A streamlined new interface makes it easier to create a new note and give it some personality—and then find it later when you need it.
People may use Evernote in all sorts of ways, but at its heart, the app is about one thing: notes. It's acknowledging that today with a new version of its iOS app—a complete redesign created with the aim of making it not only easier to write notes on the fly, but to find notes you've already created.
"Some of the feedback we've received from users has been that they love all the capabilities and the power of the product, but at the same time they're trying to get in and out of the application very fast," says Erik Wrobel, Evernote's chief product officer. He admits that the app has made basic tasks such as adding a quick note more time-consuming and clunky than necessary. With this new release, dubbed version 8.0, the team thought a lot about how to remove that friction from the system, make the process quicker, and help you feel more organized.
To do that, Evernote rebuilt the app from the ground up, giving it a new streamlined interface, and putting the app's key features at the forefront so they're easier to find.
Now when you launch Evernote, all your notes are front and center, listed chronologically based on when you last worked with them. So, if you were looking at a work spreadsheet on your laptop, that spreadsheet will be the first thing you see in your timeline when you pick up your iPhone. That grocery list you added to this morning at breakfast will be close behind.
The main interface screen defaults to a view of all your notes, regardless of the notebook they're assigned to. You can also switch your view to a particular notebook using a nifty drop-down menu at the top of the page. But the idea is that what you're looking for is more likely to be right there when you launch the app, so you don't have to spend a ton of time poking around for it.
The app is also just faster in general. "We rebuilt the code base with the intention of making the app faster, and while we don't have exact performance numbers, we believe most users will find the new app feels much faster," says Wrobel. "If you were to use the [previous] version and the 8.0 version side-by-side, you would notice a significant difference in speed. Evernote 8.0 is a great mix of improved speed within the app, paired with a fresh design that gets you to where you want to be faster and without friction, essentially working at the speed of thought."
A big part of that speed improvement comes in how you create notes in the app. When you launch the new Evernote app, one of the first things you'll notice is that there looks like there's a lot less to it. All the same functionality is still there, but Evernote has done a much better job of streamlining the experience so that it's more intuitive and easy to use.
"The overall design of the app has been reimagined to be much more focused," says Nate Fortin, Evernote's VP of design. "It's not an accident how we got here. We started out with some basic concepts and a lot of conversations with our users."
Along with the timeline of your recent Notes on the first page of the app, you'll see a small toolbar at the bottom of the page with a plus sign at its center. Tap that, and you can instantly create a new note. If you long-press the same button and slide it up, you get a few additional options: the ability to record audio, capture images, or set up notifications.
The app also adds new ways to style your notes. Rather than just letting you type notes in black text, the new text editor offers the ability to choose different colors and sizes, useful for creating headers and subheadings within a note or highlighting a particular word or phrase.
"We've paid a lot of attention to the presentation of the note and presenting it in a richer and more expressive manner," says Fortin.
That philosophy extended to the timeline view on the app's home screen as well. As you scroll through the list, you can get a sense of what's inside a note just by glancing at the small preview of it on the screen. The idea is that you can personalize your notes, just as if you were scribbling them in a real spiral notebook with highlighters and colored pens at your disposal.
Evernote has an exceptionally passionate user base—a fact that got reinforced when many of the company's customers pushed back on planned revisions to its privacy policy in December, leading the company to abandon them. Those who use both a personal account and Evernote Business get another welcome new feature: a quick way to switch between accounts by long-pressing on the Account button on the app's new toolbar. That means you can keep your work and personal life separate, and hop between them in less than a second.
Evernote's new iOS app is available now for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.
When unexpected changes leave employees without a boss, they are often given room to grow.
The distress over employee retention has reached a fever pitch. The data couldn't be clearer that knowledge workers really are on the move en masse. By one recent reckoning, 41% of U.S. employees are considering leaving their current positions within the next 12 months. The time it takes to fill an open position after a departure is lengthening pretty much across the board, with some of the most in-demand fields suffering the most drawn-out hiring processes.
One consequence of all this shuffle doesn't get a lot of airtime: The considerable (and very likely growing) share of employees who abruptly find themselves getting by without a boss for longer stretches. What's less clear is whether this is a net positive or negative, and surely the answer varies from one person to the next.
But suddenly losing your direct supervisor and being forced to figure things out can have its upsides. According to some people who've dealt with that, losing a layer of managerial oversight can sometimes clear the way for more productive work, and even offer an unexpected career boost.
In 2014, Jacob Warwick was about two months into a marketing job at pricing analytics startup Engage3 when both of the people senior to him in the department were let go. It was a mixed blessing at first, Warwick says: "Good because I had an opportunity to take more of a leadership role, and bad because I was expected to take all those leadership jobs without getting paid to do them."
During the four months that followed, Warwick got to hire in some fresh talent in order to "build out what we were trying to accomplish, with new goals and very little experience in how to accomplish them." Without getting directives handed down from a department head, Warwick's team had to answer directly to the company's top brass for their wins and failures during that period. But they were trusted to experiment, if only by default.
"In a way, that lack of experience was a good thing," Warwick reflects, "because in a startup you need to evolve very quickly. The willingness to test and hire new people after leadership was gone actually opened up some possibilities." To pursue them, though, he needed to deepen his knowledge base quickly, an experience that left Warwick with a lasting habit. These days, he says, "I spend more time preparing than doing. I know that sounds counterintuitive at a startup, but I study the ins and outs as much as possible."
Facing an unfamiliar concept, he says, "I would read 15 articles, find three or four people in the industry that understood it, and do that [brushing up] before I came to a meeting." Working without a boss, he jokes, "taught me to be more full-assed and [less] half-assed."
One reason people job hop is to do something new and see how it compares to what they've been doing. But other people's career changes can unintentionally give their direct reports at the companies they leave behind similar room to explore.
When your boss leaves, it's not uncommon to have to pick up the slack, like Warwick did. But you may be just as likely able to rewrite your own job description. Erica Hirsh is a writer in Boston Medical Center's communications department, and she's had two bosses leave within a year of each other.
Because her team is small, both of those departures forced the remaining members "to figure out what we actually needed to be doing" after having taken on a handful of new projects. Suddenly finding themselves short-staffed, they could then recalibrate in a way that played to their own strengths. Hirsh says she was given considerable "flexibility in terms of what types of things I wanted to take on" from her boss's role. "On a personal level," she says, "I got to do more, [including] co-lead a project that had been in the works for almost three years."
Both bossless gaps lasted around three months, but even after a new supervisor was appointed, Hirsh says, "for the most part people were pretty great about me continuing to do the things I wanted to continue to do."
Eric Trott was on a two-week vacation in Bangkok when his boss hit him up on WhatsApp to say she needed to talk. When Trott contacted her, the message was essentially, "By the time you get back I'll be gone." Trott had worked with his boss for a little over two years, both early members of the design team at the business news site Quartz.
"The idea of not actually having anyone to oversee me, or check in on anything, or set new goals for me was kind of confusing in the beginning," Trott recalls, a period that lasted for four to six months. "It took a while for them to find someone."
But within a few weeks, Trott says he'd hit his stride. "It forced me to lay the groundwork to grow my team to the five designers I have now," he says. Having one designer reporting to him at the time whipped Trott into boss mode on the fly. "That was the most crucial—I had to flip a switch. You've got to pull your team together and dig in and set future goals."
Just as Hirsh and Warwick found, the experience made gave Trott "the freedom to dictate and navigate and create my own path," despite the fact that there was "no real confirmation or validation in that path" close at hand, "like I was blindly stumbling along and somehow making it work."
Ultimately, all three of them made it work. Warwick parlayed his experience into a higher-level job at a new startup where he's now in a director role. Hirsh was promoted from a staff writer to a senior staff writer position, a role that hadn't previously existed. And Trott credits his outgoing boss for advocating for him just before she left; he was promoted to associate director of design amid the transition, a role into which he quickly grew.
And as Hirsh also found, the new boss that Trott eventually reported to respected that. "It took maybe about four months to really feel like I had a boss again," he says. Far from being stripped of the new responsibilities he'd had to pick up, Trott's incoming supervisor leaned on him in order to settle in, making his deepening expertise even more of an asset.
"You don't usually expect to have to teach your boss something," Hirsh concedes. But if you've figured out how to work without one for a while, then you're probably shaping up to be somebody else's boss in the process.
Impulse control is something you can practice, and these three daily techniques can help.
You already know what delaying gratification entails, which means you already know how difficult it is. Avoiding a temptation that's standing right in front of you so you can hold out for something substantially better down the line—for many of us, that's a losing battle.
But it's often a losing battle that helps win a war, like when a sports team rests its star players in an unimportant game so they can be at their best for the playoffs. And if you can manage to turn delaying gratification into a regular habit, you may be able to take your own performance from just mediocre to top-notch.
Ever seen someone get hired who wasn't quite good enough, just because the hiring manager couldn't afford to keep looking? How about a contractor taking on business that doesn't really make them money but uses up their resources so they're not available for other work? Or maybe you know someone who always stays a little more overweight than they feel good about. Each of these outcomes can be improved by learning to delay gratification.
The psychologist Walter Mischel's famous "marshmallow studies" are probably the best known research findings on the psychology of self-control and delayed gratification. He showed what happened to preschool-aged kids who could pass up a temptation in the short run—in this case, a marshmallow sitting right in front of them—for something better down the line.
Mischel found that the kids who had that level of willpower experienced some surprising outcomes: they had better SAT scores years later and were better at coping with stress, among other differences, than their peers who couldn't help opting for the marshmallow.
Self-control isn't necessarily an inborn trait that you either have or you don't, though. Mischel and his team also started to explore what led kids to take the mediocre treat now versus the better one later. And since then, psychologists have further identified how people weigh decisions like these. The good news is that there are some simple mental exercises you can practice just about every day that can sharpen your willpower when a really tempting option pops up unexpectedly. Here are three of them.
Mischel showed early on in his marshmallow research that a dependable way to cave in—you know, to finish off those remaining cold fries, even though you'll complain all night about feeling full and gross—is to focus your attention on the short-term win. Think about the fries that are right in front of you. Maybe even push them around your plate with your fingers and consider polishing them off since they look so good.
The takeaway here is that it's a lost cause trying to convince yourself that they actually don't look so good after all. The better safeguard against caving in is to distract yourself with thoughts of other things you enjoy—like watching movies, playing music, the latest technology, whatever. That doesn't mean dashing headfirst out of McDonald's to the nearest movie theater. It just means shifting your mental focus while you're sitting there.
When you merely think about things you like, instead of the other thing you also like that's right there in front of you (hey there, fries!), you're more likely to hold out for the better reward—in this case, of feeling a little better and being a little healthier than you otherwise might.
When we remain constantly busy, we get caught up in the little things that don't really matter, and lose track of the bigger, longer-term things that do.
Research suggests, for example, that people who let their minds wander from time to time—at least when it's not critical to stay focused—are more likely to reconnect with the longer-term goals they have, which mean a lot more to them than the stuff that's instantly gratifying.
So one way to make delaying gratification more of a habit is to adopt another one that's probably a lot easier: Daydreaming. When you finish one task that consumed a lot of cognitive energy, don't just snap into the next one on your to-do list. Instead, take a mental break. Even if it's just sitting right there at your desk, looking away from your computer screen and just staring off for a few moments to see where your thoughts take you.
That's true even for material rewards, not just abstract or emotional ones. Studies have shown that practicing gratitude can even help subjects tough it out for more money as opposed to opting for less cash right away. And the researchers found that it was the feeling of gratitude in particular, and not just any positive emotion, that made the difference.
At this point you may be thinking, "That would be nice, but I can't just will myself to feel grateful." But actually, you can, and all it takes is a moment of reflection. Consider this: there are already things you feel grateful for, but you rarely take time to actually reflect on them.
The same way you can carve out a few minutes in your workday for mind-wandering, you can also take a second or two to mull over what you're most grateful for. Some people even pick up some daily rituals, like keeping gratitude journals, to help them turn this into a regular habit.
These may seem like small, purely mental changes—thinking about what you enjoy, taking a second to daydream, and feeling grateful—that you might worry are no match for the power of an unexpected temptation. But don't forget that impulse for instant gratification is all in your head. So is the will to avoid it—again and again and again, until it's merely a matter of habit.
High earners tend to care less about work-life balance and more about company culture and values.
Does more money change what we value at work?
It's a question both researchers and workplace managers have puzzled over for a long while. An oft-cited study from Princeton suggested that it does factor into having less stress and more overall satisfaction, but only to a point. The threshold wasn't a magical six-figure salary, but rather plateaued at around $75,000 per year. Yet when the CEO of Gravity Payments attempted to buy the happiness of his employees by paying them all a salary of $70,000, the results were mixed.
Glassdoor's data scientist Patrick Wong points to previous Glassdoor research that revealed there was somewhat of a correlation. Analyzing the reviews of 221,000 users who posted their salaries and a review of their employer found that just 10% of them who made over $120,000 per year gave their company a one-star rating. Fifteen percent of those who made less than $30,000 per year gave a one-star rating. Though it's a small margin, it seems to indicate that lower salaries correlate to lower job satisfaction. That analysis also surfaced some other elements that make workers feel more engaged, including opportunities for advancement, an employer's culture and values, and the quality of its senior leadership.
This prompted the current question, says Wong: Do the job factors you care about most change as your income changes? As pay rises, do our workplace priorities around compensation, work-life balance, and career opportunities shift as well?
To find the answers, Glassdoor mined the data from more than 615,000 Glassdoor users who, like in the previous study, reported their salaries and a review of their employer since 2014. These users were grouped by income and ranked the following:
Career opportunities
Compensation and benefits
Culture and values
Senior leadership
Work-life balance
Business outlook
Wong says these factors were ranked in order of importance to the employee and placed in a corresponding graph. Perhaps most surprising was that compensation and benefits came in last overall at 12%. The most important factor for job satisfaction was the company's culture and values at 22%.
This changed based on how much people earned. "We see a clear pattern, with some workplace factors becoming more important as pay rises, and others becoming less important to overall employee satisfaction," Wong writes. Less than 10% of those making more than $120,000 per year said that compensation and benefits was integral to their satisfaction. But surprisingly, only 12.8% of those making less than $40,000 said that the amount of their check gave them job satisfaction.
The factors that were less important to the high earners were work-life balance and the company's business outlook over the next six months. Wong attributes this to the fact that the bigger the check, the more likely they were to spend more time at work.
Finally, interest in how well the company is doing also falls as the paycheck increases. Wong speculates that this could be due to the fact that "lower-income workers are more concerned about economic insecurity, or that higher-income workers are mostly employed in larger, more stable companies."
What matters to all workers, but particularly the highest earners, are culture and values, which ties into senior leadership (as they are often in charge of both). "As pay rises, employees shift priorities toward long-term careers, working under great leaders, and spending their days in a workplace with positive culture and values," says Wong.
We've seen this play out across numerous reports that rank the best places to work and the top CEOs. In a previous interview with Fast Company, Jennifer Aaker, a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, said, "New research shows there is a strong correlation between happiness and meaning—in fact, having a meaningful impact on the world around you is actually a better predictor of happiness than many other things you think will make you happy."
CareerBliss found that the consistent themes among the 50 companies that made their 2016 list included career development support and a positive relationship with managers, both evidence of a strong company culture. Heidi Golledge, cofounder of CareerBliss, told Fast Company in a previous interview, "Employees once again stated that compensation is important, but far beyond a paycheck is the relationship they have with their coworkers and manager that defines a happy workplace for them."
According to a Dale Carnegie Training survey of 3,300 workers, almost 40% are ready to jump ship because of poor management. That report found that honest and trustworthy leaders make workers feel nearly 10 times more satisfied with their job. Those whose management aren't perceived as such are four times more likely to be looking for a different job.
All this adds up to the fact that money in the form of a handsome paycheck can buy some degree of happiness. But the culture of your workplace and its leaders factor in much more for your personal bottom line.
Google's lightweight laptops are already a hit in education, but a bigger retail push is coming.
It was a bit strange to be interviewing Lenovo's head of Chromebooks at CES, seeing as Lenovo didn't bring any Chromebooks to the electronics industry's annual trade show.
But Jeffrey Meredith, the company's vice president and general manager of Android and Chrome computing, says more Lenovo Chromebooks are coming soon. And while Google's lightweight laptops have already taken over the education market, Meredith believes the consumer business is about to flourish as well.
Lenovo's Jeffrey Meredith
"Chrome, since its infancy, has been mainly education, mainly cost-driven, largely bought-on-bid kind of devices," Meredith says. "What's going to play over the next few months is, Chromebooks are going to move out of this education-almost-exclusive channel focus, into retail and into commercial."
The push for consumer Chromebooks will partly be driven by hardware, with Lenovo planning two waves of new devices in March and September. It'll also be boosted by Google's introduction of Android apps to the Chrome operating system.
What's less certain is whether Google and its partners can convince people to give Chromebooks another look.
Chromebooks are built on Google's Chrome OS, which was originally designed around the idea of replacing local apps with web apps. Although the platform allowed some web-based apps to run locally, without an internet connection, the system's primary purpose was to run the Chrome browser as efficiently as possible.
That focus helped Chromebooks soar in the education market, where the concept of a browser-based, centrally managed computer has been hugely appealing to administrators. Students can log in, get instant access to Google services and whatever other sites and web apps the school allows, then have everything wiped off the machine when they log out.
One of Lenovo's current Chromebooks
In the third quarter of 2016, Chromebooks made up 54% of computer shipments to K-12 classrooms in the United States, says IDC analyst Linn Huang. That market share figure even factors in iPads, which themselves have been successful in education.
Despite periodic pushes by Google, Chromebooks have been less disruptive in the consumer market, where IDC expects them to nab just 6% of U.S. laptop shipments in 2016, up from 4% in 2015. The problem is that their emphasis on speed, simplicity, and security never resonated beyond a small niche of tech-savvy users, and so the main argument for buying one became about price. Chromebooks tend to be cheaper than Windows PCs, because Chrome OS is free to license and doesn't require a lot of computing power. While the low-cost angle may have given Google some market share, Huang argues that it also damaged the brand.
"There's still a perception on the market that Chromebooks are the cheap, low-cost alternatives to Windows," Huang says. "It's what I'll buy grandma, but it's not what I'll use for myself."
For that reason, Huang is slightly pessimistic about Chromebooks's disruptive potential. "A good amount of consumer education has to happen for Chrome to shed its label of being this sub-notebook, if you will," he adds.
Lenovo's Meredith believes the time is right for another big consumer push.
Although Android apps launched on a small number of Chromebooks last year, Meredith expects them to become much more broadly available in 2017. This will make Chromebooks more interesting to a mainstream audience, he says, because all the apps and services people have on their phones will become accessible on a Chromebook. Meanwhile, the lack of a traditional PC experience will be less of a problem for younger users who've grown up on cloud services like Netflix and Facebook.
"As you think about the evolving behaviors and usage trends, paired with the fact that you have a big app ecosystem that is now accessible, we think that an audience in retail that's probably 30 and under is the primary target, all the way down to kids that gain their first exposure to a Chromebook in their schools," Meredith says.
Being in the Google ecosystem also helps, Meredith adds.
"You can't avoid or ignore the idea that a generation of people have kind of grown up with Google, and that they've used the Play Store, they've used Docs, they've used [Google] search," he says. "So they're actually entrenched in Google, and the best way to make use of many of the things that people have grown up with is a Chromebook."
The Lenovo Yoga Book, which runs on Windows or Android, digitizes paper sketches.
On the hardware side, Lenovo will try to add some excitement with a slew of new devices, first in March, and then again in September. While Meredith won't talk specifics, the devices will likely crib from what Lenovo has been doing with Android and Windows in devices such as the Yoga Book. That means more touch screens, pen-based input, and convertible designs that blur the line between tablet and laptop.
"You can envision, if you're really going to get the full benefit out of the app environment, you'll need touch, you'll need a form that can function in a mode that's good for gaming, or productivity, or video viewing," Meredith says. "You'll see form factors that start to challenge some of the norms of the past."
Despite the influx of apps and hardware, Meredith believes Chromebooks will stay true to their original mix of speed, simplicity, and security.
"If I flip the thing up and it comes on, that's a Chromebook. It should always be that. It should update with great frequency, even if you add all the apps to it, and that adds complexity. It should still have the constant updates to stay fresh. It should still be the most secure device out there," he says. "We talk about making sure that we stay true to that original vision of why the product was created in the first place."
Lenovo's convertible laptop designs could be headed to Chromebooks soon.
So how will device makers like Lenovo spread the word that Chromebooks aren't just cheap Windows alternatives anymore?
Meredith admits that the other benefits of Chromebooks have been tough to communicate. "Everybody wants simple stuff but you don't want to be told it's simple," he says. "Everybody wants security, but really talking about security in enough detail that people understand how secure it is isn't that easy."
The likely starting point, Meredith says, will be the hardware itself, along with the behavioral changes that might make people want a Google-centric, cloud-connected, touch-enabled laptop. Later on, it might make sense to talk more about the security of Chromebooks, the auto-updates, and the size of the app ecosystem.
"You know that you don't hit the save button anymore. Many people use Google Docs everyday," he says. "So I think tying up into, 'this is who you are and how you do stuff, this is the device that actually fits best for that,' is probably where we'll start."
IDC's Linn Huang says he's heard whispers of a big consumer Chromebook push as well. And while he's somewhat skeptical of the potential, he has been impressed with Google's own marketing efforts lately, noting that the company's advertising for its new Pixel phones has been successful.
"I would trust that Google would be able to pull that off from a consumer education perspective," he says. "But it's probably a longer slog than even they think it is."
It's the latest sign that financial-services companies see a big opportunity in unbanked citizens.
For some financial-services giants, the next big thing is micro, and unbanked customers are the entry point. The latest example is Mastercard, which is getting into microcommerce in Kenya with the launch of a new mobile platform that lets consumers buy goods with cash, mobile money, or bank transfer using their phones. The service, called 2Kuze, is aimed at Kenyan farmers and their customers and may mark the beginning of a deeper journey into mobile money products.
Screenshots of 2Kuze, a mobile marketplace by MasterCard that connects smallholder farmers, agents, buyers and banks in East Africa.
Mastercard unveiled the new phone-ready platform yesterday and said it will allow consumers to place orders for produce more directly with farmers. For help, the company synced up with the nonprofit Cafédirect Producers Foundation to connect with 2,000 farmers near Kenya. Spawned out of Mastercard's Lab for Financial Inclusion, the new venture is backed by the Gates Foundation. While it doesn't directly compete with existing mobile money networks like M-Pesa, it opens the door for future development in this area.
Mastercard Lab is exploring the potential for 2Kuze to help farming communities receive the right level of investment and to encourage more efficient ways of doing business with smallholder farmers.
Certainly plenty of other companies think mobile money is ripe for competition. In September, Visa debuted the mobile payments platform mVisa in Kenya that will rival M-Pesa on price. The credit card company sees an opportunity to not only tap into local commerce and peer-to-peer transactions, but also global remittances—a market of keen interest among a number of fintech players. Companies like TransferWise, Ripple, and PayPal's Xoom are all fighting to take business away from lethargic giants like Western Union.
One thing's for sure: There's money to be made. Last year, M-Pesa logged roughly $51 billion worth of transactions. And there may be a particular opportunity among unbanked citizens. Stellar, a nonprofit organization aimed at facilitating faster, less expensive money transfers, teamed up with the finance software provider Oradian in February to connect microfinance institutions to one another. The partnership enabled these community organizations to transmit money digitally, rather than physically moving cash between destinations—a service sorely needed.
As for Mastercard, it already seems geared up to tackle this particular demographic with 2Kuze. Through it's pitching the product as effort to increase financial inclusion, it may also be building a loyal following in the process—one primed to use paying products down the road.
Nearly 90% are either at or exceeding sustainable capacity, and in less than 10 years, production is set to grow by 17%.
One of the keys to sustainable fisheries has been the employ of human monitors to watch what is being scooped up from the sea. In the United States, fishing boats are routinely accompanied by independent observers who track compliance with fishing regulations.
In other countries' waters, it's a whole different story, so those government and independent agencies hoping to halt overfishing are turning to some of the same digital tools that let social media sites recognize faces in photos.
That makes it harder for scientists to understand the effects fishing is having on imperiled species in the area, and that means large numbers of valuable fish—including the yellowtail and bigeye tuna varieties found in sushi restaurants around the world—are being harvested illegally, he says.
But by effectively automating part of the job of the observer by using cameras to record what creatures are caught and sophisticated software to classify them by species, regulators would be able to get a fuller picture of legal harvests and detect unlawful operations.
Just as automation and machine learning have given internet companies detailed records and predictions of how users behave online, they can potentially enable scientists and government agencies to build similarly detailed models of the world's fisheries.
Closeup of a Satlink high-definition electronic monitoring camera being installed on a longline tuna boat in Palau. Electronic monitoring systems connect motion sensors and GPS systems with cameras that record everything that happens on deck, allowing government and industry players to see what species are being brought on board.[Photo: courtesy of The Nature Conservancy]
"Today it's estimated that what's called illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing costs the region between a half billion dollars and $1.5 billion a year," Zimring says. And even low rates of accidental capture and killing of important predators such as sharks can have significant impacts on aquatic ecosystems, he says.
"We really need to understand, from a kind of science perspective, when at-risk species like sharks and turtles are being caught, and what really happens to them," he says.
The Nature Conservancy is working with governments in the region, including in Palau, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Solomon Islands, to implement alternative monitoring programs, capturing video footage of fishing vessels instead of placing observers on each boat. The group has equipped about a dozen boats with cameras so far, with plans to place more this year.
Footage is stored on hard drives that can be removed for analysis when boats come into port. But that method still produces huge amounts of raw video that need to be manually analyzed by hand. To make analyzing the footage more feasible, The Nature Conservancy is investigating ways to use machine learning techniques to process that video material.
"You've got to be able to translate that raw video data into useful information—that's where we think machine learning can really help," says Zimring. The group is sponsoring a $150,000 challenge on machine learning competition platform Kaggle, seeking algorithms that can optimally classify types of sea creatures caught by fishing boats.
Even if automated methods can't completely replace human analysis, they can still provide a big benefit if they can reduce the amount of footage people need to review, saving time and potentially making it possible to transmit the video material more efficiently, Zimring says.
Similarly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is investigating using electronic monitoring in fisheries across the U.S. from the Atlantic to the Pacific. One pilot program is placing cameras on board smaller boats in Alaska that catch fish like cod and halibut.
"It's been difficult to get observers onto these boats, and we've been working with them to develop electronic monitoring as an alternative," says Chris Rilling, director of the Fisheries Monitoring and Analysis Division at NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center. Right now, fishing boats participating in a voluntary pilot program are equipped with cameras and with hard drives that are periodically shipped to NOAA for human review, but the agency is developing sets of training data for machine learning algorithms to use, with an eye toward integrating automated classification around 2019.
Ivan Sesebo, a human observer in longline tuna fishery, collects data and tracks a vessel's compliance with fishing regulations. To date, only 2% of longline tuna vessels have human observers onboard monitoring the catch. The Conservancy and partners are testing how electronic monitoring systems coupled with artificial intelligence can fill this data gap.[Photo: Jonne Roriz, courtesy of The Nature Conservancy
"That training data set has to come from the fishery that you're worried about, because you need to understand the complexity of the species," says NOAA researcher Farron Wallace. And even if the machine learning algorithms aren't perfect, they can still provide valuable information, since scientists will be able to test the inherent uncertainty in the data they produce, he says.
NOAA is also experimenting with ways to electronically monitor fish populations while they're still underwater. One device debuted in 2015 uses a low-powered computer and sonar system attached to the seafloor to automatically survey fish populations.
"These instruments wake up and send out pings, and we measure the energy that's reflected, and that tells us about how many fish are there," says NOAA biologist Alex De Robertis. When the device's work is done, NOAA researchers send it a specific audio signal that causes it to detach from the sea floor using attached flotation devices to rise to the surface.
This summer, the agency plans to place some of the devices in a remote area of the Arctic usually difficult to access without expensive icebreaker ships during the winter, and leave them in place to track fish populations and movements after the winter freeze.
"I think the real strength of this is to look over long time periods," says De Robertis. "It's ice-covered and very hostile and very expensive to work in there in the winter time."
Your brain can multitask really well when one of the tasks is a habit you've developed in that particular context.
The news that multitasking is bad isn't even news anymore. In recent years, people have begun to recognize what psychologists have known for decades: If you try to do two things at the same time, you'll likely get worse at both of them.
But even for those who've fully embraced "monotasking," there may be something that still doesn't quite compute. No matter how good your performance when you focus on a single task, you also do multiple things at once all the time, often pretty effectively. You may even have the lurking suspicion that there are some things you can keep on multitasking at, without paying much of a price in terms of outcome.
And you'd be right.
The truth is that there's at least one form of multitasking our brains do perfectly well all the time—the only thing is that we don't often consider it multitasking. Right now, for instance, I'm composing this article while typing at my computer.
The two may seem like one and the same, but they're distinct cognitive tasks. Likewise, I've seen cooks carry on complex conversations while chopping vegetables. And chances are that earlier this week you managed to walk down the street while talking with somebody or down the hallway while planning a meeting in your head.
On their surface, none of these things may seem to qualify as "multitasking," but that's exactly what they are to your brain. In fact, these are the only types of multitasking that our minds can pull off effectively. It's why trying to talk with a coworker while composing an email will always be hopeless, even though talking with that same coworker while walking together toward the conference room isn't. Here's a look at how your brain knows the difference.
Some of the limitations to multitasking are obvious. As you may have been reminded as a child, for instance, you only have two hands. So if you're trying to do two things at the same time and they both require your hands (or feet, or eyes), then you're going to have to do one at a time or else suffer the consequences.
But those are primarily physical constraints, not (just) mental ones. A less apparent factor involves an aspect of our cognitive architecture called "working memory," which simply refers to the amount of information we can hold in mind at one time. When working memory is filled, performance on cognitive tasks suffers. Multitasking taxes working memory by requiring you to hold in mind information about two or more distinct tasks simultaneously.
But here's the thing: Making multitasking actually work is not a matter of expanding your working memory. It's the reverse. In order to multitask effectively, you need to decrease the amount of working memory that a task requires. And that's where habits come in.
Habits associate a behavior with a particular mental and physical environment. Essentially, they allow that action to be retrieved from memory and performed whenever that environment is present. It's all about context, in other words.
If you're an experienced driver, then merely sitting in the car helps your brain automatically retrieve the habits related to pressing the gas and brake pedals. You don't need to seriously tax your your working memory in order to do that. Likewise, sitting at your keyboard and wanting to type the word "the" leads the brain of any practiced typist to retrieve the hand movements required to type "t" followed by "h" followed by "e." Hearing the equation "2 + 3" allows anyone who's learned basic arithmetic facts to pull up the answer "5" without counting on their fingers.
Because habits allow information and actions to be retrieved directly from memory, they're your brain's only reliable mechanism for partially or completely eliminating the working-memory load associated with a task. Once something has become habitual, you can integrate that task better with something else you're doing that does tax your working memory.
The reason people learn to touch-type is so they can focus on the document they're constructing without having the mental chore of actually typing the words get in the way. The context summons the action, which your brain performs more or less automatically. That means that if you're in an environment that demands a certain amount of multitasking, you want to look for elements of the task that can be converted into habits in that context.
Then you want to practice those elements. Practice gets enough repetitions of the task into your long-term memory to increase the chance of your brain retrieving the correct action the next time you find yourself in that environment.
Finally, because you're trying to retrieve information or an action from memory in a situation, you want to create consistency between the practice you engage in to develop habits and the situations in which you're going to have to multitask. Think of it this way: The reason every computer keyboard is configured the same way is to make sure there's uniformity between the context in which you first learned to type and every subsequent situation that requires typing.
That particular standard is enforced by the community, of course, but you can create consistency across your work environment for other habits as well. For example, I frequently use sticky notes to remind myself of upcoming events. But I'd often spend time searching for my pad of sticky notes, which disrupted my train of thought and made my work less efficient. I ultimately decided to place the sticky notes at the base of my computer monitor all the time—I'd never move it. Now I can just reach for a note in the middle of other tasks I'm performing rather than stopping and searching.
If that sounds simple, it is. But few of us take the time to convert these small aspects of our work into habits that actually allow us to multitask in a given context. If you can do that, you can reduce the working-memory load of many of the tasks you do. This way, even if multitasking does reduce your efficiency to some extent, you can use your habits to help your brain pull it off.
An innovative Cornell Tech postdoc program aims to keep research at its core while pushing scientists and engineers to start businesses.
PhD students once dreamed of lifelong tenure, generous sabbaticals, and a closet full of jackets with elbow patches. Academic life, with its dusty-booked charm, ruled the day. No longer. Even in STEM fields, roughly 40% of PhDs are graduating without employment commitments. Could the solution be teaching postdocs to create their own jobs, as entrepreneurs?
In the heart of Manhattan, in a set of conference rooms on loan from Google, one radical experiment in postdoc entrepreneurship is now entering its fourth year. Called "Runway" and managed by Cornell Tech's Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, the program bills itself as "part business school, part research institution, part startup incubator." Since its founding, Runway postdocs have founded 13 companies, from an intelligent baby monitor to an urban planning analytics platform, and collectively raised $15 million in funding.
"Our mission is to help commercialize research," says Shuli Shwartz, who co-manages Runway while serving as entrepreneur-in-residence at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute. "There is a gap between research results and taking them into the commercial space."
Cornell Tech's Roosevelt Island campus will include space for academic programs alongside startup offices.[Photo: Kyle Thompson for Fast Company]
Runway tackles the problem on two fronts: one, by teaching scientists and engineers to think like entrepreneurs; and two, by taking a founder-friendly approach to the rules that govern intellectual property, which are often a barrier to executing university spinouts.
"Technology transfer quite often fails, and that's a pity, because the intellectual property of the university remains on the shelf," Shwartz says. But at Runway, companies founded by postdocs retain exclusive, royalty-free control of their intellectual property, greasing the wheels for future investment. In return, Runway companies grant the institute a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity), a form of equity popularized by Y Combinator.
When he first heard about the program, Runway participant Emmanuel Dumont, founder and CEO of Shade, thought that the structure was too good to be true. At the time, he was completing his PhD in biophysics at Columbia University. "I heard about it via email, and I thought it was a joke," he says. "Then a second email—these guys must be serious."
Shade founder and CEO Emmanuel Dumont (left) and Nanit founder and CEO Assaf Glazer[Photo: courtesy of Cornell Tech]
Dumont signed on and used the program to turn his idea for a wearable UV sensor for lupus patients into reality. "When doing research, you stop thinking about the product and the market. That's where Runway helped: It provided guidance on these two fronts," he says. Dumont also credits the program with helping him navigate the yawning gap between scientific claims and entrepreneurial ambitions. "When you do science, you make modest claims. You measure everything. You don't say you 'cure.'" In contrast, "Entrepreneurship is a vision to change the world. You have to start learning to use superlatives."
Dan Huttenlocher, dean and vice provost of Cornell Tech, sympathizes with the predicaments of being a scientist/CEO. "I'm kind of your typical engineer, computer scientist type of person who likes factual stuff," he says. "It's easy to not spend enough time actively engaging with people outside of your organization and work group. For people like me that's particularly hard, because I'd almost always prefer to sit down and focus on work. But I think it's super important that you're well networked."
To that end, Runway introduces postdocs to a bevy of potential advisers, experts, and investors over the course of the one to three years they spend at the institute. Early Cornell Tech hire David Tisch, a longtime fixture of the New York startup scene, has been instrumental in getting the newly formed graduate institution connected to industry leaders throughout the city. (Academic mentors also play a central role in coaching.)
Speaking "startup" has come more easily for postdocs with private sector experience. Tomer Morad, CEO and cofounder of DatArcs, a data center management company, previously cofounded an adtech company. "Sometimes people like it more when you talk like an engineer, sometimes they like it more when you talk like an entrepreneur. You have to adapt," he says.
DatArcs cofounder and CEO Tomer Morad[Photo: courtesy of Cornell Tech]
For Morad, Runway's primary benefit has been the time and space to push technology boundaries. Without Runway, "I would have started a different company than this one, with less technical risk," he says. "You have peace of mind, because you can work on something deep. It's okay for you to take a few months and figure something out."
Cornell Tech is happy to provide that time, as is New York City. Starting under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, city officials have made a point of encouraging technology training and startup formation and investment, in the hopes that job-generating companies plant roots in the five boroughs. Last month, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen unveiled plans for a $250 million home base for the city's technology community, located near Union Square. In addition, the New York City Economic Development Corporation announced plans for a new life sciences incubator, with wet lab space. So far, Cornell Tech says, 70% of its graduates have opted to stay in New York following graduation. And to date, all Runway program alumni companies remain headquartered here.
After keeping a relatively low profile, Cornell Tech will move into the spotlight later this year with the opening of its new campus, now under construction, on Roosevelt Island. Runway will make the move, alongside Cornell Tech's edited array of graduate programs in technical fields. Students working toward those degrees have launched 16 companies since 2013. (Cornell projects that it will generate 600 spin-off companies over the next 30 years, across all programs.)
As Runway postdocs see it, Cornell Tech and the companies it incubates will be in a position to set the tone when it comes to startups with strong IP at their core. "We have really good investors, but it's not easy to find one," says Nanit founder and CEO Assaf Glazer, creator of an AI-backed baby monitor. "There's a hard sell around fear: Parents are afraid of death for their baby"—a sell that some investors would have preferred. But Glazer, father to three boys, did not want to pursue that path. Instead, he has painted a picture around helping parents make more informed decisions about bedtime and more, while contributing to broader scientific research around child development and sleep.
"If you are not in a framework that embraces those values, it will be really hard to realize your dream," he says. "For me, [Runway] gave me this security and trust that I'm doing the right thing."
There's a plethora of tech meant to make recruiting fairer. Joonko wants to help ordinary workers pinpoint bias throughout the workday.
Unconscious bias is exactly what it sounds like: The associations we make whenever we face a decision are buried so deep (literally—the gland responsible for this, the amygdala, is surrounded by the brain's gray matter) that we're as unaware of them as we are of having to breathe.
So it's not much of a surprise that Ilit Raz, cofounder and CEO of Joonko, a new application that acts as diversity "coach" powered by artificial intelligence, wasn't even aware at first of the unconscious bias she was facing as a woman in the course of a normal workday. Raz's experience coming to grips with that informs the way she and her cofounders designed Joonko to work.
The tool joins a crowded field of AI-driven solutions for the workplace, but most of what's on the market is meant to root out bias in recruiting and hiring. Joonko, by contrast, is setting its sights on illuminating unconscious bias in the types of workplace experiences where few people even think to look for it.
Before launching Joonko, Raz counted herself in that cohort. As a woman in the tech world, she'd spent eight years working in the male-dominated intelligence community, and with early-stage startups. Raz would "usually be one out of two women," she recalls, "maybe alone," noting that if there was another woman, she was typically in marketing or some other less "technical" role.
A couple years ago, Raz joined a professional women's group in Israel, where the members held jobs in product management, user experience, and the like. "Half of the time we talked about professional stuff, and half of the time we talked about gender biases in the workplace," she says. Raz recalls dropping a bomb during the first meeting she attended.
"I came in and said there are no biases. I got whatever I wanted until now," she'd reasoned to the other women in the group, "and I'm not going to come if I'm going to come here and hear everyone crying about not getting promotions." The group urged Raz to stay—for two reasons, one for her and one for them. First, they believed it was important for the other women in the group to see that a female tech worker had risen through male-dominated ranks, and second, for Raz herself to understand that bias is more subtle than she'd imagined.
Eventually, "I had this aha moment," Raz says. More than glaring discrimination like getting passed over for a promotion or enduring sexual harassment, Raz came to identify the so-called small stuff as evidence of bias, like an off-color joke "or who speaks in a meeting, whose opinion you pick at the end, or who gets the most critical task when you work on something."
That led quickly to a second "aha moment": Noticing that she too had been exposed to these small but daily occurrences triggered the realization that this was a bigger issue that no one was effectively tackling—in tech or any other industry.
But so far, a lot of these resources have been focused on addressing the hiring process. An integral part of the problem, after all, is getting enough diverse candidates in the recruiting pipeline so they can be considered for jobs. Apps like Blendoor hide a candidate's name, age, employment history, criminal background, and even their photo so employers can focus on qualifications. Interviewing.io's platform even masks applicants' voices. Text.io uses AI to parse communications in order to make job postings more gender-neutral. Unitive's technology also focuses on hiring, with software designed to detect unconscious bias in Applicant Tracking Systems that read resumes and decide which ones to keep or scrap based on certain keywords.
But as Intel recently discovered, hiring diverse talent doesn't always mean they'll stick around. And while one 2014 estimate by Margaret Regan, head of the global diversity consultancy FutureWork Institute, found that 20% of large U.S. employers with diversity programs now provide unconscious-bias training—a number that could reach 50% by next year—that training doesn't always work as intended. The reasons why vary, from companies putting programs on autopilot and expecting them to run themselves, to the simple fact that many employees who are trained ultimately forget what they learned a few days later.
Joonko doesn't solve these problems. "We didn't even start with recruiting," Raz admits. "We started with task management." She explains that when a company finally hires a diverse candidate, it needs to understand that the best way to retain them is to make sure they feel included and are given the same opportunities as everyone else. That's where Joonko sees an opening.
"We try to catch these 'micro-events,'" says Raz, and point them out to managers and workers immediately. Raz and her cofounders, Guy Grinwald and Elad Shmilovich, named Joonko after Junko Tabei, a Japanese mountain climber who became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, and who died last year.
Joonko is aimed at companies and individual managers, not recruiting firms and hiring managers. The application uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help people become more aware of how unconscious biases were shaping their workplace and their teams on a daily basis. Then it also helps them change their own behaviors in real time on the project management and communication tools they already use, like Trello, Asana, or Slack.
Joonko got its start in beta as part of Techstars Atlanta in September 2016. Since then, cofounder Shmilovich tells Fast Company that the platform has analyzed more than 103,000 cases, and several companies have participated in the free pilot project. Raz is staying mum on which companies are currently using Joonko, but she says she'll be able to announce the names soon.
This month Joonko is adding a "personal use" version for sales managers using Salesforce or developers using Jira who want to support diversity and inclusion directly with their teams. Raz says individual managers kept approaching them through word of mouth and asked if they could have the solution individually, without having to get the entire enterprise on board.
The way Joonko works is straightforward. The AI analyzes salespeoples' performance based on total experience, success rate, and tenure at the company. The manager will get a notification alert encouraging them to offer opportunities to someone who may be getting overlooked, and it's designed to send an email as soon as the right opportunity arises. Managers may also get alerts when one person on their team is consistently assigned fewer or less critical tasks due to unconscious bias.
For employees, Joonko triggers a different set of notifications. For instance, when they've reached a milestone or completed a project, the service prods them to promote the results with their manager and team members. As more people use the service, Joonko will be able to measure the effectiveness of these recommendations on all sides.
For now, the cost is just $3 per month to start, with more advanced plans in the $6–$9 per month range. Shmilovich says the company is keeping the cost low on purpose. "It's nothing sales managers can't spend from their pocket."
One potential pitfall is that while AI is smart, it can't always discern context cues. And for now, Joonko isn't examining language. Shmilovich asserts, "The system analyzes behavior patterns of the manager, so it'll be able to recognize the context of actions and decisions" in real time, which is Joonko's primary focus.
For the tool to work well, it will need to adapt to some pretty idiosyncratic work scenarios. Joonko will launch a feedback option later this year, letting managers explain why certain things happen that don't indicate unconscious bias, despite the platform wanting to flag it. For example, says Raz, a manager may be giving an employee fewer tasks because they specifically requested that.
Joonko may eventually expand into the annual performance review, another area fraught with behaviors and language that tend to marginalize underrepresented groups. For now, though, says Raz, "We actually want to help companies overcome daily biases."
GitHub's VP of inclusion shares what she's seen change in tech and what progress still needs to be made.
GitHub's Nicole Sanchez has been busy for the last two decades working in the diversity space, more often than not explaining to seemingly deaf ears why it's important for the technology industry to become more equitable.
For the last two years she has been at GitHub as an outspoken proponent for diversity in tech. I chatted with her late last year about her multifaceted career and why roles like hers are so important. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.
Let's start from the beginning. How did you find yourself in the intersection of tech and diversity?
So my first job in diversity was right after I graduated from college in 1994, long before this was a conversation that a lot of people were paying attention to. [Then in 1999] I was working at a small startup [which she declined to name]. My job was to build the most diverse team, the most diverse company anybody had seen. And the founder came to me because he specifically knew the work that I had been doing in the community.
The [experience] was very eye-opening, because as idealistic as everything was, as soon as real investor dollars came into play, all the idealism got blown out the window. By 2000, the position was gone. I ended up leaving tech with quite honestly a very bad taste in my mouth at that point, and went back to community work. Not until 2010 did I come back to diversity and tech, when I worked at a place called the Kapor Center for Social Impact [an organization that pushes for greater diversity and social consciousness in the tech space]. I worked with them for four years.
What was the diversity conversation like in 1999 compared to what it is now? What were they asking for and what was the nomenclature around your role?
Nicole Sanchez[Photo: via Github]
I had been working for an Americorp program in Boston called City Year. I was recruited to come to Boston and work on this project that put diverse teams of young people together in order to do community service in and around Boston. I learned a lot about building and managing diverse teams very quickly, and also got to witness firsthand the power of what happens when you have a diverse team that's run really well. And how much more impactful that is compared to a more homogenous team.
The way that the founder [of the startup] pitched it to me was, "I want you to do what you're doing in the community but inside my company." And I said to him "What are you? What do you want that to look like? What does that mean to you?" And he kind of described to me a United Colors of Benetton ad.
What I quickly learned is that he was less compelled by the challenges and the extra work that goes into building an inclusive culture. Think of Barbie dolls, where they're all they're all shaped the same and they just paint them with a different brush. I think what he really thought we could do was bring lots of people who truly were the same on the inside together. But they would look different on the outside and that that was going to be enough.
Anybody who works in this knows that's not how any kind of diversity works. You can put any five people in a room together that can all be from the same town and you're going to get wildly divergent opinions. One of the biggest wins we had early on was that the core of our engineering team was entirely Native American. We hired several parents onto the team right away. We had one mom who is a lawyer by training, and she would bring her toddler in, and her toddler was part of the ecosystem of our company. And it was really interesting how it shaped the company.
When they took their first round of funding, one of the first things that the investors said is something like, "What are you doing with all these random people?" And the founder started to get pressure from investors. And it went sideways to the point where it was untenable.
When you joined GitHub and started full time [in May 2015], what were the programs that you wanted to implement?
Well, one is that diversity and inclusion questions are vetted in every interview process. So irrespective of what job you're looking for—if you're interviewing to be an executive assistant, or on our marketing team, or on the engineering team—you get a set of diversity and inclusion questions that don't necessarily have a right answer.
What we'd like to do is know how you think about diversity and inclusion in tech. Why do you think tech isn't more diverse? And their answers are extremely thoughtful. All we're looking for, in that case, is people who are interested in engaging on this topic as opposed to saying, "I think it's perfectly fine." We're looking for people who are questioning the status quo, and we don't have to explain that tech is not diverse. That's not the conversation we're going to have anymore, we're past that.
What is the business case you make for diversity?
For us, the business case is that we want every developer in the world on our platform. And when we say every developer, we don't mean people who just know they're developers today. We also need people who never had the opportunity to even understand what it means to be a developer, haven't gotten their hands on education or the equipment necessary to learn these skills. And that's across ages, races, countries, neighborhoods, you name it. And so the business case for us is, if we want every developer in the world on our platform, we want to be heavily involved in developing the developers.
If companies cannot make that clear case between what they are ultimately trying to do and making sure that the group of people who are doing that thing are from a wide range of backgrounds, then the connection between the two concepts is easy to disconnect. When put under pressure or when times are tight—when you are in a recession—when you end up having to lay off a bunch of people, the things that feel ancillary are those that have to do with diversification. Because that's not "a hard business goal."
Any company that has not explicitly articulated the connection between the thing they're trying to produce or the thing they're trying to do and the need for a diverse group of people, will just miss every single time. And the hard part for me in doing this work is watching companies that have an amazingly diverse audience or user base, and just insult them over and over again. Insult their intelligence, the power that they have on their platform, their level of participation because it's outside the realm of what leadership understands. And those are companies that are going to be eclipsed by something that is better for underrepresented people.
How do you make sure people feel supported?
One of the first things my team did when we came here was we established the norm that we will be talking openly about race and gender and socioeconomic backgrounds and physical abilities. What I see most HR departments do is say, "We're not going to talk about any of that." And God forbid somebody says the word black. Like, "Can we even describe that person as black?" And the answer is yes. [Laughs] Yes.
We have to get fluent in describing each other, being respectful, understanding where the other person sits, so that when there is a transgression—let's say somebody's feelings were hurt or they were literally discriminated against—the company holds a very strong line on that. Also, some educational moment has to come from that. The difference between what I have seen at every other company and what we're doing here is that the onus of the education is not on the person who is the recipient of the transgression.
For example, if I am the 43-year-old Latina that I am, and somebody says, "You're just an old Mexican lady, what do you know?" I can be offended by that. Our HR team doesn't put the burden on me to explain why that was hurtful. The team will pick it up so that I am released from the emotional labor that is always placed on people who are from underrepresented backgrounds. It's always on us to educate. In [GitHub's] model, that's not the case, nor is that the expectation.
Diversity in tech is often under a microscope. How does that inform your position, and how do you look at the work that you do?
The good news for me is that I've been doing this for so long. It's one of those things where the only bad press is no press. I spent so many years trying to get people to think about this that being criticized is way better than being ignored.
My favorite quote is a Gandhi quote; I use it in a lot of my trainings. "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." And where we are is somewhere between laughing and fighting. The ignoring was a really long slog. And the laughing was kind of like, "Ehh, what good is that going to do anyway?" Now the pushback, I welcome it, because it means there's something legit about it . . . I don't want to make people worry. But sometimes the right people are worried. They are worried for the reasons you want them to, which is that the demographics of this workforce are changing dramatically.
Millennials are the largest, most diverse generation this world has ever seen. And if you haven't been getting ready for them for the last 20 years, you're in for a rude awakening. And so people who criticize often come from fear and misunderstanding. And while I don't welcome it—it's not fun getting trolled—I'd much rather be where we are in 2016 than where we were in 1999. So that's how I look at it.
But I'll take the really thoughtful criticism because I always want to get better at what I do.
So far, most forms of concierge medicine are only within reach of the wealthy. Can Forward change that?
Which would you prefer: high-quality health care without the co-pays, deductibles, and administrative hassle, or, in the words of one Google veteran, a high-tech "doctor's office that looks more like an Apple Store"? Adrian Aoun, the cofounder of Forward, a newly launched primary care startup, doesn't think you should have to choose.
But you're going to have to pay for it: $149 per month for your primary care needs.
Forward is the latest new startup to experiment with "direct primary care," a model that trades "fee for service" billing, meaning payment based on pricey tests and procedures, for an approach focused more on health outcomes. The idea is to have doctors stop taking insurance and instead charge patients a flat monthly or annual fee. Theoretically, that frees up doctors to focus on their relationships with patients while curbing administrative overhead.
Forward CEO Adrian Aoun
Aoun, a Google veteran, is aiming to to give direct primary care the high-tech touch. Forward offers members standard medical services alongside genetic screening tests, body scanners, wearable sensors, artificial intelligence software, and a homegrown electronic medical record system. Membership also includes labs, travel vaccines, and ultrasounds (with X-rays on the way). It's a bit like technology-driven primary care group One Medical, which has quickly grown to more than 50 practices across the country by offering features like online booking, virtual visits, and same-day appointments. The key difference is that One Medical accepts most forms of insurance, and it offers those who lack insurance a $175 initial doctor visit and $125 for subsequent appointments.
Forward's founders are big names in Silicon Valley's tech community—Aoun ran special projects for Google, and his cofounder, Ilya Abyzov, is a former Uber executive—but both are fairly new to the medical sector. As is the case for many of his fellow technologists who recently moved into health care, Aoun started the company after a personal brush with the broken system. In this case, it was a close relative who had a serious cardiac event and landed in the emergency room. "The bill was the second heart attack," he recalls. "I couldn't believe that what you pay for is the extra days in the hospital [and] the duplicate tests."
Forward's San Francisco office. The design aesthetic intentionally evokes an Apple Store.
In the aftermath that experience, Aoun concluded that the typical doctor's office really did need something of an "Apple Store" makeover. He raised an undisclosed sum from Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund, John Doerr, First Round Capital, and others to get it started. Fast Company toured Forward's swanky first office, in downtown San Francisco, a few days ahead of its official opening. It certainly pays homage to the iPhone maker with its minimalistic white walls and an iPad station where members check in.
But technology isn't a silver bullet in health care—it rarely drives down costs (typically, it's the opposite). Far more interesting is the company's bet that direct primary care can go mainstream. Direct primary care started in the mid 2000s, modeled after concierge practices that cater to the wealthy but at a lower cost. It is an increasingly popular option for patients, but the percentage of doctors involved still remains very small. "The innovation in direct primary care is the business model," says Zak Holdsworth, CEO of Hint Health, a company that works closely with direct primary care practices. "Tech is just a way to scale the model."
Holdsworth and others say that Forward is one to watch, in part because it has far more capital behind it than the majority of other new primary care groups. Recognizing that it's still early days, here's some food for thought as the company attempts to scale its model:
$149 per month is expensive relative to many other direct primary care models and is more in the range of a concierge practice, says Holdsworth. The average fee his clients charge is in the $50–80 range. Aoun says the price will come down over time, "as we give our members unlimited access to our doctors and our tech." And for now, Forward is also offering some free memberships to those who can't afford the fees.
Some experts believe that Forward would struggle if it doesn't reduce the price, especially if it opens practices outside of San Francisco. "It's not easy getting people to pay for a product they have been accustomed to having someone else pay for, like an employer," says Jeffrey Gold, a Boston-based physician who started a direct primary care practice. The challenge for Forward, argues Gold, will be to recruit enough "low maintenance" patients that balance out the ones with expensive needs, especially with the overhead of supporting high-tech equipment.
Of course, it's totally plausible that tech workers in the Bay Area with six-figure salaries will choose to invest in their own primary care. And with enough of those people, it's a potentially solid business. It remains to be seen whether Forward can recruit significant numbers of patients with multiple, expensive chronic conditions who are struggling to make ends meet. After all, these are the patients that could benefit the most—and they drive the lion's share of health care costs.
A big part of Forward's mission is to drive down costs by offering access to preventative medicine. Genetic screening tests and regular lab tests for a wide variety of biomarkers might seem like no-brainer precautions, but medical experts like H. Gilbert Welch have argued that rigorous testing doesn't necessarily make us any healthier.
New patients step into a state-of-the-art body scanner to measure weight, pulse oximetry, and other metrics.
When doctors look too closely for diseases by tracking an extensive range of factors, they almost always find something (and that includes false positives, which often require more tests). Clinicians don't know whether these patients will present with any abnormalities in the future, but patients tend to want further tests and procedures just to make sure everything checks out. And that often comes with side effects.
Take this writer as a case-study: As a 29-year-old female with few health conditions, the range of preventative tests recommended for me by the Department of Health and Human Services website is actually very limited. A far longer list of tests falls into the category of "uncertain" or "not recommended," due in part to the lack of evidence. "Over-testing and over-treatment costs so much that I worry it will cause us to not be able to treat the people who actually need it," says Dave Chase, a health care investor and advisor.
One regulatory expert I spoke to, who requested anonymity to avoid "angering rapid direct primary care" proponents, made the point that satisfied patients who are willing to pay a monthly subscription fee aren't always receiving optimal care. Sometimes doctors have to disagree with their patients or make recommendations they don't want to hear (like a lifestyle intervention, rather than a magic pill). Will these patients continue to subscribe to Forward?
Some direct primary care groups are working with Medicare and Medicaid to bring their model to the masses. One notable example is Iora Health, which contracts with employers and unions in order to serve patients that are most in need.
While this isn't Forward's approach (at least not for now), Aoun still believes that Forward can reach a broad range of users, regardless of age and health conditions. Still, for now, the practice seems to have been designed with younger users in mind. (As he puts it, "it's what we would want as customers, so we built this for ourselves.") Millennials aren't the easiest demographic to court.
Forward's approach to medicine relies on carefully tracking biometric data.
"The reason why urgent care centers have been so successful is that most young people want to forget about their health problems," says Jay Parkinson, founder of Sherpaa, a company that works with employers to cut costs through virtual visits.
Aoun is making a bet that many of his counterparts aren't actively in engaged in their health care, because the experience is so awful. To change that, the company has clearly invested a lot of time and effort into the member experience. For instance, in lieu of those horrible, exposing robes patients usually have to wear for exams, Forward offers comfortable workout gear.
Thanks to medical scribes, doctors at Forward can spend quality time with their patients, rather than inputting notes into a medical record. And the majority of people's health needs can be dealt with under one roof, unless they need to see a specialist. By having doctors actively engage with patients via the mobile app or by tracking the data pouring in from their wearable devices, Aoun is hoping to get patients thinking more about their health between visits. "We do want to make health care delightful and convenient, and we don't try to up-sell you," Aoun says. "We can change the negative association in peoples' minds."
What are your thoughts on Forward? Would you pay for a service like this? Tweet me at @chrissyfarr.
He's an industry veteran who helped lead Nike's and Fender's customized products programs. Here, he explains how to make the most of bespoke.
Several years ago, Andy Mooney went to Fender, his favorite maker of electric guitars, to build a customized instrument from scratch. He positioned the neck, fingerboard, and strings exactly where he wanted them. For the body, he picked colors he loved—a combination of cream, white, and gold. He was so smitten with the finished product that he named it after his daughter, Rose.
When Mooney became Fender's CEO in 2015, after a career in executive positions at Nike and Disney, he made Fender's customization program a priority. The new concept, called Mod Shop, is a digital platform that allows customers to design their own guitar online, choosing from a curated selection of colors and materials. It launched in August 2016 and since then, more than 18,000 guitars have been sold, ranging in price from approximately $1,650 to $1,800.
Mooney knows a thing or two about bespoke products. Back in the late 1990s, when he was chief marketing officer at Nike, he helped execute the NikeiD program, which allowed customers to build their own sneakers from scratch. They could pick unique combination of colors for the soles, tongue, laces, and upper. Including a premium of about $50, the final shoe cost roughly $200 and was delivered within three to six weeks. Originally, only one model could be customized, but today, you can personalize any one of eight different styles on the website. Nike was among the first fashion brands to mass-market customizable products, a complex logistical feat that required creating a special web platform and rethinking the supply chain.
The Rose guitar that Mooney created.
Now, almost two decades later, customization is almost a given. Many companies offer the option, including luxury shoe makers Jimmy Choo, Salvatore Ferragamo, and Manolo Blahnik, as well as mass market brands like Vans, Timberland, and Converse (which is part of Nike). Gucci, Opening Ceremony, Longchamp, TimBuk2—they're just the tip of the fashion industry's customizable iceberg.
But made-to-order is an expensive proposition. In 2015, Burberry shut down its Bespoke program (which allowed clients to chose among 12 million options to adapt trench coats to their tastes), reportedly because the company was unable to manage the complexity of the operation. Now Burberry offers a much simpler platform called the Scarf Bar, which invites you to pick the patterns on your scarf and embroider it with your initials.
Mooney, who has had a front row seat to watching the customization revolution unfold, shares his insights and advice about the process.
The first step is to figure out what your customers want out of personalized products. It's not necessarily worth investing in an elaborate customization platform if it isn't going to have positive effects on your business in a significant way.
Mooney uses the NikeiD program as an example. It was, he argues, crucial to Nike's survival. "The genesis for Nike was that the brand was becoming omnipresent," he says. "The risk that you run when you are de facto [a leader] in the fashion industry is that the tastemakers turn away from your brand and go on to something else that allows them to be distinctive." In other words, lose the interest of high-profile consumers like celebrities and athletes and you could be in trouble.
Mooney, who was CFO and then CMO at Nike, wasn't expecting the program to become a cash cow. "We never really had grand aspirations for it to be a big revenue-generating business or a big profit-making business," he says. "But we felt that it was very important to create a connecting tissue to those tastemakers."
When developing Fender's Mod Shop, one key factor was Mooney's strong belief that musicians are underserved, even though playing an instrument is a very personal experience. "They can never walk in a store and find exactly what they want," he says. "They're lucky to find a left-handed guitar to begin with, and to find one in the color and the neck composition they want is almost impossible." A player's physiology can impact how comfortable they are playing their guitar, which is particularly relevant for working musicians on the road. Giving customers the option to change aspects of the design and construction of their instrument, he reasoned, was a way to ensure they had a positive experience with the brand.
Mooney believes that if if there is a genuine need in the market for a bespoke product, customization programs can help the bottom line and promote growth. NikeiD, for instance, now brings in hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And so far, the Mod Shop program has been popular.
Once the goal has been defined, the next order of business is streamlining the supply chain. According to Mooney, the customization process is much easier if you have control over manufacturing. Fender has a factory in Corona, California, and trained craftsmen who can get to work on the guitars as soon as an order is placed online. The customer receives the guitar within 30 days.
Mooney says it isn't impossible to customize products when working with an outside manufacturing company. Nike contracted the work out, but because the corporation had such good relationships with these manufacturers, the NikeiD program ran smoothly.
This strategy can also work for smaller companies, too. If you build strong long-term relationships with the people who make your products and give them a stable stream of business, the possibility of a more complex project doesn't have to be off the table. This may also mean partnering with them to invest in new equipment or infrastructure. If they understand that you're in it for the long hall, they might well come along for the ride.
Customization can lead to chaos if consumers have too many options. Limiting those options is valuable from a manufacturing perspective because it helps streamline operations. The factory stocks a certain number of component parts and reconfigures them to client's specifications.
But this strategy is equally vital so the customer does not get overwhelmed. With the Mod Shop, for instance, a client can has 70,000 variations to chose from, including fingerboards and pickups. If Fender gave customers free rein to alter every part of a guitar, they would have 1.3 million choices. "That's about 1.2 million options too many for me," Mooney says.
The same was true at Nike. The fundamental structure of the shoe stayed the same, but customers could personalize enough parts to feel like they were investing in a unique sneaker, entirely their own. "The reality of what we are offering is variations on a theme," Mooney says. "You're dealing with existing midsoles and existing outsoles."
Ultimately, this is important from a branding perspective. If customers can change a product's every last component, that product may not even look like your brand at all. It's important to have a set of quickly identifiable silhouettes or design language. For Fender, the classic guitar shape always stays the same. At Nike, it's the basic outline of the sneaker.
"The age of brands is far from over," Mooney says. "But the brands that thrive are the ones that offer the customer an elevated level of service, which often means giving them the option to create a product that is perfectly suited to their needs and is one of a kind."
For years, Slack has known that people wanted discussions to appear in clusters. It just wanted to do it right rather than do it quickly.
At first blush, threaded conversations sound like one of the most thoroughly mundane features a messaging app could introduce.
After all, the idea of neatly bundling up a specific message and its replies in one place—rather than weaving them willy-nilly with unrelated items—has been around since the days of dial-up bulletin boards. In one form or another, it's present in Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, and innumerable other places where people communicate with each other.
But when Slack's users started asking for threaded conversations, the company behind the hit workplace collaboration tool soon concluded that the capability wasn't something it could whip up in a jiffy. It did, however, begin to noodle around with the idea—and try different approaches. And, eventually, to use a prototype version internally while continuing to polish it up for public consumption.
In all, that unhurried exploration has taken nearly two years and around six significant iterations of the prototype, during which Slack usage has grown eightfold to 4 million daily active users. Now the company is finally rolling out threaded conversations—which it logically calls Threads—to every team, including both paying customers and those who use the freebie version.
Threads aren't just a major new Slack feature. They're also a case study in how its designers approach product development. The company has never operated under the guiding principle that Mark Zuckerberg once famously summed up as "move fast and break things." Instead, it has thrived in part because it aspires to offer tools that feel fully baked from the get-go. Its fit and finish resemble those of the slickest consumer apps, in a world in which many business-centric tools still don't feel like they were designed for use by human beings.
Even by Slack standards, threaded conversations got extra TLC, because their impact is so great and so many people had been asking for them for so long. "Threads are so close to the heart of what Slack is that they might be an escalated case," says Joshua Goldenberg, head of design.
What Slack ended up building bears only so much resemblance to threading as it appears in other products. "It kind of seems like this is a solved problem," said April Underwood, Slack's VP of product, at a press briefing about the new feature. "But not in the context of work."
One of the most fundamental questions Slack faced about threaded conversations was where to put them. The most obvious answer was to stick them in-line with all the other items in a channel. So that's where the company started. By late 2015, it had a functional prototype; after some additional refinement, it started using this version in-house in its own everyday work.
By putting this rough draft through its paces, Slack discovered that putting threaded conversations inside a channel didn't so much eliminate clutter as reshuffle it. People didn't always remember that responses should be part of a thread, which turned channels into a mishmash of threaded and unthreaded discussions. The company's designers also concluded that one possible approach to tidying things up—showing threads in collapsed form and allowing users to expand them—would cause conscientious employees to obsessively expand conversations to see what was in them.
A prototype version of Threads, with replies appearing in-line
"We could have brought this product to market maybe even a year ago, if in-line was okay," said Paul Rosania, Slack's core product lead, at the media briefing. Instead, the company turned off the prototype it was using and began the search for a way to wrangle threads that actually helped reduce cacophony.
The answer turned out to be putting threads alongside the main river of channel messages, in the section along the right-hand edge of the Slack interface—officially called the "flex pane"—that is also home to elements such as search results. When people start responding to a message, thereby spawning a thread, the channel displays a counter of how many replies there are, along with thumbnail images of folks who have chimed in. If you click to expand a thread, it opens up in the flex pane, providing a degree of separation from the main conversation in the channel.
Another design decision the company made in the interest of keeping conversations from getting tangled: The replies in a thread can't spawn further levels of threaded discussion. "A thread can only hang off a single message, and that's the entirety of its depth," says Goldenberg.
Once Slack had relocated Threads to the flex pane, its designers had other critical decisions left to make. One was how to handle notifications so that people who cared about a thread could keep tabs, and those who didn't could ignore it. Anyone who posts a message that results in a thread gets notifications about replies, as does anyone who is @-mentioned in the resulting conversation. Other users can choose to receive notifications by following individual threads.
"View All Threads," a new view accessible from the left-hand channel sidebar, lets people see all the threads they're following in one place—similar to how Slack already lets you view all the unread messages in all your channels. "It's an extra layer of making sure that you don't have to go diving for things within a channel," Goldenberg says.
At one point during development of Threads, Slack pondered whether to let users cut off a thread by declaring it to be closed—an option that's available on many message boards that support threading, and is often used to perform tasks such as declaring a tech-support query to have been answered.
In the end, letting people close threads "seemed a little bit too heavyweight," says Goldenberg. "A little too prescriptive for casual use."
But even if Slack's designers didn't want to encourage anyone to shut down a conversation in process, they did think that some threads would wind down in ways that mattered to people who weren't part of the discussion. "Sometimes there will be a critical decision that everyone needs to see," says Goldenberg. The result: Threads offers a check box that lets you post a reply back to the channel as well as the thread. Select it, and the service puts a summary in the channel showing the original message and the most recent one.
That summary is important because the act of putting threads in the flex pane is, in part, a statement that Slack doesn't expect people to try to keep up with all of them from top to bottom. "We're moving away from the idea that everyone needs to see everything all the time in a channel," Goldenberg explains.
As it worked on Threads, Slack did some user research and exposed the feature to some of its own partners, such as its PR firm, that spent time inside its internal Slack channels. But the main thing that informed development of Threads was the experience of using it in prototype form and thinking about feedback that the company gets from Slack users—both specific feature requests and more open-ended pleas for new ways to get stuff done and combat information overload.
"We are really immersed in the problems our customers are trying to solve," Rosania said at the media briefing. "That gives us some clarity about where to go."
"It can be easy to build something that people request," added Christina Holsberry Janzer, Slack's group manager for user research. "But what's really important is to build what they need." The lengthy development process for Threads was about trying to accomplish that as thoughtfully as possible. But as the feature reaches millions of users in the days to come, it won't take long at all until the company knows if it has succeeded.
Yet the reality that none of these things are now disqualifications from holding the highest office in the land didn't fall out of the sky. On Wall Street, the industry in which I grew up, a culture in which "my word is my bond" shifted over the past few decades toward one where the big print can say "FREE" while the small print gives the real costs. And in corporate America at large, a single-minded commitment to shareholders has led to closing profitable businesses and outsourcing them to other countries in order to make even more profit. In the companies at which I've worked, this has been done without much (okay, any) discussion of ethical ramifications.
Everyone faces tough ethical decisions at different points of their careers, virtually without exception. I know I've been pushed to make some of those hard choices throughout mine. Sometimes it's possible to come up with "good enough" solutions that work for everyone. Other times, it's simply too black and white, and you can be forced into a choice that's career-altering.
These are extremely difficult, messy calculations no matter which direction they go. Here's a look, by my own reckoning, at that moral math.
One of the lesser-known subplots of the last financial crisis was the freezing of the auction-rate securities market. These were financial instruments whose value was set on a periodic basis through an auction process. They were sold as higher-yielding alternatives to cash.
At certain points in the crisis, the risk aversion became so great that there were simply no bidders for the securities, making money that individual investors had expected to be available essentially worthless. I was CEO at Smith Barney (at the time part of Citigroup), when all this was going down, around 2008. At one point, one of those investors called me on the phone literally crying because this was the money for his daughter's wedding, and he'd lost access to it.
What would you do? By and large, the industry's answer was, "There's nothing we can do" and, "This is really awful, but the fine print says the price is set by auctions" and, "It isn't really our fault anyway."
I'll tell you what my team and I did. After a lot of hard thinking, we made available 0% interest, non-recourse loans to those clients. By any calculation, this would cost us since our budget had us earning a higher rate on these loans, and there was a real risk that clients would take the money and run, given the loans' non-recourse nature.
It wasn't a perfect solution by any means, but it felt like the most ethical one to make under the circumstances. And we were fortunate to have the leeway inside the organization to make it without suffering much blowback. Actually, our team felt proud of our efforts. But in the end, the financial costs to the bank weren't as high as we'd expected, since not many of our clients would up taking advantage of these loans anyway.
When we asked them why, they told us that simply the knowledge that the loans were available was enough, and they were willing to bet that we'd continue to do the right thing for them. Many wanted to expand their relationship with us rather than pull money out. We'd proved ourselves an ethical business, which in turn proved to be good business: win-win.
Then there are ethical conundrums that don't leave as much room for creative solutions.
When I joined Bank of America in August 2009 to run Merrill Lynch, I was confronted with a crisis: a stable-value fund that had lost a lot of value. These are investment options in 401(k)s that are akin to money-market funds, in that they offer a yield while trying to maintain a stable principle amount. The issue was that the fund's sub-advisor had chased higher yields, a bet that failed amid the market collapse, permanently impairing the fund as a result. One more thing to note: The biggest group of investors in this fund consisted of Walmart employees, not wealthy individuals who could easily weather the loss.
But let me back up.
I'd joined Bank of America after getting fired from Citigroup for partially reimbursing clients for alternative investments that had been sold as low-risk but wound up losing most of their value in the market downturn. I broke with my CEO; it was public and it was ugly. So the pain of that decision was pretty fresh, and as you can imagine, I wasn't particularly excited to gamble my job yet again on what I considered to have been a principled decision.
I began by talking to people inside the company and within my own network to see what options I had. One guy I spoke to—somebody so senior he was considered an industry titan—dismissed the very idea of there being options. "There's nothing to be done," he told me. "Everyone knows stable value funds aren't stable."
"Huh?" I thought, "I'm pretty sure that's in the name." But again and again, I got the advice to keep my head down and do nothing. Instead, I took the case to Bank of America's CEO, and after a good bit of back-and-forth, he agreed to allocate enough money to top up those depleted stable-value funds.
While I breathed an initial sigh of relief—"Hey, we did the right thing, and I still have my job"—that feeling didn't last long. The problem-solving process itself, not to mention to solution I eventually struck inside the company, cost me some powerful allies among those who'd stuck to the other side of the argument. I didn't lose my job then, but the political damage was done: when that CEO retired, the clock began ticking down on my time at Bank of America, and before long I was "reorganized out" of that role.
How did I decide which way (and even whether) to act in these two scenarios? Even at many years' distance, that's hard to say.
One reason why is because I couldn't have foreseen the exact costs. And when the outcome—including the level of personal risk—isn't very clear, the best you can do is follow your gut. Back at Citi, I lost a job I'd loved, working with people I'd considered friends. One of my peers who left at about the same time was offered a severance package of $42 million; I was told not to let the door hit me in the ass.
There were other penalties for breaking ranks with the bigwigs in the industry that were harder to quantify. Sometimes, it's simply not possible to make ethical decisions that you know (or strongly suspect) will cost you your job because you literally can't afford to lose it. And I recognize that it can be easier to make "ethical" decisions when you know you can recover from getting fired. But even then, the career risks I was facing were considerable, even if couldn't predict precisely what they'd be.
Here's what I did know, though. The financial crisis, at bottom, was about investors' faith in banks: Would they be able to get their money back when they needed it? Once there's a crack in that belief, mistrust spreads, and banks eventually have to shut their doors—as some sure enough did. So my choice to go out on a limb in both situations wasn't strictly a matter of principle, though it was that, too. It was a way to communicate to investors that while the system had failed them, our particular institutions still deserved their faith. Once again, I thought, ethical business was good business. My colleagues didn't all agree.
So while checking your gut may sound simple, it was anything but. It came down to my sense of purpose as well as my sense of my industry's purpose; it wasn't about some abstract ethical theorem. I thought long and hard about why I had gotten into wealth management in the first place, and what my responsibilities there were.
And the answer wasn't that I got into the business simply to make a lot of money. It was because it was a business that I knew could have a positive impact on clients' lives, but at that time wasn't. It was because I found the content of the work to be fascinating. And then, yes, it was because I could do well financially in the process.
Until technology catches up with a solution to fix our productivity problems, you can use brain science to get more done.
"Our brains and bodies, which functioned perfectly for us up until the 20th century, can no longer keep up," says Harvard scientist David Bach, founder of the Platypus Institute, a research organization that studies the science of peak performance. "Industries used to take decades to evolve; today, they transform overnight. Staying ahead in a world morphing so quickly is nearly impossible."
It's no wonder brain rewiring is becoming a growing trend, with neuroplasticity conferences attracting more attendees every month, says Bach. "It's not like science fiction anymore; we're getting to the point where there is more and more usable and practical information that is making more of an impact in the world," he says. "Neuroscience can triple productivity. Who can afford not to use it?"
Athletes and military personnel have been studying and using techniques that can enhance human performance for years. "In the Olympics in Rio, 80% of the athletes were doing this kind of stuff to prepare," says Bach. "We're also seeing an increasing amount of investment and hedge fund brokers doing the same thing because the techniques can make traders better."
But there is no silver bullet. For example, SAFILOX has manufactured "smart" sunglasses that include a headband that measures brainwave activity that can provide the user with feedback and guidance for focus.
"The headband uses a little neuroscience, but none of the products available for corporate america right now are at the level of the iPhone," says Bach. "But it's an inevitability."
Until then, there are little things you can do to create a large impact on your productivity, and they're super easy, says Bach. He offers these two steps to get you started right now:
The biggest efficiency killer is stress, says Bach. "When people get stressed out it redirects the blood in their brain and turns off their prefrontal cortex," he says. "Our amygdala and adrenal glands start firing, and we go into fight or flight mode where our intelligence level drops to that of a monkey. You don't need deep thought when a mountain lion is attacking you."
In the executive arena stress reactions compromise judgment, but they're also unconscious. "Most of us know stress hurt you physically, such as in our immune systems, but many of us don't realize it impairs cognitive function," says Bach.
You can eliminate the harmful effects of stress on your brain by rewiring it to reduce chronic stress. "It has a surprisingly big impact on cognitive function without a lot of work," says Bach. "You can't reduce stress in the moment, but you can rewire your stress reaction so when you face your stimulus you relax instead of stressing."
He suggests a protocol called MIR, which stands for measure, interrupt, and replace:
Measure: First, become aware of and measure chronic stressful situations.
Interrupt: Next, redirect or interrupt the brain's automatic response, which is to go into stress mode under certain triggers.
Replace the reaction with another response, such as laughter or calm.
Imagine the situation and follow it with your positive response. You will need to repeat the process at least 200 times to interrupt the pattern and direct it to a new pathway. Replacing the reaction with something positive rewards the brain and releases dopamine.
"I worked with an executive who was working with her ex-husband and he would yell at her a lot," says Bach. "For three minutes each day she'd imagine her husband coming in and she would laugh. Thirty days later she had conditioned herself to have an automatic reaction to him, and she eliminated the stress."
Lighting has a big impact on brain function, and something as simple as having the wrong bulbs could be hurting your cognitive function, says Bach.
"Photo receptors in the brain for light can change your mental state," he says. "You want lots of blue light in morning in the office, because it gives you energy."
Bach suggests installing bright blue lights in your bathroom so you can have the light for your morning routine. "This will send a powerful signal to your body's master clock—telling it to wake up," he says. "If possible, it's also beneficial to expose yourself to natural light throughout the day. Research has found that call center employees process calls at a faster rate when near a window. In another study, heart attack patients were found to recover faster when exposed to plentiful natural light."
If you have fluorescent lighting in your office or home, get rid of it, says Bach. "Fluorescents flicker at about 150 flicks a second, and it's fast enough for the brain to detect," he says. "It consumes our brain resources, and cognitive function drops. No one should ever work in fluorescent light. Something as simple as changing the lighting can double your productivity."
A core insight around productivity is understanding that we go in and out of states of being, and certain states are more productive, says Bach. "Cultivate self awareness about how your productivity waxes and wanes during the day, and become aware of your patterns," he says. "These are opportunities. When you figure out how to recognize your positive states, you will enhance your productivity."
Human-focused software helped the World Economic Forum bring one of its core programs back to life. Could it work for your office too?
It's a tough time to be a Davos Man. Even during globalization's heyday, the World Economic Forum's annual summit was mocked for being out of touch, and this year is no different, with the spectacle of billionaires debating how to fix the middle class, and using Pokestops to remind attendees about global sustainability goals. The conventional wisdom is that the WEF's vision of free markets, falling borders, and globe-trotting do-gooders "is at best broken and at worst dead." The good news? As last year's summit proved, the "Davos Consensus" is invariably wrong.
Davos will survive, if only as a place to do deals. But this doesn't sit well with the World Economic Forum's paternalistic founder Klaus Schwab, who signed off several years ago on a plan to reinvent the organization from within. The Forum of Young Global Leaders, created in 2004, is the 800-strong group of thirty- and fortysomethings who are being groomed to save the world—or at least run it one day. Their ranks include Chelsea Clinton, Ivanka Trump, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Y Combinator's Sam Altman, and Noma chef René Redzepi. But as of a few years ago, these youngsters, like their elders, were in it mostly for themselves, the WEF feared. The group's mission of "improving the state of the world" had plateaued, partly because Schwab was telling them what they should think.
"We'd had some successful projects, but most members were either completely disengaged or only superficially involved to earn kudos," says the World Economic Forum's John Dutton, who took over the program in 2013.
Here, in a nutshell, was the paradox of Davos: What's the point of having a global conspiracy of overachievers if you don't use it?
So the World Economic Forum turned to a team of artists, designers, and data scientists to reinvent the program. The goal was to transform a clubhouse in the Alps into an incubator for social enterprise. And that's how Shaffi met Eli.
Shaffi Mather, founder of India's Ziqitza Health Care, claims to operate the largest ambulance company in the Global South. But that wasn't enough, so a few years ago, "I started thinking about emergency response in the other 90% of the world," where his network would never reach. Then at the 2013 Young Global Leader Summit in Myanmar, Mather found himself paired with Eli Beer, founder of United Hatzalah of Israel, which fields a free, motorcycle-riding fleet of more than 3,000 volunteer medics. They were part of a conversation circle including public health experts and VCs charged with creating what Mather had envisioned.
What they came up with is MUrgency, a global medical response network employing any means necessary to get doctors where they are needed the most. "It could be a nurse coming by bicycle, or a doctor arriving by Uber," Mather says. Three years later, MUrgency's medics have answered more than 300,000 emergency calls. Indian industrialist Ratan Tata personally invested in the service last spring, and Mather hints at an impending partnership with a "large emergency response organization" with 160,000 branches worldwide.
"I've been able to move ten times faster than if I didn't have this as a platform," says Mather, referring to his fellow Young Global Leaders.
This wasn't by accident. Mather and Beer weren't matched by chance. MUrgency's cast of characters were selected by software and then stage-managed by a team from The Value Web, a nonprofit network of facilitators who have worked with a who's who of nonprofits, ranging from UNICEF and the International Red Cross to the Indian government. With the World Economic Forum's blessing, they embarked on a three-year experiment to rewire the Young Global Leaders from a loose confederation of thought leaders into a tightly wound ideas factory—without the participants barely noticing.
Their secret weapon was the software created in conjunction with one of their teammates, Brandon Klein. Dubbed "People Science," his tool melds social network analysis and machine learning techniques to probe for hidden interests and connections between people, and then uses that information to generate new teams. That's how they knew to match Shaffi with Eli.
Crucially, Klein and his colleagues didn't limit themselves to LinkedIn profiles. Starting in 2013, at the Myanmar summit where the pair met, The Value Web's team began collecting granular data about the Young Leaders—not just who and what they knew, but how and why. They didn't limit themselves to careers or hobbies, either—they asked for the intimate details of their friendships, families, faith, and health.
All of this was then parsed by the software, which started connecting the not-always-obvious dots. The obvious thing would have been to create a members-only social network, or at the very least an app. No way, said Dutton. "They have enough apps. I'd rather they'd be present than distracted on their phones."
So the machine passed along these suggestions to The Value Web instead. Duly armed with this inside information, they began assembling teams with potential collaborations in mind. At conferences, they replaced the panel sessions that their Young Leaders would be tempted to skip (as their elders do habitually in Davos) with ad hoc exercises that fostered bonding. Afterwards, granular surveys asked participants for the names and context of everything they learned and everyone they met, to be fed back into the software once again.
Together, they created a high-tech-meets-high-touch formula for collaboration. Most remarkably, it didn't feel coercive or manipulative—members were given the space to discover what they had in common.
You can see the results for yourself. A network map at the onset of the program depicts a loosely coupled network surrounded by a sea of disconnected dots. (Interestingly, the best-connected members are objects of suspicion—it implies they're inveterate schmoozers.) Fast-forward to today, and you'll find a tightly knit lattice ready to get to work.
Before People Science: a loosely coupled network.
After People Science: a tightly-knit lattice.
More than 60 Young Global Leaders initiatives have been launched since 2015, compared to just two in the first decade of the program. While most wilted quickly, others persist—there's one group battling corruption in Sri Lanka (Apolitical), another planting urban farms in Newark (AeroFarms), and a third awarding prizes to startups tackling lower carbon emissions (Decarbonathon). Yet another offshoot, the philanthropic Maverick Collective, has mobilized $30 million to improve the health of 300,000 girls worldwide. As of last fall, 70% of the Young Global Leaders were collaborating on their own projects.
Klein would be the first to tell you this level of synergistic success is unheard of in corporate America, and he would know, having served until recently as the chief collaboration officer of UnitedHealth Group. There, he was charged with making more than 100,000 employees play well with others—a thankless task that prompted Klein to join The Value Web and launch Collaboration.AI, the company that runs People Science.
As he saw it, the World Economic Forum and its budding Davos Men and Women were the world's most self-actualized lab rats. The combination of their genuine desire to save the world and their proclivity to talk endlessly to each other and about themselves presented him with an array of potential experiments. His favorite was from Davos two years ago, run in conjunction with Wharton professor and Give and Take author Adam Grant.
One hundred of the Young Global Leaders were tasked with making asks and offers in a makeshift flea market for human capital. After distilling their responses on three separate passes of the machine, The Value Web's team in Davos herded them into smaller and smaller groups until the average size was four. This was profound, he said, for any number of reasons. For one thing, it meant that 96% of people in the room—or in your office, or at a conference—can't help you do much of anything. But they had created a machine, and a process, that could find the 4% who could help, and do it over and over again.
"Listen, only one in 25 people can help you, and how many people will meet today? Twenty-five at best," Klein said as I slurped miso soup for breakfast atop a skyscraper in Tokyo. Having only just arrived for the last day of the 2016 Young Global Leaders summit in late October, I asked him to fill me in on what I'd missed. The goal was to see People Science in action, but I quickly learned that it was like trying to observe a black hole—you could only spot the light escaping at its edges.
Upon arrival, for example, 600 or so of the Leaders, already sorted by his algorithm, had been subjected to a series of frivolous but rigorous icebreakers designed to separate them. "Because everyone wants to sit with their friends," he said, "and we have to break those cliques." Once malleable, they were reassigned to play Davos-themed rounds of Cards Against Humanity. ("Governments around the world were focused on [tiny hands], but [the first machine on machine conflict] caught them by surprise.") And if that didn't sufficiently boost their esprit de corps, the previous evening had ended with each team receiving a bus pass and metro map for a madcap dash across the city for dinner.
If these misadventures gave the conference the feel of the world's most rarified summer camp, well, that was intentional, too. "We're trying to create a storyline," explained Aaron Williamson, a board member of The Value Web and its leader on the ground in Tokyo. "A lot of our preparation focuses on 'what is the story?' Because events don't really become a part of us without that drama." In other words, you can use data to forge all the weak ties you want, but it's shared experiences that temper and strengthen them.
"How does a group of disparate people with different backgrounds from different countries come together to make a difference in the world?" he asked. "What decisions led to their impact?" If you can crack that code, maybe you could replicate it.
That was the deeper game, as Williamson described it. Sure, Bill Gates or Arianna Huffington attend Davos after they've ascended to the elite of the elites. But what if you could have followed their rise from mid-career, guiding and helping them help each other while identifying the patterns and relationships that made them successful? And once you had that, could you reverse-engineer the process?
The tone of Davos is an intoxicating mix of humble-bragging and overweening earnestnesses, and Tokyo was no different. At my prompting, conversations with Young Global Leaders quickly turned self-referential—they knew who was pulling the strings, and didn't mind so long as it worked.
As someone experienced in finding signals buried in the noise, Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño, who runs the World Bank's Big Data projects, understood why the WEF would want to foreground these connections. "How to quantify the value of the YGLs is something the Forum has struggled with," he said, "but to me, it's the indirect value that's huge. The compounding effect of connecting the right people could define the future of this enterprise. It could change your mind; it could change your life!"
A recurring theme in nearly every conversation was the overwhelming importance of "trust." By this, they meant two things. One is that everyone here was equal in their self-regard; there was no wasting time establishing they were, in fact, peers. The other was rooted in the storytelling Williamson had described. "The algorithm can't say: 'You people should talk—go!" insisted Valerie Keller, executive director of global markets at Ernst & Young. Each fervently believed Klein's software was necessary, but insufficient—that there was an irreducible human element it couldn't account for.
A particularly resonant example of this belief belonged to Geoff Davis, a veteran micro-financier who's worked closely with the movement's founder, Muhammad Yunus. His nomination as a Young Global Leader in 2007 coincided with an illness that nearly killed him. "I was weeks away from dying; my organs and systems had started shutting down," says Davis. After a year of secluded convalescence, the annual summit served as his reemergence. "I'd told a few people privately of what I'd endured and what I learned, and they insisted I tell the group," he recalled. "So, I stood and started tearfully describing it…"
Multiple Young Leaders I spoke to recalled it. Surely such raw emotions can't be crunched by an algorithm, much less reverse-engineered, right?
Wrong. The next morning on the Narita Express, Klein showed me the Matrix. "The health question is always my favorite," he said, as we took a tour of the database during the ride to the airport. There it was, one field among dozens nestled in the records for literally hundreds of the Young Global Leaders: "Have you or your family suffered a serious illness?" Bonding over brushes with death is one of Klein's strongest predictors of personal trust—and one of the best levers at his disposal. Even when he and his colleagues tried to generate teams with nothing obviously in common—as was the case on their sprint through Tokyo—the machine had silently matched them along such lines all the same.
Unleashing artificial intelligence on human relationships is one of the hallmarks of what the World Economic Forum calls the "Fourth Industrial Revolution," which was the subject of a talk in Tokyo by Schwab. "When everything is predicted and prescribed, what is the role of humanity?" he had asked plaintively.
I think the pairing of People Science with the hands-on techniques of The Value Web offers one answer. When that the digitally networked and biohacked revolution is realized, the value will lie in helping people make their own discoveries, face-to-face, and to do it smarter and faster.
"It's crazy how little time, energy, and money goes into convening people physically versus doing it online," said Lucian Tarnowski, yet another of the YGLs and the CEO of BraveNew, a corporate learning and sharing platform. "VCs might categorize the market Brandon or I are in as 'human resources,' or tell me the knowledge management market is worth so many billion dollars per year. But this is a totally new market—call it the 'potential gap' market—and it's so new it doesn't have a value yet."
The World Economic Forum, at least, is sold on the idea. Dutton's team is busy internalizing and refining The Value Web's methods at their behest (although it's probably too much to hope they'll use it at Davos 2018). For his part, Klein has taken Aaron Williamson's long-term view to heart, and is currently testing People Science at a high school in Minneapolis that his children might one day attend.
Working with teachers and the school's principal, they recruited students who self-identified as open-minded and diverse, as well as interested in designing their own curriculum. The only requirement is that they had to pick another student to join them in the class—one they didn't know, and who differed from them in age, race, or interests. For three months, they ran a sort of mini-Youth Global Leader summit, with rotating groups overhauling science and English and history classes, with one team visiting local authors and booksellers and even writing a book.
"We have to apply these principles to our own communities," said Klein. "Otherwise we're all going to keep going in the direction that we're going."
A people-focused, software-driven approach to building better teams and optimizing collaboration.
Life is a series of picking teams. Starting from the playground until now—from youth sports and college study groups through your first job, subsequent career, and all the projects you've ever been assigned—your personal success hinges on playing well with others. Who your teammates are is random at best, and typically guided by false assumptions.
But what if your arbitrary teammates were replaced by peers who challenge you, help you grow, and accelerate your career?
Building better teams is what I do; whether leading over 100,000 people through collaborative team and project work at the world's largest health care organization, or, as a member of the most prestigious facilitation group—The Value Web, and as the cofounder of Collaboration.AI, a new startup using social network analysis and artificial intelligence to discover deeper connections within teams. Through the combination of high-tech and high-touch methods, we've helped everyone from Harvard University to Oracle to the International Red Cross develop better teams. These methods are at the heart of our work for the World Economic Forum, in which we paired teams to generate new projects, rather than the other way around. That led to a 700% increase in member-led initiatives in the last three years alone.
So, how do we do it? You may be surprised to learn that the answer lies in uncovering and understanding the data of each individual. Easily the best tactic to assembling better teams is understanding all aspects of who your teammates are, so without judgment or pretense, you can begin helping them and they, you. To prove it, below is a quick summary of the method we've been using with the WEF and many other organizations over the last three years.
This may sound obvious but it can't be overstated: What is it you want the team to do? The first and most important step is to define the team's objectives as well as determine the talent you have to build the team. Successful projects depend on a combustible mix of complementary skill sets, diversity, and close ties—or a lack thereof. reveal how success is contingent upon the makeup of the entire production team, not just star performers.
Don't make the mistake of pegging someone as just their LinkedIn job history or their resume. If there's one thing we've learned from working with some of the world's highest overachievers, it's that there's no hard, bright line between the personal and professional, and that the former can be harnessed to build trust for the latter. Before social media, it used to be onerous (and too creepy) to factor in personal preferences, interests, charities, health, and even family when building tight-knit teams. And if betting the success of a project on a rigorous analysis of Facebook "likes" still sounds too risky, just ask them to answer a private, personal survey—as our social media addictions prove daily, most people love talking about themselves.
Many people race to the latest trend, cool chart, or productivity craze to organize their inputs. But it's important to first think about what information you actually need to gather. Look back at your Objectives and People to ensure you're including the inputs necessary to meet your team creation goals. For example, as a conference organizer, do you know why each participant is attending your event? If you are creating a "tiger team" at work, do you understand each individual's network so you can be sure they have the personal relationships necessary to bring about change? In charge of a change management program…do you know the individual triggers of change for each person to personalize their impending job shift?
"Design thinking" has become a four-letter word in some circles, and with good reason. I've lost count of how many times I've spoken to the architects of dysfunctional teams and failed projects who indignantly insist, "Oh, we did that." Yes, they analyzed flame wars fought over email and mapped the team's social network to definitively conclude how and when they were ostracized, but these results were never fed back into the process. Iteration is crucial to ultimate success.
The loudest or most senior person in the room typically has more input as to who should be on which team. Generally speaking, this is the core mistake most organizations make. Leaders need to get their hands dirty. Take a good hard look at how their "friends" are actually bottlenecks. Understand and use all of the data to inform team creation.
"At the end of the day people won't remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel," Maya Angelou wrote. Don't measure satisfaction scores on a scale of 1 to 5; measure how the participants actually feel about their experience. Who is still working together six months later? Which pairs of team members have spawned projects since? Whose email traffic to new people has steadily increased since the team disbanded? Measure broader networks, new ideas, personal impact, and greater productivity. And if measures don't exist, devise them.
Dissatisfied with the lack of team creation tools at our disposal, our team banded together to build the world's first team creation engine. Visit Collaboration.AI's Quick Connectors to start using your data to create great teams.
From insurance to construction to Hollywood, the specter of automation looms for some surprising jobs.
I was recently talking to a friend of mine who's an accountant. He has his own accounting firm and lives an upper-class lifestyle in the Chicago suburbs. As he's an accountant with an additional degree in economics, naturally the conversation veered to the future of the economy. He said he will happily pay for his daughter's college education, provided she won't pursue a degree in accounting.
This isn't the first time I've heard a parent say they don't want their child following in their career footsteps; a lawyer recently told me the same thing. And it's not because they feel they've been unsuccessful or that their career was too demanding. Indeed, both are relatively well off and have plenty of free time to spend with their families. It's because they feel future job prospects in their fields are bleak due to one thing: automation.
My accountant and lawyer friends are right to steer their children away, says Phil Burton-Cartledge, program leader for sociology at the University of Derby in the U.K. "When it comes to advice about higher education, I'd recommend students go for more generalist as opposed to specialist degrees, whether in the human, natural, or computer sciences. A broad range of skills and competencies is the best way to future-proof people for the challenges coming down the line," he says.
But it's not just professionals in the legal and accounting sectors that will see jobs disappear due to automation. Knowledge workers, retail, and manual laborers will also see their job prospects decline. Here are the jobs that could be hit the worst.
The effects of automation on the insurance industry are already being felt. In Japan, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance has recently replaced 30 of its medical insurance claims reps with an AI system based on IBM's Watson Explore, reports the Guardian. The software can "analyze and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio, and video" better and faster than a human can, and can "drastically reduce" the time needed to calculate Fukoku Mutual's payouts, according to a company representative.
First it was the ATM that ate into human banking jobs, then the smartphone app. It's likely that many of the remaining human-based teller and representative banking jobs will be finished off by AI, reports CNBC. AI won't just be able to conduct cash transactions, it will be able to open accounts and process loans at a fraction of the cost and time it takes for human employees. "The ATM of tomorrow is going to replace the teller," Andy Mattes, CEO of financial software company Diebold told the network. "It can do approximately 90% of what the human being can do, and it's going to be your branch in a box."
Once thought indispensable to a company, keen-eyed financial analysts could spot a trend before it happened, allowing institutions to adjust their portfolios and potentially make billions of dollars. But human financial analysts can no longer compete with artificially intelligent financial analysis software that can read and recognize trends in historic data to predict future market moves. It's no wonder that financial analyst jobs could be the worst hit in the estimated 30% of banking sector jobs lost to AI in the next five to 10 years.
Manual labor jobs are also under threat by automation. Robotic bricklayers will soon be introduced to construction sites that enable the machines to replace two to three human workers each, reports Technology Review. SAM (Semi-Automated Mason) can lay up to 1,200 bricks a day, compared to the 300 to 500 a human can do. While a human is still required to work with SAM to complete the more nuanced tasks, the use of SAM reduces the need for the three other bricklayers it would take to do the same job. Other on-site construction jobs such as crane operators and bulldozer drivers can also expect to see their positions filled by AI-controlled machines in the next decade.
The supermarket employee restocking the cans in aisle three may soon no longer be a person. As robots become more advanced, they are capable of performing actions that previously required a pair of eyeballs, such as managing inventory on a store shelf. Once such robot called the Tally is designed to audit shelves for out-of-stock items, misplaced items, and pricing errors, reports Inverse. Tally roams the aisles and uses multiple sensors to scan the shelves, alerting human staff of its findings.
While robots like Tally can cost retailers tens of thousands up front, chains stand to save hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars over the long run because, unlike humans, robots don't get sick, need holidays, require a 401(k) payment, and can be retrained in an instant with a simple software update.
Farmers are being replaced by artificially intelligent robots that can do everything from milk cows to pull lettuce. A family-owned dairy farm in Germany is one of the first to install Voluntary Milking System robots that allow cows to walk up to the machines at their leisure when they want to be milked, reports Modern Farmer. And more than 1 million of the U.S.'s farmhands could see their jobs replaced by intelligent machines that do everything from weed cabbage patches to pick apples, reports Quartz.
While traditional taxi drivers may be feeling the pinch from the likes of Uber and Lyft, drivers of all three will see their jobs dry up as autonomous vehicles hit the road. And it's the ride-share companies who can't wait to rush their drivers out of the car. As Uber's CEO has said, its service would be a lot more inexpensive and its profits much greater if you weren't "paying for that other dude in the car." In the next 10 years, cities across the world will have fleets of self-driving taxis. Uber is testing such vehicles and Singapore is the first country to already put up to a dozen on the roads.
A common refrain you hear from populist politicians the world over is that they will bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. But that's never going to happen. Even China, the country where the majority of the world's manufacturing jobs exist, will see its human manufacturing workforce depleted by robots in the near future. As a matter of fact, it's already happening. Foxconn, the manufacturer who makes everything from iPhones to Xboxes, recently replaced 60,000 workers with robots.
Sadly, not even my job is safe. It turns out writing is not a problem for AI. In 2014, the Associated Press began to use intelligent software to write quarterly earnings reports. Up to 3,000 reports are being written by AI every quarter, the Verge reported. It's entirely feasible that content sites of the future could exist without any human writers at all.
It's possible that we could see actors looking as young in movies as they did when they first debuted on the big screen. Recently, Hollywood has taken a liking to advanced CGI techniques that allow even deceased actors to be resurrected from the dead—the most notable example being Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarkin CGI resurrection in Rogue One: a Star Wars Story. In the same 2016 movie, Carrie Fisher also appeared as the 21-year-old Princess Leia from the 1977 Star Wars film. It's possible that if both studios and audiences embrace the CGI resurrection technology, there will be fewer jobs for new potential movie stars in the future as the same beloved stars of today (and yesterday) could keep staring and "acting" in big blockbusters for decades to come. Matter of fact, the use of CGI to bring actors to the big screen was recently the subject of an excellent sci-fi flick called The Congress, starring Robin Wright as herself.
Is the world going to become a place in which automation is everywhere yet employment is scarce? Burton-Cartledge says it all depends on the kinds of policies governments deploy to manage this problem.
"Presently, automation is proceeding at a relatively slow pace because labor markets are loose and supply is plentiful," he says. "However, if the incoming U.S. president and the current U.K. government decide to restrict immigration, the market becomes tighter. Similarly, the baby boomer generation are retiring and withdrawing from the workplace, and the generational cohorts following them are less numerous. With tighter labor markets, wage pressures are likely to build, and the solution to protect profits is to invest in more automation. Therefore the worst case is sharpening unemployment."
But there is hope. Burton-Cartledge says that people who choose careers, such as in the creative, technology, or health care industries, in which the building of or decision making about relationships are central, will thrive during the next wave of automation. And then there are the policies governments could adopt to avoid or at least mitigate the problems automation will bring.
"One would be the introduction of a basic income payable to all citizens that would give people independence from work as a means of making a living—and give them more freedom to take risks, such as starting a new business," says Burton-Cartledge. "Or alternatively, the benefits of automation could be shared by reducing the workweek. If automation means higher productivity, do we need people working 40-hour weeks alongside masses of people who can't find work?"
A shorter work week? Maybe automation isn't that bad.
This cleaner, faster desktop version of LinkedIn makes it easier to read news, connect with people, and spruce up your profile.
Does it feel like the desktop-browser version of LinkedIn hasn't changed that much in recent years? That's because it hasn't, at least when it comes to its overarching look and feel. The site got its last sweeping redesign back in 2012; everything since then has been incremental and evolutionary.
Today, however, the kingpin of business-oriented networking—now officially part of Microsoft—is unveiling a significant desktop redesign. For all that's changed, it may feel familiar: It's a more expansive version of the mobile-browser version of LinkedIn that launched in late 2015, and also brings the desktop incarnation of the service more in line with its apps. (The company first teased this update at a press event last September, and is starting to roll it out to users now.)
"We knew we were going to bring the same product and architecture to desktop," says Chris Pruett, senior director, engineering. "Most of the effort has been in embracing what we did in mobile web."
In terms of features, the new site consists of all the stuff that's already part of LinkedIn, including business people and their profiles; content such as posts and links to articles; job listings; and a messaging service. It's just that the site aims to present it all in a more engaging way that will increase the likelihood that you'll want to visit more often and hang out longer when you do. "We're bringing communications and content to the forefront," says Amy Parnell, senior director of user experience and design. "It's a much more focused experience."
Up until now, LinkedIn has felt less like one site than a loosely integrated collection of them, with a look and feel that wavered considerably from section to section. The new version is much more streamlined and coherent, organizing all sorts of content—from news items to job listings—into streams that look like they belong on the same site.
Under the surface, the company says that the new version is using a reengineered engine built with snappy performance in mind—so it feels less like a series of web pages loading and more like an app. The app-like aspirations are also apparent in the new pop-up messaging window, which resembles Facebook Messenger more than the previous version's email-like interface.
The previous desktop version of LinkedIn, based on a design that dates to 2012
Throughout the site, LinkedIn has tried to make it more obvious why you'd care about an item and what you might do with it—something that, in previous versions of the service, has not always been a cakewalk. "People know they should use LinkedIn, but they may not know why," explains Pruett. "This redesign should help them answer that question."
Calls-to-action such as "Say Congrats," "View Jobs," and "Say Happy Birthday" are now everywhere. When the site tells you about someone's new job, it also notes what that person's old job was—a helpful hint if you need a nudge to recall why you're connected to someone in the first place.
Endorsements for skills like "content strategy" or "reputation management" now spotlight specific contacts who have a real background in the subject they're praising someone for, which could make them feel less like a recommendation mill of questionable value. "We're teasing out the person highly skilled in that particular thing as the primary endorser," says Parnell.
Other nuggets in profiles are now summarized so that they don't devolve into a data dump, even if there are a lot of them. "I have someone on my team who has 50 patents," says Pruett. "Literally, you'd just scroll through 50 patents."
LinkedIn may be a site about work, but its designers wanted the new version to feel less like work. Traditionally, the counter for pending invitations has shown the total count of invites that you haven't either accepted or declined—a figure that can be pretty imposing if you're not a fastidious type. (Mine currently stands at 201—sorry, everybody.) Henceforth, however, it will only show the number of invites that have arrived since your last visit, which should be less intimidating.
As for the classic LinkedIn profile, the company hopes that its more approachable design will encourage users to flesh theirs out rather than leave them in neglected, skeletal form. On the way is an AI-powered feature—originally designed for mobile use—that will compose a summary of your work experience rather than making you write one from scratch.
If the longevity of the previous desktop site is any indication, this one might be around for a while. Pruett says that it's been engineered to allow LinkedIn to get new code in front of users within three hours of the time it's complete, and do that three times a day. The company plans to take that as an opportunity to introduce new features at a faster clip—which means that its impact will be seen as much in the LinkedIn of tomorrow as in the fresher look that's premiering today.
