Even in an era when conspiracy theories can be shared by millions on Facebook, it's more important than ever to stand up for free expression.

What does the First Amendment mean in the age of "fake news"?

I've been asking that question ever since the election, but Nat Hentoff's death on Saturday really made me grapple with its substance. The legendary writer and jazz critic, who worked with me at the Village Voice in the mid-1990s, was the fiercest free speech warrior I've ever known. Whether Hentoff was defending the right of the Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, or condemning political correctness on college campuses, or tangling with feminists over proposals to ban hate speech, he stood firm in his commitment to the First Amendment. For him, except for the "yelling fire in a movie theater" hypothetical, free speech was absolute. There were no exceptions.

But it was a different era, when hate and lies spread through printed newsletters and pamphlets read by maybe a few hundred people, and it was easier to defend bigots' right to free expression. Today, when conspiracy theories, lies, and bigotry can be shared with tens of millions of readers via Facebook and Twitter and other social media, is it naive to still be such a warrior for the First Amendment?

Hentoff was an old-fashioned liberal—an atheist born Jewish in a Boston suburb, he fought in the civil-rights movement, befriended Malcolm X, collaborated with revolutionary artists like Charles Mingus and Gil Scott-Heron, and condemned fascism and the excesses of capitalism. But for him, even the most hateful voices, whether they were homophobic radio DJs or KKK memberd, deserved the protection of the First Amendment.

Hentoff hated what the bigots stood for but he understood that the First Amendment was established by our Founding Fathers for them as well as his progressive friends. In his book, Free Speech for Me But Not For Thee, he perfectly captured the hypocrisy of liberals who demanded their right to say whatever they wanted while trying to figure out way to suppress the voices of their enemies. For him, the First Amendment is even more crucial for those voices on the fringe and at the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum.

He believed that the best way to combat hatred and bigotry and greed, and to create a better world, was by overwhelming it with more persuasive speech and stronger arguments and moral actions rather than censorship or suppression.

When I was in college, I devoured his columns, which felt like Biblical passages handed down from a righteous God. They taught me so much about the few principles in life that are worth living and dying for. One of them is to forever oppose the death penalty, that no human being has the right to take the life of another, no matter how horrible a person (even Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot).

And the other is to vigorously advocate for free speech with all of your heart and soul. Amid the tumult of some controversy dominating the headlines in those years, I'd begin his columns in a vengeful state of mind—angrily demanding that ugly voices and bigoted people be cordoned off or shut down or exiled—and I'd always finish reading them with Nat having taught me that even their voices deserved to be heard. And I was inspired to fight even harder for the First Amendment. Because in the end, through the force of our arguments and our empathic vision, justice will prevail.

But what if you disagree with the meaning of the words "free" and "speech"? And what if you use your free speech rights to make up a completely erroneous story about a public figure and deceptively describe it as news?

Anyone involved in reporting and reading the news since the election has been caught up in the debate over fake news, stories such as "FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in apartment in murder-suicide" that went viral on Facebook and were completely fictitious. In the days after Donald Trump's surprise victory, some blamed the preponderance of fake news, much of which attacked Clinton, for influencing the electorate. Since then, the phenomenon has led to real-world consequences, such as the gun-toting Pizzagate believer who fired shots at the pizzeria in Washington, D.C., that was falsely linked to a pedophile ring run by Clinton and her aides.

And the concept has become more muddied in the eyes of the public, with conservatives appropriating it to attack any erroneous reporting by the mainstream media. In the wake of the furor, Facebook and Twitter adopted some changes that enabled those platforms to minimize the presence of fake news, prompting some to fear that the hysteria was being used to justify censorship. And the term has become so twisted and misunderstood that some, like the Washington Post's Margaret Sullivan, are even calling for it to be retired: "Instead, call a lie a lie. Call a hoax a hoax. Call a conspiracy theory by its rightful name."

Whatever you call it, it still exists and is expected to keep growing in power and reach, polluting our discourse and even upending the common set of facts required for any healthy debate. Elsewhere on the internet, the hate speech protected by Hentoff is thriving, especially on Twitter and Facebook, where pockets of white supremacists and Nazis and misogynists can spew their anger. And haters and bullies can harass and troll their victims into suicide. And where ISIS's social media soldiers seduce new recruits to their murderous cult. Suddenly lies and hoaxes and hate speech are everywhere, reaching hundreds of millions of people around the world.

So in this day and age free speech suddenly seems like less of a priority, like some precious principle only possible in a perfect or a less dangerous world. Back when Hentoff was preaching First Amendment purity, it was a different era. The media was dominated by mainstream newspapers and magazines and TV and radio networks, which tended to tread carefully and navigate the middle, out of a fear of offending viewers and driving away advertisers. Extremists only had a few outlets for their vitriol—small newsletters and pamphlets that reached at most a couple thousand readers. The one exception was talk radio, which really grew in the 1990s and continues to spew vicious lies and innuendo to millions of listeners. Now, through social media, that dark echo chamber has grown ever louder.

One of Hentoff's heroes, Justice Louis Brandeis, once wrote that "falsehood and fallacies" could be exposed through discussion and that the "remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." But in today's environment, especially when elections can be swayed by a swarm of fake news, that belief risks appearing naive, writes Princeton professor Peter Singer.

What would Nat say? Would he still stand by his principles in the era of social media and fake news and Twitter trolls? Would he protect the right of some teenager in Macedonia or curmudgeon in Manhattan to spread a lie halfway around the globe to an audience of millions with the touch of a button?

I believe Nat would have stood by his principles. With the exception of violent threats and harassment, which are not protected speech, he would have defended the rights of racists and haters and misogynists and anti-Semites to spew their vitriol on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else online. He would have understood that democracy is messy and that the government regulating speech is a slippery slope that ends in an Orwellian state that outlaws unacceptable opinions.

Hentoff never wrote about free speech issues in the age of social media, as far I know, but it's pretty clear where he stood in recent debates over the issue. When some academics, including Obama's former regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, voiced support for restrictions on free speech, he condemned such efforts to trim the First Amendment. Amid alarm over the explosion in spending on political campaigns, Yale Law School professor Owen Fiss once wrote that "we may sometimes find it necessary to restrict speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others." And amid the success of conservative talk radio, Sunstein voiced support for the government requiring the media to give dissenting voices a "right to reply."

Hentoff was fierce in his denunciation of such ideas: "If there is a mandated right to reply to the press, who will administer that right? The government, of course. So the governmental decision to tell an editor what to print—an action hitherto forbidden by the First Amendment—could well be a political decision to favor the incumbent government."

As a journalist who relied on reporting and the facts, Hentoff would have been horrified by fake news but as a free speech warrior, he would fight for its right to not be suppressed by the government. As for Facebook's recent efforts to combat fake news, by partnering with fact-checking organizations to identify fictitious stories and to warn users about them, those steps might not have bothered him so much if it wasn't being done by Facebook. After all, since it's the biggest platform in the world, it has an audience of a billion-plus users, far more than any news outlet and almost any government on the planet. Its role is so outsized that any effort to filter the news could be perceived as an attempt to chill dissent and opposing viewpoints. (Not to mention concerns about the ability of understaffed fact-checking organizations to take on this task and the fact that Facebook's new system doesn't apply to videos, memes, or photos.)

Yet is drawing a line between fact and fiction, by flagging such content, any different in essence from a newspaper labeling stories that are news, analysis, and opinion? Facebook is a private company and, much like most TV networks and newspaper publishers whose editors and publishers filter out content they consider objectionable or inaccurate, it has every right to treat such content differently.

Facebook and Twitter need to be very careful in how they proceed when it comes to "fake news"—just as their vast influence can spread unfounded rumors, it also means that overzealously clamping down on unacceptable voices has a greater impact and may stifle dissenting points of view. Along with erroneous stories about the Pope endorsing Trump, there's also the risk that a cogent analysis employing exaggerated metaphors to make its point also gets caught up in the blacklist of fake news (such as one that suggests a potential papal endorsement as Trump's dream scenario). And censoring even the craziest conspiracy theories, like Pizzagate, will just fuel their resurgence underground where they linger unchallenged, poisoning minds.

And it's up to all of us to make sure that the government—whether the new Trump administration or your state and local elected officials—doesn't stifle opposing viewpoints. Trump loves to attack the media and has expressed a willingness to "open up libel laws," potentially making it easier for public figures to sue journalists who report on their misdeeds. And his wife, Melania, hired the same lawyer bankrolled by Trump adviser Peter Thiel to destroy Gawker, when she disputed a story in the Daily Mail. And there is concern that Trump could use the U.S. government's vast information apparatus, from federal agencies' public relations departments to the Voice of America to his own Twitter account, as a giant propaganda operation that is more focused on punishing his enemies and manipulating opinion than informing the public.

Nat would have been the first one to denounce such tendencies. Not because he was a partisan—he viciously criticized the Obama administration for its lack of transparency—but because he was a warrior for the First Amendment. As all of us should be.

Expect to take assessments, interact with artificial intelligence, use passive job-seeking platforms, and more.

According to Glassdoor's newest report on job trends, there are close to 6 million jobs to be filled right now, a record number since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking job openings in 2000. Another growing trend is that nearly every employer is hiring for tech roles. A recent report from job market analytics firm Burning Glass found that there were as many as 7 million job openings last year that required coding skills.

So if you're among the 40% of workers who are actively looking for a new position or planning to hunt in 2017, here are some things that will play into how you find and land that new job.

You Might Get Your Best Job Offers When You're Not Looking

In a job market that favors the seeker, the old adage that it's best to look for a job when you already have one has never been more true. According to a LinkedIn report, 85% of people—known in HR parlance as "passive job seekers"—are employed and satisfied with their position. Yet nearly half (45%) say they'd be willing to talk to a recruiter about a potential opportunity.

If you're among this group of not-so-active seekers and have tech talent, there are a burgeoning number of platforms designed to help connect you with your next job. The likes of Woo, Jobr, Switch, and Anthology let employed workers post what it would take to get them to switch jobs anonymously. That includes requests for flex work, relocation, and the size of the company, in addition to salary and benefits requirements.

Expect To Take Assessments

According to the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 13% of U.S. employers utilize personality assessments. About 2.5 million people take the Meyers-Briggs test each year, and it's used by 89 of the Fortune 100 companies. Nick Shaw, managing director of CEB Talent Assessment for the U.K. and Ireland, says that cognitive and behavioral assessments are designed to find the right person with the right skills that will best fit into an organization—something that's in the candidate's best interest, too, because there's nothing worse than learning that your "dream" job is actually a nightmare.

Shaw recommends trying to be as open and honest as possible to avoid creating the illusion that you'll fit in if you won't. "In advance of an interview process, candidates should reflect on successful outcomes that they have achieved, the behaviors they demonstrated, and how these relate to the role for which they have applied," Shaw says. Candidates should familiarize themselves with the requirements of the test, and practice similar questions in advance to ensure that they are not fazed under the time pressure of the test, he advises. 

Consider Career Coaching Or Skill Development

"In 2017, we predict a rise in pre-hire coaching and skills development as employers and people look to find the perfect fit," says Jonas Prising, chairman and CEO of ManpowerGroup. The company currently partners with LearnUp, a pioneering pre-hire coaching platform, to help get entry-level candidates work ready. "This approach to coaching people into roles rather than screening them out offers short online assessment, coaching, and real-life scenarios connected to open positions," he explains. "It's a win-win, helping individuals develop important skills and matching employers to ready-to-succeed workers who start strong, develop skills, and stay longer."

Expect to Rely (Even More) On Social Media

Seventy-nine percent of job seekers use social media in their job search. This figure jumps to 86% for younger job seekers who are in the first 10 years of their careers, .

LinkedIn may seem like the obvious choice, but don't just farm your first-degree connections. Data from the platform suggests that "weak connections" can be key. That's because people are more likely to be referred for jobs by their second- and third-degree connections. Similar findings came out of a study of Facebook users.

And there's a lot to be said for applying for a job using a creative approach on Snapchat. Last summer, we reported on how one college student landed a coveted spot at a media agency, simply by doing his homework and crafting a clever geofilter for the company.

Expect To Interact With Artificial Intelligence

AI is becoming more prevalent in all areas of our work this year. So it's no surprise that advancements in machine learning and chatbots are going to play a part in the job search. For example, Mya is a chatbot that walks candidates through the application process and "helps" them get better positioned for making it to the interview stage. Mya asks questions about the applicant's experience and gives them a chance to sell themselves in a way that just providing their resume doesn't.

Location Might No Longer Hold You Back

As we discovered last year, where you are located isn't necessarily a deal breaker for an employer anymore. So plan to cast the net wider when job hunting. As FlexJobs recently revealed by cross-referencing the list of U.S. News List of 100 Best Jobs with employer listings in its database, more than half (56) of the jobs listed regularly offer flexible work options.

Positions included everything from accounting to administrative assistant, art director to biochemist. Health care jobs such as pharmacist and anesthesiologist were included, as were tech positions such as IT manager, software developer, and information security analyst.

Officials say they need more Uber data to monitor fatigued drivers and further Vision Zero. Where were they when Uber offered years ago?

In early 2015, about a year after Bill de Blasio was sworn in as the 109th mayor of New York City, Uber approached his office with an offer to help the new administration with some of its key policy goals. The detailed proposal included a lengthy list of resources that Uber was willing to provide, including in-house talent for tech support, a direct supply of vehicles to improve service near ferry landings, and—most notably—a seven-point plan that would allow the city to use Uber's vast data and engineering assets to further its "Vision Zero" initiative, a signature policy of the de Blasio administration aimed at reducing traffic fatalities.

"The Uber folks here are dying to find some ways to help support the Mayor's agenda and have a lot of resources to do meaningful stuff," Matt Wing, Uber's top communications official for the Northeast region, said in an email to the city's director of intergovernmental affairs in February 2015.

But the city never seems to have taken Uber up on the proposal. According to another email, Uber executives did meet with City Hall in March of that year, but they never heard back about the offer to help with Vision Zero. Uber's proposal and subsequent emails, obtained by Fast Company through a records request, underscore how eager Uber was to get on the good side of the de Blasio administration early in the mayor's term, which if nothing else is a contrast to the company's image as a regulation-flouting Silicon Valley outsider with an open contempt for the cities in which it operates. Broadly speaking, the proposal could also be seen as an early precursor to the Uber Movement data initiative the company announced this week.

Almost two years later, Uber's offer to help de Blasio further his most high-profile safety initiative puts an ironic twist on a new battle with New York City regulators. Uber and the city are currently sparring over a proposed rule by the Taxi & Limousine Commission that would force ride-hailing companies to share data on trip drop-off locations. Uber already shares data on pickup locations for every ride, and it argues that sharing additional data on drop-offs would put the privacy of its customers at risk.

The drop-off information would of course be anonymized, but as the argument goes, it's pretty easy to de-anonymize anyone if you have enough data points. "This will enable them to piece together the full details of every trip New Yorkers take," an Uber spokesman told me by email.

Uber is not alone in its concern. Some privacy advocates have raised objections to the collection of drop-off data, and in fact, they've been worried about this very thing for years. In 2014, after the TLC said it wanted to start collecting pickup data, the Center for Democracy and Technology wrote a letter to the commission warning of the slippery slope that now seems to be happening. "[S]hould the TLC expand these requirements—for example, by requiring the drop-off location to also be transmitted—much more detailed profiles of individual passengers could be created, implicating their privacy interests," the letter read.

So why does the city want this data now? Austin Finan, a spokesman for the mayor's office, called the data a "basic ask" of New York's for-hire vehicle industry, one he says "does not compromise customer privacy in any way." Now for the twist: He also said the data will help the city with Vision Zero—ostensibly by allowing by allowing officials to make sure Uber drivers don't wear themselves out by driving too much. "Fatigued drivers put themselves and other road users at risk, and these rules are vital in furthering the city's Vision Zero goals," Finan says.

But if the city was so interested in using Uber data to further Vision Zero, why did it not take Uber up on its proposal two years ago? Granted, that proposal was not some noble act of altruism. Uber was doing what companies do, namely protecting its business interests by trying to ingratiate itself into a government it has to work with. It's also important to point out that Uber did not, as part of that proposal, offer to share drop-off data. But the proposal still had some good ideas, including a strategy to combat reckless driving by deactivating drivers who chronically speed and an offer to share data about areas with high traffic incidents. The company even offered to include a PSA from de Blasio himself in its mandatory driver safety video.

I asked Finan whatever happened with Uber's proposal but didn't get a response. Emails between Uber and City Hall indicate that de Blasio was at least open to entertaining the company's Vision Zero ideas, but Uber executives ultimately grew frustrated by what seemed to be a lack of interest on the city's part to engage in meaningful discussions, according to one person briefed on Uber's dealings with the city.

This makes the city's argument—that the extra data collection is strictly about safety—feel a bit hollow, especially because Uber says it is willing to provide data on trip duration, which would allow the city to estimate trip times without drop-off information. It's also worth noting that de Blasio, who is running for reelection this year, will need to cast Vision Zero as a resounding success.

So far, the city isn't backing down. Allan Fromberg, the TLC's deputy commissioner for public affairs, insists the drop-off data will serve as an integral part of ensuring everyone's safety. "Drop-off locations can help us audit whether the trip durations self-reported by bases are valid," he says. "At the most basic level, we can do this by taking the reported pickup time and location and the reported drop-off time and location and seeing whether the destination, based on distance, route, and general traffic speed could have feasibly been reached within the time indicated by the drop-off."

After a hearing last week on the proposed rule, the TLC said it will reconvene on Feb. 5. In the meantime, Uber may have thrown a wrench in the works with the aforementioned Uber Movement initiative, announced Sunday, which will let city planners access coveted Uber trip data to study traffic patterns. The initiative is being called an "olive branch" in some press reports, a way for Uber to show it has made good-faith efforts to use its data to help cities. Crucially, researchers with access to Uber Movement will be able to study average travel times across distances within cities.

Maybe the timing is a coincidence. Then again, when you have enough data, is anything a coincidence?

Five activists, including singer John Legend, debate what's next for criminal justice reform and the role that tech and data can play.

Police shootings of unarmed African-Amer­icans have inspired outrage, but that's just one of many ways America's criminal justice system is tilted against people of color. Today, a growing movement is challenging structural racism that has millions of Americans in a cycle of incarceration. We gathered leaders from different parts of this fight—singer John Legend, who founded the "Free America" campaign; activist DeRay Mckesson; former prosecutor Adam Foss; Obama Administration data expert Clarence Wardell III; and Malika Saada Saar, Google's senior counsel on civil and human rights—for a conversation with Fast Company's J.J. McCorvey at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in November.

You each have a distinct perspective on criminal justice reform. Broadly speaking, what is the way forward for the movement?

John Legend: We have to understand that while we talk about criminal justice and presidents and national politics, most criminal justice decisions that affect real people are made by district attorneys, state legislatures, governors—people on the local and state level. Most of the prison system, the budget, and the actual population of the system are not federal. Presidents and Congress affect federal law, but so much of the law that affects criminal justice policy and the communities that are impacted by it is done by state and local politicians. We have to be aware of what they're doing and push them. We have to get involved in DA races, mayoral races, and police commissioner and sheriff races.

Adam Foss: To put some numbers to it, 2.3 million people are in jail and prison, and 10% of those people are in federal prisons. So 2 million people are in state and local jails, put there by state and local prosecutors and overseen by state and local sheriffs.

DeRay Mckesson: As for the issues around policing, what's really hard is that there's not much data. Any number you've ever heard about police violence comes from local media reports. That means if you get killed in America and no newspaper writes about it, you are not in the data set. That is wild.

Malika, you recently joined Google and have been working on a lot of these issues. What role should tech companies play in rebuilding trust between communities and police?

Malika Saada Saar: We like to disrupt, and if anything needs to be disrupted, it's mass incarceration. One very powerful and practical approach companies can take is banning the box [removing questions from employment applications about whether people have been convicted of crimes]. [Google] did in March [2016]. I heard someone say that culture always eats policy, law, and regulations. So how can we be part of this cultural shift in understanding the human cost of mass incarceration? At Google, we enabled children of the incarcerated to send digital love letters to their mothers for Mother's Day, to their fathers for Father's Day. It was this opportunity to use our platform to give voice to children who have been so deeply hurt because they've lost their mother or father to prisons.

John, you've been touring the country and visiting prisons, listening to what inmates have to say. What have been some of the most surprising insights?

JL: I grew up with family members and friends who have been incarcerated. I didn't look at this problem as something that wasn't connected to my own lived experience. But I wanted to go and see the human toll for myself and be able to communicate that. We just disappear these people from society. Most prisons are pretty distant physically from our cities, which makes it easier for society to ignore that we have so many people warehoused in them. Families are having a hard time reaching them physically, and the emotional toll, the financial cost for our society and our communities, is tough to watch. I would cry but also be very pissed off. We need to get pissed off. We need to understand that what we do in America is radically oppressive. We are the leading incarcerator in the world. There's nobody better at locking people up than we are. We need to confront that, because that's being done in our name. Our money pays for it; our politicians are enacting these laws. If that's what the land of the free and the home of the brave is known for, why aren't we saying more to do something about it?

A lot of people are sentenced to jail and prison for low-level offenses. That makes me think about the movement to decriminalize marijuana. Most of the people who are able to start businesses based on these new regulations are not people of color, and simultaneously we have a lot of people of color behind bars on marijuana charges. Will the legalized marijuana movement ever get more inclusive?

JL: I hope so. California is trying to do a better job than some other states at making it possible for people who were arrested on marijuana charges to get their records expunged and be able to participate in the legal economy that they were participating in when it was illegal. All of the states need to take on similar regulation.

AF: It's a grave injustice that what five years ago was getting people sent away for double-digit sentences is now a cutting-edge, moneymaking machine.

Adam, I imagine you've had to make a lot of these decisions as a former prosecutor. What can be done to encourage prosecutors to pursue alternatives to prison sentences for low-level crimes?

AF: I want to talk about what you ended the question with: low-level crimes. There's this narrative about low-level, nonviolent drug offenders. We've been saying it for years: Let's let those people go free. When do we start talking about populations of people that maybe did something violent—not because they are violent people, but because they lived in a place where their day-to-day was consumed by violence, their conditioning since they were kids was kill or be killed? In a flash, they do something violent, but that doesn't make them "violent offenders."

As a prosecutor, we have a ton of autonomy, but we don't know anything about the populations that we're serving. We don't know anything about where they come from, or the collateral consequences of conviction. It's a training issue, and on the back end, it's a metrics issue. When my boss was considering me for a promotion, he didn't see how much time I had spent out in the community, because we don't collect that data. He wanted to see how many trials I had, and how many of those I won. Neither one of those equates to anything about safety or justice or accountability. When we start giving people different metrics, then people can be evaluated not by how many trials you won, but by how many people's lives you made better. That will be a 21st-century system of prosecution.

DM: Most cases don't even go to trial. Our televised myth of how criminal cases proceed is Matlock and Perry Mason and Law & Order—this dramatic situation that goes down. But most of the time someone like Adam is just deciding, sometimes with a public defender or whatever counsel that the accused has, at which level to charge them. Most of the power is in the district attorney's hand. The judge just kind of puts their stamp of approval on whatever the district attorney decides. A back and forth about the evidence almost never happens. The DA has the power to be more merciful or more harsh. Adam chose in his career as assistant district attorney to think about the consequences of locking people up for a long time, and he was able to improve some people's lives who may not have had that chance if he wasn't involved.

Clarence Wardell III: What you measure drives a lot of behaviors. As a country, we're okay with collecting crime data, but we're not good at talking about the presence of justice rather than the absence of crime. That's how people think policies like stop and frisk are okay. We're only looking at one side of the equation. We're not good at collecting all the data and understanding it right now.

What are some of the ways that data collection could be improved?

CW: Oh, man. One of the things that worries us in this push for more data transparency and collection is how we analyze and use this data. Right now, the conversation immediately goes to things like predictive policing. But even if we were to say, "Tomorrow all the police departments will share their data," is that even good stuff? The tools that a lot of police departments have are rudimentary. As we collect more data, we need to be cautious about where we're getting it from, what type of biases are inherent in it already, and then if we're smart about that, maybe we can make some better decisions.

MSS: I work at Google, so we have to talk about data, but before I came to Google, I was a human rights lawyer working on issues of women and girls behind bars. Those stories, those lived experiences, have to be part of the conversation. I worked with women who were shackled during labor and childbirth. I talked to one woman who, when she was transported from Kentucky to Tennessee, at seven months pregnant, had a belly shackle over her during transport. Our girls—our daughters—who are bought and sold for sex are criminalized, arrested for prostitution, even though they are not of age to consent. These girls are put behind bars for essentially being subjected to commercial serial rape, and they're disproportionately black and brown. When we talk about overcriminalization of our youth, when we talk about the consequence of mass incarceration on our children who are black and brown, we don't talk about these girls. We don't talk about what they have experienced. We don't talk about the sexual abuse–to-prison pipeline that is the girls' story. Yes, we need the data, without question, and we need data that doesn't reproduce bias. But we also need to be able to bear witness to women and girls whose lives are broken because they are criminalized.

AF: When I came in as a prosecutor, I was just as equipped to be a tax attorney; I just went to the DA's office. I received no training—just thrown into a courtroom. It's like, "Here you go, use what you learned on television and what the person who started six months ahead of you is telling you. . . . " We'd get these cases, like a young girl who was in Target shoplifting with a bunch of older men. And I look at this case and I'm like, I'm going to divert your case because I'm a progressive prosecutor, I'm going to give you some community service, and see you later. Another prosecutor might put her on a path to state prison. Neither one of us was talking about all the red flags that this girl was being trafficked. It wasn't until my fifth year as a prosecutor that I learned that human trafficking didn't mean that there were bands of women coming over the border from El Salvador and being sold. It was happening in my neighborhood. That's an opportunity that we have in a data-driven, solution-oriented system. You need to learn this stuff before you even walk onto the job. We just didn't know that trafficking was a thing that we could be stopping not by punishing these girls for shoplifting but by saying, "Aha, here's a clue."

JL: Nearly every woman that we met when we visited prisons was a victim of some sort of abuse.

MSS: Ninety percent.

I want to go back to use of force and technologies that can be used to hold police accountable. We saw in the recent shootings of Alton Sterling and Paul O'Neal that officers' body cameras failed to capture footage of the incidents; a bystander's smartphone did. When Boston tried to start a pilot program for wearing body cameras, it was a volunteer program—and not a single officer volunteered. What needs to change about the way these potential solutions are implemented? If it's not body cameras, what other technologies can we use to help hold law enforcement accountable?

DM: The activist community is split on body cameras. Some people feel like it's another form of surveillance in communities. The reason [some] people support it is that there's never been an officer held accountable without video, whether it was the body camera or a dash cam or cell phone. Without video, it's like it didn't happen, right? So we think that is important. What I would say about the data piece is that there's so much data that is already out there that we haven't figured out how to assemble yet. Right now there's no public database of all the elected officials in the country. Doesn't exist. There's no public database of bail. You can't find: How did judge X set the bail in communities? The bail amounts are public—they are in court documents somewhere—but we haven't figured out how to aggregate that stuff. It'd be interesting to think about how we do that. My organization, Campaign Zero, created the first public database of use-of-force policies in police union contracts. We had to FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] all the police departments and put [the information] in one place. It was 2016 when we did that. Late to the game, but nobody had done it before.

JL: There are a lot of things that we aren't very good at collecting that would be useful for policy makers to know, and for the community to know to hold them accountable. What kind of charges did the district attorney recommend? And then, if [the accused] gets locked up, how long did he or she serve and what percentage of their original sentence?

DM: But we know the rainfall in every city in America. Pizza Hut knows where your pizza is.

AF: To give some real-life experience why that is, when I went to ask for bail for somebody in a courtroom, I'd write it down on a manila folder with a ballpoint pen. That manila folder would stay in my file cabinet until the case was over. That information was never input anywhere. After the case was disposed, it went into a box that went downstairs, and after five years that box went somewhere else. Five more years later, that box was destroyed. It's inertia. It's this idea that we don't have the resources to give me an iPad in the courtroom so that when I'm inputting bail, as soon as I write out what my bail is going to be, it's going somewhere and it's staying there.

MSS: I was trained that you always document so you can make sure that the world will bear witness to the human rights abuses committed. One of the reasons I'm excited about being a human rights lawyer working in tech is because we can bear witness in ways that were unimaginable before. Our mobile devices have changed the conversation around police brutality, and that has become a public-square conversation. We are now able to use technology to bear witness to each other's lives, to document abuse not just within one community, or one country, but in a global context—and then share it on these global platforms. I think about what happened in Ferguson, or Baton Rouge. Technology is about being borderless. It's about surmounting walls. I mean, if the 20th century was the history of how walls and boundaries define us and diminish us in so many ways, the 21st century is about how we can surmount those walls. Tech is part of what allows us to do that. Every human rights abuse, every genocide, every act of rape, every war crime happens in an atmosphere of isolation and silence. Tech allows us this powerful opportunity to disrupt that silence, to disrupt that isolation, so that we understand what is happening.

How Melanie Whelan of SoulCycle, Neil Parikh of Casper, and Alli Webb of Drybar turn ho-hum tasks into shareable phenomena.

In today's economy, it isn't enough to make great products—you have to inspire passion. We gathered leaders from three of the most dynamic emerging cult brands—spin-class exercise chain SoulCycle, salon startup Drybar, and mattress-business disrupter Casper—to discuss how they think about their customers, their businesses, their competition, and their culture. In this candid conversation, led by Fast Company's Amy Farley at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in November, the trio of leaders reveal how they cultivate love for their companies.

Each of your businesses has identified something that people consider a chore or a necessity and made it fun. Neil, is that where you started: There must be a better way to buy a mattress?

Casper cofounder and COO Neil Parikh: Why does every block have a mattress store? You go in, there are orange walls, there are salespeople (who earn commissions), a thousand different options. It's like buying a used car. It's one of the worst experiences ever. Why does this exist? It just doesn't make any sense.

Drybar founder Alli Webb: We didn't invent blowouts; we just created a much better experience. And we made it affordable.

SoulCycle CEO Melanie Whelan: SoulCycle is an experience. From the beginning, we have treated it as a live production. Every hour on the hour, it's curtains up. You have an instructor who is trained to lead a class that's not just a great physical workout but is really about challenging you to do better—on the bike, as well as in your life—and to share messages that leave you feeling stronger and more inspired.

When did you know that your concept was really connecting?

MW: We opened in Los Angeles in the winter of 2012, and I went out in 2013 for the one-year anniversary. People were [telling me], "You don't understand what this means to me." Feeling the energy of those riders—I felt like I was outside of the community. I was like, "No, I work here too!" That was the moment where we knew, Okay, we've got a national brand here and something that we can scale.

NP: When we were starting, people said, "No one's going to buy a mattress online, and no one's ever going to share that they bought a mattress online." Then we got to, like, 100,000 unboxing videos [on YouTube].

AW: When we opened our first location in Brentwood [California], we had no idea what to expect. But that very first day, women were lining up. We quickly had to take down the "Walk-ins Welcome" sign. I was doing blowouts and trying to run the front desk, and it was just madness. We were like, "Holy shit, we're on to something." We were all crying that first day.

SoulCycle and Drybar have employees—the fitness instructors and the stylists—whose personalities are part of the appeal of the brand. How do you channel their creativity while still creating a consistent experience?

MW: We always hire for attitude and aptitude, and less for experience. For instructors, we want someone who can hold the energy of a space, who can lead a group of people, and who's genuinely inspired by the music [they play in classes]. And then we'll teach them everything there is to know about the SoulCycle method, the anatomy of the workout. When the people who work at SoulCycle feel ownership over the experience that they're creating, they feel pride, and they're going to bring a different level of energy. It's freedom within a framework.

AW: So similar. Freedom in a framework, that's a good way to put it. If [a customer is] in L.A. or New York or Dallas, we want her to know that she is getting a [blowout] the way it was meant to be. Once you have the fundamentals down as a stylist, though, then we want you to put your own signature on it.

Casper started by selling just one item: a mattress. Neil, how did you make sure you were making the right mattress?

NP: My cofounder Jeff [Chapin] spent 10 years at the innovation consultancy Ideo, and a lot of our design process is inspired by what he learned there. One [aspect is] human-centered design. We watch how people are sleeping, figure out the problems they're having, and determine the key insight. People generally love memory-foam beds, because they're supportive for your back, but they sleep really hot, and they are bad for sex.

You feel like you're getting stuck inside of it. We realized that by adding latex to the top, you can keep it hyperbreathable and make it a lot bouncier. And because the materials are durable enough, you can put it into a box. We're always trying to watch how people are behaving, design against it, and then add a little bit of zing at the end.

Alli, is there something that's been particularly effective for getting people to come back to Drybar?

AW: One of the biggest pillars of our success is customer service. We really think we're like a bar, so when people come in, you have to know their name and things about them. That creates loyalty. And I don't know if this happens at SoulCycle, but there are times where, you know, we mess up. It's that customer service of telling them, "We're sorry. We know we made a mistake. Let us make it up to you."

MW: The challenge that Alli and I in particular have is that this is a people-led, people-driven experience. Alli is very kind to say, "I'm not sure if it happens at SoulCycle." It happens all the time. But we started with this foundation of hospitality, and we empower everyone at SoulCycle to make the call in the moment. We're a culture of "yes." You might not have liked that playlist, but I'm going to find that "yes" for you. That creates the entire vibe of the company. The fitness is really secondary. Everyone is trained to listen and make sure that the customer feels heard, which is ultimately mostly the problem.

AW: Where there's smoke, there's fire: If one woman had a bad experience, chances are that probably happened to a bunch of other women and they just didn't tell us.

MW: If one person says it, 100 people think it. You have to find where those weak points are.

AW: In terms of marketing, we just try to be real. We call our voice "sophisticated whimsy." We have to be really sensitive about [materials] that we send; we want people to be excited because there's something fun or kitschy in there, which goes a long way toward keeping people interested in your brand. On the flip side, when we're raising prices, I send a letter that says, "Our rent went up, our bills are going up." And that's the truth. We're very transparent with our clients about everything that we're doing, and I think that instills a lot of loyalty and brand equity. You may not like it, but we're not hiding anything.

Speaking of sophisticated whimsy, Casper has nailed a certain playful voice in its ads and other marketing.

NP: Normally when you'd see advertisements from mattress stores, you think, "That's not relevant to me; this is a nuisance. Why is it here?" We asked, "How can we design a series of advertisements so that for the six out of seven people who aren't in the market, it's at least going to be interesting? You're going to see a story line, you're going to be engaged.

It reminds you, Oh, that's how they think. That has carried throughout everything that we do.

You don't try to make people feel bad that they're not getting enough sleep. Similarly, with SoulCycle, it's all about health and fitness, but there's no guilt involved. Is that something that you're very conscious of when you're talking about your products?

MW: We just try to make it fun. When in life do you get to disconnect from your device, disconnect from your computer, step into a room, and just listen to great music with people? You're with your friends or you're meeting new friends, and someone tells you that you can be stronger tomorrow than you are today. That's compelling.

NP: It's very much about fun. Because forever, we've been trained that sleep is a negative thing. "I'm cool because I only sleep four hours a night," or, you know, "My parents punish me, and therefore I have to go to bed." We're trying to unwind a lot of that psychology and convince people that we should be proud of the fact that we want to sleep eight hours a night.

Because of your success, you each now have a lot of imitators. Has your notion of who your competitors are changed as you've grown? Melanie, you have said that your biggest competition is actually Netflix rather than other fitness clubs.

MW: There are so many choices for how you spend your time, whether it's an extra hour of sleep, an hour you're going to spend getting your hair blown out, or an hour of an incredible Netflix series. So you press snooze one too many times and you miss your SoulCycle class in the morning. It's our goal to be the best part of our riders' days. It's not really about the other competitor that's in a market we're going into. How do we create an experience that truly is the best in the market so that you don't press "Snooze" in the morning?

How about you, Neil? Who is your competition and what's your advantage?

NP: Our competition is still the corner store. Ninety percent of mattresses are still bought in person. The competitive advantage we're seeking is, can we deliver an amazing experience over and over and over again? The analogy I give to our customer experience team is we're trying to develop the Michelin-starred restaurant of companies. It's easy—well, somewhat easy—to cook a meal in your own home once for your friends. To do that 500 times a day, or 5,000 times a day, 365 days a year, is a totally different problem. When you care, when you have the right values, and when we can train people to do it over and over and over again, so that our millionth customer has the same—if not better—experience as our 10th one, that's going to be the reason we win.

AW: We pay very close attention to our copycats and competitors. I used to lose a lot of sleep over it. We were new, this was a whole new category, and we didn't know how big the opportunity was. The problem is when someone walks into, like, Sally's Dry Bar, and they say, "I went to Drybar and it wasn't that great." That confusion in the market is frustrating.

How do you keep an experience-based model fresh? How do you keep people from getting tired of the concept?

MW: It's about making sure that every experience is a little different. It's personal, so the front desk saying, "I haven't seen you in two weeks, Alli. Were you on the road?" And making the time for that real conversation and dialogue, not just a quick transaction. Then making sure that we have something in the room that's going to surprise and delight them. We launch 14 retail collections every year. When you come in there's something new—maybe a new bra, maybe a new sweatshirt—that excites people. We look for special experiences: live DJs, theme rides, community events. We're very cognizant of it, because we do see our riders two to three times a week, so we empower our studio managers in each location to make those calls and design their own experience.

AW: Everybody always wants great hair. I don't think it ever gets boring or old. When you know you're going to Drybar later in the day, you're kind of excited for how you're going to look and feel. That's what we're selling—that feeling. We always say that we're not just selling blowouts, we're selling happiness and confidence. As long as the experience is good and we're treating you well, and you know that your hair is going to look great when you leave, you keep coming back.

Constantly checking your email is an addiction that's destroying your productivity. Here's how to break the habit.

We have a love/hate relationship with email. Forty percent of employees wish they had less email, according to a poll by Adobe. Yet a study from email-marketing platform provider Reachmail found that 70% of us check work email after 6 p.m., and 58% typically respond to an email within one hour.

"People have to understand that the email problem is largely their own fault," says Kevin Kruse, author of 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management. "Email, for many, is an addiction. Just like sex, drugs, and gambling, checking email releases the pleasure hormone dopamine. We like checking for new things. We like to do email rather than the hard thing on our to-do list. And let's not forget FOMO; many of us check email constantly because of the fear of missing out."

Time spent on email is time that can be better spent on important goals or relationships, says Kruse. Here are five tips for getting control of your email habit and cutting the amount of time you spend on it in half:

1. Put It On The Schedule

Ultra-successful people don't check email; they process it. "They treat it like any other work task: Plan for it, schedule it on their calendar, and then tackle it," says Kruse, who recommends dealing with email three times a day, once during the morning, at noon, and again at night.

"Many self-made millionaires I've interviewed process their own email, but they only do it once a day," says Kruse. "I think the key is not the amount of time, but rather doing it intentionally. We should all schedule our email work just like we should schedule all of our other work. Maybe we need three hours a day to handle it all, or maybe we need 30 minutes, but it should be done with intention."

2. Quit The CC

Another easy way to reduce the amount of time you spend on email is to stop cc'ing in so many people on your emails. That includes skipping "reply all," says Kruse.

"Basically, the less email you send, the less you'll receive," he says. "One large energy company reported that they cut total email traffic by over 50% just by training people to think twice before sending out an email."

3. Set Up Rules

Another way to drastically cut down the time you spend on email triage is filtering certain kinds of messages into separate folders, says Alexandra Samuel, author of Work Smarter with Social Media: A Guide to Managing Evernote, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Your Email. Use your email provider's rule function to send less important messages, like cc's and newsletters, to alternate folders that can be handled at your leisure.

"The more you use rules to make conscious, consistent choices about which emails need your attention, the less time and energy you'll spend on messages that aren't as important as the work or personal tasks you really need time for," says Samuel, who teaches the class Work Smarter with Email on Skillshare.

4. Stop Using Your Inbox As A To-Do List

People often use their email inbox as a second to-do list, leaving messages there to deal with at a later time, says Kruse. "This is horrible for productivity," he says. "Even though I receive a couple hundred emails a day, I always achieve 'inbox zero' before I quit for the day."

Kruse follows the "4 Ds." When he processes email, he first asks himself if he can delete it. If not, he decides if he can delegate it, forwarding it to someone else. If he can't do that, he asks himself if he can do it in less than five minutes. If so, he replies or handles the task. If he can't do it in five minutes, he defers it to later.

"But rather than leaving it in my inbox, I drag it onto my calendar and I pick a specific date, time, and duration in which I respond," he says.

5. Inform Others

You'll be more likely to reduce the amount of time you spend on email if you let others know your intention, says Kruse. Talk to colleagues about it, and tell your boss that in the spirit of maximizing your productivity, you're only going to process email at certain times of the day, and you'll have your email notifications shut off.

"Ask her if it's okay, and establish a system for how she can reach you for time-sensitive requests, perhaps via text or a phone call," he says.

Cutting back on email will mean changing old habits, and that can take a while, says Kruse. "It's best to be patient with yourself, and to know that it will take time before you psychologically realize you don't need to spend as much time in email as you do," he says.

The lesson: Inclusivity starts at the top.

With her latest philanthropic campaign, Melinda Gates is trying to bring more women into the tech industry by helping to build a better pipeline. Gender diversity is an issue the former Microsoft executive knows well, which makes her advice especially valuable.

Find Your Own Style

Gates had a long, successful career at Microsoft, but it took her a while to find her way at the company. "When I started, I loved the industry and what we were building, but I didn't love the [corporate culture]. So I finally decided to quit," Gates said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in November. "But then I thought, I'll just try to be myself for a while [at Microsoft] and see what happens. And I started becoming a lot more successful. I was a manager by then, and people [were] flocking to work in my area. It turned out they were people who wanted to have their voices heard [too]."

Change The Perspective

Some of the Gates Foundation's most successful campaigns—such as an effort to rethink how to get birth control to women in the developing world—couldn't have happened without a female point of view. "If we didn't have women working on it, we wouldn't [have found the solution]. Men don't see it as a problem; birth control is not their issue. That's exactly why we want women saying, 'I'm going to work on [applying] tech and innovation and science toward humanitarian problems—whether they affect women or men.' "

Inclusivity Starts At The Top

At the foundation, Gates makes a point of speaking up in support of female colleagues in situations where, say, a man restates something that a woman already said or talks over her at a meeting. And Gates is equally eager to correct herself when she makes the same errors. "It's important for all of us who have a seat at the table—men or women—to stand up and say what we see. We have to be transparent about it and realize that we all make mistakes."

Here's what to look for in your next interview.

Four top executives share how they go deep with candidates.

Hunt For Hunger

"I look for someone with something to prove—to your old boss, your dad, your third-grade teacher, yourself. I don't care where it comes from: You need that hustle." —Emily Weiss, founder and CEO, Glossier

Go Negative

"I ask, 'Think of your worst day—what happens?' You learn about people's pet peeves, about what environment won't work for them. Sometimes they disqualify themselves without realizing it, because they reveal they don't really want the job." —Tom Ogletree, director of social impact, General Assembly

Push Past Stock Responses

"Give me an example of when you failed, and another example of when you failed, and a third example of when you failed. Ninety-nine point nine percent of people are out of their stock an­­swers at that point, and they have to go beyond the script." —Will Dean, CEO, Tough Mudder

It's All About The Fit

"[In a candidate,] social intelligence is as important as a professional CV. How do you integrate yourself into a group without losing yourself?" —Martin Gran, managing director, Snøhetta

Do you feel like your attention span is shortening? Stretch and strengthen it with these steps.

There's a growing body of research about how counterproductive multitasking can be. While we may feel like we're getting more done, the reality is that regular multitasking can leave us with a diminishing ability to focus.

That's good to know. But if you're a chronic multitasker who finds it hard to focus, is there any hope of getting your attention span back?

While neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, psychology professor at McGill University in Montreal and author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession won't speak definitively for everyone, he says there are some general things most of us can do to improve our focus. Put these practices into place to sharpen your concentration and be more effective.

Step One: Get More Sleep

While we may immediately think of task-related issues that affect focus, our attention span happens within a bigger physiological context, Levitin says. If you're not getting proper sleep or feeling a great deal of stress, you may find it hard to focus, even in the best circumstances. Caffeine can increase focus in some people but may undermine it in others, causing them to feel anxious or "jittery." Understanding your own needs to feel rested and able to focus—and tending to them—is really the first step to improving your ability to hone in on what's got your attention for longer periods of time.

Step Two: Write Down What Is Distracting You

When people try to meditate for the first time, it's common for their minds to wander or for unwanted thoughts to creep in. "We call that the monkey mind"—and the same thing can happen when it's time to focus, says Diana Raab, author of Healing with Words: A Writer's Cancer Journey. This is where keeping a journal or even a list can come in handy. Write down the thought or to-do list items that pop into your mind so you can let them go or deal with them later, she says.

Step Three: Turn Off Digital Distractions

Like any practice, focus happens best when you set yourself up for success, says professional development expert Benjamin Brooks, founder of PILOT, Inc., an employee coaching platform. Be sure you have the resources and materials for the job at hand and block out time to work on the task. "Be sure to turn off notifications for email and social media," he says. When push notifications are activated, other people are deciding where your focus goes, he adds.

Step Four: Commit To What You're Doing

It sounds simple, but in order to focus on something, you have to commit to doing it, Levitin says. Without such commitment, you're going to be distracted by your thoughts or other demands on your time. You've got to decide that this is the work you'll complete now—without multitasking—and do it.

Step Five: Practice

Regaining focus may require practice, Levitin says. You may need to start out with 10 minutes at a time, forcing yourself to stay on task. Then, work on incrementally increasing the amount of time you're focused on a task. The goal is to get yourself staying on task for between 25 and 90 minutes, depending on the type of work you're doing and what your personal focus thresholds are.

Step Six: Integrate "Distraction" Breaks

In between periods of focus, taking brief breaks can actually help you enhance your focus even more, Brooks says. While the type of break that's most effective will differ for many, the key is to shift to something completely different than what you were previously working on, he says.

"It's stopping work completely to read an aviation book or make myself a cup of coffee or check out something on Politico—something completely different that actually allows me to reset for a second so when I am working, I'm working at my full efficacy rather than this deep-down distracted sense," he says.

With one show on Viceland and other projects in the works, former Twitter stars Desus and Mero are seeing how far fast talk will take them.

In the back of the studio, perched on a mossy boulder, is a stuffed grizzly bear wearing a Yankee fitted and wheat-colored Timbs. He has a vaguely sour expression on his face, like he can barely believe some of the things he's heard.

Just in front of him, at a heavily graffiti'd table, is the source of this bear's audio trauma: Desus Nice and The Kid Mero. Both are decked out in the typical uniform of hoodies and hats with pancake-flat brims, and they're already locked in animated, blurry-hands banter when I enter. It doesn't stop for 45 minutes. Being in a room with Desus and Mero is like having twin hyperverbal AK-47s pointed at your ears, loaded with infinite ammo. They're precise, effective, and inexhaustible. As I take a seat across from them, in the Vice studio where the pair film their TV show four days a week, the air around us converges into a giant word cloud.

"This feels like either a job interview for you or like we're codefendants on a court case," Desus says.

Before I can acknowledge the wisdom of this observation, Mero jumps in.

"You could sit on that couch over there instead," he says, "But then it would feel like therapy."

I don't admit it out loud, but I'd gladly accept free therapy from these guys. They seem tuned into some cosmic frequency that catches channels far beyond most mental terrestrial radios. Over the past few years, Desus and Mero have managed to jump out of their Twitter timelines and into a series of increasingly sophisticated recording rooms. They've gone from podcasts to TV shows to top-secret deals they're not allowed to talk about just yet—which is ironic since what got them here is their ability to talk in an entertaining way about literally everything else.

Release the Art

It all started uptown in the Bronx, where Daniel (Desus) Baker and Joel (Mero) Martinez grew up in the 1990s, getting the finest possible education in shit-talking.

"We were trained classically in the New York public high school system to be out here roasting for hours and hours," Desus says.

Although the two knew each other back in the day, they only realized they had conversational chemistry when they reconnected on Twitter decades later. At the time, Desus was writing for a financial magazine (not Fast Company) while Mero worked as an aide at a junior high. Any time they tweeted back and forth, though, it flowed like crackling dialogue between veteran comedy writers. Anyone following them both had front row seats to watch ideas bloom skyward in a Dr. Seussian super-stack. Even on Twitter, it was clear that Desus and Mero complemented each other like Reese's ingredients, and fans urged them to team up on a project. All that remained to be seen was whether the digital seeds of their dynamic would flourish offline.

A lot of funny people on Twitter fail to click in real life. It takes them longer to react to each other's words, they have trouble reading each other's faces, and they run out of things to talk about shockingly quick. Not these two, though. During a brief meeting at Complex Media, which had been courting the pair for a potential podcast, their real-time interaction made good on the promise of their dueling Twitter accounts. Complex wrote a check and it was time to get down to business.

"What a lot of people don't realize about starting a podcast is that it's not as easy as it looks," Desus says. "The recording might sound shitty, the audio levels could be off. A lot can go wrong."

If a motivated Russian hacker saw fit, he or she would find tucked away on Desus's phone the initial three test episodes of what became Desus vs Mero. The owner of these recordings refuses a gentle request to play me a snippet, although he says they might host a listening party for them some day. While Complex took care of the technical issues to give these early episodes a crisp sound, Desus and Mero's flow was apparently less fluid. They talked over each other a lot, instead of punctuating their finished sentences for emphasis like they do now. It didn't take long after the launch in December 2013, however, before they found their rhythm—and an audience to go with it.

The alcohol and weed-drenched conversations on the show were loose but densely joke-packed, and made listeners feel like they were sharing a couch and a blunt with two funny friends. Desus and Mero flitted between the street wisdom segment, Knowledge Darts, hip-hop and sports talk, and blissed-out hypotheticals like what if Gummi Bears were the size of real bears. They went in on New York's abundance of young female phlebotomists, and the overwhelming dad-ness of late-period Jay-Z, who was now "washed"—the worst thing a once-hot performer could be. Desus and Mero turned out to be superior in podcast-form than on Twitter. Maybe an even more optimum medium for their voices lay in store.

Early on, there were a couple moments of frustration where the show didn't seem to be catching on fast enough. Desus would sneak out of his job early to get to the studio on time, grumbling on Twitter every step of the way. (These complaints only endeared him further to his followers.) When a swarm of fans did show up, though, they prove rabid. If episodes were ever late, a pronounced outcry sounded online, asking when Desus and Mero would "release the art." By the ninth episode, Complex recognized it had a burgeoning hit on its hands and dedicated money to make the show available in video form as well.

Not long afterward, high-profile fans started pouring in. A-Trak, a producer and label head who is also Kanye's tour DJ, soon asked the duo to host his Fools Gold Day Off festival in Brooklyn, and they accepted. Although Desus and Mero had never hosted anything before, the next thing they know they were on stage in Coney Island, in front of thousands of day-drunk hip hop heads. In between introducing sets from hometown heroes like French Montana, the two more or less performed their podcast live onstage. By midway through the day, the crowd was chanting the hosts' names. After it was all over, several people told them they'd come to the festival just to see Desus and Mero.

"That's when we knew we were onto something," Mero says. "We were like, this should be bigger. That's when we started having ideas, like this should be more than a podcast."

It's Lit

At the point when Complex's DvM contract was nearly up, MTV emailed Mero out of the blue to ask if he and his creative partner wanted to be in business with the network. Mero thought the message might be spam, but after a day or two, he passed it along to the Money Team—a braintrust comprised of his and Desus' two lawyers and Victor Lopez, their always-hustling manager, who helped them navigate new opportunities.

"If someone wants us in a commercial for tractor and fishing supplies—" Desus says, and Mero immediately picks up the thread, wide-eyed acting out how a D&M tractor ad might go, complete with south-of-Mason-Dixon accent work.

"That's not our natural demo, though," Desus says when Mero finishes. "So Victor would advise against it. Also everyone who shops there probably calls me racist online."

When it came to the MTV opportunity, though, The Money Team agreed with the pair's interest, and arranged a meeting where they could lay out some of their many programming ideas. MTV was impressed and duly signed Desus and Mero to an overall deal, not long before the final episode of DvM dropped, in January 2015. The only problem was the network had no idea what to do with them.

"We kind of just sat there for two years," Desus says. "We did a lot of things but we didn't produce anything, and that was what we were there for."

He and Mero would appear on MTV2's ill-advised advice show, Guy Code, or the zinger-delivery system, Joking Off, but neither was ever a perfect fit. On Twitter, Desus and Mero crafted concise, self-contained jokes; in person, the natural improvisers' best bits emerged from riffing and feeding off each other's energy. The structure and tone of these shows never captured Peak Desus and Mero.

"Some of the stuff we did on MTV hasn't been stuff we're super proud of," Mero says. "From the podcast, we knew we were funny on camera, and we thought now it's time to create a vehicle—not something that someone dropped us into but something we came up with for ourselves."

Fans were frustrated too. They'd see the duo pop up on MTV2 for maybe a minute, not realizing that what they were seeing was the only minute of airable content the legal department let slide. Meanwhile there was no podcast; no art for anyone to demand they release. Fans did not remain silent about this injustice either, tweeting out occasional accusations of washedness. The outcry helped keep Desus and Mero on their toes. Other deals had been popping off—Mero teamed up with Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig to sell a sitcom treatment about working in the Bronx public school system—but for now, fans had very few ways of finding them. Sick of being stuck on the shelf, the two quietly plotted a return to podcasting and a bridge to the next level.

Coincidentally, it was Ezra Koenig who helped steer them toward a new home for their show. When Desus and Mero appeared on Koenig's Beats 1 show, Time Crisis, they were struck by the studio's state of the art set-up. One of the other guests that day, grimy New York rapper Despot, mentioned that he had an in with Red Bull, who had a similarly decked out studio. Despot made the introduction, which is what lead to Red Bull partnering up with Desus and Mero to put out their new podcast, Bodega Boys.

"We were trying to shop it around and other companies were like, 'What the hell is this? We don't want this?'" Desus says. "And Red Bull was like, 'We'll take it. Do whatever you want. We won't edit a thing.'"

Although Desus and Mero were pretty sure that with their rising profiles, they'd attract an audience for this new show right away, they opted not to do any advance promotion for it. Instead, they quietly dropped the first episode of Bodega Boys just after 9/11 in 2015, tweeting out the link with zero warning. Red Bull would have been happy with a few hundred downloads for such a low-key release. What they got was 80,000 practcially overnight. In the ensuing months, devoted fans flooded Red Bull Studios with constant gift packages for Desus and Mero, and posted Instagram selfies in front of the building with captions like, "Yo, I made it to Mecca."

The Brand Is Strong

The instant success of Bodega Boys proved that Desus vs Mero was no fluke. There were no audible signs that nine months had elapsed since the duo had last released the art. Rather, it sounded like they'd been having an endless, resin-caked conversation the entire time and had finally bothered to hit record.

The two were happy to be kayaking their audience's ear canals again each week, while still appearing on MTV2 shows. They wanted something more, though.

"Being on MTV was like community college," Mero says. "It was like if you graduate and do two years and transfer to a four-year. We learned all the ins and outs of TV—like blocking, opening up off the camera, looking into your camera—because it was a real official operation. The stuff we were trying to make we weren't making, but we learned a lot in terms of like 'How do you make TV?'"

Less than a year later, they were able to put those lessons to use.

Nick Weidenfeld, the development exec behind some of Adult Swim's biggest hits was a Desus and Mero fan, and had befriended the two online. During the summer of 2016, when Weidenfeld was transitioning into his new role as president of programming at Vice's nascent TV channel, Viceland, he decided to get in touch. At the time he reached out, Desus and Mero were nearing the end of their MTV contract and weighing options for their next big move. It was perfect timing. It was also the culmination of vocal podcast fans and insiders like Emmy-winning producer Erik Rydholm laying the groundwork for their unstoppable march to TV. On October 17th, Desus and Mero debuted on Viceland and has been growing strong since.

"We know the shit is fire," Mero says. "That's not even a gassed statement or whatever because it's like if 5000 people tell you, 'Yo, you have a wicked jump shot,' you've got a wicked jump shot. But you need those people who are in that gatekeeper position to know it too before they allow you into these places."

Beyond the Viceland show and Bodega Boys and the sitcom with Ezra Koenig, there are other mysterious projects Desus and Mero are sworn to secrecy about for the moment. There's one more that they mention, though. Just as the show with Koenig will draw from Mero's former life working in a Bronx public school, Desus is putting together a series about his old office job at a financial magazine. It's still in the early stages, but if all goes according to plan, it won't be one of many future DVR-ables starring these two. Desus and Mero basically want to storm the studios with so many shows that the fans they've worked hard to energize become permanently sick of them. It just may happen, too. For now, though, as they regularly say, the brand is strong.

"The brand is brolic right now," Desus says, raising a fist. "It is HGH."

"It's so HGH," adds Mero. "Barry Bonds asterisks."

And what would it take for the pair to be washed all of a sudden, other than having entirely too many TV shows on air at once?

"Not much," Desus says. "A couple of bad quotes."

"The internet will destroy you as fast as it made you," Mero confirms.

"Even faster."

When big companies delay payments, small businesses can get squeezed. There are benefits to reversing that trend.

Jean-Noel Barrot is assistant professor of finance at MIT Sloan School of Management. This piece originally appeared at The Conversation.

Operating a small business, the backbone of the U.S. economy, has always been tough.

But they've also been disproportionately hurt by the Great Recession, losing 40% more jobs than the rest of the private sector combined.

Interestingly, as my research with Harvard's Ramana Nanda shows there's a fairly straightforward way to support small businesses, make them more profitable and hire more: Pay them faster.

A Major Source Of Financing

When a business is not paid for weeks after a sale, it is effectively providing short-term financing to its customers, something called "trade credit." This is recorded in the balance sheet as accounts receivable.

Despite its economic importance, trade credit has received little attention in the academic literature so far, relative to other sources of financing, yet it is a major source of funding for the U.S. economy. The use of trade credit is recorded on companies' accounting statements as "trade payables" in the liability section of the balance sheet. According to the Federal Fund Flows, trade payables amounted to US$2.1 trillion on nonfinancial companies' balance sheets at the end of the third quarter of 2006, two times more than bank loans and three times as much as a short-term debt instrument known as commercial paper.

Recent news reports have highlighted the problem of slow payments to suppliers as large companies extend their payment periods, often with crushing results for small businesses.

Other countries have tried to reform the trade credit market, especially in Europe, where a directive was adopted in 2011 limiting intercompany payment periods for all sectors to 60 days (with a few exceptions).

In an earlier paper, I showed that requiring payments to be made within shorter time periods had a large effect on small businesses' survival when it was adopted in France. Receiving their money earlier led them to default less often on their own suppliers and their financiers. Their probability to go bankrupt dropped by a quarter.

Accelerating Payments

To learn more about the impact of such reforms in the U.S., we studied the effects of speeding up payments to federal contractors.

The QuickPay reform, announced in September 2011, accelerated payments from the federal government to a subset of small business contractors in the U.S., shrinking the payment period from 30 days to 15 days—thus accelerating $64 billion in annual federal contract value.

Federal government procurement amounts to 4% of U.S. gross domestic product and includes $100 billion in goods and services purchased directly from small businesses, spanning virtually every county and industry in the U.S. In the past, government contracts required payment one to two months following the approval of an invoice, with the result that these small businesses were effectively lending to the government—and often while doing so, they had to simultaneously borrow from banks to finance their payroll and working capital.

Our research shows that even small improvements in cash collection can have large direct effects on hiring due to the multiplier effect of working capital. On average, each accelerated dollar of payment led to an almost 10-cent increase in payroll, with two-thirds of the increase coming from new hires and the balance from increased earnings per worker. Collectively, the new policy—which accelerated $64 billion in payments—increased annual payroll by $6 billion and created just over 75,000 jobs in the three years following the reform.

To give an example, take a business selling $1 million throughout the year to its customers and being paid 30 days after delivering its product. It therefore has to finance 30 days' worth of sales at any given time (or 8% of its annual sales). As a result, it constantly has about $80,000 in cash tied up in accounts receivable.

A shift in the payment regime from 30 days to 15 days means that the firm has to finance only 15 days of sales, or $40,000. And that would in turn help it eventually sustain $2 million in annual sales and double in size.

Holding Back Growth

These findings confirm the widely shared belief among policymakers and business owners that long payment terms hold back small business growth.

They also raise the question as to why the economy relies so much on trade credit if it costs so much in terms of jobs, and whether other policies might be undertaken to reduce it. An interesting follow-up policy to QuickPay was SupplierPay. In that program, over 40 companies including Apple, AT&T, CVS, Johnson & Johnson, and Toyota, pledged to pay their small suppliers faster or enable a financing solution that helps them access working capital at a lower cost.

It is likely that more information on customers' quality and speed of payments would allow suppliers to choose whether to work with businesses that pay more slowly. So following a "name and shame" logic, companies might feel they have to accelerate payments not to be perceived as bad customers.

The Broader Impact

Would it make sense to sustain and extend this policy? An interesting aspect of our analysis is that the effect of QuickPay depends on local labor market conditions. It was most pronounced in areas with high unemployment rates when it was introduced. Elsewhere job creation was limited.

The reason for this is that helping small businesses grow gives them an advantage over other companies operating locally. By hiring more, these small business contractors make it harder for others to do so. Unless there is unemployment, this crowding-out effect offsets the employment gains of the policy.

As such, such a policy will be effective in stimulating total employment only in areas or times of high unemployment.

The San Francisco startup has learned that eaters prefer variety to speed. So it's expanding its offerings and making them to order.

In 2013, meal delivery service Sprig launched in San Francisco with one simple goal: making it easy to eat well.

The creation of tech entrepreneurs, not restaurateurs, the service launched with just three meal options a day, available only at dinner and ordered through an app. The high-quality, healthy meals typically included a protein and a few sides and were delivered to wherever you were in roughly 20 minutes. If you weren't interested in one of the three meals, then you weren't interested in Sprig, at least that night.

Seeing a need for more choices, Sprig eventually expanded from three to five daily options. It also started to deliver lunches.

Now it's taking a huge step by expanding from five options to a menu of 20. "The goal of that menu primarily is to add more variety, and have a better quality delivery experience," says Gagan Biyani, cofounder and CEO of Sprig.

The company's original menu catered for busy professionals. With its new menu, in development for the past six months, Sprig aims to appeal to a larger customer base, including groups and families. The 20 items will change seasonally and include main dishes such as Korean BBQ chicken and savory braised beef stew as well as shareable sides like roasted winter vegetables and rancher's mac & cheese. The menu also includes more gluten-free options as well as meat add-ons to transform vegetarian salads into protein-filled entrees.

From Ready-To-Go to Made-For-You

As you can imagine, growing from five to 20 options will transform how Sprig operates. Prior to today, its service worked similarly to other delivery services like Square's Caviar, with cars driving around a city loaded with pre-prepared meals. That meant when you ordered a kale salad from the company, that salad was likely already made and in your neighborhood, so Sprig could get it in your hands in just a few minutes. That was great for speed. But depending on what you ordered, preparing meals in advance didn't necessarily make for the tastiest dishes.

"That's actually one of the biggest customer insights we have over the last three years, is that speed is not the thing that people care the most about," says Biyani. "They care more about the quality of the food."

With the new menu, the company is also introducing a new business model that will prepare and distribute meals from the company's kitchen in San Francisco as they're ordered. "It will make the food quality a lot better because we're preparing the food as soon as a customer orders, or just a little bit before," Bivani says. "That is really more important than [the fact that] it might take 30-40 minutes instead of taking 20-30 minutes."

Even if Sprig is de-emphasizing the speed of its deliveries, it needs to manage its time carefully. If you order a meal from a local restaurant, it might sit around waiting on a driver (and getting cold). Or it might not be ready when your delivery driver gets there, slowing down the process. Sprig handles every aspect of the process itself, aiming to get a hot meal to your doorstep as efficiently as possible.

"There's this logistics platform that spans all of Sprig, from how we purchase ingredients to how we put them on the road," says Angela Wise, Sprig's head of product. "That's why vertical integration is so powerful, is that one system powers all of Sprig. The systems are super connected, so there are lots of cozy synergies and customer experience benefits. We think it's the secret sauce to delivering a really awesome experience at a very reasonable price." (Entrees average about $13; sides are $5-$7.)

As Sprig's product manager, Wise oversees everything from menu creation—each recipe is meticulously tested in-house before it hits the streets—to food photography and the way the service's app works. It's a role that extends beyond the tech to the meals themselves.

"The food is designed not only to be delivered . . . it's also designed to look great in an app," says Wise. The company wants customers to discover food they might not have even realized was on the menu, and a big part of that experience is in the pictures.

"Your average restaurant doesn't spend nearly as much time taking beautiful pictures as we do because they have the benefit of that really comprehensive experience," says Wise. At a local eatery, you might smell bread baking or ask a couple one table over about a dish they ordered. Sprig, however, must rely on visuals alone rather than appealing to all your senses. "Photography for us is a brand value. Everything we want to express is expressed through photography," she says.

Tastes Great, Less Waste

The meal-delivery business has already claimed multiple victims, and one of its challenges is that it's tough to predict how much food you'll need on hand. Recent reports suggested that another Silicon valley company, Munchery, didn't sell 16% of the meals it prepared over the past two years, accounting for a $1.9 million loss and forcing the company to decrease the average cost of each plate. While waste is certainly an issue for any food-based business, Biyani says that Sprig's new approach should actually result in less waste, and it's adding more high-quality ingredients, not taking them away.

"One of the reasons we're moving to this model is if you imagine if you're going to stock a car of food, you might have it roaming around, and you might lose some meals that you predicted would go out, and you were wrong about your prediction," he says. "Now what we do is, we have all the meals in one facility, so it's easier for us to predict the waste we might have and minimize that waste."

The company uses data science to know, for instance, how many potatoes to chop up for a Tuesday evening dinner rush. And now, since meals are made on demand rather than preprepared, Sprig can avoid issues like making too much of one dish and not enough of another in an evening. Perhaps more importantly, every customer's meal will arrive even fresher than it did before.

Staffing Up

Besides its vertical integration, Biyani says one of the keys to Sprig's success is its employees. As of last Friday, all of Sprig's servers were offered full-time employment, making them staffers rather than contract workers like drivers for services such Lyft and Uber. Employees each make $14.50 an hour and get health benefits with premiums paid by Sprig, along with equity in the company.

That's not just good news for those workers; it's also better for Sprig. "It's a lot easier to manage a group of people that are part of your team," Biyani says. Drivers queue up within the app for their shift, and are told when to stop by the kitchen to pick up a delivery.

"Managing that flow is a critical part of our operations, and the fact that we're one facility that both makes and delivers the food is an example of why we can deliver food hotter and have more control over the experience," he says.

Sprig's new menu and delivery process go into effect today. The startup currently offers service only in San Francisco, after suspending it in other parts of the Bay Area and Chicago. But its new plan includes aspirations of future expansion. "We're focused on fine-tuning our new menu in our home market, but absolutely plan to expand this model elsewhere in the future," the company says.

People see your email signature much more often than your business card.

Networking. The mere word conjures up discomfort: There you are, making forced small talk with complete strangers while balancing cube-shaped cheese or veggies and a pool of dip on a plastic plate. But networking isn't just an activity you do over cocktails and canapés, with conversations centered around safe topics like the weather or what you find most "rewarding" about your job. Nor does it require coffee or sitting awkwardly through yet another "informational interview."

Networking is simply any act that builds strong personal connections with other people. And it's an essential activity—a necessary evil, some may say—for advancing your career or, if you're an entrepreneur, for securing new business and meeting investors. Since it's a human-focused undertaking, you're actually networking every time you interact with another person—or at least you can be.

Each tap, tweet, post, message, and comment is the chance to make a connection—therefore, it's networking. That means that in the space of an ordinary workday, you have plenty of opportunities to network in a multitude of micro-ways, hold the micro-cheese. Here are a few of them.

Your Email Signature

Come what may of other communication tools, email isn't going anywhere soon. According to a recent Radicati report, the average number of business emails sent and received per user each day totaled 122. And that figure is set to grow; by 2019, researchers estimate, we'll be trading 126 emails a day.

So rather than groaning about the state of your inbox, consider the 122 networking opportunities you have each time you hit "send." Set up an email signature line if you don't have one, and take a fresh look at it if you do. Do recipients know not only how to reach you (off email) but also what they should be seeking you out for when they do?

Does your signature line appear at the bottom of each email sent, or do you have to remember to drop it in each time? Send yourself an email and consider how it looks from the perspective of a recipient. Would you like to talk to that person on the basis of the signature line alone? If not, change it.

LinkedIn Updates

You may have a polished, professional, up-to-date profile on LinkedIn, but that only tells part of your career story. To use LinkedIn to its fullest, you can't just treat it as a directory. You have to share updates pretty regularly in order to tell connections what's on your mind, whether it's your point of view on some industry news story or just congratulating a colleague on a business win.

You can break out of your own immediate professional sphere, too. Consider sharing updates on a nonprofit cause you care about; many business connections deepen around shared charitable interests, not just professional ones.

And yes, updates are a chance to toot your own business horn—but just as the best networking isn't all "me me me," you should also use updates to cross-sell your colleagues' talents or promote the services of vendors you trust. (Just remember that LinkedIn is still a business platform, so keep your LOLs and selfies for other social networking sites.)

Your Speaker Or Award Bio

Okay, maybe you aren't exactly invited to speak or receive an award on a daily basis, but the further you go in your career, the more often these opportunities may crop up. As they do, you'll need to craft custom bios that are tailored to each one. And as counterintuitive as it sounds, even if you're the main-stage attraction, the bio you submit should be all about the audience, not about you: Who are they? Why do they care about what you have to say or what you've accomplished? How can you draft your bio to connect with them more meaningfully?

The bio you submit won't just appear in a program handout, it's also likely to be posted on the event or organization's website, included in online marketing materials and even a press release (where others will readily find it with a quick Google search). So take the time to craft a targeted bio each time you're asked for one. Use the opportunity to not only just tell them what you've done in the past, but also to show them what they should be seeking from you in the future.

FAQs And Instruction Materials

Whether someone chooses to buy your product or service may come down to how you network your FAQs. Even an instruction manual can be the deciding factor for future purchases:

To be fair, as an individual professional, you aren't singlehandedly building and selling cars, but if you're a consultant or independent worker, chances are you have an FAQ page on your website. Pay attention to it. Even if you're an employee in a traditional business, chances are you've been called on at some point to train a new hire. Any guides or resources you draw up in the process are direct proof of your knowledge base and communication skills—and in one sense, of your networking prowess.

Just like good dinner conversation, all of these resources should guide and engage, leaving the inquirer better informed and, hopefully, impressed by your expertise.

Your Professional Headshot

Have a look at the photo you're using on networking sites—not just on LinkedIn and Twitter, but also Facebook, Google+, and even Instagram and Snapchat. The standard "shoulders suit and tie" portrait could be as unapproachable as the "candidly caught lounging on the sofa" selfie.

Does your photo show who you really are? Does it convey your personality? It's 2017, but so many people's headshots on even the most well-established platforms still aren't formatted properly—they're sized wrong and wind up pixellated, cropped, or stretched awkwardly. This doesn't just look unprofessional, it's bad networking.

Keep in mind, too, that there's no hard and fast rule as to whether you should use an identical photo on each site versus changing it up depending on the social platform. It depends on how (and how much) you use each one. But whatever you do, your image should fit the type of networking scenario you're looking to create in a given digital space.

The bottom line is that you should put as much care and consistency into these routine activities as you would a formal business event. You can network in more ways and places (and often more effectively) than you might think.

J. Kelly Hoey is a speaker, investor, and author whose latest book is Build Your Dream Network: Forging Powerful Relationships in a Hyper-Connected World.

Keep asking the right questions, and you'll be wrong about the future less often than your competitors.

Remember what 1997 was like? How well?

It was Amazon's first full fiscal year. Microsoft's Windows 97 operating system wasn't there quite yet, and it soon became Windows 98. The internet bubble was on its way, but we couldn't see it. Y2K was around the corner, too, but few of us were worried yet. Google? Not for another two years. Many companies were still asking themselves if they really needed a web page, and professionals were deciding whether or not to get an email address.

Back then, the world of 2007 was a long way off and hard to envision, and 2017 was virtually a complete abstraction. That wasn't an abject failure on the part of the business world, of course; the future really is hard to foresee. But in retrospect, there are always real costs to imperfect forecasting (the financial crisis being one of them, growing cybersecurity threats another) that still have to be reckoned with long afterward.

Most of us aren't futurists, and futurists aren't oracles. They simply try and make some sense of what's coming—not hard and fast predictions, just possibilities. The most accurate forecasts we're able to make are often necessarily broad. What's always clear is simply that technology will only burrow deeper into our world and organizations, disrupting the way we do things and throwing more threats and opportunities in our way. How it will is more of an open question by comparison.

Still, there are a few ways companies can get better at predicting not just what changes may be around the corner, but how they'll affect them once those disruptions arrive. Making everyone in your company more effective futurists all starts with asking the right questions. Here are a few of them.

1. What's Our Process For Assessing The Future?

Your company may not have a formal, codified method for making predictions about the future, but it definitely has a business strategy. And business strategies arise from some set of assumptions about what changes are afoot—accurate or otherwise.

That means that, functionally anyway, your company already makes guesses about the future all the time. What matters is the basis upon which it does, and determining that takes a little self-examination. Start by taking these steps:

1. Closely examine your current strategy, right here in the present. How well is your team executing your current plan? What changes are needed today? Consider those execution methods from the perspective of your immediate situation to determine whether changing circumstances is likely to make your organization more or less effective.
2. Analyze the impact of your current work of your team, partners, and customers. Where are the most obvious places your results can be improved or revenue increased?
3. Evaluate your present capabilities for making those improvements. What assets and resources do you have at your command to try something new?

If this type of assessment sounds a little too present-focused, don't worry. The assumptions you're making about the future are embedded directly in the way you're doing things right now. Most people inside organizations—front-line workers all the way on up to execs—don't often take time to think through them. Closely reexamining your existing processes can make it easier to see the type of future that your current strategy assumes you're heading toward.

2. How Are We Reading The News?

For many of us, innovations in the tech sector tend to be harbingers of change everywhere. Many business leaders' predictions hinge on an aggregated, subjective sense of what they read in the news. And that's not a bad place to start. But it's the inferences we can make about the cutting-edge innovations that truly matter, and making more studied extrapolations takes practice.

Let's take just one example from this article earlier last year on "smartdust." That refers to an Internet of Things (IoT) technology that's based on tiny sensors that can be scattered around, then report back to a network on the environment—noise, light, chemicals, vibration, temperature, and the like. And on the horizon are RFID tags the size of pinheads that could be attached to any product as it makes its way through manufacturing and distribution.

If you work in accounting or for a chemical company, for instance, "smartdust" may seem little more than a sci-fi curiosity, especially since IoT as a whole seems to have hit some serious obstacles lately.

But while the specifics may not directly impact you or your industry, the underlying trend of such an innovation certainly does. What it hints is that we'll be inundated by a new wave of information as the planet becomes increasingly connected. These are some baseline inferences we can make about how that wave will unfurl, even if individual technologies have wildly different fates:

• Anything that can be digitized will be.
• Anything that can go wireless will.
• Anything that can get smaller will.
• And information will want to move more freely.

These technological transformations will continue to reshape the way the business world is organized. As information becomes more plentiful and less centralized, more organizations are likely to decentralize, too, in order to respond swiftly to it all.

In keeping track of news developments, don't get overwhelmed by the details, but don't disregard them either. Just think analysis first and synthesis second: That big new merger that's getting so much buzz—what does it reveal about the buyer's priorities and instincts about what's coming? Or that new technology that's still years away from hitting the market, the one you keep hearing about in dribs and drabs—what preceding tech is it building upon or threatening to eventually supplant?

Then start connecting those dots: are other companies all making similar bets? Is there another existing technology whose fate might be sealed by that sci-fi–sounding one? Developing this kind of integrated sense of the changes you're hearing about—however disparately—can help you sharpen your futurist muscles. Just making some time in company meetings (even 15 minutes a week) to talk through some of the latest business and tech news together can bring that habit to your entire team.

3. Are We Constantly Testing What We Think Is Working Fine?

When business and technology aren't integrated, all sorts of bad things can happen. The most common culprit for this lack of integration is untested assumptions about the relationship between the two.

For instance, software designed to automate an existing business process may only speed up an inefficient or ineffective process that isn't contributing maximum business value—even though you assume that Technology X is automating Process Y. "We have something in place that's already doing that," you may imagine. But can you confirm it's actually working?

It can cut the other way, too. Adapting processes to fit the rules embedded in software may eliminate some activity that differentiates the company and gives it an advantage—at least temporarily, until what you assume about the competition is no longer true. In both of these cases, the outside world is changing more rapidly than ever; it sometimes presents a change before a project is implemented.

Sometimes end users change their minds. Sometimes they balk at anything new that is imposed on them. Sometimes techies fall in love with new technology for its own sake. Sometimes they are never asked what new technology is available that might improve a business process. Little wonder that so many technology projects fail! The only way around this is to constantly test the basic beliefs that undergird your company's choices—to know as soon as possible when certain "solutions" (technological or otherwise) are no longer actually solving anything, even if they once did.

But the answer here isn't to try and turn over every single stone again and again. It's to keep asking, "What is our purpose?" In other words, why are you here, and what purpose does your company serve? And are you serving that purpose as effectively this month as you were last month? If not, how come? And the answer to that will lead you to those broken links in your organization as soon as they break.

4. How Are We Managing Information?

Imagine for a moment the building you work in stripped of its walls to reveal the plumbing infrastructure—pipes bringing water into the building and distributing it. Imagine now the various uses to which it's put—someone washing their hands with hot water on one floor, someone else using cold on another, a water heater providing hot water, a water fountain cooling it, and so on.

Now imagine the building's information infrastructure—telephone and internet wiring, boxes for incoming and outgoing snail mail, cable television connections, wireless routers, and so on—taking information from the outside or inside and distributing it.

Then picture the users of this information. An executive studies a computer dashboard of operational data, an employee surfs the web, an administrative assistant sifts through the paper mail, a committee meets and hears a report, email flows endlessly, operational plans are printed and bound and put on a shelf, and on and on.

New ideas float along these "flows" of information. And a leader's task is twofold: Ensure that you have the right flows in place, and create "filters" that capture the most valuable ideas while discarding the stuff that isn't useful or relevant.

How do you set up those filters? In general, information can be managed in three ways. One is through organizational structures, such as decision-making groups. Another is in processes—who hands off what information to whom. The other is through automation—technology that gathers and presents data, such as CRM data from a website.

But while it's vital to view your organization as an information collector, processor, and distributor all at once, it's just as important to see and act upon something new in all that information. The futurist Amy Webb outlines a handful of questions that anybody can ask themselves in order to distinguish a genuine trend from something that's merely "trending"—to tell the proverbial signal from the noise. To paraphrase three of her criteria (although there's more than that):

• A trend is timely but persists over time.
• A trend evolves even while it's still emerging.
• The dots connect more and more as the trend goes mainstream.

We can't predict the future. But we can make sure the next generation of leaders is prepared to live it, make sense of it, and orchestrate its upheavals as strategically as possible. That takes learning, experimentation, and a little bit of luck.

But it also just takes practice. And as long as you can get everyone inside your organization to keep asking the right questions, you're likely to be wrong about the future less often than your competitors are.

Serial entrepreneur Faisal Hoque is the founder of Shadoka, which enables entrepreneurship, growth, and social impact. He is the author of Everything Connects: How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability (McGraw-Hill) and other books. Use the Everything Connects leadership app for free.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Faisal Hoque. All rights reserved.

The company calls it the "holy grail," and says it can help women make data-driven decisions about their reproductive health.

Piraye Yurttas Beim was diagnosed in her early thirties with diminished ovarian reserve, a condition that can compromise fertility. That prompted Beim, a molecular biologist, to dedicate her career to helping millions of women with reproductive conditions who struggle to conceive.

Now after eight years of research, her company, Celmatix, is unveiling its first genetic test, "Fertilome," which provides insights into how a woman's DNA might impact her reproductive health. It's particularly useful for women who have a family history of reproductive issues as well as those who are considering starting a family in their thirties or forties and are weighing freezing their eggs. "This [test] has been the holy grail for us," says Beim.

The timing is right for this kind of test, explains Beim, as recent clinical findings have uncovered a set of variants across dozens of genes that are associated with fertility difficulties for women. These include endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, and primary ovarian insufficiency, which can be a precursor to early menopause.

Celmatix is hoping to make quick work of reaching doctors and patients as it's already well established in the fertility space. Its first product, Polaris, spread quickly to more than a dozen leading fertility clinics in the United States. Polaris is used by specialists to compare a patient's profile to hundreds of thousands of others to calculate likely outcomes, based on comparable patients.

Genetic testing for cancer is increasingly common, as the body of scientific literature is extensive. But reproductive medicine "gets very few dollars for research," says Beim. To change that, Celmatix has opened two CLIA-certified labs, one in New Jersey and one Brooklyn, to conduct research into fertility. So far, says Beim, New York City-based Celmatix has presented its research findings at 35 medical conferences. In 2016, it submitted data for its laboratory-developed test to the New York State Department of Health for regulatory approval. At the time, some physicians in New York State were able to request early use of Fertilome. During this period, 130 patients received the test, which allowed Celmatix to understand how physicians are communicating with their patients about genetics.

Fertilome isn't the only genetic test on the market for would-be parents: Companies like Counsyl and 23andMe screen users to determine if they're a carrier for disorders like cystic fibrosis, and should consider in vitro fertilization. But Beim describes it as the world's first comprehensive screen for fertility.

Patients can ask for the Fertilome test at their physician's office. The results are designed to be actionable, meaning they help guide patients to take positive steps. Some women might decide to freeze their eggs, seek guidance from a fertility specialist, initiate fertility treatment sooner, or adopt lifestyle changes that might mitigate risk.

In the future, Beim hopes that a test like Fertilome will be routine for women, and help them make data-driven decisions about their reproductive health. "My prediction is that the way we talk about and treat reproductive conditions and infertility will be unrecognizable in 10 years," she says.

Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank and professional golfer Jordan Spieth embrace boldness as they plot their future, together and apart.

Kevin Plank has built Under Armour into a $5 billion business from a very modest start in the basement of his grandmother's house. Jordan Spieth, the face of UA's golf apparel brand, won both the Masters and U.S. Open in 2015, and last year helped bring the Ryder Cup back to the U.S. In this conversation with Fast Company's Robert Safian at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in November, Plank and Spieth discuss how they've inspired and empowered each other to be better at what they do.

How did you two find your way to each other? Jordan, what is it about Under Armour as a brand or a business that made you want to asso­ciate yourself with it?

Jordan Spieth: In 2012, while I was still at the University of Texas, I visited UA's campus in Baltimore. Kevin wanted to know my goals, my ambitions, where I saw myself in 30 years. I was 19 and about to drop out of college [to go pro], so I was like, maybe I'll take some food money. I loved the youth, the fearlessness, and the intensity that Kevin brought. I loved the commitment that he was making to golf. And I loved that they wanted me to be the face of the brand and [that we could] help grow it together. It really fit with who I am as a person.

Kevin, what did you see in Jordan?

Kevin Plank: I don't know if there's any one "wow, this is the guy" moment as much as all these things that lead you to know. The relationship, the handshake, the lunch with Jordan and his dad, seeing him win, seeing him lose—all those things that reveal character. When you can find someone who is classy, decent, and smart and yet still aggressive and still believes so much, that's somebody we've got [to be in business with].

Both of you embrace risk-taking. Why is that important?

KP: Let me shape this for him. Masters, 2015. Sunday. Number 13, a long par 5 over Rae's Creek. Jordan has a two- or three-stroke lead. [The conventional, safe play] is to lay up, but you see Jordan pull out a wood and he ends up hitting it six feet from the pin. Why did you go for it?

JS: That's a perfect example for me to explain my philosophy on how I play golf and approach life. I was playing it as, This is the best chance I have to make the lowest score I can make on this hole. I trusted myself and bet on myself on that shot, like I did the whole week. We didn't need to back off.

Other people would say, "Oh, that is a risk," but you don't see it that way. Doing it the other way doesn't occur to you.

KP: [If you played it safe], do you think you would have won the tournament?

JS: Yeah, but my percentage chance would have gone down. I was playing for the highest percentage.

KP: What's impressed me is he literally doesn't change the way he plays golf, whether it's the first hole at the AT&T [tournament] or it's number 18 at the Masters. I like that mentality. That's why "Aggressive, young, and fearless" has become one of the mantras of our company.

JS: You're welcome.

Kevin, you've been aggressive in pursuing women's apparel, and it's a growing part of your overall business. How does Under Armour think about the opportunity that the world of women's sports presents?

KP: It's the same role that we play for men. I've grown up in Under Armour 20 years now and also have the perspective of [my kids], a 13-year-old boy and a 9-year-old girl. I've recognized that I used to come home and ask, "How was practice today, son?" You're darn right that I want my [daughter] to know that she can grow up and be whatever she chooses to be. I want to be one of those agents of change who continues to make that possible, and sports are a great accelerator for that. That ability to know what adversity is like competing at the highest level is a really important lesson. Our mission is for our women's business to be greater than our men's business someday. We feel that obligation—it's our job to tell great stories, to build great product, and to inspire little girls so that they can do anything in the world they want to do.

Channel your favorite episode of Friends.

Start by making sure you've invited all the right people.

Use The Sitcom Method

"Meetings should be like an episode of Friends: You know how they're going to end when they start. When people come in knowing what 30 minutes of their time is going to accomplish, they galvanize around the mission." —Brad Soulas, associate creative director, Saatchi & Saatchi

Finesse The Guest List

"Only invite people who need to be there. And always invite people who need to be there. They are two sides of the same coin. Too often you're inviting everyone because you've got a culture where you need to cover yourself in some way." —Susan Reilly Salgado, founder, Hospitality Quotient

Master The Chat

"We favor quick, one-on-one conversations over gathering 18 people in a room. Walk to people's desks, ask a question, and resolve it quickly." —Merrill Stubbs, cofounder, Food52

Get Shorter

"We're experimenting with meetings that are 20 minutes rather than 30, or 45 rather than an hour. That time can be wildly productive, and no one has ever said, 'I wish that meeting was 10 minutes longer.'" —Trevor O'Brien, chief technology officer and partner, Deutsch

The Danish import claims to offer fresh food and drinks with a unique ambience. Is that enough to compete in the crowded U.S. market?

Here are some things you likely won't find at Joe & The Juice, the Danish franchise that's like a Starbucks, Jamba Juice, and Le Pain Quotidien all rolled into one: scripted cashier greetings, bathroom codes, or a generic easy-listening soundtrack on a loop.

And here's what you probably will encounter: a lively staff that makes an effort to connect with customers and, by blasting an idiosyncratic playlist, for instance, gives the place a distinct vibe. Vibe—now that's a term rarely associated with food and beverage chains.

"The music is always so fun, as well as the staff," reads one Yelp review. Another notes: "The spirited young boys behind the counter were rugged, good looking, sexy, fast, and efficient while engaging in a fraternal banter that set a good energy . . . this place has the vibrancy and fun feel of a bar."

That's exactly what Joe & The Juice is going for. Founded in 2002 by Kaspar Basse, a former professional karate champion from Denmark, the company is establishing itself as the go-to place for health-conscious people who like their fresh-pressed juice served with a side of edgy. The locations usually offer a spacious communal area outfitted with slick midcentury furniture, bright art, book-lined shelves, and a free photo booth. Joe & The Juice sells coffee, tea, sandwiches, fresh juices, smoothies, and veggie shots made with organic ingredients and prepared on the premises. You have your pick of juices like Hangover Heaven (apple, elderflower, mint), Go Away Doc (carrot, apple, ginger), and Sex Me Up (passion fruit, apple, ginger).

For Lars Bo Hansen, the senior executive director at Valcon Management Consultants who used to consult for Joe & The Juice, everything rides on the in-store experience. "It is the ambience and the emotional factors that differentiate them," he says. "Obviously, the products are healthy, but the freshness and the vibe combined makes it unique."

With more than 170 branches in 14 countries, Joe & The Juice has big ambitions. You can spot them all over Europe, in trendy neighborhoods or places with heavy traffic like Reykjavík-Keflavík Airport. There are currently five U.S. stores in San Francisco, New York City, and most recently, Miami. But that's just the beginning: Several hundred more locations are slated to open in the U.S. in the next few years. General Atlantic, a leading growth equity firm, announced a strategic investment in the company in October 2016 to fuel its North American growth.

Ask Basse what the key is to rapid, successful expansion and he'll tell you it all comes down to one thing: hiring the right people.

The "Casting" Process

As a former athlete, founder and CEO Basse understands the importance—and draw—of nutrition. When he started to kick around the idea of launching his own company, he realized he loved the concept of Starbucks, save for two big omissions: the lack of freshly prepared healthy food and a distinctive atmosphere.

"We are probably the only ones to deliver three categories [coffee, juice, and food] without being a restaurant," Basse says. "We deliver a more intimate, inspiring atmosphere and more nutritious, better tasting products than most of our competition."

The U.S. market seems ripe for an efficient chain that can offer more than just plastic-packaged tuna sandwiches. But with Joe & The Juice, it's not just what's served—it's how it's served. And that's where the employees come in.

The staff, called "juicers," are encouraged to be themselves in how they dress and talk, and even to play their own music. They're given control of their stores, and in return, treat it as such. They bring their personalities to work. The idea is that employee freedom fosters a strong relationship between barista and customer.

"It brings such a unique culture and environment," Basse says. The baristas are encouraged to joke around, discuss the news, and share their favorite albums with customers. It's something he imagines that young Americans would appreciate. "The U.S. is the entertainment capital of the world, so we probably fit better in the U.S. than in many other parts of the world," he says.

Basse says staffers feel a particular sense of ownership since they know they have a future with the company. At Joe & The Juice, 99% of mid- and top management started out as juicers. The upward mobility has transformed the way the company hires and how staff regard their jobs.

So how does one become part of the Joe & The Juice team? Via a rigorous, structured recruitment program known as "casting." "It's very functional, fun exercises over the course of a few hours," Basse says.

Potential hires partake in various social, personal, and physical tests ranging from how fast they can operate a juicer to how well they can chitchat. Does their dialogue sound natural? Can they easily follow a strawberry banana smoothie recipe? Are they charming?

The company maintains that it hires both men and women, but a look at the website reveals a dominance of dudes, most of whom are good looking. (We're not the first to notice the predominance of pulchritude.) A video of an employee party, in which the overwhelming majority of attendees are male juicers competing in relay races, confirms the bro vibe. It looks like a hipster Chippendales.

These competitions, called "show-offs," are meant to promote a "youth culture that is fun and filled with social ties and love, but also demands dedication and ambition," Basse says in a follow-up email to our initial interview. He maintains that the company practices neither gender nor aesthetic profiling when recruiting—that even though currently 80% of juicers are male, Joe & The Juice actively tries to attract all genders and backgrounds. Women are encouraged, he says, to join the ranks and participate in company functions. In fact, it was a woman who won Joe & The Juice's latest casting competition in New York City. "Diversity is increasingly a vital focus for us," Basse says.

As for the preponderance of the genetically blessed among the ranks, perhaps, Basse wagers, happiness just looks more attractive. "We are a group of people who feel almost 'family ties' in our work and social relationships," he writes in his email. "That's why we come across as a group of similar-type individuals. In fact, we are absolutely not more attractive than any average person on the street, but our common belief in what we do makes us shine a little bit."

Ideally, the shared values also help the company's retention rate. Basse stresses his dedication to finding the right recruits from the get-go in the hopes of keeping his staff long term and helping them advance in the organization. He has seldom looked outside for manager and executive positions, reasoning that they rarely have the same understanding of the company's ethos or culture. Limiting turnover, he says, "really makes sense. It's a good, healthy signal to show people from the inside that if you love this and are ambitious in this company, there are a number of levels of achievement and positions you can apply for and obtain."

Valcon's Hansen notes that while this sounds simple, many food and beverage companies fail to make it work: They kill motivation by stripping front-line employees of responsibilities and a sense of ownership. At Joe & The Juice, the goal is for employee enthusiasm to spill over into the café experience. "Motivating juicers motivates customers," Hansen says. "Bored employees bore customers."

Joe & The Juice offers its employees full benefits, including health insurance and time off. (Though no literal ownership: Stock options are currently not part of the package.) There's even a financed "exchange program" for juicers to travel to and work in different cities to learn how sister branches operate. Hence, you might spot a Swede in the New York City location.

Basse has high hopes for next iteration of this program, going so far as to propose a future program in which Joe & The Juice partners with New York University or University of California, Los Angeles so that the exchange staff can take college courses in addition to their overseas work.

"This is our own way to educate young people so that eventually working with Joe & The Juice becomes the ultimate contemporary education for young people, from both a practical and theoretical level," Base says. "It goes a little beyond just serving products."

A New Challenge

As the company pushes forward in its latest challenge of conquering the U.S., it seems keen on attracting a consumer base that values authenticity, the current holy grail of marketing. The plan is to open 15 more U.S. stores in the coming year, with an emphasis on San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, and L.A. The brand will extend next into the Midwest and Southwest, starting with Austin.

Andrew Alvarez, an industry analyst at the research group IBISWorld, says entering the U.S. market is a "tall order" for any foreign brand, though he thinks Joe & The Juice has a pretty solid brand concept that resonates with millennials, a powerful and sought-after demographic. In terms of competing with the big boys, there remains the lingering question as to which specific group Joe & The Juice markets to: the coffee addicts or the health enthusiasts? Can it appeal to both?

The two segments have become particularly picky over the last few years. Traditional fast food is experiencing a slump as consumers shift to healthier eating habits; that zeal extends into the beverage market. The smoothie/juice industry has been invigorated over the past five years by the cold-pressed juice craze, which is typically a lower-calorie, healthier option than sugar-saturated smoothies that have taken a hit. Combined, the smoothie/juice industry revenue is expected to increase an annualized 2.8% to $2.3 billion in 2016.

Meanwhile, the third-wave coffee movement has taken hold as consumers expect artisanal quality from their morning buzz. The $40 billion coffee and snack shops industry expects 4.5% growth in the next year, thanks to increased consumer spending and greater confidence in the country's economic outlook. (Starbucks and Dunkin' Brands Inc. lead the way, with 42% and 25%, respectively, of market share.)

Somewhere between these two industries lies Joe & The Juice.

"How do you appeal to those two demographics?" Alvarez says. "It's definitely a tough nut to crack." Alvarez believes Joe & The Juice has more in common with Starbucks than a juice bar, but he sees the healthy offerings swaying a segment that demands freshly prepared, nutritious options along with their morning beverage.

"This is a larger trend that doesn't seem to be going away," says Alvarez. "It's only going to seem to move forward in that direction, toward more transparent, healthier offerings." Whether the increased presence of Joe & The Juice pushes Starbucks to widen its offerings remains to be seen. The stronghold also faces further competition from growing chains such as Peet's and Caribou Coffee. As Alvarez notes, "So many different players are giving Starbucks a run for their money."

For his part, Basse has nothing but respect for the coffee giant, though he does see room for improvement.

"I'm still a big admirer of Starbucks," he says. "It's indescribable what they've accomplished. But they don't have our healthy profile, and they don't have the same dynamic environment because their job is easier: They only have to do coffee. We have to do so much more."

Actress and entrepreneur Sarah Jessica Parker and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong talk creativity in business, the new media landscape, and more.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and actor-entrepreneur Sarah Jessica Parker—who collabo­rated on city.ballet, a documentary series about dance that airs on AOL—are experts at navigating the contemporary media landscape, thinking boldly, and engaging their fans and customers. Though their backgrounds differ signif­icantly, both have extensive thoughts on how to foster creativity in business, which they shared with Fast Company's Robert Safian at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in November.

You both have been involved in a lot of evolutions. Tim started at Google and then went to AOL, which was sold to Verizon, which is now buying Yahoo. Sarah Jessica, you are a performer and a producer and you're in other businesses: fragrances, a book imprint, footwear. Do you think of yourselves as risk takers? Is risk a good thing?

Tim Armstrong: I started in investment banking and quit to start a newspaper. I remember my boss at the bank saying, "What are you doing?" By taking risks earlier in your career, you get used to taking them. You can judge a risk versus an opportunity, and I think that is a skill set. When I left [Google for] AOL, people were scratching their heads. There was an article that said, "Has Tim Armstrong Lost His Mind?" I had to sit in a room with [Google leaders] Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, and they basically pounded me for two hours about how stupid it was for me to leave. At the end I said, "I'm going to leave, guys, I'm sorry. I really love you, but I want to go do this." In my gut I knew it was the right decision.

Sarah Jessica Parker: There are times in your life when you're not in a position to take a risk, and that is a very hard decision to make too—if you don't have the financial means to support that risk. I don't want to diminish that: Not everybody gets to take risks. But it's important to be curious. There are ways of pursuing [what you love while] doing what all of us did, which was take jobs you don't like. It's a badge of honor to have survived [jobs] that weren't inspiring or challenging, or to have worked with people who you didn't think that highly of, because you had to subsidize the dream.

A lot of people dream of being a performer like you. Yet you are spending a lot of time and energy building other businesses. Why is being an entrepreneur appealing?

SJP: Because I love to learn and work with people and develop ideas. I love business. I didn't know it. I was a terrible math student. I tested on my standardized tests like I had never been exposed to the inside of a schoolroom in my entire life. It was humiliating. It was such a heartbreak for my mother, who was an educator. Because [writer and producer] Darren Star said I could be a producer on Sex and the City, I discovered that business is complex—there are ledgers and profits and margins and all of this stuff, and that's important—but it's the people who make the business: the customer, your partners. You'll get the numbers figured out. So it's not that surprising that an actor, who likes to connect with people, would like to have other areas in their life where they can connect with people and learn from them.

TA: The reality is that the numbers only come through creativity. Like, your job as a creative is basically to make products that everybody wants and nobody needs. And I think that is [a focus of] our creative business.

The two of you worked together on city.ballet. Sarah Jessica, you could have gone with any partner. Why AOL?

SJP: They were excited by the story. We didn't have to sell, sell, sell. And they wanted to put the money behind it in a big way.

Tim, is AOL going to compete with HBO? Do you think of yourselves as competing with HBO?

TA: We are doing a lot of deals now to get distribution power, so we have lots of connectivity and consumers overall. That is the piping. The second piece is what you put in the pipes. Our dream is that someone like Sarah Jessica comes to us with an opportunity, we enable that opportunity, put it across our distribution, and put it across everybody else's distribution—so when creators in the future decide who they want to work with, they come to [us] because we care as much about their content as they do.

I understand that at a company meeting not that long ago, you literally got down on your hands and knees and begged your product team to open up more products to consumers.

TA: Every consumer has 8,760 hours on planet Earth every year. Fewer of those hours [are being filled by content from media] companies like mine. We want to be open to people coming to us and giving us ideas and programs that differentiate our content and experience. We want to create platforms so that when you're [viewing] that content, [you can] add to it, share it, mix it. We will have a failing business in 2020 if we don't open experiences with a consumer. I did get down on my hands and knees. I begged. If someone's got a better idea than begging, I don't know.

SJP: The best part about being a new company or promoting [the HBO show] Divorce is this opportunity to connect with the consumer. There are so many options now. How do you distinguish yourself? Without the consumer, I have no shoe company, no show. They are as important in the creative process as any of us. You have to keep listening to them, communicating with them, spending an hour and a half every night or every other night just answering comments. Even when it's painful, you respect them, you respond. [With television now], there is this whole system of supporting a show every week. I find a way to talk about an upcoming episode in a way that I feel comfortable with that isn't pushy, that doesn't feel like I'm trading on our relationship. I try to answer questions after every episode and check in with the #DivorceHBO Instagram.

Is that to try to talk people into making the show appointment TV the same way that Sex and the City was?

SJP: I don't think you can talk people into anything anymore. There are too many options. It is up to you to share the story, to be in communication. It's the same with the shoes. There are only two or three of us at the shoe company, and that's how you build a brand, right? I mean, I don't know how else to do it.

TA: We recently ripped down all of our executive offices and invited live consumers in every day. So our office is really loud now, because there are consumers in the office, literally sitting right next to where we sit. You have a deeper relationship with those people when you behave that way.

There is an emphasis on data in the marketplace today. How do you balance data with your instinct about a project?

SJP: It gives people confidence and courage. But I don't know that it's relevant.

TA: Data can put you in the cul-de-sac region really quickly if you're not careful. You need to have data as an enablement tool, but most great ideas didn't start with somebody looking at a research report and saying, "Here's a piece of data I see."

SJP: Meanwhile, in the shoe category you learn a lot from SKUs, like what sold and what didn't, and that's very important data. You learn about the customer and retail in Georgia versus La Jolla.

Does either of you have a personal mission statement?

SJP: To support curiosity, to encourage it in others, and to let it be my guide.

TA: Having a personal mission statement—I highly suggest it. It's been helpful. I have a written one in my closet: "Be a great father, be a great husband, be a great friend." And then [I want] to find the world's most talented people and make sure the whole world sees them. Talented people aren't always the easiest, but talent really matters.

Expert tips on guiding teams large and small.

Prolific founders and business leaders, including executives from Facebook, NASA, Sonos, and Slack, share some of the advice that has guided them throughout their careers. Click through our slideshow above to read insights from the 2016 Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York.