Here's how the vice president and chief innovation officer of Ralph Lauren keeps the 49-year-old company moving forward.
To keep stalwart preppy brand Ralph Lauren relevant in a fast-fashion era, David Lauren is looking for fresh ideas at every level of the company.
"When I started about 17 years ago, there were about 6,800 employees. Today, there are 26,000," Lauren said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in November. "My job is to make sure we're protecting the brand DNA and innovating. It's hard to move large organizations, no doubt about it. It's about [finding] entrepreneurial energy. You have to figure out ways to think small. At our company, although it seems like we have a lot of employees, when you go in and meet each team, it's just a handful of people. The more nimble we can be, the more we can be tuned in, so we'll hear the [next] idea and try it.
"The truth is that innovation comes from every group. When you walk into a store, there's a guy in the back who looks like he's just stocking shelves. He may have the best idea. You have to take your ego out [of the equation] and recognize that the idea could come from anywhere. We've [also] created a culture where you don't feel intimidated to bring your ideas forward. Failure is built into it: We're making millions of products every day, and maybe we'll sell a ton of one jacket, but five other jackets may not sell as well. And we learn. The goal is to see what works, and to be able to say, 'That's not working—evolve it.' It's kind of like Woody Allen [says] in Annie Hall: A shark has to keep moving forward or it dies. You have to keep moving forward."
If you can tell a story that makes sense, it doesn't matter how old you are.
My cofounders and I were 21 and 22 when we started Next Big Sound, and by far the biggest challenge we faced was in convincing investors they should trust us with their money. That was in 2009, and around that time Mark Zuckerberg was one of the youngest founders to have ever raised venture capital, at 19 years old. Whatever encouragement we drew from that knowledge, it still wasn't easy pitching people 20 to 40 years older than we were.
We eventually pulled it off by telling a good story that made sense. If it sounds simple, it actually took a while to get right. Here's a look at the process we used to craft and test a narrative that sold our vision to people so much our senior.
Our story started with the music industry in 2009, which was in a state of dynamic change. I already had experience in the field, but it mostly amounted to stapling weekly CD sales reports together as an intern at the biggest label in the world.
That counted for more than you might think. Because I had access to that data, I could tell the industry wasn't paying attention to where people were spending more of their time and attention. As I saw it, there was an opportunity to build a data company that tracked all of this information.
Venture capitalists categorically hate the music industry, but most love data analytics businesses. That became the starting point for our narrative. In our story, we positioned music as just the next industry to be transformed by data, with Next Big Sound leading the charge.
If I hadn't workshopped a music-centric version of this investor pitch with investors over many months, we would've ended up with a very different (and probably unsuccessful) story. Instead, we used compelling examples to drive the story home. Michael Jackson had just died that summer. To give prospective investors a sense of the volume of online music data, we showed that his actual sales spiked 1,000% following his passing, but online activity involving Jackson jumped more than 10,000%. Clearly there was a lot of interest that wasn't being reflected just in music sales.
If hitting on the right narrative to position your startup is about understanding investors (in this case, their penchant for data companies over music companies), it's also about helping them understand you. That's where your age can be an asset, not a detriment. After all, pitching is personal; every given founder has a unique potential advantage over every other founder, and these advantages are usually the best place to find your story.
What unique advantage could three first-time founders have in a highly competitive marketplace in which venture capitalists like Foundry Group were reviewing thousands of pitches a year? How about the fact that as recent college graduates we were used to living with lots of roommates and on very little money?
We spent the first three years of the business living in a six-bedroom house with the first three people we'd hired. That's the reality that drove part of our story that we were "cheap to keep alive." What about our unique hiring advantage, where we found we could siphon off some of the most talented engineers from our alma maters? That made it into our story, too.
There were other ways to mine our biographies for selling points. What edge could a small team from Boulder, Colorado, have over global enterprise software companies selling into Sony Music? How about the fortunate fact that my freshman year of college happened to be the same year that Facebook launched? I'd grown up with the technology we were tracking.
When I stood in the boardroom presenting to the label executives, I looked a lot more like the generation they associated with these new technologies than our competitors, who sent in seasoned sales executives. Plus, by the time I got in the room, I'd also presented to hundreds of label employees. My age aside, I knew which parts of our demo drove the most excitement, and which features caused people to tune out and check their phones. Over time, I was able to refine our demo for investors accordingly.
I've been incredibly fortunate to work with my two cofounders, David and Samir. Whenever we're crafting fresh narrative to take to investors, we workshop them first among ourselves.
That's the first test. Once we go back and revise it, we regroup again for a second test, usually with some portion of our larger team—which can include Next Big Sound's board of directors, our current or potential customers, vendors, partners, investors, or just friends of the company. This is where the wisdom of people who have years of relevant experience can send us back to the drawing board again, and save us from making big mistakes when it really counts.
This way, by the time the story goes out to a broad audience at a conference or in an email blast, a fundraising roadshow, a formal sales presentation, or a company all-hands meeting, it's been fully battle-tested.
Looking back, I knew as much about music data as a 22-year-old as any of the people I was selling to. Our story worked because I was able to convey that. The phrase "nobody knows anything" isn't meant disparagingly—it's just a recognition that no one can predict the future with 100% accuracy. That is, until you tell them a story about the future that makes sense, with you at the center of it.
Alex White is head of Next Big Sound at Pandora, where he oversees a team of two dozen data engineers, designers, product managers, and data scientists focused on prediction research and cross-platform performance measurement.
Understanding and developing your own ego doesn't make you a narcissist, one writer argues. In fact, it's a prerequisite to leadership.
This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.
Ego tends to geta bad rapin leadership circles, and it's no wonder why. When somebody is said to "have an ego," it's typically meant that they're arrogant, condescending, or self-absorbed. The best leaders are popularly cast as humble servants, visionaries who've managed to shrink their egos to make room for other people, ideas, and ways of doing things.
Executives are routinely coached to turn away from ego altogether. They're led to believe their egos will only get in the way of their credibility and effectiveness, and spell certain doom for their ability to forge a purposeful, positive, productive work culture.
Thinking about your ego as something to be stuffed down and barred from your professional life isn't just counterproductive, it also misunderstands what ego actually is and how it works. Devaluing your ego stunts your development as a leader and makes it harder to champion a healthy, inspirational work culture.
Embracing your ego doesn't automatically make you a raging narcissist, either. Instead, it can give you a personal advantage that, if you harness it appropriately, translates into a competitive advantage for your company. Your ego is a good thing. You came into this word with it. Just as it did in your early childhood, while it was still developing, your ego even today provides the essential framework through which you understand the world and your place within it.
While ego experts differ over the stages, cut points, and pacing of ego development, a 2014 meta-analysis by researchers Lê Xuân and Hy Jane Loevinger lays out the psychological underpinnings of the ego's role in emotional and cognitive maturation. To paraphrase that framework, our egos help us move through these four stages:
Self-centeredness ("What do I think is important?")
Group-centeredness ("How can I fit in to what the group thinks is important?")
Independence ("I'm the leader of my own destiny")
Group affiliation ("How can I, amid constant change and disruption, become self-actualized while also demonstrating to others how to make their own way?")
That fourth stage is characterized by comfort with ambiguity and the innate complexity of real people and situations. This progression suggests that ego isn't a malevolent "thing" after all, it's a process. And it's entirely different from egotism, narcissism, arrogance, and the other traits with which we tend to hastily conflate it.
In practice, "having an ego" simply means understanding the worldview through which you act—in order to get your own needs met as well as the needs of others. And that, of course, is in every leader's job description.
Take that fourth stage of ego development, about becoming "self-actualized while also demonstrating to others how to make their own way." Isn't that what leadership is all about?
It's dualistic: Yes, you must serve and support and help and encourage. And to do that, you must be compassionate and humble. But before you can do any of those things, you need to develop confidence in yourself—not arrogance, but well-justified faith in your own abilities. That takes discovering how you—uniquely—can support both yourself and other people to go through the same process, to "self-actualize" in reaction to all the messiness of business and life.
The veteran leadership researcher Deborah Rowland recently put it this way in Harvard Business Review: "Leadership development must start by working on the inner game. It's very hard for leaders to have courageous conversations . . . until they've built their systemic capacity to view disturbances as transformational, not dysfunctional." Or in other words, until they've gotten to know and supported themselves properly.
Pause for a moment. Can you imagine anything on earth more appropriately pride-inspiring than reaching this level of individual development, not just as a leader but as a person? Ego isn't the antithesis of "servant leadership" or the enemy of an inspiring, engaging, productive work culture that you and your team can be proud of. It's the underpinning of it.
And experts who've studied how the most effective work cultures develop claim that a truly purpose-driven company is made up of people who see what the company does as supporting things they already personally believe in. Without that alignment, it all falls apart.
You may think of ego as a relatively new concept, a modern concept developed by Sigmund Freud or Friedrich Nietzsche. It's not. Hy Jane Loevinger traces its origins far back into antiquity, where what we now understand as a psychological concept had antecedents in ancient Greek, Hebrew, and Hindu cultures.
As a human, you're hardwired to want to understand other people as well as to understand yourself—there's no either/or. Our sense of self has everything to do with our sense of other people. It's all relational, and our ego is the framework for understanding those relations.
Trying to kick your ego to the curb is like running from your shadow. It will always be there, so you might as well embrace and develop it. In the process, you can develop those relationships more thoughtfully and deliberately. Some of this takes some self-reflection that touches on the philosophic, but that's not to be confused with self-absorption. Dig deep into your current understanding of your place in the world, in your community, and in your workplace, so you can begin to question that understanding and deepen it.
Simply schedule regular check-ins with yourself to see how you're progressing along those four stages of ego development (you just don't automatically complete them at a certain age), especially in the context of your most challenging relationships. Then move from yourself outward: Are you supporting not just your own ego, but your organization's collective ego?
And yes, all this self-reflection may feel a little egocentric. It is, and that's the point.
With his new VR content studio, Scenic, the Helvetica director is exploring new ways to tell stories.
With a new content studio called Scenic, Helvetica director Gary Hustwit has gathered a group of like-minded documentarians to explore nonfiction storytelling in the emerging format of virtual reality. Their goal is to move quickly and keep trying new things.
"I've always had an entrepreneurial streak, even when I was a kid. A big part of why I started Scenic was to give more filmmakers a chance to play around with [virtual-reality] tools," Hustwit said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in November. "You have to start thinking in VR to then be able to create in it. You have to make a lot of mistakes and try things. We know so much more than we did a year ago, it's crazy—and I still don't feel like I know that much about making nonfiction VR. But you learn as you go. There is no rule book. My first job, when I was 7 or 8, was selling avocados from our front yard. It was a booming business. I grew up in Southern California, and we had a huge avocado tree in our yard. Four for a dollar—I could clear $20 a day. That's a lot of money for a 7-year-old.
"[I still love] that idea of creating your own job, starting your own thing. Like when I was in college, getting into punk rock, and then helping my friends start record labels. Being independent and trying to do things on your own and not relying on anyone else for funding or permission to do something: That's been a theme through most projects I've done. It's about having the confidence to try [something new]. If it works, great—try another project and keep going. And if it doesn't work, you can go back [and get] a normal job."
As the visionary behind a $400 million fashion juggernaut, Eileen Fisher has always pushed hard to maximize her brand's impact. The designer has also long found meaning and inspiration through meditation and mindfulness practices—which she has worked to integrate into the workplace.
"Meditation gives you a little space between things, a chance to stop and make choices," Fisher said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in November. "We get very busy, and we do a lot of things that really aren't purposeful or meaningful or even true to who we are. But if we make a little space, then we can stop and go, hmm. We take a moment of silence before our meetings. It's about giving people that little bit of space.
"We [also] have this practice of active listening, where you'll sit with another person and [both of you are] asked a question. You let the other person answer for two minutes and you just listen. And then you talk for two minutes. What happens is that you feel really connected to that person you just had a four-minute conversation with. Sometimes [people will] say, 'Oh, my God, I don't remember anyone listening to me like that before.' As we do it more and more, we build these connections across the company, this relational field where people feel like they know people and can call [them]. When you know someone, you care in a different way, and [ideas] start to spring up through different connections. When people are passionate and connected and feel purposeful, they come up with [surprising] things."
Finding the right standing desk means weighing more options than you might imagine. Grab a tape measure.
I'd been thinking about getting a standing desk for a long time, but I couldn't quite take the plunge.
It wasn't for lack of interest. I spend a lot of time at my desk, so I was anxious to figure out a new setup that didn't leave me seated for eight hours a day. What finally pushed me to commit was when one of my time-coaching clients told me her standing desk was helping her to be more productive.
But soon after I finally started to research them in earnest, I found myself a little overwhelmed with all the options on the market. Here's how I managed to comb through everything before finally settling on a standing desk I love.
The first fork in the road for anyone considering a standing desk is to decide between a setup that's purpose-built for standing and an addition that converts your existing desk for that function.
If you like your existing desk, it's worth exploring the add-on options first. But if you aren't too enthused with it, you'll probably want to go for a new one that lets you stand. In my experience, most of those are in the $600–$1,000 range, and most tend to offer a good desk to sit at plus the ability to easily adjust your work surface up and down. A few of the more popular options I looked at include StandDesk, UpDesk's UpWrite, and UpLift 900.
As I continued to look into standing desks, I also heard about the Milk Desk. It's a height-adjustable model that also includes some storage compartments, a departure from most standing desks that are really meant to streamline everything with only a flat work surface. That feature caught my interest.
After all, was I shopping around for a standing desk just to get on my feet, or in order to rethink my work setup altogether? If it was the latter, what other types of adjustments should I consider making?
This was a useful thought experiment. When I first started to research desk models, I imagined myself ending up with two separate workstations—the one I already used, for sitting, and a new one for standing. In my office there's already a large desk that works great for supporting a monitor, computer, and printer, plus contains plenty of drawer space.
But did I really want to add to that in order to give myself the option to stand? On further thought, I wasn't thrilled by the idea of putting two desks in a relatively small office, and the more research I did, the less I realized I'd need to. I didn't want to overhaul my work setup completely by condensing my storage space, a goal some models seemed dead-set on accomplishing—I just wanted to get on my feet.
As a result, I ended up shying away from standalone standing desks and began to look more closely at attachments that turn your normal workstation into a standing option, products like Varidesk, Ergotron Workfit, and Kangaroo Junior. Since I already had a desk that worked overall, I decided to go with an attachment. The question was which one.
Whether you're trying to decide on a new standing desk or an attachment, it's important to think about not only your work style but also the existing equipment you use. For example, if you need double monitors, a keyboard, and a writing space, make sure that everything will fit. And also measure up to ensure that the width and depth of your desk or desk attachment fits your workspace without being cumbersome.
In my case, I ended up going with the Kangaroo Junior because its footprint was narrower than Varidesk; I couldn't fit my printer and other items on my work surface as well as having a standing attachment with too wide a base. I also liked the fact that my monitor and keyboard could easily sit on the surface of the Kangaroo Junior. And for a small fee, I could have it arrive preassembled. I also liked that I'd be able to move both the monitor and keyboard tray up and down as I liked.
All of this is to say that the question, "Is a standing desk right for me?" is a little misleading. You really need to ask yourself which standing setup will fit best with the way you already work. And while that may sound obvious, it's something you'll only really come to grips with while researching your options.
While you do, don't just think about your work habits—be sure to pay attention to the measurements and even the weight constraints of the equipment in the space you're trying to modify. (You may even need to buy some new cables to allow your desk to rise a few feet higher and still connect to the outlets.)
Try not to do what I did on my first day with my new desk setup. I stood up all day and ended up completely exhausted. I even had a bit of a headache. I'm not sure if this was due to the standing itself or because the monitor is now a bit closer to my eyes while standing than it is when I sit down.
After that misstep, my very wise brother who's used standing desks himself offered a few pointers, and I found a few others online. The general consensus is that you should alternate standing and sitting at roughly 30- to 60-minute intervals. When I tried that strategy, I had a much better experience.
I'm finding that I usually like to start the day standing and then alternate up and down as needed. I don't set a timer, but if my legs get fidgety when I'm standing, it's time to move the desk down. When I'm sitting and my legs or hips feel uncomfortable, it's time to stand up.
My mood and energy level play a role, too. I find that if I'm excited about something or have an energy surge, it helps me concentrate if I get on my feet. If you sometimes find yourself distracted by your own energy at certain times, standing may release just enough of it to allow you to concentrate.
I can't say for certain whether this new setup is making me more productive. But even researchers who've tried to answer that question haven't yet found anything conclusive. Still, I have found that it's making me more comfortable throughout the day. And for that alone, the switch has already been worth it.
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More than 30 million people in the U.S. have an eating disorder, yet most insurance denies treatment. How tech is working to fix that.
Kristina Saffran was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa before her thirteenth birthday. She made a full recovery, but millions of fellow sufferers aren't so lucky. Insurance will routinely decline to cover treatment, which is often in excess of $30,000 per month.
At just 15 years old, Saffran and her cofounder Liana Rosenman formed a nonprofit called Project Heal to raise funds to help others with eating disorders access the care they need. Saffran, who is now 24, says their organization raises about $1 million per year from private donors, with a recent influx of support coming from high-profile investors like Arianna Huffington and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. That might seem like a drop in the bucket by Silicon Valley standards, but Project Heal is one of the largest eating disorder nonprofits in the country.
Mental illness is still a long way from reaching funding parity with other diseases, despite recent policy promises. The approximately 30 million people with eating disorders are particularly underserved. It has been a challenge for those in the advocacy world to attract donors, according to Saffran, as the disease is still widely viewed "as a white girl vanity issue."
Because of this stigma, the academic community also faces challenges in raising funds for much-needed research. Research dollars spent on schizophrenia, for example, average $81 per affected individual, while the average amount of research dollars per affected individual with an eating disorder is just 93¢, according to the National Eating Disorders Association.
"There's a fundamental injustice here," says Tom Insel, the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, who now works at Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences. Insel also serves as an adviser to Project Heal. "You have what many people think is the most fatal mental disorder (one in five anorexia deaths is by suicide), and yet it's very difficult to get the evidence-based treatment and the kinds of care that we know work."
Project Heal is working to rally key players in the academic and technology communities to come up with ways to change public perceptions of the disease, spur new ideas, and do more with limited finances.
"The organization is breaking through silos in the field and reaching companies and stakeholders that haven't traditionally been involved in advocacy," says Jenna Tregarthen, CEO of Recovery Record, an app for eating disorder treatment and a Project Heal board member.
One approach is to use mobile technology to monitor patients between treatment sessions. And Tregarthen's Recovery Record is finding early success doing just that.
The app essentially digitizes the process for patients with eating disorders to track and monitor their symptoms, feelings, and triggers, and shares that data in a user-friendly manner with their clinicians. Previously, the patient would have needed to present a week's worth of notes to a specialist in person. Thus far, more than 400,000 people have registered for the app, completing upwards of 15 million self-monitoring entries.
Tregarthen, who started the company after watching a close friend suffer from an eating disorder, sees ample opportunities for other technologists to step up. "There are so many issues that need to be addressed, ranging from the stigma to the shortage of trained specialists," she says. In the coming months, she's hoping to raise funds to study some of the behaviors and symptoms reported by users in the app, which remain poorly understood.
Saffran says a future goal for Project Heal is to create a virtual community for eating disorder sufferers to connect and share insights about their treatment. For now, the organization is piloting an online program with four of its chapter leaders from across the country who want to be mentors. These people will be trained online and assigned a mentee to video conference and connect with via text and chat. Supervision for this program will also be conducted online, and outcomes will be tracked via the Recovery Record app.
Project Heal is also finding support from the academic community, where researchers are increasingly finding evidence that anorexia nervosa isn't purely a sociocultural disorder. "This illness has been mislabeled for so long as a choice," says Cynthia Bulik, founding director of the University of North Carolina Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders. "It is perceived as a product of girls wanting to lose weight to look like models, but that's simply not true."
Bulik and a team of researchers kicked off the largest-ever genetic investigation in 2014 to work toward a greater understanding of the disease, and potentially uncover new treatments. The effort involved sequencing the genomes of thousands of individuals affected with the disease, compared to healthy controls. The results of the study will be published in the next year, but Bulik says that she is expecting to find "hundreds of genes of relatively small effect (that) seem to combine in different ways among those with anorexia."
Bulik is also working with microbiologists at the University of North Carolina's School of Medicine to delve into the gut microbiome of people with anorexia, and compare it to those who have never been diagnosed with the disease.
Bulik and others say that the academic community who are focused on eating disorders is tiny but starting to grow. "A lot of the conversations we've been having with Project Heal and other organizations involve accelerating the field by bringing people in from outside our own spheres," she says. "That's how we're going to be disruptive going forward."
Has your job lost its sense of purpose for you? Try these tips to get it back.
While most people work to make a living, more than half of us go to work every day to make an impact on society or our community, according to a May 2016 survey from Adobe. If you're finding it tough to get excited about your work or wrestling with the Sunday night blues on a regular basis, it's possible you've lost sight of the meaning in your work.
Many of us spend so much time at work and even get much of our identity from what we do for a living that it's easy to understand why we want the work to be meaningful, says life coach Valorie Burton, founder of the Coaching and Positive Psychology (CaPP) Institute and author of Happy Women Live Better.
So how do you find meaning in your work, even if your job isn't obviously infused with deep meaning? Here's how to get in touch with your work's purpose.
Before you know where to look for the value in your work, you need to know what it is that you actually do value, says executive coach Elizabeth McCourt, founder of McCourt Leadership Group. "For some people, it's adventure. For some people, it's freedom. For some people, it's money. For some people, it's family," she says. "Then, look at what you're doing with your life, with your work and your other things." Once you're clear on what is meaningful and important to you, you'll have a better idea of where to find it, she says.
The next step is to shift your mind-set—even if you hate your job. If you walk around all day thinking about how much you hate everything, it's going to be very difficult to see anything good. So cut the negativity, at least for now.
If you're having trouble identifying anything meaningful or even good about your job, do a pro and con list, says Lisa N. Bertrand, master career specialist and legal ethics coordinator at Hofstra University School of Law. Yes, the "con" list may be longer, but writing them out will help you release them. Then you can start to think about the "pros."
It may not be easy at first, but even listing that the job provides money for you to support yourself, or that your office building is nice, count. The goal is to find some positive aspects of the situation, she says. You can also look at the company as a whole and how it contributes to society's good. You play a role in that. Own it, Bertrand says.
Bertrand's background is in law, but her passion is theater. After she went to work for Hofstra, she saw the opportunity to add more of what she loved to her workplace and suggested doing a show. "The Law Review" is a musical theater show about law school life. She presented the idea to the dean, who loved it.
"[Creating such a project] gives you that opportunity to shine. Let me tell you, when I have to do this paperwork, it kind of helps to know that I have to go to rehearsal for the show in a couple hours," she says. Thinking about ways to make your office more fun and meaningful to you also showcases your leadership skills and initiative.
Giving back makes you feel good, and often, you can find ways to do so through your company. Find out if the company supports a particular nonprofit or cause and get involved in those efforts, Burton says. Alternatively, the company may offer time off for volunteering or a matching gift pledge. If no such option exists, spearhead the efforts to start one, she says.
Heather Taylor joined MyCorporation.com as a social media and editorial manager in 2011. It was her first job out of college. After three years, she left, as she was worried that staying too long might inhibit her ability to work anywhere else. Between 2014 and mid-2016, she worked in advertising, public relations, editorial, and social media. With hindsight, she realized how good MyCorporation.com actually was, and rejoined the company in late 2016 as a social media associate.
"I had noticed through different news stories how well they were doing, and stayed in touch with my boss and kept that relationship strong," she says.
Unlike Taylor, you might not need to leave your job in order to realize its true value. Taking a long weekend break or vacation could help you renew your enthusiasm.
Similarly, give yourself a break between big projects if you can, Burton says. If you're the type who keeps charging toward and accomplishing one goal after another without stopping to enjoy the fruits of your labor, you may be suffering from a touch of goal fatigue, she says.
"It's important as a team to be able to celebrate, perhaps have a little bit of a breather in between projects, even if it's not really long, being able to say, okay, let's have a little bit of downtime, even if it's just a day or two before we dive right into the next thing," she says.
Finding meaning in your work may take a bit of searching. And if it's still not there, you may have to create it or even find a new job. But by searching out the good, you can reinspire yourself.
Research suggests that anxiety about memory loss can chip away at our brain's ability to retain and retrieve information.
First, some bad news: Starting in your early twenties, you begin to undergo a long, slow cognitive decline. When you're in your early twenties, your cognitive capabilities are at their highest: You're able to think fast, and your memory works at its best. From then on, your speed of thought begins to slow, and it takes longer and longer to learn new things. (You can teach an old dog new tricks, but you and the dog have to be more patient.)
But the good news about your long, slow cognitive decline is that it's long and slow, which means that well into your seventies and eighties, you may not really experience much of a problem in most aspects of thinking. The functioning of a healthy brain doesn't get that much worse just because it's getting older. Brains usually decline in their functioning because of disease, strokes, micro-strokes, and brain injuries—not primarily because of age.
Of course, this seems to contradict many people's experiences as they get older. Talk to anyone in their fifties, sixties, or seventies, and they'll tell you stories about actors' names they can't remember, keys they can't find, walking into rooms only to forget why they went there, and going to the store without a list and forgetting what they were supposed to buy.
As it turns out, much of the explanation for these occurrences isn't really about what's wrong with your memory, but rather what's wrong with the way you think about your memory—namely that worrying about its impending collapse may actually hasten it.
Art has three kids who are still smack in the prime of their cognitive lives. They haven't started that long, slow decline, yet they forget stuff all the time. Ask them why they forgot to do a homework assignment, and they'll say, "I spaced." Ask them why they forgot to empty the trash, and they'll reply, "Oh, oops." At no point after forgetting something crucial, though, did any of them say, "Oh no, I just had a 'Senior in High School Moment.'"
Yet it seems that after many people turn fifty, they begin to assume that each forgetful moment is a sign of an approaching cognitive apocalypse. Each piece of information that cannot be accessed exactly when needed is interpreted as evidence of mental doom.
This over-interpretation of intermittent forgetting is not only wrong but may actually be detrimental. Studies suggest that one of the worst things you can do for your memory, ironically, is to worry about your memory. Researchers have long known that it's harder to think and remember things under pressure. The amount of information you can keep in mind at any given moment shrinks when you're stressed, making it harder to think flexibly. And all of that affects what you're able to retrieve from your memory.
Research shows that even brief encounters with positive and negative information about memory and aging can affect adults' ability to remember. In some studies, older adults read either a brief article claiming that memory gets worse with age or one arguing the reverse—that it doesn't change much over time. Then they each took a memory test.
Sure enough, the group that read the more positive article didn't do that much worse than a control group of college students (who were still in the prime of their cognitive lives). The group that read the negative article, suggesting that memory really does worsen, performed badly on the memory test.
Some more good news: There are things you can do to help your memory as you get older. Most important, take care of your brain. Many of the memory problems people experience later in life are the result of things they did early in life. If you enjoy a regular sleep schedule, and you avoid overdoing drugs, drinking too much alcohol, and sustaining sharp blows to the head, you're off to a good start.
As people get older, their sensory systems tend to become less sensitive. All that loud music you listened to as a kid causes hearing problems later in life. Cataracts and retinal issues can cause problems with your vision. Even your sense of smell can weaken. As your senses dull, the information that reaches into memory to pull out information weakens as well, which can make it harder to retrieve information later. So it's important to get regular checkups to make sure that your eyes and ears function as well as possible for as long as possible.
Finally, make sure you remain a lifelong learner. Lots of studies demonstrate that the more education you have, and the more actively you continue to learn throughout your life, the longer it takes for signs of decline to appear. Education doesn't protect the brain from damage, but it does create lots of different ways to solve problems and remember things.
And remember that the belief that memory gets worse as you get older can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, so do your best to forget those senior moments—literally.
In the home and beyond, it's more important than ever that gadgets get standard ways to talk to each other. And there are signs of progress.
Smart home gadgets were everywhere at the CES trade show in January, from useful iterations on connected light bulbs and door locks to odder endeavors such as fridge cams and connected trash cans. But one theme was constant: They're not all going to work together.
While some of these devices can communicate with others, no universal language yet exists for the "Internet of Things"—the industry catch-all term for ordinary devices made more powerful through connectivity. Device makers must instead choose between disparate frameworks such as Apple's HomeKit, Samsung's SmartThings, Works with Nest, Android's Things, and Amazon's Alexa. The burden then falls on users to determine whether the products they want are compatible with the system they bought into.
The good news is that standardization is under way, with meaningful progress toward a common language for all these devices. But it'll probably be another CES or two until consumers start to notice.
The Open Connectivity Forum—the industry body that's building an Internet of Things standard—didn't have an outsized presence at CES. Its modest demo pavilion blended into a sea of booths within the smart home section of the Sands Expo, which itself is a shuttle ride away from the cavernous Las Vegas Convention Center that serves as CES's main venue. Yet the firms that are leading OCF are some of the biggest in technology, including Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, LG, and Sony.
LIFX light bulbs support OCF predecessor AllSeen.
Until about a year ago, those companies were split on how to standardize. Intel and Samsung belonged to one standards group, called the Open Interconnect Consortium, while Qualcomm, Microsoft, LG, and Sony were part of the AllSeen Alliance. Each group was developing its own framework, with seemingly different policies over intellectual property, structure, and bylaws.
But over the last year, those two groups hashed out their differences and merged into one entity, now called the OCF. All members are now working toward a single framework that will support the couple dozen existing products already certified by AllSeen. With the newfound unity, there's been an uptick in interest from device makers; the group now has more than 300 members.
"I think we've eliminated one of the potential hurdles for other companies to consider joining and participating," says Matt Perry, a Microsoft program manager who is also the OCF's president.
The goal for this year, Perry says, is to get products into the market. Member companies are now trying to define standard behavior for various types of devices—for instance, a common on-off function across all connected light bulbs, and a common set of climate adjustments for smart thermostats—and are coming up with a certification process. The group has also started working beyond the smart home, into automotive and industrial applications.
"A standard's just a standard. When it really gets interesting is when you have real products that are interoperating together, and that makes it more compelling for other companies to join," Perry says.
The connected refrigerator at the OCF's CES display
To that end, the OCF used its CES booth to demonstrate how products might work together. A living room section showed light bulbs, a TV, an air conditioner, and a robot vacuum cleaner all turning on and off from a single command on a Windows PC. In the kitchen section, the touch screen on a connected fridge triggered the room's lighting, air purifier, air conditioner, and coffee maker. The OCF also demonstrated its potential for medical devices, for instance allowing different-brand blood pressure detectors to feed standardized information into a single smartphone app.
Once the OCF feels it has enough products, it'll offer a logo that consumers can look for. The logo wasn't always a certainty—last year, Perry said the OCF was still evaluating whether to create one—but since then, member companies have started to ask for it.
"The companies are proud of the work they put in from a tech perspective, and they trust the certification program, so they wanted to have some way to represent that work, and asked us to have a cert mark so they can put it on their products," says Kimberly Lewis, a marketing program manager for Intel's Standards and Advanced Technologies group.
The OCF isn't giving a timeline for when that logo might appear, or how many devices the group would like to see on the market first. But Lewis notes that there's a lot of interest in pushing things forward.
"Everyone's anxious to make money, so it's like, 'When are we going to be done?'" she says. "That's a good problem to have, that people want to start putting this in their products."
Although competition among standards is no longer an obstacle, the OCF still has plenty of competition from existing Internet of Things platforms. Some of the biggest companies in tech, including Apple and Google, aren't participating, nor is smart home mainstay ZigBee, which used CES to announce its own common language for smart homes. Device makers must still make tough decisions about which of these platforms to support.
Perry says the OCF's phone lines are still open, though it doesn't sound like there's been much progress in working with the major players who aren't yet on board. For now, the OCF is assuring itself with the long view, believing that free, open standards will prevail over time.
"There's only one company out there that's probably going to be successful with a vertically integrated stack or solution, and that's Apple," says Gary Martz, Intel's product line director for Internet of Things communications frameworks. "And even then, in markets where they've done this, at some point in time, markets develop to a level of maturity where there are enough industry heavyweights that they'll sit at the table and they'll participate as well."
That's not to say there's no room for proprietary systems. One might imagine a virtual assistant like Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa sitting on top of all these connected devices, able to control them all in a standard way instead of needing each device maker to add their own support. (Alexa currently has more than 7,000 "skills," but gadget companies must hand-craft each integration individually.) The real value of interoperability, Martz says, is that it grows the overall market so that these kinds of uses can flourish.
"The players that recognize this are going to do very well," Martz says. "If somebody comes in and says, 'Oh, my brand is so important, and I'm going to use this space as a competitive barrier,' they're not going to be successful, not in this space, not in the narrow space that OCF has defined as having this common framework."
That's not to say there's no room for proprietary systems. But Martz's point is that those systems—whether they're virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, home-monitoring services, or other types of offerings—should sit on top of interoperable hardware. In other words, people shouldn't have to worry whether their smart door lock is compatible with Apple's system, or Google's, or Amazon's. Instead, "door lock" would be a generic concept that every service could tie into, with no walled gardens keeping them out.
"The players that recognize this are going to do very well," Martz says, whereas companies that try to use hardware compatibility to beat their competitors will fail. On the whole, he's optimistic that the industry will choose the right path.
"[Compatibility] is not the space that we need to differentiate our products on," he adds. "This is the space where we all need to agree on interoperability, so we can all provide features above the standards."
Nonetheless, investment activity held steady in 2016, and venture capitalists' outlook was optimistic as the eventful year drew to a close. How come? Here's what six top tech investors say they expect to happen in the year ahead, based on the way things are shaping up right now.
The outcome of the presidential election surprised the tech world, but some in Silicon Valley have already begun to see silver linings.
Ian Patrick Sobieski, managing director of Band of Angels Acorn Fund, LP, acknowledged "a lot to fear with the wild card in the White House, but one can hope that the promised reform of the FDA licensing process makes it cheaper for promising innovation to get to market without compromising safety." If that happens, Sobieski expects, "there will be more seed investment for medical devices and hence more innovation in these areas."
Another Band of Angels VC, Amit Kumar, believes biotech may receive a similar boost. "There are tremendous new innovations in cancer, heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and other areas that are languishing due to a lack of early stage funding." There may be a perfect storm brewing that could change that, he says.
"With renewed vigor in the capital markets for biotechnology, potentially a less burdensome regulatory environment, and dramatic advances through a coupling of informatics and biology, I expect to see more capital flowing to risky yet innovative early-stage life science and biotech companies."
Band of Angels is Silicon Valley's oldest seed funding organization. So far, the group has seen 55 profitable M&A exits and 10 Nasdaq IPOs; 17% of its current portfolio is in life sciences companies. Kumar adds, "While many of these biotech companies will fail, a notable portion . . . will be successful financially and, more importantly, will enable new life-saving products for millions of suffering and often terminally ill patients."
As some see it, machines are just as likely to help save lives, and 2017 may be their breakout year. "I'm excited to see machine intelligence begin to impact and transform the health care industry," notes Jocelyn Kinsey, a senior associate at DFJ.
"As a growth investor, I hope 2017 will be the year health care artificial intelligence (AI) is adopted within the clinic." There are a number of opportunities already on the horizon, Kinsey says, including "assisting physicians with prediction and detection of disease based on sequencing and genomic data, more accurate diagnosis using advanced medical imaging analytics, and personalized treatments for patients with chronic diseases."
Shadi Mehraein, a managing partner with the women-led market focus Rivet Ventures, is also optimistic about AI's expanding roles, not only just in medicine but also in education and commerce, too. "We'll also see interactions with search and mobile increasingly moving to voice and images. As this continues to shift," Mehraein expects, "vertical applications for AI will emerge [in both] the enterprise and consumer spaces."
"2016 was the year when the cheapest robot in history has been launched on the market," explains Ewa Grzechnik, venture partner with Europe-based Black Pearls VC, referring to Franka Emika, a programmable robotic arm that's roughly one-third the price of its competitors. "In 2017, it will be available for commercial purchase and will first hit the electronic assembly industry," Grzechnik notes.
Right off the bat she expects it to "replace much human labor in the most repetitive manufacturing tasks. This will spur discussions about the future of employment in the automated world, but also bring manufacturing back to the high labor-cost countries," including Germany and the U.S. (The only catch, of course, is that manufacturing jobs may not come with it.)
Won't robots and AI need even better data? That has to come, too, according to Carl Fritjofsson of Creandum. "We're sure to see an evolution with sharing and collaboration of data, similar to how open-source software development allows thousands of developers to create products together with no single entity claiming the rights to the innovation."
"Instead of confining data to internal silos, by contributing and having access to a larger data set across organizations," says Fritjofsson, "each participant of the data network will benefit instantly."
Driverless cars may be a major beneficiary of the combined data that Fritjofsson foresees. "I'm looking forward to seeing the first waves of autonomous vehicles hit the roads," says VC Arianna Simpson. "2016 was a year of research and development with a smattering of test runs, but in 2017, we'll be seeing them start to operate in more meaningful numbers."
That could lead to some market consolidation, Simpson expects. "From an investment perspective, I expect to see a lot more M&A in the space as well. Cruise and Otto were major hits in 2016, and there's going to be a lot more where that came from."
For many of these innovations to take off as VCs predict, users will need to be able to talk to their cars, robots, phones, and other AI-powered technologies without frustration. As Anarghya Vardhana, a senior associate at Maveron, sees it, that's setting up 2017 to be a slam-dunk year for voice-driven technology.
"Voice-based input is the easiest, most efficient, and best way to interact with our devices," Vardhana claims, even "though this type of interaction is yet to truly take off in the consumer space." That's set to change, he believes. The year ahead may see an "increase in people interacting with technology—phones, computers, game consoles, TVs, and more—with their voice, and an increase in the use-case for voice-based input."
Vardhana finds that possibility exciting and hopes consumers do, too. "Imagine talking to nearly all the technology around you, and for that technology to accurately and intimately understand you. That is the future."
Beck Bamberger founded BAM Communications in 2008 and writes regularly for Forbes, Inc., and The Huffington Post about entrepreneurship, public relations, and culture.
A study reveals that women aren't as successful when they feel they have to negotiate.
When Christine Exley, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School surveyed 200 U.S. adults about whether or not they thought women should negotiate their salaries more, nearly three-quarters said yes.
Of course they did.
Conventional career wisdom tells us that we should always be ready to negotiate for compensation and benefits at work, especially for a higher starting salary at a first job. This practice has been especially encouraged for women, who often fail to do this. Research from Levo and Glassdoor revealed that 66% and 68% of women polled, respectively, accepted the salary they were offered without trying to get more. This, despite the plethora of platforms that aim to help salaries be more transparent so workers can negotiate for what they are worth.
The result for women not negotiating from the beginning of their careers, according to Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, authors of Women Don't Ask, is the loss of more than $500,000 by the time they reach age 60—not to mention achieving pay parity with men along the way.
That's a lot of pressure.
So Exley, along with professors from Stanford and the University of Pittsburgh, decided to dig a little deeper to discover what the consequences were for women when they negotiate. Referring to previous studies upholding the benefits of negotiation, they write, "While vast, this literature does not provide direct comparisons of the financial returns that women achieve when they choose whether to negotiate versus when they always negotiate."
Their resulting research, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research and titled Knowing When to Ask: The Cost of Leaning In, found that women do indeed reap financial benefits from negotiation, but only when they strategically decided when to ask. What failed to net them a positive result was being forced to do so, rather than choose when they wanted to.
To reach this conclusion, the research team selected 292 evenly split male and female undergraduate students to take part in several experiments.
The experiments allowed pairs of participants (the workers) to argue freely through instant chat messages (so they couldn't see the other person or their gender) to make a case to the opposing side (the company). Some participants could choose whether or not they wanted to negotiate and others were told they had to, no matter how they felt.
Where the differences arose were when workers had the opportunity to choose whether or not they wanted to negotiate. Here only 66% of women negotiated versus 74% of men. But when they did try to gamble for a better earning, they succeeded along with the men. When the female workers were in the forced situation, the results weren't positive. The findings indicated that women were likely to avoid those negotiations when they found the gain was limited.
This builds on other research published in the National Bureau of Economic Research that indicates that women aren't really less likely to negotiate. What they are is reluctant to do so in certain circumstances, like a face-to-face meeting. By comparison, the research team found that men aren't affected by being forced to ask for something.
Of course, there are caveats. The research team admitted that in a controlled experiment like this, workers always knew what they were worth based on the computer-generated earnings. In the real world of work, there is room for ambiguity. That's why they suggest that teaching better negotiation techniques isn't the only remedy for pay inequity. "Our results leave room for an alternative policy intervention: Teach women about what they bring to the table."
Leading up to Donald Trump's inauguration, the ACLU invites Americans to create shareable pledges to defend the U.S. Constitution.
The American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) new social media initiative is the first major promotional effort by the nonprofit since it received an unprecedented surge in popularity after the election of Donald Trump. On Monday, the ACLU unveiled "The People's Oath," a desktop and mobile website that lets anyone create and share their own pledge inspired by the oath of office that Trump will take during his inauguration on Friday.
Each pledge begins, "I do solemnly swear to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States to ensure . . . " and visitors can write their own ending or select one from a "get suggestions" button. Some of the prewritten endings include " . . . to ensure that Planned Parenthood's doors stay open," and ". . . to ensure that we are all treated equally and fairly by the police." Pledge takers can then add a photo and signature and share the image to social media with the hashtag #PeoplesOath.
The social media campaign, created with brand strategy firm Co:Collective, is partly aimed at attracting a younger membership base to the ACLU. People who create and share pledges will be invited to sign up for the ACLU's email newsletters.
"The ACLU has been shapeshifting to make sure the role for people and how they involve members is very clear," says Tiffany Rolfe, chief creative officer at Co:Collective. "After the election, there has been a lot of energy around the ACLU. [The People's Oath] is made to introduce people to what the ACLU stands for and signals the beginning of a relationship that will bring people in throughout the year."
The ACLU plans to launch additional social media-driven campaigns later this year to capitalize on the post-election wave of public interest, Rolfe says. When asked if the nonprofit was concerned about trolls using the pledge-generator tool to create hateful messages, Rolfe replied, "the ACLU believes in freedom of expression."
Deep learning and AI are turning millions of satellite images of Earth into usable data, helping insurers and aid groups alike to do their jobs.
A hurricane hits a shore town. What is the estimated property damage? A city is doing an inventory of trees. How many are there? An aid group is trying to get food to an impoverished rural population. What's the best location to make a drop?
Answering those and myriad other questions about our planet usually takes painstaking boots-on-the ground work. But satellite imagery and advanced machine learning, aka deep learning, is changing all that.
Anyone who's ever toyed around with Google Earth knows the eyes in the sky can capture amazingly detailed images of what's on the ground. The new AI is now teaching those orbiting cameras what they're seeing.
"The challenge is, how do you convert all those pixels into meaningful information?" says Shay Har-Noy, vice president and general manager of platform at satellite imagery provider DigitalGlobe. And that's exactly what the Colorado-based company is doing.
DigitalGlobe collects about 73 terabytes of satellite images every day, adding to a 16-year running archive of photos of locations around the world.
Each of the above images contains a pool inside the pink polygon. Note the variability of color, location, size, and visibility. PoolNet is a classifier implemented on GBDX that relies on a convolutional neural network and vast amounts of crowdsourced training data to distinguish properties that contain swimming pools.[Photo: DigitalGlobe]
DigitalGlobe has developed a "geospatial big-data" platform it calls GBDX that trains computers to automatically detect relevant objects in those satellite images. Using deep learning, a technique that harnesses large sets of data to develop multilayered mathematical structures to classify images, audio, or text, DigitalGlobe's cloud-based systems can accurately pick out and analyze points of interest in the photos without a great degree of human effort.
That has let the company reach new customers who are interested in accessing structured geographical data they can work with in tools like Excel, but aren't interested in manually sifting through huge sets of raw images. Potential users range from insurers and investors looking to understand real estate development patterns, to aid organizations aiming to serve populations in sparsely mapped areas of the globe.
Airplane recognition results at Beijing Capital International Airport.[Photo: DigitalGlobe]
Among DigitalGlobe's new customers is PSMA Australia, a consortium of Australian federal, state, and territorial agencies working with the company to build a national database of information about man-made structures across Australia. The database, called Geoscape, saw its first data release last month and is ultimately slated to include satellite-imagery-derived information about more than 20 million structures across the continent.
The GBDX platform relies on the Amazon Web Services cloud to store DigitalGlobe's enormous collection of data—the company was among the first to use Amazon's Snowmobile service, which uses a shipping container filled with data storage equipment to transfer huge volumes of information to Amazon's servers. The platform enables developers to process that image data with DigitalGlobe's machine learning algorithms or their own, either for their own use or for resale to their own customers interested in the results.
The platform has also been used for processing data in the wake of natural disasters. After Hurricane Matthew struck Haiti and the southeastern U.S. last fall, DigitalGlobe was able to detect areas covered by water before and after the hurricane and combine those regions with open-source data from OpenStreetMap to determine where roads and buildings were submerged or at heightened risk of flooding.
An image depicting coastal change in the Chatham area of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Areas highlighted in red denote water loss, and areas highlighted in green indicate water gain. Note that water loss is due to tidal effects, while water gain is most likely due to shifting sand bars.[Photo: DigitalGlobe]
DigitalGlobe also maintains crowdsourcing networks of people who can quickly hand-label images after a disaster, letting aid workers know where to look for damaged buildings and people potentially in need of assistance. That technique helped the company provide guidance to nonprofits and first responders after the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, Har-Noy says.
"We were the very first company to capture imagery of Kathmandu, which had a very large amount of damage," he says. "What we were able to do is capture imagery, run it by these crowdsourcing detections in order to detect rubble, destroyed buildings, etc., and we were able to make it accessible to various NGOs that were being deployed on the ground."
Crowdsourcing can also help with training and testing machine-learning algorithms, since human workers from around the world can be paid to quickly label features on satellite images or verify labels applied by machines, he says.
And while both crowdsourcing and automation let DigitalGlobe and its customers extract more detail from satellite images than ever before, Har-Noy says the company takes steps to protect people's privacy and safety. The resolution of commercial satellite images, regulated by the U.S. Commerce Department, means people aren't recognizable at the level of detail the company releases, Har-Noy says. DigitalGlobe also doesn't release images of active U.S. combat areas.
"We take privacy very seriously with regard to the information we release, we make accessible, and also that other people derive," Har-Noy says.
Still, machine learning's apparent success in understanding satellite images raises questions about how automated processing of higher-resolution photos, like those from aerial photography, may impact privacy in the future, says Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union.
"This is part of a larger trend, which is that machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques in general are allowing monitoring to take place on a mass scale that used to be very expensive because it required human attention," he says.
As wide-area aerial imaging, such as the controversial plane-based surveillance reportedly deployed in Baltimore last year and the balloon-mounted cameras used at last year's Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, potentially becomes more common, lawmakers and the public will have to decide appropriate limits on how the technology and data are used and automatically processed, Stanley says.
"These are decisions we're going to have to make as a society if we want to go down the road of allowing us to be monitored by machine," he says. "If you start adding more advanced analytics to a tool like that, you could do some very invasive things."
We chat with the Virgin founder about where he gets inspiration for his diverse businesses, and how he ties them all together.
When I was in elementary school, one of my favorite moments in the academic calendar was Sports Day: classes would be cancelled and we'd go outside to take part in relays, high jumps, and tug of war. Parents and siblings would come out to support us, bringing homemade packed lunches. There were even special races for the grown-ups. I remember cheering loudly for my father on as he competed against the other dads. As an adult, I've always found working out and going to the gym to be a chore, but when I think back to my best experiences with fitness, Sports Day always comes to mind.
Richard Branson, the business world's ambassador of fun, wants to package the spirit of these childhood sporting events with his new enterprise: Virgin Sport. The company is going to create sports festivals around the world—taking a page from the playbook of music events like Coachella and Glastonberry—where entire families can come out, bring a picnic, buy a beer or a healthy snack from the food tent, listen to music, and participate in sports. There will be a signature race like a half-marathon, but there will also be less intense events like outdoor fitness classes and yoga. The cost to attend one of these events will start at about £48 ($57) in the U.K.; prices in the U.S. have not been determined yet, but will be about the same as an average music festival.
Branson has hired Mary Wittenberg, former race director for the New York City Marathon and CEO of the New York Road Runners, to launch the company. The very first Virgin Sports Festival will take place at the end of April in England, but there will be other events throughout the year everywhere from San Francisco to Oxford.
Branson is famous for trying his hand at businesses in industries ranging from Virgin Galactic, which will take tourists to outer space; to Virgin America, an award-winning U.S.-based airline; to Virgin Cola, a Coca-Cola-like beverage brand that eventually went bust. I sat down with him to discuss Virgin Sport and his overall approach to starting companies.
Ashley Lewis for Virgin Sport
What's your vision for Virgin Sport?
Sporting events in the past have all been very much aimed at the individual and not at the family as a whole, whereas a concert is fun for everybody. That's what a sports event should be, and that's what we're going to make it. We're thinking about it very much in the same vein as a music festival; even the tickets that people will buy will look like music festival tickets.
Where do you come up with ideas for companies like this? Virgin Sport sounds worlds away from say, Virgin Galactic.
I get ideas for businesses literally everywhere. It was my son-in-law, Freddie Andrews, who came up with the idea for Virgin Sport. We were doing a biking challenge in Cape Argus (South Africa) together. Instead of the elevator pitch, he pitched me the idea while we were cycling up Table Mountain outside Cape Town. In order to shut him up, I said, "Yes." I suppose, "No," would have been shorter, but he's my son-in-law, so what could I do?
But joking aside, an important part of Virgin is to help people with their health. This business seems to fit that criteria absolutely perfectly.
Virgin's whole approach to business is to make things and experiences fun. Do you think about how you will monetize a project from the very beginning?
I never think about those things when I start a business. I think, "Is there a need for this? Will it be fun to do? Will people enjoy it? Is it the right thing to do?" If you get all of these criteria right, then you'll pay the bills and you'll have more money coming in than going out.
Sometimes, I've gotten that right and sometimes I've fallen flat in my face. But fortunately, more often than not, I've been able to deliver.
Do you feel that perhaps thinking about revenue too early on can interfere with creating a good business?
Yes. I think about Virgin America, for instance. What mattered was getting every single little detail right. We've had eleven years in a row of being voted the best airline in America. It took a while, but in the end the money started coming in and it became a company worth three billion dollars. The key was not worrying about the bottom line. I think the bottom line will sort out itself if you get the business right.
Ashley Lewis for Virgin Sport
You mentioned that sometimes you get ideas right and sometimes you don't. When do you decide that it's time to give up on a business?
I generally hang on in there far too long. I think it's not so much about whether it's not working financially. If you haven't get the quality bang on right, then it's not going to work.
We took on Coca-Cola once with Virgin Cola. We had a lot of fun, but we eventually had to fold. The difference was that when British Airways took on Virgin Atlantic, we were exceptionally better than them. But when Coca-Cola took us on and tried to crush us, we were just another can of cola. It was easy for them to take us out because we weren't exceptionally better than them.
You win some, you lose some.
You have a diverse portfolio of businesses. Are you always applying insights from your other businesses whenever you start a new one?
The main thing is not to do any new business that doesn't enhance the brand. The brand is your reputation, it's your life, it's all you've got. So every decision has to be considered.
I'm sure Mary and her team will be debating what to charge for Virgin Sport. If there's any danger of overcharging you'll damage the brand: you mustn't do that. You've got to give people good value for money. You've got to surprise and delight people. We just try to make sure that any new brand that we launch helps all the other brands in the portfolio.
So what would you say is the through-line between all your businesses?
We aim to reach for the skies in everything that we do. Sometimes literally. Take, for instance, the fact that we're going to take you into space someday. The Virgin Galactic brand will be, I suspect, the halo brand for all the other brands.
We like to try to things differently from everybody else as much as possible. We want to provide good value for everybody. We like to have a lot of fun doing it. We want to make sure that our people are really happy and thoroughly enjoying what they're doing.
And it sounds a bit corny, but we really want to make a difference in the world. Every company must draw a circle around itself and look after the community within that circle. We'll speak out and campaign on issues we feel strongly about. And we'll use Virgin as a force for good.
Relying on what made you successful in the past can hinder you. Here's how to break those habits.
It's the time of year many of us are trying to build good habits. But while habits and routines can save time and help you form a path to success, more people should consider abandoning them altogether, suggests Rod Favaron, CEO and president of the social media technology company Spredfast.
Favaron joined Spredfast in 2010, when the company was a young startup. A couple years later he realized his "good" habits were getting in the way of company growth: "In an entrepreneurial environment, you go with your gut and make bets," he says. "I had a habit of making decisions that way. But when companies grow up, you have to change how you make decisions because it can be a horrible habit."
When a company is in the growth stage, it has data, input from customers, and market information. "It's more mature so we rely on instinct less," says Favaron. "For me, [not going with my gut] was a hard habit to break; by the second slide of a presentation, I'm ready to make a decision."
It's common for people to rely on their good habits and strengths that have made them successful, says Stuart Sidle, professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of New Haven. "Unfortunately, some of these strengths could derail your career as situations change."
If someone moves from sales into management, for example, the habits they used to help win the sale can harm them in their new management roles, says Sidle. "Someone's attention-seeking and willingness to take risks may help them win the sale," he says. "On the other hand, as a manager they may need to share the limelight with those they are leading and be expected to role model careful adherence to company rules, so some of their habits as sales people may not go over as well."
Spend your energy making the most out of each opportunity or challenge instead of adhering to some set of standards that cannot possibly be the best approach to every situation, adds Favaron.
"When we overdo our good habits they can become bad, because we become stuck in doing what is familiar and stop growing new habits based on changing contexts and self-development needs," she says.
Habits are rigid, which is antithetical to innovation, adds Favaron. "Spending too much time in rote habit keeps the brain from growing," he says. "You can't innovate or grow within confines. And who knows what you can do without boundaries?"
Anything you get into a habit of doing professionally needs to be rethought reasonably often; make conscious choices instead of mindlessly following habits, says Favaron. "If you don't sub-optimize completely, you assume you know the answer," he says. "If you assume you know the answer, you will miss having a breakthrough. It's okay to do what you did yesterday, but it will never be amazing again."
Favaron looks at all of his habits, even taking a different route to work sometimes to force himself to rethink his routine, he says. "If you don't challenge yourself to do something different, you might miss out," he says. "Habits can be come mundane even if they're effective."
Following the same formula can also keep you stuck in the past. When someone asked Favaron if he had a pen they could borrow, he realized he hasn't carried a pen or paper with him in years. "At a previous job I kept notes in black binders, and I had the entire history of the company documented that way," he recalls. "At Spredfast I have nothing written down."
Technology changes how we communicate, and the need to write something down with a pen is rare. "Now the new habit is sending email, Slack, text, Twitter DM, LinkedIn, and more," he says. "Continuously break whatever your habits are so you can always be better and faster."
The truth is that past methods rarely work well consistently, adds Favaron. "If anybody brings up how they used to do something at a previous company, we call it a Band Camp moment," he says. "It's like saying, 'One time in band camp . . . ' The problem is that very seldom do we encounter the exact thing."
It's more likely a different product, market, or time, says Favaron. "Experience is good; it lets you see a bad decision early and around corners," he says. "However, it can eliminate 13 new ways to do something before you ever get a chance to think about them."
The moment someone asks for your services is the moment they expect you to ask to be paid for them.
When you're anxious to get work or earn a quick windfall, you're more likely to get burned. That's especially true for people who enter into freelance work for the first time. But even seasoned independent workers wind up getting screwed when the pressure's on. Here's why that happens and how to avoid it.
My coaching client Loren was hanging all her hopes on one opportunity. Recently divorced after years of spending most of her time with family and a little time writing for nonprofits, she was having difficulty reentering the workforce. Her family duties made freelancing the only viable option. She was hungry for gigs.
That also meant she was vulnerable to taking on the wrong ones. Loren's desperation put her in a weak negotiating position right from the start. Prospective clients could sniff out her lack of confidence and subsequently devalued her credentials. Her blind trust that she could hammer out a good contract or two with them nonetheless was just that—blind.
Still, Loren started off on the right foot. By networking energetically, she met Gretchen, a consultant who'd been itching to pitch a nonprofit. Since Gretchen was neither up to speed on nonprofits nor a writer, Loren struck her as a great fit, and Loren herself agreed. She leapt right into planning and helped Gretchen rewrite her pitch and refine her proposal. Gretchen then drew up the budget and inserted Loren's fees as a line item.
They presented the proposal together on a conference call and hoped for a positive outcome—which arrived for one of them. Gretchen got the gig but Loren didn't, despite having provided much of the meat of the proposal. This type of thing happens a lot more often than you might think, and it's usually avoidable. In this case, the client requested a cost reduction, which for Gretchen was as easy as drawing a line through Loren's name on the budget.
Loren got burned, of course, earning no compensation for all the work she'd put in. In a coaching session soon afterward, she told me that her "disappointment took me right back to tenth grade, when I brought home a C and felt like I'd failed my parents." To help Loren move past that experience, we put together a few steps she or anyone could use to protect themselves the next time around.
As you walk the thin line between blame and responsibility, you can tell you're still on the blame side because you're still angry—at the other person, but also yourself. To move forward, you need to stop assigning blame and start looking at it in terms of contribution—how you yourself might have contributed to the mishap, emotions notwithstanding.
This wasn't actually that hard for my client. Loren's biggest contribution to the problem, she realized, was not asking for what she needed most—money. Next came asking for a commitment from Gretchen that they were in this together. Those two actions would have earned her more than money and possible success—they would have earned her respect.
Is it hard to ask for a fee for spec work? You bet. It took me years and many disappointments to make myself do it. But it's worth it, and so are you. First, you need to show any potential clients or collaborators your enthusiasm: "This is a great opportunity and I'd love to be involved." Then stake your claim: "I charge a fee of ___ [or, if you prefer, "half my usual rate"] to prepare pitches. That covers my services and meeting time. How does that sound?"
How do you talk about a potential partnership with someone you barely know on a project you're just learning about? Just use the paid-for time working on the pitch together to size them up. You can decide whether they're actually the right person to tackle a big project alongside after you win an offer together.
These were lessons Loren learned the hard way after looking back over her experience. But they also pointed the way ahead. After all, once this opportunity fell through, she was still really in need of new work—even more so now.
When we're in need, we're all vulnerable. And to reverse some of that vulnerability, it's important to always have an alternative. You never want just one iron in the fire. If you don't have any obvious opportunities, invent some. Stop furiously pitching and instead spend some time building a prospect list or updating your website or LinkedIn page. Volunteer your time with a relevant industry group.
Keep in mind, too, that when someone asks you for something, at that precise moment, they expect to be asked for something in return. It's called reciprocity. Asked for your services? Ask for money. If not money, ask for work-in-kind. (But really just ask for money.)
In retrospect, it's clear that line item in Gretchen's budget for Loren's services was screaming "Cut me!"—because it was just a single line item. Writing touches everything in business, though. Loren should've made sure her services were woven throughout the proposal, not dropped in just once.
A final rule for even the most desperate of independent workers to bear in mind: If they're asking for your smarts, they really need your smarts, and your smarts are worth money. If you have expertise, you have leverage.
That's why there's a difference between seeking out volunteer work for networking purposes, or because it's something you care about, and agreeing to take on work for free. Free work reduces not just the value of your expertise but also the respect that's necessary for any professional's work to be successful. When you give something away for free (outside of a charity context that you've already decided has meaning for you personally), people assess it as having little or no value.
It's true that stress and isolation narrow your thinking and make this type of leverage hard to see. When you feel stressed, it can help even to just remind yourself that your thinking isn't at its best. Talk things through with a friend or coach. Someone else can help you get more perspective—so you can see that you're not really as desperate as you may feel.
Ted Leonhardt is a designer and illustrator, and former global creative director of FITCH Worldwide. His specialized approach to negotiation helps creative workers build on their strengths and own their value in the marketplace. Follow Ted on Twitter at @tedleonhardt.
What if you decided to thank people whenever you felt the impulse to say "sorry"?
We all say "I'm sorry" too often—that much you already know. And, trust me, I'm right in that boat with you. I'm consciously aware of the fact that I'm a chronic over-apologizer.
Sure, I've read the countless articles about apps that could help me and little tweaks that could stop me in my tracks before those two small words mindlessly fly out of my mouth. But in all honesty, very little of it has worked for me. Nothing really sticks, and I still catch myself apologizing way more often than I should.
That is, until recently. I saw this Tumblr post circulating around the internet, and it piqued my interest.
Instead of attempting to stop yourself from saying something altogether, the user suggests replacing that oft-repeated "I'm sorry" with two different words: "Thank you." This flips the script and changes something that could be perceived as a negative mistake into a moment for you to express your gratitude and appreciation.
Sounds great in theory, right? But how practical could it actually be? Would this be yet another suggested phrase that gets thrown out of the window the second I feel tempted to apologize?
Naturally, I felt the need to test it out myself—which is exactly what I've been doing over the course of the past week. It involves quite a bit of conscious thought (yes, there have been plenty of times when an apology was dancing on my lips, and I managed to catch it just in time). But so far I've managed to be pretty consistent with this change.
When an editor pointed out an error I had made in one of my articles, I didn't respond immediately with, "Ugh, I'm so sorry about that!" Instead, I sent a reply with a line that read, "Thank you for that helpful note!"
And like the Tumblr user, when I ran late for a coffee meeting with a networking acquaintance, I resisted the urge to apologize profusely and instead thanked her for waiting for me.
While it does take a little bit of effort on your end (and, fair warning, you might slip up a few times at first), swapping out these words is still a relatively small change for you to make. But rest assured, so far I've noticed a big impact—more so with myself than with the people I had been apologizing to.
When I had previously spewed out countless sorries, I spent a good chunk of time feeling guilty. I had begun our exchange with something negative, which then seemed to cast a dark shadow over the rest of our conversation—like I had started things off on the wrong foot and needed to spend the rest of my time proving myself and recovering for my faux pas.
But by switching that negative to a positive, I found that I could move on from my slip-up much faster. I didn't need to spend time mentally obsessing over what I had screwed up, because my genuine "thank you" had provided a much more natural segue into a different discussion—rather than the awkward exchange that typically follows an apology.
Needless to say, this is a change I plan to continue to implement to improve my communication skills. It's the only thing I've found that actually halts my over-apologizing. And as an added bonus, it transforms those previously remorse-filled exchanges into something constructive and upbeat. What more could you want?
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
Here's why it seems like everyone is looking for a new job in January (and how to get noticed if you are, too).
If you kicked off 2017 by browsing the online job boards, beefing up your resume, and submitting a few applications, you're not alone.
January is one of, if not the, busiest times of the year for job applications. Nine out of 10 of Monster.com's busiest days for job applications last year were during the first month of the year, with the most significant spike landing on January 27, a day when the number of job applications grew to 75% above the daily average.
Monster.com's careers expert, Vicki Salemi, adds that there was also a dramatic increase during the first week of last year. "In the first week [of the year] people have a lot of momentum toward their job searches, but then they get back into a regular routine at their current job," she says, adding that job seekers typically follow up with another round of applications on the final days of the month.
There are a wide variety of factors that collide at the start of the year that send employers and employees to job boards en masse. Most obvious are the psychological reasons, such as New Year's resolutions, and the fact that many Americans spend the holiday season discussing their career ambitions and frustrations with family.
"A lot of folks use that as a time of reflection," says Jamie Chafel, a recruiter in the software technology search division at Boston-based recruiting agency WinterWyman. "There's a lot more interaction with friends and family, and one of the questions that comes up is, 'How's work going? How are you liking it?'"
Another reason why job applications often skyrocket in January comes down to timing. Both employers and job seekers tend to hold off until after the holiday lull, knowing there will be fewer opportunities and applicants right before the break. This often leads to a higher volume of applicants and job postings at the start of the year.
The final driver of January job application sprees is purely economical. Employees typically avoid jumping ship right before their year-end bonus arrives, while employers often set new targets, hiring budgets, and identify areas of need for the coming year at around the same time.
As a result January is a time of greater opportunity and competition for both job seekers and employers. Chafel says it's extra important for candidates to be as visible as possible during this period on as many platforms as possible, including job boards, social media, and through networking.
"Understand that there's that many more applicants out there, so there's probably even less time being spent reviewing your resume before deciding whether to schedule an interview," he says. "You need to catch the reader's attention very quickly."
Salemi adds that edgy fonts and layouts aren't always the best approach when trying to stand out in a crowded field, advising applicants to err on the side of professionalism. Instead she says it's best to use as many numbers as possible at the top of your resume. "If you're managing a team, how many people on your team? How often do you meet? What's the annual budget that you manage? How much money did you save in the budget last year?" she says.
Salemi adds that during the busiest recruiting month of the year, applicants should apply as soon as they see a job posting that interests them. "The sooner you apply, the better; you can't assume the job will still be there tomorrow," she says. On the flip side, Salemi says that candidates should prepare for slower response times at the start of the year.
As job seekers prepare for an application frenzy, employers should also take this opportunity to improve their retention policies and employer brand, suggests Scott Dobroski, career trends analyst for Glassdoor. "They should really be paying attention to employee feedback right now," he says, adding that now is the right time to respond to feedback and implement changes. "Job seekers will notice, and you will reap the rewards year-round by seeing stronger applicants and more resumes."
Dobroski adds that while January is a good time for job seekers to reassess their resumes and employers to reassess their retention policies, neither should limit those efforts to the start of the year. "Regardless of what the calendar says, if it's a good job market, it's a good job market, period," he says.
