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Manoush Zomorodi Challenges Us To Stick Up For Our Internet Rights

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The Note To Self host talks about her new project, Privacy Paradox, aimed at helping us salvage our digital privacy.

As the host and managing editor of WNYC's Note To Self podcast, which calls itself the tech show about being human, Manoush Zomorodi spends a lot of time thinking about that fleeting, uneasy feeling you likely get every time you download a new app and grant it access to your data. You might have had that feeling two months ago, when Uber started asking for permission to track your location even after you've exited the app—or perhaps the feeling surfaces each time you see an ad on Facebook that mirrors what you were searching for minutes prior via Google.

This is the inspiration behind a five-day interactive project Zomorodi has dubbed the Privacy Paradox, which starts today. Each day this week, Note To Self will present listeners with a challenge, podcast, and newsletter to nudge them toward a better understanding of what being connected means for their digital privacy. I spoke to Zomorodi about what listeners can expect from the Privacy Paradox, and why it all matters.

Fast Company: Tell us a bit about the idea behind your Privacy Paradox series.

Manoush Zomorodi[Photo: Amy Pearl, courtesy of WNYC]

Manoush Zomorodi: For me, it was really that split-second moment that I think we all experience when we go to download a new app or sign up for new platforms, and the Terms of Service pops up. And we've all been through it, right? We don't read it. We know that we're not supposed to. I think there's some study that says it would take us 22 days of our every year to read all the Terms of Service. But that split-second of ickiness, where you're like, "Am I a bad person? Am I giving away access to my entire identity for the rest of my life by clicking 'agree?'" And then we do it anyway. I was like, "Wow, this is happening to me all the time."

I was curious to know more about it and I sort of dug into what research there was. I learned that behavioral economists actually call this the Privacy Paradox. Actually, Americans do care very deeply about their privacy. In fact, 74% of Americans, according to Pew, say it's extremely important to them that they be in control of their personal information, and yet to be a person in the modern world, we have no choice. We need to be on all these platforms to be searchable, to be relevant, to pay our colleagues back for lunch, to sign up our kids for camp.

So is it just too difficult for us to disentangle ourselves from all these platforms and apps?

I don't think it has to be on or off. Really, that's what the project is: the idea being that each person has to figure out where they set their own personal privacy boundaries. But also, all of us need to think more broadly about what our digital civil rights are. I think it's totally fine to be on Facebook. What bothers me is that we don't have control over our data once we put it on there. We know that if we post something, Facebook is going to look at it, and they're going to target ads at us. But there's all sorts of new technology that a lot of people don't know about. For example, they know that cookies are a thing, but they don't know about digital fingerprinting. Even if you opt out of cookies, you can be followed around the web because of all these data points that are put together to figure out who you are. They don't realize that there is now technology that can parse not what you post online, but what punctuation you use—what sort of word choices you use. It can literally read between the lines of what you post. So I think we would feel better, and it would also be more American if we knew more what was being done with our data and were given a choice to opt out or even to take it back.

On the very shortest scale, I think that might be deciding whether or not to use the particular app. But what I'm really interested in is exploring what we can do more broadly and systemically. I went to see Sir Tim Berners-Lee at his lab at MIT—the guy who invented the web—and he was like, "This is not what I had in mind." So one of the things he's looking at is personal data stores—this idea that instead of you logging into Facebook, Facebook would log into you, and you would decide what you gave Facebook, and you could also take it back. It sounds sort of fantastical, but this guy invented the web, so I feel like if anyone could do it, it's him.

Another thing that I think we need to talk about is: Maybe there should be a Hippocratic oath for technologists. We ask that of physicians, lawyers, even us journalists—truth to power. People are like, "Oh, no one will ever stick to that." Well, you have to start somewhere. The other paradox about privacy is that we need to start talking more publicly about it—about what sort of role it plays. Our digital rights have not been defined by the courts yet. We're at this crucial moment where we need to have a public conversation about what we want going forward.

Privacy Paradox[Illustration: John Hersey]

During each day of the Privacy Paradox project, you're sending out a newsletter, posting a short podcast, and assigning listeners a challenge. Can you talk about what you'll be covering each day, and what you're hoping listeners will get out of this series?

We want to start on a very straightforward, technical basis. It's time we start talking on a micro-scale, with each person thinking a little more purposefully about how they use their digital tools and what they're okay with or not okay with. So for example, on day one we're going to ask people to check the privacy settings on their phone. That's pretty basic, probably, for your readers. We're also going to ask them to get on Signal, the encrypted text messaging app—not because they necessarily have to have a private conversation, but for people who maybe these days are worried that they could be targeted for their beliefs or affiliations or origins going forward. We're also talking about metadata. I think people hear the word and they start to space out. So we want to explain, "what is metadata?"

I'm learning more and more that we really have to start from basics. Open your phone, go to the settings app, scroll down to privacy, and see what each of your apps have asked permission for. Why does this app that's for your to-do list want access to your microphone? There's no reason why they need that. We know that the tech companies obviously want as much information as possible. But make a choice—take back just a little bit of your metadata. What I've learned with these projects is just starting to feel slightly empowered is a big thing. And it keeps you from feeling like, 'Oh, this is just the way it is. There's nothing I can do, so I might as well give up.' No! We have to keep the fire alive.

Our goal then is, through the week, to look at the various aspects of privacy. On day two, we're talking about specifically marketing and advertising, and how it works. And it's not just advertising. We're partnering with ProPublica on day two, to talk about their work on how Facebook categorizes people. And then, we get a little bit more psychological—which I think is different—and talk about the importance of privacy to how we become fully formed human beings. We talked to Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, who runs the psychiatric clinic at Stanford University, and he talks about the idea of individuation—that the mind needs a private space in order to become a fully formed adult. He's dealing with a lot of Stanford undergrads. (One could say that our current president also shows some regressive behavior online, as well.)

We're also talking to Luciano Floridi, a professor of philosophy at Oxford Internet Institute who was Google's in-house philosopher and advised Google on how to make decisions that algorithms can't make, like when the right to be forgotten was passed in Europe. How does a tech company start to make moral and ethical decision when they're dealing with things that can't be automated? I thought that was really cool—that seems like a sign of progress to me. We have a totally weird guest on day four, which is [Elan Gale], the executive producer of The Bachelor. He has some really insightful things to say about how people's behavior changes when they know they're being observed. And then day five is with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. We've made a madlib for your personal Terms of Service. His, obviously, are far more stringent than, perhaps, yours or mine might be. But if you just lay out some very basic principles to download by, maybe you can feel a little better and feel like your technology and the way you use it aligns with what your values are. It sounds kind of lofty, but I don't think it's too big to ask.

The tech reporters, we get this. But I'm hearing from my listeners that they're like, "I feel like it matters, I can't quite put my finger on why, and I certainly don't know what to do about it. But it's bugging me."

That brings me to: How do you try and convince people who don't think too much about privacy that it is important?

I think it's particularly related to what our country is going through right now, which is defining what it means to live by American principles. And that has really been what has connected it for me. This sounds so cheesy, but I went to Washington, D.C. with my 9-year-old over the winter break, and we went to the National Archives, and we looked at the Bill of Rights to see what the Fourth Amendment said. It's weird: The word privacy is not even mentioned in it once. But this idea that is enshrined—it's not about having something to hide. It's just self-determination; it's autonomy. It's free will.

That, to me, matters far more. I find that far more motivating than "I should have a strong password." That really is what gets me excited—the deeper idea—and instilling this in my kid, that privacy is important. In your real life, it means being able to go to your room and close your door and read and think. You should also be able to do that in the other places we live a lot of the time, which is online. We're treating our online lives differently than we're treating our real life. The Supreme Court has barely ruled on any of this, and yet this other virtual world is where we spend so much of our day.

In this moment of media turmoil, what have you been thinking about and hearing from listeners?

For me, what was very powerful was after the election, I sort of figured—just by what we know about the typical public radio listener—that maybe [my audience] leaned toward voting for Hillary. But we had a lot of Trump people get in touch and say, "I'm here. I'm listening to you, and these are issues that matter to me too." It was really gratifying.

We've been trying to do matchmaking with listeners because you figure well, you both listen to this show, so at least you're starting on one spot of common ground. We're going to do this, I think, in a couple of months. So I don't feel like I quite know where that's going to go, but I'm intrigued by it. And I felt great that this was a bipartisan thing—I found a bipartisan thing, everybody! We can all care about privacy and living life a little smarter and better online. And I feel energized as a journalist, so that's a good thing, too.

This interview has been edited and condensed.


Companies That Stay Silent On Political Issues Can Pay A Hefty Price

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Executives fear that taking a stand on Trump's policies will be risky. My research suggests their fears are misplaced.

President Donald Trump's executive order temporarily banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries has put corporate executives in a bind. Almost from the moment he announced the ban, questions poured in about the issue.

The media have highlighted a cluster of companies that have made public statements against the executive order. For example, Netflix called it "un-American," while Ford Motor Company said: "We do not support this policy or any other that goes against our values as a company."

But overlooked are the many more companies that tried to distance themselves from the debate. Chevron, Disney, Verizon, GM,Wells Fargo and others have all taken a wait-and-see approach. An illustrative example is Morgan Stanley, which expressed concern and said it is "closely monitoring developments."

Such responses are no doubt based on the prevailing wisdom that companies need to stay out of politics. Most large corporations have diverse constituencies that draw from both sides of the political spectrum. As a result, executives fear that attracting the political spotlight by taking a stand on the executive order will alienate either the millions of customers who voted for Trump or the millions who voted against him.

My research suggests their fears are misplaced. And in fact, the opposite may be true: It may be more dangerous to remain silent than to take a political stand.

Violating Expectations

Consumers today form relationships with a company based not only on the quality of the products and services it sells but also on a set of expectations of how it (should comport itself).

When companies violate these expectations by behaving inconsistently, consumers reconsider that relationship. Obviously, this can have a major impact on company performance if many customers experience a violation.

I've been working with colleagues at Clemson University and Drexel University to test this notion in a series of controlled experiments.

In one field experiment, for example, we exposed study participants to statements about a pharmacy chain moments before they entered one of its stores. Some read a statement in which the company described itself as guided by a set of values (what we call a "values orientation"), while others read that it tries to adapt to whatever market conditions warrant (a "results orientation").

These statements established participants' political expectations of the company. We predicted that for a values-oriented company, taking a stand would align with expectations but that abstaining would violate expectations.

Participants then read a short article reporting that the company had either just taken a stand on proposed gun control legislation (we randomized which side of the issue the company took) or had abstained from making a comment. After shopping, participants reported their in-store experience and whether or not they had bought anything that they hadn't planned to purchase before entering the store. We used the unplanned purchase to indicate the impact of the political stand on the customer-company relationship.

In general, unplanned purchases remained consistent no matter how the company reacted to the political issue. That is, about 18% of participants made an unplanned purchase whether they read that the company had taken a position or not.

But when we accounted for expectations set by the company, the effects were stunning. For a values-oriented company, 24% of participants made an unplanned purchase when it took a stand, but that dropped to just 9% when it abstained—violating expectations. For a results-oriented company, the effect was reversed: Unplanned purchasing was 26% when it abstained and dropped to 13% when it took a stand (again, violating expectations).

Even after accounting for the personal view of the participant and whether his or her state voted Republican or Democratic in the 2016 election, purchasing behavior was significantly affected if the company went against prior expectations.

Costs Of Staying Silent

Additional experiments reveal that consumers behave this way because they find it hypocritical for a company that claims to be "guided by core values" to then withhold its position on a political issue. The implication appears to be that the company is hiding something and is therefore trying to deceive its customer base. Conversely, reinforcing expectations may forge trust and enhance relationships with customers.

For a real-world quasi experiment on the potential costs of staying silent, we need look no further than Lyft's and Uber's respective responses to President Trump's executive order. Lyft reacted by publicly opposing the order and pledging US$1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union. Uber was more equivocal. In a Facebook post, CEO Travis Kalanick acknowledged concerns and said he would raise the issue "this coming Friday when I go to Washington for President Trump's first business advisory group meeting."

As part of a poll I administer periodically to gauge reactions to companies that take political stands, a group of leading scholars were asked to grade Lyft and Uber on their respective approaches. The panel was generally favorable toward Lyft, although conservative panelists questioned whether its actions would have a lasting impact on the political issue at hand.

However, Uber was criticized by scholars of all political persuasions for not confronting the issue. Panelists thought Uber was taking some leadership by reacting quickly, but its lackluster response was not consistent with its purported beliefs as a bold game-changer. It is little surprising, then, that the move motivated many customers to uninstall the Uber app from their phones. Uber received so many requests, in fact, that it had to implement a new automated process to handle all the deletions. The company later announced in an email to defecting customers that the executive order was "wrong" and "unjust." Kalanick also resigned from President Trump's business advisory council.

Feet To The Fire

The danger of inaction—as Uber's experience shows—is real. In remaining silent on important societal issues, executives may be harming performance more than they think.

It is no longer enough to engage government solely through private channels, although that will certainly be necessary as well. Consumers are willing to hold executives' feet to the fire if they believe the executives are betraying corporate values.

This may be especially true for companies that forcefully advocated for free trade, access to a global talent pool, action on climate change and inclusivity for all orientations and religious backgrounds during Barack Obama's tenure. My research suggests that both liberals and conservatives could view it as a breach of trust to abandon those beliefs by acquiescing to a swing of the political pendulum.

Though our current political environment is polarized and contentious, most people still find failures of sincerity more troubling than differences of opinion. As long as a company is not being deceptive by obfuscating its beliefs, consumers can be surprisingly tolerant of a company that holds an opposing view.

So to corporate executives: Your constituents are watching. They acknowledge that your company has a distinct set of values. They are asking for you to be forthright. And they want to know that you have the gumption to stand up for your stated values.


Daniel Korschun is associate professor of marketing, Drexel University. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How Constraints Force Your Brain To Be More Creative

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When we have less to work with, psychologists have found that we actually begin to see the world differently.

For decades, the dominant view among psychologists was that constraints served as a barrier to creativity. Anybody who spends a short time working under a confining bureaucracy, dealing with a micromanaging boss, or sitting in a classroom that teaches to the test can grasp the appeal of this argument. But it isn't the whole story.

Patricia Stokes is a Columbia University psychologist and an expert in the science of creativity. In one experiment she conducted back in 1993, rodents were forced to press a bar with only their right paws. Eventually, they not only learned to adapt to that constraint, but they figured out how to press the bar in more ways than a group that had free use of their limbs. This has come to be called "little 'c' creativity"—a form of creativity not focused on producing creative works but rather on solving practical problems through new uses and applications of resources. And it's this form of creativity that tends to get short shrift.

We tend to think of creativity as something artistic—the quality that produces masterpieces. But it's actually an important part of just getting everyday stuff done. It's what allows a programmer to complete her first line of original code, a product manager to identify a new market for an existing product, and an elementary-school teacher to find an entertaining way to teach subtraction. And when it comes to situations as different as these, constraints seem to improve our performance.

The Bubble Wrap Test

In a 2015 study, Ravi Mehta at the University of Illinois and Meng Zhu at Johns Hopkins University examined how thinking about scarcity or abundance influences how creatively people use their resources. The researchers thought that by highlighting resource scarcity, they could reduce people's natural tendency to use what was available to them in conventional ways.

To test their predictions, the researchers ran five experiments. In one, they started by randomly dividing 60 undergraduate participants into two groups. Mehta and Zhu then instructed the first set of subjects to write a brief essay about growing up having scarce resources, while the second set wrote about growing up having abundant resources. Then the researchers presented both groups of subjects with an actual problem their university faced.

With a recent move of its computer lab, the school had 250 bubble-wrap sheets and wanted to find a use for them. The experimenters provided a sample of the material, then asked them to come up with a plan for how to use the bubble wrap. Afterward, participants completed a survey to measure the different ways they approached the challenge.

The professors then hired 20 judges to assess the novelty of the suggested ideas. The judges, blind to whether participants belonged to the scarcity or abundance group, scored the proposals. And lo and behold, the scarcity group came out on top for their creative uses for bubble wrap.

How Constraints Shape Our Sense Of The World

The question was why: What about having fewer resources seems to lead people to view them more expansively? With abundance, Mehta and Zhu concluded, people simply have no incentive to use what's available to them in novel ways.

Our environments, in other words, either impel us to see things differently or they don't. That implies that creativity is in many ways situational, not some inborn faculty or personality trait. When people face scarcity, they give themselves freedom to use resources in less conventional ways—because they have to. The situation demands a mental license that would otherwise remain untapped.

Seen in this light, resource abundance can actually be counterproductive. Our problems, challenges, and opportunities may become more manageable with constraints that direct us to make the best out of what we have. Without constraints, the research suggests, we tend instead to simply retrieve exemplary use cases from memory; we typically sit on a chair, so that's how we think of chairs.

That functional fixedness can prove a real cognitive roadblock, causing us to see resources only as what they appear to be on the surface, or what they've been in the past. We follow the path of least resistance, which is helpful for letting us conserve mental energy by turning instinctively to commonplace ways of thinking.

With constraints, things unfold quite differently. We dedicate our mental energy to acting more resourcefully. If you ask someone to design or build a product, you might get a handful of good ideas. But if you ask someone to design or build it while sticking within a tight budget, chances are you'll get much better results. In fact, that's precisely what a team of researchers found when they examined how people design new products, cook meals, and fix broken toys—budgets significantly increased how resourceful people were in responding to these challenges, leading to better results.

So while you may not think of your quarterly budgeting process as a hotbed of creativity, it may set the stage for some innovations you wouldn't expect.


This article is adapted from Stretch: Unlock the Power of Less—and Achieve More Than You Ever Imagined by Scott Sonenshein. Copyright © 2017 by Scott Sonenshein. It is reprinted courtesy of HarperBusiness, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

Why Setting Goals Can Actually Make You Less Successful

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Sometimes goal setting can lead to a narrow focus that may lead you to limit yourself and miss opportunities. Just ask cab drivers.

It may seem that planning out your goals in weekly, monthly, and yearly increments would be a blueprint for success. But could a more haphazard approach actually be better?

In my life, I've set and accomplished financial goals, but I haven't set a career goal since college, when my one-year, five-year, and 10-year plans revolved around becoming a copywriter at an advertising agency and eventually leading a team. But then I stumbled into the world of publishing decades ago and never left. My modus operandi has been take each day as it comes and see what happens.

"Goal-setting research has shown that goals are great and horrible at the same time," says Adam Galinsky, a professor of business at Columbia Business School and leading researcher on the topic. "Internal stretch goals can be good motivators for people who want to perform, stay focused, and get engaged."

The downside is that goals can lead to undesirable behaviors and unintended consequences.

Your Focus Can Become Too Narrow

Goals can help you focus your attention, but they can also make that focus so narrow that people overlook other important features of a task, says Galinsky.

"This intense focus can blind people to important issues that appear unrelated to their goal (as in the case of Ford employees who overlooked safety testing to rush the Pinto to market)," Galinsky writes in "Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting," a study he cowrote and published in the Academy of Management Perspectives.

Bill Sanders, managing director of the operational-strategy consulting firm Roebling Strauss, Inc., agrees that goals often bring tunnel vision: "Leaders focused on a specific goal tend to miss alternative ways to achieve the same or better results, ignore warning signs that the 'engine is hot,' and miss what they could have learned on the journey by only thinking about the destination," he says.

You Often Sacrifice One Goal For Another

Another problem with goal setting is having too many can lead to poor choices. People with multiple goals are prone to concentrate on only one goal, ignoring the others, says Galinsky.

"Goals that are easier to achieve and measure (such as quantity) may be given more attention than other goals (such as quality) in a multi-goal situation," he writes.

Goals Can Be Limiting

If the timing is off, goals can become ceilings rather than floors for performance, says Galinsky. Once a goal is achieved, people relax, rest, and pause.

A study done by the National Bureau of Economic Research set out to find why it's so hard to get a cab in New York City on a rainy day. "Most people blame demand: When it is raining, more people hail cabs than when the weather is clear," Galinsky writes. "But as it turns out, supply is another important culprit."

Research found that most cab drivers set daily goals, and on rainy days they're able to make money more quickly than on sunny days. When they hit their goal sooner, they go home.

Goals Can Promote Unethical Behavior

Stretch goals should be challenging enough to inspire effort and performance, but not so hard that employees see no point in trying. While this logic makes sense, these goals can cause employees to take too much risk or even engage in bad behavior, says Galinsky.

For example: "At Sears' automotive unit, employees charged customers for unnecessary repairs in order to meet specific, challenging goals," he writes. "In the late 1980s, Miniscribe employees shipped bricks to customers instead of disk drives to meet shipping targets. And in 1993, Bausch and Lomb employees falsified financial statements to meet earnings goals. In each of these cases, specific, challenging goals motivated employees to engage in unethical behavior."

Goals Cause You To Address Failure

Missing a specific goal, even slightly, can be easily interpreted as failure, which can limit potential, says Sanders. "Even though you may have outperformed anyone in your position before you, improved profits more than anyone could imagine, and improved the team's skill set in the process, you can still walk away feeling like a failure," he says.

And goals can trigger a fear of failure, adds Anisha Vinjamuri, CEO of the management-consulting firm InnovationsIQ. "The brain is wired to seek rewards and avoid pain or discomfort, including fear," she says. "When fear of failure creeps into the mind of the goal setter, it commences a demotivator with a desire to return to known, comfortable behavior and thought patterns."

Goals Eliminate The Power of Randomness

Innovation comes from a certain degree of chaos and randomness, says Vinjamuri. "Extreme goal setting kills creativity," she says. "It creates a culture of fixed mind-set versus growth mind-set, which has been gaining a lot of traction in the recent years."

This can also affect personal change. "To be great at any profession, it's important to recognize what motivates us periodically and realign our career paths to match what we enjoy doing the most, because we tend to give our best when we're most satisfied and happy at work," Vinjamuri says. "As much as setting rigid goals gives us a sense of security, real growth comes from being able to handle and manage randomness. Much of it ties back to positive personality traits that are essential for growth in any profession like flexibility, adaptability, less resistance to change, and openness to new ideas."

For me, accomplishments like starting and selling a business and writing a book with a teenage philanthropist (whose foundation is ironically named Random Kid) were things I could never have imagined or even known how to do if opportunities hadn't shown up. Randomness has given me a penchant for life's surprises.

A Better Replacement

Instead of asking yourself if you're meeting your goals, Galinsky suggests asking, "Am I meeting my preferences? Writing those down can be helpful because it allows you to not lose track of it," he says. "Sometimes we forget what's important to us. But this changes over time."

Also, be open to what happens and pay attention to your decisions. "There is a belief that you will find what you're looking for when you're not looking for it, such as looking for love," says Galinsky. "It's okay to have goals and then make your decisions consistent. Understanding your own preferences and what you want is critical, and it's how you avoid making mistakes. But the value gets lost when you say things like, 'Three years from now I will be assistant vice president.' People get too strategic, and that takes out spontaneity."

Why YouTube Is Taking Its Time On Mobile Live-Streaming

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Two years after Periscope and Meerkat, YouTube is jumping on the live mobile video bandwagon. Carefully.

It may seem odd that more than two years into the mobile live-streaming hype, we've heard so little from the biggest video site of them all: YouTube. In 2015, Meerkat was the talk of South By Southwest and Twitter quickly responded by launching its own live-streaming app, Periscope. Now it's practically normal: We can watch news events unfold live on Periscope and groan every time one of our friends goes live on Facebook. Even Instagram is in on it: Photos of lattes and sunsets are now supplemented with endless live feeds from brunch, protests, and our friends' apartments. So, again: Where the hell is YouTube?

Oh, here they are. Today, YouTube announced that it's rolling out live video to people with 10,000 or more subscribers. That's a tiny sliver of YouTube's user base, but the company promises to extend live video—along with its new "Super Chat" pay-to-highlight messaging and monetization feature—to all of its users this year.

Limiting live video to YouTube stars may seem overly cautious, if not downright sluggish (especially considering how late the company is to this game). But this type of slow-paced iterative rollout of new features is pretty standard for platforms of YouTube's size, and for good reason.

First, there's the issue of quality. If you've ever scrolled through the current live streams on Periscope, you know how varied the results can be when you let anyone with a smartphone broadcast to the whole world. Some of it is intriguing or entertaining. Some of it is pretty weird. And then there's the subset of it that makes you question whether mobile live-streaming should exist at all.

If you think things can get odd or questionable on Periscope, just imagine what would happen if millions of YouTube users suddenly had the option to "go live." How would they wield that power? A post-traumatic flashback to Chat Roulette comes to mind, and that wouldn't even be the worst-case scenario. Everything from live-streamed terrorist atrocities to the most banal moments of people's lives could clutter up YouTube before the new feature could have a chance to prove its value to the masses. By contrast, handing the live video keys over to more experienced YouTube creators likely ensures a certain level of semi-professionalism in the quality of the streams that start popping up on the platform.

Of course, YouTube already lets people tune into live video feeds. They just typically come from broadcast partners rather than bedroom gossip hounds and amateur singer-songwriters. But even the professionally produced live streams offer us a glimpse at how easily things can go sour. If you've ever watched a presidential debate or really anything having to do with politics on YouTube, you've likely watched the real-time chat box on live videos can turn into a firehose of hate speech and conspiracy theories that fly by in all caps too rapidly to even allow for the possibility of a levelheaded discussion. We are, after all, talking about YouTube here. Have you ever read even the regular comments under a video? If YouTube doesn't do something to tame the vitriol, expect a fair amount of hate speech and abuse to accompany the further democratization of live broadcasting.

This isn't just a YouTube problem. In today's political climate especially, hot-headed online discourse and outright harassment are common features across social networks and media sites of all stripes. For its part, Twitter is in the process of tweaking its abuse report tools and policies in a long-overdue bid to fix one of its nastiest problems now that neo-Nazis feel unusually empowered there. The fact is that the internet is pre-loaded with people ready to shout, stalk, doxx, and even threaten others, with the misbehavior seeming to be at its worst when content is flowing in rapid, real time and audiences are staring into their screens. It's a modern reality that platforms like YouTube need to plan for.

The quality issue is especially important for YouTube, which makes the bulk of its money from advertising. Every new live video has the potential to lure somebody's attention—or, as YouTube execs see it, their lucrative eyeballs—from another, non-live video that they explicitly chose to watch. If you pull someone away from an eight-minute Saturday Night Live clip, the odds of it being a 60-second feed from some extremely bored guy's basement had better be pretty low. And the odds of the viewer being repulsed or annoyed enough to close the app had better be close to zero.

Piracy is also a risk when it comes to a quick, universal rollout of mobile live-streaming on YouTube. Periscope learned this the hard way when its app coincidentally debuted a few weeks before the season premier of Game of Thrones in 2015. Still playing with the proverbial bubblewrap on the trendy new app, some users couldn't resist the urge to livestream the show with Periscope, and the takedown notices from HBO quickly followed.

Of course, piracy is a problem with which YouTube is already very well acquainted. Indeed, more than almost any other platform, including Facebook and Twitter, the company's very success depends on its ability to remain on the good side of copyright holders. That's why it invested millions of dollars in its Content ID copyright infringement detection system and is busy training its algorithms with 50 million reference files from content owners like record labels and TV networks. YouTube engineers have worked hard to keep that system smart, even teaching it common workarounds employed by pirates, like warping audio and distorting video. A careful, phased rollout of live video is probably the best way to train Content ID to accurately detect multiple copyright violations in real time, especially when much of the content being live-streamed isn't likely to be in the Content ID database.

YouTube hasn't said how long it will take for the rest of us to get the ability to stream live, other than that it's expected to happen later this year. Suffice it to say that until then, YouTube will be learning from its early adopters and their audiences, tweaking the features as they go. In the meantime, there's always Periscope.

Will Twitter's Q4 2016 Earnings Benefit From A Trump Bump?

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Donald Trump's affinity for the struggling social network may help lure much-needed users. Only time will tell if they'll stick around.

Barring any last-minute changes, Twitter will unveil its fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday morning, but will this earnings report be as lackluster as the last one? As always, the answer to that question hinges on whether the company has managed to lure in new users over the past few months.

Election chatter—along with sustained civic engagement following the election—and President Trump's warm embrace of the platform may have given it a boost in the fourth quarter. What remains to be seen is whether those new users will keep coming back for the long haul. Analysts at MoffettNathanson noted recently that even if there is a "Trump bump," Twitter simply hasn't proven itself as a social network for the masses. Despite live-streaming major events like the Olympics, Thursday Night Football games, and the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, Twitter barely moved the needle on user numbers during the third quarter last year.

Other analysts are a bit more optimistic that Q4 earnings may exceed expectations as a result of election-related engagement and potential success from live-streaming the presidential debates and NFL games.

Twitter could use the good news. Its Q3 2016 earnings report, which confirmed rumors of layoffs and all but quashed any acquisition talk, revealed that it had 317 million monthly active users—just a 3% increase year-over-year. That came as little surprise given Twitter's track record for user growth: The company only attracted an additional 15 million users during the 18-month period from Q1 2015 to Q3 2016.

One thing Twitter has steadily worked on recently, amid continued criticism, is curbing harassment and empowering users to report hateful content—an improvement that CEO Jack Dorsey will surely point to during the earnings call. (In fact, Twitter just announced yesterday that a new algorithm will help bury abusive tweets and that it would make it more difficult for harassers to create new accounts.) This isn't just important to retain and attract users; Twitter's infamous reputation as a hotbed for abuse and harassment was reportedly part of the reason Disney declined to submit an acquisition offer last fall.

Dorsey will likely also give an indication of how Twitter's live-streaming efforts are faring. Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour is reportedly now in charge of all live video initiatives, an area Twitter invested heavily in last year with its NFL partnership.

We'll be keeping our eye out for anything interesting in tomorrow's report. Stay tuned.

7 Late-Breaking Signs You Should Rethink Taking That Job Offer

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Getting a job offer is exciting, but don't let your enthusiasm cloud your judgment. Run through this checklist before saying yes.

You're in the final stretch of a long, drawn-out interview process for what you initially thought might be your dream job. You got your hopes up. You want it—and now you've finally got it. But with an offer in hand, the endorphins swirling in your bloodstream, and a hiring manager waiting by the phone for you to call and accept, something still doesn't feel quite right.

As career counselors always say, you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you. And over the course of the hiring process, there have been a few subtle things that struck you as not quite right. With so much invested at this point, you might be tempted to brush them off. But should you? Keep in mind that this is the stage of the process where the ball's in your court, and you have more leverage than you might think—don't squander it. Here are a few things that should give you pause before saying yes.

1. Big Promises

It's one thing for a prospective employer to detail the type of career growth they foresee being associated with a position—that's something you'll always want to know. But it's another for that description to sound a little too good to be true. Beware of an employer that makes promises that sound even slightly out of range for what their organization could reasonably provide. If you've done your homework and researched the company, you'll have a strong sense later on in the interview process where those limits might be.

You'll have plenty of conversations about career potential and compensation, advancement and training opportunities. And all that can be a lot to take in. Just consider it with a measure of skepticism. Ask questions to see how many employees have reached whatever level of success an employer might be dangling in front of you.

Likewise, listen out for flattery, even of the underhanded kind. Every hiring manager has to work to woo their top-choice candidate, but if their enthusiasm for you seems to go overboard—as though bringing you on board would be the best thing that ever happened to their organization—take note. Always listen to your BS detector.

2. Gaps Between The Opportunity And Your Personal Goals

People take jobs for many wrong reasons: more money, to get away from a job they hate, or just needing to try something new. So while you're caught up analyzing the potential opportunities of accepting this offer, it's easy to lose sight of your own goals.

Pause for a moment after getting an offer to step back from scrutinizing its details. Reflect on your own ambitions and passions as though this job didn't exist. Write them down. Then go back to the offer: Will it move you closer to them or further away? Or more to the point: How many of your goals will this job satisfy, and how much, and how many might it steer you away from? Like much in life, the answer is usually a mixed bag, and that's fine.

It doesn't have to be your dream job, but in order for you to take it, the role does need to move you closer to where you want to go. If not, you could be wasting valuable time that'll set you back in the long run, no matter how great some of those details may sound. An amazing opportunity may not be the most amazing opportunity for you.

3. High Turnover

If you find out the company has a high staff turnover, that's a red flag to try and learn more. Hit up LinkedIn, PayScale, Glassdoor, and other sites one more time (because surely you've already checked them at least once) to see if you can find out from former employees why people leave. Always ask during the interview about the last person who held the position. High staff turnover could mean a negative or even toxic company culture that you'll want no part of. No matter how good the offer may sound, always weigh it carefully if you know that staff tend not to stay put very long.

4. A Spotty Reputation

How is the organization viewed by others in the same industry? What's its reputation in the business community? Has the business been involved in an unusually high number of lawsuits? (Hint: Always Google a company's legal record!)

Ask about who the company has dealt with—and not just former and current employees—what they think, and consider their opinions. Customers and suppliers are a good source of information. You should also look into trade associations in the field: Does your prospective employer belong to suspiciously few, or suspiciously dominate too many of them? What are some concrete ways the company supports its local community?

Your own reputation will be linked with your employer's by association, so make sure you consider whether you can stand behind the brand.

5. Unprofessional Behavior (Even Small Stuff)

Is the employer late for the interview? Are there people attending the interview that you weren't told would be there? Does no one apologize or explain these surprises? Is the hiring manager dressed inappropriately for an interview?

Are you asked personal questions that shouldn't be part of an interview? Do they call or text you after working hours? Have they contacted someone at your former workplace—somebody who isn't a reference—before clearing it with you first? This could be a result of a weak organization, a lack of integrity, or a lack of respect for you. Regardless, it should raise alarm bells about the values and ethics of the organization.

6. Unanswered Or Dodged Questions

Whenever you're interviewing for a position, you shouldn't be afraid to ask tough questions—about the last person in the role, the company's turnover rate, how performance is judged and promotions are given out. Don't just listen for the answers, though—listen for any hesitation on the employer's part in answering them.

If a hiring manger or HR contact seems like they're trying to hide something or glosses over your request for information, politely push back. Any company you want to work for is open, transparent, and has nothing to hide.

7. Mismatched Work-Life Expectations

You may want to have weekends and evenings to spend with your family, but your boss expects you to put their needs first. The job offer may include some great benefits like generous parental leave, flex hours, or vacation time, but you may find that the work culture doesn't encourage you to use them. Be very clear about your expectations from the start so you can avoid getting into a work situation you wind up regretting.

It's never easy to look at a job offer critically, especially when you've been asked to make a decision in a few days. But if you've learned a few new things in the hiring process that you didn't initially know, there's always time to do more digging. Have a close look at anything you unearth before saying yes.

Flipboard's Quest To Save Online Publishing—And Itself

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With Flipboard 4.0, Mike and Marci McCue grapple with an alt-fact, ad-saturated internet using a mix of mobile tech, AI, and print-era publishing aesthetics.

The iPad was a futuristic gadget when it debuted in April 2010, but the apps it presented offered a rather nostalgic revival of traditional media. Photos, graphics, magazines, and books optimized for its high-res screen featured a print-era visual polish that had been sorely missing from ad-crammed web pages and monochrome ebook readers.

One of the early hits was Flipboard, a graphical embodiment of social media that launched in July 2010. It turned Twitter and Facebook feeds into an online magazine by displaying the photos, articles, or other pages that people linked to. Previews of articles were laid out like items on a newspaper page; and flicking up on the screen triggered a visual effect that looked like flipping pages. Flipboard was among the top 10 iPad apps in its early days, according to rankings by AppAnnie. "It seemed to be a perfectly timed creature of the iPad age, of the tablet age," says digital advertising consultant Ken Doctor, author of the book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.

But what about the current age—with tablet sales slumping, phablet phones gone mainstream, and ever-more competition, be it Facebook, Apple's News app, or even Snapchat? "It's kinda like the beautiful little toe of the internet," says Doctor of Flipboard. "You don't really need it, but it is a really good-looking little toe, and it works well." Flipboard has just launched a massive revamp, Version 4, in the hopes that people will feel they need it. About 97% of Flipboard downloads are now on smartphones, and that's where the revamp starts, with upgrades for iOS and Android phones.

Flipboard launched as an iPad app on July 24, 2010.[Photo: courtesy of Flipboard]

On the surface, the new Flipboard doesn't look much different, and in some ways may be less intuitive. Under the hood, however, it's enriched with better artificial intelligence to both refine the articles you see and banish sites that fling atrocious advertising or fake news at readers. The killer feature, though, remains its social component. Users have created and shared about 30 million collections of articles about their favorite topics and those can be bundled together to create magazines, and published for everyone else to read. Flipboard also pulls in content from over a dozen social networks. The latest update—being released today—is an attempt to make the app more approachable for newcomers. And while Flipboard still has a learning curve that may exceed many people's patience, those who hang in will discover a different and enriched way to browse the news.

I've been meeting with CEO Mike McCue and his team since the summer as they worked to fold Flipboard's increasingly complex inner workings into a straightforward package. It's been a long process: The launch was slated for some time in November, then pushed to December 8, then January 26. Now, it's ready.

A Different World

Flipboard calls itself a "social news magazine;" others call it a newsreader. That's just one of the gaps between internal and external perceptions of Flipboard that have posed a challenge for the company.

The company has already survived plenty of tech, media, and business changes. Twitter began restricting access to the network—for all third-party apps—in 2012; and Twitter user growth has stagnated (and it's laid off staff). Facebook is the biggest home of news—some of it fake; and Apple News now has choice real estate on iPhones.

In 2015, Flipboard reportedly pulled out of acquisition talks with Twitter (McCue won't comment on it). It lost several senior staffers, including cofounder Evan Doll (who ultimately returned to Apple to run its health software division); and it fell short of ad sale projections. The company has yet to make a profit. "We've always had high expectations for what we can do around revenue," admits McCue.

Flipboard launched on the iPhone in December 2011[Photo: courtesy of Flipboard]

But Flipboard has also grown to over 100 million monthly active users, he says, and it has cash left from $210 million of investment (providing an $800 million valuation). Flipboard's redesign, version 4.0, promises to harness the latest technology to improve the reading experience, combining artificial intelligence with user feedback to weed out poor journalism and crappy advertising—two menaces of the post-truth web. New AI capabilities also promise very fine-grained, customized content offerings.

At the same time, McCue is rejecting robo-driven "programmatic" advertising that packs web pages and app screens with adverts about belly fat or links to fake news. He's using humans to sell premium-priced slots for magazine-style ad campaigns from upscale brands. The model is not Yahoo News but rather a newsstand copy of Vogue. "We've had a very ambitious goal around reforming advertising," says McCue. "We'll either live or die based on that."

The Anti-Web

McCue wasn't out to build just an app, he says; the tech veteran wanted to rebuild the very web he'd helped construct. In 1989 McCue founded Paper Software, whose virtual-reality browser tech was acquired by Netscape, and he subsequently founded Tellme Networks, a mobile "voice-browser," as he calls it. Before the age of smartphone apps, people called a toll-free number to ask questions of Tellme's speech-recognition system. Microsoft bought Tellme in 2007 for a reported $800 million, eventually folding the technology into its voice interfaces for Ford cars, Xbox, and the Cortana virtual assistant.

Flipboard emerged from a series of weekend brainstorming sessions at McCue's house in 2009 with about 15 friends and former colleagues from Paper, Netscape, and Tellme. Among them were iPhone software engineer Evan Doll and John Giannandrea, who's now Google's SVP of engineering. "What if the web was accidentally deleted and we needed to build a new web, knowing everything we know today, that the world is moving to mobile, that it's moving to social, that people now are nodes on this web, just like websites?" McCue says he asked his friends. "What would we do differently?" Doll joined McCue as a cofounder of what would become Flipboard (though only McCue put up money). Other people from the meeting joined as advisors.

Launch night, 2010[Photo: courtesy of Flipboard]

For content, they started with Twitter. For a design metaphor, they reached to that old-media mainstay, magazines. "The content [on the web] wasn't structured," says Marci Pedrazzi McCue, Mike's wife and Flipboard's head of marketing and PR. (They met when she joined Tellme in 2000.) "It was like, how do I go to one place to see all of the things I want, instead of these separate silos? And so the concept of the magazine as the organizing principle for all the content that was out there, was very early on in the thinking," she says.

Flipboard CEO Mike McCue at an office happy hour[Photo: courtesy of Flipboard]

Dressed in faded jeans, white converse sneakers, and a Patagonia jacket, silver-haired Mike McCue sports the de rigueur casual style of the Valley. But he is also a bit folksy. A gap between his front teeth makes for a disarming smile, and a twang in his voice is reminiscent of Fred Rogers. Flipping through a magazine created by a user called Nikon Girl, the pitch of his voice rises. "This is an article about a Leica camera, which to me is like, OK, this is like awesome to me," he says, jumping back in his chair. He may be exaggerating to convince me how cool the product is, but it doesn't feel fake.

Sitting in Flipboard's conference room, along with Marci (who wears a colorful scarf and fashion-statement orange horned rim-style glasses), we reminisce about when news came from the newsstand. I wonder, are magazines for old folks like us? "A magazine is a timeless concept—a collection of ideas packaged together, for a passionate audience," says Mike. He posits that the firehose of information from services like Twitter is what's getting old. Flipboard staffers, even the one third (out of about 150) who are under 30 years old, get the revamped magazine concept. "They're tired of the relentless, nonstructured newsfeed," he says.

The Curated Internet

One challenge to Flipboard's magazine metaphor is that it's gotten muddled over the years. When it was built mainly on social networks, Flipboard was essentially a feed, albeit a very pretty one. "It became clear that you couldn't depend on the Twitter API," says Mike of the application program interface required to tie apps into Twitter. The network was limiting third-party access to data and imposing restrictive design guidelines and certification requirements. Flipboard added other news sources and also hired editors to vet and select what to include.

With Version 2, launched in March 2012, Flipboard became more social by enabling users to make their own content collections, called magazines, on any topic. "This was HUGE because now people were adding new blogs and sources to our network. This is when the ecosystem opened up," Marci tells me in an email. That's a key difference between Flipboard and standard news readers—the user community.

Marketing team Marci McCue and Christel van der Boom, 2011[Photo: courtesy of Flipboard]

"People who get into curation really get into it. They'll have 20, 30, 40 magazines," says Mike. "You'd be amazed the number of socks magazines on Flipboard." I counted at least 30. Some user collections are private, most are available for anyone to subscribe to, and many are collaborative. Mike contributes to magazines for Leica cameras and wooden boats—two of his passions.

California lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom regularly curates eight magazines on topics like gun control, environment, and immigration. Football player/astronaut Leland Melvin flips articles, photos, and videos to five magazines. Al Gore sporadically posts articles, generally by or about him; and Bob Villa promotes his own material.

In October 2014, Version 3.0 finally brought in artificial intelligence, courtesy of Flipboard's purchase of newsreader Zite (from CNN) earlier that year. Flipboard closed the service, spurring a lot of negative Flipboard reviews among Zite fans, but it gained a team of AI developers. Editors still curate the main topic areas, but now the vast majority is generated by algorithms. Altogether, Flipboard has about 10,000 topic areas—an overwhelming list for new users to scroll through, let alone chose from and read about.

There must be something to this setup, since others have copied it. Apple News also has topic areas, although its emphasis seems to be on following specific sources, like the New York Times, The Economist, Fox News, or Fast Company. An app called News360 is a closer copy, with its own seemingly endless list of topics.

Flipboard also remains the prettier app, thanks in part to partnerships that integrate about 200 big English-language publishers (and additional ones for other languages) into its interface with large photos and the flip animation. They include Bleacher Report, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, CNET, CNN, Fast Company, Fox News, Huffington Post, The New York Times, People Magazine, Road & Track, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired. The relationship also allows Flipboard to share advertising revenue. Flipboard has simpler arrangements with tens of thousands of smaller sources, which appear just as web pages within the app and don't bring in ad dollars.

In addition to aggregating, Flipboard invests a lot of resources in hand-selected content. It has hired journalists like Josh Quittner of Time magazine and former CNN producer Gaby Schwartz to select specific articles for a general news "Daily Edition," as well as topic categories: business, politics, sports, technology, and celebrity news. Steve Fine, former director of photography at Sports Illustrated, plays a similar role at Flipboard.

A Critical Upgrade

The new app, which I tried in beta, opens with the question: "What's your passion?" You can search for almost any topic from its list of about 10,000 and get either the exact thing or something pretty close. I experimented with a search for "German Philosophy," which isn't one of Flipboard's topic areas. But it recommended Western Philosophy and offered subcategories to home in on, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.

I could also make a wide, eclectic collection of topics. Under History, I picked Ancient Egypt, Alexander Hamilton, and Roman Empire, but skipped Canadian History and American Civil War. This fine-tuning was in earlier versions of the app, but was harder to find.

So what's a Flipboard magazine—the packages put together by editors, the user-curated collections, or the overall feed based on the topic areas and the user-curated collections people follow? Flipboard simply calls all those things magazines now. "What 4.0 tries to do is…make it a lot more accessible to our users so they don't have to know, wait, am I following a magazine? Or a topic? Or a person?" says Mike.

Users have to understand some of Flipboard's internal logic to use the app.

However the new app also adds questions. When I started to make a magazine, it first asked me to select one of four choices: "For a passion" (based on interests), "For reading specific sources," "For sharing in a group," or "For collecting" (personal collections that can be public or private). I scratched my head for a while. There are fine-print descriptions of each option, but it's a lot to absorb on your first button click.

Under my profile screen of the app, there are similar-looking collections of topics under two sections: Magazines and Following. I had to ask Mike to explain the difference. Magazines are ones that I've created in some form—be they ones generated by keywords and algorithms (now called Smart Magazines, like my philosophy and history ones) or collections I add individual articles to, like one on the topics that I write about. It took me a few minutes to be sure I understood the difference. "Following" meanwhile, refers to magazines that other people have created, like a humorous one about androids called Sexy Robots. Those are a lot of fine distinctions for the uninitiated to keep track of—or even to care about. Overall, though, I wouldn't say that the new app's interface is more intuitive than the previous version.

The distinction between Magazines and Following is subtle.

The clunkiness may not matter so much if Flipboard can deliver on its biggest promise: more fine-tuned, personalized content. It aims to do this with an AI engine called Flavour that Mike describes as a Pandora station for news. Flavour uses natural language processing and machine learning to assess the content of any article, or even a tweet, in fine-grained detail, he promises.

One goal of Flavour is that users won't have to worry about where content is coming from. It creates Smart Magazines using feeds from all of Flipboard's possible sources, including articles selected by the editors, feeds from premium content providers and other sites, user magazines, and feeds from hand-selected Twitter "influencers"—currently over 3,000 as diverse as Ryan Seacrest, Elon Musk, and Kellyanne Conway.

The promise is that Flavour will weed information by the user's interest areas. Someone into startups, for instance, might get celeb investor Gary Vaynerchuk's tweets on that topic, but not posts about the great dinner he had. Mike may not get every article from Nikon Girl's magazine, but he should get the ones about Leica cameras. A user can up- or down-vote any article to refine the filters—upgrading a feature in Version 3.0 that never worked well.

The topic "Artificial Intelligence," displayed (left to right) in Apple News, Flipboard, and News360.

To assess how it works, I followed a few topics on the new Flipboard, Apple News, and News360. Articles in the "AI" category overlapped more than half the time, and the three apps all hit the same major stories. Under the less-mainstream Archeology topic, Flipboard and News360 had a lot more in common with each other than with Apple, whose articles were also older.

I especially enjoyed the stories that both Flipboard and News360 brought up, but Flipboard has a lot more customization options. Beyond Twitter and Facebook, Flipboard users can link to an additional 11 social networks to pull in content, such as LinkedIn, Sina Weibo, SoundCloud, YouTube, and Pinterest. A pop-up menu in articles, which Marci had to show me, allowed me to not only like an article, but to "less like" it, similar to a thumbs down that tunes a Pandora radio station.

Personalization enabled by AI will be the big new development in online news, says Ken Doctor, putting Flipboard in competition with the original news sources it draws on. "Flipboard was an early innovator out there…in personalization," he says. "If others are able to increasingly personalize the experience on their own brands—on news-creating brands and features-creating brands—I wonder if that can make Flipboard less differentiated, less attractive."

Flipping A Profit?

The biggest publishers are key to Flipboard getting to profitability, which the McCues say they aim for "in a couple years." Mike won't say how much Flipboard is currently bringing in, but he hints at a range. "To get a company of 160-some people [to profitability], you need about somewhere in the range of $50-$80 million in revenue annually," he says. "We are well over more than halfway there."

Flipboard doesn't make money off ads from most sites, but it does with the 200-some premium sources through ad revenue sharing deals. If a publisher sells and runs the ad, Flipboard gets a cut. If Flipboard's own sales team sells ads across a topic area, the premium sites that contribute to that area get their cut.

For all the other sources, the focus is to minimize crappy ads. In the new app, users will be able to report sites with annoying advertising, as well as fake news. Flipboard has also developed an algorithm to flag bad sites by scanning features like domain name practices commonly used by bots and spam sites, or user behavior like leaving the site almost immediately after landing on it. Such crummy sites won't get pulled into Flipboard magazines anymore.

Meanwhile, sources big and small that Flipboard knows to be good in terms of content and advertising, from Vanity Fair to Gardenista, will get extra weighting that makes them more likely to come up. The challenge is that, no matter how many sources Flipboard vets, users can always add more.

For the sites that are part of the flip interface, Mike doesn't allow pop-ups or banners—or any ads on a page of content. Instead, ads appear between pages. Users come across what are essentially full-page ads while flipping through an article—as they would in a copy of Vogue. (Flipboard in fact hired a former Vogue staffer, as well as ad and marketing people from publishers including the New York Times, the Financial Times, News Corp., NBC Universal, and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.)

Flipboard is focusing on lavish advertising packages. One by United Airlines, for instance, starts as a one-pager, but readers can scroll to the right, to experience something like a magazine spread, and then continue to even more pages. It also features video, an advertising genre that Flipboard is aggressively trying to grow.

Readers can scroll sideways to explore the United Airlines ad spread.

The experience reminds me of iAds, Apple's ambitious, failed program to get advertisers to produce media-rich advertising within iPhone and iPad apps. "If you clicked on it, then it took you to this awesome experience—which took forever [for advertisers] to build," says Mike. He says that the United ad was made quickly from photos the company already had, and video taken from a TV commercial.

Flipboard also sells advertorial space, like this roundup of photography articles sponsored by Sony's camera division.

The big reason Flipboard is going after magazine-style ads: That's where the money is. Global media and marketing for 2016 was estimated by Advertising Age at $965.1 billion, of which only around one-third is online. Mike is betting that high-end advertising, the kind you see in Vogue, will start making the move to digital, and that Flipboard will become a preferred platform. "And the neat thing about that is, you don't need a billion users to make a billion dollars," he says. "You need 100-ish million users or 50 million users that are really engaged."

Flipboard faces enormous competition for online advertising—led by the marketing and targeting power of Google and Facebook. Flipboard is just one among ever more places to advertise, says Ken Doctor. "With all the distribution possibilities the publishers now have, with Facebook and Google and Apple, Snapchat and all, what I've heard [from the publishing partners] is, not a high priority, because we don't see that much impact from [Flipboard]," he says.

Mike says that advertisers "love" Flipboard's ad options, but the proof will come in revenue. Flipboard is currently selling just 20% of its ad inventory, he tells me, though he claims Flipboard doesn't need to get near 100%. "It's more like, I'd love to go from selling 20% of our inventory to 30%. That's a huge amount of additional revenue," he says, enough to make the company profitable. Even if Flipboard can make its revenue goals, it won't happen soon. "It's gonna take time, it's gonna take years," says Mike. "We're signed up for that."


This Is How Planned Parenthood Is Gearing Up For Its Hardest Fight Yet

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Planned Parenthood has been battling to keep its doors open for 100 years. Here's how it's preparing for the latest threats.

When Sarah Stoesz became the CEO of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota 15 years ago, her affiliate included 29 clinics. Today, there are 19. A barrage of state laws restricting abortion access, funding cuts, and anti-choice policies have caused clinic after clinic to close, leaving large swaths of the region without access to quality reproductive health care.

Despite the fact that a majority of Americans supports reproductive rights; despite a weight of evidence proving that accessible family planning services leads to healthier, more economically vibrant communities; despite the mountain of barriers that low-income women, young women, and women of color face in accessing health care, conservative legislators have pledged to "defund" Planned Parenthood. It is a crusade for Stoesz, and all the leadership of Planned Parenthood is ready to fight.

"The values that Planned Parenthood represents are in fundamental disagreement with the values of many of the people who have now been elected to Congress and to legislatures across this country," Stoesz says. "We are not planning on losing this fight. How to prevent this is the first thing I think about every morning and the last thing I think about before going to sleep."

What The Fight to "Defund" Really Means

In 2015, Planned Parenthood received $553.7 million in funding from government health service grants and reimbursements, constituting around 40% of its annual budget. The term "defunding" has emerged as shorthand to encompass the many ways that Congress can cut off this support. At the moment, Republicans are targeting Planned Parenthood's ability to receive Medicaid reimbursement, which accounts for 75% of the government support Planned Parenthood receives.

Sarah Stoesz, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota.[Photo: Flickr user Lorie Shaull]

This money is not bequeathed to Planned Parenthood in one large chunk. The organization operates 650 health clinics around the country that accept Medicaid in order to provide essential health care—STI testing and treatment, cancer screenings, pap smears, contraception, and more—to low-income patients. After Planned Parenthood provides these services, clinics submit a claim to Medicaid for reimbursement—just like any health care provider that accepts Medicaid. This does not include abortion services because the Hyde Amendment has prohibited federal funding for paying for abortion care since 1976.

The vast majority (79%) of Planned Parenthood health care patients have incomes at or below the federal poverty level, and Planned Parenthood is often the only place they can go. Without convenient and affordable access to reproductive health services and family planning, unplanned pregnancies go up. Maternal and infant mortality rates go up. Incidences of unsafe and self-induced abortions go up. STI rates go up. The impact of losing this care would be drastic.

A 100-Year Fight

For any organization fighting for survival—whether it's an international nonprofit or a scrappy tech startup—chaos and anxiety can run rampant. Leaders are not only responsible for keeping their organizations afloat, but must also reassure employees, stakeholders, and clients that everything is going to be okay. This is a steep challenge, but coping with resistance is part of Planned Parenthood's DNA. Ten days after Margaret Sanger opened the U.S.'s first family planning clinic in Brooklyn in 1916, she and her colleagues were arrested.

"The intent here is to destroy Planned Parenthood, not just because we do particular services, but because we are a champion of one of the most radical ideas in history—that a woman's body is her own," says Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood's executive vice president. "That was a radical idea 100 years ago and apparently is still a radical idea. We've been through ups and downs and we are not going anywhere. We will use every means possible or necessary to protect that care."

Related:In Pictures: 100 Years Of Design At Planned Parenthood

After a raid on the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, five arrested women were Marcella Sideri, Margaret Sanger, Hanna Stone, Elizabeth Pissont, Sigrid Brestwell, and (rear) Antonette Field.[Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images]

Planned Parenthood's leaders, particularly those working in primarily conservative parts of the country, are accustomed to fending off political attacks. Staci Fox—the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Southeast (PPSE), which covers Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—said that the Trump-Pence administration's threats are nothing she hasn't seen and fought before. Her affiliate has successfully fought similar defunding measures in Alabama and Mississippi over the past two years. When Alabama Governor Robert Bentley announced in 2015 that he was terminating the state's agreement to provide Medicaid reimbursements to Planned Parenthood, PPSE filed a lawsuit challenging the decision and won.

"We've been living and breathing these battles in the South for decades," Fox said.

Lawsuits have proved a powerful and effective defensive strategy for Planned Parenthood, with courts around the country and at multiple levels of government affirming that defunding violates the Medicaid Act. Twenty-four states have attempted to cut off Planned Parenthood funding over the past few years, and Planned Parenthood has overwhelmingly won lawsuits challenging these measures in Mississippi, Louisiana, Kansas, Arkansas, Ohio, Arizona, Indiana, Utah, Florida, and Texas (to name a few). Its own legal team, along with organizations like the Center for Reproductive Rights and the ACLU, have pledged to fight defunding and other anti-choice measures in the courts every step of the way.

Pro-choice and pro-life protesters argue their point in front of Denver Planned Parenthood on January 20, 1985.[Photo: Jim Preston/The Denver Post via Getty Images]

While operating under duress is not new for Planned Parenthood, there is no doubt that this moment—with a White House, Congress, and cabinet stacked against it—is particularly worrisome. The organization's mission is not just to provide comprehensive reproductive health care, but also to serve patients regardless of their ability to pay. Stoesz said that even without government funding, Planned Parenthood will never close all its doors, but blocking Medicaid reimbursements undermines the "access for all" pillar of its mission.

"We have never faced this kind of threat before, but at the same time, the outpouring of support for Planned Parenthood is unlike anything I've seen before," Stoesz said. "It's the worst of times, it's the best of times. It's also an unmapped time. We are planning our own strategic moves, but because there is so much uncertainty, it's harder than normal to plan strategy."

Hitting The Streets

Regardless of what's happening in politics, Planned Parenthood has always made mobilizing grassroots support a strategic priority. Now, in the face of overwhelming political opposition, this support is more critical than ever. Planned Parenthood is working to harness the post-election/inauguration energy and outrage into political activism—calling on supporters to participate in rallies and protests, make donations, sign petitions, canvas in communities, call politicians, and volunteer. The leadership wants to send a clear and unavoidable message to politicians that Planned Parenthood has a powerful movement behind it.

Staci Fox (second from left)[Photo: via Planned Parenthood Southeast Advocates Facebook]

"First and foremost, we are mobilizing our supporters," Fox says. "One in five women in this country, at some point in their life, will have been to a Planned Parenthood. That's a lot of women. Whether here in Atlanta or D.C. or California, people are hitting the streets. We are trying to give people voices to make sure they are heard so folks know this type of legislative move in Congress is not the will of the people."

For example, on January 6, Planned Parenthood supporters showed up at Speaker Paul Ryan's office to deliver 87,000 petitions. Planned Parenthood was also a partner for the Women's Marches that attracted millions of people across the country after Inauguration Day. However, the question remains whether grassroots activism will be enough to prevent defunding. In any case, the wave of public support has heartened Planned Parenthood leaders and employees who said they feel more resolved than ever to keep fighting.

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

"I am so energized right now, and I think our staff are too," says Stoesz. "Among the 350 people that work here, I hear them saying to each other, 'We got this, this is what we do, this is what we were born to do.' We've been building our muscle for this fight for 100 years and practicing our moves."

[Photo: Flickr user ProgressOhio]

Even the most determined optimism is not enough to keep creeping anxieties and fears at bay. According to a clinic worker at Planned Parenthood of NYC, who wished to remain unnamed, "the vibe is defiant but anxious." Optimism and resolve is tempered by realism, although the specifics of what will happen if Planned Parenthood is defunded remain unclear.

"We always have contingency plans, but I am so far away from conceding that will be necessary that I'm not ready to do much of that work." says Stoesz. "No matter what happens, we are not closing down Planned Parenthood. In the worst case, we will be engaged in thinking more and more creatively about how to pivot so that we can continue to be Planned Parenthood in whatever political environment we find ourselves."

Without federal funding, Planned Parenthood would have to adapt. It would have to seek out other ways to serve low-income patients and support clinics in underserved areas. This prospect is neither simple nor easy. According to a Congressional Budget Office report, defunding Planned Parenthood would greatly reduce access to services for up to 630,000 people (resulting in thousands of unplanned births). This estimate does not account for the people who would lose care if defunding caused clinics to close. Some Medicaid patients would choose to pay for Planned Parenthood services out of pocket. Others would forego care altogether.

"If Planned Parenthood is defunded, it is going to cause a public health disaster," says Laguens. "We are doing a lot of thinking and meeting and trying to figure out how, in the short term, we could fill gaps or find other places for people to go. But the reality is that there is just no way if people are denied coverage, we are going to be able to make that up or find ways for them to be served."

[Photo: Flickr user Paul Sableman]

Politicians pushing defunding have claimed there are other places Planned Parenthood patients can go for these services, such as Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). But many of the FQHCs and rural health clinics they tout are not required to provide family planning services or are not required to serve low-income patients. Among the limited number of health centers that are equipped to provide reproductive health care and accept Medicaid, many are already burdened with waiting lists and long lines. They would not be able to handle the upsurge in patient volume. There are no good backup plans, which Laguens said is driving Planned Parenthood to brainstorm new ways to deliver its services.

"We are focused on two fronts: Fighting for service to be provided in-person, and continuing to push boundaries of all the other ways we can get care to people," says Laguens. "We are thinking about innovations that can open up the next frontier. I still don't see how we will do an IUD by drone, but hey, if we can, we will figure that out."

Planned Parenthood can and will survive without government funding. Losing Medicaid reimbursement would be a major blow, but not a fatal one. Rather than legislating the organization out of existence, the only thing lawmakers will accomplish with defunding is to deny poor people access to care. Planned Parenthood's leaders say it has been around for 100 years and will be around for 100 more. The organization will find a way to survive, but in the meantime, millions of women will find themselves bereft of options.

LinkedIn Just Rolled Out A Redesign—Here's How To Clean Up Your Profile

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Now that LinkedIn has a new look, it's time to update your account—starting with these four cuts.

With its largest desktop redesign ever, LinkedIn is fighting the good fight against distraction. The 2017 updates make for less clutter across the platform and a more focused experience on every front, especially your personal profile.

But, much like a garage full of junk, sprucing things up only makes a real difference if you get rid of all the random junk that's just taking up space.

With that in mind, here are four cuts your LinkedIn profile needs to take these changes to the next level—and show off the parts of your personal brand that really matter.

1. Stale Professional Experiences

Do you still have a blurb from your internship eight years ago? Or maybe a portfolio item that was totally impressive when you were just starting out?

Consider giving them the axe today.

Details about your ancient professional history draw attention away from your most recent and relevant experiences. So, allow your past two roles to sell you and boil anything seven to 10 years in the past down to the essentials (which in some cases might include just your job title and company name).

The further back you go in your career timeline, the more "less is more" rings true.

2. Unendorsed Skills

Your skills section is a keyword oasis, which can make loading it with the maximum allowed 50 skills pretty tempting. But it'll backfire, as in many cases, handfuls of them go unendorsed altogether. (Translation: You have a list of talents that no one is willing to say you're any good at.)

These "dead" skills become clutter. They raise more questions than they do interest. Worse, how much keyword power could they really have if other users aren't interacting with them?

Prune your skills section and attract new endorsements on a regular basis.

3. Lackluster Accomplishments

Many of your once-independent profile sections such as Projects, Honors & Awards, Patents, and others are now gathered in a new "Accomplishments" section. It's pretty genius, because organizing the content this way removes a ton of unnecessary bulk.

There's a trade-off though: These accomplishments now directly compete with each other for attention.

Look carefully at what you've listed here and identify which items you'd want someone to be sure to see, and those you'd be okay with them forgetting. I always recommend removing your language skills if you're not fluent (because "high school Spanish" isn't impressing anyone). While you're at it, cut test scores and courses from your ancient academic history.

Other possible distractions: Certifications that have expired, projects that fizzled, and publications with URLs that are no longer valid (check these twice!). Awards from early in your career that you know aren't that impressive can be excess noise, too. Removing these items will allow your more impressive—and relevant—accomplishments to stand out.

The idea is to only highlight those items that build the personal brand you want reflected right now.

4. Old Recommendations

Granted, anytime someone says something really lovely about you, it's a nice thing. So, I get why you'd cringe at the thought of cutting nice paragraphs all about you. But hear me out: Outdated recommendations can undersell you, or sell skills you're not interested in using anymore—which means they can undermine who you are today.

For example, let's say you spent the early half of your career in marketing, but now you're solely interested in backend web development. A profile full of songs of praise for your marketing-related talents could distort the "I'm an ace with servers and databases!" impression you're looking to make, and instead make you come off like someone who fell into tech yesterday.

Obviously, if you've won recognition from a particularly notable figure, or if someone says you're the best professional they've ever worked with, it may be worth retaining because of the awesome level of social proof it holds. But in most cases, you'll want to replace or hide old recommendations to give emphasis to those that pair well with your current direction.

LinkedIn is a place to shape a precise, meaningful, persuasive story about your talents—not a career catchall. Cutting distracting content might feel odd at first, but it's vital to refining the message you deliver. So really try to make the most of its new streamlined design to wow everyone who visits your profile.


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

The Tech Geek's Guide To Talking To Other People At Work

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That blank stare from the CMO doesn't mean she's an idiot. It means you need to translate your tech speak into business speak.

I was talking with the head of research and development for a major medical device company, and he was really frustrated. "Anett," he said, "my leadership team doesn't understand what we're doing. We're not just a back-office function supporting the company—we're building our products!" He felt like his team was getting trampled on and disregarded—he just didn't know how to get his message across.

People in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields are used to getting blank stares and being asked dumb questions when they talk about their work. But it's not that everyone else is stupid—it's just that you know a lot more about the technical details than they do.

In other words, it's a communication challenge: You need some better ways to present your solutions, discoveries, or obstacles to everybody else in your organization—to translate them from tech speak into business speak. So whether you're a recent engineering grad just entering the corporate world, or a mid-career IT manager hoping for that big promotion, here are four tips to help you explain what you do and why it matters.

1. Give Your Conclusion First

As a technical professional, you've been trained to follow the scientific method: Articulate the hypothesis or problem, explain your process, describe your results, and then give your conclusion. The scientific method is critical to your work, but it can screw up how you talk about it.

You can't follow that same sequential structure when you speak. In business, you have to give the conclusion first, ideally in the first two minutes. You have a narrow opening: The audience's window of attention closes quickly. So avoid the urge to show your work first, and present your conclusion immediately.

2. Don't Expect An "A" For Effort

Just as your senior leaders don't want to hear the details about how you came to your conclusion, they don't care how much effort it took to get there. When you go to a restaurant, you don't care about how long the pastry chef spent on your cake, just as long as it looks and tastes great. It's the results that matter.

The same goes if you're a tech expert or science wonk. It may be the process that excites you intellectually and gets you up in the morning. And sometimes those results look so deceptively simple that it almost feels deceptive to focus just on those. But to communicate to everybody else, you can't take them through every hour—that's not going to make them see how good you are.

Resist the urge to explain your process. It may feel unfair, but you won't be appreciated strictly for your effort. Learn to take pleasure in the achievements themselves—and again, to always talk about those first.

3. Make Listeners Feel Smart

When you speak to your boss, your peers, or your senior leadership team, your goal isn't to demonstrate how smart you are. Your goal is to make them feel smart. No one wants to feel dumb, but when people don't understand what you're saying, that's how they'll feel—even if that wasn't your intention. They'll get worried that they're making stupid decisions. They'll check out. And next time, they may even be less inclined to listen to you.

So if you want to keep your audience engaged and preserve your own influence, speak like you're talking to a friend. Maybe that friend isn't as well versed in the technical details as you are, but that's okay. Focus on connecting, not explaining.

This is true, even when you're speaking to other people with technical backgrounds; don't assume they're going to immediately understand what you're talking about.

Technology moves quickly, and the forks in the road where one person's specialized knowledge departs from another's usually come up fast. So even if you work in the same field as someone else, there's still probably a gap between your knowledge bases just by virtue of you doing different jobs. Your job as a communicator is to bridge that gap.

4. Stay Positive No Matter What

Even if you're leading a project that ends up getting dropped, you need to stay positive in front of your team members. I worked with a tech leader from a major aerospace company who told me he'd spent nine months working on a project, only to have it cancelled after funding was cut. "You get used to it," he shrugged.

He's right. Projects get canned all the time in tech fields, but great leaders don't let their teams get discouraged. Stay positive, and move onto the next project—and when you talk to others in your organization, make sure they know you're looking forward to that.

If you come from a technical background, there's no reason you can't be an effective communicator. Keep these four strategies in mind, and you'll be less likely to get bogged down in the details, even if those are the things you like the most.

Here's Why Apple's 10th Anniversary iPhone Will Likely Cost More Than $1,000

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Apple is intent on packing the top-of-the line phone with new features and wrapping it in fresh design themes.

A special 10th-anniversary edition of the iPhone is expected to be the ultimate iPhone, and it'll come with a price tag to match—very likely north of $1,000, says a source with knowledge of Apple's plans.

The price tag isn't very surprising considering that the 256GB version of the iPhone 7 Plus sells for $969, and the new iPhone 8 is expected to be packed with many more features—including a new OLED display, which is said to look great and stretch across the whole front of the phone, according to our source, but will probably cost Apple roughly twice as much as the LCD display used in current iPhones. The new phone is also likely to get a memory upgrade from the current iPhone 7 line and, our source points out, memory is relatively expensive now due to the strong dollar.

The new 5.8-inch phone will probably be called the iPhone 8, but some believe Apple will call it the (far cooler-sounding) "iPhone X."

The new phone will look something like a smooth black monolith, with few visual interruptions to its sleek design. (It's not hard to imagine the promo video: The mysterious black monolith floats slowly through space—a single letter "X" above it.)

Along with the 5.8-inch iPhone 8, Apple is expected to release a 4.7-inch model (likely called iPhone 7s) and a 5.5-inch model (likely called iPhone 7s Plus), according to reports confirmed by our source. Only the iPhone 8 is likely to have an OLED screen, the others with LCD displays as KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Quo wrote in November.

Several sources tell Fast Company that Apple has been tying up much of the available OLED display manufacturing capacity in the marketplace at the expense of smaller phone makers. That marketplace is very small. Only Samsung and a couple of Asian upstarts make the OLED displays, our source says, and only Samsung's displays meet Apple's quality requirements.

The 5.5-inch iPhone and the 5.8-inch iPhone are expected to each have dual-lens cameras, like the iPhone 7 Plus before them.

As rumored, the sides of the iPhone 8 will likely be made of forged stainless steel, a less expensive material than the aluminum used in current iPhones. The back of the iPhone 8 is expected to be made of glass rather than metal, our source says, confirming previous reports.

Apple has been working to remove the physical Home button from the iPhone, our source says, relocating it underneath the display surface. It would become a button to touch, not press. Our source says the technology is still "evolving" but that Apple is likely pushing hard to get the new Home button into the iPhone 8, which it hopes will be the most feature-rich iPhone ever.

There's even a chance that the physical buttons on the sides of the iPhone may go away, our source says, replaced by touch-sensitive inlays in the metal.

Our source says Apple has been working with Lumentum (formed when JDS Uniphase split in 2014) on 3D-sensing technology for the new high-end phone. It remains unclear how the technology will be applied, however. It could be used to recognize the user's face for authentication. It could also be used in the camera to provide better image resolution. It could even be used in some form of augmented reality application, according to our source.

The iPhone 8 is expected to have a far bigger battery than the current iPhone 7 line, but its exact size remains unclear.

Intel scored a big win by getting its modem chips inside some of the iPhone 7s, and the company's new 7480 LTE modem will likely go inside some of the new phones as well. Qualcomm is also expected to supply the modems for some of the phones. Apple selected the vendors for the RF technology in January, our source says.

But don't believe those recent rumors that Apple is accelerating its manufacturing schedule for this year's phones, says our source, who has seen no evidence for that among suppliers. At the start of the year, Apple does manufacturing test runs of up to 100,000 iPhones. This can be a burden for suppliers, our source points out, because Apple often demands free parts for the devices in the test runs. Full production of the newest iPhone typically begins in May and hits full stride in August.

Apple is expected to announce its new phones in the fall and begin selling them shortly thereafter, as usual.

And, as usual, it's worth noting that Apple can change the features and specs in an upcoming phone at any time, even late in the production cycle. So while the above preview describes the iPhone 8 as it likely exists today, some features and specs could change before launch day.

This Is The State Of Gender Diversity On Boards Around The World

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Spoiler alert: We've got a long way to go to get to parity.

One particular problem the recent Snap IPO news brought to light yet again is how few women sit on the boards of directors of major public companies. This, in light of the fact that recent findings from MSCI ESG, a global research firm, indicate that companies with strong female representation on boards generated a Return on Equity of 10.1% per year versus 7.4% for those without.

How is this playing out on a global scale? Egon Zehnder, an executive search firm, has been studying the progress (or lack thereof) of board diversity for 12 years. Its latest Global Board Diversity Analysis (GDBA) reveals that there have been incremental gains worldwide. In 2016, for example, almost 19% of seats on the boards of the largest companies in the world were held by women. That's an increase of nearly 5% since 2012. The GDBA's authors say this is due to countries making gender diversity a priority.

Most Boards Still Have Very Little Female Representation

The data also reveals that most Western European countries, Canada, and South Africa have better representation than the U.S. The analysts find that the U.S. progress has stagnated for the last four years, falling short of having at least two women per board.

Japan is one of 11 countries out of the 44 studied where more than half of the boards have no female representation at all. But a majority (77%) of countries do not have a minimum of three women per board, including Russia and Brazil.

Countries with boards that became less diverse include China, Mexico, Taiwan, Czech Republic, and Turkey. The analysts chalk this up to "stagnation or situations where social, economic, or political headwinds make it difficult to achieve gender diversity on a broader scale, let alone in the boardroom."

More Women Needed As Chairpersons

The analysts note that diversity is often led by a board chair. "When diversity is a priority at the top, it will trickle down to board representation, board behavior, and overall mind-set," they write. But there hasn't been any progress toward women getting into those roles worldwide. The report found that men are in 95% of those positions.

Countries that have made the most inroads to women in leadership, not surprisingly, have the highest number of female CEOs and CFOs, such as Sweden. At 29%, Norway boasts the highest percentage of women holding executive and non-executive chair positions. Italy comes in a close second with 27%.

The Transformational Potential Of Quotas

On a positive note, the analysts cite Italian and French company boards as "transformed" by government-enforced quotas that were passed in 2011. Italy's companies have increased their female board representation from 8% to 32%. In France, the shift went from 21% to 38%.

Norway was the first to introduce the concept of board diversity quotas in 2003, and nine countries in this report have instituted some type of government mandate for a target percentage–-usually between 20% to 40%.

"If progress continues at the rate we've seen globally over the last two years (1.6% per year)," the analysts write, "the average number of women per board will reach three by 2021, while gender parity remains 20 years away." Still, they point out, it would be too early to declare a win in four years, because most of the countries that need to make the target are in the developing world.

"A significant share of the female population is still living in countries where the diversity ambition is not yet prioritized," they observe, "and these regions are decades away from reaching this critical target."

Could The Way Unemployment Is Reported Change Under Trump?

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The president doesn't trust the unemployment numbers, but the stats he's looking for have been a part of the report for 70 years.

When it comes to certain issues, we know the truth is complicated.

Take the gender wage gap. It's commonly quoted that women make, on average, 77¢ for every dollar that a man in the same job earns. That number comes from U.S. Census Bureau data that indicates what the typical American woman working at least 35 hours a week, year-round, is paid. But it's not accurate to cite that figure as the ultimate indicator, as the actual figure varies between white women versus black and Hispanic women.

Nor is it fair and accurate to cite the unemployment figure as the chief indicator of the health of the job market or the economy.

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its monthly jobs report on February 3, the unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 4.8% with 227,000 new jobs added for the month of January. Taken alone, that figure looks remarkably healthy for the new administration. By comparison, when President Obama took over in January 2009, he inherited an unemployment rate of 7.6%, representing a continued loss of jobs across all industry sectors, according to the BLS's report that month.

During his campaign, Trump at times has called the unemployment figure (which decreased during Obama's eight years in office) "one of the biggest hoaxes in politics," as well as a "joke," claiming the rate could be as high as 42%. Others have called the statistic into question, including Jim Clifton, chairman and CEO of Gallup, who titled a blog post he wrote "The Big Lie."

Who's right when it comes to the numbers?

"Saying that the BLS unemployment rate is "misleading" could mean two very different things," Katharine Abraham, PhD, the commissioner of the BLS between 1993 and 2001, tells Fast Company. Abraham, who is currently director of the Maryland Center for Economics and Policy, says it could mean that you think the unemployment rate doesn't measure what it claims to measure, or that the unemployment rate measures what the BLS says it measures, but that it isn't the best or only measure of what is going on in the labor market. "I interpret most of the comments that have been made by people associated with the Trump administration as being of the latter sort," she says.

"I'd take strong issue with anyone who questioned the integrity of the BLS numbers," Abraham continues, but agrees that it makes sense to be paying attention to some other labor market statistics the BLS produces. She's referring to the labor force participation rate and the share of the workforce who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work—in addition to the unemployment rate.

How The BLS Gets Its Numbers

What many people don't know is that since 1940, the BLS has been producing the kind of in-depth report that covers all the areas Abraham points out.

The current report, as well as each previous one, is over 40 pages long and includes a variety of measures both in chart and text form that analyze employment numbers by industry, location, etc. At the end of each report, as well as in a dedicated FAQ page on the BLS website, there is a clear explanation of what the numbers are, how they are gathered, and how each category is defined.

For example, the basic concepts involved in identifying the employed and unemployed:

  • People with jobs are employed.
  • People who are jobless, looking for a job, and available for work are unemployed.
  • The labor force is made up of the employed and the unemployed.
  • People who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force.

To find these numbers, the BLS takes surveys every month called the Current Population Survey (CPS) to measure the extent of unemployment in the country. It went through a major modification in 1994 to computerize the interview process and get more information.

The BLS doesn't count every individual every single month to see if they are working or not. They take a sample of around 60,000 eligible households (about 110,000 individuals). This is much greater than the average public opinion poll, which tops out at around 1,000. To get a representative sample, the BLS divides by geographic area that reflects both rural and urban centers as well as different industries. To further mix it up, every month, a quarter of the households rotate off the survey so no one household is interviewed more than four months in a row. As the BLS notes, "This procedure strengthens the reliability of estimates of month-to-month and year-to-year change in the data."

Related:This Is The Hidden Challenge In The Future Of Work

Bob Murphy, a professor at Boston College who previously worked as a White House economist under President Bill Clinton, calls survey and statistical analysis the "rock-solid gold standard." Furthermore, he says that the BLS is a world-class independent statistical agency that is inherently nonpartisan, and challenges to their reporting is "complete nonsense."

"They're very clear about the margin of error," he points out, and the BLS has noted in the past if the unemployment rate falls by as little as 1/10th of a percentage point, it is not statistically meaningful. "Politicians and the public don't appreciate that," says Murphy.

Why Is The Administration Suspicious Of The Unemployment Numbers?

Despite the proliferation of data, just over one-third of executives (38%) had real confidence in the insights their analysts were providing, according to a survey by KPMG and Forrester Research. Bill Nowacki, the managing director of decision science at KPMG in the U.S., told Fast Company in a previous interview about that survey that the mistrust could be the result of traditional thinking clashing with new technology.

Murphy says that the mistrust of government officials goes back to Watergate. "Also, social media has a huge multiplier effect," he says. "Something that would have never gotten to see the light of day gets sent around a lot," Murphy explains. And while he encourages skepticism toward officials, Murphy says the spillover to mistrust the BLS is "not justified."

Some economists have pointed out certain statistics that need to be taken into account that don't necessarily get widely reported in the media. For instance, on the morning the report was released, Justin Wolfers, PhD, an economics professor at University of Michigan, tweeted: "Be careful: Household survey estimates can't be compared with previous month because of changing survey weights." Wolfers also observed, "Benchmark revisions were relatively minor, but suggest job growth through 2016 was a bit faster than previously believed (85k over the year)."

Another reason is that the labor force participation rate and other more nuanced data aren't headline makers. As Murphy says, the BLS is already putting out a "whole slew" of numbers including broader metrics that include people who are discouraged and have left the workforce. That number is considerably higher, at 9.4%.

Then there's the labor force participation rate, defined by the BLS as the measure of people 16 years old and over who are either working or actively seeking work. Murphy notes that the steady drop in the labor force participation rate was a previous concern. "That seems to have bottomed out," Murphy adds. Indeed, the labor force participation rate rose by 0.2 percentage point to 62.9% in this last report. That technically leaves 37.1% of eligible workers out of a job.

However, that's not always the case, as Murphy says. He explains that part of it could be due to a long-term shift in demographics. "We have more people retiring and choosing to leave the workforce," he explains. Boosting the economic literacy of the general public would help, Murphy says, so that people could understand what's behind the unemployment percentage.

Can The BLS Numbers Change Under Trump?

The BLS overhauled some of its statistical analysis during the 1990s, in part to dig deeper into the joblessness rate, recognizing that unemployment alone isn't enough to measure how the workforce is doing. The new reporting came out in 1996. It's important to note that was an election year, when the incumbent administration had a stake in the changing results. Yet because the BLS is an independent nonpartisan organization, it stayed on schedule.

Fast Company asked Wolfers if he thought that the BLS could change the way it reported its findings under the current administration. "My guess and hope is that it won't change," he replied, "but many people's faith in this administration has been proved wrong so far."

The Build-Your-Own-Handbag Startup That's Perfected Mass Customization

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How Mon Purse's Lana Hopkins shook up the supply chain and embraced technology so consumers can design their own bags at non-luxury prices.

If you pop into Bloomingdale's in New York in search of a new handbag, you might notice that, next to the Rebecca Minkoff, Marc Jacobs, and Salvatore Ferragamo displays, there's a new brand called Mon Purse.

Unlike other handbag brands that rely on the expertise of a designer to construct fashionable products each season, Mon Purse puts the control entirely in the customer's hands. Founded by Australian entrepreneur Lana Hopkins in 2014, Mon Purse invites customers to design every part of a handbag from scratch using a 3D bag maker on the brand's website or on a screen in a department store. Once you decide on a silhouette—say, a tote or a clutch—you can pick the color and texture of leather, the hardware, and what to monogram on the side. The final product then gets delivered to you within a month.

Lana Hopkins, CEO of Mon Purse

The concept of bespoke handbags is nothing new, but until now it usually meant going to a high-end store and working with a craftsman. The whole endeavor could cost thousands of dollars. Another startup, 1Atelier, has modernized the process with a digital interface, but the brand's bespoke bags target the luxury consumer who spends an average of $1,200 on a handbag. With the clever use of technology and a reimagined supply chain, Mon Purse has not only been able to achieve customization at scale, it has done so in a way that makes these products more affordable: You can get a wristlet for $65 and a satchel for $480, all designed to your exact specifications.

Mon Purse's business model has been wildly popular since the brand's debut. The company says that business has grown 8,000% over the last two years, exceeding $10 million in sales in 2016, and is on track to hit $20 million this year. I sat down with Hopkins to discuss why she thinks customers are so attracted to customized products, and how she used technology to make her business model a reality.

What made you decide to launch Mon Purse?

Lana Hopkins: I launched Mon Purse because I was trying to solve a personal problem. I was running around Bondi, an area in Sydney, looking for the perfect handbag. I just couldn't find what I was looking for. I love gold hardware, but all the bags that caught my eye had silver hardware. Whenever I found something that came close, there would always be one or two things about it that I wanted to tweak. And I thought, if I'm going to make a big investment in a bag, I'd rather get something that I really want, not something that is second-best.

I was really disappointed walking out of the Westfield department store, but as I was leaving the building, I stumbled upon the Build-a-Bear Workshop. On a whim, I spent an hour building a tiny teddy bear from scratch. I picked out his little body, then chose a beautiful pair of eyes and a nose. I watched him come to life. As I walked back to my car, I couldn't believe that I felt excited about this bear I had just built. I mean, come on, I'm a 30-year-old woman.

But what it came down to was that the process of creating cultivated in me an emotional connection with the object because I was putting my energy and my heart into something. That was the moment I decided to create a platform that would allow women to build their perfect bag from the ground up.

So you think the power of customization has to do with the fact that the customer feels a bond with the product they make?

Yes. I think it's true with almost any product the customer co-creates. Just before I started Mon Purse, my husband designed a pair of Nike shoes through the Nike ID program. He's absolutely in love with them and refuses to stop wearing them. They're his favorite pair of shoes because he feels like he has some deep connection to them.

When a customer has the opportunity to design her own handbag, in the case of Mon Purse, she's making a conscious effort to create a unique product that reflects her personal style and psychology. That's an investment in self-expression and time, which increases her bond with it. I've found that the intensity of a customer's emotional connection with a product correlates to her willingness to purchase it. And customers tend to feel great about a purchase they had agency in creating.

This seems to be part of a broader trend of customers caring less about carrying designer labels. They're more interested in ensuring that products reflect their own personal style.

Yes, we've definitely noticed the same thing. When you go into a department store and scan the aisles, over the last couple of years the size of logos has started to shrink. There's also a trend of some brands going entirely logoless. Take Victoria Beckham's brand, for instance, which is designed by Victoria herself. Even she has decided to forgo putting her name on her products.

But designing a bag from a blank slate can be intimidating. How do you ensure that your customers don't feel totally lost in the design process?

That's right; most women are not fashion designers. They haven't gone to art school and learned the principles of bag construction. But they know something beautiful when they see it.

The first day, when we uploaded all of the possible combinations, there were thousands of different leathers and structural options. My computer crashed. I thought, if my computer can't sustain that, people's brains certainly won't be able to, either. The solution was simplifying. We invested a lot of time in user testing to understand exactly what our customers wanted.

Women don't want to be overwhelmed by too many options. Our customer does not want hundreds of thousands of different colors and textures to choose from. They want to pick from a couple of summer and winter colors. We've also created some classic bag designs as a starting point for the customer. We've hired a very talented designer who used to work for Tom Ford and Chloe because we appreciate that it's important for us to define our design language. We need to have a clear aesthetic and offer a fashionable product. For us, the look is about minimalism. This simplicity makes sense when it comes to the core model, because the customer will be adding all the bells and whistles they want on top of it.

We've also built an algorithm that allows you to protect yourself from yourself, so to speak. Our designer lays out some basic principles about what colors do and don't go well together. So for instance, we would never want you to have a handbag that has an ostrich front, a leopard-print handle, and a bright yellow grainy side.

None of this is to say that we're imposing limitations on the customer. We started with 17 million possible combinations, and now we have 6 billion, and that's just the beginning. But the way you communicate something visually and the way you structure your user experience should be as straightforward and intuitive as possible. The customer should leave feeling that she created exactly the product that she wants, something that is very much in fashion, but that also reflects her style perfectly.

How do you make all this work from a supply-chain perspective? How do you get a product to your customer in four weeks?

We built a proprietary supply chain. In a traditional supply chain, the goal is to make a thousand of the same bag, whereas we're making a thousand bags a week that are each entirely different.

When I first started, I went to thousands of factories in Europe, and I finally found one in Turkey that was perfect. Initially, we were just working with the sampling room to test out the business model. The way sampling rooms work is that you create a custom sample one at a time, then those samples get passed on to the general production department where thousands of products will get made.

So what we did was we took the sampling department model and injected capital and infrastructure into it. We now own several factories in Turkey. We're continuously refining how to increase the speed without compromising the quality of the product. This process is thoroughly data-driven. We now have enough information for us to know that black is our top seller, so we will always have a certain amount of black leather on hand. But at the same time, our business is all about being as lean as possible and producing on-demand because we don't know exactly what people are going to ask for.

You're now available at Bloomingdale's. Why did you decide to go into department stores, rather than staying as a direct-to-consumer brand?

For us, partnering with the top department stores in the world—Bloomingdale's in the U.S., Selfridges in London, and Myer here in Australia—is actually a marketing and branding opportunity. This was the key to us scaling quickly. It allowed us to infiltrate local markets because we're found in stores that have already built decades of trust with customers.

And in terms of the store itself, we realize that not everybody wants to design a bag while they are out shopping. Some people want to check out the products, take a look at the sizes and shapes, and smell the leather. The point is that before they leave the store, we've created a proposition for them. They've seen everything they need to go home, make a cup of hot chocolate, and take the time to design their dream bag.

So you don't think that brick and mortar is dead?

No, it most certainly isn't. People are always going to need human interaction. The brick-and-mortar store is about injecting magic into people's experiences with the brand. We've found that whenever we show up in a department store in a particular city, our online sales from people in that city grow as well. The two things go hand-in-hand.


Can Fast Fashion Be Ethical? Reformation Is Rewriting The Rules

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Yael Aflalo, founder of the the clothing company Reformation, uses tech to create less waste. Her inspiration? Tesla Motors.

We think of fashion as a creative industry. But is it innovative? "I've found that fashion is not at the forefront of technology as a lot of other industries," says Yael Aflalo, founder of Reformation, an eco-friendly, fast-fashion brand favored by Rihanna, Taylor Swift, and Karlie Kloss.

Case in point: Aflalo was recently interviewing a candidate for a tech position at her company who had a background in robotics. On the surface, it didn't seem like this fellow was particularly passionate about the fashion industry, so Aflalo asked him why he was interested in working at Reformation. "'In a nutshell,'" she recalls him saying, "'fashion is so far behind technologically that there's just so much opportunity for innovation.'"

Yael Aflalo[Photo: Celeste Sloman]

Aflalo, who launched Reformation in 2009, believes that there are many aspects of the fashion industry that can be improved with the right technology. As a passionate defender of the environment, she believes that the entire fashion supply chain should be scrutinized. Fashion is, after all, the third most polluting industry in the world. In a thoroughly data-driven way, her company quantifies how much waste it creates at every point in the manufacturing process, and then finds ways to offset any pollution. The majority of Reformation products are made in the company's Los Angeles factory. When it comes to the consumer experience, Aflalo believes that technology can be used to make shopping more fun and less of a chore. Her new store in San Francisco reimagines how spaces in a clothing shop should be configured.

In this Creative Conversation, we talk to her about what inspires her, and why she thinks it's possible for fast fashion to be sustainable and ethical.

You've said that you find inspiration in unlikely places, including Tesla. How did you connect a car brand with Reformation?

I look everywhere for inspiration for Reformation. I now own a Tesla, and the process of buying my car was really informative as I thought about my own business. Since I was starting a sustainable brand, I was intrigued by how Tesla does not market itself as sustainable. Instead, it describes itself as the best car out there. I realized the same was true for a fashion company: Sustainability is important, but you need to give the customer a stellar product and a fantastic experience with the brand.

I am also inspired by how Tesla reimagined the retail experience. Buying a car should be fun, and for the most part, it's not. Tesla found a way to turn that experience around. Think about traditional car lots, which are expensive from a real estate and maintenance perspective. You've got to ask yourself, Why? Do people really need to see the actual car they are going to buy? Tesla decided that the way things were done was ridiculous, so they created retail experiences where they only display one car and let the customer build their own car online, which is then delivered to them.

Then there's the fact that most people feel really insecure about buying a car, and often need to go shopping with someone whom they feel has more experience. They're worried they might get a raw deal, or they don't know how to talk about the technicalities. Tesla, on the other hand, equips the customer with all the information they need through their website and informed sales associates. And importantly, there's no pressure to buy a car when you're shopping. There's something pretty great about that: It's fun and easy and liberating.

A model sports a Reformation dress.

How did you translate some of these discoveries to your own company?

When it comes to clothing, I think the shopping experience totally sucks. Unless you're buying couture, clothing stores tend to have racks and racks of clothing you need to rifle through. It's impossible to keep that inventory organized so you might never find your size. Then when you try on clothes, you're stuck in a tiny changing room with terrible lighting. The goal of the store is often to get you out as soon as possible so someone else can use the room. I asked a lot of people what they thought about the average shopping experience, and most of them, like me, hate it.

So I used some of these insights to build an entirely new experience. Our new store in San Francisco will have touchscreen monitors where customers can pick the clothes they want to try. The outfits will appear in the fitting rooms. The way we use space in the store is totally different: Rather than using the main floor to store racks of clothes in every size, we only display a couple of best-selling outfits. The majority of the store is devoted to really plush, luxurious fitting rooms instead of the cheap, uncomfortable fitting rooms that most stores have.

Why are you so invested in being an eco-friendly fashion brand?

For me, climate change and the impact we're having on the environment is the biggest issue facing humanity. I'm not an engineer and I'm not an environmental scientist, but I do know how to make clothes, so for me, this is my way of trying to address it.

We do everything that we can to be sustainable. From sourcing materials to business practices, we think about our impact on the environment. We have the "RefScale", where we measure the environmental impact for every item that we make, from carbon dioxide, to waste, to water usage. We look at the difference between what we do and what the industry average is, and ensure that there is a significant energy savings in our approach. We also offset the carbon dioxide and water we do use.

Your approach is unusual because it is so data-driven. Many other fashion brands that talk about being environmentally friendly don't quantify their efforts.

It's really not that hard to quantify sustainability. I think a lot of companies are approaching it from a marketing perspective, and I wonder how many of them actually want to make a big change. I also wonder how many of them can. It's hard for a big company with a lot of staff to forgo profit because they want to be more green.

It's also hard to reconfigure your supply chain to make it greener once it's already been established. A startup has a big advantage in terms of developing a supply chain from scratch that abides by these environmental values.

A model wears a Reformation dress.

You call yourself a fast fashion brand, but your company is very different from say, Zara or Topshop, in terms of values. How do you define fast fashion?

I think that fast is the future. Pretty soon, it won't be called "fast fashion," because all of the slow brands will be gone.

To me, fast fashion is about paying attention to what people want and making that right away. Instead of guesstimating what people are going to want to wear in 18 months, we release some products, see what is doing well then release more of those. It's that simple. Instead of doing a giant advertising campaign to convince people to buy a red dress because you have a million units of it that you purchased a year ago, we just make what people are already buying right now.

One of the criticisms of fast fashion is that it encourages people to treat clothes like they're disposable. How does that square with your environmental values?

I think training consumers not to treat clothes as disposable has to do with educating them about the true cost of the clothing. It's about making it clear that there are people behind the clothes. If you wear a complicated jacket that you bought for $10, chances are there is human suffering behind it: you're probably not paying the person who made it a good wage. If you're buying T-shirts for $2, $5, or $7, that should immediately set off alarm bells. That's just about inexpensive clothing.

The question is not fast we're making the clothes, because you could take 18 months to make garments and still not pay your workers. We have our own factory where we focus on ensuring that we're abiding by a code of ethics. But we're also fast fashion.

Negotiating Lessons From A Former NFL CEO

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The NFL consists of 32 independent competing businesses, but when they negotiate, the focus is on collaboration.

Nicknamed the "Princess of Darkness," Amy Trask became a master negotiator as she moved up the ranks at the Oakland Raiders, eventually becoming the NFL team's CEO. Currently an analyst for CBS Sports, she found that the best deals are struck when you work from a place of collaboration.

"The structure of the NFL is 32 independent businesses that compete with one another in the absolute sense of the word on game day," she says. "Those 32 businesses are each structured differently and managed differently. On game day, I wanted nothing more than to destroy the team we were playing, but right up until kickoff, productive business conversations focused on collaboration."

Trask chronicles her experience as one of the most powerful women in football in her book You Negotiate Like a Girl: Reflections on a Career in the National Football League. She offers these four tips for getting what you want when you're striking a deal:

1. Find An Authentic Style

Negotiations are most effective when you learn what style works for you, says Trask. While at the Raiders, Trask quickly realized that owner Al Davis considered those who negotiated for him as chess pieces to be deployed and maneuvered as he wished. At one point, Davis told Trask to negotiate like a Russian, suggesting she be bold and forceful, slam her hand on the table, and declare, "Nyet, nyet, nyet." Trask, however, didn't share this philosophy.

"Over the course of my career, I learned what was comfortable for me, and what was not," she says. "The best advice I've ever received came from my mother. She told me, 'To thine own self be true.' I didn't realize until I was almost out of college that the advice was really Shakespeare's."

2. Know Where To Sit

While it sounds like a minor detail, setting the negotiation stage is important. Instead of conducting the conversation from across a desk, consider another seating arrangement, suggests Trask.

"There is an expression in business that parties should sit across the table to negotiate, but I don't think that's an intelligent approach," she says. "If the goal of two parties is to strike a deal, rather than sit across the proverbial table and negotiate, parties should sit side by side. It sends a message of collaboration."

3. Go In Knowing What The Other Party Deems Important

To settle any deal, you have to know what's most important to the other party, says Trask. "The goal is to reach an agreement," she says. "If something was important to the other party, and that something meant nothing to me, concede the point. Tell them, 'Have at it.' Maybe something else will be important to me. I'd like them to let me have at that. Not everything in negotiation has to be a quid pro quo."

Learn about the other person's goals, and don't be afraid to ask. "If parties are engaged in a discussion and the other person is discussing a point, ask, 'Is this important to you?' and 'Why?'" Trask says. "The best deals are when each party walks away believing that it didn't get all it wanted."

4. Don't Play Games

Once you know what is important to each other, line up your goals and compare objectives, says Trask.

"We may have far more in common than we otherwise realize," she says. "Gamesmanship is not as productive as aligning interests and seeing where you match."

Coming from a position of collaboration, it's easier to strike an agreement together. "It's just a smart way to do business, and it's smart in other parts of life as well," says Trask. "Not everything need be zero sum. It's a waste of time and counterproductive to argue over concessions on issues that could thwart a deal."

Is It Time For Investors To Tie Executive Compensation To Diversity Goals?

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A billion dollars of diversity initiatives have barely moved the needle. Could tying goals to executive pay make a difference?

The tech industry has poured an estimated $1.2 billion into diversity initiatives over the past five years, according to Intel and Dalberg's 2016 Decoding Diversity study, yet the investment has barely moved the needle. Racial and ethnic minorities today secure only 1% to 2% more available jobs in the industry than they did 15 years ago, according to the same report. There are a wide variety of theories as to why this is the case, ranging from a lack of diversity in executive leadership teams to an exclusionary corporate culture, but the bottom line remains the same.

In fact, the industry known for propelling the world forward continues to lag behind the rest of the American private sector's workforce when it comes to diversity—by about 16-18 percentage points, according to the Decoding Diversity study—and some are beginning to question whether there's more that can be done.

"If the tech industry considered it an important enough goal and objective, they would address it much differently," said Michael Connor, the executive director of Open MIC, a nonprofit organization that attempts to shape policy through shareholder and investor advocacy. "When there is a problem companies identify very clear goals, they set their sights and they go after it. They also, more often than not, align executive and staff compensation to the achievement of those goals."

That is the key difference from the other problems the tech industry has solved, according to Connor, and one theory as to why the needle has barely moved: a lack of motivation for those already at the top.

The business case for diversity has been well established in recent years. Intel and Dalberg's 2016 Decoding Diversity study suggests that the tech sector "could generate an additional $300 billion to $370 billion each year if the racial/ethnic diversity of tech companies' workforces reflected that of the talent pool." A recent McKinsey & Company study also found that companies in the top quarter for racial diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns higher than the national median in their industry, while gender diversity boosts performance by an additional 15%.

But in spite of programs designed to build the talent pipeline within educational institutions, revised hiring practices and increased unconscious bias training, minorities leave the tech industry at 3.5 times higher rates than white men.

Carmen Scurato, the director of policy and legal affairs at the National Hispanic Media Coalition, says the tech industry has taken some positive steps forward with regards to training and hiring more a diverse workforce, yet once hired its not uncommon for minorities in the tech industry to feel like they're being pushed out. "Once they're in these people are promoted less and get paid less," she says. "If you don't feel valued than you'll look to another opportunity where you do feel valued."

Open MIC released a report this week that outlines the financial benefits of championing diversity among leadership teams, and encourages shareholders to demand tying executive compensation to workforce diversity.

According to Pat Miguel Tomaino, the associate director of Socially Responsible Investing at Zevin Asset Management LLC, investors are starting to wake up to the connection between workforce diversity and company success.

Like most investors, Tomaino's job is to identify potential areas of risk, and make bets accordingly. "A company that is not nailing diversity doesn't have the proper searchlight going out into the market to get the best people," he says. "That's what we call a human capital risk." When it comes to existing portfolio companies, Tomaino believes it is the shareholders' responsibility to put pressure on the executive team to tie compensation to diversity targeting in the hopes of seeing more dramatic results.

Tomaino adds that major Wall Street investment firms and financial institutions like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are also taking a greater look at environmental and social risk factors when considering where to invest their capital. "That represents an even bigger pot of money that is committing, at least in words, to the importance of these issues," says Tomaino, who explains that while most are yet to make serious commitments, many have begun investigating these environmental and social risk factors further.

[Image: courtesy of Open MIC]

Though diversity has been a persistent issue in the technology industry, Tomaino argues that it's becoming even more relevant for one of his major portfolio companies, Apple Inc. Apple recently announced its intention to double down on its services offerings (such as iCloud, iTunes, Apple Music and the App store), an effort that will depend on the company's ability to anticipate and deliver on personalized consumer expectations. "That's where having diverse teams, teams that look like your customers and can anticipate changing tastes, is going to be critical," suggests Tomaino.

As a result, Zevin Asset Management, along with a small group of shareholders, recently presented Apple with a resolution that encourages increased diversity among the company's executive leadership team. It also proposes following in Microsoft's footsteps and tying employee diversity goals to executive compensation.

[Image: courtesy of Open MIC]

"We haven't overprescribed how the company should get there, but we need more assurances as investors that the tone the company is setting at the top is aligned with where it says it wants to go with regards to diversity," says Tomaino.

While Tomaino isn't banking on the proposal receiving approval, he believes it will, at the very least, send a clear signal to Apple's leadership that failing to address the issue of diversity could directly impact their bottom line.

"Diversity is an area we want to see the companies in our clients' portfolios lead in, because it's one of those litmus tests for tone deafness," he says. "If the company is failing to articulate its goals with regards to diversity and providing a satisfactory plan for getting there, than we have concerns that that's not the only issue they're failing to pick up on."

As many companies and investors have learned, "tone-deafness" can be a legitimate financial liability, making it an increasingly important consideration for investors in the tech industry.

What It Was Really Like To Work At Labor Nominee Puzder's Fast Food Empire

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Some of Carl's Jr. king Andrew Puzder's former managers are bitter about his company's employment practices

Capital & Main is an award-winning publication that reports from California on economic, political, and social issues.

President Trump's nominee to lead the Labor Department, Andrew Puzder, admitted this week that he employed an undocumented housekeeper for years. But those revelations didn't derail the fast-food CEO's nomination—he is still strongly supported by the White House and his confirmation hearing could come as soon as next week. In that role, Puzder's job will be to oversee America's job market and to enforce rules on workplace safety and discrimination and employer-provided benefits.

Since 2000, Puzder has been the CEO of CKE Restaurants, where he employs 70,000 workers at Carl's Jr. and Hardee's restaurants. The 66-year-old attorney helped legendary Carl's Jr. founder Carl Karcher out of legal and financial jams in the 1980s and '90s. The two grew close and he eventually took the reins as CEO of the fast-food empire. A free-market advocate, he believes that job growth is being suffocated by regulation and he vigorously opposes overtime rules, federal sick pay regulations, and Obamacare. Puzder contributed nearly $700,000 to the Trump campaign and has been praised by the president for "fighting for workers."

Puzder commands the loyalty of some top managers but not the affection that many of his employees felt for Karcher. A hard-driving boss, he has called his workers the "best of the worst" of the American workforce, and once said of his store managers, that "you're lucky if they have a high school diploma." Some employees, from line workers to upper-level managers, are bitter about the company's employment practices and question his fitness to serve as the nation's top labor official.

Andrew Puzder, CEO of CKE Restaurants[Photo: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons]

Former employees and one current worker—some of whom spoke to Capital & Main on condition of anonymity, cited the disinterest and even disdain they said he showed for his own workers. They describe him as smart, articulate, and competent—but also as cutthroat, fostering an atmosphere at corporate headquarters where backstabbing is common and camaraderie is rare. (Puzder did not respond to interview requests for this article.) It's a description that might fit more than a few contemporary CEOs, but in Puzder's case the stakes are much higher because this particular CEO could soon run a vast federal bureaucracy that is responsible for the well-being of American workers. Puzder's critics fear that as CKE goes, so will the Department of Labor.

If he were nominated for any other post, Puzder's accomplishments in business and his lifelong interest in public policy might have outshone the indifference with which his own employees say he treats them. But as nominee for secretary of labor, Puzder's track record as an employer is front and center, and that's why, some workers say, they've chosen to share their experiences, despite their doubts and fears about doing so publicly.

A manager who currently works at the company and fears he'll be fired if he gives his name, recalled Puzder's visits to Hardee's in the early 2000s, when the CEO was looking to boost sales at the then-troubled brand. "People would shake in their shoes as he came in," the manager said. "He was very rude…If you were a white, blond cashier, you were doing a great job. If you were an overweight person, it was highly recommended that we try to get rid of you. We were trying to change our image at the time."

In 2011, Puzder told a reporter at National Restaurant News that during the Hardee's turnaround he issued a memo saying "no more people behind the counter unless they have all their teeth." The company got into legal trouble because of its image-consciousness in 2005, when it settled a lawsuit with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of a woman with facial deformities who said she'd been denied a job at Hardee's while other similarly qualified people were hired.

One former department director at the company's Carpinteria, California offices, who signed an agreement not to speak publicly about CKE when she left her job, and who asked not to be named, confirms that Puzder is highly image-conscious and sometimes puts his own fiercely partisan political interests ahead of the company's. She said her willingness to speak up didn't sit well with Puzder. She describes staff members painstakingly polishing her boss's op-eds and watching him spend tens of thousands of dollars to spruce up a Southern California Carl's Jr. ahead of a campaign stop by then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who Puzder backed in 2012.

LaTonya Smith, a former manager-in-training at a Hardee's restaurant in Birmingham, Alabama, describes working 100-hour weeks, scrubbing and polishing to perfect her restaurant's health department rating, only to lose her job when she told her manager she had to leave work early for an emergency medical appointment for her spiking blood pressure. "They don't give women a chance," Smith told Capital & Main.

Smith filed a complaint about her dismissal with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that claimed, "Hardee's is a largely male-dominated culture through the supervisor ranks and physically demanding…Women employees are viewed as being less strong than male employees." She ultimately sued Hardee's for race and gender discrimination and settled for an undisclosed amount.

Dozens of employee lawsuits and complaints filed with federal and state agencies similarly describe a male-dominated workplace where racial, gender, and age discrimination, along with sexual harassment, are tolerated, but reporting those abuses is not. In court documents and interviews, workers allege that reporting discrimination has caused the company to retaliate against them, and has cost some employees promotions, or even their jobs.

[Photo: Flickr user Doug McCaughan]

Interviews with management employees, most of whom have left CKE, reveal a company where even higher-level workers are dispensable. The former department director who worked with Puzder in Carpinteria said, "It was shut up, keep your head down, and be happy you have a job." Former manager Ron Suckle, who worked in risk management at the Carpinteria offices, said CKE's company culture came from Puzder: "On the executive level of CKE, it was a boy's club, a white boy's club. He basically treated the employees like chattel."

The company's nine-member executive management team is all-male. Among its corporate peers—the nine U.S. burger chains with $1 billion or more in annual sales—it is one of only three companies with an all-male executive management team. The team consists of a single person of color, chief operations officer Eric Williams, who is African–American.

While CKE's competitors are far from achieving gender and racial equality in their top ranks, some have made more progress than CKE in diversifying their leadership. Sonic Drive-In, which is about the same size as CKE, also includes nine executive managers, four of whom are women. McDonald's lists 16 top executives, among them seven women. At Jack in the Box, four of the 12 highest-ranking executives are women; two are non-white. Wendy's and Burger King's executive teams also include female leaders. Only the company's smaller competitors are completely led by men. Capital & Main couldn't immediately confirm the ethnic makeup of top executives at most burger companies that compete with CKE.

"The diversity of a management team is a good indicator of diversity at all levels of a company," said Jennifer Chatman, a professor of management at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "If there are women and racial minority members at the highest level of the company, it means that the company has made an effort to hire, develop, and promote people who are not members of our society's historically dominant and high-status group—white men." The racy TV commercials don't help matters, Chatman said. Carl's Jr.'s include the innuendo-heavy three-way bacon burger spot, which shows a trio of nearly identical blond models in bikinis lustily feeding each other strips of bacon as they tout the "three-way."

"Leaders looking for justification for why they should hire or treat people differently based on gender would find support based on this ad campaign," Chatman said. "[The ads] give people in the organization clues about what the culture of the organization is—what's likely to be rewarded, punished, and overlooked," she said.

Puzder personally participated in auditioning models for the signature ads, said a former company vice-president who didn't want her name used, and enjoyed being on the set during filming, the former department director told Capital & Main. Indeed, in 2015, he told Entrepreneur magazine that the brand aimed at young hungry guys reflected his own personality.

Still, Cathy Kellner-Diaz, a vice-president of international marketing, spoke enthusiastically about her work at the company, arguing that she and other women have enjoyed opportunities for advancement at CKE.

"I'm proud to be a woman in this organization," Kellner-Diaz said. Puzder recruited her from an ad agency where they had worked together. "We've had a productive and successful relationship," she said. "Andy brought me to CKE because I'd definitely achieved results. It was a great compliment."

With Puzder's confirmation facing an avalanche of opposition from labor and women's groups, COO Williams penned an op-ed in Business Insider last week crediting the CEO with mentoring and helping him reach the top at CKE. Company spokesman George Thompson said that some 29% of vice-presidents are people of color, and a third are women. He cited several other individuals who started at the bottom and built rewarding careers at CKE, such as Enrique Delgado, a company vice president who began cleaning tables and serving food, and James Spear, an African-American man who started at the company 16 years ago as a crew member and now serves as vice president of operations.

[Photo: Al Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images]

Notwithstanding such individual successes, men and women who have served in management in the company say the glass ceiling is firmly intact at CKE. Management's lower ranks—the relatively low-paid restaurant managers and their supervising district managers, are majority women and people of color, but their numbers shrink significantly in upper management.

A former manager, who didn't want her name published because she's now an executive at another restaurant chain, said one reason it's tough to move up in the company is that it offers no clear path to advancement. "No one is investing in your professional development." She added that there are no performance evaluations, and that bonuses are given at the company's discretion, with no clear criteria for earning one.

"It's sold to people as, 'You might make more money,' but it doesn't work that way," she said.

"I had to do a lot of pushing just to get a raise," said the former department director who'd agreed not to speak publicly against CKE Restaurants. It was tough to advocate for herself, she said. "If you went to HR [human resources], you were a troublemaker. You wouldn't be invited to meetings—or I wouldn't be."

"Certainly, having clear criteria for what makes you promotable and what constitutes justification for raises are bread-and-butter practices," Jennifer Chatman said. "The less codified and clear the criteria are, the more there's potential for inequities to occur. That's Organizational Behavior 101."

A company spokeswoman did not answer questions about the company's policies on performance evaluations, job postings, or bonuses. Some companies, like McDonald's, detail a commitment to diversity and programs to achieve it on their websites. When asked if CKE had a similar document, a spokesman responded that the company is committed to equal employment opportunity and follows anti-discrimination laws.

The same manager who recalled Puzder's visits to Hardee's also noted that the company encouraged discrimination in not so subtle ways. He said that if a restaurant's clientele was half black and half white, a manager would be encouraged to hire workers that reflected that demographic mix. He said that higher-ups, not including Puzder, would sit down with a restaurant manager and ask her to look around the dining room. Then, they would ask her to look at her crew members. It wasn't said out loud, but the people who ran the restaurants were led to believe that upper management wanted to hire workers that matched the racial makeup of a restaurant's clientele.

It is unclear how widespread this practice was, but as Capital & Main has previously reported, two managers at different Hardee's franchises in Alabama said in court documents that they were subject to similar policies. One alleged that a white manager was hired to replace her because her store's customers were mostly white, and another manager said she was directed to hire white workers at restaurants where their customers were also mostly white.

Puzder's confirmation has been postponed for a fourth time, at least in part because he has yet to submit any of the paperwork required of cabinet nominees. If he does make it to his confirmation hearings, some of his workers—past and present—will watch the proceedings with trepidation.

"He's the antithesis of someone who should be labor secretary," Ron Suckle said. "He's anti-labor. He basically believes workers should be used and not nurtured."

Why Trump's Nordstrom Tweet May Have Crossed An Ethical Line

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Once the official @POTUS account retweeted his criticism of its decision to drop Ivanka's products, everything changed

After a week of major retailers dropping Ivanka Trump's products, the #GrabYourWallet boycott made its biggest impact ever today when it prompted the president of the United States to respond with an angry tweet that may have crossed an ethical line, say government ethics experts.

This morning, just 20 minutes into a national security briefing in the Oval Office, President Trump went on Twitter to take a swing at Nordstrom, which announced last Thursday that it would no longer sell Ivanka Trump products: "My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom. She is a great person — always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!" Within seconds, the share price of the retailer, which attributed its decision to the brand's poor performance, dipped for a few minutes before quickly recovering. Later, the official @POTUS account retweeted Trump's tweet, a possible ethics violation which illustrates the conflicts of interest inherent in the real-estate mogul's new role as the president.

Nordstrom's decision last week turned out to be a tipping point. The next day, Neiman Marcus said it would no longer stock items from the Ivanka Trump Fine Jewelry collection. (There are now rumors that the collection may be discontinued altogether.) Also employees at T.J. Maxx and Marshalls reportedly received an unusual memo last week instructing them to remove Ivanka Trump signs and hide products among other merchandise on racks. This week, Belk department store, Jet, and Shopstyle all dropped her products.

Since he was elected, Trump and his daughter, who serves as one of his closest advisors, have been under pressure to divest themselves from their businesses to address concerns that they could wield the levers of government to advance their own companies or to be influenced by special interests. But the Trumps haven't gone that far. The president handed over control of the Trump Organization to his two oldest sons but retains ownership of the company through a trust and will benefit financially from his sons' business deals.

Ivanka herself made a public show of separating herself from her company last November and in January, she announced on Facebook that she would take a formal leave of absence from both the Trump Organization and her own brand. But it's clear that the Trump family has been closely watching the brand's fate. Maggie Haberman, the New York Times White House correspondent, said that sources close to Ivanka claimed she was upset by Nordstrom's decision.

The tweet and especially the retweet raised plenty of concerns among lawyers and ethics experts. "This is not trivial," says Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University who is an expert of government ethics, told Fast Company. "Trump is using government power for his personal purposes. That's why we all wanted him to divest. He refused to and here he is using government power for his financial benefit or the financial benefit of his daughter."

What are the legal implications of his decision? It's complicated.

According to the Code of Federal Regulations, government officials cannot use their public office "for the endorsement of any product, service, or enterprise." The law further states that officials cannot use their position to give the appearance that the government "sanctions or endorses" the activities of a private party. In this case, "sanctions" can mean to penalize, much like the U.S. has placed sanctions on Iran. The catch here is that the law applies to every single government employee besides the president and the vice president. It was designed that way because, while other employees of the White House can step aside due to a conflict of interest, forcing the president to do so would leave a massive power vacuum.

That said, the regulations provide us with a clear guide as to the right and the wrong way to use the government's power. It makes it clear that there is a distinction between using one's capacity as a government official and acting as a private citizen. Trump first tweeted under his private Twitter handle, @realDonaldTrump, to make this statement. "I interpret this tweet to mean that Donald J. Trump is acting in his personal capacity, not on behalf of the United States government," Clark says. "He's talking about his daughter and he doesn't invoke anything about the government here."

According to Clark, this initial tweet was not an ethical violation. The law ensures that government employees are afforded the right to act as private citizens. "It's absolutely critical that government officials, in general, make communications in their personal capacity," she explains. "And that the government not be able to shut down or gag government employees by prohibiting them from speaking on their own behalf."

[Image: via Twitter]

But all of that changed when the official @POTUS account retweeted Trump's original tweet, because suddenly the official weight of the government was behind Trump's criticism of Nordstrom's decision to drop Ivanka's products. "The @POTUS handle is seen as government property," Clark says. "It's an official government organ."

On the surface, it seems like a small, perhaps even insignificant difference. After all, the impact is exactly the same: The world recognizes that the American president is angry at Nordstrom's department store. But by using the government's handle—much like using the government's letterhead or standing behind a White House podium—Donald Trump is invoking the power of the government. "It may seem like a technicality," Clark says. "But I would say this is about using government resources and government symbols—like saying something standing in front of the seal of the presidency—that would be indicating that his words have a different social meaning."

And there could be a legal argument that Donald Trump has crossed a line. The question is whether Congress is willing to take him to task for this. "It's an abuse of government power and Nordstrom is harmed by it," Clark says. "He's violating a common law standard that he owes to the American people the obligation to use government power for government purposes."

Even if Congress doesn't act, there's another course of legal action that could take place. Norman Eisen, a former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, and cofounder of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, says that Nordstrom could consider suing the government under California's Unfair Competition Law , designed to protect businesses from "unfair practices."

It's unlikely that Nordstrom will follow through on this. Suing a sitting president or the government would be a landmark, resource-draining case and Nordstrom likely wants to create as much distance from this controversy as possible for fear of driving away Trump-supporting customers.

Spokespersons for Nordstrom and the White House did not return calls for comment.

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