His anti-regulation stance may help more businesses hire freelancers, but will his other polices hurt independent workers themselves?

When American freelancers were asked which presidential candidate they supported this summer, 45% sided with Clinton, while 33% preferred Trump, according to a survey commissioned by Upwork and the Freelancer Union.

Now that Trump is set to become the 45th president of the U.S. this month, some believe that his victory may ultimately prove beneficial to the country's 55 million freelance, contract, and contingent workers.

That's because the president-elect campaigned on a number of policies that, if followed through on, could mean more job opportunities for freelance and contract workers. "They [the Trump administration] care about lower taxes, simpler tax codes, and a stronger economy," says Matt Baker, the vice president of strategic planning for FreshBooks, an accounting software platform used by thousands of freelancers and independent workers. "If he and his administration can positively impact those three things, that's going to be good news for [freelancers]."

A recent survey of over 100 CFOs and another 100 line managers commissioned by Work Market—an online marketplace for businesses to manage independent workers—found that the most significant barrier to hiring more freelancers is regulation, something President-elect Trump has promised to reduce.

The survey found that 40% of respondents expressed a fear of violating the Fair Labor Standards Act, 39% cited fear of worker misclassification, and 28% were afraid of not abiding by the rules set out in the Affordable Care Act.

Part of the regulatory restrictions placed on freelance employers may be purely economical. In 2014 the Obama administration claimed that cracking down on worker misclassification could generate an additional $7 billion in federal taxes over the following decade.

As a result, the rules, regulations and classifications surrounding freelance and contingent workers may be acting as a barrier preventing more organizations from hiring freelance and contingent workers. While deregulation typically strips protections away from employees, many argue that freelancers currently have little to lose.

"Deregulation can mean less [worker] protection, no question," says Leif Abraham, the CEO of And Co, a New York-based startup that provides administrative services to freelancers. "But the question is, in a general sense, what protections actually exist for freelance talent in the U.S.? I would say currently it's already a pretty deregulated area. There aren't many protections for freelance talent."

No matter what the future holds for freelancers under president Trump, Abraham believes little will change in the first year of his administration, as freelance workers are fairly low on the priority list. Others believe they won't be addressed at all in the next four years.

"I think Trump's presidency will not have an effect on freelancers one way or another," suggests Alli Manning, the senior manager of Contently's creative network, which includes over 100,000 freelance professionals. "There's so little regulation now that I actually don't see it changing in any significant way for the individual freelancer themselves."

Instead, Manning believes that local and state governments will take the lead on regulating the freelance economy, as exemplified in New York City's passage of the "Freelance Isn't Free" Act, which made it the first American city to guarantee wage protection for freelancers.

Outside of New York City, however, a majority of laws pertaining to freelancers provide no protections to individual workers, but instead address employer compliance, which can potentially discourage employers from seeking freelance talent. At least that's how Jeff Wald, the president and co-founder of Work Market, understands the data, which he believes is hard to deny when you consider the various legal definitions of the word "employee" in the United States.

"Every state has its own definition, the Department of Labor has a definition, the IRS has a different definition, the Affordable Care Act sets out a different definition, the ERISA [Employee Retirement Income Security Act] guidelines set out a different definition," he says. "How, as a business leader, could you possibly hope to navigate that tangle of regulations as someone that's running a nation-wide company with a nation-wide workforce?"

The only thing preventing employers from hiring more freelance workers, according to Wald, is a clear and consistent set of rules. "The Republicans in Congress and the incoming administration are pro-business and anti-regulation," he says, suggesting that their reign could result in more freelance hiring.

One piece of federal legislation that has been largely positive for the freelance community is the Affordable Care Act, which allows them to access affordable health care coverage without a full-time employer. Trump campaigned on a promise to repeal the ACA, and its future remains uncertain.

The way in which Trump's administration approaches the Affordable Care Act could ultimately determine the size of the freelance workforce in the coming years, suggests Baker of FreshBooks. He explains that the primary concern for current freelancers, and the main barrier for would-be freelancers, is the lack of a safety net (no protections if they get sick, or sued, or want to someday retire).

"If it's repealed and there's no backstop or no message around how things are going to get easier, the perception will be that it's now harder to find health insurance, and fewer people will be confident enough to take the leap [into freelancing]," he says, adding that if the Affordable Care Act is amended in ways that makes it easier for independent workers to find affordable insurance there could be an influx of new freelancers during the Trump administration. However, the Trump administration has made no policy plans on other freelancer safety net issues.

Whether or not Trump's presidency does address the freelance community, many of its members are frustrated with the relative lack of acknowledgement and interest it receives from policymakers, especially when compared to the lip service paid to the small business community.

"These independent businesses are the new 'small business' backbone of the U.S. economy," argues Stephane Kasriel, the CEO of Upwork, a global freelancing platform. Kasriel adds that freelancers can be even more beneficial to the economy, because they are relatively mobile and can work in places where traditional jobs are scarce. "Any president should want to empower this country's workforce, and as independent work continues to increase, providing more opportunities for the businesses freelancers are creating is key," he adds.

The head of the billion-dollar company says meetings aren't for sharing information—they're for finding weak spots.

As you might imagine, leading one of the world's biggest e-commerce companies comes with its challenges. Since becoming Alibaba's CEO in May 2015, I've had to adopt a handful of strategies to help me overcome them each day.

Some are more tactical, like rethinking the company's approach to meetings, a difference that even our founder Jack Ma has noticed since I came on board. Other strategies I've learned to embrace deal with bigger-picture issues—like how to make tough calls and take action when the path forward is unclear. Here are six of the approaches to leadership that I've found serve me best.

1. Use Meetings To Find Weak Spots, Not To Trade Updates

I'm a strong believer in efficient communication, so I ask my teams to share all the relevant presentation materials with me before each meeting. In general, I've found that meetings are among the worst formats for sharing information. They're best when they're kept short. I try to get all the facts lined up before the meeting and use the meeting itself for discussion, debates, and decision making. That way we can use the time together to look for weaknesses in our strategy or line of thinking.

Typically, I start out with some basic questions that let me poke around and see if the person presenting actually knows their stuff. If he or she can respond to some of my random questioning right up front, then it's a good sign they've done their homework. Those who flounder generally haven't thought everything through thoroughly. When I get the sense that's the case, I'll usually press forward with some additional questions so we can get straight to uncovering any holes in our approach.

All my meetings have to have minutes and action items. Meetings without actionable outcomes are useless. I've found that lecture-style meetings can be helpful—but only sparingly; hosting them once or twice a year is sufficient. On a day-to-day basis, meetings aren't the place for getting everyone up to speed. They're for finding your weak points and debating how to fix them.

2. Make Imperfect Decisions, Even If They're Wrong

I face tough decisions every day. In fact, the easy ones often don't make it to my desk at all. As such, I try to devote my energy to making the types of challenging decisions that nobody else in the organization can. Even if a decision will result in controversy, a final call has to be made. And having the courage to make it, and to bear that responsibility, is really important.

But for any team, the greatest fear shouldn't be whether a decision turns out to be wrong. You can always course-correct if things don't work out. The real fear is in the state of paralysis that results when you can't make a decision at all.

Leaders have to have the courage to be decisive, even if that means making imperfect choices. In some cases, there isn't always a clear right or wrong. I've found that if you have resolve, almost anything is possible—all roads really do lead to Rome, even if some turn out bumpier than others. The key is just to keep moving forward.

In fact, the adage that "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line" makes logical sense but doesn't always work out in practice. In my experience, innovators don't often have the luxury of waiting to identify the shortest distance between two points. Sure, the CFO can work out the numbers and precise projections, but if you hesitate to act until everything's figured out, you might have surrendered your first-mover advantage.

It isn't easy to set plans into motion when they aren't fully formed yet, but that's often necessary. When the plan isn't entirely clear, you need to rely on your intuition. Most people, after all, want to get things right, and leaders need to have faith in their teams if they want to make progress. I expect of all our managers in the company to have the courage to create opportunity—which includes the courage to bear whatever risks accompany it.

3. Quit Coordinating Purposelessly

Speaking of which, I've found that the most decisive action often comes from the front lines. If everything has to be decided through central command, then many opportunities will be lost. Managers need the leeway to make decisions independently.

Sometimes coordination can be counterproductive; you don't need teams to align if they don't have common goals. That's like binding the legs of two people headed in different directions. We want to make work as straightforward as possible. If an issue can be resolved by one department, there's no need to involve a second.

The internet and mobile communication have really opened up management possibilities in this regard, allowing teams to work as parts of highly efficient networks. At the 11.11 Single's Day headquarters this year, there were no more than 10 people on the ground, because nowadays everyone doesn't have to be in the same room in order to communicate effectively. A leader doesn't have to stay at headquarters, and neither do the staff. People are all links in the same universal communications chain. They can be everywhere without being anywhere specifically.

4. Be Willing To Redefine Everything

The iPhone redefined the mobile phone, making a touchscreen interface the norm. That's one of my favorite examples of how a single innovation can change everything. The future isn't invented by analyzing the past. Leaders have to be fearless in questioning what we think we know. After all, true innovation has no past, only a future.

That doesn't mean wiping the slate clean completely, though. "Restructuring" is a word I use often. I believe in rearranging a company's existing building blocks in order to create new ways of doing things. Simple addition and subtraction doesn't cut it. What we want is to create a multiplier effect—to restructure a business so a chemical reaction can take place, bringing about something new, something more.

That's what we're trying to do at Alibaba in retailing. The landscape has evolved beyond merely meeting customers' needs. Now it's about creating new demand, and to do that, we need to find ways to stimulate latent, yet-to-be-discovered consumption demand.

5. Don't Fixate On The Numbers

To this day, the thing people always care most about during our 11.11 Single's Day Global Shopping Festival continues to be the final GMV (gross merchandise volume) number. Every year people ask me for an estimate, but I always decline, even if it's Jack Ma asking. My mantra is, "The house never places bets."

When the GMV ticker on the 11.11 monitor reached 118.8 billion yuan ($17.5 billion USD), I was pretty pleased. In fact, I would've been happy even if it hadn't gone any higher. In 2012, our total GMV was 19.1 billion yuan ($3.1 billion USD), and a lot of people came up to me afterward to say we should've done more to hit the 20 billion mark. But I don't think there's anything wrong with leaving a little bit on the table for next time. Everyone has their own measure of success, and for me, the most important thing is how much of the progress made is translated to day-to-day operations.

Similarly, a company's stock price is often used as the metric for judging a CEO's performance. But to me, this number isn't important. If all I do is obsess over Alibaba's stock prices, then the business will be compromised and decisions will be made for the wrong reasons. A low stock price doesn't necessarily reflect a bad situation, while a skyrocketing stock price is probably more optimistic than it should be.

I believe it's far more important to recognize that the market has its own logic, and to accept it. We need to have faith that the ultimate measure of success isn't reflected in these ups and downs but in the long-term value we're creating. And long-term value can't be fully expressed by just a single number.

6. Rest Up So You Can Dream Big

Work stress is inevitable, but no matter what challenges the day may throw at you, it's crucial to get a good night's sleep. In fact, perhaps my biggest competitive advantage is that I'm able to sleep no matter what. I have a knack for falling asleep and waking up naturally when I need to without an alarm clock.

But even if that doesn't come easily to you, you still need good quality sleep. Every effective leader needs to sustain the clarity and energy to make tough decisions and plan for the future—to dream big, day in and day out. After all, as Alibaba's CEO, it's my duty to dream.

Daniel Zhang is CEO of Alibaba Group and inventor of Alibaba's 11.11 "Singles Day" Global Shopping Festival.

The "exec exchange" program, which sees CEOs in different industries trade jobs for a day, has provided valuable insights.

A fresh perspective can be a valuable tool for taking a business to the next level, and one New Hampshire business leader has an unusual way of finding it. In 2012, Travis York, CEO of the marketing agency GYK Antler, created an "exec exchange" program that involved swapping jobs with an executive in another industry for a day. Initially the idea was to learn how to better serve client Jeremy Hitchcock, CEO of the internet performance technology provider Dyn Inc., by switching places.

"We thought it would be good to be in each other's shoes so we could understand each other better and gain a deeper perspective," York recalls.

But the experiment turned out to be a more impactful learning tool than either man imagined. "I'm a creative brained person, and they're technologists," York says. "I ended up gaining a lot of insight about how to code, develop, and roll out products and services. It was fascinating, and I learned things I could apply at our agency, and Jeremy learned that marketing is part art and part science."

Since then, York has swapped roles three more times, with each experience offering insights into different fields as well as ideas for challenging himself and his team.

How It Works

York and his partner structure the exchange to mimic a real day in each other's life. "We take a representative day and follow along each other's schedule," he says. "Typically we try to schedule a few more broad tasks that help each of us get to know the organization."

The key to success is keeping it as genuine as possible, says York. "It's a legit trade of jobs; this is not a job shadow or unrealistic experience. It's being in each other's shoes."

But there are a few rules: "We can't hire or fire, or give raises," says York. "Other than that, we empower each other to do what we need to do and to make decisions."

Choosing your exchange partner wisely is vital, says York. "You have to trade with somebody you trust—someone who you aren't afraid to see warts and all. Everything is fair game, and sometimes stuff that is more thorny or serious than you imagine comes up. You have to trust the level of confidence and discretion. And you have to be willing to work together to solve or resolve issues."

At the end of the exchange day, both organizations meet for a Q&A session within the companies where employees are invited to ask questions or give impressions of the day. "This can be pretty intense, and there are challenging conversations," says York. "You'd be surprised how candid the input can be when you're looking for guidance from an outside party. It's a learning experience for everybody involved."

A few weeks later, York and the other executive follow up for a one-on-one exchange of honest observations, with regular check-ins thereafter.

What He Gained

During York's exec exchanges he's met and pitched clients, negotiated deals, sat in on company meetings, and made public appearances. Each experience was an opportunity to gain new insights into other leadership styles and industries.

One exchange was with Kent Devereaux, CEO and president of the New Hampshire Institute of Art, where York gained a greater awareness of arts and culture in the community. During that day, York was taken into the archives to see the gifts that had been given to the school, such as unique books, artwork, and photographs. "It was inspiring to see the unique ways things are brought to life creatively," he says. "It helped me think about things differently."

The school also gave York a better perspective of his creative talent. "I saw how they're getting their training and education," he says. "We now have a handful of intern slots from the school, and our own employees are getting continuing ed with things like pottery, photography, and writing classes."

Another swap was with Mark Bollman, president and founder of the Boston-based men's fashion company Ball and Buck. One of York's tasks was to go into the design studio to look at product concepts. "It was a unique look at how the product and manufacturing sides work," he says. "A number of discussions were about marketing, such as how to position, package, and promote the brand."

When an employee called in sick, York worked the retail store. "Mark would have had to have done that," says York. "It gave me some insight about merchandising and pushing through product."

Finally, York switched places with Matt Bonner, former forward for the San Antonio Spurs. He attended a charitable event, did the player's workout, and had a conversation with Bonner's agent about upcoming contract negotiations. The experience taught him about team building and work ethic and discipline.

"Being in someone else's shoes for a day and letting them be in yours gives you a greater perspective and firsthand insight about different leadership approaches," York says. "Our job as a marketing agency is to position, package, and promote. We're always looking for the next idea. Advertising and marketing rely on relevance. There's no better way to meet new people and gain new experiences. It's something you can't know as an outsider looking in."

Keep Glossier and Memebox on your radar, along with newer upstarts like foundation customization app MatchCo and all-natural skincare line Ever.

The last few years have seen an upswing in financing for beauty startups, with funding rounds steadily increasing since 2012. By last September, various new beauty companies had already snagged more than 74 rounds of funding in 2016, according to CB Insights, which predicted the industry was on track to clock $424 million in financing during 2016 and a record number of funding deals. (CB Insights has not yet responded to a request for updated numbers.)

As investors have helped fuel its growth, the beauty sector has become more personal and accessible. On one hand, there's the pared-down aesthetic of companies like Glossier, which offers a basic lineup of beauty and skincare necessities, or Milk, which takes a no-fuss, one-swipe approach to its pigmented eye and lip products. Then there are the companies democratizing beauty and catering to consumers who wish to customize, say, their foundation or shampoo, rather than relying on products stocked by mainstream brands. Here are some of the beauty startups we'll be keeping an eye on this year:

1. Glossier

Helmed by Into the Gloss founder Emily Weiss, Glossiermade its debut in 2014 as an extension of the blog that also inspired its name. Glossier has since amassed a legion of loyal followers—in no small part due to the popularity of Into the Gloss—and most recently, picked up $24 million in Series B funding. The company plans to use that money to introduce international shipping and release new products Glossier fans have been clamoring for, like sunscreen and a heavy-duty moisturizer.

2. Milk Makeup

A more recent entry into the cool girl's orbit, Milk Makeup is Glossier's more colorful cousin. Launched in February 2016 by the minds behind the creative agency Milk Studios, the line has a similar minimalist approach to its branding and collection. As with Glossier, Milk products don't require application brushes, though they are splashier and far more varied, especially in terms of eye and lip products.

3. Memebox

With $160 million in total funding, Korean beauty box company Memebox has topped even Ipsy, which led the well-heeled beauty box space until Memebox closed a $60 million funding round in December. The Y Combinator-backed startup exclusively features Korean beauty products and has, in part, capitalized on the rising popularity of K-beauty abroad (though Korea still leads Memebox sales). Memebox may have started out as a beauty box service, but the company has expanded to boast a thriving online store and brick-and-mortar presence, with annual sales of more than $100 million.

4. Seed Beauty

Chances are, you've heard of at least one of the two brands incubated by the Los Angeles-based company Seed Beauty: cult beauty brand Colourpop and Kylie Cosmetics, the eponymous line started by the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner clan. Colourpop first appeared on the scene in 2014 and made its mark by courting prominent beauty bloggers and jumping on the liquid lipstick bandwagon. The brand's rock-bottom prices certainly helped, too—most products range from $5 to $8—as did the rate at which Colourpop managed to churn out new lip and eye products.

Seed Beauty grew out of a family-owned manufacturing lab that created products for major brands, which explains why Colourpop can conceive of and launch new products in just days. Coupled with the added success of Kylie Cosmetics—whose new product releases continue to sell out within minutes—this is one to watch, especially since Seed Beauty claims to be working on new brands.

5. MatchCo

Though a number of brands have expanded their shade ranges in recent years, few have offered full customization as an option. Enter MatchCo, a beauty startup whose iPhone app can scan your skin and create a foundation specific to your skin tone for $49. This means MatchCo, which launched in January last year, mixes up a foundation exclusively for you, rather than matching your skin to an existing range of shades. As of last October, MatchCo's app had been downloaded more than 100,000 times, and the service has found an unexpected user base in women who are in their 40s and older.

6. Function Of Beauty

Function of Beauty is to shampoo and conditioner what MatchCo is to foundation. For $32, customers can personalize 8-ounce concoctions of shampoo and conditioner that target specific issues—split ends, frizz, excess oil, heat damage, and more—based on their individual hair needs. A recent Y Combinator grad, Function of Beauty drew $1.5 million in its seed round last year and increased its revenue 50% month-over-month during just the first six months after launch. Eventually, the company wants to fully automate the process of formulating shampoos and conditioners, from ideation to bottling.

7. StyleSeat

Since getting its start in 2011, StyleSeat—an OpenTable-style booking service for beauty and wellness appointments—has drawn more than 10 million users and 400,000 beauty professionals. Last year, StyleSeat acquired salon and spa booking platform BeautyBooked, which allowed the company to expand beyond just serving independent beauty professionals and gain more traction in cities like New York and Los Angeles.

8. Ever

Stella & Dot's all-natural skincare line uses an ingredient sourced from the magnolia plant that purports to combat aging, brighten skin, and protect against environmental damage. That, plus Stella & Dot's social-selling prowess gives Ever a leg up in a crowded beauty marketplace: Together, Stella & Dot's three brands—Ever, Keep Collective, and its eponymous flagship line—clock $300 million in annual revenue, by way of more than 50,000 sellers in six countries. It's a model that has proven successful by the likes of Beautycounter and has even played a role in the rapid growth of an upstart like Glossier, which doesn't have sellers per se but does have a robust referral program.

9. Beautycounter

Beautycounter's social-selling approach sure has paid off: The natural skincare and cosmetics company is reportedly on track to bring in $225 million in revenue for 2016, despite not devoting money to typical advertising. Beautycounter's 20,000 sellers function as living and breathing ads and, through individual websites and social gatherings/selling parties, earn the company 35% of its sales. They also double as advocates for safer beauty products and increased transparency and regulation when it comes to ingredients in cosmetics. In June 2016, Beautycounter acquired Nude, the natural beauty line started by Bono's wife, Ali Hewson; as part of the deal, the duo became investors in Beautycounter.

10. Skin Laundry

The Drybar of facials, Skin Laundry offers 15-minute laser and light treatments, using technology that claims to deep clean skin and help stave off acne and wrinkles. Founded in 2013, Skin Laundry has 15 locations in the U.S., London, and Hong Kong, and is now bringing its own branded line of products to Sephora (as Drybar did a few years back).

11. Madison Reed

The idea behind at-home hair coloring service Madison Reed was to give women a viable option aside from shelling out hundreds of dollars for monthly touch-ups at the salon. For just $25 per box—or $20, if you opt for a subscription—Madison Reed promises salon results without compromising on the ingredients of its products, which are dictated by the European Union's safety standards. (Its subscription service is largely responsible for Madison Reed banking $15 million in revenue last year, according to Forbes.) In December, Madison Reed opened its first physical salon in Manhattan, where women can get their roots touched up for $45 in 45 minutes flat.

2016 was a dismal year for online lending, but 2017 is already looking up.

Online lenders are emerging from a scandal-plagued 2016 older, wiser—and now richer. Small-business loan platform Funding Circle has raised an additional $100 million in equity funding, cofounder and U.S. managing director Sam Hodges said today. Accel Partners led the round, with other existing investors, including Index Ventures and Rocket Internet, also participating.

Last spring, following a loan-doctoring scandal at Lending Club—at the time, the industry leader—capital for online lending startups became harder to come by and many suffered layoffs. Avant, Prosper, and Lending Club cut staff by the hundreds.

Funding Circle weathered the storm, closing 2016 on a high note with $485 million in Q4 loans to small businesses. In total last year, the company lent $1.4 billion. According to Hodges, Funding Circle is cash-flow positive in its home market, the United Kingdom (where it benefits from the support of the government-owned British Business Bank), and expects to make its U.S. business profitable in 2017.

Success on that front will hinge on winning over new types of customers, such as sole proprietors. Some sole proprietors and owners of smaller-cap businesses have been turning to personal loan products, industry leaders say; business lenders like Funding Circle hope to win them back.

Online lenders also face increased competition from banks, many of which have shiny new platforms thanks to partnerships with startups. Kabbage, for example, has made bank partnerships central to its strategy; CEO Rob Frohwein says that licensing Kabbage technology to banks has grown to become an "eight-figure business" for his organization.

"We're really angling toward the center of the small-business ecosystem," Frohwein says, pointing to functionality like insurance and payment processing that could be added to Kabbage's software infrastructure.

Funding Circle, in contrast, remains focused on building its brand as a lender. "There's a huge small-business credit gap in all the markets where we operate," Hodges says. And the companies that emerged stronger from 2016 are all chasing it.

The social network has long resisted the "media" label. But with its new Journalism Project, it just took a big step in that direction.

Media
[mee-dee-uh]
noun
1. a plural of medium.
2. (usually used with a plural verb) the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, magazines, and the Internet, that reach or influence people widely: The media are covering the speech tonight.

Ever since it first launched, Facebook has resisted being described as a media company. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has instead insisted that the social network is just a platform for ideas, even as its role as a source of news and information has expanded exponentially, with 44% of Americans now getting their news from Facebook. When the fake news controversy erupted in the wake of the election, he continued to insist that he didn't want Facebook to become "arbiters of truth"—in other words, editors who choose what people should and should not be reading.

Still, it certainly meets Webster's definition of media: "the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, magazines, and the internet, that reach or influence people widely." And since the election, it seems to be inching toward accepting responsibility for the news content shared on its platform. Last month, it partnered with fact-checking organizations to flag fictitious stories and conspiracy theories. Last week, it hired former CNN anchor Campbell Brown as its liaison to myriad publishers.

And today, it launched the Facebook Journalist Project, which sounds a hell of a lot like journalism. The initiative includes almost every element of what traditional media companies do, such as developing news products and "storytelling formats," training journalists, promoting "news literacy," and helping shape the news. All that's missing is the actual reporting and writing—which is what makes it a media company, rather than a publisher.

According to a post by Fidji Simo, Facebook's director of product, the new initiative will "establish stronger ties between Facebook and the news industry." He later told the New York Times, which has been invited to take part in the project: "We've heard loud and clear over the last year that there are questions about our role in this ecosystem. It has added an extra motivation for us to be involved even earlier on."

Not that these changes will be good for the rest of the media. Due to Facebook's gargantuan reach, publishers depend on it to reach readers, but they continue to lose revenue as advertisers swarm the social network. Not to exaggerate the situation (actually, yes, to exaggerate the situation), but it could be compared to the Greeks accepting the gift of the Trojan horse, or even how a female praying mantis bites the head off the male of the species right after having sex with it.

Though, to be fair, some of the initiative's features should help publishers attract subscribers and bolster their bottom line for now. It just partnered with German tabloid, Bild, to offer free trial subscriptions to readers (who are then more likely to become paid subscribers) from within Instant Articles, the quick-loading articles on Facebook's app. And it plans to provide financial grants to news organizations engaged in projects that improve news literacy and research, though the details remain vague.

So far, the initiative has prompted cautious optimism. Jennifer Preston, the vice president for journalism at the Knight Foundation, which will partner with Facebook on the project, acknowledged the social network has disrupted the traditional business model for media companies. But she noted, that since 1.79 billion people around the world consume news and information on Facebook, "It has a huge opportunity to do a better job helping inform local communities with quality information. We see this as an important step by Facebook to move toward a level of civic responsibility demanded by its role as the primary conduit of news and information for billions. We're delighted that it's just the beginning of their effort."

The Facebook Journalism Project includes the following initiatives:

• Collaborating with news organizations to develop products, including building entirely new "storytelling formats"—such as how to present packages of stories—and helping evolve current formats such as Facebook Live, 360, and Instant Articles.

• Supporting local news and independent media, working with with them to promote their content and shape "what local news on Facebook could look like."

• Helping publishers develop new tools by expanding their legendary hackathons to have Facebook engineers host sessions with news organization developers "to collaborate to identify opportunities and hack solutions."

• Investing in research and projects that promote "news literacy"

• Partnering with the well-respected Poynter journalism institute to launch a certificate curriculum for journalists, as well as going into newsrooms to discuss "best practices" and find ways to "engage and build audiences around their reporting."

The field of HR is regularly said to be on its deathbed. Can embracing much more transparency revive it?

This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

When Celinda Appleby was hired at Oracle as the head of global recruitment marketing, she didn't have a predecessor to look to for guidance. The role had just been created, and she was tasked with building a global employer brand team from the ground up. Appleby began to poke around for resources to help her do that, and ultimately landed upon HR Open Source (HROS), a network that I cofounded.

HROS offers a library of free case studies contributed by other human resources professionals, and in it Appleby found one contributed by the social media company Hootsuite, which had made its own framework public. And when she had questions about modeling Oracle's employer brand program on Hootsuite's, Appleby turned to HROS's Facebook group, where over 2,300 HR and recruiting professionals in more than 50 countries regularly weigh in with their ideas and experiences.

Since rolling out Oracle's global employer brand program, Appleby has since contributed two case studies of her own to the HROS community, drawing on that experience. Having helped set up the platform, I obviously believe in open-sourcing HR issues, but I'm hardly alone. Buffer, for instance, is famously committed to laying bare its HR and management challenges and encouraging conversation around them. And you don't have to look far to find proof of concept in other fields, where sharing "institutional knowledge" means going outside your own institution.

Talk Is Cheap, And It Pays Off

That's something software developers have understood for decades, and there's little doubt that the "open-source" approach to writing code has contributed to some of the biggest, fastest technological advances we've seen in our lifetimes.

In HR roles, though, practitioners are still used to playing it close to the chest, and it's holding everyone back. Every couple of years, there's an articleor two issuing HR's death certificate, variously claiming that the profession has failed to curb employee turnover, solve retrenched diversity and inclusion issues, or lower the pressures brought on by an increasingly multigenerational workforce. And maybe that's true. But what's certain is that there's more to be gained than lost when HR practitioners compare notes and collaborate.

Wondering how your competitor designs, implements, and measures ROI for a certain recruiting initiative? Why not go ahead and ask? Unlike the race to corner a market, for instance, HR challenges rarely amount to zero-sum games. Sure, the talent market may be tight, and competition for certain in-demand roles even tighter, but in most cases, when your competitor makes a more thoughtful hire who's likely to stick around longer, it doesn't automatically lower your chances of doing the same.

At least that's the theory we set out to test with HROS when I cofounded the platform in 2015 with Ambrosia Vertesi, Duo Security's VP people, first as a pilot program with Hootsuite and shortly thereafter as a standalone, public initiative. From the start we've asked users to lay out the "how" of their efforts in a prescriptive level of detail, plus dish on their failures and pitfalls so others can avoid repeating them. So far, HR professionals from major companies like Cisco, Virgin Media, Dell, GoDaddy, and others have all proved willing to do so.

This creates a sense of community—and a collective intellect—that minimizes inflated fears of losing a competitive edge. Beyond the case studies and curated resources, HROS users trade ideas, knowledge, and expertise in real time through the organization's Facebook group. What's more, they save their companies money in the process. Practitioners don't hesitate to ask questions about issues their employers might otherwise hire consultants to solve, or pay fees for access to research reports and training materials.

The Hot-Button Issues Open-Sourcing Can Solve

Open-sourcing HR can fundamentally change the way practitioners work. In some cases an HR rep is struggling to make a case to a skeptical boss to do something new or different. Being able to point to a case study as proof that it's doable can be indispensable. In other fields, finding quantifiable evidence to back up a proposed approach is easy and routine. In HR, it isn't. But if those in the field don't get comfortable with offering one another tangible, comparable examples—free of charge—innovation will continue to trudge along, and we can expect to keep hearing that HR is on its last leg.

This is especially true in some of the most pressing issues, like diversity, where transparency can make such a big difference. Over the past few years, a handful of leading tech companies have been diligent about releasing demographic data and sharing their approaches to improving the diversity of their workforces. In recent months, their progress has slowed, and certain companies have slackened their pace sharing updates with the public, ostensibly to give themselves time to retool. But with a completely open-source approach, neither big strides nor setbacks would require their own announcements—it would all be out on the table.

Even for companies that aren't comfortable going that far yet, greater transparency can still prove useful. Leela Srinivasan is chief marketing officer at Lever, a recruiting software company, which had been experimenting with ways to use its employer branding campaign to appeal to more diverse candidates. "A lot of companies have a fatalistic attitude toward the topic," says Srinivasan, believing, "'It's the talent pool, what can we do?'" By answering HROS's call for detailed case studies on diversity efforts, Lever felt challenged to quantify what it was already doing and see how it stacked up.

Otherwise, she says, "we wouldn't have gone back to find that 74% of women who joined our company during that period were influenced by employee blogging and storytelling. We wouldn't have stopped to reflect on the fact that we had doubled the percentage of women on our sales team, all while growing the team."

For Srinavasan, getting into the habit of discussing failures around issues like this—something that other companies still approach squeamishly—was the biggest upside. "Without that prodding" from the community, she says, "most practitioners would gloss over the failures, but often that's where the richest learnings occur."

Defying The Ghosts Of HR's Past

To be sure, there are plenty in the HR world who aren't ready to embrace this kind of openness, and probably won't be anytime soon. The "war for talent" mind-set dictates that practices should be siloed and guarded as competitive advantages. Despite some encouraging signs of interest in greater collaboration, many still believe that keeping their recruiting and staffing strategies under wraps is the key to their success.

They're probably mistaken. The history of HR is largely one of closed practices, and seasoned practitioners came up through an environment where ideas like "radical transparency" set off alarm bells. But if that's got us anywhere, it's to a world where the interest in greater openness has never been higher. Many HR professionals can already see how past norms no longer accord with their field's biggest challenges right now. And they recognize that, just like in so many other fields, collaboration and resource sharing isn't just useful, it's the only way real, sustainable innovation comes about.

Google has its own version of open-source with its re:Work initiative, and the company's recruiters are often pretty vocal about what they're looking for and why. Facebook recently opened up its internal unconscious bias training program to the public. We'll have to wait to see how each of these shifts play out, of course, but the direction they're all pointing in is unmistakable. The future is open, and it's already here.

Lars Schmidt is the founder of Amplify Talent, a recruiting and branding agency that helps companies like Hootsuite, NPR, and SpaceX reimagine the intersection of culture, talent, and brand. He's also the cofounder of the HR Open Source initiative. Connect with Lars on Twitter @Lars.

There's nothing like early-morning vodka shots 12 stories above the frozen streets of Ulaanbaatar to give you a fresh perspective.

It was a Friday morning and I happened to be drinking vodka.

I don't even drink, but I'd just closed a deal with the CEO of a Mongolian hedge fund and he insisted on drinking shots to celebrate.

From his boardroom on the twelfth floor, I could see the frozen streets of Ulaanbaatar below, a foreboding reminder that I still had the rest of winter in the world's coldest capital city to suffer through, not to mention a half-million dollar target to hit.

But hey, I was 24, working in one of the world's most interesting emerging markets, and gaining experience doing something my entry-level consulting position back in New York hadn't prepared me to do: sell.

And not just sell to anyone, but sell to presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, and other intimidatingly influential personalities in every country where I was sent, from Nigeria to Qatar, South Africa to Turkey. I landed the gig through the simple magic of referrals—namely the "weak link" kind that research has shown to be the most powerful. A friend of a friend was in the same position and recommended me for an opening.

In just one week, I did a first-round interview, flew out to the company's European headquarters for the final round, and received and accepted an offer on the spot. That may go against traditional career coach–issued advice, but it worked for me and I never regretted it. I flew straight home, quit my consulting job, and was off to my first assignment in Nigeria a few weeks later.

In my new role as country director for an international media company, I was in charge of selling advertising in promotional country reports that would be distributed by major media brands. And all the while, I had to manage a remote team of three, no matter where those sales duties took me.

Needless to say, it was a formative experience. Here's how it's shaped my career ever since.

Wherever You Go, Everything Is Sales

There are some jobs you can't possibly know exist until you leave a corporate hub like New York or San Francisco.

For two years, I pitched in parliamentary palaces, climbed 10 stories in Ethiopian office buildings with no elevator, and drove to government offices halfway across countries I'd arrived in less than 48 hours before. I would fly from the Middle East to South America on the same day if we scored a half-hour slot with the governor of a central bank.

I signed contracts with farmers in warehouses in Paraguay and with CEOs in top-floor multinational headquarters in Johannesburg. The contrasts of these experiences kept me on my toes. I learned to strategize, pitch, negotiate, and close deals on five continents and in a handful of languages.

Some people say that everything is sales, and I've reluctantly come to believe them.

In February 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that the youngest members of the workforce are hesitating to take sales jobs, and a Forbes contributor agreed, arguing the same year that companies needed to do a better job (ironically enough) of selling their sales positions to sales-shy millennials.

Here's the thing, though: Selling is a universal skill, and it's instrumental in every career. Personally, I couldn't be happier that I took a couple of years early in my own career to pound the pavement and learn the ins and outs of sales. In the process, I single-handedly delivered over $1.5 million in revenue to my company in 27 months. Even if you aren't in a sales role, you need to be able to interact with people you've never met before, learn what they need, and explain how you can help deliver it to them at a competitive price (ever been on a job interview?).

I learned directly from government officials and company executives about every imaginable industry, from stocks and steel to reinsurance and cement. I toured leather factories, soybean farms, and coffee plantations, learning to speak the language of my clients, whether that was investment banking or industrial agriculture. To this day, I'm one of the only people my age who I know has this depth or breadth of firsthand sales experience.

And it's proved to be an asset, even outside of sales jobs. Since exiting that role in 2015, I've moved into an operations and project management position for a top tech company in Silicon Valley. I know I'm going to keep drawing on my experience as a young, globetrotting sales rep in the years ahead.

Most People Aren't As Confident As They Need To Be

People in my former company have big personalities. Every one of us can walk into a boardroom of 10 executives in any foreign country on the planet and command the room in at least three different languages. We ooze confidence and enthusiasm for our product, the country we're in, and the person in front of us. We know it's not only what we say, but how we say it.

That job taught me to project confidence when I least felt like it, which has been a useful lesson for everything from assuming leadership on a new team to going on Tinder dates in New York. The more confidently I act, the better I perform.

Lose Control, Lose The Sale

I was taught to keep my eyes on the objective of every meeting with a potential client, which was usually a signed contract. You can be friendly, but you're always steering the interaction.

The ability to subtly maintain control of an interaction as it unfolds is a powerful job skill. It's useful for every type of business interaction on the planet: What's the goal of the email you're sending? What do you want to communicate to your boss during your weekly check-in? What are the most important parts of your work experience to get across during your job interview? If you can be clear and purposeful the whole time, you can keep things moving in your direction.

Preparation, Preparation, Preparation

For every one-hour sales meeting, I prepared for days. I always researched the company, its competitors, the entire industry, the relevant economic background of the country it operated in, and the career and personal history of the individual I was going to meet.

I apply this principle to every meeting I have with important stakeholders in my current job, and I plan to do the same on every new job interview I ever go on. I'm notorious for not leaving my house for up to 48 hours before a big interview, but my preparation pays off when I know the company, the role, and my most relevant experience inside and out.

High Spirits, High Sales

Your attitude is an aura. No matter what you're saying or how big you're smiling, people can feel how you feel. If you're always focused on the positive, your team will be more motivated, your friends will want to spend more time with you, and some researchers say you'll attract better mates and earn more money in the long run.

It's Better To Win Big Than Avoid Losing Small

In my sales job, I focused less on the likelihood that we'd probably sell $25,000 that week and more on the possibility of landing a six-figure deal at any moment. I made my team's mantra about aiming for the big wins, not getting by with the minimum to make our target.

In life, I've learned that you can either focus on the probable or the possible. Guess which one successful people choose more often.

Always Ask, "How's Your Granny Doing?"

Contrary to what many people think about salespeople (smarmy, ingratiating, fake), my sales job taught me to be deeply authentic. Americans tend to want to get straight down to business, but some of my biggest sales were made after hours of talking to CEOs in Latin America or Africa about their grandmothers or their hometown cricket teams or their passion for woodworking. And it was genuinely wonderful.

Sales, and life itself, is about making connections, sharing experiences, admitting mistakes, laughing, and letting go. Doing it well demands being human, which is something we forget when we get caught up in competition, money, sales targets, promotions, and power—things that can add to your stress and cloud your judgment in any role in any industry, anywhere in the world.

More than anything else, my experience as a sales rep traveling around on my own made me more comfortable opening up to all kinds of people, understanding what we're all really saying (and not saying), and creating space for human connections, not just commercial ones. I can't think of a better training ground right at the start of my career.

Elaina Giolando is an international sales director and digital nomad who's lived and worked in more than 50 countries. She writes about global careers, unconventional lifestyle design, and meaningful travel on Life Before 30.

Kimberly Bryan discusses what to do when your business is thriving.

After earning a degree in electrical engineering and spending years working as a product manager in the pharmaceutical industry, Kimberly Bryant wanted to help girls of color get involved with computing. So in 2011 she launched Black Girls Code, a nonprofit that is inspiring students to learn more about technology at workshops in more than 10 locations around the U.S.

Ditch Distractions

When your business is thriving, it's tempting to expand your vision. That isn't always the right move. "There's not enough said about the beauty of being able to focus on what you do well. We know how to reach black girls," Bryant said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in November. "If we just do this and we get it right, our impact will be indelible. There is strength in that. As business leaders and entrepreneurs, you can get distracted by all the opportunities. But we're going to focus, we're going to get it right, and we're going to do it better than anybody else."

Engagement Matters

Attracting the right team is about more than just talent. "If people are not tied to the work from a mission-driven focus, I don't think you're going to motivate them. And people need to grow. I ask people we're interviewing, 'What do you want out of this experience?' Then I can give them assignments that [make them] feel fulfilled."

Pride Is Powerful

Bryant has never hesitated to share her message of empowerment. "From the beginning, [I have dealt with] naysayers. You know, 'Why does this need to be called Black Girls Code?' Someone recently tweeted to me that 'your organization is unapologetically black.' That's right. We are unapologetically black. My goal is to make sure the girls understand there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. This is about taking pride in our culture and advancing our culture."

How the Warby Parker co-CEO and Union Square Hospitality Group restaurateur combine tech and human connection.

Whether you're arguing with your cable company or trying to rebook a flight, awful customer service encounters are a disheartening part of daily life. But Union Square Hospitality Group restaurateur Danny Meyer—who wrote the influential 2006 statement of customer-care purpose Setting the Table—and Warby Parker's Neil Blumenthal are helping inspire a new generation of companies to overhaul how they think about interacting with the public. Meyer and Blumenthal have both turned their unusual philosophies into booming businesses with enormous loyalty, as they explained to Fast Company's Noah Robischon at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in November.

How do you decide where and how to implement technology in your business? Danny, you've said that you're going to have employees at the Union Square Cafe wear Apple Watches.

Danny Meyer: First of all, the goal should not be to remove humans from the equation, but [to] empower human beings who actually have a beating heart and who are caring people to achieve a greater degree of hospitality. The moment you tell me that tech should be used to remove people, that's just not something I want to be part of. Two kinds of employees will be outfitted with Apple Watches: managers and sommeliers. There is a gentle ping that could go from the manager to the front desk to say table 62 is ready. Or when a waiter places an order for a bottle of wine, the sommelier, who is wearing a watch, gets a ping and can bring you that bottle and save eight minutes. [Our] system can say table 42 has just paid their bill, and they can ping the coat checker and have your coats ready for you at the front door so you can be off. The bottom line of all this is, can we give you back the gift of time?

Neil, you have been able to bring more people out of the back office to the front of the stores through your use of technology. How does that work?

Neil Blumenthal: We view technology the same way. When we were opening our first brick-and-mortar stores, we started looking at all these point-of-sale systems because we needed a way for people to check out. We couldn't find a system that did everything that we envisioned, so we built one, [which] runs off of iPad Minis. We want to eliminate low-value interactions and amplify high-value interactions. Asking somebody for their billing address, that's a low-value interaction, and frankly, you'd prefer not to talk to a human being about that. But helping you select the right pair of glasses for your face is something that we want to engage with.

We spent a lot of time creating functionality that can get everybody who was at the back of the house to be on the floor, working and engaging directly with customers. We had timers, and we would say, "Okay, can we reduce time here?" We would look at that data and match it to our observations: Is somebody's head down, looking at the screen? To Danny's point, that's a bad interaction.

Both of you have built personalization into your businesses without allowing it to feel robotic or weird. How have you done that?

NB: Our customer-experience team is constantly looking for cues when they get an email, when they're talking to someone on live chat. There was an instance where [a customer] was live-chatting and made a few Lord of the Rings references, and [a Warby employee] recognized it and was like, "But I don't know that much about Lord of the Rings," grabbed another [employee], and they had a whole conversation. That's a level of personalization that doesn't require technology. We have had instances where people start talking about Harry Potter and then maybe we'll order them a Harry Potter scarf and send them the latest Harry Potter book. Going above and beyond, that creates these great moments. And your community loves you for it.

It's also [about] having integrated teams that are constantly communicating. We respond to pretty much every tweet unless somebody is saying something horrible about the world. Our social media team flagged a tweet [saying] that this customer was in love with one of our customer-experience associates because she had helped him so much. She then recorded a short video on YouTube and sent him the link through Twitter. We thought it was just going to be this quick, special thing, but it kept getting retweeted. That video has over 30,000 views. [With] Twitter, you only have 140 characters and that's really hard for a customer service interaction. We made it part of our playbook to record short videos, so suddenly a potentially challenging customer service interaction becomes a marketing tool, just because it's a great customer experience.

Danny, Union Square Hospitality Group has been using a guest-engagement software tool called Venga. How are you finding it helps your businesses?

DM: It's fishing all the different lakes to collect as much relevant information as exists [on social channels] so that on a day-to-day basis we gauge what people are saying about our restaurants. It allows us to eavesdrop on conversations that are happening in public and crystallizes the feedback. It can give us actionable opportunities, or we might see a pattern. It could be that something needs to be addressed. In the old days, I wouldn't learn about that until two weeks later when I got a snail-mail complaint, by which time this person has probably told 30 or 40 people how awful their experience was. [Now] we can address it in real time.

And by the way, we also get really good tweets, and that gives us a chance to play offense and go overboard. About a year ago or so, there was a couple doing what some people lovingly call a "Danny dine-around." I don't really call it that. But they had read Setting the Table and wanted to eat [one meal at every one of my restaurants]. They had planned this out just perfectly. They would not have time to go to Shake Shack, but they knew they could get it at JFK [airport] for their flight home. And they tweeted, "We're crushed! No one told us that we were going to be in [the wrong terminal]." Well, the guys at Shake Shack picked that up in real time, tweeted back to them, and brought them their meal two terminals away. That ended up becoming a whole legend that they tweeted about forever.

How do you hire people who understand technology but at the same time have qualities that make them extremely customer-friendly?

NB: We look for three things: people who are proactive, curious, and passionate about Warby Parker. You have to be proactive because stuff is changing and you have to be taking action. We are moving too fast for people to just wait for direction from their manager. We want to hire lifelong learners because [technology] is changing constantly. At Warby Parker, we say that we're customer focused but medium agnostic. When we started six years ago, we primarily sold through desktop e-commerce. Now it's primarily mobile commerce. We have experimented with social commerce. We now have [more than] 40 stores. I don't know what will be next. Maybe it will be virtual reality. People who are passionate about Warby Parker are passionate about creating a company that can scale, be profitable, and do good in the world—without charging a premium for it. People who love fun, creativity, providing awesome customer experiences. That's not something that is easily taught.

Danny, you also have a set of values for the Union Square Hospitality Group.

DM: We have identified a set of skills that are almost always present in someone who has what we call a high HQ—a hospitality quotient. [These people] are kind and optimistic, intellectually curious, have an amazing work ethic and a high degree of empathy, are self-aware. [They are] motivated more than anything by the desire to make someone else feel better. We don't know how to teach any of those things. What we teach is how to identify them and hire for them.

I hate to say it, but we're all selling a commodity. I'm really proud of our food, and I know our chefs would be furious if they heard me say that any of what we sell is a commodity, but let's face it: Whatever we cook, I bet you could find another handful of examples in this city that are at least as good. What you're going to come back for—or not—is how we made you feel. We know that. Once we hire these people, we also then have to tell them how we expect them to behave, and those are [our] four family values: excellence, hospitality, entrepreneurial spirit, and integrity.

Neil, it was announced recently that direct-to-consumer contact lens company Hubble Contacts raised more than $7 million in funding. Do you see yourselves getting into contacts or other products?

NB: We have been very focused on eyeglasses in particular because it's a massive industry. We received some pretty good advice early on that if you stop to pick up every piece of gold along the way, you'll never get to the end of the rainbow. This is not to say that you won't see us continue to expand into other categories or offer additional services, but it's always about how we grow quickly while creating the infrastructure. I think you'll continue to see diagnostic tools that help us get prescriptions easier, faster, less expensively. Five years from now, you'll still need to go to the doctor to have other eye-health checkups, like glaucoma. But when people want to renew their contact lens or eyeglasses prescription, they will be able to do that from home using a mobile device.

Here's another eyeglass question, but for Danny. Augmented reality—glasses you can see through that provide digital information—do you see a time when servers . . .

DM: No.

Why not?

DM: The first four gifts of hospitality we all got within seconds of being born were eye contact, a smile, a hug, and some pretty good food. With any transaction, people want to know that you see them. The surest line between your heart and the next person's heart is eye contact. I just don't want stuff getting in the way of that.

Firing an employee is the worst task most managers have. Here's how to make it slightly less painful.

One of the least enviable tasks managers and business owners have is firing someone. However, chances are that if you supervise people, you're eventually going to have to let some of them go—even good employees.

Here are some dos and don'ts from experts.

Create A Paper Trail

While it's not legally required to create a paper trail documenting the reasons you're firing the employee, doing so can help you protect the company and you if the terminated employee , says labor, employment, and human resources attorney Charles A. Krugel.

If you've tried to help the employee perform better or curb their behavior, note those actions—and be sure to document each event immediately after it has happened for greatest credibility. If you're going to give employees second chances, it may make sense to give them a third chance, too, depending on the circumstances.

"I think 'three strikes' is kind of a rule of thumb," Krugel says, although that's more a cultural norm than a hard-and-fast rule. "That's usually what unemployment comp administrators look at. They seem to look for two warnings and then a third strike and you're out. However, obviously, that's going to also be contingent upon the nature of the problem," he adds.

Take Care Of Housekeeping And Know Your State's Laws

Different states have different rules and regulations when it comes to terminating employment, says Steven Lindner, PhD, founder of The WorkPlace Group, a recruitment firm. For example, California requires that the employee's final paycheck be delivered immediately when an employee is fired. The employee may also be entitled to compensation for accrued vacation time, continuation of health insurance coverage, and other accommodations, depending on your company's policies and the state and federal laws and regulations that apply to your business.

Lindner recommends working with your human resources department or attorney to ensure that you comply with any requirements. In addition, compile a list of any company-owned equipment or data that need to be retrieved from the employee.

Do It In The Middle Of The Week

Have you heard that "sage" advice to fire someone on a Friday afternoon? Don't do that, says Deanna Arnold, owner of human resources consulting firm Employers Advantage, LLC. "If you do it at the beginning of the week or the middle of the week, it gives people the opportunity to jump back into the job search," she says. When you fire someone on a Friday, they have all weekend to ruminate over the situation, but can take very little concrete action, such as tapping outplacement services or contacting people in their network, she says.

Stick To The Facts

When you're doing the actual employment termination, keep it short and fact-based, Krugel says. Don't defend your actions or get into long explanations. The more you ramble, the greater the likelihood that you could inadvertently say something that could be understood as discriminatory against protected classes, he says. He points to Johnson v. Securitas Security Services USA Inc., a case where a supervisor's alleged comment to a 76-year-old employee who was fired that it was "time to hang up your Superman cape," was enough for a terminated employee to state a claim for age discrimination.

Have A Witness

Lindner advises that you always have a second person on hand to act as a witness to the event. That way, if the former employee later alleges any wrongdoing, you have backup to support your side of the story, he says.

Be Humane

In most cases, it's not necessary to immediately march someone out of the office escorted by a security guard. Of course you need to protect your company, but it's usually a good idea to give the employee time to gather their things and say goodbye to coworkers.

However, it's also important to gauge the reason for firing and the temperament of the employee. If you think they will be explosive or exceedingly disruptive, it may be best to handle matters by phone, Krugel advises.

Look For The Lessons

Once you've fired the employee, look for any clues in the situation that there are cultural or other issues that may need to be addressed, says Krugel. Once, a member of his team was fired for sexual harassment. Immediately after the termination, he called an employee meeting, reminded his employees that the workplace had zero tolerance for such behavior, and invited any employees who had concerns to discuss them. Your team may need reminders, training, or other support to address issues that arise.

In addition, consider the lessons for hiring employees in the future. Are there questions you should be asking during reference checks or other red flags for which you should be on the lookout? Take the lessons you learned and use them to strengthen your processes.

The legendary performer developed her knack for showmanship because of her weaknesses.

Weaknesses Can Be Strengths

With a new show debuting in Las Vegas this month and more than 3 million followers relishing her emoji-stuffed (and often politically charged) tweets, Cher knows how to hold an audience's attention. It's a skill she developed in the face of adversity.

"When I was growing up, no one knew what dyslexia was," Cher said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in November. "My teachers would say things like, 'She's really smart, but she doesn't apply herself.' [With Twitter], at the beginning, my tweets were frightening. I would read them back and they didn't make sense. But then I started using emojis, which was heaven. They're like hieroglyphs. I learn so much about what's really happening on Twitter. I mean, there's a bunch of crap, but then there are some fabulous things. What I get from Twitter are ways that I can enrich someone's life, enrich my life, or do some good.

"I love the creative process. I believe that my job onstage is to take people away from their lives and problems and whatever. I always design the shows to entertain me, and they seem to entertain my audience, too. When I first started [performing] after Sonny and I split up, I didn't want to just go out and sing. I thought, I'll be bored to sobs if I do that. So I made this amazing show [which ran at Caesars Palace from 1979 through 1982]. Everyone hated it. They went, 'Oh, Cher and her stupid Las Vegas show.' But [everyone] is doing that today!"

Paying everyone a small amount each month no matter what could make a big difference for freelancers and entrepreneurs.

On January 1 Finland became the first country in history to launch a large-scale universal basic income trial. The two-year trial selected 2,000 unemployed Finnish citizens and will pay them €560 ($587) each month whether or not they find a job during the trial. There are also no requirements for reporting how they spend the money. The experiment aims to see if large-scale UBI programs could actually help boost employment and spur the economy by providing people with a small guaranteed income, which could enable them to take more risks, such as applying for different kinds of jobs, seeking out self-employment through freelancing, or starting a small business.

Related: How Finland's Exciting Basic Income Experiment Will Work—And What We Can Learn From It

"Studies have shown one of the top reasons more people don't become entrepreneurs is because they don't have the capital to both support themselves and start a business at the same time. This means they can't afford to leave their current job to start their own small business," says Marjukka Turunen, the head of the legal unit in benefit services at KELA, the Finnish government social security institution that is overseeing the project. "UBI would give them a solid financial foundation to do this."

Or at least, that's the hope. After all, no one really knows how a large-scale universal basic monthly income service would affect individual productivity—it's never been done before, after all. But it may be the only thing that could help give millions of people an income in the next decades as robots and artificially intelligent software eliminate jobs once held by humans. By just 2021, 6% of all U.S. jobs could be eliminated in this manner. As that proportion of job losses grows, UBI could be the only hope of guaranteed income for many.

But while the Finnish study and other smaller ones mean basic income may finally be closer to happening, many are questioning if such a system could work in the U.S., a country with a relatively less generous social benefits system compared to most European nations. Yet a growing number of economists are saying it's no longer a question of if, but when.

"I'm quite optimistic [that UBI will be rolled out in the U.S. eventually], because it is becoming a political imperative," says Guy Standing, professorial research associate, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network.

He explained: "The 20th-century income distribution system has broken down irretrievably. Unless something like a basic income is introduced, the economic insecurity of the "precariat" (which includes most freelancers and taskers working in the platform economy) will become so great that the appeal of political extremists will be hard to resist. The election of Trump, in my view, is a dangerous signal of precisely that siren luring society toward the rocks. Providing income security is essential to preserve freedom, social justice, and healthy political democracy."

Standing also believes UBI could not only help freelancers survive, but thrive. Here's five ways how:

1. It Could Help People Retrain For In-Demand Jobs

"A basic income—by which I mean a modest amount paid to every individual monthly, without conditions—would provide people with basic security, which is essential for mental and physical health, and is conducive to longer-term perspectives and decision-making," says Standing. "As such, it would give people a greater sense of being in control of one's life." That feeling of control and stability would enable people to leave dead-end jobs in favor of more education, enabling them to retrain for
in-demand jobs, without the fear of not being able to pay for basic necessities.

This in turn could eventually provide a more in-demand workforce and spur a growing of the economy. And it's not only the economy that could benefit—other areas of society could bear fruit from UBI, including "some work that is ignored in official statistics and that is unremunerated, including the work of care, for our children, other relatives, and our community," says Standing.

2. It Could Inspire People To Take Risks And Start Their Own Businesses

"By providing basic economic security, a basic income would encourage a more entrepreneurial mentality, which might take the form of starting a new business or expanding an existing one," says Standing. In other words, that financial cushion UBI provides could be just enough stability for people to allow them to spend their own savings or other capital on starting a business—thus potentially creating even more jobs. After all, as KELA's Turunen pointed out, one of the top reasons more people don't become entrepreneurs is because they don't have the capital to both support themselves and start a business at the same time.

But Standing says the payment frequency of UBI here is key. If UBI were paid annually instead of monthly, it may not result in as many successful entrepreneurial endeavors. "One reason for supporting a modest regular basic income rather than a larger lump sum paid once or at the end of a year is that it puts a lid on 'the weakness of will, the tendency to take a risk carelessly. A [monthly] basic income would help give mental stability, which is conducive to strategic risk-taking."

3. It Could Help Freelancers Maintain Health Insurance Coverage

Since I've been living in the U.K., I've noticed people here don't fret as much about starting a small business or freelancing because they don't have to worry about health care coverage. Health care in the U.K (and many European countries) is provided by the state and not conditional on employment of the ability to pay for it. Now that President-elect Trump and the Republicans have vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, many freelancers are once again worried if they'll be able to keep and pay for their health insurance.

If UBI is rolled out in the U.S. people would potentially have one less hurdle to overcome to going freelance or starting their own business because they would be guaranteed an income no matter what, which could then be use to help cover the most expensive and necessary living costs: private health insurance. "A basic income would provide some defense against economic shocks, due to illness, an accident or other personal setback," says Standing. "While many of us who support a basic income also believe in a national public health service paid mainly out of taxation, if an insurance model is pursued there must be robust safeguards to ensure the low-income groups and those who will probably have fluctuating incomes, such as most freelancers, do not find they 'pay more, for less'."

4. It Could Help Freelancers Say "No" To Abusive Clients

Many times freelancers are afraid to say "no" to clients, even ones who are psychologically abusive or are notorious late payers—in other words, ones they should dump. Having a UBI as a buffer could mean freelancers could be less desperate in taking any job that comes along and enable them to focus on obtaining work with high-value, beneficial, decent clients.

"It would enable more people to say 'no' when confronted by exploitative and oppressive demands. And it would enable more people to say 'yes' to forms of work that one might wish to do but otherwise would have to omit due to financial pressure to do paid labor," says Standing. "A basic income could enable more people to pace themselves and think and act in a longer-term way."

5. It Could Help Compensate Freelancers For The Unpaid Work They Do

"The primary justifications for a basic income are social justice and an enhancement of freedom. This applies to everybody, regardless of their work status," Standing says. "However, freelancers realize more easily than those in wage labor that they have to do a lot of work that is not recognized or remunerated. A basic income helps to legitimize those forms of work."

In other words, a UBI could help compensate freelancers for the parts of their work they don't bill clients for—or that clients refuse to pay for. Those types of work include chasing down leads or interviewing for freelance writers, wandering around town for inspiration to find the best look for a freelance interior designer's client, or a freelance developer taking the time to master that obscure coding language a client of hers insists on using on their system.

It's the time-consuming tasks like these, which are almost always never billed for, that separate the average freelancer from the incredible one. If freelancers the country over—a country in which freelancers make up 35% of the workforce—felt UBI enabled them to take more time to perfect their work for client, the entire business sector, and ultimately, economy, benefits.

Stop thinking of yourself as the boss.

Share the power and you'll multiply your team's productivity, say these top executives.

Empower Employees To Be The Boss

"I view each person who works with me as an entrepreneur. We want to encourage people [to think of themselves as] owners of their area. It's easier to recognize standout talent when you allow them to showcase how they ideate, or what they'd do." —Rebecca Minkoff, cofounder, Rebecca Minkoff

Manage Together

"Develop a strategy with a team, rather than for a team. They'll [be more willing to] push the boundaries if they are the ones who helped set the boundaries inthe first place." —Ashley McCollum, general manager, BuzzFeed's Tasty

Share In Everyone's Agony

"I make their problems my problems. This notion that we're in it together gets people motivated. They don't have to solve problems by themselves." —Osman Khan, cofounder and CEO, Paddle8

Find inspiration In Your Business's Impact

"Remember your customer. There is nothing like the enthusiasm of a 2-year-old driving a [play] bus to remind you why that budget needs to be completed." —Regina Asborno, deputy director, New York Transit Museum

A leading advocate for Saudi women, Princess Reema Bint Bandar Al-Saud has learned a lot about how to effect change.

Be The First Domino

Princess Reema is heading Saudi Arabia's effort to get women involved in sports and exercise, which is both a health initiative (Saudi women have high rates of obesity and diabetes) and part of a mission to diversify the oil-focused economy. Even developing one sport can have a big impact. Right now, in Riyadh, there is just one small retail chain dedicated to serious sports bikes. "My role would be to look at bicycling—or any sport—and say, 'How do we expand this?' We will work with [government agencies] and young entrepreneurs," she said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in November. "It's not just the store that sells the bicycle. You need the individual who is repairing [bikes]. You will [also attract] the store that sells bicycling clothing, and hopefully a bicycle magazine in Arabic. My job is to make all the dominoes fall. But first it's to set them up."

Make Yourself Heard—And Also Listen

Because of strict religious codes and a paucity of women in the workplace, Princess Reema often deals with men who've rarely or never been in meetings with women. That can work to her advantage. "Because they're so uncomfortable with it, they listen. That's actually awkward. I'll say, 'I don't know if I'm right. I'm just voicing an opinion. Feel free to [disagree].' The other awkward thing in Saudi is a classist society, so I walk in with a title and that makes people want to be quiet. That's not healthy. I have to repeat, 'If we're colleagues, then we're equals, and if we're equals, we all have a say.' We're working toward the same objective. It's not that I want resistance—just feedback."

Try Diplomacy

As a former CEO of a major Saudi retailer and the founder of the social enterprise Alf Khair, Princess Reema has helped women enter the workforce and take control of their own health care. But she's always been careful not to push too hard. As an example, she mentions Saudi laws that assign every woman a male relative to be her "guardian." Though she believes guardianship to be outdated, she's thought carefully about what might change it. "I'm never an advocate for aggressive campaigns. I don't agree with that methodology, even if the message is correct. The issue is, how do you explain to a community of men who historically are taking care of you that you don't need them in the same way? You could do it aggressively, or you could say, 'Thank you for the time and care you've given me. I appreciate it. But I'm evolving, and let me show you what I can do.' I don't want to minimize it, because it is so difficult for many women. But there's a better way to handle it."

It turns out there's a place for archaic physical media of questionable audio fidelity—even in the Spotify era.

For Andy Molholt, there's something oddly special about hitting play on his boombox at the beach. The Philadelphia-based musician tours frequently with his band Laser Background and, between that and the many shows he helps book back home in Philly, he winds up seeing a lot of bands perform in bars, basements, and warehouses. If he likes them, he usually buys a tape.

"It's nice to only be able to listen to what's in front of you, instead of having the entirety of music at your fingertips with Spotify and all that," says Molholt of his growing tape collection. "There's also something warm and fuzzy about tapes to me, maybe in a nostalgic kind of way."

He's not alone. Over the recent holiday shopping season, U.S. artists and labels saw a 140% increase in tape sales over the previous year, according to a new music industry report from BuzzAngle. Over the course of 2016, Bandcamp saw its own 46% increase in cassette sales, according to a spokesperson for the music service. Also last year, the National Audio Company—the largest cassette tape manufacturer in the U.S.—saw a 20% increase in its commercial tape duplication business (this doesn't include blank tapes or audiobooks), according to a company spokesperson. This continues an upward-sloping trend for the Missouri-based company, which did more business in 2014 than at any other point since its factory opened in 1969.

And while it's still a tiny sliver of overall music consumption—too small for Nielsen to care enough to track independently of other music formats—the seemingly counterintuitive revival of cassettes shows no sign of slowing down, even as streaming music subscriptions explode. But why?

As tempting as it may be to dismiss cassettes as another display of analog hipsterism, the mini-trend has very real, practical benefits for budding artists like Molholt, who releases music on a tape-only label called Endless Daze. For one thing, they scratch a simple economic itch. For about $2 apiece, tapes can be produced in small quantities much more quickly than vinyl records, whose own resurgence has slammed pressing plants with so much demand that a new record can take up to six months to turn around. And unlike with vinyl, musicians can produce new copies of cassettes in their apartment in a pinch.

For newer, less established artists, tapes are also a lower-risk investment than vinyl: If your debut EP doesn't sell, you're not stuck sitting on a heavy box of vinyl that took over a thousand bucks and half a year to produce.

Tapes give musicians an affordable way to sell their work to fans—usually for about five bucks apiece—and help cover their costs on the road in an age when streaming royalty checks will barely fill up the gas tank. They let fans support their favorite artists without the $25 commitment of vinyl or some other trinket emblazoned with the band's logo. It may seem odd given the scarcity of cassette players in our lives, but if nothing else, a rectangular hunk of plastic can serve as a convenient vehicle for a free digital download of the album. Plus, it's a souvenir.

"For the fans, there's a certain coolness about tapes," says J. Edward Keyes, Bandcamp's editorial director and a longtime music journalist, who has amassed close to 500 cassettes. "You can't quite put your finger on it. But they're sort of fun. They're weird little tchotchkes."

Indeed, the appeal of tapes has more to do with collectibility and nostalgia than it does with convenience or sound quality. In fact, the lower audio fidelity of tapes is seldom seen as a disadvantage.

"Tapes were biggest mostly in noise and hardcore, where the fact that they were degraded was almost kind of an asset," says Keyes. "Because it made it sound muddier and screwed with the dynamics and the sound in an interesting way."

Molholt, for one, loves the sound of tapes. "I feel like everyone is obsessed with super high fidelity but I like it when things are warm and warbly," he says.

The Cassette Decade

The tape revival is not a new trend. After being swiftly crushed into obsolescence by the rise of the superior-sounding compact disc in the 1980s, the U.S. cassette market started seeing a miniature revival of sorts about a decade ago, driven at first by underground and more experimental music scenes and then by more popular flavors of indie rock. By 2010, the so-called "cassette revival" had landed on the radar of mainstream media outlets like NPR and the Boston Globe, leading to an ongoing resurgence in interest from everyone from Pitchfork and Rolling Stone to Forbes and (hello) Fast Company.

All along the way, the return of cassettes has seemed like a strange, low-fidelity fluke in a world being overtaken by music streaming services. But even as paid music subscriptions have approached the 100 million mark, offering new signs of industry growth as physical albums continue their years-long free-fall, the cassette tape refuses to die.

In large part, we have in-the-know music obsessives like Molholt and Keyes to thank. But in recent years, we've seen tapes inch toward an unexpectedly mainstream sort of hipness, complete with Urban Outfitters selling tape players and used cassettes. That retailer, which produces its own limited-run mix tapes for promotional purposes, declined to comment for this article. But suffice it to say that its stamp of approval makes the tape trend officially "cool" in the eyes of many millennial consumers (even if it elicits a groan from punk bands and noise artists who have long embraced the format).

Since 2013, music retailers have also celebrated Cassette Store Day with special tape releases, hoping to extend the success of Record Store Day to a less popular format. To some, these music-buying holidays are a cheesy gimmick. To others, anything that will get consumers to pay for music, 15 years after Napster, is worthwhile.

Major labels have taken note. The 2014 release of the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack on cassette may have been a somewhat clever marketing tactic for the movie (whose storyline features a mixtape filled with throwback hits from the '70s and '80s), but there's no such rationale to explain why Justin Bieber, Eminem, Macklemore, and Twenty One Pilots have put out tapes in the last year or two. But again, whatever it takes to get people to pay for music.

"I do arch an eyebrow when I see major labels putting things out on tape," says Keyes. "That, to me, is just purely cashing in on what they perceive as kind of a trend. To me, tapes are really for smaller bands and record labels. Not because Columbia wanted to reissue the Top Gun soundtrack for the hundredth time. Something about that is a little more bogus to me."

Keyes now has a routine habit of buying tapes at shows or, quite naturally, ordering them online from his employer Bandcamp, which has the added bonus of unlocking free, unlimited streaming from within the service's app. At the Latinx Punk Festival in Brooklyn last summer, Keyes bought tapes from many of the bands he saw, who hailed from all over the world. At a festival showcasing many artists, the availability of cheap physical media allows any fan to easily collect a lot of music for later listening, something that would be cost-prohibitive with vinyl and downright annoying with subscription services.

One Tangible Thing

In an age when most music exists on the boundless, only somewhat navigable reservoir of sound called the internet, splintered across streaming services, YouTube embeds, torrents, and message board threads, there's something to be said for the tangibility and simplicity of physical media. Like reading a book or a paper magazine, listening to vinyl or cassettes pulls us out of the digital ocean for 45 minutes or so and forces us to focus on one thing. What a concept.

As a bonus, Keyes notes, cassettes often look cool. "They usually do such a nice job with the cover art, especially [tape label] Orange Milk," he says. "They have such a clear aesthetic and design. It kind of makes you want to buy them all and line them all up."

Trendy as they may be, nobody is predicting that tapes are going to explode into a dominant force in the music industry. Not even vinyl, which has been growing in popularity for several years, has a chance of reversing the inevitable trend toward the all-you-can-stream, subscription-based music economy. But don't expect cassettes to go away anytime soon, either.

"I can't predict whether it will make mainstream inroads," says Keyes. "But as a viable method for artists to put out music in a physical format, I wouldn't be surprised to see it grow."

Robots are all thumbs. Engineers are working to improve dexterity so bots can take over housekeeping drudgework—as well as people's jobs.

Berkeley robotics professor Ken Goldberg is turning an empty coffee mug around and around in his hands. "Oh, it's so complicated for a robot to be able to make sense of that kind of data," he says, eyeing his fingers grasping the cup with a look of wonder. Artificial intelligence is taking on complex cognitive tasks, such as assisting in legal and medical research, but a manual job like picking up laundry off the floor is still science fiction. It's a long way from Roomba to Rosie the Robot. Universities like Berkeley and Cornell and companies like Amazon and Toyota are working to close the gap with mechanical hands that approach human dexterity.

Success would unleash a new robotics revolution with positive effects like reducing household drudgework, and fraught effects such as eliminating jobs in places like warehouses. Machines have been taking over manual labor for centuries; but they've been limited to specific, predictable tasks, as in factories. "Parts are all in a given place," says Goldberg. "You're just doing repetitive motions, and you can spend a lot of time getting the repetitions really, really precise." The challenge is in "unstructured environments," like a messy home or busy warehouse, where different things are in different locations all the time.

Get A Grip

"Grasping is something that's very subtle and elusive," Goldberg says. "Humans just don't even think about it. If I want to pick something up, I just do it." It's an ostensibly simple task accomplished by a complex network of circuitry inside the mind. In lifting that mug, a person has to pick the best of many ways their fingers will fit around it, be it encircling the whole mug or grabbing some part of the handle. And which part, with which fingers, in which positions? Humans also have to factor in physics like friction and center of gravity.

The trick: Human brains have developed automated, easily customized routines. "When I see a new pen that I've never seen before, I know how to pick it up," says Goldberg. "So what I do is, I map it into something I do have experience with and I apply that, adapt it on the fly." He and his grad students at the Berkeley Autolab are applying the same principle to robotics. They've developed an online database of 3D virtual objects, called Dexterity Network (Dex-Net, for short) to pre-calculate how to grasp any kind of shape. Dex-Net contains about 10,000 virtual objects, with plans to grow to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions.

During a visit last September, Goldberg empties about a dozen 3D-printed models on a table in front of me, and they are bizarre. I eye a red one about the size of a hearty baked potato. It's lumpy, without anything that screams "handle." Goldberg's been telling me how human dexterity is superior to a robot's, which seems like an invitation to demonstrate. Mimicking the vice-like grasp of a robotic claw, I close my thumb and forefinger over the closest thing to a handle and start to lift. It instantly slips from my grip, clattering on the table. "These we call adversarial shapes," says Goldberg, who adds, "They're sort of diabolical." He believes that if Dex-Net can master enough of them, it should be able to handle any object.

In my defense, this was my first attempt. Dex-Net employs an algorithm that makes 1,000 tries per virtual object, with 1,000 different variations. The goal is to build an inventory of "robust" grips a robot can draw on. I return to the lab in December, where grad student Jeff Mahler, who runs Dex-Net, has connected a popular two-arm industrial bot, called YuMi, to the network. "It's very good at doing things like fixed motions," Goldberg says. "But in this challenge…every situation is different, so it's constantly adapting to what it is sensing. And that's new."

Using Amazon's Alexa Voice Service, Mahler asks the robot to pack some of those oddball 3D-printed objects into a box. It reaches for the red thingy the same way I had, with the same result. "Oh no! I dropped the object," the robot exclaims. But even failures generate knowledge. "You could do this in parallel, so you have hundreds of robots doing experimentation," Goldberg says. "Through a combination of accident and guided search they will figure out the strategies or policies that will work, and they can share them."

Trying in another spot on the red object, YuMi finally gets a good grasp. The robot places it and two other items that Mahler requested into the box, adds packing material, and closes the box for shipping.

If you're thinking, "Amazon might like this," you're right. In 2015, the e-commerce behemoth launched the Amazon Robotics Challenge, a contest to build robots that could replace people in its shipping centers. The University of Delft in the Netherlands won the 2016 competition, mastering the challenge to unload 12 products from a tote bag into a series of bins, then load another dozen objects from bins into a tote. Delft's robot used a suction device for things with a flat surface, but it needed a claw for others. The process was precise, but agonizingly slow.

Berkeley hasn't taken part in the Amazon challenge, but it will enter a longstanding contest this year for housekeeping robots. Part of the annual RoboCup competition (best known for its robot soccer games), RoboCup@Home challenges teams to perform household tasks like vacuuming, serving food, or cleaning up clutter. Each team will pick one of two Japanese models to program: Toyota's Human Support Robot or SoftBank's rather adorable Pepper.

How appealing would a robot housekeeper be? Very, Goldberg predicts. "If it cost even $2,000 but it would keep the floor clean, that's worth it," he says. "We're constantly yelling at my kids to pick up after themselves." The professor has two children with his wife, the filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain. Such bots wouldn't just help with sloppy kids but also assist people limited by disabilities or old age, even extending beyond the home to pitching in on tasks like shopping.

A company called Seven Dreamers has taken a first step toward Rosie with a clothes-folding robot called Laundroid. A dozen years in development, the device is promised to go on sale in March. It's extremely slow and does just that one chore.

Give It A Hand

In the original Westworld, Michael Crichton's 1973 exploitation film, only the slightly misshapen hands give away who is a robot. "Supposedly you really can't tell, except by looking at the hands. They haven't perfected the hands yet," a veteran guest to the android-populated Westworld park tells his friend, a first-time visitor.

Today's robotics have a long way to go. The YuMi in Goldberg's lab has essentially two rigid metal fingers (called jaws) that open and close. It might grab better with a full hand, or at least with fingers that could sense what they are grabbing. "Currently they don't do this at all," Goldberg says. "It tries to close the jaws; and if they close all the way, it says, 'Oh, I missed it.'" Funded by industrial firm Siemens (as well as Google and Cisco), Goldberg's team is developing technology to improve real robots already deployed in industry. But there are very different ways to build future robot hands.

One developed by researchers at the Cornell Organic Robotics Lab looks freakishly human, with four fingers and a thumb roughly the color of light human skin. Instead of metal and motors, the fingers are made of rubbery silicon with air ducts. "Basically, each finger is a balloon," says Cornell assistant professor Rob Shepherd. It's driven by compressed air, like that from the CO2 tanks that power paintball guns. The underside of the finger doesn't stretch much, but the top portion can as air is pumped in, causing the finger to curl inwards—rather like a human's.

You can literally shake hands with Cornell's device, and it's not surprising that one proposed use of the tech is for a bionic hand. (The U.S. Air Force funds the research in part because it "is interested in human health and well-being," says Cornell.)

Flexible fingers could make the grasping process a lot easier. "What is beneficial about our prosthetic hand is that it can conform to and deflect around objects," says Shepherd," which means it can pick up objects of different shapes without needing to come down exactly right on them." Rubbery fingers don't supersede Berkeley's progress on dexterity algorithms, but they allow wiggle room (literally), increasing the chance that a grip will work.

Cornell's would not be the first bionic hands. Companies such as Bebonic and Open Bionics make mechanical hands like something out of the latest sci-fi flick. They are capable of fine dexterity, but in part because a human brain is still operating them. The hands pick up electrical signals from the flexing of muscles in the amputee's forearm. And these hands, with multiple segments, joints, and motors, are expensive. Open Bionics is aiming to get its hand down to around $3,000.

Shepherd reckons that rubbery hands, made by pouring silicon into molds, could be mass-produced for about $50 apiece (including incorporating some additional technologies we'll mention in a bit). Flexible robotics aren't new, either. A company called Soft Robotics Inc., for instance, makes mechanical arms with flexible grippers (though not resembling fingers) for delicate, preprogrammed tasks such as packing fruit without crushing it.

Cornell's breakthrough is the development of sensors that are both precise and simple to build. Within each silicon finger are three clear polyurethane tubes, called light guides, that act like fiber-optic cables. Each has an LED on one end and a photodetector on the other. The amount of light passing through the tubes diminishes as they bend with the finger. Combining the photodetector readings from all three tubes allows the robot to calculate the position of each finger and even how hard it is pressing on something. Shepherd has posted a video of the hand running its fingers over three tomatoes and picking the ripe one by sensing how soft it is.

The fingers could even feel pain, in a sense, by detecting excessive pressure, say from gripping too hard or something falling on them.

Still Out Of Reach

Robots have to overcome a lot of mechanical and computational challenges before they can take on most human chores. Human hands are extremely detailed, building and growing from the cellular level. "What we're doing is making a very low-resolution approximation of a human hand," says Shepherd. Cornell's fingers have three sensors and may get up to 100, but the nerves in a human finger are the equivalent of thousands of sensors.

Simply adding more sensors won't close the dexterity gap, either. "We have a hard time dealing with the sensory data that we already have," says Goldberg, about the robots Berkeley is using. "So it's not just having the sensor. It's the algorithms that go with it." In short: Even a klutz among humans is a dexterity virtuoso among robots. Closing that gap will take time. "What I generally argue is that we're far from that, very far," says Goldberg. That could be a bummer for people who want to ditch their housework but a relief for those who want to keep their factory, warehouse, or agricultural work.

The e-commerce giant just touted 100,000 new jobs, but it thrives on increasing automation wherever possible. Maybe there's a local fix.

Today, Amazon announced that it will create 100,000 full-time, full-benefit jobs in the United States over the next 18 months. The jobs, Amazon says, will range from entry-level positions to software development roles.

The announcement is designed to play nicely into President-elect Trump's rhetoric about bringing more jobs back to our shores, but it's important to remember that Amazon's business model is premised on increasing automation wherever possible, which means replacing more and more humans with machines.

In other words, while job creation is a reason to celebrate, it's worth being skeptical about the amount of job-creating Amazon will do in the long run. Even as it has increased its staff from 56,200 in 2011 to 306,800 last year, it has also outfitted its warehouses with robots and conveyor belts that have reduced the human labor required to ship a package to one minute. Its drone program might soon make mail delivery people obsolete. And it is reducing the need for customer service agents with policies like proactive refunds.

And more broadly, Amazon has played an important role in cutting jobs throughout the retail supply chain. It conditioned consumers to be able to find any product online and have it shipped to our home within days, which has had far-reaching ramifications across the marketplace. This week, women's fashion brand The Limited was the latest brand to shutter all 250 of its stores, effectively becoming an online-only retailer. Sears closed 200 stores over the last fiscal year and has 150 more closures scheduled for 2017. It joins, Macy's, Sports Authority, Ralph Lauren, Office Depot, American Apparel, and Aeropostale, which all closed stores over the last year.

"Malls are becoming ghost towns," says Joel Levitin, a partner at law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel, who specializes in bankruptcy and restructuring. "Part of this definitely has to do with automation and how we've gotten so used to buying things online."

A New Way Of Thinking Local

While many retail jobs lost to automation are unlikely to return, there are reasons to be encouraged by a growing movement within the startup community to bring more manufacturing to the United States. Over the last couple of years, a flock of startups—American Giant, Shinola, the Reformation, Buck Mason, and Yogasmoga, to name a few—have begun to think harder about how to make products locally, not just because it will create jobs, but because they actually believe they can make better-quality goods here. While the output of these startups is relatively small compared to a leviathan like Amazon, it signals a shift in business strategy and consumer demand that has the potential to become more widespread.

American Giant's founder and CEO, Bayard Winthrop, says he's passionate about making his apparel line in the U.S. from end-to-end, because that allows him to ensure that he can give his customers the best hoodies and T-shirts in the world. This doesn't mean Winthrop is against automation: He's been working hard to find or engineer the best possible machines to keep his factories as efficient as possible, so that he is able to offer products at prices that keep pace with brands that manufacture more cheaply overseas. But his approach means he's generating hundreds of American jobs. His company is contributing to the slow, but steady increase in U.S.-based apparel manufacturing, which has gone up by 35% since 2009.

"The focus needs to be on fostering competitiveness," Winthrop explains in an email. "Old retail is suffocating … trying to figure out how to survive rather than how to innovate. The bright spot in manufacturing apparel is going to be led by a new generation of businesses."

Among this new generation of businesses is luxury eyewear startup State Optical, which manufactures entirely at a 30-person factory in Chicago. It takes two weeks and 75 steps to make a single pair of glasses, which retail at $350 and above—on par with most higher-end eyeglasses on the market. Cofounder and CEO Scott Shapiro launched the business two years ago with the belief that the American market is ready for more brands that emphasize quality and craftsmanship over low cost.

The lesson here is that the American marketplace has changed. Some proportion of retail and warehouse jobs are gone forever, eaten by the internet and automation. But the way to bring more jobs back home is twofold. First, introduce technology and innovative thinking into the entire supply chain process, to make it possible to produce products locally at competitive prices. And second, appeal to consumers' desire for products that are made with attention to detail and high-quality workmanship, something that American factories can do better than their overseas counterparts.

Can business acumen lead to a cogent political negotiation style?

Donald Trump's entire campaign rested on his lack of political experience. He was the outsider promising to drain the swamp. Now that the businessman is about to become president, how will the skills that propelled him to the White House—those of a showman and dealer—work in the political world?

What does it mean to have a businessman making political decisions? Could future political strategy and negotiations source more from business know-how and less from a diplomacy playbook?

To answer these questions, it helps to look at how business negotiation and strategy are different from political negotiation and strategy.

What Does It Mean To Be A Good Business Person?

Being a wildly successful entrepreneur requires not only growing a solid business, but also giving the entire enterprise an aura of something larger than life. In that sense, people like Trump are very good at what they do. They spend years crafting an image of what their business is, as well as honing their own personal brand. For decades Trump has portrayed himself as a brazen, singular player who goes against the grain to get things done. And this has helped him brand himself as a "true" American entrepreneur.

Decisions are thus made with those interests in mind. As Baruch Fischhoff, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Institute for Politics and Strategy, explained to me, business strategies are similar to political ones, but have different ramifications and ways that players intrinsically judge them. "We all make decisions in about the same way," he says. But depending on the magnitude of the decision, there's an intrinsic cost-benefit analysis.

Fischhoff talks about two models for how decisions are made, which come from the scholar Herbert Simon. One is called "bounded rationality," where a leader narrows his or her gaze to solve subsets of a bigger problem. That is, they realize their limitations and focus on small gains to help achieve bigger goals. Conversely, a leader can also take everything into consideration and try to attack from that perspective, and then assess the outcome critically.

In business, it's easy to understand the risks—the business could lose or gain money or partners, etc. But things aren't so easy to analyze when it comes to politics. Political decision making, explains Fischhoff, goes from the realm of economics analysis to a new realm where there's no way to predict overall ramifications. Which is to say, the political actors need to know that there are myriad unknown elements to consider when making any moves. The stakes are higher. Political analyses, he says, are "much harder calculations than the ones entrepreneurs need to make." When a president makes a seemingly small move, it could alter relationships with a key ally. Understanding the potential risks when making political negotiations is at once impossible but necessary.

This leads to what seems like an obvious assertion, but an important one nonetheless. Negotiation in business is more circumscribed, but in politics it's far reaching. "In politics, compared to business, there are potentially many more people and issues that can affect how decisions are made and things turn out," wrote Professor Fischhoff in a follow-up email. "Policies (and people) can be sabotaged or promoted for reasons far removed from seemingly immediate concerns."

In essence, the scope is what makes the difference. During negotiations, smart actors should consider an "all-other-problems" category when deciding how to begin a negotiation. This is quite simply all the things that could happen. Assessing what that category includes for political situations is beyond behemoth and categorically different from a business strategy.

Can Business Acumen Lead To Political Prowess?

The first step toward transforming from business person to successful political negotiator is to realize your limitations. They "would need to come up to speed on what you can and can't do with the kinds of analyses [many business people use]," says Fischhoff. More, they should surround themselves with people who are well versed in the areas they are not. Fischhoff explained why a steady political strategy is needed when taking the reins:

One conflict facing someone new in any job is between the desire to make a splash and the need to avoid doing irreversible damage. Given that one can't think of everything or know what is missing, it is important to have advisers who worry about the decision makers' long run—and not their own short-term goals.

This extends to both business and politics, of course, but is especially sage when trying to transform a brash entrepreneur into a successful statesman.

When it comes to politics, both decision-making models—be it bounded rationality or approaching the larger issue—work. And they shift how a leader is perceived: Both a business and political leader's legacy is crafted by how they attack issues. But the unknowns in politics are far more vast than for most other spheres, and how they approach filling those knowledge gaps will dictate their success as political negotiators.

"In politics, there may also be less sorting by expertise and background. People with a hunger for power can succeed in politics without knowing very much or even knowing how to get needed knowledge. They might even disparage others' knowledge, in deference to their own intuitions," wrote Fischhoff. "In business, one is more likely to interact with people who are familiar with their domain and who want to know all that they can."

In short, political leaders need to realize their own cognitive capacity because their actions aren't siloed within their own industry. Ego and image may make up a good chunk of someone's business maneuvering, but in politics, the stakes are higher and more stratified. Brash, unscripted hand waves may catch people's eyes in the moment, but there's no way to know what will follow. And political negotiations require a more honed and keen eye to be done successfully.

Whether or not the future of politics is drawn from business learnings or something entirely different, it's important for leaders to be both reflective and critical. They must be ready to learn as the scope of their decisions and negotiations increase. "Even within an institution (firm, university), people are surprised by what they discover when promoted a rung," Fischhoff wrote. "The greater the shift in domains, the more difficult that task becomes."

Go into the Oval Office with the president and hear his stories from eight years in the White House.

Exactly one week before handing over the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, President Obama is inviting you to join him on a tour of the White House. And you don't have to travel to Washington, D.C. to make the visit.

Today, Facebook-owned Oculus is releasing "The People's House," a 360-degree video featuring President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. Shot by well-known virtual reality production company Felix & Paul Studios, the eight-minute Facebook 360 video brings viewers along for the ride as the outgoing president waxes philosophical about the White House, what it means to him—and the American people—and some of his favorite memories there.

The video, filmed in November and December, but in the works for months, was intended to be released before President-elect Donald Trump moves into the White House. Oculus will also release a 15-to-20-minute virtual reality version of the video sometime later in the year.

For Felix & Paul Studios, and Oculus, this is wasn't the first time working with Obama and VR. They had all come together last summer on "Through the Ages," a VR experience celebrating the National Parks Service's centennial. Ryan Horrigan, Felix & Paul's chief content officer, told me that the White House project had originally been planned for much earlier in the year, but was delayed by the opportunity to work on the National Parks video.

The idea for "The People's House" was for the video to be part historical document and part Obama's personal narrative, explained Colum Slevin, Oculus's head of experiences. The Obama administration has made an effort to open the White House to the public—and hundreds of thousands of people from all across the country, and the world, have been able to explore the famous building. As well, the rooms on the public tour are visible in Google Street View. The Facebook 360 video and subsequent VR film are the latest ways for the public to explore the mansion.

From the beginning, you're taken into the White House, where you have a 360-degree view of the building's interior, with President Obama narrating as you move from one location to another, East Room to the Situation Room to the Oval Office.

"Michelle and I always joke, 'we're just renters here,'" Obama says early in the video of the house he and his wife have lived in for the past eight years, and where their two daughters have more or less grown up. "The owners are the American people and all those invested in creating this amazing place with so much history."

And indeed, the video is meant to share some of that history, whether it be Obama recalling being in the Situation Room while the operation to capture Osama bin Laden was underway, or Michelle Obama talking about a portrait of George Washington that Dolly Madison saved from a fire set by the British Army.

All told, the production team shot 25 scenes in nine White House rooms—though not all of those are featured in the shorter 360 video released today. The VR experience will include much more of Obama himself, as well as more of the West Wing and the residence, but the 360 video still gives a rich sense of what it's like to be there.

Given that the project was coordinated with Obama and his people, it was obviously essential that Felix & Paul be able to be on site at the White House prior to Trump's inauguration. Horrigan recalled that he and his team were able to be on site for about five total days—during which they had the president for part of one day and the First Lady for part of another. But they hadn't known until shortly before production began when they would be invited.

"You could wait and not know what's happening, Horrigan joked, "but when they call and say 'Do you want to do this next week,' you have to be there."