally benefitted (over and over again) from having a supportive and influential network of people around me (and hope I'm helpful to them as well!)

So what happens if you're someone with so many demands on your time that physically attending networking events is nearly impossible?

A Better Option: I've got two words for you: social media. No matter how good (or not good) you are at it or how much you like (or dislike) it, you'll need to harness the power of these platforms as a solid alternative to participating at live events. Your specific strategy should be customized to your own needs, personality, and comfort level with various platforms, but you absolutely must leverage networking tools like LinkedIn, Twitter chats, and Facebook Live events (to name a few) if you're not able to attend face-to-face gatherings.

Blipping off the radar entirely may feel more safe and comfortable, but you're shortchanging yourself (and may cause yourself a lot of unnecessary stress when you need support from others) in the long run. Business is built around relationships. It is truly who you know in many, many instances.

So even if you abhor the idea of networking, try your darndest to find survivable (and maybe even enjoyable) ways to stay connected with influencers around you.

And for sure have a firm handshake.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.

For companies like JibJab, selling stickers and GIFs to iPhone users is both relatively easy and a major opportunity.

This holiday season, Apple is expecting record sales for new iPhones. In order to encourage developers to create messaging products for iOS rather than Android, the company unveiled a radically overhauled version of its iMessage platform this autumn. And for developers, the new iMessage is turning into an easy way to attract customers.

According to mobile research firm SensorTower, JibJab, a 17-year-old sticker and online card company, saw 1,500% download growth in the week after iOS 10, which included the overhauled iMessage platform, came out in September. In the new iteration of iOS, iPhone and iPad users can download stickers, emojis, and other graphics directly from Apple's App Store. By creating a platform for users to quickly download new graphics for their messages, Apple also created a whole new marketplace for intrepid app makers.

Greg Spiridellis, JibJab's CEO, has profited from that new marketplace handsomely. As he puts it, "I was waiting for the new iMessage—it was like Christmas in Cupertino."

JibJab makes money both from its freemium app (which requires a paid membership for features beyond GIFs, stickers, and avatars) and audio-enabled e-cards that let users insert their own face into kooky animations. Although the company declined to discuss its financials in detail, it says it has over 1 million paid subscribers overall.

Building For The New App Store

Apple and app developers have an odd symbiotic relationship. App developers depend on Apple for the platform that allows them to do business. At the same time, Apple depends on app developers to sustain the ecosystem that attracts customers to iOS devices over their Android rivals (and to generate the healthy cut of income that Apple takes from the App Store). But at the end of the day, Apple holds most of the cards, and the new iMessage store is no exception.

Apple encourages developers to create stickers for iMessage, as well as in-iMessage features such as original content, photo editing, games, online payments, and communications tools. JibJab is part of a crowded ecosystem of more than 1,500 apps offered by everyone from Bitmoji to Venmo (which, though a payments app, has a surprisingly robust messaging capability) to Whalerock, the makers of the massively popular Kim Kardashian Kimoji app.

Although iMessage apps typically gross less than conventional games and other sorts of apps, they're also generally easier to set up. In most cases, they're either quick conversions of products that already exist in the App Store, or packages of stickers or GIFs that can quickly be created, tested, and shipped to market.

According to Spiridellis, "Apple has a structural advantage by virtue of owning the operating system. It is the only platform on iOS that can offer third-party developers the ability to integrate directly into a messenger." (Apple's rules for iOS prevent third parties from putting competitive full-blown app stores onto its devices—something that rival Android offers.)

Silly Stuff, Serious Money

Here's the kicker: Those funny GIFs and emojis that you send to your friends, family, or (maybe) coworkers generate large amounts of revenue for Android and iOS developers. For one of the larger global players, Japan's Line, stickers generated approximately $268 million in sales in 2015.

According to Spiridellis, JibJab was able to create and release its iMessage app in approximately 10 weeks in what he called "a race with every other developer in the world" to have a product ready for the rollout of Apple's new iMessage.

"You can build an iMessage app the same way you can build any other extension," he adds, "like a keyboard app or by reusing the same code from your main app. However, when it's integrated directly into iMessage, it's a much better user experience."

Companies like JibJab get limited analytics information from purchasers, similar to what's offered to developers of conventional iOS applications. This includes metrics on installs and data related to payments.

Meanwhile, JibJab and others look to profit from opportunities inside the iMessage ecosystem. As of December 2016, Apple has rolled out additional iMessage effects in iOS 10.2, and players as varied as The New Yorker and McDonald's have all expanded into the iMessage app world.

The weeks leading up to the holidays are full of distractions, so we found bosses that successfully keep everyone both happy and productive.

The month of December, perhaps more than any other time of the year, is the ultimate tightrope act for bosses. Be too loose with keeping your employees on track and risk hurting business. But be too strict and face coming off as a Grinch, and possibly damage employee morale long after the holidays have ended.

So how can business leaders motivate employees to stay productive and motivated during the holidays? We spoke to 10 CEOs across myriad industries to reveal their best practices. Here's what they had to say, in their own words:

Celebrating Successes, Relieve Stress And Have Fun Together At A Holiday Party

"This time of year is especially busy for our business, with our entire team working extra hard to sell, produce, and ship out product in time for the holidays. This can mean working late nights and weekends to make sure everything goes smoothly. We strive to reward and balance this extra effort with positive recognition of everyone's contributions, extra time off once the work is successfully completed, and of course having fun together as a team with a big holiday party. This year in particular, we're going to a nearby fun park where we can relieve any built-up stress with laser tag or a competitive go-kart race. We're true believers in 'work hard, play hard,' getting things done and celebrating successes together."
— Mark Buff, CEO of Mohu the Cord Cutting Company

Ease Employees' Pre-Holiday Anxiety By Allowing Remote Working

"The holidays can create a lot of stress for employees—with holiday shopping to finish, family gatherings to prepare for, and traveling to visit loved ones. In order to combat these stresses, which can reduce morale and productivity, we encourage our teams to work remotely as needed. This is something we offer throughout the year but is particularly important during the holidays when a rigid schedule or commute can become an extra burden.

"To further promote this, our company even offers VR staff meetings that enable employees from across the country to connect and collaborate even when they're physically far away. This kind of flexibility gives our employees peace of mind that they're doing their jobs, while also taking part in everything the holidays are about. Furthermore, for those employees who still come into the office for work, we hold in-house happy hours, which we've found not only help to ease stress and celebrate the holiday season but encourage team building and creativity within the office."
— Abi Mandelbaum, CEO of virtual reality company YouVisit

Provide Adequate Time Off For Every Holiday (Not Just Christmas)

"Providing adequate time off to allow employees to recognize holidays and volunteer opportunities are important. I encourage employees to recognize the various holiday periods and respect the time off that is needed to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, to name a few. I also provide employees with the opportunity to take paid time off to volunteer in their communities, and our culture committee works with each facility to arrange food and/or clothing donations or to adopt a local family in need. I found that when employees are able to spend time with family or to care for others in need, that is the motivator that gets them through the stress of the holiday season."
— Tim Estes, CEO of cognitive computing company Digital Reasoning

Use It As A Time To Let Everyone Try Something New

"At a time of year when team members are often thinking about the year ahead and what their New Year's resolutions will be, set them up for success by helping them learn something new in a fun, stress-free way. If there is a skill specific to your business that's essential for employees to master, turn it into a game or friendly competition rather than bringing them to a seminar. Or if there is something everyone in the office has been buzzing about—like the "escape room" challenges growing in popularity—take them to a totally out-of-the-box activity or class rather than a traditional holiday party to give them the chance to learn while stepping out of their comfort zone as a team."
— Sue Yannaccone, president & CEO of ERA Real Estate

Remain Transparent Around Goals While Setting Realistic Expectations

"The holidays should be about enjoying more time with family and friends. As a CEO, I don't want to take this special time away from employees, but I also expect employees to strive for their goals like any other month. At BetterWorks, we strike a balance between finding time for all the holiday festivities and work by staying really transparent around our goals. I encourage managers to set realistic expectations given employees' travel and vacation schedules this month, and do their best to remove the pressure of a daunting to-do list, especially if things can be pushed to early next year. When employees have a streamlined list of goals and objectives, even in the midst of holiday distractions, their motivation to reach those goals stays high."
— Kris Duggan, CEO of enterprise software company BetterWorks

Bring Local Vendors To Your Workplace To Help Alleviate The Stress Of Holiday Shopping

"As a SaaS company, the holiday season coincides with our busiest time of year as our customers go through open enrollment and our development team pushes our autumn and winter software releases. During this time and throughout the year, I make it a point to ensure our associates are well fed and recognized for their hard work. But for the holidays we go all out and offer on-campus shopping where we bring in top local vendors. It alleviates the shopping stress for our associates and supports local businesses. We'll even wrap the gifts for our associates with a free gift-wrapping service. Celebrate is a core value and during the holidays, we burn off stress with a fun desk decorating contest, including prizes and a hot chocolate bar served up by the management team."
— Shawn Jenkins, CEO of Benefitfocus

Plan Ahead For Unproductive Time

"I prefer to embrace the fact that year-end is generally unproductive the last few weeks so plan for it. Set deadlines to wrap up things before the holidays. Be realistic about what can get done so expectations are accurately set. Use the end of the year to 'clean out'—email, folders, etc.—so that you can come back refreshed at the start of the new year. Coordinate office celebrations to include everyone and try to keep festivities to one day so employees don't feel obligated to contribute throughout the hectic month."
— Christine Robins, president & CEO of outdoor grill maker Char-Broil

Take Time To Reflect And Plan Ahead With Individual Employee Meetings

"Keeping your team motivated during the holidays is tricky. I like to use the end of the year as a time of reflection to celebrate the things that we learned, the customers we closed, the products we improved, and so on. I practice this by scheduling individual meetings with team members so we have the chance to connect on a personal and professional level.

Also, it is equally important to reflect on the things that were not done well in the past year and how we as a team can improve them. I believe this gives the whole team an opportunity to realize that there is more to do collectively and opportunities to build a better company. The end of the year is a perfect time for this since people are naturally reflecting on what the next year will bring, and as a leader, you can share the broad scope as opposed to the details that employees focus on. Lastly, I send an annual letter (borrowed this idea from Bill Gates and Warren Buffet) to the whole company, as I believe it is important to communicate a sense of momentum so employees are excited and want to push ahead now as opposed to waiting for the new year."
— Manish Shah, CEO of health technology startup PeerWell

Give Thoughtful Gifts

"Every Friday at the end of a long week through December I set up a treasure hunt for the staff around the office. The presents aren't just chocolate, they're specific to each individual member of staff, which could be a Starbucks voucher for my member of staff who can't start her days without coffee, or a bottle of a certain brand of wine that another member of staff loves.

These little touches really go a long way with employees and it not only brightens up the end of the week but they leave the office with a smile and it makes them start the weekend happier and ultimately it's a great talking point for Monday morning."
– Jayson Jaurigue, director and founder of Eight Ray Music

Set Goals That Can Be Met With Flexible Holiday Schedules

"Setting a schedule with clear deadlines, and delineating specific expectations to be met during the holidays is essential. Not only does this help staff understand what is expected of them and the targets that should be met, it significantly alleviates stress during an exceptionally busy period. Having specific tasks set for allocated dates allows workers to be productive, but also ensures they can balance their work with home life, and fully appreciate their much deserved time to relax. It is important, however, to have a flexible schedule to allocate for holiday obligations and to allow for potential disruptions. Allowing this flexibility reduces stress, whilst simultaneously motivating staff to carry on working. At Smart PA, workers are allowed to go home early on a Friday—a tangible and immediate goal, which ensures motivation."
– Sarra Bejaoui, director of operations and cofounder of administrative support firm SmartPA