When you ring in the new year, leave behind these common mistakes that may be holding you back.
Whether you saw 2016 as a time to celebrate or an enormous dumpster fire, there's something thrilling about the prospect of a new year. It's a clean slate. Twelve months stretch ahead, full of promise.
So while you're making your list of resolutions that you'll take with you into January, it's also a good time to think about what you should leave behind. To give yourself the best chance of reaching your goals and realizing your resolutions, leave these mistakes behind when the clock strikes midnight.
"I often see people learn their lesson and eventually hire and delegate, finally understanding that they can't manage every aspect of a business successfully. But it usually happens after burning through tons of money and resources and time," Canning says.
"I'd love to see people leave behind being bullying and cruel and polarizing to each other. We may disagree, but we have to find ways to agree to disagree, and to still think of the more important greater good," she says. Instead, work on finding common ground and healthy ways to disagree.
If you don't take time out, you're not going to be able to sustain high performance, she says. "We see a lot of turnover at CEO level and at some of the C-suite levels because people aren't recovering, they aren't taking that time to regenerate," she says. So start planning some time for yourself in the new year.
Saltz says that we're more apt to achieve big goals if they're structured as a series of small ones. "People have a tendency to go, 'I'm going to revolutionize my life this year.' [That's] very unwieldy and undefined—and actually usually lasts for a week and then you're done," she says. Instead of shooting for the moon, take concrete, specific steps that will get you where you want to go. And celebrate those achievements to keep you motivated along the way.
Much of the reason we hold ourselves back isn't lack of will, talent, or ability—it's lack of follow-through, says Canning. We become disorganized or run out of time to take the steps necessary to realize our goals.
"You can get incredibly lucky or you can be very well connected. But for most people, it comes down to refining your intentions, getting incredibly organized, and setting up some sort of framework for consequences in the event of failure," he says. Lean on your network to keep yourself accountable and ensure you'll follow through on the things that you say you're going to do.
It's easy to fall into the role of firefighter, tending to the most urgent needs and tasks during the course of the day. However, if you're ignoring your high performers or your own personal development because you're spending too much time tending to lower-performing employees who need help or a greater degree of management, you could be missing an important opportunity for retention, development, and greater productivity, Spears says.
"That's irresponsible to the high performers. If you can spend more time there and create a little bit more connection with those employees to keep those people from leaving, that's a really good investment of your time," she says. And that goes for you, personally, as well. Spend some time tending to your own career and personal development needs, she says. Everyone in the organization will be better off for it.
Just as it's important to stay in tune with your need for downtime, it's also important to recognize and deal with anxiety when it rears its head, Saltz says. "A lot of people have felt that 2016 has been a rough year in terms of high anxiety," she says. Insecurities and disagreements can promote anxiety. When people feel a great deal of discord or don't feel in control, those types of things promote anxiety too, she says.
Get in touch with soothing techniques to make yourself feel better. From using websites and apps like Headspace and Calm, to exercise or sessions with a therapist, come up with an anxiety management plan to help you feel better and be more clearheaded, she says.
One of the best things you can leave behind is the power of that negative voice in your head telling you what you can't do, Spears says. Get over your self-limiting beliefs and reinforce your understanding of where your strengths lie. "You can get there with a 360-degree review, and bringing in someone and being vulnerable and saying, 'How can I get better?'"
It's not always easy to face our insecurities, but that voice may be holding you back in ways you don't even realize, she says. It's time for its power to go.
Big things are happening in space travel and tech, with new startups mushrooming every day. Here are four trends to watch.
There was a time when NASA was singlehandedly driving America's dream of exploring outer space. But that has changed over the last 15 years. A slew of private space companies have entered the market with ambitious plans to build rockets and colonize new planets. SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin—each led by well-known entrepreneurs—have become household names.
But over the last seven years, hundreds of smaller startups have also popped up, each trying to accomplish something different in the new space race. Astrobotic, for instance, has launched a lunar delivery service, charging $1.2 million per kilo to take anything you want to the moon. World View is developing enormous balloons that can take passengers or equipment to the very outer reaches of our atmosphere. Saber Aeronautics is using video game technology to help people create missions and operate satellites with little training.
Chad Anderson has seen these exciting new developments firsthand as the CEO of the Space Angels Network, an organization that surveys and invests in emerging space startups. It began tracking private space companies in 2009, when SpaceX had its first successful launch, and he says that VC investments in private space companies have been on an upward trajectory every year. (This does not include infusions of corporate capital, such as Google's $1 billion investment in SpaceX last year.) He says that seven years ago, there were fewer than 50 private space companies, but this year, the number has grown to almost 200 that have received non-government funding to execute their business plan.
"There's a robust ecosystem in the space industry now," he says. "In the past, the government would have been a space company's customer. Now they might have the government as a customer for some of their data, but other private customers as well. Then they might buy parts from another space company."
I sat down with Anderson to discuss some of the big trends that he believes will take off next year.
While the private space industry is booming, government still has an important role to play in driving space-age technology forward. Space startups often build on primary research that began at NASA, and many also rely on the government to be a customer. "The exploratory science that NASA is doing translates to private-sector activity eventually," Anderson says.
The good news is that Congress appears to be in favor of giving NASA the resources it needs to thrive. It received a $19.3 billion budget in 2016, a nearly $1.3 billion increase from the year before. It is unclear how the Trump Administration will handle NASA. So far, the president-elect has said very little about his plans for the country's space program, and it is unclear whether his pro-business policies will play out in the space sector. "If it comes at the expense of investing in the longer term gain, his pro-business approach could be harmful," Anderson says.
What we do know is that there's growing interest from governments around the world in investing in space. This year, Luxembourg's government invested $227 million in asteroid mining research, which included funds that went to two American companies—Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources—that would create European operations.
Meanwhile, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency invested $290 million on a probe to orbit Venus, and China's president announced a plan to land "taikonauts" on the moon by 2036 and Mars thereafter. Both countries say these space missions are designed to boost the local economy and spur innovation in robotics, aviation, and AI.
Anderson says we can look forward to more private-public partnerships in the future as governments realize the value of investing in space. All of this will be a boon to the space startup community. "The government has a big role to play as a customer," he says. "It's good to see more agencies, in more countries, interested."
The Outer Space Treaty, which was first signed in 1967, is still the basis of international space law. It was developed right before the U.S. went to the moon and stated, among other things, that no country could place a weapon of mass destruction in orbit in outer space or claim any celestial resource. "It's a different time in space now from back then," Anderson says.
Many within the private space industry are lobbying to modify the treaty to allow companies to claim some portion of what they mine or discover on a space mission. "What is the incentive to invest private capital and take on so much risk by going to space if you don't even know if you have any claim to resources once you get there?" Anderson says. "This creates that incentive."
He says that one model for a new treaty could be the Homestead Acts of 1866, which the U.S. government created to entice Americans to settle in less inhabited parts of the country, mostly in the West. The law gave applicants ownership of land at little or no cost, which led to more than 270 million acres of public land given to 1.6 million people. By creating similar legislation for the ownership of property in space, many in the private space industry believe more people will be willing to invest in the technological infrastructure to get there.
Right now, the idea of space tourism appeals to a small, self-selecting group of people who love the idea of space so much that they are willing to take on the many risks of being among the first private citizens to go to space.
But this is slowly changing. At the National Aerospace Training and Research Center in Pennsylvania, scientists have been trying to understand who can actually withstand the physical stress of flying on a Virgin Galactic rocket, for instance. They're finding that even very old people or people with pins in their bodies after surgery can handle the gravitational pressures and exertion.
As space tourism becomes less pie-in-the-sky fantasy and more concrete reality, and as more people begin to seriously prepare for space flight, the whole concept will seem less daunting. This might even begin happening as early as next year. Again, Anderson compares the voyage to space to the early days of traveling out West. "At first it took a very special kind of person to leave their families and go off with a shovel and a wheelbarrow," he says. "But once they had developed a train to go out there, a different demographic started traveling. We've seen this scenario play out multiple times over history, and I don't see how this will be any different."
Anderson says that 2017 will be exciting for launches. Blue Origin is planning to start sending trained astronauts next year, and paying commercial passengers the following year. Rocket Lab is set to begin test flights on its Electron small satellite launch vehicle in 2017 as well. There are many other companies depending on these launches to get their satellites and instruments to space. "Even one new launch system will do a lot to relieve the pressure and backlog we have at the moment," Anderson says.
In the past, companies relied on NASA's much bigger launchers to get to space, but companies like Rocket Lab are testing out smaller launch vehicles. While the price of a payload is about the same on either type of vehicle, smaller vehicles tend to be able to launch more frequently and can have smaller customers. "What they are selling you is the opportunity to be the primary payload," Anderson says. "If the launch is delayed, it is because you were delayed, not because the primary payload you were flying with was delayed. It will take you to the orbit you want to go to, whereas if you ride as the secondary payload you are likely going to another orbit and must figure out how to get to where you wanted to go."
The moon will continue to be the destination of choice for these spacecraft. While a lot of attention has been paid to NASA and SpaceX's plans to go to Mars, a growing number of companies are working on lunar missions. Astrobotic, for instance, is partnering with a range of organizations—from scientific groups to companies who want to use a lunar landing as part of a marketing campaign—to deliver equipment and materials to the moon. Others are thinking about using the moon as a staging area or a launch site for travel to other parts of our solar system.
All of this extraterrestrial activity is causing concern about the trail of orbital debris that might be left behind. Space law requires companies to clean up after themselves, so expect more of them to invest in creating enormous harpoons that pull trash down from space. There will also be an increase in technologies that help us track where objects are in space.
Next year should bring lots of new developments. But there is an infinite area to explore beyond our planet, so there's a lot left to do. "Space is a long game," says Anderson.
2016 brought the "reachpocalypse," and much else besides. Here's what comes next for the embattled world of social media.
Let's travel back to a simpler time, shall we? It's November 6, 2007, and Facebook has just launched something called Pages. Now, companies can have an official presence on the network, just like real people! The first day, 100,000 Pages launch, with brands from Coca-Cola to Verizon and Blockbuster getting onboard. In the years afterward, millions of companies raced to build up audiences they can reach directly and on-demand, through the sheer magic of social media.
Fast-forward to the waning months of 2016, and the magic is a little harder to feel. Certain corners of the social world have become uglier places, with some in the business world calling for a draw-down. But the pitfalls of political partisanship weren't the only things companies struggled to circumnavigate last year. From a more practical standpoint, it turned out that just having an audience on social media doesn't mean you actually get to reach it.
And as we head into 2017, the fact that social media is paying ever fewer dividends to many brands and their marketers is becoming more apparent. So what comes next?
Starting in 2012, Facebook began to curtail the percentage of a Page's followers that actually see a brand's updates. At first, it was cut to around 16%. Later, it was reported that large brands who post to Facebook were reaching as few as 2% of their audience, or just one in every 50 of their own followers. After the latest tweaks last summer, the average reach for some branded posts has been cut again by half.
This isn't part of some grand conspiracy. More content than ever is being shared—photos, GIFs, videos, and more—and the space in our news feeds is at a premium. So Facebook prioritizes, using its own algorithms to auto-select what we see. Content from friends and family members takes precedence, meaning that company updates, more often than not, don't make the cut.
Facebook is hardly alone in elbowing companies to the social margins. Users of Instagram, which the social network owns, now have their feeds curated by algorithm, with the order optimized based on "relationship with the person posting." Even Twitter, long celebrated as the place to see real-time, streaming updates in the raw, is increasingly algorithm-driven, with the "best Tweets" auto-selected to appear at the tops of users' feeds.
To lovers of the free-wheeling early stages of social media—where the only limit to a company's reach was creativity and cat-GIF curation—these changes add up to nothing short of an obituary. The days of being able to engage with users for free on social media through so-called "organic posts" are undeniably numbered.
This is hardly a secret or a news scoop. We've known it for years, in fact. But many of us have been in a state of denial. It's time to come to grips with the hard truth that 2017 presents us with: Social media as we know it may not be dead, but it's surely dying. This doesn't mean businesses should give up the ghost, though. In fact, it's just the opposite.
Social media is more pervasive than ever and poised for a unique metamorphosis. It's about to be reborn over the course of this year as a hyperfocused business tool—more targeted, simpler to use, and possibly more effective than before.
If that sounds Pollyanna-ish, think again. A curious thing has happened as companies' ability to reach users organically on social media has tanked: The power of social media to influence buying decisions has surged. In one of the most comprehensive studies to date, McKinsey recently surveyed 20,000 consumers in Europe and found that social recommendations are behind more than a quarter of all purchases made. This is well above the 10% to 15% that's been estimated in earlier research. And in the majority of cases, the McKinsey report found, these social updates had a direct impact on buying decisions.
For companies, this presents a thorny challenge. Social media has never been more influential, but getting updates in front of users has never been more challenging. To shun Facebook and other networks altogether is to ignore the more than 2 billion users around the globe who rely on social media for news and updates. But to embrace them requires jumping over ever-higher hurdles in the hopes of connecting with customers.
But there are some viable solutions. Not surprisingly, paying for social media ads is a big part of the equation—just as Facebook, for one, has intended. There's more to the story than bowing to the social network's business model, though. Some of the most innovative companies are increasingly taking a three-pronged approach—blending paid social media ads with strategies that tap customers and even their own employees to spread content further and more effectively than before.
In a new report, Gartner's industry analysts are unusually blunt: "Sustained success in social marketing now requires paid advertising." And they're right. It's absolutely true that, like it or not, pay-to-play is becoming the foundation of effective social strategies, with more than 80% of companies reportedly planning to deploy a social ad campaign in the next year.
All the major social platforms now have their own "native ads"—promoted posts and updates designed to look just like the real things, distinguished (sometimes barely) by tiny disclaimers. The good news is that once you get over the initial sticker shock of ponying up for tweets and Facebook posts, paid social media actually presents some clear advantages for businesses.
After all, the social platforms that are pressuring companies to pay for reach still want to keep them happy in exchange. So instead of blasting out updates, brands can now target both followers and non-followers with a high degree of accuracy. Yes, you have to pay for that, but the of data captured by networks now lets companies zero in not just on specific demographic groups but on "lookalike audiences," similar to those of competitors. Ads can then be optimized depending on a campaign's goals—from views to click-throughs and more—and budgets can be allocated more exactingly.
To be sure, aspects of these new capabilities have already proved to be potential ethical minefields. Facebook has come under fire in recent months after revelations that it allowed some advertisers to exclude certain ethnic groups. The company responded with some changes to its approach, but it's highly likely that as precision improves, the line between effective ad targeting and naked discrimination will continue to be debated—as well it should.
But that's a challenge that the most innovative marketers and inclusive brands can rise to, as many have done in the past when faced with thorny social issues impacted by technology. And to help, they'll have more data than ever to guide their choices, because the return on this social investment can finally be tracked and quantified. Paid social media analytics tools (my company offers one of them) can give a real-time window into results, with instant feedback on the cost per view, click, and other metrics. While the work of creating and bidding on these ads has put off some users in the past, a host of online platforms can now simplify the process of deploying paid campaigns. Put simply, advertising on social media is effective, scaleable, and increasingly DIY.
Paid ads offer a surefire way to reach a desired audience on social media—for a price. But there's another critical and generally overlooked route to getting the message out that comes with no extra cost: your own employees.
Employee advocacy—inviting coworkers to share brand messages on their own social media accounts, can have a range of benefits. For starters, you expand your reach, often exponentially in the case of large companies. Plus, because messages are being shared from personal accounts (rather than the company's), they generally reach a higher percentage of followers. Not to mention that content shared by employees reportedly gets eight times more engagement, on average, than content shared by brand channels—and is re-shared 25 times more frequent.
But there's a right way and a wrong way to encourage employee sharing. It should never be obligatory, for starters. Employees have to actually want to share company news, and it needs to be relevant to their own followings.
And the process of sharing has to be dead simple. Asking employees via email or Slack to post something on social media, for instance, is a clumsy workaround and rarely sees results. As an alternative, we here at Hootsuite developed a "one-click" option where companies can send preapproved updates via mobile app to employees, who then just tap to send.
"User-generated content" has been a buzzword for a while now, but it's worth understanding why it still makes so much sense on social media. On one level, it taps into users' basic impulse—the one at the heart of social media's appeal in the first place—to create and engage, rather than sit on the sidelines passively.
For companies, it's a way to build ties with customers while leaning on users for crowdsourced inspiration and creativity at the same time. Plus, encouraging your own customers to create and share branded content represents a sort of end-run around algorithms that limit the reach of posts from corporate accounts.
But how do you incentivize users to generate all this clickable content? Well, an old-fashioned contest never hurts. Close to home, for example, we recently challenged our followers to post photos from unique office settings as part of our #IWorkFromHere campaign, to highlight how the Hootsuite app lets businesses manage social media on the go. More than 1,400 people shared entries—from locales as exotic as the Andes Mountains and the cockpit of a helicopter—for a chance to win roundtrip flights anywhere in the world. The result: 2.2 million people a day saw these posts, which translated to more than 2,000 new mobile users.
Online tools now make it easy to plan and deploy contests to create user-generated content, though some common sense is always advisable. (Among many cautionary tales is #McDstories, a memorable 2012 effort from the fast-food giant that saw users flood the Twitterverse with . . . well, not exactly the kind of content the company had hoped for.) Asking for user-generated content always entails some risk, but it also lends a crucial layer of authenticity and excitement that's often missing from branded efforts.
The "reachpocalypse" is upon us. But for businesses, the decline of organic social media reach needn't be a doomsday scenario—quite the contrary. The new social media order that's taking shape in 2017 promises companies the kind of precision and measurable results long expected from traditional channels like print and broadcast. Social media had a rough year in 2016, but things are looking up.
A centuries-old tradition gave rise to China's most valuable company and captured the attention of everyone from teens to Silicon Valley.
A little over a year ago, my roommate Mike said something strange. He's a theater director and was working on a production in China. Mike complained that the play's producer had imposed a no-stickers rule on the production's WeChat group, but people kept sending them anyway.
Up until then, I had thought of WeChat as a social messaging app, like Facebook crossed with WhatsApp. But it turned out that in China, where relatively few people use email, almost everyone uses WeChat. In a country of 710 million internet users, Tencent, the Shenzhen-based goliath that owns WeChat, reports that as of September, the app has 768 million active users—up 35 percent over the same period last year. When an app popularized in part through the exchange of horse-dance GIFs and cartoon anthropomorphic dumplings becomes the default platform for work communication, you're going to have a sticker problem.
Things got really weird, though, when Mike started mentioning the Red Packets. It's a feature WeChat introduced in 2014 to exchange money electronically, based on the age-old Chinese custom of giving red envelopes filled with money at weddings, holidays, and special occasions. Mike said whenever people weren't checking their messages enough, the producer would send a red envelope to the group, and everyone would go crazy. To me it sounded bizarre, the equivalent of your boss tossing a fistful of change at your cubicle. The producer would also send red envelopes as a reward to the cast and crew for their hard work.
I was in Beijing for the last weekend of the show's run, and can happily say all those red envelopes seemed to pay off. I returned to the U.S. still mystified by the phenomenon. A few days later, a Red Packet icon appeared in a chat stream I had going with friends back in China. I tapped on it, and a full-screen message announced that I had received 0.03 yuan—a fraction of a cent. It also said my friend Julian had opened one too, that we had taken 11 seconds to do so, and that I had opened mine first. I felt ridiculously excited, like I'd won way more than part of a penny.
That was when I started to understand the competitive, gambling-like thrill of Red Packets. Like many other payment apps, WeChat allows its users to send Packets of predetermined amounts to each other, either individually or in groups. But it also encourages users to send money to groups in randomized amounts.
Say you have a chat group with five pals. You can put $5 in a red envelope and set it to disburse equally, so each friend gets $1. Alternatively, you could stipulate that the first two people to tap will get all the money in equal portions—$2.50 each—or that the first two people get a random cut, maybe $1 for one person and $4 for the other. The result is that any time a red envelope appears, people scramble to tap on it as fast as possible. (The packets expire in a day, adding to the time pressure.) Only afterwards do they see how much money they've won, giving it an addictive element of surprise. So addictive, in fact, that third-party apps now exist that let users grab red envelopes without unlocking their phones.
Back in our chat stream, Julian wrote, "Wah! I lost." I started to type a reply, then noticed something new had appeared—a digital wallet containing 0.03 yuan. And because I now had a WeChat Wallet, a host of other features appeared too: a button to buy movie tickets, one to book train and plane travel, another to hail a car, one to pay utility bills, and more. Suddenly I'd been lured into their payment ecosystem.
[Photo: Eveline Chao]
Since I live in the U.S., I couldn't actually use those features, but back in China, my friends could, and they'd become hard to resist. It had changed their lives, they said. Like many others across the country, they live in WeChat all day long, talking to friends and work colleagues, hailing cars, paying for restaurant meals that previously required cash (credit cards are still a rarity in China), and shopping in online and real-world stores that partner with WeChat. And for most of them, the gateway to it all was an ancient custom made digital.
WeChat introduced mobile pay in 2013, a year before its Red Packets, but it's the latter—with its seductive blend of social networking, gaming, and gambling—that got users on board with the concept of sending money electronically. Today, out of WeChat's 700-plus million active users, nearly 300 million have added their bank information to WeChat Pay, enabling them to withdraw from and add money to their virtual wallets. That's contributed to the most bustling mobile payments economy in the world: In 2015, China's mobile transactions surged to $235 billion, surpassing the U.S. for the first time. According to iResearch, China's mobile payments market is estimated to be worth 15.7 trillion yuan in 2016—28 times the $62.5 billion forecast by eMarketer for the U.S. in 2017—and 28.5 trillion yuan in 2018.
Red envelopes have seen similarly explosive growth. When the envelopes debuted in 2014 during Chinese New Year, the number of people using WeChat payments more than tripled from 30 million to 100 million in a month. Over the six-day holiday, users sent each other 20 million red envelopes. One year later, that number reached 3.2 billion.
That stunning growth was in part the result of a masterful bit of marketing. Tencent partnered with China Central Television's Spring Festival Gala, an annual TV event watched by an estimated 700 million people. (Think the Super Bowl times seven.) Throughout the show, viewers were prompted to shake their phones for a chance to win a combined $80 million in red envelopes from corporate sponsors. (WeChat has a "shake your phone" feature that's normally used to connect strangers who are shaking their phones at the same time.) The company said that 20 million viewers shook their phones 11 billion times throughout the show. Afterwards, news stories reported that some people had jerry-rigged contraptions to shake multiple phones at once.
This past Chinese New Year destroyed the previous year's records: more than 420 million WeChat users sent a total of 32 billion red envelopes—a tenfold percent increase from 2015. And—here's an "only in China" factoid—409,000 of them were sent in a single second, just after midnight on the first night of the holiday.
WeChat's ability to create a bustling payments economy echoes the general success of its parent company. In September, Tencent became China's largest company by value, surpassing state-owned China Mobile, when it reported its third-quarter revenue: $6 billion, up 52% year over year. How much of that can be attributed to Wallet and WePay was not specified: WeChat, China's most popular messaging app, makes money largely from online gaming, advertising, and selling sticker packs. But Tencent—which began with the instant messaging app QQ and is now pursuing artificial intelligence and electric cars alongside investments in a range of companies, including China's dominant ride-sharing operation, Didi Chuxing—did cite WePay as a major reason for its "other" businesses' growth, which increased $726 million in the third quarter, or 348% over the same period last year. According to estimates by HSBC, based on current tech company valuations, WeChat could already be worth more than $80 billion, about half of Tencent's market capitalization.
Given all the buzz, you might assume that Tencent invented virtual red envelopes. But in fact, it was Alibaba, China's largest e-commerce marketplace, that first launched the concept in 2012. Theirs, however, was more straightforward: Person A sends X amount to person B. It never took off, but at the time, it didn't matter. Alibaba practically owned payments and commerce; its online payments service Alipay was like early-2000s PayPal, the payments platform launched by eBay. But when Tencent debuted Red Packets in 2014, Alibaba founder Jack Ma called it a "Pearl Harbor moment" for his company.
In response, Alibaba literally stepped up its game. In 2015, it redoubled its efforts to make Alipay more social, including adding digital red envelopes with game-like features to Laiwang, a messaging app it launched in 2013 that was already considered a copy of WeChat. In the game, users could send an envelope to a group of people, and recipients had to compete for it by guessing how much they'd received. This past year, Alibaba held a Chinese New Year promotion in which users could add friends and collect "lucky cards" to win cash, resulting in 1.1 billion new friend connections, the company said. Jack Ma also sent Alipay red envelopes to people who correctly answered a question he posted on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter.
Not to be outdone, during Singles Day on November 11—thought to be the world's biggest online shopping day—Tencent founder and chairman Pony Ma announced the company was giving employees a total of 30 million RMB ($4.35 million) in red envelopes, in amounts ranging from 188 to 1,888 yuan ($27-$274).
In December, WeChat unveiled a new weapon in its arsenal: a partnership with Starbucks that will allow WeChat's users in China to buy lattes, pastries, or other Starbucks products for a friend or family member. The initiative, meant to encourage "everyday acts of kindness and appreciation," also brings WeChat Pay to Starbucks's nearly 2,500 stores in mainland China.
While WeChat leads the pack in volume of transactions both worldwide and in China, Tencent has never disclosed how much total money its users actually send. The amounts are usually very small; 8 or 8.88 RMB (about $1) are especially popular, given the luckiness of the number eight in Chinese culture. (Until this past March, Tencent has been absorbing the fees incurred when users transfer Wallet money to their bank accounts. It now charges users 0.1% for such transfers.)
And yet, while both WeChat Wallet and Alipay report similarly sized user bases, Alipay remains the country's leader in mobile payment, with 68% of the market, and purchase-related market share two to three times higher than Tencent. In a sign of the scale of China's mobile payments, Alibaba told the Financial Times last month that payments through Alipay had even exceeded those through the state-owned payment network connected to China's central bank.
Nonetheless, Alipay and others will likely continue to copy WeChat's red envelopes because there are other ways Tencent benefits from gamified money.
One example of the increasing returns of red envelopes: The feature has reinforced the creation of chat groups, the usage of which grew three to four times in the months after Red Packets were launched, according to Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz. Groups have expanded beyond personal, real-life circles (high school alumni, weekend soccer club) to interest-based ones (cars, practicing English) where people make new friends.
"Group chats are key to driving future growth of the platform because they enable new communities and new relationships to emerge," writes Chan. "As social interactions become increasingly digital, having an online place to make new friends . . . is incredibly valuable for engagement and stickiness on the platform."
It's now common to welcome a new member to a group by sending them a red envelope. And the groups have given rise to new game behavior, like the Red Packet Chain Game, in which whoever receives the least amount of money from a red envelope has to initiate the next envelope, and so forth.
Groups are also prime marketing environments. A personal trainer can charge others a monthly fee to join their motivational chat group. Or someone in a fashion-oriented group can announce they're traveling to Italy soon, and take orders for leather bags, either directly or through a third-party WeChat e-commerce platform like Weidian or Youzan, which can be accessed without leaving WeChat. Notably and cleverly, chat groups have a limit of 100 people unless Wallet payments are enabled, which raises the limit to 500. (WeChat does not take a fee from transactions or commissions from e-retailers.)
Red envelopes have also become messaging mediums themselves. Aside from the popularity of numerology (Chinese tend to pay more for phone numbers with lots of eights in them), the abundance of homonyms in the language enables a great deal of wordplay, much of it with numbers. For example, the numbers 5-2-0 are Chinese slang for "I love you." During Chinese Valentine's Day—celebrated on the Internet on May 20—the company said that many couples exchanged packets containing 5.20 yuan (less than $1). For 2016, Tencent increased WeChat's p2p payment limit for the day, from 200 yuan (about $30) to 520 yuan ($78). Nine million red envelopes worth $640 million were sent. (Though much of the cash went straight from the recipient back to their sweetheart as an "I love you" in return.)
"This was money as a message," writes Andreessen Horowitz's Chan. "Even though the money exchanged netted out in this case, long term, this kind of contrived/emergent social behavior is more important for WeChat because it gives users an entirely new way to engage and communicate with each other."
The upshot of all this is that more than 60 million users send Red Packets each day, and not just for utilitarian reasons. They send them for fun, to be silly, to say hello, or of course, to watch a group of friends go crazy as they compete for a small gift.
Despite its massive success at home, WeChat has struggled to take off elsewhere. But given the ongoing digital-payments battle in Silicon Valley and Wall Street—and an unceasing fight for users' eyeballs—how long could it be before the red envelope war spreads to the U.S.?
I realize how alien the concept of red envelopes is in the U.S. every time I try to describe it to friends: "It's like if Facebook merged with Slack and integrated Venmo into messaging, but a Venmo that had gamification features in its social networking . . . and the money could go straight toward hailing an Uber or buying Fandango tickets."
Facebook has, in fact, emulated WeChat by introducing payments into its Messenger platform, but so far, you can only send money to individuals. In December, PayPal introduced e-cards that allow users to send each other monetary gifts. According to a recent survey conducted by the company, 62% of respondents said they wished they could ask for money as a gift; roughly that same percentage didn't want to give money as a gift because they were worried about it seeming too impersonal. (PayPal tapped home design guru Jonathan Adler to design the cards.) "It's always great to stand out in the marketplace," Patrick Adams, CMO for PayPal North America, told Fast Company.
A direct copy of Red Packets might not work in the U.S. Exchanging red envelopes is a preexisting cultural tradition in China. There's also a higher comfort level with the straightforward gifting of money in China, and an enthusiasm for numerology that makes sending a string of numbers more significant there.
And China's digital environment is an utterly unique beast: WeChat is so all-encompassing, largely because the government blocks foreign competitors who are less easy to control and censor. (Facebook and Twitter are largely inaccessible on the mainland, though Facebook's WhatsApp is available.) According to a December report by security researchers at Citizen Lab, over 170 phrases can trigger censorship of messages on WeChat, including "Free Tibet" and "ISIS crisis." Even users outside of China are subject to censoring.
China's later adoption of the internet also suggests that users are more open to trying new things. WeChat's pay-to-unblur-a-photo gimmick was considered a successful marketing stunt in China, but could conjure up awkward associations in the U.S. Just ask Snapchat, which upon launching Snapcash, gained a reputation as a platform for performers to collect money for stripteases.
Introducing payments into group chats can also have ethical and legal implications. In early November, a candidate for postgraduate student representative at the University of Hong Kong Council was accused of bribing voters by sending out Red Packets. Ming Pao newspaper reported that the council decided not to investigate because the amounts of money involved were small, totaling just RMB 80, or about $13.
But what if those amounts were bigger? What if, among several WeChat groups supporting different institutions, political candidates, issues, etc., one gains a reputation for being especially generous with the flow of red envelopes? A tech reporter named Wendy Tang told the Hong Kong Free Press that it's the "norm" for users to send out envelopes when asking for favors—for example, a writer asking friends to share an article of theirs. Again, the amounts involved are usually tiny, and the envelopes are generally viewed as fun but meaningless. But in such a system, it seems easy for those with money to effectively drown out those without.
Moreover, something like Red Packets could run afoul of U.S. gambling regulators. Illegal WeChat gambling groups have already attracted government scrutiny in China. In some groups, users place bets on the randomized digits that the app generates when dividing an envelope among the group. Others gamble on sporting events and use red envelopes to settle up. In response, Tencent imposed limits on 8,000 WeChat groups and curtailed payment and Red Packets functionality on more than 6,000 accounts. Staying on top of such groups will no doubt be an ongoing problem for Tencent.
During last year's Spring Festival, WeChat staged a "shake your phone" promotion in Times Square. Image: Tencent
A final obstacle, as slow-to-catch-on ApplePay knows: There's a lot more competition in the U.S. Preexisting payment options like credit cards, ATM machines sitting right next to cash registers, and even paper checks are far more entrenched in the U.S. than in China. U.S. tech companies are battling not only each other—at the app, OS, and hardware level—but also retailers and banks to lure consumers to one of an ever-widening array of mobile payment solutions.
For instance, Starbucks, Dunkin' Donuts, and Taco Bell have all reported sales boosts, thanks to successful in-house payment apps and rewards programs. (According to a survey by Point, 94% of consumers say they'd be more likely to use a mobile wallet if they could earn and redeem rewards.) At TechCrunch, John Mannes argues that brands have an incentive to create their own payment solutions and hold onto valuable customer data, rather than handing it to an outside player like ApplePay.
That said, U.S. tech companies are already following the WeChat playbook in plenty of other ways. Facebook just hired a WeChat executive, and its new Messenger features—including payments, games, and the ability to hail Ubers—have somecalling it a WeChat clone. Twitter has announced that it's adding stickers, a WeChat staple that began on Japan's Line app. Kik's CEO has spent the last year calling his company the "WeChat of the West," after securing $50 million in funding from Tencent. And Apple's new iOS 10 features changes to iMessage seem lifted from Asian apps, like auto-"emojify" and animated "bubble effects."
It wouldn't be a huge leap for Apple or some other messaging titan to copy one more thing. Maybe it can't be red envelopes per se, but it could be similar and more regulator-friendly. To really take off, it should be fun, utilize some combination of social interaction and gamification, should tap into existing IRL habits, and find a way to make money exchange mean more than simply money exchange. Any company that can do that successfully will leave its competitors seeing red.
A one-item to-do list, smarter ways to email, and productive procrastination: We've gathered the best ways to get more done this year.
There is no one definitive strategy to being productive, and it may take a little trial and error to find what works best for you. But if you've resolved to make 2017 the year you finally slay your to-do list every day, it can help to find out what's worked for some of the most productive people.
In that spirit, we turned to some of our top experts and contributors to find out what approaches keep them productive all year long, in the hopes that a few of these can help you do the same in the year ahead.
The early bird only catches the worm if it plans the night before, says PR strategist Christina Nicholson. "By filling out my specific planner the night before, I don't feel rushed or like I have to get to something right away," an approach that some time-management experts endorse. Simply having a battle plan is like waking up to find your work already started. Right away, Nicholson finds, the start of her day has "already been scheduled for me"—by her.
"By acknowledging I had limited time, limited bandwidth, and too much to do, and forcing myself to choose just one thing and getting it done every day, I wound up accomplishing some of my most important goals," she says.
"The more I walk, the more ideas I have," says Ellevest founder and CEO Sallie Krawcheck, opting for a low-tech productivity approach. "I put on some well-worn background music—so I only half pay attention to it—and go. Sometimes I get only an idea or two, but sometimes they come fast and furious and I'll stop repeatedly to write them down."
These impromptu solo brainstorms have proved surprisingly fruitful. "I can come up with four to eight ideas for newsletter updates, business initiatives, website improvements, people I should connect—you name it—over a four-mile walk."
"Some think that stopping work on a project is a failure," says Viv Goldstein, leader for global innovation acceleration at GE, but backing away when you're no longer adding value is crucial. "Don't be afraid to stop work," she says. "It creates capacity to work on things that truly matter and ends up saving time, energy, and resources."
This includes mental resources that can ebb and flow. Allen Gannett, CEO of the marketing analytics company TrackMaven, says that just being "willing to switch between projects to match my mood, I get much more done in a typical day.
"For example, if I'm working on a client presentation and I start to notice my attention waning," Gannett explains, "I'll go and answers emails for 30 minutes rather than just sit there pretending to continue working." He hasn't given up for good, just for the time being. "Usually by the end of that time, I'm ready to dive back into the presentation—and I got a dozen emails done" in the meantime.
You may think that to truly be productive, you need to stop procrastinating, but it might be better to embrace it. "I love procrastinating, and I've come to grips with the fact that I'll never stop procrastinating," confides Tacklebox Accelerator founder Brian Scordato. "So I make an effort to only do things I love when procrastinating—exercise, [spend] time with friends and family, etc." That's helped put his less productive time to better use. It "eliminates the time-wasters we usually procrastinate with," so you can get back to work without feeling guilty.
If many of these tips sound pretty low-tech, count on a futurist to change that. Liz Alexander relies on a scheduling app to keep her schedule in order. "In an average week, I probably have a dozen or more people wanting to get onto my calendar. It used to take three or four emails just to nail down a single appointment," she says. But after outsourcing that "tedious back-and-forth" to Calendly, Alexander says she's found more time "to do more revenue-generating work."
We waste inordinate amounts of time just yapping, says writer and designer Lisa Baird. "Conversations get so much further, so much faster when you close your mouth, open your ears, deprioritize your own agenda, and truly understand someone else's."
That matters more as organizations get flatter, says Baird. "Today's consensus mode of doing business, where everyone has veto power, makes the notion of 'stop talking' a crucial productivity tool if you want to design or ship anything at all."
How? "Ask open-ended questions, but sparingly," she cautions. "Speak just enough to get the ball rolling, then be quiet. Suffer silently through awkward pauses." Baird admits that "this may feel a little weird, since most of us view productivity as doing, doing, doing." But it's the most efficient method she's found for "moving from thought to action," especially on teams.
"I'm a huge fan of the Boomerang plugin for Gmail," says The Muse cofounder and CEO Kathryn Minshew. "I use it to schedule emails to disappear out of my inbox and 'boomerang' back in at a later date, like '7:15 a.m. Tuesday' or '5 p.m. Friday'."
MailChimp's VP of customer support Jon Smith does something similar by pushing less urgent but important emails into a small handful of folders, leaving the most crucial ones marked "unread," and archiving the rest.
This way Smith's top-priority messages stay front and center. "I try to have no more than 60–70 emails in my inbox at any given time," he explains. "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."
Behavioral scientist David Hoffeld prefers "preloaded decisions that link a behavior with an external reference," which researchers in his field have found can increase the likelihood of completing a task. These "action triggers" are simple formulas, Hoffeld explains: "When X happens, I do Y".
While working on his latest book, Hoffeld would decide earlier in the day to do some writing after putting his kids to bed, and "then when that time came, I simply sat down and wrote for a few hours," he says. "Preloading this decision and connecting it to an environmental stimulus enabled me to avoid decision fatigue, and gave me a boost in productivity."
"Productivity is really about what you don't do," says Jocelyn K. Glei, author of Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done. Glei proposes sitting down and listing six to 10 things "that you commit to not do in 2017 because they are keeping you from focusing on your best work." Think of them as your anti-resolutions, she suggests—"things like not sleeping with your smartphone in the bedroom, not opening your email first thing when you arrive at work, or not checking social media before lunch."
Psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic backs her up. He says that "saying 'no' to irrelevant tasks, or outsourcing them" is the real secret to productivity. "Realize what you love and do well, and focus on that."
If you plan your day well, 40 hours should be enough time to get your job done.
It's no secret that most Americans work more than 40 hours a week, but are those extra hours necessary? "So many people say, 'I have to do this,' but they might just be putting those expectations on themselves," says Maura Thomas, productivity expert, author, and founder of RegainYourTime.com. Many people make assumptions about what their boss wants without ever testing the waters to find out if it's true.
"You shouldn't need to work more than 40 hours a week consistently," says Tracey Gritz, productivity expert and owner of The Efficient Office. If you're getting ready to go on vacation or you're working on a big project, you might need to clock more than 40 hours a week, but as a general rule, 40 hours a week should be sufficient to get your job done, Gritz says.
Productivity experts offer six practical tips that will help you to consistently work a 40-hour week in 2017.
Most employees have no idea what all their tasks, assignments, and deadlines are because most people keep the things they need to do scattered everywhere—in email, their calendar, a notebook, and on lists. "It's like trying to do a puzzle with all the pieces in different rooms," Thomas says. It's much harder to step away from work when you don't know all your assignments and deadlines, she says.
Thomas recommends spending 30 minutes to an hour compiling every task and deadline into a single list that is either available as an electronic document that can be reordered, sorted, or divided, or entered into a task app like Todoist or Wunderlist that allows you to set categories and due dates, and create reminders and alerts. "Most people will make this long list on paper, but then the only choice we have is to add a task to the bottom of list," she says. "Sometimes that's not the best place for it."
Defining your goals and priorities will help you work less and will have the greatest impact on your workload, Gritz says. Limit your goals to no more than three, she recommends, because when someone sets 12 goals, it's impossible to accomplish anything. Then set your priorities, which are typically more personal, such as not reading email during dinner, using all your vacation time each year, or spending Friday nights with your family. "Everything you do has to align 100% with your goals and priorities," she says.
When a colleague asks for help on a project, it's hard to say no, and it's even more difficult to turn down your boss, but, says Gritz, it's important to say no to any task that doesn't align with your goals and priorities. The next time a coworker asks for help, she says, simply respond: "Thanks for thinking of me for this project, but right now I have full plate with my current workload." And if your boss asks for assistance, gently push back by saying, "If I do this today, of these three tasks, which one can I push to a new deadline? What would work for you?"
Each morning, identify one to three tasks you will accomplish that day, and don't feel like you have to pick three, Gritz says. Some days you can only accomplish one task, and that's okay, she says. Rather then making "reading email" your first task, Gritz suggests diving into a more creative assignment first. "When we check email first thing in the morning, we get sucked into everyone else's goals and priorities, and we end up meeting theirs, not ours," she says. Also, beware of checking social media in the morning. If you see an email or a social media post that upsets or annoys you, it will lower your creativity and energy, Gritz says.
The simplest way to leave work on time is to turn off your computer's email notifications and shut off your smartphone while you're working on a project, Gritz says. It's common to receive a distracting email that takes you away from your goal for the day, she says. "If you took out interruptions, you could work an eight-hour day," she says.
Set an alert on your calendar 30 minutes before quitting time to remind yourself to wrap up your work and get ready to leave, says Paige Lichens, a licensed yoga and meditation teacher and independent consultant. Before you walk out the door, reflect on everything you've accomplished and review your tasks for the next day, says LinkedIn Career Expert Catherine Fisher. "This will ensure that when you come in the next day, you are always one step ahead," Fisher says. "Feeling organized will help you maintain peace of mind so you're less inclined to check your work email or tackle tasks after hours."
Time to stop reviewing resumes? One expert explains why past performance is a bad predictor of success.
In theory, hiring new people should be exciting. In practice, it rarely is. As you kick off the new year, there may be some open positions you're looking to fill. In an ideal world, the hires you'll make in 2017 will upgrade your talent pool, inject fresh blood and new energy to your team, and address a skills gap in your organization. More likely, you'll settle for someone capable but not outstanding, or possibly a second- or third-choice candidate—that is, unless you do something about it.
Here are a few ways to change up your approach and make smarter, more effective hires in the year ahead.
A recent industry report suggested that even the most successful companies in the world are dissatisfied with their talent identification processes.
This is unfortunate. If you can't get the right people into the right roles, it will be harder to motivate them, more expensive to train them, and a challenge to retain them—not to mention tough to get rid of them if you need to. The lesson is therefore clear: Bad hires are costly, so you should take recruitment seriously. Hire slow and fire fast, not the other way around.
While the science of personnel selection is robust and well established, it's rarely applied. Most companies play it by ear or follow untested recipes, or even methods that are known to be inadequate. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the typical job interview, which tends to be unstructured and is therefore a poor indicator of potential. Likewise, resumes and recommendation letters are only weakly related to future job performance, particularly when the role or organizational culture changes.
Many recruiters and hiring managers are reluctant to adopt more scientific methods, imagining their roles involve as least as much art as science. But the body of research has been growing for decades, and tools like reliable psychometric tests or well-designed structured interviews can be powerful predictors of future performance. Still, they're rarely deployed in the selection process.
It's tempting to evaluate people based on their past achievements, but performance often doesn't always let hiring managers generalize from one context to another.
Unfortunately, people are often hired because of their resumes, yet what matters most isn't what a candidate has already accomplished but the qualities that have led to those accomplishments—particularly when they're likely to drive high levels of performance in the future. What people have done in the past may be the closest-to-hand evidence for what they can do in the present, but it's probably less reliable than you might imagine.
This is especially true when it comes to assessing young candidates whose past job experience is limited. Moreover, if you're looking to invest in someone who can become a future leader—who will ultimately build and maintain a high-performing team—their individual performance is of limited use. Many candidates will be great individual contributors but fail to do well as managers or leaders. By the same token, some people may be average individual contributors but excellent managers, thanks to their ability to engage and develop others.
All this means it's crucial in the year ahead for hiring managers to de-emphasize past performance and look for some new ways to test current competencies.
Smart people working in large organizations have a phenomenal capacity for making simple things complex, especially in their hiring practices.
Big companies tend to spend a great deal of time and money coming up with extensive "competency models," highlighting the key attributes they look for in new employees. These models are rarely original—a camel is a horse designed by a committee—and they're often too complex to be adopted by most hiring managers, who need a simple but solid guideline.
To paraphrase Karl Popper, models can be accurate or useful, but they're rarely both. As my own firm's scientific review of the hiring field has shown, the raw ingredients of potential always come down to three things: ability, likability, and drive. Everything else is window-dressing.
So whether you're hiring sales reps or software developers, you want them to have curiosity and a decently high IQ, high emotional intelligence, and ambition. Of course, the level of each will vary according to the job, and so does the importance of each of these three components from one role to another. But the basic puzzle pieces are the same everywhere.
That means there's really no need to complicate things further. When a candidate gets high marks in all three categories, they will almost certainly perform well. With two out of three, they will probably be about average. With one out of three, there's likely to be some sort of liability, or else you'll just end up spending a lot of money to develop them. Because when selection falls short, training and development costs invariably follow.
HR professionals have largely bought into the idea that someone's potential rests on their innate strengths. But this feel-good suggestion isn't just misguided; some researchers suggest it's likely to harm your organization. Even the most talented and productive people have downsides to their personalities, and ignoring these less-desirable elements can get them and others into trouble.
Regardless of how talented someone is, they can only develop new strengths by identifying their weaknesses, a word that's rarely used in mainstream HR circles, where flaws are more referred to as "developmental opportunities." The truth is we all have both strengths and weaknesses, and when you're vetting a job candidate you need to screen for both. Otherwise you'll end up with only an incomplete picture of who they are.
In other words, talking about someone's "potential" is too often a lopsided conversation, overly focused on their potential to do good, rather than their potential to do harm. In reality, potential has a bright side and a dark side, and the best hires will simply have more of the former than the latter. So don't just explore the relative drawbacks to hiring a certain candidate, or ask, "What do you consider your biggest weakness?" in an interview and leave it at that. Try to get a good handle on the negative elements on of a candidate's personality—the things that can't exactly be "developed"—and make sure you can work well with those, too.
Here's the thing, by way of closing: None of these suggestions are all that new. But as 2017 gets underway, there are still plenty of organizations that haven't even begun to consider taking them on board. The costs of that are pretty clear, and the businesses that wise up first will gain the biggest leads over competitors in the ever-tightening race for talent.
Sure, you could shoot for that promotion or raise. Or you could set these goals to radically change how you approach your work.
Instead of setting the same vague goals year after year, try these six unexpected career resolutions that experts say could make you happier, more engaged, and even more successful in your work.
Many people are disenchanted with the state of the world, Harlan says. Think about the changes you need to make to feel more fulfilled overall. "Think about the organization you're working with: What do they do, or what does my team do that creates a positive impact in the world? Look for what choices you can make, and actions you can take, that are going to bring you more meaning," she says. That may mean making changes in your career to get the fulfillment you're seeking, or readjusting the rewards you seek from work and other areas of your life.
Try to let go of the negative emotions and take a more analytical approach, Newmark says. What is the person's motivation for taking objectionable action? Usually, it's more about them than about you. "I realized that almost all the things that have ever been unpleasant—somebody yelling at me or whatever—really weren't about me. I've learned that you shouldn't take these things personally," she says. You don't have to be a doormat, but you also don't have to waste energy on grudges.
Sure, you want to make sure you can prove your case for what you're asking, but you can always make up excuses about why you're not ready, she says. The longer you put off asking for a raise, promotion, or other career goal, the longer you're likely going to wait for it. Sometimes, you just have to go for it. You don't have to be 110% ready—75% to 80% ready is fine, she says. (Or even 51%.)
Whether you're supervising staff or just interacting with your fellow team members, showing confidence in the abilities of those around you may not seem like an obvious resolution. But trusting your teammates and employees, encouraging them, and supporting them in their own stretch goals is going to strengthen your relationships—and make those around you stronger, enabling you to accomplish your goals, too, Newmark says.
If you're serious about reaching that goal, Harlan recommends finding an accountability partner or group. When selecting a person or group to keep you honest and on task, accomplishments don't matter as much as their dedication to staying committed to moving forward with their own goals—and expecting you to do the work to achieve your own.
A 2015 study from researchers at Dominican University of California measured the impact of accountability on goal achievement. More than 70% of study participants who sent weekly updates to a friend either completely accomplished their goal or were more than halfway there compared to 35% of those who didn't share their goals or write them down.
Elster says this might not be the most surprising resolution, but to move forward, it's important to understand the obstacles in your way. Do you have a boss who isn't helping you develop in your career? Are you a "yes" person who takes on too much to the detriment of your professional development? Use this resolution-setting time to really think about the actions you need to take to clear those obstacles and get to where you want to go, she says.
"What trap are you caught in that you can try to break down?" Elster says. "Look at how you can break free from anything that's holding you back."
It's not enough to simply say you want your organization to be more diverse. Here are tangible ways you can make it happen.
In recent years, many companies have been emphasizing their dedication to diversity. But what does that really mean? If we look at Silicon Valley, whose diversity numbers continue to be shaky, saying doesn't necessarily mean doing.
In fact, a recent LinkedIn study found that, despite the heightened press, a majority of tech leaders don't know what they are actually doing to make their organizations more diverse. And unless real action is taken, 2017 won't bring about any seismic changes.
For most companies, creating a more diverse and inclusive landscape involves doing away with common myths. As organizations begin think about the next year's goals, here are some ways to help bring about a more diverse workspace.
Executives trying to make excuses for their poor diversity showings often point to what's called the "pipeline problem." The issue, as they see it, is that for technical roles, there simply aren't enough qualified diverse candidates. The problem with this argument is it's simply not true. Numerous studies show that there is an abundance of women and non-white people with applicable skills.
So if a company is trying to make an honest and concerted effort to create a more diverse workforce, they must first acknowledge that the issue isn't a lack of candidates. And if they are only seeing a certain type of candidate, then they should begin to source talent from new places.
It's not enough to simply say you have an open mind: Employers must actively look for talent in new places. Companies often rely on word of mouth or referrals by current employees. This creates a circle of like-minded people with often similar backgrounds. Instead, employers can approach new sources—different universities, for instance—to find candidates outside of their networks.
Companies like Github have been working to create partnerships with programs and universities that train technology talent from underrepresented backgrounds. While it's easy to look within your network and find people who fit the description, this perpetuates a homogeneous work culture.
Perhaps the most important way to make your company more diverse is to force yourself to think outside the box. As explained in the last step, instead of just choosing the top five applications from Ivy League alums, make sure you are bringing a concert of voices to the table. Pinterest's chief diversity officer, Candice Morgan, told Fast Company at our Innovation Festival that the company interviews at least one woman and one person from an underrepresented background for all leadership roles.
And it helps to remove as much bias in decision making as possible. Recruiters can do their job blindly so that only qualifications can be seen.
But avoiding bias goes beyond just hiring. It's making sure that people within a company are aware of how they present themselves to each other. To help with this, companies can bring in trained counselors to lead bias training exercises. Morgan added that she implemented this at Pinterest, too.
For many, simply looking at a company's demographic makeup is enough to know whether or not it's diverse. But that is not enough. While companies may be hiring people from divergent backgrounds, what's important to know is whether they are fostering their success. One of the biggest problems non-white and non-male employees face is a non-inclusive culture. So other statistics like employee retention reveal whether or not companies are succeeding. And if they aren't, companies need to look critically at the reasons why.
Another way to foster a more diverse work climate is to ensure that everyone is excelling at their job at a similar rate. That is, promotion velocity for people from diverse backgrounds is proportional to others. These statistics help illustrate a fuller picture about how a company is progressing and changing its culture. It also signals to potential new hires that it cares. Overall, by analyzing numbers beyond mere demographic makeup, companies can better strategize for the future.
The most important thing to emphasize is that this isn't just for appearance. Cultivating a diverse workforce has business effects. If a company is simply trying to hire more minority employees to make itself look good, then it's not solving the problem. A diverse body of employees ensures that the business is serving all potential clients.
A McKinsey study concluded that diversity drives better results. The ultimate point of building a more diverse team is to make an organization more successful in the long run.
Overall, vowing to make a company more inclusive and diverse requires understanding what many underrepresented people face in the workforce and coupling that with why organizations should be more proactive in recruiting them. This conversation is anything but new, yet most industries are making scant gains. The only way to overcome that is to analyze what the underlying problem is. Following that, they can formulate a strategy to build better, stronger, and more successful teams. It's as easy as that.
Startup Noom reveals 4 key tips to help you keep that "New Year, New You" slim-down resolution.
So 2017 is finally here and once again you're determined to get healthy and drop those extra pounds. You and millions of others. It's far and away the most popular promise we make as that ball drops in Times Square. Yet sadly, statistically speaking, you're very likely to drop the ball on that get-healthy goal.
Tech innovation is increasingly playing an important part in the laudable bulge battle. Think Fitbit and any number of apps that count calories and log meals. But now there's what Scientific Reports' Nature calls a crucial new tool: artificial intelligence.
The popular app Noom is one of the biggest to turn to AI. An analysis of the results of 35,921 users from 2012 to 2014 found interesting results: 77.9% of participants reported a decrease in body weight; 25% lost more than 10% of their body weight; and nearly 80% reported they kept the weight off for more than nine months.
The app uses AI to sift through a user's exercise and food logs and suggest personalized diets and changes in fitness regimens to maximize a user's weight loss. The AI also helps educate, suggesting articles that explain things like why whole grain bread is better than white.
But since the study, Noom has added an old-school approach to its data-driven app: real-life weight loss coaches. Actual human beings.
Noom's president, Artem Petakov, told Fast Company that he's seeing even greater success that takes all the calories in/calories out math that most apps gather and turns it into motivation. Personalized programs start at about $45 a month.
The data entered by users goes to their coach's dashbord and then the coach offers immediate feedback—and empathy—to keep clients on track.
Noom's mantra is that to change your body, you have to change your brain.
"We all have low will power," says Petakov, who has a background in both artificial intelligence and cognitive therapy psychology. "It's not about the strength of one's willpower; it's about behavioral change. And behavioral change is a skill that can be learned.
"You analyze what contributed to the bad behavior becoming a habit so you can learn its cause and then you can take the cause to replace it with a better behavior," says Petakov. "This is a process that can be learned just like math or a foreign language can be learned."
Noom made a refreshingly honest appraisal of the data it gathered: AI is not a cure-all and can't do what a chat with a human coach in real time can do.
"In May we took the bold step of discontinuing all of the programs that are purely AI, and going for a hybrid approach," says Petakov. "What we found is that with a human coach the results for users were about three times better, as opposed to just having an AI-based coach."
AI cannot match the live coach's ability to understand and identify the emotional processes and thought patterns that trigger bad eating behavior, Petakov says.
"We tried points. We tried badges. We tried levels. None are as powerful as (another person at) keeping somebody motivated, on track, and excited in the tough moments. It's having an accountability buddy. There's a reason why programs like AA and the other accountability programs are effective," says Petakov.
Noom discovered that coaches who get their clients to identify their motivation for getting healthier have more success. Promising you'll buy yourself a new Xbox if you drop two pant sizes has one major problem: In the end you'll probably get that Xbox even if you fail.
So whether it's to fit into that dress for your reunion or to set a healthy example for a child, keeping a user's eye on why they want to change their habits is another key.
"Identify your fundamental intrinsic motivations and then pick the reward really carefully and make sure it is meaningful," says Petakov.
"You aren't going to do yourself any good if you start a weight-loss program before you can fully commit to seeing it through," says Petakov. "So make sure you are ready. If you quit halfway you won't see any results and you will have put in a bunch of work and that will just discourage you in the future from trying again."
"Don't go into it with an 'I might try this' kind of attitude. Take the plunge and really give it a really serious shot. That is the way to get the motivational wheel going. And once you start seeing some results then you will feel like you want to keep going until you eventually achieve your desired goal."
Even if you've got normal ears, the IQbuds' audio-enhancing technology can help take the stress out of noisy environments.
I have good hearing. In a hearing test, I can make out softly spoken words and quiet tones at a variety of frequencies. But stepping into a loud bar or restaurant, I'll often turn around and walk right back out. Not only does the noise frazzle my nerves, I get exhausted trying to discern voices from background clatter. That puts me in the target market for a new class of smart Bluetooth earbuds, such as Nuheara's $299 IQbuds.
Equipped with built-in microphones, the IQbuds process ambient audio in real time before feeding it to your ears. That allows you to customize how you hear, such as muting background noise, boosting the voices of people you're talking to, or layering streaming music with ambient sounds so that both come through clearly. Though the buds, which are due to ship around March, aren't hearing aids, IQbuds claims that they do aid hearing. It's a delicate legal and rhetorical dance that the company hopes will provide appeal to a much bigger market than it could reach with a regulated medical device.
Nuheara isn't alone in this market. In fact it's been overshadowed by a very well-funded rival, Doppler Labs, which is preparing a very similar product. I have tried Nuheara's IQbuds and Doppler's Here One and found promise in both, but they have been prototypes with potentially deal-breaking flaws like echoes, tinny sounds, and clunky interfaces that the manufacturers assured me would get fixed in the final version.
Recently, however, Nuheara handed me a pair IQbuds fresh off the assembly line, equipped with final software, to demonstrate how well they really work.
All sound processing takes place within the 5-gram IQbuds.
My first question was whether IQbuds could filter out noise without distorting other sounds. It turned out that some distortion was inevitable, although the effects are often so slight that I stopped noticing. "At the end of the day, we are processing sound," says David Cannington, the cofounder of Australia-based Nuheara, acknowledging that there will be some artifacts from the digital manipulation. As we talk in a noisy café, on a busy street corner, and especially at a crowded restaurant in downtown San Francisco, he sounds a skosh tinny, but his words are easier to distinguish than with a naked ear.
Cannington and his cofounder Justin Miller dealt with sound in much rougher settings at Miller's previous company, Sensear. The Australian firm makes heavy-duty headsets for workers in the mining and petroleum industries. Sensear's headsets have to block dangerous levels of background noise but filter through speech so that workers can communicate. "They'd wear bricks on their ears just to be able to hear," says Cannington. Recent advances in headset chip technology have allowed Nuheara to pack similar capabilities into in-ear buds weighing less than 0.2 ounces apiece. (Nuheara claims up to seven hours runtime from the tiny rechargeable batteries squeezed into them.)
When Cannington and I meet for lunch at a restaurant, it's the third time I've tried IQbuds, and the first time with final software. The place is practically empty, and I'm wondering how I'll be able to judge the performance in such a quiet spot. Nevertheless, I try on the buds, inserting the tip in my ear canal and then twisting the whole device—clockwise in the left ear and counterclockwise in the right—to lock it in. It's a similar process with Doppler's Here One. Both products come with a selection of ear-canal tips; Cannington and I have selected small ones for my little ears. I have to occasionally twist the buds to keep them in tight. Otherwise, they feel fine.
They don't sound fine, though: Cannington's voice seems to be coming through an old cellphone with bad reception. It's tinny, hollow, and echoey; and I can't believe this is as good as it gets. It's not. The voice-enhancing feature, called SINC (Super Intelligent Noise Cancellation), is turned up all the way. "The whole purpose of SINC is to elevate speech frequencies and to drop the background noise," says Cannington. Hearing loss typically begins in the higher frequencies that correspond to most voices (like Cannington's Aussie twang), and the primary goal of a hearing aid—which Cannington keeps saying his product is not—is to make voices clear.
"I think that people that come into a situation like this and struggle to separate speech from background noise are not going to worry about the tininess, because they can hear the speech," he says. Having normal hearing, I don't need such a boost. I dial back the virtual control knob to about three quarters on the iPhone app (the buds will also support Android), and the audio-processing artifacts mostly go away. Within an hour they will essentially disappear.
The SINC control often disappears, too. It looks almost identical to the app's virtual knob for controlling the volume of all sound—speech, background noise, and music or cellphone calls coming in through Bluetooth. (The app, connected to the IQbuds by Bluetooth, is only required to make adjustments. The headphones can function otherwise without a phone.) Another similar-looking screen features a graphic equalizer to further emphasize or de-emphasize certain sounds. I pick a setting that softens both the very lowest and very highest frequencies to further dampen background noise.
Yet another screen features eight equalizer presets for specific environments, like Restaurant, Workout, Plane, or Music. I frantically take notes and capture screen shots, trying to make sense of all the options.
Distinguishing the different app screens can be confusing.
Doppler's app, though slicker, is not so different. The audio principles remain the same, and they can be confusing to navigate. People with "real" hearing aids—those approved by the Food and Drug Administration—generally go through a fitting process with an audiologist to optimize adjustments for their specific hearing deficiencies. Prospective Nuheara or Doppler customers are garden-variety consumers who may not have documented hearing loss and just want to tweak their audio experience. (Doppler's app does have a setup program that customizes audio settings for each ear.)
The best hearing aids from companies like Starkey, which cost thousands of dollars apiece, can assess the environment and automatically choose the right settings—something Nuheara says it would like to enable. Despite proudly showing me all the features in the app, Cannington concedes that most people won't use them. "My belief is that a majority of people will want to elevate speech in a noisy environment, so they'll have it in Restaurant mode," he says.
The included case holds a battery that provides three charges. (Doppler offers a similar case.)
Eventually, the quiet restaurant fills up with diners. Cannington launches a smartphone sound-meter app. It measures background noise levels fluctuating between 81 and 87 decibels—around the level (85dB) that can cause hearing damage over prolonged workplace exposure, according to the U.S. government's Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
I take the buds out to judge if they've really made a difference. A roar of sound fills my ears, and Cannington's voice recedes into the background. I have to concentrate on his specific tone to distinguish it from the general clatter. Conversing has suddenly become a chore.
Cannington smiles when I describe the experience. "This concept of stress reduction—it's underestimated," he says. "And what I mean by that is, you come to a restaurant like this, you start straining and increasing the level of your voice. There's a level of stress that goes with that." I think he's right: My instinct is to get out of this place.
I put the buds back in and realize that I've forgotten about that tinny effect that annoyed me at first. Has it gone away as I made further adjustments? Have I grown accustomed to it? No matter what Cannington sounds like through the IQbuds, it's so much better than straining to hear him without them.
"For someone like you who doesn't have hearing loss, we're helping you have a better hearing experience," says Cannington. "People who have got slight hearing loss, we're helping even more." He's in the latter group, with some high-frequency hearing loss, he tells me. At 57, he's also in the 35- to 60-year old target market that Nuheara is aiming for—the age of most people who backed the product on Indiegogo.
That's different from Doppler, whose 29-year-old CEO, Noah Kraft, is targeting more of a hipster crowd. Doppler's ads feature attractive, fashion-forward young people, and the company promoted its previous, simpler product through sales at the 2016 Coachella music festival. Doppler does have a hearing rights advocate on staff, and Kraft says that the company could make devices to address any level of hearing loss.
The FDA recently loosened regulations for hearing aids, making it easier to purchase them without first having a medical exam. That doesn't have any immediate effect on Nuheara or Doppler, but the FDA has also said that it wants to encourage innovation in audio products from consumer electronics companies.
Something I have learned from my experiences with these devices: Even without a diagnosed hearing impairment, there are many times in this noisy world when my hearing is impaired. It's stressful enough to limit the places I go, or at least my enjoyment in going there. "This is the whole reason why we built the product," says Cannington, "to take back control of that auditory world."
The R-8 and R-9, priced at under $1,000 and $1,800 respectively, aim to make high-end AR affordable.
With the arrival of consumer virtual reality, get used to seeing a lot more people wearing headsets that transport them to different worlds. Today, San Francisco-based Osterhaut Design Group (ODG) unveiled its two latest products, the R-8 and R-9 smart glasses, each capable of a wide variety of augmented- and virtual reality functions, displaying high-quality video, and most features offered by any high-end Android tablet.
The former, aimed at early adopters and "light" enterprise companies, costs under $1,000. The latter, targeted at commercial enterprises, will run $1,799. Both use Qualcomm's latest and most powerful mobile processor, the Snapdragon 835, and each will be available in the second half of 2017.
R-8
ODG has been in the smart glasses business for years, and its R-7 system has been adopted by hundreds of companies and is in use across a wide variety of industries, such as health care, automotive, energy and oil and gas, mining, warehousing, aerospace, and others. The company plans to continue selling and supporting the R-7, meaning that for the first time, it will maintain three separate platforms, each focusing on a different target market.
Because each of its glasses offer a unique, high-end experience capable of displaying what appears to be a large HD-quality screen (the size depends on the model), ODG has attracted some impressive investors and partners. In the U.S., 20th Century Fox has invested in the company and is providing content based on its hit films. ODG has also partnered with China Mobile's MIGU to introduce the devices in China.
ODG is playing a long game, but COO Pete Jameson believes that smart glasses are going to be the next great mobile platform, a natural evolution of devices that have gone from the desktop to our pockets to our hands, and eventually onto our bodies.
Already, we're seeing the emergence of wearable augmented reality devices like Microsoft's HoloLens, the Meta 2, and eventually, Magic Leap. But ODG says its already in the market with its devices, and that unlike the others mentioned above, none of the R-7, R-8, or R-9 rely on being physically connected by wires or cables to any other computing devices.
R-9
Rather, each of ODG's smart glasses connect to a mobile phone via Bluetooth LE. That's a significant differentiator, Jameson said, because it means that the devices can be taken and used anywhere, even in harsh environments or places where being physically tethered to a computer isn't possible—atop a utility pole, under a truck, in the rain, and so on.
As Nima Shams, ODG's vice president of head-worn products, explains it, the company's glasses are built around three pillars: cinema-quality graphics; full integration on the device; and extreme mobility. That's because, he added, the genesis of ODG was creating devices that could be used by professionals in gritty environments where nothing else would work.
The R-9, which is meant for the prosumer market, offers the equivalent of a 110-inch HD-quality screen at 10 feet away. That means that, although the device itself weighs under 120 grams, once you strap it on, you're looking at a very powerful screen that displays sharp graphics, crisp fonts, and is capable of delivering rich video experiences, anything from the latest movies for someone looking for in-flight entertainment to in-depth schematics for a field technician.
That video experience is powered by dual 1080p displays, individually driven to each eye. The R-9 also features two cameras, a 13-megapixel, full 4K HD sensor, as well as a fisheye lens. Together, they make it possible to track the wearer in physical space, meaning that AR and even VR experiences can be rich, with the kind of full 6-degrees of movement capability that devices like HTC's Vive VR headset offers.
The R-9 also will support add-on modules that will come from both ODG and its partners. They could include enterprise-quality radios, cellular radios (negating the need for a mobile phone), or others.
The R-8, which ODG hopes will break into the high-end consumer market, offers dual 720p screens capable of delivering the equivalent of a 90-inch screen at 10 feet. It also has a fisheye lens and has dual stereo 1080p cameras. The idea there is that users can launch telepresence calls in 3D, or, perhaps, capture and transmit 3D imagery from one R-8 to another.
Both new devices are being unveiled at CES this week, along with a series of content demos from outside developers. During a Fast Company visit to the company's offices last week, the demos were still in unfinished form, yet offered a strong impression of what the glasses can do.
ODG is one of the best-funded augmented reality companies in the world, having raised $58 million to build out its smart glasses operation. Though the market is still nascent, it is hoping to be a leader, and to surpass offerings from its rivals, yet conscious that anything that boosts AR's awareness is good for all, even as many companies vie for the lion's share of a market that is predicted could be worth as much as $90 million by 2020.
Few of us love conflict, but avoiding it is a mistake, says Nate Regier, psychologist and CEO of the leadership-communication consulting firm Next Element. "Conflict is energy and can be used to create instead of destroy," he says.
Instead of running from it, engage conflict positively by being honest about your feelings, offering resources to problem-solve the conflict, and being clear about your boundaries and those things that are non-negotiable, says Regier. And don't agree to disagree: "Instead, agree to struggle with the other person to find common ground," he says.
It can be easy to confuse being busy with being productive, but they are not the same, says Anne Grady, author of 52 Strategies for Life, Love & Work. Being productive involves high-payoff activities.
"A high-payoff activity (HPA) is an activity that brings the greatest result for the time invested," she says. "Twenty percent of the tasks that we do on any given day generate 80% of our results. These are not always the most enjoyable activities, and they aren't always the ones we would choose to do, but they do generate results."
Identify your HPAs by answering these three questions:
What is an activity that you do at work that is the reason your job exists?
What are a few tasks that, if you stopped doing them, the company would have to scramble to figure out a way to get them done?
Which tasks create the highest revenue return or the highest productivity return?
Putting off your life to get things done is another habit to ditch for 2017, says Regier. "It's addictive to do one more thing before you relax, enjoy, or connect with people in your life," he says. "This isn't helpful and reinforces that you are a 'human doing,' not a human being."
Set aside time each day to "cheerfully waste," says Regier. A few minutes to relax, enjoy, or talk with someone about nothing reminds you that you are in charge of time, not the other way around, he says. Also, get out of the office and spend time with people. Make time every day to shut off your computer or phone and connect with people.
Stress is so commonplace, many of us have normalized working with "noise" filling our mind, says Ora Nadrich, mindfulness expert and author of Says Who? How One Simple Question Can Change the Way You Think Forever. Instead, identify negative thoughts that are replaying like a tape loop—such as "I just can't finish the project in the time I've got" or "I can't stand wasting my time sitting through yet another meeting"—and challenge the thought.
"The question to ask it is 'Says who?'" says Nadrich. "Is that your belief? Or did someone else plant that idea in your head? It's amazing what happens when you challenge a thought with a simple question. It disarms its power over us. Most negative thinking was inherited or internalized, and there's no reason to believe it."
If a thought does come from our own head, ask if the belief is helping or hurting you. "If it's ruining our ability to get our work done, we can kick it off the desk," says Nadrich. "It's a powerful way to break the habit of working while stressed."
Start 2017 by firing your inner perfectionist, says human development expert Lois Barth, author of Courage to Sparkle. "Perfectionism is rooted in an outdated belief that we are simply not good enough," she says. "It is a dead end."
Instead, establish a "good enough" approach. "The good-enough approach often gets a bad rap, and lands like you're settling or a slacker, but it's anything but," says Barth, who suggests starting small, taking action, and reminding yourself that you can course correct.
"When we fire our perfectionist and allow ourselves to grow in dynamic ways, we have a better chance of staying motivated and on track with our goals," she says. "The pursuit of our dreams becomes a far more fulfilling experience."
If you are a stickler for details, following everything to the letter, you could be sabotaging your chance for success because you're too rigid, says Vicky Oliver, author of Bad Bosses, Crazy Coworkers and Other Office Idiots.
"Sometimes rigidity is hard to shake because it may have helped the person in the past," she says. "Having high standards is often the silver lining of being quite rigid. But in a team environment, the rigid coworker needs to realize she is being intractable and let go."
Instead, pick your battles. "It's an acknowledgment that you absolutely positively cannot win every battle," says Oliver. "Pick your battles and, by inference, let a lot of things go. You will live longer and you will live to fight another day at the office."
Moving from aspiration to achievement takes commitment, but many of us believe talent and luck are sufficient, says Suparna Rajaram, a professor of psychology at Stony Brook University.
"Psychological research increasingly shows that grit, a mind-set to learn the needed skills, and sheer practice are necessary ingredients for accomplishing big or small tasks," she says. "When people lose sight of these steps, they look elsewhere to explain why they cannot complete a project on time. A continued pattern of this behavior can make us look outside for explanations, and one outcome of this can result in making excuses."
Excuses hold us back from doing the work it takes to succeed or getting a clear understanding of reality. "There will be times when we lose or don't get what we want or deserve," says Rajaram. "Accepting that reality can reduce the impulse to make excuses."
The workplace is becoming more complex and a new skill set is required to find success, says Richard V. Perrone, chair of the department of human services and psychology at Beacon College. "Folks that are being left behind or held back at work likely are clinging to habits and practices that worked in the past, however, what they quickly find is the reality is just the opposite," he says. "These are the people who have difficulty relating well to the complexities of today's workplace."
To succeed, you must repackage your current skills or learn new skills. "This can be done by thinking beyond the specific function of a task and looking at the task and how it connects to the overall work environment," says Perrone. "Employees need to accept some level of uncertainty and frustration while they take intelligent risks in getting a positive foothold within their work environment."
None of these skills will appear in a job description, but they can help make you one of the most indispensable people in the office.
You may have resolved to lose weight or exercise more this year, but what about resolving to become a better employee? Your efforts could make you indispensable (and could even get you promoted).
No matter what industry you work in, here is some practical advice on how to be your best self at work every day of 2017.
Don't overlook the value of less-tangible skills like emotional intelligence or "EQ" in succeeding at work. The World Economic Forum said it will be one of the top 10 job skills by 2020 because people with high EQ handle pressure well, know how to cooperate with others, are open to feedback, and empathetic. Who doesn't want to be around more people like that?
To develop more emotional intelligence start by practicing active listening. To get better at this, Harvey Deutschendorf recommends pretending you'll be tested after your chat and ask them to clarify statements so you can really understand what they are telling you. He also suggests opening yourself up to talk about yourself in a frank, non-defensive manner to better connect with your coworkers.
A Harris Poll on behalf of University of Phoenix that surveyed over 1,000 U.S. adults who work full time in HR or senior management showed that 51% of managers who used public recognition and 54% of managers who used rewards to solicit ideas were better able to encourage innovation.
Saying "thank you" is good for your health and good for the bottom line, too. Acknowledging fundraisers' work with donors led to a 50% increase in their productivity, according to Harvard Health.
Collaborative research by TINYpulse and Microsoft Workplace Analytics revealed that employees who had the largest number of connections among their peers in the workplace had the most influence. And the more they collaborated with others the more highly regarded they were in the organization. The high performers spent as much as four hours more per week working closely with others.
To get more proficient at expanding your networks, start by not being afraid to show what you don't know. Lack of experience can lead to questions that could connect you with people you'd never met if you just pretended to know everything. For women who are dealing with unconscious bias, it helps to highlight other women's achievements. Endorsing another woman could lead to collaboration and an expanded network.
Dorie Blesoff, chief people officer at kCura, a legal software firm, says, "If your company doesn't offer a formal learning and development program, don't let that stop you." Conferences or classes are a great way to do this. She also suggests asking for a stretch assignment or participating in a cross-functional team to expand your contributions beyond your department.
Blesoff says, "If you actively seek out learning and develop new skills, you will stand out as someone who takes initiative and deserves more responsibility." Just don't forget to show off what you've accomplished. "What's most powerful is when you can demonstrate that your learning and growth also promote the success of the organization," she says.
Karen Nowicki, director of engineering at kCura, concurs with her colleague Blesoff's advice and adds, "Even if your organization doesn't have a formal performance coaching program, make it clear to your manager that you are interested in frequent feedback if you want to boost your own job satisfaction and move your career forward in 2017." Nowicki recommends asking to schedule monthly one-on-one check-ins to gauge your performance throughout the year. "That way," she says, "you'll always know where you stand, and what you can improve."
Vip Sandhir, CEO and founder of HighGround, an employee engagement software provider, says that standout employees set goals outside of their comfort zone often and tie them closely to the broader corporate goals for maximum impact.
But it's not enough to set the goal and put yourself on autopilot until you reach it. Sandhir says it's necessary to pair this with frequent check-ins with your manager on goal progress and challenges. He also suggests being proactive about getting constructive feedback from other teams and peers. A BetterWorks employee sentiment survey found that 92% reported they'd work harder if their coworkers could see their goals, while a New Norms @Work survey found that 26% of workers believe that discussing success with colleagues motivates them.
"While none of these characteristics will appear on a job description," says Sandhir, "these three things build confidence in employees, both by themselves and the employers who want to keep them.
It's one thing to set goals, and it's another to meet them on time. The Project Management Institute reports that only 64% of projects meet their goals.Getting the job done without stretching deadlines can quickly make you a workplace star. One way to make sure you get things done is by avoiding generating too many ideas up front, according to entrepreneur Faisal Hoque, so keep it simple and straightforward. Once you've defined your project's basic scope, says Hoque, outline a few of the initial milestones. "With every small first step," he says, the path forward becomes ever clearer."
Everyone could stand to learn how to write better emails. Thankfully, Jocelyn Glei wrote the book on making them shorter and more effective in her book Unsubscribe. To be more clear, concise, and actionable, Glei recommends the following strategies:
Get right to the point immediately and do your explaining later
Establish your credibility
Make the next step clear
Doing these things, says Glei, "shows you've respected [the recipient's] time, and they now know that dealing with you won't be another headache they don't need."
Although a slew of job seekers use social media to scope out a potential new employer, there are plenty of ways to use social to boost your career in the job you have. Use it to search for thought leaders. Not only can their wisdom add to yours, but you can use social to position yourself alongside them, further giving your cred a boost. You can and should also use social platforms to share what you are working on. As Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes notes, "Social media, used correctly, can be an executive productivity tool, a global broadcast channel, a source of consumer and competitor intel, and a PR vehicle."
Whenever there's more than one person working on a project, there are bound to be differences of opinions. Those can escalate to conflict depending on the personalities of the players involved. If that happens, fear not, says entrepreneur John Rampton. First, he says, "it's important to find out what's causing the clash before you roll up your sleeves to try and fix it." That could be emotional overload or members of the group who aren't willing to compromise. Once that's determined, Rampton recommends reminding everyone of their common goal and suggest a compromise.
Above all, says Nate Regier, CEO of Next Element, don't fear it. "Conflict is the source of energy. The real problem is the casualties caused by misusing that energy—by failing to channel it into something productive."
Don't fear artificial intelligence. It's what's going to help you do your job faster and better in 2017.
Artificial intelligence is growing fast. Recent research puts it as a $5 billion market by 2020, and Gartner estimates that 6 billion connected "things" will require AI support by 2018. Connected machines, wearables, and other business tools like voice assistants are already boosting productivity at work and at home.
Two reports just surfaced that tackle the troubling predictions that automation, artificial intelligence, and robots are going to supplant human workers. The McKinsey Global Institute and Glassdoor research indicates that we don't have to worry that we humans will become obsolete.
Matt Gould, chief strategy officer at Arria NLG, U.K.-based company offering AI technology in data analytics and information delivery, explains that AI has the ability to distill expertise into the machine. "Knowledge work, for the first time, can be produced at volume from NLG-AI systems," Gould says. "Far from killing the jobs of knowledge workers, this tends to free them up to do what they are paid to do—innovate, model, refine, and improve on the expertise of their business."
So what exactly should we be looking out for as artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent? We asked the experts to weigh in on where they see AI headed this year.
Chris Bolte, CEO of Paysa, says AI will drive awareness and action for jobseekers. "Employees will have the ability to use technology to gain this awareness—monitoring their individual relationship to the job market, and when there is a change in that relationship," he says. Most people aren't paying attention to the job market until they need to find work. That results in an ad hoc approach to searching and applying for work
In the same way personalization works for e-commerce, Bolte predicts that the job hunt will evolve with AI by sending you alerts not only about job openings that fit your skill set but also when your salary is no longer competitive with the broader market, or even within your specific company. By extension, AI could also help identify when you are due for a promotion, as well as the likelihood you will actually get it. "Using AI, individuals will no longer be subject to randomness or coincidence and can rely on technology," says Bolte.
Kris Duggan, CEO of BetterWorks, says that AI and machine learning will pave the way for HR 2.0, especially for opportunities to provide feedback to employees and get a holistic picture of what's driving their work. Duggan says 2017 will witness the rise of data and analytics to help visualize behaviors of employees, from the time they were hired to their success down the road. "By using machine learning," says Duggan, "companies can focus on building teams to support long-term goal achievement, instead of frantically hiring to fill immediate needs."
Rob May, founder and CEO of Talla, a company developing technology for chat platforms like Slack, Hipchat, and others believes that AI will be able to automate some of HR's more mundane tasks. May says currently chatbots like Talla's can handle about 10% to 20% of most daily activity such as onboarding and training, employee polling, and answering company policy questions.
"I wouldn't suggest replacing the face-to-face employee engagement pieces of onboarding with a bot," May points out. "The right way to use the bot is to replace information overload with information precision." Many new hires get a ton of information during their first couple of days on the job, much of which won't get retained. A bot, says May, "can be used to drip information to the new employee over days or weeks or longer, meaning that person can get the right information at the right time, once other things have been learned that make the information more relevant, valuable, and memorable."
Doron Gordon, CEO and founder at Samanage, a cloud-based IT service desk provider, explains that chatbots can facilitate communication between staff and management. "Instead of going from department to department, employees will use chatbots to request services, streamlining service management and consolidating service processes," Gordon explains. More specifically, Gordon says machine learning will directly impact the way IT teams service employees. "AI-integrated platforms will take into account the types of issues an employee is having with a device and how many requests they are sending," says Gordon. "From there, the solution can alert IT that a specific employee needs a new device."
Hamesh Chawla, vice president of engineering at Zephyr, a software-testing platform, envisions AI driving both innovation and evolution for developers because of a shift in focus towards data science.
"As a starting point, developers need to go in with the mind-set that democratizing the data will be a key factor in their development model," Chawla says. Once the data is in place, says Chawla, machine learning models must be put together, which is an area that would need education in data science to build the right actionable insights. "The key here is that data is not an afterthought in this new model, rather front and center of development," he says.
Shaun Ritchie, CEO and cofounder of Teem, believes that AI will outrank traditional business tactics like social media by helping to streamline every aspect of work. Specifically, Ritchie says, "Scheduling meetings, booking rooms, and reserving resources is a job in and of itself." Connecting AI to existing technology such as meeting-room booking and calendar-syncing platforms, says Ritchie, will eliminate stolen conference rooms and unused tech tools. Virtual home assistants like Echo and Alexa will also enter the workplace, further personalizing interactions and automating meetings.
Gould, Arria NLG's chief strategy officer, says that other functions such as writing and compiling documents and slide presentations that describe a quarterly snapshot of a company's health (aka a CFO Board-Pack) used to take days or weeks for a team of financial controllers to compile and release. AI enables this all to be delivered in seconds, says Gould "as though an army of analysts were constantly on call to provide the expert insight."
As such, Gould says forget about fearing AI and make friends with it. Given the chance, AI "will lift [workers] from the daily drudgery of writing up their smarts and communicating their insights."
Eero, Plume, and others are trying to remove Wi-Fi's pain points, but better reception is just the beginning of a broader strategy.
For a technology that tends to gather dust behind TV stands or inside closets, the wireless router has gotten a lot of attention lately.
In 2016, innovative new routers came from such well-known companies as Google and Netgear, and from startups including Eero, Plume, Starry, and Almond. Their stated purpose is to transform Wi-Fi from something you tolerate into something you love, whether it's through simplified setup, superior coverage, hardened security, or eye-catching design.
But a better Wi-Fi experience might not be the only objective. Many of these companies see Wi-Fi as a stepping stone to bigger plans, in which the router becomes a platform for new kinds of services. So if you think the router revival is interesting now, wait until you see what happens in the next few years.
The router renaissance is due to a couple of factors. One: People are demanding more bandwidth for streaming video services; and two: They are connecting more devices overall, including smartphones, tablets, streaming TV boxes, connected speakers, smart thermostats, smart lighting, and networked security cameras.
While internet speeds have increased to accommodate these advances, the router is becoming a bottleneck. A typical $100 router may have blind spots where the connection becomes slow or unreliable, and it doesn't give much useful feedback when something goes wrong.
"What I had noticed was, the number of people who were having problems, and the urgency around getting it resolved, had just started to really skyrocket," says Nick Weaver, Eero's CEO and cofounder.
Eero routers
Eero users install multiple routers around the house, which creates a single "mesh" network that can reach into dead zones. Set-up is supposed to be easier than traditional wireless range extenders, and it doesn't require separate login credentials for each access point. Eero launched in February, and has seen several new competitors emerge—Luma, Netgear's Orbi, Google WiFi, and Plume among them.
Although mesh networking isn't a new technology, Weaver says the cost of Wi-Fi radios has decreased, so systems with multiple access points are becoming more practical just as people are starting to need them. Cloud computing has also become cheaper and more reliable, Weaver says, so router-makers can analyze the data to improve their systems over time. Eero, for instance, just released a new version of its mesh network based on what it learned from existing device performance, and it can double the connection speeds between routers.
"There's a lot of new technology available that allows this kind of large-scale data analysis to be something you can run with a company of 130 people, whereas before you might need 130 people just to manage your data infrastructure," Weaver says.
Plume Wi-Fi pods
Plume is also leaning on the cloud for its Wi-Fi pods, which sell in three- and six-packs and plug directly into power outlets. Instead of managing connections locally, Plume analyzes the data on its remote servers, deciding how best to distribute bandwidth to each room.
"We have very much a central control plane that sits on the cloud and uses a lot of cloud computing," Plume CEO Fahri Diner says. "That enables us to have these devices that are small and beautiful, and lower-cost than others."
Starry, meanwhile, wanted to take troubleshooting into its own hands with its touchscreen Starry Station router. Each device is displayed as an icon, with larger ones representing greater data use and red ones indicating connection problems. It also tells users in plain English when there's a problem with the internet, offers parental controls, and includes a way to request tech support by phone.
"The internet service company wasn't necessarily excellent at supporting this consumer, so I think there's a big consumer experience opportunity," says Alex Moulle-Berteaux, Starry's chief marketing officer and head of product.
Today, companies like Starry, Plume, and Eero are merely trying to deliver better Wi-Fi. But in the future, their hardware could begin to serve broader ambitions.
Eero, for instance, packs a lot of power and storage into its routers that aren't being used to their full potential. Although Weaver won't say specifically how that extra power might be used, he notes that a virtual assistant like Amazon's Alexa might respond much faster if the command is processed locally. He says there are some "pretty interesting things you can do" when you have a distributed system for always-on networking, computing, and storage in your home. "If you look at this thing as just a Wi-Fi device, you're not really looking at the whole picture."
Plume also sees its network of Wi-Fi pods as a gateway to more smart home services. If there's a router in each room, as Plume recommends, one might imagine pressing a button on the nearest pod to bring a new smart light bulb or door lock online. Future Plumes might even have their own sensors to detect when someone has walked in.
"If you have this underlying network where Wi-Fi is everywhere, where Wi-Fi is smart and controlled, then you get to imagine these kinds of services that come over the top," Diner says.
That pitch might prove compelling to internet service providers, for whom Wi-Fi is already a major source of customer service complaints. A system like Plume could not only cut down on costly technician visits, but open the door to new home automation services. Major ISPs such as Comcast are already dabbling in smart home offerings, as they try to avoid becoming dumb pipes for internet service.
"Basically, it's an extension of their broadband infrastructure that they need to be in control of, so they're very interested in it," Diner says. (Liberty Global, the largest ISP outside the United States, is a Plume investor.) That's why Plume is hoping to offer its router system directly through internet service providers.
As for Starry, it's hoping to become an internet service provider itself. The company has been testing internet service in Boston that beams to apartment buildings through a roof-mounted receiver, then uses existing wiring to hook up with Starry Station routers in each residence. When the internet service launches, it'll include a Starry Station router, and won't even work with other routers at first.
"It's really important to us that we manage the entire stack, the entire chain, and so understanding what the ultimate performance is inside the home is critical to delivering a great service," Moulle-Berteaux says.
The Starry Station router
The Starry Station router could also become a platform for other smart home services. It's based on Android, and Moulle-Berteaux says the touchscreen could eventually serve as an intercom, a video chat device, or a way to see who's at the door when someone rings a connected doorbell. He notes that the current hardware has a Bluetooth radio, a microphone, and a speaker that are currently laying dormant.
"We are thinking about it as a platform," Moulle-Berteaux says. "The kinds of devices and usage patterns that exist are ripe for thinking about software features."
These ambitions may explain why a company like Google is suddenly interested in making its own routers, and it adds some mystery to the rumor that Apple has disbanded its own router team. But none of it matters unless the products succeed as routers first. Otherwise, there's no foot in the door for new kinds of router-based services.
"It's a startup and we have to be sure we don't boil the ocean," Diner says. "So we make sure we're really focused on Wi-Fi performance as the meat and potatoes, if you will."
The high-tech cycling startup is expanding into the out-of-home market with a new commercial bike meant for public spaces like hotel gyms.
Peloton, the high-tech fitness startup whose interactive exercise bikes let people pedal along at home to live-streamed workout routines, is expanding into the out-of-home market for the first time. The company today is announcing a new industrial-grade cycle intended for public places like hotel gyms, college campuses, military bases, or anywhere people work out.
For the four-year-old indoor cycling operation, the move marks a bold bet that its growing base of riders are loyal enough to the brand that they will actively seek out Peloton equipment when they visit gyms on the go. It's also a way to potentially gain a crucial edge over competitors like FlyWheel and SoulCycle in the ballooning industry of so-called "boutique fitness," where brand loyalty is embraced with cult-like fanaticism.
Complete with its own software platform, 22-inch "sweat-proof" screen, and Fitbit integration, Peloton's new commercial cycle is only the second product the company has launched in its history. The announcement was shared with Fast Company in advance of a public demo later this week at CES in Las Vegas. Unlike Peloton's current consumer bikes, which retail for $1,995, the new commercial-grade equipment is meant to accommodate multiple riders, with a re-engineered laser-cut steel frame that can withstand the wear and tear of regular public use.
[Photo: Isaac James, Peloton]
John Foley, Peloton's co-founder and chief executive, told me in a phone interview that the new product is a response to demand from existing customers, particularly business travelers who say they want to be able to replicate their home exercise routines when they're traveling for work. Peloton has built its following with high-intensity spin classes taught by popular instructors like Robin Arzon and Alex Toussaint. The classes can be accessed via live-stream or on-demand and watched on high-definition touch screens mounted directly on Peloton's home bikes.
Expanding on that concept, Peloton's new bike promises the same experience in commercial spaces. Foley says a Peloton bike located in, say, a hotel or public gym could offer instant familiarity to travelers looking to combat the disorienting malaise of business trips.
"When you think about traveling, especially for business, you're going to be eating more, you're going to be drinking more, you're out of your routine," he says. "So to have that access to a 45-minute fantastic workout with your favorite instructor right there at your hotel is a pretty cool thing."
In addition to hotel gyms, the bikes could even be placed directly into rooms—a way for hotels to differentiate themselves in the bid to attract health-conscious travelers. Eventually, Peloton's website will include a locator map showing which hotels across the country include Peloton bikes.
How big the demand will be remains to be seen, but Foley is optimistic that it will be sizable enough to encourage hotels and other commercial operations to participate. Although Peloton declined to share specific membership or revenue figures, it says sales of its bikes have grown rapidly over the last year, going from 20,000 units in 2015 to an estimated 60,000 in 2016. It says its current rider base is in the "hundreds of thousands."
Placing bikes in commercial spaces wouldn't just appeal to those existing customers, but could attract new ones. The software for the new bike includes a marketing layer that quickly shows first-time users how to operate it. All you need to get started is an email address and a little ambition. If you use one of the bikes at your hotel, expect a follow-up email that summarizes your workout metrics and includes a friendly reminder that—yes—you, too, can own a Peloton cycle of your very own.
Hotels are just the beginning. Foley says other potential locations could include college campuses, hospitals, military bases, or even firehouses. "Those guys, as you know, like fitness," he says of firefighters. "Random places like that are actually perfect use cases."
The new bike will be offered to a set of commercial partners before being rolled out nationwide in the spring, priced at $2,995 plus $495 a year—inclusive of subscription and warranty. Foley says Peloton tried to keep the cost reasonable for vendors. He pitches the company as a kind of Apple meets HBO and Netflix, with the ultimate goal being to attract new subscribers and keep them hooked on the virtual classes. In other words, it's all about the spin.
"Digital content is the core of our business model, so we're trying not to be greedy on the hardware," Foley says. "We want to get as many bikes in the marketplace as possible."
As Wi-Fi networks expand, so do your chances of getting hacked and tracked. Here are the dos and don'ts of using free internet.
As of New Year's Eve last week, all 279 subway stations in New York City have public Wi-Fi, meaning nearly 6 million daily riders now have access to free internet. Of course, "free" internet services usually come with a price that includes giving up privacy and possibly even security, and free Wi-Fi on mass transit is no different. New York's network is run by Transit Wireless, a subsidiary of the Australian company BAI Communications. Glancing at its Terms of Service is a reminder that, when it comes to free Wi-Fi, no one has your back.
For instance, the terms state: "Transit Wireless does not ensure or guarantee privacy for users of the Service. Any such use shall be at your sole risk and Transit Wireless, its affiliates and its agents shall be relieved from all liability in connection therewith."
That's a pretty clear signal that you're on your own. Free networks are the digital equivalent of sharing a straw with all your neighbors. Some networks provide moderate security; others provide none. If you're planning to jump on New York's underground Wi-Fi—or any public network—here are the basics for staying safe, or at least safer. (Reminder: You'll have to check manuals or help pages for the how-tos for your specific devices.)
Here are the steps you can take from minimum to maximum protection:
1) Turn off automatic connectivity
Computers try to be handy by automatically logging into Wi-Fi networks you have used before. Turn this capability off and instead connect manually each time. See tutorials for Windows, Mac, and iOS. (Android varies by maker.)
2) Connect to the right network
Just because it says "Starbucks Wi-Fi," doesn't mean it is. (Typically, it's called "Google Starbucks.") Hackers can set up spoof hotspots to scarf up your data and access your system. Check with the barista or the signage for the right network name—including the right spelling.
3) Look for https sites
Almost every reputable website uses an encrypted connection, with an address beginning with "https" (instead of just http), and web browsers typically flag an address that doesn't use this encryption.
4) Connect to networks with passwords
Even something like "wifi123," written on the café chalkboard is better than nothing, as it's used to create an encrypted connection between your computer (or phone or tablet) and the hotspot.
5) Use a virtual private network (VPN)
The gold standard of safety is a virtual private network that encrypts the connection from your device all the way to servers operated by the VPN service provider. Few VPNs are free. They typically cost up to $10 per month, although some allow a certain amount of free internet traffic per month before charging. We haven't investigated all services, but two that I like are Cloak (for Apple devices) and TunnelBear (all platforms).
6) Use your phone as a hotspot
The best way to avoid Wi-Fi dangers is to avoid Wi-Fi. Many cellphones can act as a wired or wireless access point for your computer. Cellular data limits apply, but you might switch to your phone hotspot temporarily if the public Wi-Fi networks are sketchy or you are doing something sensitive, like checking your bank account. (See this tutorial.)
1) Download software updates
A great way to take control of a computer on a shared network is to trick the victim into installing spyware disguised as a software upgrade (like Adobe Flash updates). Wait until you are on a home or office network before downloading and installing anything on your computer. For a phone-app installation, turn off Wi-Fi and use the cellular connection instead.
2) Buy anything or visit a financial site
You transmit a lot of sensitive data if you make an online purchase or visit a financial service such as a bank. Connections should be encrypted with https, but it's still a good idea not to connect over public Wi-Fi (unless you are using a VPN).
3) Let Bluetooth give you away
Advertisers use transmitters called Bluetooth beacons to send offers to passersby. If you prefer to not get them, you have two options. Turn Bluetooth off if you aren't using devices like wireless headsets. Otherwise, don't install apps that ask to use Bluetooth to share data. You should see this in the permissions screen when you are installing an app. (Here's how to turn off Bluetooth on Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS.)
Reverse chronological order is no way to plow your way through an overstuffed inbox.
Ideally, your time away from work was (at least, somewhat) relaxing. But that post-vacation zen can go right out the window once you sit down to tackle your inbox and realize there are approximately one million messages waiting for you.
Responding to emails can be stressful any day, but it's even worse when they've been piling up. And feeling that stress, you may set a goal to get through them as quickly as possible—only to commit one of the common mistakes below.
So take a few minutes to read how you can avoid them. It'll be worth it!
Mathematically, answering as quickly as you can makes sense. If you spend one minute reading an email and one minute replying, you'll get through your list way faster than if you spend five minutes reading and five minutes replying.
And while you're correct that this is not a day to debate internally between "Sounds good!" versus "I agree," you don't want to just fire off a quick reply either.
"Sounds good" or "I agree" work equally well if someone asked if you like their plan, but make no sense if they asked you a specific question about it. Meaning, you're going to get yet another email back from them—and they'll know you didn't read what they wrote the first time.
The Fix: If you have pages of emails to get through and can't curb the desire to reply ASAP, copy and paste a generic response. Try this "I'll be spending today catching up on emails. If you need a response before 5 p.m., please email me back and let me know."
Yes, it's an extra step, but if your number one goal is to get back to everyone first thing, it'll allow you to do that, then exhale and take your time responding.
In your head, you're sharing a status update so the other person can tell you what to do next. But in your recipient's head, you're saying, "This has been taken care of." You're esssentially taking a "hot potato" approach to email, assuming the responsibility falls to whomever got it last—which means there's a good posibility of miscommunication.
This is why as Muse managing editor Jenni Maier writes, "Every single email should include a next step (even if that's 'no reply needed')."
When you send a hot potato email, one of two things will happen. You'll get it right back with a question (so all you've done is duplicate work). Or, perhaps worse, they'll say nothing and you'll each think the other person is the one who's taking next steps.
The Fix: Take Maier's advice and make sure messages have a clear intent. If you're sending something along just to close the loop, it's absolutely okay to say that, or even "for your reference." Spelling out exactly what you want from the other person forces you to get clear first—which means you'll catch yourself if what you really need is to take a step yourself before sharing your progress.
Your plan to respond to in reverse chronological order is well-intentioned: You want to get back to the person who's been waiting the longest, first. However, it's not a wise plan if your goal is to be as efficient as possible.
Case in point: I worked with someone who went on a two-week vacation, and when he returned, he replied to his oldest emails first. This meant he followed up on my questions to ask if they'd been sorted—before he saw a later chain where his point of contact solved those issues for me.
The "Did you get this?" and "Nevermind! Saw you did!" emails were unnecessary, and if your whole goal is to catch up quickly, you don't want to waste time on them.
The Fix: This is a great time for the "Last In, First Out" (LIFO) approach. Because, as Muse COO Alex Cavoulacos explains, "This technique is predicated on letting the old stuff deal with itself."
In other words, by the time you got to the email someone sent a week ago, it could very well be that they already handled whatever they asked you about. And if they still want your attention sooner rather than later, I'm willing to bet they noted the return date on your OOO and sent a follow-up that was sitting at the top your inbox when you returned.
When you're staring down a week's worth of messages, your temptation may be to just dive in. But if you're thoughtful about how you go about replying, you'll avoid common mistakes and save yourself having to go back and answer them again.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
LG has slimmed its new flexible TV screen to the thickness of a credit card.
After many years of technological advancements to reduce their power consumption, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens are finally emerging as a higher-performing alternative to LCD TVs that people could at least imagine owning. LG has been selling super-pricey OLED TVs since 2013. The first model in the U.S. was a 55-inch HD screen that cost $15,000, but prices have been dropping fast: LG's latest 55-inch, 4K-resolution model lists for $2,500.
A prototype shown in Berlin last September.[Photo: courtesy of LG]
OLEDs boast rich color and stratospheric contrast levels, but they haven't yet delivered the truly sci-fi aspect promised for over a decade: paper-thin screens that can stick to the wall like wallpaper. Now, LG has come awfully close with a new flexible TV screen only the thickness of a credit card.
The W7 Signature line, which LG just introduced at CES in Las Vegas, is a line of 65- and 77-inch 4K TVs that takes OLED way farther than LCD has gone in thinness. Unlike LCD pixels—shutters that control how much light from a backlight comes through—OLED pixels are self-illuminating. The benefit so far has been very deep blacks, with no backlight glow bleeding through. But no backlight also means a much thinner screen, with the OLED material and electronics mounted on a sheet of glass. LG has now gotten the glass so thin that its latest screen is flexible—able, in theory, to bend around slightly curved surfaces like wide columns inside a building. Despite the thinness, "It's fairly durable," says Tim Alessi, head of product marketing at LG USA. "It seemed pretty substantial."
A ribbon cable tethers the wafer-thin screen to its electronics.
There are a few cheats. The W7 needs to hang on a steel mounting plate that takes the total thickness to three millimeters and requires the screen, for now at least, to lie flat on a wall. (All those electronics had to go somewhere.) The W7 screen is attached by a cable to a box about the size of a soundbar that provides all the video processing and smart TV functions, as well as a Dolby Atmos surround-sound system. The W7 is still far from a TV that you can roll up and carry under your arm, but it bestows bragging rights to having what appears to be the thinnest TV out there. LG promises everything else, too, saying that the W7 will perform as well as its best OLED models in aspects like high dynamic range and color quality (99% of the top standard, called DCI).
The 65-inch screen weighs 17 pounds and comes out in the spring; the 77-inch version goes on sale in the second half of 2017. Like many TVs that debut at CES, the W7 models don't have price tags. "Let me put it this way, it will be less than that $15,000 initial OLED," says Alessi.
