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Five Creative Ways These Freelancers Landed Gig Work

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Some freelancers find work in unexpected places, from Tinder dates to Facebook posts.

According to a recent study by Upwork and the Freelancers Union, the most common places for freelancers to pick up work are friends and family (36%), professional contacts (35%), and online job platforms (29%) like Upwork, Freelancer.com, Guru, and even Craigslist.

This breakdown spells trouble for some. American workers looking for projects on online marketplaces, for instance, are often competing with workers who live in countries where the dollar is strong. That means many foreign workers can accept far lower rates. If you can hire someone to transcribe an interview for $3 an hour, you aren't giving that contract to a freelancer charging $15.

So where else can freelancers find work? Just ask these five, who picked up gigs in some unexpected places.

1. Tap Your Dating Life

Joy Yap found freelance work by unintentionally mixing business with pleasure. She went on a Tinder date with an entrepreneur who was just about to launch a company.

They didn't hit it off romantically, Yap recalls. But, remembering her line of work, the entrepreneur reached out a couple months later with an offer to do some freelance marketing for his startup. "I agreed!" she says. "I've been doing freelance work for him off and on for about a year now, and saw the company grow from inception into a million dollar company today."

Anyone who's used an app like Tinder knows that modern dating often involves a little harmless cyber-stalking to gather extra intel on the person you've just met or are planning to meet. "One funny way I got a client on Fiverr," says Alex Genadinik, referring to the gig marketplace, "was from a girl I was dating about a year ago. Early on during our dating, she and her friends decided to Google my name, which is very unique, and my Fiverr profile was one of the things that came up in their search."

The woman and her friends shared Genadinik's Fiverr profile with someone they knew who was looking for his line of freelance work, and the two ended up striking a deal. "All along I thought he was just a regular client that randomly found me on the internet," says Genadinik. It was only months later that the woman let him know she'd played professional matchmaker. "[It] was pretty embarrassing for me because everyone was clued in except me," Genadinik says, but hey—he got the work.

2. Advertise In Real Time

If you're a freelancer, chances are you've sat at coffee shops with your nose in your laptop. So why not let passersby know exactly what you're doing and that you're available for hire? Shayla Price says she landed a gig by creating and placing a makeshift placard saying "freelance writer" in front of her computer while working at Starbucks and other public places. Price says she's received a few inquiries every time she whips out the placard.

3. Email The CEO Directly

"I've been obsessed with a large, multinational hair care brand for many years now," says Termeh Mazhari, "so when I became a freelancer, I decided to just email the CEO directly."

Going straight to the source may sound like a waste of time—execs usually aren't the ones hiring contractors. But in Mazhari's case, it paid off. "I told her about myself and the value I could bring to the company, and to my great surprise her assistant wrote me back and arranged a meeting with the CEO at their posh Manhattan office!"

What's more, Mazhari landed more than just a tiny one-off project this way. "I ended up getting a year-long consulting gig with the brand, even though they already had a large internal PR team as well as multiple external agencies working with them."

4. Hustle For Facebook Shout-Outs

After Stephanie Moore got laid off, she decided freelance full time and turned to Facebook to market her services.
"It started with one client . . . that I met through Facebook. She was very popular with a national brand," Moore recalls, so she decided to attend one of the client's networking events. There, Moore told her she wanted to "shift my focus from marketing and design to PR," and the client "agreed to be my guinea pig."

Their bargain went like this: "After each big accomplishment," Moore says, "she would shout me out on Facebook as her publicist. Every time she tagged me, there was a guaranteed client on the way. All of her friends and potential clients began to reach out and ask for press releases, designs, etc. The more work I did, the more tagging I would get." By tapping into one happy client with the influence to amplify Moore's work, offers began piling up. "People would post my designs tagging me in the post, almost bragging that Stephanie Moore did it."
Like another "solopreneur" who recently shared her method with Fast Company, Moore never thought Facebook could drive so much of her business—95% of which she now estimates comes from the social network.

5. Tell Prospects What Their Competitors Are Up To

If one company is looking for services, then their competitors are probably looking, too—or will want to as soon as they learn of it.

"I had one company contact me for a strategic marketing plan for the upcoming year," recalls freelancer Stephen Twomey. He saw that as not just one potential opportunity but several. "I knew they were looking at other consultants as well."

"So, since I knew company A was looking for something, I contacted companies B, C, [and] D and mentioned that one of their main competitors was looking for strategic marketing consulting"—without mentioning which one. Twomey says "Company A ended up going with a different [contractor], but company C actually bought a consulting package."

The services you offer may not belong in a creative field, but it still often takes ingenuity to land those gigs in the first place. For just about every freelancer, thinking outside the box can really pay off.


Anne Loehr is a sought-after keynote speaker, writer, consultant, and trainer. She helps leaders in large organizations connect their everyday decisions today to the workplace of tomorrow. Follow Anne on Twitter at @anneloehr.


Why The Plaza Hotel's Business Etiquette Lessons Are Selling Out

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Think you know how to sit properly, tie a modern knot, and maintain proper eye contact? Think again.

I made several mistakes within my first minute.

My posture was poor (I leaned too far back in my chair), my leg crossing was incorrect (ladies cross at the ankles, not thighs), and I was not properly aligned to the dining table (you should be a hands-width away).

I did, however, pass the wardrobe test (thanks, J.Crew holiday sale), so I had that going for me.

I was having tea at The Plaza with Myka Meier, founder and director of the Beaumont Etiquette school. Meier has launched The Plaza Hotel Finishing Program with the iconic New York City hotel. It's where business enthusiasts, mostly in their 20s and 30s, can go to learn manners.

Amid the high ceilings and gilded halls, students can take an hour-long course ($75) or five-hour-long intensives ($599). Class topics range from networking to dining and social interaction, all within continental etiquette standards. These are all things that some American millennials, raised in a rather casual culture, feel they're lacking.

Myka Meier

"The most important thing about etiquette, especially in business, is showing respect," explains Meier. "It's about being kind, thoughtful, and respectful to everyone around you." Beaumont instructors will teach you how to shake hands (two pumps of the hand in business, three socially), introduce colleagues, tie a modern knot, navigate a wine menu, and even start a conversation (never, ever start with, "So what do you do?").

They even have a whole bit on how to enhance eye contact, which is a "huge issue," says Meier. "You need to connect with someone right from the beginning," she stresses, "otherwise you're not going to make the sale."

Many enrolled in the program know the basics of etiquette but lack the certainty to fully execute on the spot. For example, one might feel pretty sure they know which fork to pick up during a specific meal course, but hesitate until they see someone else do so. Beaumont gives them the confidence to stop pausing.

It also gives them the tools to attract whatever it is they want in business—be it more clients, a higher position, or better rapport with colleagues. For that, they need charm. As Meier says, the most successful people are the most charming.

"You can learn charm," promises Meier. "Charm is all about evoking positive emotion."

While it all might sound a little old-fashioned, Meier is quick to point out that "this is not your grandmother's etiquette class." She gives it a modern spin infused with practical, relevant advice. Sprinkled within the courses are rules on how to email, whether or not to text emojis to your boss, and the best way to navigate your tech life according to the expectations of business leaders.

With digital life growing at an alarming speed, so too is modern etiquette evolving. In fact, as society loses more social interaction, one could argue etiquette becomes even more relevant. Text language is bleeding into email, personal lives are laid open on social media, and employees are tagging their superiors instead of engaging in conversation.

"The more time goes by, the more we're relying on our devices," notes Meier. "And the more we are used to working online, the less confident we are when we walk into a room to network."

Meier sees a generation that has become more careless and lax in their business behavior. Uncouth. We might have more conference calls these days, "but you still need to be on time to a Skype call," explains Meier. "It's just as important."

So far, the response from attendees has surpassed Meier's expectations. The intensive workshops sold out within 24 hours, with a 60/40 split between women and men. A recent class had participants from all over the country—from California to Alabama—with 15% signed up for the entire series.

Meier partially credits the high interest in etiquette to the perception that Britain's young royals have made it "cool again." There's also the popularity of shows such as Downton Abbey and Netflix's The Crown, which portray aristocratic habits as chic and aspirational.

Students get more than just interactive feedback on how to change their business behavior. They also get the chance to network. Students repeatedly stick around to chat up their fellow students, grabbing drinks in the storied hotel lobby. "That has been huge," remarks Meier.

Beaumont Etiquette founder and director Myka Meier teaches a course on business etiquette at The Plaza in New York City.

Some clients are so inspired that they send their whole teams or departments for a refresher—or to be completely revamped. HR and law firms often request Meier send her instructors to teach a course in-house. They all, she says, realize business manners "can make or break your professional development."

With such groups, instructors send around a box of anonymous questions that usually jump-start some enjoyable team building. Employees put anonymous "annoyances" into a box, which instructors address (attendees usually admit to being the cause of any which "annoyance").

"It usually turns into a few good chuckles," says Meier. "The whole point is to make them realize they will get a lot out of this course . . . It's a safe environment, I'm not going to go back to your bosses!"

Meier was trained by a former member of the Royal Household of Her Majesty the Queen, and attended multiple finishing schools in England, Japan, and Switzerland. She worked in London at a global communications firm, in which she helped U.S. based-companies adjust to European modes of communication—basically, she taught them international etiquette. There she constantly dealt with corporate horror stories, like a prospect who went through the initial rounds of interviews but blew it after being dismissive of waiters at lunch (a glimpse at how they could treat their staff) or spitting food while speaking (a preview of a client's experience).

After seven years, she finally decided to strike out on her own. In 2013, Meier launched Beaumont in London, followed by New York City in 2014. In New York, she continuously brought clients to The Plaza because she trusted their basics of etiquette. She was there so often that the partnership between The Plaza and Beaumont was an organic one. It was like she was already part of their establishment.

At first glance, it seems obvious—the new mom looks like the female embodiment of The Plaza: polished, charming, and perfectly dressed. There's not one hair out of place. Meier, in essence, is like Eloise, if Eloise was forced to grow up and get a job. The young entrepreneur reasoned it was silly for Americans to fly overseas for etiquette training—they needed a stateside school. She saw the U.S. market specifically ripe for such an establishment because culturally, Americans haven't valued etiquette as much as other countries.

Myka Meier hopes to bring a fresh and modern perspective to etiquette, restoring a lost art form to the U.S. business industry.

"[Americans] are finally realizing how important it is," she stressed, noting its place in international dealings. "It's often the small details."

In that sense, Beaumont can teach more than general international manners—instructors can create bespoke private classes to help you target a specific country. If you're going to Switzerland, you should know how many times they kiss on the cheek, or where to place one's wrists during business lunches. Such details vary country to country.

There are some, however, who might question the need for such a thing at a time when Alexa can answer everything. Can't the internet provide this service? To that, says, Meier, tread carefully.

"Google can be a dangerous thing," she warns. "You get a hundred different opinions."

As Meier sees it, getting professional etiquette help no longer has a stigma attached, so you might as well trust the pros. In person, she says, instructors can observe you, mold you, and correct you.

In fact, etiquette has become so fashionable and necessary that it's extended beyond the millennial market. Starting this spring, The Plaza will introduce Beaumont classes for children ages 5 to 17. There, the future of America will learn how to make eye contact, correctly refer to adults, and also, like the rest of us, learn to identify multiple forks at the dinner table.

Moving forward, Meier has big plans for Beaumont. The Plaza might be the perfect building to house her style of etiquette, but she has her eye on new outposts.

"We have gotten many requests to open in new cities," she says, citing a specifically large number from California. "Etiquette is becoming trendy again."

Indeed.

This Seven-Step Guide For Dishing Out Feedback Is Totally Idiot-Proof

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Keep this in your back pocket, first-time managers.

Giving critical feedback isn't easy, especially if you're new at it. But it doesn't need to be half as hard as many managers think. The main thing is to keep it short and specific. Every good feedback conversation has to accomplish three goals:

  1. Draw attention to the issue
  2. Create a two-way dialogue about it
  3. Inspire and confirm the commitment to new behavior

How do you do all that as efficiently as possible, without leading to hurt feelings? These seven steps can help you map out a script, no matter how sticky the situation or unfamiliar the experience.

1. Initiate The Conversation

Start things off respectfully. The usual feedback advice is for the person giving the feedback to ask for permission first—and that's often a good idea. For example: "Can we talk about what happened this morning?" Feedback is best received when you've been welcomed to provide it.

Sometimes, though, this approach is less than ideal. You may need to be more direct. But even if you skip asking permission, you can establish respect. You might say, "I need to talk with you today. Is this a convenient time, or would you prefer this afternoon?"

Whichever approach you take, just make sure to have the chat as close to the moment of concern as possible. Don't wait three days to address something that happened this morning. Take care of it at the first opportunity.

2. Share What You've Noticed

Share your concern or observation. When you do, get straight to the point, but use an expression that makes it clear these are your observations.

"I've noticed there are paint drips on the floor when you leave the job site."

"I've heard some of your support calls, and I've noticed you don't connect as well as you could with customers."

"I noticed that you arrived pretty late this morning."

3. Back It Up With Specifics

Never make a generic observation and leave it at that. Provide specific, supporting evidence you can see.

"In the last two homes you painted, there were splatters on the hardwood in the dining room and on the rug in the baby's room."

"When the customer told you he was calling to disconnect his line because his spouse had died, you didn't express any empathy. You just said you'd be happy to disconnect the line."

"Our meeting was scheduled for 9:00, and you arrived a little past 9:30."

4. Let Them Explain How They See It

After you present the situation, your team member needs a chance to talk. Ask a question in a neutral, curious tone to allow her to share any relevant information. Generally, "What happened?" is all it takes to get the other person's view of the situation.

"What happened in those rooms?"

"What happened on that call?"

"What happened that put you behind schedule?"

There might very well be an understandable reason for the poor performance you've noticed. Maybe the person showed up late because of a car accident. (If so, make sure she's okay and don't carry the feedback conversation any further.)

5. Share The Problem-Solving

Once he's had a chance to share his thoughts, invite him to solve the problem. Start by reviewing your expectations, then ask for his thoughts on how to meet them. If he can't come up with an effective solution, you can provide specific suggestions on how the employee could improve—but by that point, you've already made it clear you're working together on the issue and making recommendations, not just dictating orders.

"Please put down a drop cloth every time you paint. You should also use masking tape to protect the molding from drips."

"I suggest you take another moment or two just to listen to what the customer is really saying. Ask yourself what emotion they've shared, pause, and express your empathy before you jump into action."

"You might want to give yourself 30 minutes for a client call before your next appointment."

Sometimes you might discover that the employee simply needs more training.

6. Make Sure They Get It

You're not done yet. Ask one or two open-ended questions to check for understanding, and a third yes-or-no question to secure their commitment.

1. "How would your results change if you did that every time?"

2. "What concerns do you have about this approach?"

3. "Can you stick with this from here on out?"

Then end with a fourth question, asking your team member to summarize what you've just agreed to:

4. "Could you please recap for me what you'll do next time?"

7. Explain Why It Matters

In order to make the new behavior stick, you need to explain why it's important and express confidence that your employee can do it.

"Keeping homes clean throughout the painting process is part of the service we deliver. That's why you've got to do a quality job."

"I'll check back with you on your next three calls to listen for those empathy statements. We can work on that together if we need to."

"I'll see you at 9:00 a.m. for next week's meeting. You're an important member of the team, and we don't make the best decisions without you."

You might conclude with:

"I'm confident you can do this really well."

"I appreciate you taking the time to make this happen."

"Thanks for your commitment on this one."

One of the main reasons other types of feedback chats don't lead to changed behaviors is because the conversation goes on too long or the employee forgets what they need to do. This formula can help keep things short, specific, and concise—so you'll see results every time.


This article is adapted from Winning Well: A Manager's Guide to Getting Results Without Losing Your Soul by Karin Hurt and David Dye. It is reprinted with permission.

Four Easy Ways To Reboot Your Relationship With Your Boss This Year

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Don't get lost in the daily routine. Make sure you're always deepening your manager's trust in you.

Maybe you've been at your job for just a few months. Maybe you've been there for a few years. Either way, once you slip into a comfortable routine, it's easy to take your foot off the gas without realizing it.

You might not be coasting through the work you do. Perhaps you're even digging into your latest project really intensely—and that's a good thing. But it only increases the chances that you may be neglecting your relationships around the office, starting with your boss.

Now that the adjustment period after the holidays—aka "January"—is behind you, it's time to take a fresh look at how you've been interacting with your boss to see if you can invigorate your relationship. As career coaches are always saying, you need to make yourself indispensable, not just reliable; "satisfactory" never got anybody promoted.

Here are four things you can do to right now to remind your boss why they just can't live without you.

1. Do Something Important That You Weren't Asked To Do

In any job, it's really easy to fall into trap of project- or work-management, where you're just slogging through your tasks in order to keep things on track. The daily responsibilities pile up, and it's your job to make sure everything gets done well and on time. Once one task is completed, you move onto the next one—probably hoping for praise on the thing you'd just finished and looking for guidance on the one you're about to start.

But neither comes, and you start to get worried that your efforts are going unnoticed. Your solution here is to pick a task that's a little outside of your normal work—one that matters to the business. The employee who's most likely to catch the eye and ear of the boss is the one who creates, plans, and executes a valuable initiative that nobody requested.

The challenge here is that you need to find something you have the skills and time to actually pull off. But it may not be as difficult as you think. Maybe it's as simple as finding a new way of organizing your meeting calendar, or a modest cost savings program that still makes a difference to your team's budget.

Your manager might not be able to weigh in on every project you tackle, but every boss is on the lookout for people who can think in ways that positively impact the organization, both inside and out. Those who can are eventually rewarded. One caveat here: When you're looking for improvements you can make, just be sure not to disparage the way something is being done that you want to change. Pose it as a question, like, "What do you think of me taking a closer look this month as how we're organizing customer feedback? I think I can come up with some ways to streamline it."

Once you get your boss's support, make sure you follow through. You'll be thought of in a different light, and you'll also put your career on a faster track to move up in the organization.

2. Mentor A Subordinate

Take a new hire or somebody on your team who's at a position a few rungs beneath you under your wing. Why? First, it will get that employee trained and up to speed faster than your boss might've expected. Second, it will free up your manager's time to take on other tasks while knowing that an important team member is being trained and mentored.

Best of all, your leadership skills will be on full display when you offer some pointers and help them develop their own skills. Not everybody has innate leadership abilities, but even many people who do just don't have the chance to show them off. Mentoring a team member is one great way to give yourself that chance, and get noticed for it.

3. Master The Easy Stuff

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Think again. It's amazing how the easiest parts of your job can cause the most frustration—not just for you but for your boss and your whole team—when it isn't done well, or is done "just okay." Little headaches in your everyday workflow can really jam things up. So if you're looking for an easy reset button to hit where you and your boss are concerned, take a fresh look at your day-to-day tasks: Whatever it takes to move things along, become a perfectionist at it.

Your boss wants to know that you'll accept nothing less than perfection every single time they assign you a task or project. The less your manager has to go back and glance over your work, the better. That way, you'll be able to ask for more more challenging stuff, and your boss won't have any qualms about giving it to you.

4. Think A Step (Or Three) Ahead

Thinking ahead is a gift you can give your boss pretty much every day. The best way to do it isn't to think about what happens when your role on a task or project ends, but what happens next—after you've handed it off to somebody else.

In just about every job imaginable, most actions are linked to other actions, so the best thing you can do is think through the linkage before your role on the chain is finished. Many employees stop the process short of the end, thinking that they've already come to it, then hand something off that isn't always in the best shape. But the real end is when all of the ramifications of the work have been accounted for and there's no further action to take.

Your goal is simply to show your boss that you grasp the complete picture. To do that, try and think of some ways you can adapt what you're asked to do in a way that helps people further down the line. These can be small tweaks to your process, but if you lighten the load of the next person who'll have to take over what you've finished working on, you'll be thanked for it.

It's easy to think of your relationship with your boss as just an interpersonal thing—your rapport, how well you communicate, and so on. But it's shaped by the work you do together day in and day out, which means that some of the best ways to get noticed (for the right reasons) are hidden in plain sight.


Don Raskin is a senior partner at MME, an advertising and marketing agency in New York City. He is also the author of The Dirty Little Secrets of Getting Your Dream Job.

Your Cheat Sheet To Negotiating These Five Perks With Your Next Job Offer

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If they aren't budging on salary, here are five other perks to ask for—and how to ask for them.

So you finally landed that big job offer. Congratulations! But don't break open the bubbly just yet. It's time to gear up for the tricky negotiation phase that often takes place before the deal is officially sealed.

And we're not just talking salary, either. Sure, it's important to negotiate your base pay, because what you take home today can impact your future earnings. But remember, "Your salary is not the only 'benefit' from your job," says certified career coach Hallie Crawford.

So quash those nerves and don't be afraid to talk about what additional compensation, perks, or benefits could really boost your job satisfaction. After all, "Employers expect you to negotiate," says Vicki Salemi, an author and career expert with Monster. Plus, asking for and getting these things will feel light years' harder after you're already locked into your position, she adds.

That said, if you've only ever negotiated the salary figure on your offer letter and nothing else, you may not even realize what other potential benefits are on the table. So we've lined up five often-overlooked areas below—and offer tips on how to confidently make the ask.

1. A Sparkling Signing Bonus

Once you've negotiated a salary to your liking, Salemi suggests immediately turning your attention to a signing bonus; they've become more common in recent years. "I've seen more people asking for it—and rightly so," she says.

A 2016 survey from the human resources association WorldatWork, which surveyed respondents from the finance, manufacturing, consulting, and IT sectors, found that 76% of organizations had a sign-on bonus program. Most of the bonuses were a fixed-dollar amount, though some companies used a percentage of the salary offered.

How to make the ask. For the sake of holding onto a bargaining chip, chances are good that the human resources rep isn't at liberty to bring up a signing bonus or offer up the max amount that's been allotted—unless you bring it up first. So it's up to you to kick off the conversation by asking if a signing bonus is available. "I can't tell you how many times, as a recruiter, we had a signing bonus on the table, but people just didn't ask for it," Salemi says. "You always need to ask."

If it turns out the company doesn't have a signing bonus program, you can always use that fact as leverage to push for other perks.

2. The Timing Of Your Next Raise

It may seem hasty to ask about your next pay bump when you haven't even stepped foot inside your new office. But "find out right off the bat when the increase will be," Salemi suggests, because whether you're eligible for a raise in six months or 16 can drastically affect your future income.

How to make the ask. Ask how often employees are evaluated for a salary increase, which can vary from quarterly performance check-ins to the traditional annual review. If it's the latter, clarify whether your hiring date makes the cutoff for the next round of assessments, which Salemi says could be tied to a fiscal year that starts in April rather than January.

If the next time you'd be eligible for a raise wouldn't happen for more than 12 months, see if there's room to move up the date. No such luck? Try to boost your starting salary. "Say, 'Well, since I won't be getting an increase for 15 months, can you add 2% or 3% [to my base salary now]?'" Salemi suggests.

And don't forget to ask how your performance will be measured so you can set goals for yourself and know how to exceed them, Salemi adds. Not only will you be gaining clarity on how to earn that next pay bump, you'll also be showing your commitment to excel in your new role.

Related:The Right Way To Ask For A Raise—And Get What You Deserve

3. Extra Paid Time Off

Whether you're a parent who needs weekday flexibility or a world traveler who stockpiles vacation days for epic trips, paid time off (PTO) can be as valuable as currency if it means you'll still get paid, whether you take a personal day to chaperone a kindergarten field trip or mosey the Medina of Marrakech.

Most new employees are given 16 paid time-off days, according to a WorldatWork survey. But if upping that PTO allotment is a priority for you, you're in luck. "As a former recruiter, that was the easiest thing to get approved every single time," Salemi says.

How to make the ask. First, know how many vacation days you're allowed, then ask how additional days are accrued. Is it on an annual basis? Or is it based on seniority, such as getting five extra days a year after you've received a promotion? You don't want to overstep boundaries by requesting the amount of vacation reserved for the executive suite, but asking for a few days on top of what you were offered may be easy for your employer to grant—especially if they're not budging on salary, Crawford says.

4. Freedom To Work From Home

Working remotely is one perk that's also been growing in popularity, thanks to technology that allows you to jump on a conference call with Tokyo before delivering a client report to Denver.

Not having to step into a brick-and-mortar office every day of the week won't just save you time and money in commuting costs. "The more and more people do it, [the more they] realize they're more productive and working harder than if they were in the office," Salemi says. "It's not so much where you work as long as [the work] gets done, and that it gets done effectively."

That means the arrangement is very much on the negotiating table, so long as you work in an industry where you can get by with cell phone and internet access rather than constant face-to-face contact.

How to make the ask. Find out what the employer's work-from-home policy is, and whether you're eligible to work within those guidelines. If not, ask them to consider a trial run where, for example, you work from home one day a week, then set plans to evaluate the arrangement six months down the road.

For those early in their career, however, Salemi cautions that it's important to regularly make an appearance at the office, even if your new employer approves a work-from-home arrangement. "I would say you should be in the office for the majority of the time, especially at the beginning, otherwise you're kind of out of sight, out of mind," Salemi says. So try to determine how much in-person interaction your boss needs to keep that relationship strong before you start taking full advantage of any work-from-home policies.

Related:Your Ultimate Work-From-Home Productivity Guide

5. A Flexible Work Schedule

A flexible schedule can take many forms, from working a four-day workweek to adopting nontraditional on-the-job hours. It can be ideal for parents; working from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., for instance, makes it a little easier to balance work with carpool duty.

How to make the ask. Wait until late in the offer process, Crawford suggests; this isn't a benefit you want to ask for during the interview phase (unless not having a certain schedule is a deal breaker). Once you have the offer in hand, kick off negotiating by communicating exactly what kind of schedule you're looking for.

"Don't just generalize, because your definition of a flexible schedule may be different from the hiring manager's opinion," Crawford says. There's no need to offer up why you'd like the schedule, "especially if it's a personal reason that can make you seem less committed to the job," she adds. If your hiring manager does ask, Crawford advises couching it as a professional reason rather than a personal one. In other words, "I'd like to come in at earlier hours to best serve our clients and their schedules" may go over better than "I can't afford extra daycare."

Finally, if you get your hiring manager to agree to any of these perks (high five!), don't rely on a handshake to seal the deal. "Get everything in writing, in case your boss, who you negotiated with, resigns and no one has record of it," Salemi says.

Related:Management Or Bust? 5 Questions To Ask Before Accepting That Promotion


This article originally appeared on LearnVest and is reprinted with permission.

Gender Equality Isn't Political—See Utah For Proof

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Utah broke for Trump 45% to Clinton's 27%, but the state's strides in gender equality may point the way for other conservative locales.

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

Hillary Clinton lost Utah to Donald Trump by double digits, pulling in 27% of the popular vote to his 45%, fewer than six percentage points ahead of independent candidate Evan McMullen. On balance, the Beehive State is not a politically liberal place.

Yet in 2014, before the outlines of the presidential race had begun coming into focus, the state's business leaders recognized a serious problem. Utah ranked 49th out of 50 states for gender pay disparities. Only 15.4% of state legislators were women, and there was just one woman in Utah's Congressional delegation.

In the three years since, we've made some major strides toward gender parity in leadership roles and in the workplace. That's meant securing the support of people all across the state—men and women alike—who may not have joined in a Women's March but still see gender equality as an crucial objective. Utah's continuing efforts on this front proves that progress can be achieved even in right-leaning climates, because the issue fundamentally isn't about politics—or at least it doesn't have to be.

Here are some concrete ways we've learned here in Utah to make real headway on gender equality without pinching political nerves.

Making Change A Matter Of Public Concern, Not Politics

In right-leaning places, public-private collaboration typically stands a better shot at gaining support than government action does. But before you can put together any kind of initiative, you need to convince enough people there's a problem. That common ground wasn't actually that hard to find; it was clear that Utah's serious deficit of women in politics hurt both parties in the state.

Politicians then turned to the business community, and in January 2015 the Utah Women's Leadership Institute (WLI), which I now lead, was formed. From the start, the coalition included some of the state's most influential business leaders like Zions Bank CEO A. Scott Anderson, Questar Corporation CEO Ron Jibson, Workers Compensation Fund–Utah CEO Ray Pickup, Deseret Book Company CEO Sheri Dew, and Intermountain Healthcare COO Laura Kaiser. By involving the business community early, WLI was able to make sure that gender equality remained a bipartisan and public concern, not a political crusade.

From there, WLI's mission was clear. On the government side, we train women in leadership skills and prepare them to run for public office, at any level and for any party. And on the business side, we advocate for the positive impact female leaders have on economic development. One way we do that on both sides is through the ElevateHER Challenge, which asks Utah organizations—public, private, and nonprofit—to examine their demographics and take clear steps toward improving gender diversity:

  1. Increase the percentage of women in leadership roles. Make sure the candidate pool for senior-level positions includes many qualified women, and encourage women to apply.
  2. Improve the retention of women at all levels. Find out why women are leaving and create opportunities for women to design programs that incentivize them to stay put.
  3. Get more women onto boards by diversifying the candidate pool and offering more training opportunities to groom top female talent for board positions.
  4. Keep regular data on the gender pay gap within the organization, and develop a plan based on those states to close it. Never stop monitoring that progress.
  5. Create leadership development and mentoring programs geared toward women.
  6. Urge women to run for public office. Recruit women and support candidates by offering financial and campaign resources—regardless of political party.

So far, more than 115 organizations have taken WLI's ElevateHER Challenge—all the way on up to the statehouse. Governor Gary Herbert accepted the challenge on behalf of the entire state. A 501(c)3, WLI has already trained 70 women, of varying ethnic backgrounds and political beliefs—who either have run for political office or plan to do so.

When Public And Private Spheres Both Commit

In just a few years, Utah's state government has seen noticeable changes. The Utah Science Technology and Research (USTAR) Initiative, a technology-based economic development organization, has increased its female board participation from 0% to 20% in the past two years, reached gender parity on staff, and has closed the organization's pay gap completely.

In 2014, Governor Herbert appointed Dr. Ivy Estabrooke from a pool of more than 140 predominantly male candidates to serve as USTAR's executive director. And just last November, he named Susan Opp, the executive vice president of L-3 Communications, its board chairwoman. Dr. Noelle Cockett, a prominent geneticist, was also appointed president of Utah State University late last year.

One key to these successes has been building checks and balances between businesses and government at every step. Another has been securing (and re-securing) the full cooperation of both spheres regardless of political affiliation. That takes patience and diligence, but we've already shown it can be done.

In fact, we've essentially taken political opinion off the table, turning gender equality into a nonpartisan issue at a deeply partisan time in America. Other states—no matter how riven by political divisions—can use a similar approach to make meaningful advancements.

This is an important lesson as the country adapts to a rightward shift in federal policy. It may have been Hillary Clinton who decades ago reminded the world at the UN that women's rights are human rights and vice versa. At the time, that was a radical pronouncement. But today, and despite the Utah electorate's clear rejection of her candidacy last fall, that idea is much more widely accepted. As long as we can remember that gender inequality is blind to politics, and affects women and households on all points on the political spectrum, the easier it'll be to rectify it everywhere.

Utah still has room to grow to achieve gender equality in business and government, but the progress we've made in a short time and in a conservative climate speaks volumes. The public-private collaboration we've pioneered can be a model for others in right-leaning places. And it gives me hope that, come what may in the near-term, we'll break that final glass ceiling over 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in our lifetime.


Patricia Jones is the CEO of the Women's Leadership Institute. She is also the cofounder and former President of the polling and market research firm Dan Jones & Associates and served in the Utah Legislature for 14 years.

How To Create Your Own Opportunities At Work

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When your job isn't giving you room to grow, make some.

You're a hard worker, just like you said at your job interview. In all your time at your company, you've done consistently good work. You're reliable. But for some reason, you just aren't shining as much as you'd like. Maybe there's a sexy new project at work that you were hoping to be assigned, but it went to someone else. Perhaps you're holding out for a promotion but haven't seen it yet.

You're starting to wonder if your hard work doesn't cut it. You're doing some great things, but your boss doesn't seem to notice. You aren't getting bigger or better projects, which means you aren't really growing in your position. Is there something else you should be doing?

Executing Isn't Enough

The solution here isn't necessarily to approach your boss and ask point-blank what gives. Before you charge into your boss's office demanding a change, stop for a minute and ask yourself: How proactive am I in my career? Do I take on more than is required of me? Do I go out of my way to take on projects that benefit teams other than my own? Do I regularly help my teammates? And do I do these things without permission, or only when I'm asked to? In other words, am I fearless?

If the answers here are mostly "no," it's time to be more proactive. Don't wait for your boss to create opportunities for you—create them yourself.

No matter what stage of your career you're at, simply "doing" the work is never enough. In order to take charge of your own career, you often have to take the initiative.

The most successful people are proactive. They provide value beyond what's asked of them, and in the process, they showcase their talents and show everybody else how much they can contribute. Over time, teams learn to come to them with bigger and better projects. It's a virtuous circle that benefits both the company and their careers.

Depending on your personality, this might not feel so natural. It may also come more easily to people at senior levels who typically don't have to wait for a supervisor to approve every decision they make. People earlier in their careers might hesitate to be so proactive, fearing that if they do, they'll be scolded for overstepping.

In reality, this fear is typically unfounded. What it really boils down to is your confidence and how much you know about the company and industry you're in, not the current stage of your career. Here are a few tips for being more proactive at every level.

Take An Inventory Of Your Strengths And Weaknesses

Just as you would while preparing for a job interview, sit down and log your strengths and weaknesses. Has your team actually seen the full breadth of your skills? Do they know what you're capable of? Are you actively utilizing your strongest skills, or are they being underleveraged?

Sometimes assets are hidden inside what appear to be disadvantages. Maybe you've been harping on the fact that you're the youngest on your team—does that also make you the most social-media-savvy? Consider your strengths and weaknesses from all angles. You need to understand them better before stepping up to show your team more of what you've got.

Pick The Right Project

Being proactive isn't about picking any extra project and adding it to your to-do list. It's about identifying strategic opportunities for the good of the company—not just for yourself.

Which opportunities are those? Ask yourself these questions to pinpoint where you can help your company or team—and your career in the process:

  • What do you know about the business, company, or industry that only you can see?
  • What are some possibilities your company or team haven't explored yet, and why not?
  • What gaps do you see?
  • What business objectives are you most passionate about at your company, and which of those are you uniquely qualified to help with?

Note that the answers to these questions may mean working with your current team, or not! Embrace the opportunity to meet teams other than your own if that's where you can best contribute. Going out on a limb to forge those relationships is another sign that you're interested in growing beyond what you already do.

Once You Seize It, Sell It

Now it's time to sell your boss on the value of you taking on this project. Boil it down to a one-liner summarizing what you hope to achieve, and why it's important to the company or team. Practice explaining that in the mirror if it helps.

While it can be scary to work on a project with no obvious stakeholders, if it's a truly valuable undertaking, it'll prove itself. Other people will see its value as it develops, and you yourself will become more certain of it.

Keep in mind, however, that it's essential that you believe in the value of the undertaking. If you're not sure it's worth pursuing, get a second opinion from someone you trust (a close colleague, a mentor), or table it until you find another opportunity that makes your heart beat faster with conviction.

Keep Up Your Existing Responsibilities

The only way you can get away with working on something only you see the value in (at first) is if you're keeping on top of all your current duties. As you start to stretch into self-initiated projects, it can be tempting to focus on those alone, but that's a mistake.

Being proactive only to drop the basics isn't a sign of leadership potential—it's a sign of poor time management, a reason why you might not be progressing in your career as quickly as you thought yourself capable. That can be tough to recognize, but it's useful intel.

Don't Wait For Permission To Do More

This is crucial, whether you're an intern for the season or a seasoned manager. If you find yourself waiting for someone else to signal or approve the next step, check yourself: It's up to you to keep the ball rolling. Rather than waiting for a new assignment or task, ask yourself what else could be done, and do it.

Of course, be sure to use your best judgment here. There's a category of things that you may in fact need approval for; sending a mass email to the whole company or expensing some unapproved dinners might create some challenges. But for a more run-of-the-mill project, it may not be necessary. Default toward asking for forgiveness, not permission.

Manage Up

You're ultimately the best (and only) person to represent your own interests to your boss. Tell her what you want out of your career, and ask her to keep an eye out for opportunities for you. A good manager will keep you top of mind for upcoming projects that match your interest and skill set—or they'll tell you why they think you're not ready for those opportunities just yet. (If it's the latter, don't despair; this kind of feedback can be helpful, as now you have something tangible to work toward.)

But asking for your manager's support isn't the same as sitting on your hands and waiting for it. After all, it's easy to wait for approval. It's a lot harder to take initiative. But when you're proactive, it often pays off—for you as well as your employer.

Four Steps To Turn Your Contract Gig Into A Full-Time Job Offer

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"Permalancers" forgo perks and benefits in exchange for flexibility. Here's what to do if you change your mind.

Contract gigs can be a pretty sweet deal. By the very nature of the job, you're expected to jump right in and start solving problems. Then, in three to six months or so, you can move onto your next exciting challenge, no strings attached. For some, this is truly an ideal setup. But many others may find themselves longing for the perks of a full-time position: the job security, the steady routine, and definitely the health insurance.

If you fall into this camp, don't worry. Whether the job post explicitly says it or not, there is often an opportunity to turn contract work into a full-time position— f you play your cards right. Follow the advice below, and you'll go from part time to full time in no time.

1. Be Up Front (Within Reason)

Before anything else, you should make it clear that you're interested in a full-time position during the interview.

"Some people are purely serial contractors, so your employer might not even know that's something you could be interested in," says Jamie Hichens, senior talent acquisition partner at Glassdoor.

But, she warns, there is such a thing as being too pushy. Immediately saying you're only looking for full-time work or acting like a full-time position is already a sure thing for you are both good methods of getting on a recruiter's nerves.

"The best way to express that you're interested in a full-time job is to say something like 'I'm so excited to join this team—I'm definitely interested in contract work, but if there were an opportunity for it to become full time, I'd be very open to that,'" Hichens recommends.

2. Become Indispensable

It goes without saying that a company won't want to hire you full time if you underperform, but even meeting the expectations of your role isn't always enough. To truly stand out, Hichens recommends that contract workers outshine the full-time employees on their team.

"We recently hired someone for a contract role of three to six months, but because she went above and beyond what was expected of her, we offered her a full-time role—even though we didn't even have an open position for it listed on our site. She proved her value by thinking of new things to do in her role that weren't expected of her—she redid processes and streamlined things in a way that proved to be invaluable," Hichens shares.

3. Make Sure To Mingle

Sometimes, contract workers make the mistake of isolating themselves from colleagues since they don't see themselves as a "real" team member. But this is a missed opportunity, Hichens says. If you don't see yourself as part of the team, what are the odds that your team will?

You don't have to become best friends with your coworkers, but you should make an effort to get to know them. A little personal connection can go a long way toward receiving a job offer.

"Don't just be 'the contractor,'" Hichens says. "When people really keep to themselves, it rarely works out in their favor. Even things as small as joining in on water cooler talk or sitting together at lunch are good ways to lean into the situation and act like you're a part of the full-time team."

4. Do Your Homework

Even if you follow the steps above, you can't expect a job offer to simply fall into your lap—you have to take action. After a few months, check in with your employer to find out whether or not they see a chance to bring you on full time. Come to that meeting prepared not only to state your case for full-time employment, but also with clear expectations of what you want and need out of a full-time job.

"Be ready to talk salary and benefits, and always prepare to negotiate so you make sure you're getting the best deal possible," Hichens recommends.

Salary and benefits negotiation are an art form in and of themselves, but the first step is knowing the market value of your skills so you can push for fair compensation without pricing yourself out of a job. From there, the power's in your hands.


This article originally appeared on Glassdoor and is reprinted with permission.


How To Deal With That Coworker Who's Acting Like Your Boss

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You already have a boss, thank you very much. So here's what to do, in this order.

You've got a coworker who, to put it diplomatically, has a hard time keeping their leadership tendencies in check. To tell it like it is: He treats you like he's the boss. He provides tons of constructive feedback (even when you didn't ask for it), divides up roles on team projects (giving himself the best one), and quashes any opportunity for others to have a say.

This can go from an annoyance to a prevalent problem when your boss doesn't step in. Maybe she's too busy to stay apprised of team dynamics, maybe the department is understaffed and she's happy for someone to step up and take on a larger role, or maybe she's hearing how things are going directly from him—and has no idea he's steamrolling people left and right.

While it's super-frustrating to deal with a bossy coworker day in and day out, there are steps you can take to address the situation.

Start with these four tactics:

1. Speak Up In The Moment

Your colleague has just taken charge and relegated you to a boring task again, and you're really upset about it. But, would she (apart from the ability to mind read) know that?

Not everyone who takes charge does it maliciously. If the team okays her ideas—or doesn't say anything at all—how's she to know that people are actually seething?

So step one is speaking up. She may not realize how aggressive "Here's what we're going to do . . ." sounds.

Practice saying things like, "I have an idea for a different approach . . ." and "I'd like to take a more active role in the direction of this project. How about if . . ."

Maybe she'll do a decent job at sharing leadership roles, it's just that no one had previously expressed interest. Your first step is to give her a chance to do just that.

2. Schedule A Chat

Maybe you skimmed over the "raise your voice" advice thinking, "Been there. Tried that." Or, you're reading this after you've been blindsided by your colleague popping by your desk or replying all with (negative) feedback on how you draft emails.

So, offering your thoughts in the moment isn't the right option for you.

In this case, you're going to want to schedule a talk with him. As you know, emails can be misconstrued—especially when they're on delicate topics—so this is definitely worth saying in person.

Avoid "you" statements ("You were wrong because . . . ") as it'll likely just make him defensive. Instead try something like, "I appreciate you taking the time to you share your best practices with me. However, I've found success with [whatever it may be]. If I hit a roadblock, I'll be sure to reach out to the team for suggestions."

You opened with a dash of "kill them with kindness" and then clarified two key things: that you'll drive the discussion if you're seeking feedback, and that he's an equal member of your team (that consists of others with valuable ideas, too).

3. Nominate Coworkers To Step Up

Not everyone's comfortable making the jump from saying nothing to advocating for themselves. An intermediate step is elevating someone else on your team—which is an equally effective tactic to make sure decisions are distributed more fairly.

Try using the tactic women used in President Obama's White House to combat gender bias in meetings. If your bossy coworker shouts down an idea from someone else, raise your voice in support of it—and call out the original speaker. This will make it clear that there are multiple voices around the table worth listening to.

4. Go To Your Boss

Remember when I said there's a good chance your manager's unaware of the problem? If you've tried doing all of the above and none of it has worked, it's time to go to your boss. (The other benefit of making this step four is that you'll be able to tell your manager that, yes, you have spoken to the person in question and tried to solve the problem before bringing it to her.)

The best way to broach the topic is not to throw your colleague under the bus, which could make you sound like you're coming from a place of competition or jealousy. (Think "Greg acts like he's more senior than us.")

Instead, talk to your supervisor about your opportunities for growth and professional development—which is totally par for the course. You could say, "I'd like to take the lead on more projects: What steps could I take?" That way, your boss knows your coworker isn't the only person interested in these opportunities.

Another approach would be to say, "I'd like to make more substantive contributions, but I often feel there isn't space for my opinion in meetings. Do you have any suggestions for how I might take a more active role?" This should open the door to discussing why you feel that way, and how you can remedy it.

Either way, you've alerted your boss to the fact that the current team dynamic's keeping you from being impactful. And at this point, you'll at least know you've tried your best to remedy the problem.

If you've spoken to your difficult teammate (twice!), elevated your other coworkers, and asked your boss for a larger role and nothing's changed, then—if we're being honest—the team dynamic is likely to stay as is.

Assuming you're not looking to quit, rather than fighting an uphill battle, find other ways to get your voice heard in the office. Spearhead more solo projects, collaborate with people in different departments, or get involved with groups not related directly to your job, such as a book club. By choosing to create opportunities for yourself, you're showing your boss—as well as other people in leadership positions—that your voice deserves to be heard, and by not letting that happen, they're missing out on a lot of great ideas.


This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.

10 New Rules For Brainstorming Without Alienating Introverts

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Try this revolving-door policy for your next brainstorm, by letting introverts come and go when they please.

The brainstorm is beloved by some and dreaded by many. We live in a world that offers choice for everything from styles of coffee to TV shows to TVs themselves. But when it comes to brainstorming, we pretty much have one option: get everyone in a room and start throwing ideas out there.

This generally works well for extroverts (though some say otherwise) and not so great for everyone else.

It doesn't have to be this way. In fact, there's a way to brainstorm without aggravating or alienating the introverts on your team, and it isn't as difficult as you might think.

One Brainstorm, Different Brains

Professor Dario Nardi of UCLA has been conducting cutting-edge research on brain connectivity for years. As he recently explained it to us, "Generally, introverts spend more time processing data, have more activity and linkages in the back half of the brain, and are easily over-stimulated. Oppositely," Nardi adds, "extroverts spend less time processing data, have more activity and linkages in the front half of the brain, and are easily under-stimulated."

So while there's some debate as to whether the introvert-extrovert divide is an oversimplification, brain science nonetheless points to a spectrum anchored on either end by thinking patterns that are virtual mirror images of one another.

This means many extroverts enjoy traditional shout-it-out, put-it-up-on-the-board brainstorming. They like the stimulation; they like the speed of data processing. But introverts get overwhelmed by all the noise. Because introverts process data more slowly, they tend to get exhausted trying to keep up with all the ideas flying around, one after another. There's no time to process them all.

Not only does the traditional brainstorm disadvantage introverts, it shortchanges your whole team—which is missing out on many of the ideas, or synthesis of ideas, that introverts can offer the whole group.

The New Rules Of Brainstorming

Fortunately, all it takes is putting in place some new rules that takes brainstorming from a free-for-all only extroverts can love to a truly collaborative process.

1. Let folks come and go. Not everyone has to be there all the time while the brainstorm is taking place. Different people have different tolerance levels for the process. Don't force introverts to stay longer than they can be of use.

2. Invite introverts to show up later . . . Don't force them all to arrive right in the beginning. Many extroverts talk out loud to figure out what they actually think. That can be really productive for them but exhausting and frustrating for introverts. Introverts often have to keep waiting for an extrovert to get to the point, and meanwhile they can't think about their own ideas.

3. . . . even halfway through. It doesn't hurt to let introverts show up in the middle of the session, after up to half of the time you've allotted has already gone by. That may sound like a lot, but as long as they're using the same period to mull over their own ideas independently, it's not a waste. Just make sure the introverts know it isn't a free pass to opt out of the process. Instead, they'll show up later on with their own thoughts better formed. And when they do, have someone give them a recap—which will in turn help the extroverts get their own ideas in order and refocus the session.

4. Impose a moment of silence . . . After the recap, declare a three-minute period of silent reflection for everybody to write down their thoughts. This will give the introverts a chance to process what they've heard. Then, when the brainstorm is opened up again, the newly joined introverts share their ideas first.

5. . . . then open the door again. The introverts don't have to stay. They can leave at this point if they want.

6. Pause every 30 minutes. If there are introverts who want to stick around, halt the brainstorm every half hour and ask directly if they have anything to share. They don't have to, but creating the space makes it much more likely you'll get the benefit of their insights, too.

7. Bring all the introverts back in at the end. When the brainstorm is over, invite any introverts who've left back into the room to look over the notes on the board. Have the extroverts explain anything that's confusing. Then ask the introverts to think about the topic overnight. As they process data more slowly, they may have some fresh ideas a day later.

8. Leave space on the whiteboard. The next morning, leave the brainstorm board open for the introverts (or anyone else who's had an after-the-fact epiphany) to add in anything else they might've thought of.

9. Regroup. Bring everyone together for a facilitated discussion—not a free-for-all, and not a second full-fledged brainstorm—where all the ideas you've generated in the past 24 hours can get efficiently parsed, organized, and shaped into a plan your whole team can move forward with.

10. Give everyone a stake in the action that follows. Keep in mind that not all extroverts are the same. Some can brainstorm for days on end without ever coming up with a concrete goal. Other extroverts love to brainstorm, but their patience runs out after a while; they ultimately want to arrive at a decisive plan. Just like the introverts, these extroverts should be allowed to leave the session whenever they feel it isn't going nowhere. But when it's time to choose a course of action, they should be called back in after the introverts have added their thoughts.

Your brainstorm can afford to loosen up and adopt a revolving-door policy, with people coming and going. But once you've generated enough ideas, everyone has to come together again and forge ahead as a team.


Judah Pollack and Olivia Fox Cabane are the coauthors The Net and the Butterfly: The Art and Practice of Breakthrough Thinking.

How Stand-Up Comedy Taught Me That Approval Is Overrated

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You don't get better if you're just trying to affirm how good you already are. This writer learned that when she took the mic.

Three years ago, I called a stand-up comedy instructor to sign up for one of his classes. "I do not like being on stage, and I am not funny," I said. "Do you think I can still take the class?" Thankfully, he said yes.

In every lesson, I would stand up in front of my classmates and share my jokes. Feedback was instantaneous: They would either laugh or they wouldn't. If they laughed, I'd keep the joke for the final showcase performance. If they didn't, I'd scrap it. I was thankful for this feedback. I didn't want to embarrass myself at the showcase.

Most jokes I wrote didn't make the cut. But by the end of the 10-week program, I had a five-minute set of solid jokes.

I was asked to be the closing act. And to my delight, the audience laughed! A lot. I took the set to open-mic nights, and it was received just as warmly—not bad for someone who'd never heard the words "you are funny" directed at her in her entire life.

In comedy, I didn't want to prove I was good. In fact, I knew I was not good. My goal was to learn to get better.

I've noticed that a lot of people look for feedback in their hobbies, but they seek only approval at their jobs. Could it be that companies themselves make it difficult to learn, and push people to look for approval instead of improvement?

How Companies Discourage Learning

There was no way I could create a good comedy set without feedback. You can never really know if your own jokes are funny. The only way to find that out is to test them in front of an audience. Professional comedians test their jokes in small gigs before they go on a big stage. Done right, feedback can be as useful at work.

It often isn't. In most workplaces feedback is part of performance reviews. Everyone hates performance reviews. One recent report estimated that 22% of employees would actually call in sick to avoid facing an appraisal.

What's more, other researchers suggest that more than half of a given performance rating doesn't even have to do with the person being evaluated—it hinges on the traits of the person doing the evaluating. If this sounds intuitively right, it's something that companies themselves are beginning to affirm. In the past few years, major employers have abandoned the annual review. PwC discontinued annual reviews for all 200,000-plus employees as early as 2013. Deloitte, Accenture, and KPMG followed suit.

One of the troubles with the traditional performance review—linked as it is with raises, promotions, and training opportunities—is that you need to prove you're already good to be rewarded. So that's the mind-set with which many of us approach feedback in these experiences. We look for approval and validation, knowing that negative feedback can be used against us, rather than help us grow.

As a result, a lot of us get triggered into a fixed, defensive approach to our work. We hesitate to take the risks that creativity and innovation depend on. Failure doesn't look good, so we hide our mistakes and become subtly more antagonistic—trying to find ways to win over the "judges," rather than experiment with methods to improve our work.

Stanford researcher Carol Dweck has argued that passion for learning, rather than hunger for approval, is where true success is born and sustained. Just scrapping performance reviews doesn't change the fact that the approval of a few people is directly linked to your livelihood. Even with that particular ritual gone, many of us don't automatically embrace what Dweck has long called the "growth mind-set" that's needed to truly learn.

Is there a better way to kick this addiction to approval? How do you keep learning, rather than just trying to show your employer and the world how good you already are?

Approval Shouldn't Be Your Driving Force

Sometimes, self-promotion really is necessary—like when you need to land your next job, client, or funding, for example. By all means, try to get your bosses on your side. Just don't let their approval drive you in the process. Here are some reasons why, which stand-up comedy helped me come to terms with:

It will reduce your risk-taking. To have an impact and improve, you need to get yourself out there. Stand on that stage. Write that article. Cold-call or -email that person. There's no learning without doing—or without making yourself vulnerable to other people's judgment in the process. The more interesting work you do, the more haters you will have. Don't let that stop you.

It will diminish the pleasure you take in your work. One of the reasons we enjoy our hobbies so much is that we do them for ourselves. Because we want to. Because we enjoy it. We don't care so much what people think. Wouldn't it be great to find the same pleasure at work? Choose the projects you enjoy and give them your authentic self. Get into flow and forget others' opinions.

Approval can be a misleading measure of success. We believe we've made it when we get accepted to a great college or graduate program. When we land a job at a prestigious company. When we close a funding round. When we get a promotion. These achievements are just a stamp of approval. They don't necessarily represent impact or value added. Did we improve people's lives? Did we build something useful? What's worse is that our need for recognition is insatiable. We can never have enough.

In the new economy, the approval of a few gatekeepers becomes less and less necessary. You can self-publish if you're a writer, freelance if you have the skills, and crowdfund if you have the ideas. The market decides. You can never predict the market's reaction to your work. You can only focus on honing your craft and putting your best work out there.

How To Embrace Feedback

Isn't the pursuit of approval a basic human need, you might ask? The answer is yes. When we're children, we learn to seek our parents' approval as a means of survival. That's why, as adults, negative feedback can trigger us into fight-or-flight mode.

But however ingrained it may be, that reaction isn't universal or unchangeable; it often depends on the context. I was surprised by how painless it was to get feedback in comedy, contrary to feedback at work. What makes learning a hobby easier? If you can put your finger on that, you may be able to better embrace feedback in other areas of your life, too. These are a few steps you can try:

Don't put all your eggs in the job basket. I cherished feedback in comedy because I didn't see myself as a comedian. The stakes were low. You need to lower the stakes at work to be able to approach it with a learning attitude. If your sense of self-worth (and income) come just from your job, failure and criticism will hurt a lot. Develop your life outside of work—including other streams of income. You're not just a marketer. You're perhaps also a parent, a friend, a cook, and a basketball player.

Adopt an eternal-novice attitude. There's no shame in being a rookie in a new hobby. Try to separate the quality of your output from your identity. Don't say to yourself, "I am a good marketer." Say, "I am a marketer who loves the job and keeps getting better at it." See the difference? Most people overestimate their skills. If you believe you're already good, you stop learning. And even if you were good in the first place, you can soon become obsolete.

Strengthen your relationships. You need some people in your life who accept you regardless of the success of your professional endeavors—people who won't love you any less if you don't get that promotion or job offer. Surround yourself with them, and you won't be looking to fulfill your deepest emotional needs through your work, as though your life depends on it. You can embrace your career with a little more playfulness. You'll welcome feedback just as you do in your hobbies.

Accept it if it helps you improve, and discard it if not. It isn't about proving to the world how good you are. It's about getting better all the time. Have fun. Have a laugh—preferably with others.


Caterina Kostoula is an executive coach and a global business leader at Google. Follow her on Medium, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Why Google, Ideo, And IBM Are Betting On AI To Make Us Better Storytellers

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Robots may not have learned to feel empathy yet, but they're already pretty good at getting humans to do so.

Sharing emotion-driven narratives that resonate with other people is something humans are quite good at. We've been sitting around campfires telling stories for tens of thousands of years, and we still do it. One reason why is because it's an effective way to communicate: We remember stories.

But what makes for good storytelling? Mark Magellan, a writer and designer at Ideo U, puts it this way: "To tell a story that someone will remember, it helps to understand his or her needs. The art of storytelling requires creativity, critical-thinking skills, self-awareness, and empathy."

All those traits are fundamentally human, but as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more commonplace, even experts whose jobs depend on them possessing those traits—people like Magellan—foresee it playing a bigger role in what they do.

Using AI To Read A Crowd

Connecting with an audience has always been something of an art form—it's part of the magic of a great storyteller. But AI is steadily converting it into a science. The AI-driven marketing platform Influential uses IBM's Watson to connect brands with audiences. It finds social media influencers who can help spread a brand's message to target demographics in a way that feels authentic and, well, human.

Ryan Detert, Influential's CEO and cofounder, says that the tool uses two of Watson's services, Personality Insights and AlchemyLanguage, to look at the content written by an influencer, analyzing that text, and scoring it across 52 personality traits—like "adventurousness," "achievement striving," and "openness to change." To date, says Detert, Influential has gathered these insights on 10,000 social media influencers with over 4 billion followers altogether.

Once a brand comes to Influential with their marketing goals, the platform uses Watson to identify the traits most strongly expressed by that brand, then matches influencers whose personalities, social media posts, and followers best reflect it. If a brand narrative wants to project adventurousness, Influential will find influencers who score highly on that characteristic and whose followers respond well to it.

Influential worked with Kia on a 2016 Super Bowl ad featuring Christopher Walken, and Detert notes, "We saw a 30% higher level of engagement on FTC posts, which are branded posts [flagged] with [a hashtag like] #Ad or #Sponsored. The more the brand and influencers' voices are aligned," he says, "the greater the engagement, sentiment, ad recall, virality, and clicks." The influencers that the AI technology pinpointed, says Detert, "outperformed their regular organic content with these branded posts." In other words, the machine learned how to connect with the influencers' fans even better than the influencers themselves did.

Influential's Watson-powered AI tool figured out how to get this Kia ad to resonate with influencers' followers more powerfully than those influencers' own posts did.

Influential also uses Watson's AI to analyze social buzz and tell brands how they're being perceived. Sometimes, says Detert, that means telling brands, "You're not the brand you think you are," and going back to the drawing board to come up with a better story.

Seeing, Describing, And Beyond

Somatic is a digital marketing company whose experiments with machine learning show the technology's potential in visually driven storytelling, too. One of its tools, called "Creative Storyteller," uses AI to scan photos and generate short text descriptions of what it sees—but not in generic prose.

The tool, says Somatic founder and CEO Jason Toy, can write about visual data in different styles or genres, even mimicking the prose styles of celebrities. As long as there's enough written content out there for Creative Storyteller to be trained on, Toy says it can do a pretty good impression.

Creative Storyteller has been used with major companies to turn an ordinary marketing campaign into an interactive one. In one case, says Toy, "We built an interactive ad where a user uploads a picture and a model talks to them in a style of someone else about that pic."

Such short-form stories work well, but longer text often fails because the AI lacks context, notes Toy. "These machines are able to learn the information you give them. It seems magical at first, but then cracks appear with longer text."

Google AI researcher Margaret Mitchell's work may eventually fill cracks like those. She hopes her research, which is geared toward "helping AI start to understand things about everyday human life," can start to push machines beyond just generating "literal content, like you get in image captioning," toward anticipating how those descriptions will make people feel.

Says Mitchell, "There is increasing interest in developing humanistic AI that can understand human behaviors and relations."

[Image: via Somatic]

Forging Human-Machine Storytelling Partnerships

Now for the inevitable question: Will this "humanistic AI" ever beat humans at their own game? Suzanne Gibbs Howard, a partner at Ideo and founder of Ideo U, believes collaboration between human storytellers and machines is more likely in the near term. Some of the questions she's considering include, "How might the world's storytellers leverage knowledge and insights via AI to make their stories even more powerful, faster? Might AI be a prototyping tool?"

Magellan, Gibbs Howard's colleague at Ideo U, believes the answer is yes; AI as already shown its ability to "explore unmet or latent needs" in an audience that a human storyteller might miss. That could prove helpful for planning and refining a story. "It's not hard to imagine AI crowdsourcing story plots from the internet and identifying people's needs from social media," he muses.

Jason Toy also sees collaboration with AI as the model to strive toward. "I see them as systems that work with humans. They'll always need the human as high-level architect. Storytellers need to think about how the story will be felt, told, and the medium."

"It's all about practicing empathy," stresses Magellan. And for all the strides in AI research that he's seen, empathy just doesn't appear to be a skill machines will pick up too soon. "There's a level of emotional intelligence you must possess as a storyteller," he says. "Until robots gain that, we've got a leg up on them!"

In fact, storytelling may be one way to future-proof your job. Spend some more time around the campfire, but don't be afraid if a robot turns up to help.


Darren Menabney lives in Tokyo, where he leads global employee engagement at Ricoh, teaches MBA students at GLOBIS University, coaches online for Ideo U, and supports the Japanese startup scene. Follow him on Twitter at @darmenab.

The Scrappy Startups Using Text Messages To Fight Trump

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Making daily calls to legislators is one of the most effective ways for citizens to voice their concerns. Mobile tech is making that easier.

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the constant stream of news flowing out of the White House under the new administration. And you'd be forgiven if you didn't know about every protest that has sprung up in opposition to the new president's executive orders and cabinet appointments.

In a time of such turmoil, many people feel like they have to do something, but what, and where to start?

In the midst of such chaos, some leaders are helping citizens figure out which actions to take that could actually influence legislation. The Women's March organizers started 10 Actions for the First 100 Days to enable people who want to voice their disapproval with Washington's policies to easily do so (by providing guidance and templates for correspondence) while riding the momentum of the movement.

Related: What Will It Take For the Women's March To Become A Movement?

Laura Moser was one of those people who woke up the day after the election wanting to do something. "I was groping in the dark," she confesses. "I knew I wanted to be of service" to change the things she could in order to make the country a better place for her children, ages 3 and 7.

"I kept thinking about my long-dead grandfather, who had stayed in Berlin perilously late, until September 1938, because he—like so many other educated, prosperous Jews—in the words of my father's cousin, "thought Hitler would fold." There was no reason to upend his whole life for a cheap used car salesman of a popular agitator, until suddenly there was," Moser recalled in an essay she penned for Vogue.

Laura Moser[Photo: via Twitter]

Although she'd done some "light canvassing" in previous elections, Moser didn't consider herself a political activist. However, her husband was part of the Obama campaign in 2007, and he's currently one of the four partners behind Revolution Messaging, a D.C.-based digital agency that provided the technology for Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign to raise $218 million online.

With that technology accessible, and armed with the knowledge that phone calls to legislators were more effective than emails, Moser conceived Daily Action, a digital nonprofit for political activism.

"I settled on this as a solution for me," she explains, "because I'm a writer and journalist and good at research." The idea was that she would research the issues and then make it easy for people to make that call to their legislators on one issue every workday.

"I'm pretty shy," she admits, "and it was scary for me, initially." Most people have never placed a call to their representatives, Moser observes. Still, she explains, "Once you realize you are talking to young college graduates (who answer the phones), it's not scary, and it's your right."

The way it works is straightforward. Text the word "DAILY" to the number 228466 (or "ACTION"), and enter your ZIP code. Those who don't want to subscribe can dial 844-241-1141 to hear the day's "action." Subscribers subsequently get one text message every weekday with a number to call to hear a 30-second message from Moser before it connects to the appropriate office. On February 1, for example, those calls were directed to Customs and Border Patrol and prompted callers to voice their concern over the enforcement of Trump's controversial migration ban. Other days the calls have asked senators to "hold" on Senator Jeff Sessions's nomination to become attorney general, or urged them to vote against Betsy DeVos's nomination for secretary of education.

The text of Moser's call and some talking points to use when getting through to policy makers' offices are also listed on Daily Action's Facebook page.

Daily Action launched officially in mid-December, but since inauguration day, Moser says the number of calls placed each day and the number of subscribers has shot up. "We have about 10,000 calls a day," she asserts, and the user base is over 157,000.

Moser's efforts are not the only ones available to a new and burgeoning group of activists. Startup Phone2Action connects businesses and citizens with policymakers via mobile calling and texting. Their latest tool enables citizen advocacy through Twitter, email, Facebook, or phone. The latter works when you enter your phone number on the platform, and it calls you back when it connects with your representative.

Countable's platform and app allows you to read brief summaries of active and upcoming legislation and click "yea" or "nay." The site posts the latest news and issues, as well as trending topics and profiles of elected officials. It's interesting to note that during the flurry of executive orders, Countable's site was experiencing downtime due to increased demand.

Moser says to deal with the rapid increase of users, Daily Action took steps to divide messages by time zone, but notes, "Not everyone picks up the phone at the same time." She is now planning to post multiple actions per day, after success with setting up two calls to the House in the same day and not having any problems, she says.

As for the challenge of keeping members engaged in the long term, Moser says, "If [the administration] keeps acting like this, unfortunately I don't think that's going to be a problem." Moser is quick to point out that it was not her original idea to be anti-Trump, but rather anti-extremism. "He was pro-Planned Parenthood," she recalls, and says she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt until the cabinet appointments. The president's cabinet, she observes, is comprised of the far-right minority of the Republican party, which has steered her choice of causes to surface for subscribers to Daily Action as "responding to the triage of horrible things."

Moser believes she's not alone. She notes that a friend who is a right-leaning Catholic marched to protest the recent migration ban. "I was astonished to see that she felt he'd gone too far," she says. "I'd like to continue to mobilize reasonable people."

What Happened When I Forced Myself To Wake Up At 5 A.M. Every Day For A Month

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Some early risers might get more done, but it turns out there are times when getting up earlier can make you less productive.

Early risers get a lot of good press: They are supposedly more productive and possibly better problem solvers. But after a month of forcing myself out of bed at 5 a.m., I learned that getting up early isn't always the best thing for you.

I'm a morning person, and most days I'm out of bed by 5:45 a.m. I usually have 15 minutes before the rest of my household starts to wake, and I use this time to enjoy a cup of tea as well as the stillness of the morning. I look forward to this time so much that I wondered, What would happen if I expanded the 15 minutes to an hour?

While it was a nice thought, getting up at 5 a.m. was harder than I expected. My alarm went off a mere 45 minutes earlier than normal, but I had to drag myself out of bed. With no plan other than tea and stillness, I quickly learned that an hour is too long. The second day I decided to meditate, a practice I've wanted to do but never seemed to have the time for. Unfortunately, I fell asleep in my chair. Eventually, I took out a piece of paper and did a brain dump of all the things I wanted to get done in January—at least I had a plan.

As the month went on, I used the time to get a head start on work, but by 9 p.m., I was exhausted and would head to bed. That meant I lost out on evening time with my husband and son.

Why was 5 a.m. so much harder than 5:45 a.m.?

Forty-five minutes can make a huge difference, says Damon Raskin, MD, a sleep expert affiliated with Concierge Choice Physicians in Pacific Palisades, California. "We get our deep restorative sleep in the early-morning waking hours when REM sleep occurs," he says. "If you shorten that, you are going to feel unrefreshed, and you're not going to have enough sleep."

A Better Way To Get Up Early

Turns out that simply adjusting your alarm clock isn't the best way to make a long-term change. Instead, understand that your brain is always looking for patterns, says Shawn Stevenson, author of Sleep Smarter: 21 Proven Tips to Sleep Your Way to a Better Body, Better Health and Bigger Success.

"Your body clock, or circadian rhythm, governs how your body is in sync with all of life, and when you make a shift in that, there will be residual fallout," he says. "By waking up 45 minutes earlier, you proactively created at-home jet lag. If you keep pressing it for several days, your body will eventually sort itself out, but there is a more graceful way to do it."

First, withdraw from electronics at least an hour before bed, which affect the quality of your sleep. "When it comes to our health, most of us know that calories aren't equal; 300 calories of broccoli aren't the same for your body as 300 calories of Twinkies," he says. "Sleep is similar, and unfortunately many today are getting Twinkie sleep, not cycling through proper brain activity because electronic devices suppress melatonin (the hormone that controls sleep cycles)."

Every hour you are exposed to blue light from a device, you suppress melatonin production for 30 minutes, says Stevenson. "You may be getting eight hours of sleep, but you will still wake up feeling exhausted," he says.

Morning exercise will also help by regulating your cortisol levels, the hormone that gets you going in the morning, says Stevenson. "Normal cortisol rhythms spike in the morning and then gradually bottom out in the evening," he says. "If you are changing your wake time, five minutes of exercise can help reset your rhythm. Do body-weight squats or walk around the block."

Implementing a gradual wake time will also help. "Move your wake time up by 15 minutes and go through that for a couple of days to a week," says Stevenson. "This is especially important if you want to establish a consistent sleep pattern."

And not having a strong plan doesn't help, says Stevenson. "If you don't have a reason to get up, and your body wants to rest, forget about it," he says. "You need something that will fill that space that is compelling."

The Benefits Of Getting Up Early

Being the proverbial "early bird" has its advantages, says Shanon Makekau, medical director of the Kaiser Permanente Sleep Lab in Hawaii.

"Morning people have been shown to be more proactive, which is linked to better job performance, career success, and higher wages, as well as more goal-oriented," she says. "These people tend to be more in sync with the typical workday schedule, versus night owls who may be still be waking up at around lunchtime."

Early-morning hours also tend to be more productive because there are fewer distractions. Jeremy Korst, CMO of the automated tax software provider Avalara and former general manager of the Windows 10 group at Microsoft, gets up between 3:30 and 4 a.m. for two reasons: clarity of thought during that part of the day and quiet time. He does strategic work from 4 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. that requires focus, then he works out and heads to the office.

"No one else is awake yet, and it's quiet," he says. "This isn't a time for clearing my inbox; this is heads-down work time, during which I'm more productive than any other time of day. Without distraction and a bit of separation from the flurry of the prior workday, I can truly focus on important work."

Getting up early makes Korst feel like he's got a jumpstart on the day: "I'm in the office early, so I am already ahead of the day and the schedule a bit," he says. "This helps as calendars are nearly always jammed—getting ahead of it is critical."

What Happened When The 30 Days Were Over

Unfortunately, my experiment didn't produce long-lasting results. When my month was over, I immediately returned to my normal 5:45 a.m., which felt like sleeping in. I even slept until 10 a.m. on weekend mornings—a very rare occurrence for me. I feel more productive now that I'm back to my normal routine.

"The jury is still out regarding whether or not simply shifting one's wake time earlier is enough to garner all of the positive benefits of the early bird," says Makekau. "It may be that one's internal tendency toward productivity is inherent or, more importantly, is tied to the congruency between the internal sleep/wake clock and one's external schedule. Night owls could be just as productive as long as they are allowed to work on a delayed schedule."

Athleisure Makeup Has The Cosmetics Industry Breaking A Sweat

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Cosmetics brands are catering to fitness enthusiasts' desire to look good in and out of the gym.

To promote its new Athleisure Makeup line, Tarte partnered with social media "fitfluencers" to push the concept that "sporty is the new sexy." The campaign, titled Hustle & Glow, includes a beautifully produced video in which a woman wakes up in her spacious Malibu mansion and heads to the bathroom for a full beauty routine in preparation to . . . go on a solo run.

The video was met with wide appreciation from Tarte fans (and nearly 80,000 YouTube views), with many saying it inspired them to get out there and look good on the asphalt (or sand). As athleisure becomes more than just a fashion trend, it's extended into new, unexpected categories. Cosmetics is one of them. It's makeup that's easy, comfy, and suited for an active individual. Brands big and small now cater to the growing fitness enthusiast, many of them millennials who are willing to pay for a sweat-proof mascara or non-clogging foundation. And these products are appearing not just at Sephora, but at the counters of local yoga, pilates, and barre studios as well.

In other words, yoga pants for your face.

"These are high-maintenance products with a low-maintenance routine," says Tarte CMO Candace Craig Bulishak. Tarte's tinted SPF, for example, is infused with antioxidants and natural ingredients like apple extract.

Birchbox, the beauty e-tailer and subscription service, also noticed that their customers were among the women embracing the athleisure trend, says PR director Jenna Hilzenrath. But no one had approached the space from a beauty perspective. Athleisure isn't necessarily about working out; it's the overall concept of being active, comfortable, and put together.

Arrow line by Birchbox

Take, for example, Birchbox's Arrow line, which was introduced in June 2016 for women who have an "average" relationship with beauty.The collection of lightweight products, like a cheek tint and brow gel, are intended to keep up with the modern woman's day, "whether that means going straight from pilates to brunch or just powering through an action-packed, appointment-filled day," states the company website. They want to enhance their appearance in a fuss-free, subtle manner—they want the no-makeup makeup look.

"We saw that opportunity to translate that concept of all-day activewear in the beauty category, to create high-performance products that achieve that effortless, natural look," says Hilzenrath of the in-house line. Arrow is paraben, vegan, and cruelty-free, and "designed to work with your body," says Hilzenrath.

The concept is working. As of January, Arrow's lip balm was the best-selling product on Birchbox, outpacing all other brands in their lip category. Arrow launched four more products in January and plans to expand into new products in the coming year.

More Than A Fad

Birchbox's success shouldn't be a surprise. Athleisure sales totaled $97 billion last year, up 40% from 2010, according to Morgan Stanley. It has dominated the apparel industry, having spread from sports brands to more mainstream clothing companies like J.Crew and Tory Burch. It's been worn by Michelle Obama, inspired celebrities including Kate Hudson, Beyoncé, and Hilary Swank to launch their own lines, and even claims its very own entry in the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Add that to the fact that millennials are now the largest U.S demographic, and they prefer buying experiences and spending toward "creating a lifestyle," according to a recent report by Fung Global Retail & Technology. Millennials are perhaps the healthiest generation—they exercise more, eat better, and smoke less than previous generations. The gym and yoga studio have become social gathering places.

The new era of "going out to the gym" is what partially inspired Rochelle Rae to found Rae Cosmetics, sweat-resistant makeup made for women. For the self-described "sweaty girl" from Texas, "no makeup is not really an option." She, like her peers, wants to look presentable for herself—and others.

"The active lifestyle and culture has changed—going to the gym, to a yoga or pilates class is much more than just working out. Now it's a social experience," Rae said via email. "You don't just go quickly and quietly work out alone and leave. You meet friends, then have a coffee or snack, you might even meet a future date and hit happy hour on a patio . . . You meet more people at the gym than at a nightclub or grocery store. So you want to look your best."

That also means it's a place to take even more pictures. There was a time not long ago when taking a photo at the gym was considered inappropriate, but now Instagram is rife with selfies of people doing #yoga, #pilates, and #running.

"Taking care of your appearance and your upkeep when you're at the gym is like a badge of honor in some ways," notes beauty editor Bahar Takhtehchian, who is seeing more young women document their fitness routines. "People want to look and feel good at the gym."

This isn't to say that prior to the athleisure craze, products best suited for workouts weren't available. They were. They just didn't have the cute sporty logos or market themselves as such. Instead they called themselves "oil-free" or "mineral-based," or "best for sensitive skin."

"This is a lot of smart marketing," says Takhtehchian of the influx of athleisure makeup lines. "Companies are always looking for new ways to sell a product, and one that speaks to and connects to the consumer."

Big brands are beginning to pick up on this as well. Sephora has been actively curating athletic-appropriate cosmetic lines and promoting "gym bag" beauty buys for January, which was designated "skin fitness month." Sephora also worked in tandem with Tarte on its aptly named Athleisure Makeup line.

The result is a line of over a dozen items made with natural ingredients, including sunscreen, self-tanner, bronzer, highlighter, and mascara. These products were reportedly tested in the "sweat chambers" of spinning classes by Tarte company employees.

Natural ingredients are particularly suited for athletic pursuits. Dermatologists usually warn against wearing makeup during workouts, because most products contain chemical ingredients that clog pores and irritate the skin. Consumers are also increasingly keen on all-natural ingredients; a recent survey by Kari Gran found that 73% of millennial women feel that they are important.

"There's always a potential for any product, even those designed for exercise, to clog pores and create issues that might be detrimental to the skin," explains Dr. Debra Wattenberg, New York City dermatologist and associate clinical professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai Hospital. But if cosmetics at the gym are nonnegotiable, Wattenberg suggests waterproof mascara, oil-free tints and—most important—a sunscreen of at least 30 SPF.

One startup—also pushed forward by Sephora—has made sunscreen the most important aspect of its line. Sweat Cosmetics, founded by five professional athletes, specifically caters to women who work out in the sun.

Sweat Cosmetics CEO Courtney Jones is a former professional soccer player who was frustrated by a lack of cosmetics that fit her ultra-fit lifestyle. She had problem skin and often found herself caking on foundation, especially when her soccer games were televised. Throughout her career, she noticed that looking good enhanced confidence and therefore, enhanced performance.

"Athletes didn't have products that were made for us," Jones recalls. "A certain part of me still wanted to cover up."

Team at Sweat Cosmetics

Together with her fellow teammates, Jones worked to fill the gap—she wanted something that upheld sun safety standards, yet could satisfy her cosmetic needs. After 18 months of testing, the cofounders, along with a team of chemists, launched Sweat Cosmetics, a collection of breathable SPF 30 mineral foundation brushes in various skin-tone colors. The products are 80 minute water resistant, with no fragrance, oils, or silicones.

That was in June 2015. Just two months later, Sephora contacted them unprompted. "They loved our product and appreciated that the niche we were going after was completely different," says Jones.

This was a shock because industry insiders and consultants told them it would take years of hustling to get attention from the retail giant. "We talked to so many [people] that were like, 'Don't even try,'" says Jones.

By the following spring, Sephora was selling their product online, which was their initial goal. As Jones says, "If Sephora is not in your sight, I don't know what you're doing."

The Sephora partnership got Sweat up and running. In the last year, Sweat's monthly revenue has grown over 560%. "We're not done with Sephora yet . . . this is just the start," says Jones.

Moving forward, the company plans to expand into skincare and more color categories, but not all at once. Like cult favorite Glossier, it wants to focus on an edited line of just a few products that "women swear by."

The Message

After the video for Tarte's "Hustle & Glow" line debuted, a few social media critics wondered whether the video was overpromoting the need for women to always look good, even during self-care activities.

To that, says Tarte's Bulishak, it's all about "however women or men want to feel beautiful in their skin." Tarte, as the other brands discussed in the piece, repeatedly attest to trying to help women find their confidence, not enslave them with beauty products.

"We encourage women to feel empowered, and if you want to wear makeup, go for it. If you don't want to wear makeup, that's okay, too," says Bulishak.

Sweat Cosmetics' Jones feels similarly that her brand is meant to aid those who, like her, perform better with a little bit of makeup. It's an option, not a mandate. "We want to use our brand to encourage women to be active and to work out, and give themselves a little bit more confidence," says Jones.

But also, stresses Jones, it's no one's place to judge whether today's modern woman wants a bit of coverage out there on the field: "Women are going to do what they want to do . . . and no one should have to say anything about that."


AI For Matching Images With Spoken Word Gets A Boost From MIT

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The research could one day be used to translate between any two languages, even obscure ones with no written record.

Children learn to speak, as well as recognize objects, people, and places, long before they learn to read or write. They can learn from hearing, seeing, and interacting without being given any instructions. So why shouldn't artificial intelligence systems be able to work the same way?

That's the key insight driving a research project under way at MIT that takes a novel approach to speech and image recognition: Teaching a computer to successfully associate specific elements of images with corresponding sound files in order to identify imagery (say, a lighthouse in a photographic landscape) when someone in an audio clip says the word "lighthouse."

Though in the very early stages of what could be a years-long process of research and development, the implications of the MIT project, led by PhD student David Harwath and senior research scientist Jim Glass, are substantial. Along with being able to automatically surface images based on corresponding audio clips and vice versa, the research opens a path to creating language-to-language translation without needing to go through the laborious steps of training AI systems on the correlation between two languages' words.

That could be particularly important for deciphering languages that are dying because there aren't enough native speakers to warrant the expensive investment in manual annotation of vocabulary by bilingual speakers, which has traditionally been the cornerstone of AI-based translation. Of 7,000 spoken languages, Harwath says, speech recognition systems have been applied to less than 100.

It could even eventually be possible, Harwath suggested, for the system to translate languages with little to no written record, a breakthrough that would be a huge boon to anthropologists.

"Because our model is just working on the level of audio and images," Harwath told Fast Company, "we believe it to be language-agnostic. It shouldn't care what language it's working on."

t-SNE analysis of the 150 lowest-variance audio pattern cluster centroids for k = 500. Displayed is the majority-vote transcription of the each audio cluster. All clusters shown contained a minimum of 583 members and an average of 2482, with an average purity of .668.

Deep Neural Networks

The MIT project isn't the first to consider the idea that computers could automatically associate audio and imagery. But the research being done at MIT may well be the first to pursue it at scale, thanks to the "renaissance" in deep neural networks, which involve multiple layers of neural units that mimic the way the human brain solves problems. The networks require churning through massive amounts of data, and so they've only taken off as a meaningful AI technique in recent years as computers' processing power has increased.

That's led just about every major technology company to go on hiring sprees in a bid to automate services like search, surfacing relevant photos and news, restaurant recommendations, and so on. Many consider AI to be perhaps the next major computing paradigm.

"It is the most important computing development in the last 20 years," Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, one of the world's largest makers of the kinds of graphics processors powering many AI initiatives, told Fast Company last year, "and [big tech companies] are going to have to race to make sure that AI is a core competency."

Now that computers are powerful enough to begin utilizing deep neural networks in speech recognition, the key is to develop better algorithms, and in the case of the MIT project, Harwath and Glass believe that by employing more organic speech recognition algorithms, they can move faster down the path to truly artificial intelligent systems along the line of what characters like C-3PO have portrayed in Star Wars movies.

To be sure, we're many years away from such systems, but the MIT project is aiming to excise one of the most time-consuming and expensive pieces of the translation puzzle: requiring people to train models by manually labeling countless collections of images or vocabularies. That laborious process involves people going through large collections of imagery and annotating them, one by one, with descriptive keywords.

Harwath acknowledges that his team spent quite a lot of time starting in late 2014 doing that kind of manual, or supervised, learning on sound files and imagery, and that afforded them a "big collection of audio."

Now, they're on to the second version of the project, which is to build algorithms that can both learn language as well as the real-world concepts the language is grounded in, and to do so utilizing very unstructured data.

Here's how it works: The MIT team sets out to train neural networks on what amounts to a game of "which one of these things is not like the other," Harwath explains.

They want to teach the system to understand the difference between matching pairs—an image of a dog with a fluffy hat and an audio clip with the caption "dog with a fluffy hat"—and mismatched pairs like the same audio clip and a photo of a cat.

Matches get a high score and mismatches get a low score, and when the goal is for the system to learn individual objects within an image and individual words in an audio stream, they apply the neural network to small regions of an image, or small intervals of the audio.

Right now the system is trained on only about 500 words. Yet it's often able to recognize those words in new audio clips it has never encountered. The system is nowhere near perfect, for some word categories, Harwath says, the accuracy is in the 15%-20% range. But in others, it's as high as 90%.

"The really exciting thing," he says, "is it's able to make the association between the acoustic patterns and the visual patterns. So when I say 'lighthouse,' I'm referring to a particular [area] in an image that has a lighthouse, [and it can] associate it with the start and stop time in the audio where you says, 'lighthouse.'"

A different task that they frequently run the system through is essentially an image retrieval task, something like a Google image search. They give it a spoken query, say, "Show me an image of a girl wearing a blue dress in front of a lighthouse," and then wait for the neural network to search for an image that's relevant to the query.

Here's where it's important not to get too excited about the technology being ready for prime time. Harwath says the team considers the results of the query accurate if the appropriate image comes up in the top 10 results from a library of only about 1,000 images. The system is currently able to do that just under 50% of the time.

The number is improving, though. When Harwath and Glass wrote a paper on the project for an upcoming conference in France, it was 43%. Still, he believes that although there are regular improvements and increased accuracy every time they train a new model, they're held back by the available computational power. Even with a set of eight powerful GPUs, it can still take two weeks to train a single model.

An example of our grounding method. The left image displays a grid defining the allowed start and end coordinates for the bounding box proposals. The bottom spectrogram displays several audio region proposals drawn as the families of stacked red line segments. The image on the right and spectrogram on the top display the final output of the grounding algorithm. The top spectrogram also displays the time-aligned text transcript of the caption, so as to demonstrate which words were captured by the groundings. In this example, the top three groundings have been kept, with the colors indicating the audio segment that is grounded to each bounding box.

Language To Language

Perhaps the most exciting potential of the research is in breakthroughs for language-to-language translation.

"The way to think about it is this," Harwath says. "If you have an image of a lighthouse, and if we speak different languages but describe the same image, and if the system can figure out the word I'm using and the word you're using, then implicitly, it has a model for translating my word to your word . . . It would bypass the need for manual translations and a need for someone who's bilingual. It would be amazing if we could just completely bypass that."

To be sure, that is entirely theoretical today. But the MIT team is confident that at some point in the future, the system could reach that goal. It could be 10 years, or it could be 20. "I really have no idea," he says. "We're always wrong when we make predictions."

In the meantime, another challenge is coming up with enough quality data to satisfy the system. Deep neural networks are very hungry models.

Traditional machine learning models were limited by diminishing returns on additional data. "If you think of a machine learning algorithm as an engine, data is like the gasoline," he says. "Then, traditionally, the more gas you pour into the engine, the faster it runs, but it only works up to a point, and then levels off.

"With deep neural networks, you have a much higher capacity. The more data you give it, the faster and faster it goes. It just goes beyond what older algorithms were capable of."

But he thinks no one's sure of the outer limits of deep neural networks' capacities. The big question, he says, is how far will a deep neural network scale? Will they saturate at some point and stop learning, or will it just keep going?

"We haven't reached this point yet," Harwath says, "because people have been consistently showing that the more data you give them, the better they work. We don't know how far we can push it."

Four Immigrants Affected By The Ban Share What It's Like To Work In America Right Now

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A doctor, a professor, and tech and advertising employees from the banned countries relay how their bosses have responded to their fears.

A week after it was enacted, a federal judge temporarily blocked President Trump's ban on individuals from seven Muslim-majority countries. Still, many immigrants are unsure of how long the blockage of the ban will last. And as the fate of the executive order remains uncertain, so does their employment status, as well as their (and their family's) ability to travel abroad.

Related:What The Trump Immigration Ban Means For Business

The ban has not only affected the lives of citizens from the seven listed countries, it also has economic and workplace consequences for the U.S. companies who employ them: 97 U.S. companies—from startups to some of the biggest tech firms—recently filed an amicus brief against the ban.

Immigrants from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen positively contribute economically in the U.S. Many are also the type of skilled knowledge workers that are critical to the success of U.S. businesses. At Google alone, at least 187 employees were affected by Trump's ban.

I spoke to four people directly affected by the ban about their thoughts about the future and what their employers are saying. All four requested anonymity due to fear of reprisal from the government.

I Save The Lives Of People Who Support The President Who Is Keeping My Family Out Of The Country

"Norah" has spent more time alone in the last week than she has in her entire adult life. Though both she and her husband are allowed to live and work in the U.S. on employment authorization documents, her husband and their young son were visiting relatives in Iraq when the ban took effect, leaving her separated from her family. "I feel like a never-ending midnight has settled around me, and dawn will never break," Norah says.

Norah saves American lives. She works at one of the largest cancer research organizations in the U.S., and as a doctor, her specialty is in the early diagnosis of some of the most devastating diseases in existence. A few days ago she saw a patient she previously diagnosed with early-stage cancer that is difficult to treat if it's not caught soon enough. He came in to see her wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat. "I know he didn't mean anything by it. I know him personally, and he is a good man," she says.

"It probably didn't even occur to him that the man he supported for president just enacted a ban that has devastating consequences for my family." Norah didn't mention anything about the hat or ban to her patient. "The only thing he should be focusing on right now is getting better," she says. But after the patient left, Norah sat in her office and cried.

"That's when the head of my department came in. He knew my family was trapped outside America and put two and two together. And he just listened to me and let me cry; let me get it all out," she says. "It was the best support he could give me; just listening."

My Boss Supports Trump, But My Coworkers Told Me That They Donated $1,000 To The ACLU

"Ali" first came to the U.S. from Libya over 20 years ago. "As a student, just living here for a few years showed me the greatness that could be achieved in a free country," he says. After returning to Libya for many years, Ali then moved back to the U.S. to work for a mid-sized private advertising firm and has been directly involved with ad campaigns that address what it means to be "American."

Then the ban took effect on January 27. "I really didn't think Trump would do it. I hoped not, anyway," he says. "As someone who works in advertising, I get that appealing to his voters' sense of fear over Muslims will result in a branding win, but the policy does not make economic or democratic sense." Ali says that the ban has forced him to cancel an upcoming trip abroad, but others he knows have been affected much worse.

Ali's company has not shown any signs of opposing the ban. "The owner is a big Trump supporter," Ali says. "I think since he sees that the ban has not affected my ability to work here, it's no big deal." Other employees, however, have been more supportive. "Half of my colleagues came to me, and they said they were sorry for what Trump was doing. Then they presented me with a card, and it stated that combined they had donated $1,000 to the ACLU the week after the ban was announced. Together we've had some big advertising campaign wins over the years, but I have never been more proud or appreciative of my colleagues than then."

It's Heartwarming That My Employer Has Offered Sympathy, But There Is Not Much They Can Do If I Am Not Allowed To Work Legally

"Mo" is an assistant professor of research at a tier-1 university in the Midwest. Originally from Iran, he has lived in the U.S. for 15 years. He works legally in the country with employment authorization documents and has had his green card application pending for two years. His green card application is based on an approved National Interest Waiver petition, which mean that his area of expertise is deemed to be in the national interest of the U.S.

"The biggest impact [of the ban] is on my ability to continue my work in the university," Mo told me before the block of the ban was in place. He noted that the ban stalled the processing of any immigration petition, including his pending green card application. "My work authorization expires in March, and I filed my renewal request back in November. However, due to this ban, my renewal request will not be processed, and as of now, this means both my wife and I will not be able to work."

"I am proud that my university has made a public statement raising concern about the impact of this executive order on the university as well as the nation in general," says Mo. "I do believe that American companies and institutes need to take a public stance on this matter, since that is probably the only hope of influencing a change in the policies. In my own case, it is certainly heartwarming that my employer has offered support and sympathy toward the issue, but ultimately, there is not much they can do to help me personally if I am not allowed to work legally."

I am forced to choose between visiting my sick mother and keeping my job

"Sara" is originally from Somalia. She came to the U.S. over five years ago to study and then was hired by a large and well-known tech company as a software engineer under the H-1B visa program. Like many in her situation, Sara was very upset when she heard of the ban. Though she is safely in the country, her mother who lives in Somalia is sick, and she worries that if her mother's health takes a turn for the worse, she'll have to choose between being at her mother's bedside or having a job.

"It is very hurtful what the president and his closest aides have enacted," Sara says. "Before, there was so much hope. Now there is only fear." But that fear hasn't got the best of her. She's actively involved in planning protests against the ban. "In parts of my country, planning a protest like this could get you killed. People like me, good Muslims, don't come to America to threaten it. We come because we admire it and the freedom it provides."

Sara says her division managers at the tech giant she works for allowed her time out from her workday to help plan protests with a larger organization. Her managers and most coworkers have also made protest signs and said they'll stand by her side in an upcoming march. "This is what is great about America—we stand together," she says.

With Logitech's ZeroTouch, You Can Now Use Amazon's Alexa In Any Vehicle

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With ZeroTouch you can use Alexa to keep up with your calendar, listen to books, and even order toilet paper.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Amazon's Alexa was the unexpected star. The virtual assistant showed up in everything from refrigerators to baby monitors, perhaps making its biggest splash inside cars. Both Ford and Volkswagen announced plans to bring Alexa into their new vehicles. Today, Logitech is making a similar announcement, offering the ability to bring Alexa into literally any car, even that rusted-out truck you've been driving since the late '70s—all you need is a smartphone.

The trick to how the technology works is Logitech's ZeroTouch system. Hardware-wise, it's just a car mount for your phone. The device comes in two forms, a dashboard mount, and an air-conditioner mount. When used in conjunction with the free ZeroTouch app, you're able to control your phone, and many of its functions hands-free while you drive using your voice and gestures. For instance, you can wave your hand in front of your phone and ask it to call a friend or pull up directions to a local restaurant. Everything is done using voice commands, with no need for you to ever look at your phone's display.

ZeroTouch's Alexa integration, which officially starts rolling out today, adds all of Alexa's functionality into the mix as well. That means you can ask her to do things like play your favorite audio book, stream tunes from Amazon music, or yes, even order paper towels. Anything you can do with Amazon's Echo or Dot products can also be done with the ZeroTouch while you're behind the wheel. The only requirement: an Amazon account.

I've been using the ZeroTouch since its launch in May of last year. To use the mount, you attach a small piece of metal to the back of your smartphone or smartphone case. When you get in the car, that metal connects to the magnet in the dock to mount your phone. Once it detects it's attached to the mount, the ZeroTouch app also automatically launches—so there's also not a ton of fumbling around to figure out where the app is and launch it, it just works. When you remove your phone from the dock, the app also closes on its own.

Living in San Francisco, I don't actually own a car, but rather use a mixture of traditional rental cars, friend's cars, and things like Zipcar and Maven. The air-conditioning vent mount has been perfect for those situations. It's small enough that I can keep it in my purse, so it's always with me, and it gives me a portable mount so I can keep Maps at eye level when I drive (a must-have for a directionally challenged person like myself).

Using ZeroTouch is great for reading and responding to texts on the road or getting restaurant recommendations (it has Yelp and Foursquare integration). But do you really need Alexa in your car? Maybe. I've been using a beta version of the Alexa integration along with ZeroTouch for a few weeks now. As for how, most commonly that has come in the form of asking Alexa things like what's on my calendar for the rest of the day, or what the weather forecast for the remainder of the afternoon is. She can offer a rundown of the day's headlines, entertain me with tales of what happened this day in history, or tell an (often corny) joke. When I got caught up in a new book one morning, I was also able to have her keep reading for me right where I left off when I got in the car.

For me, the most useful feature of the device's Alexa integration is the to-do list. Inevitably, when I'm driving is when I remember a number of things I need to do. Whether it's remembering to contact my accountant about this year's taxes or something simple like picking up some beer before friends come over to watch the game—I remember when I'm behind the wheel, but immediately forget everything when I get home. With Alexa, I can build an epic to-do list populated with items not only added while I'm driving, but also while I'm at home chatting with my Echo Dot. That means I end up forgetting a lot less.

If you pair Alexa with smart devices in your home, you can also do things like ask Alexa to turn on the heat while you're on your way home from the office, or turn on your porch light as you pull into your driveway (or off when you realize you forgot to hit the switch on your way out). Do you need to do that? No, but Alexa is managing to tie together smart homes in a way that other manufacturers haven't quite managed to do just yet. It just works.

It also works outside of your car. You need the mount; however, heavy Alexa users could bring the dock into a hotel room our office, and take advantage of Alexa just as if they had brought their Dot or Echo along for the ride. With an air-vent dock a little over the size of a quarter, that makes Alexa a whole lot more portable.

Logitech's Alexa integration is also just the beginning of what we're likely to see this year from the smart assistant. If the first few weeks of 2017 is any indication, while the smart assistant is coming to cars today, it's about to be everywhere.

Quip Gets A Redesign To Focus On Project Management

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After getting bought by Salesforce, Quip is becoming more of a whiteboard than a word processor.

Quip is moving further away from its roots as a word processor with its first major update since being acquired by Salesforce last year.

The modern document editor has a new design—it's a bit less minimalist than the old Quip—and lets users sprinkle their documents with date reminders. Quip is also getting its first Salesforce product tie-in, with spreadsheets that automatically pull in fresh sales data.

CEO Bret Taylor says the changes reflect how organizations have adopted Quip as a project management tool. Instead of monolithic pages to be printed, Quip is best for creating collaborative, free-flowing documents that build up over time with checklists, spreadsheets, bullet points, and text.

"We don't want a separate app for tasks, a separate app for spreadsheets, a separate app for documents," Taylor says. "We want this one canvas where teams can lay out what they're working on, and mix and match them all into one document."

New Look For New Features

Quip's new date reminders are an extension of the app's project management focus. By typing a date or pressing the Reminder button, users can create a due date for themselves and anyone they mention with an "@" symbol on the same line. Those reminders can exist anywhere in the document, including within spreadsheet cells, next to checkboxes, and inside regular lines of text.

"You can start from a blank sheet of paper, and kind of gracefully escalate into this pretty robust task management system," Taylor says.

The redesign, meanwhile, helps underscore Quip's collaborative nature. Quip's left sidebar now lets users switch between documents from anywhere in the app, and adds a shortcut of frequently viewed documents. And instead of hiding checkboxes, reminders, and other functions behind an easy-to-miss "Tools" button, Quip now lists those possible actions along the top of the screen.

Perhaps it's an acknowledgement that Quip's old design was too bare-bones, in that it hid essential functions for the sake of minimizing distraction. Taylor, however, points out that Quip's toolbar is still contextually aware, showing different options depending on what you've tapped on or highlighted.

"You look at the legacy products like Microsoft Word, and they've got these toolbars with two thousand buttons at the top," he says. "We really want our product to feel minimal and simple, but we wanted to do that in a way that doesn't diminish the power underneath the hood."

As for Salesforce integration, Quip will release a tool for Salesforce's AppExchange store next week that synchronizes sales reports with Quip spreadsheets. That way, users who want to see how they're doing in a particular quarter can crunch numbers within Quip and always have the latest data. Users can also link to those documents from the Salesforce dashboard.

Taylor says the feature arose from talking to mutual customers of Quip and Salesforce after the acquisition, and figuring out how they'd want to bring the two products together.

"At a very superficially high level, Salesforce is very structured. It's essentially a database of all your customers and opportunities. And Quip is very unstructured. It's the place people go to brainstorm and make decisions, and [customers] wanted to essentially connect those two worlds," Taylor says.

Whiteboard In App Form

With all of these changes, Quip is becoming harder to recognize as the Microsoft Word alternative it seemed to be when the product first launched in 2013. But Taylor points out that if you look at Quip's first blog post, the underlying philosophies of collaboration and interactivity have remained intact.

"We've always had things like checkboxes and comments and all these things that are not within a traditional document canvas, so I would say the idea that you add these interactive controls—it almost makes these things feel like an application as opposed to a document—has always been something that really excited us," Taylor says.

Down the road, expect Quip to expand on the idea of being a digital whiteboard of sorts. Taylor notes that Instacart, one of Quip's clients, still edits 60% of the documents it created a year ago, and when asked specifically about a possible free-form drawing tool, Taylor says it's the type of thing he'd love to focus on.

"With Quip, you have one document for that team, and they're just constantly writing, and erasing, and rewriting, just like that whiteboard in their open-office floor plan," he says. "And so I think adding things like drawing to play into the fact that Quip is kind of this whiteboard for teams is something I could really imagine us doing in the future."

Beyond that, Quip is looking to add more ways for users to express themselves within the app, and to improve the app's communication features. And while the links to Salesforce will likely grow deeper as well, Taylor says Quip will remain available as a standalone product. If anything, Taylor sees Salesforce's reach as a way to bring more people to Quip, instead of just the other way around.

"We both think it can make the Salesforce experience and the Salesforce platform more complete, but it's also a great opportunity to expose a much wider range of mainstream companies to the Quip experience," Taylor says. "And so I don't really see this coming at the expense of our broader vision around changing the way people work together."

The Gender Pay Gap On Snap's Board Is The Norm At Major Tech Companies

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Joanna Coles is the lowest-paid non-employee director and is set to make much less money than her male peers off the highly anticipated IPO.

A key detail that illustrates the tech sector's continuing lack of diversity and gender equity was buried in last week's hype over Snap's upcoming IPO.

Snap's board of directors includes five members who are paid by the company and only one of them is a woman: Hearst magazines' Joanna Coles. And she is the lowest paid non-employee director, receiving a little over $110,000, compared to her peers, whose pay ranges from $1.1 million to $2.6 million. And since Coles was awarded less stock than the other non-employee directors, she's sure to make less money off the IPO, when the company hopes to raise at least $3 billion.

The diversity of Snap's workforce is a mystery. The company has never released a diversity report, something most other companies in the sector—including Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Apple—have been sharing with the public over the past few years. In the S-1 registration documents, the company expressed its commitment to diversity: "We fundamentally believe that having a team of diverse backgrounds and voices working together is our best shot at being able to create innovative products that improve the way people live and communicate," it writes. The filing goes on, "We believe that diversity is about more than numbers."

I reached out to Snap for comment and a spokesperson wrote in an email, "The S-1 does not reflect Ms. Coles' latest grant which was issued in January 2017." They would not, however, divulge details of the new grant.

Read More:Virtual Marketplace Aims To Change The Ratio of Women On Boards

Of course, Snap has plenty of company when it comes to the lack of inclusion, diversity, and equity on corporate boards. Facebook's seven-person non-employee board, for instance, includes only one female non-employee member; Twitter only has two women out of six; Amazon's 10-person board (not including Jeff Bezos) is made up of three women.

Of Amazon's three women, two have far fewer shares than the average board member does (Patricia Q. Stonesifer holds 25,423 Amazon shares, per its 2016 proxy statement, which is well above the average of 11,096 shares but the other two—Jamie S. Gorelick and Judith A. McGrath—own fewer than 5,000 shares each). Facebook's sole female board member, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, earned $374,922 in fees and stock awards, which is the same as fellow board member Marc Andreessen but less than the $404,922 given to Erskine Bowles. Desmond-Hellmann also holds the fewest number of shares (25,680) in the group. Of Twitter's two board members, we only have compensation numbers on one—Marjorie Scardino—as the company just brought on Martha Lane Fox earlier this year. Scardino received $295,000 in 2015 (tied for the smallest compensation with fellow member David Rosenblatt) and owns 12,359—which is the fewest number of shares listed for beneficial owners (beside the two newest members who hold zero shares).

Snap likely won't be talking about its workplace diversity numbers anytime soon. But with only one female board member who makes far less than her male peers, the soon-to-be-public company might soon come under more pressure to come up with better answers than "diversity is about more than numbers."

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