When we don't know what's going to happen, we tell ourselves stories about what might happen. And they often make us feel worse, not better.
Even if you've kept only one eye on the headlines lately and the other tightly clenched, you're probably aware that these are, shall we say, some pretty uncertain times. But what you may not be aware of is that human beings, thanks to much earlier times, far back in our evolutionary history, aren't built to deal with uncertainty all that well for all that long.
Picture yourself in a semi-wooded wilderness. There are predators about—or maybe there are and maybe there aren't. It's really the not-knowing that has you on edge. Anytime something unknown encroaches on our environment, we worry it might kill us, just as our ancestors did. That's true not just of physical creatures we've never encountered—even if they turn out to be harmless—but of ideas and concepts that seem potentially dangerous, too.
This anxiety puts us in a heightened state of stress. Pumped with more adrenaline and cortisol, our entire brains essentially get hijacked by a single region of it, the amygdala. Evolutionarily, this was useful. We actually evolved to live in these high-stress states, at least for short bursts of time: There's a lion—run!
But today, getting back to our mental baselines isn't as easy as determining whether there's a lion or just a titmouse crouching behind that shrub. In our current political environment, for instance, uncertainty about what's happening around us and what's coming next can last for weeks or months on end. It exhausts our nervous systems, leaves us wiped out, jittery, craving an end.
Fatigued, our brains try and create certainty in one of three ways:
We make premature decisions. We decide on something, often too soon, just to lock it in and make ourselves feel better.
We freeze and make no decisions at all. We get overwhelmed and can't take any action, and feel victimized by circumstances.
We fill in the gaps of what we don't know with groundless assumptions and label them facts. We create unfounded stories in our heads that either lead us astray or cause us to stress out even more. It's either, "Everything is going to end horribly!" or, "It's all going to be fine!"
Bad news: All three of these strategies fail. Each one still leaves us feeling heavily stressed. So while you can't impose order on the world, in all its chaotic, anxiety-inducing complexity, you can impose more order on your poor, exhausted brain. Here are a few ways to steady yourself in times of uncertainty, so you can feel more centered and, hopefully, act with a little more clarity.
Imagine your mind is a scale: There's a bucket on one end labeled "Things I Know," and a bucket on the other end labeled "Things I Don't Know." If you want to be able to handle a heaver load on the "Things I Don't Know" side, you need to dump in some more content on the opposing end—the things you know. For your brain to reach something close to equilibrium, the two sides need to be roughly even.
How? Return to old favorites. Reread a favorite book or two (there's got to be one you haven't touched since college) or rewatch a movie or TV series you love.
Plan out your meals for the whole day or the whole week. You can even go nuclear and follow the renowned choreographer Twyla Tharp's regimented routine: She wakes up at the same time, eats the same breakfast, does the same workout—all to give her the space to sit in the uncertainty of choreography.
But even adding just a little extra routine can help you find your own centeredness. The more things in your life that you know to be certain, the more cognitive and emotional stamina you'll have to handle the things that you can't pin down.
In a recent interview for our book, poker champion Annie Duke told us that the key to making good decisions in the uncertain environment of a poker game is to think in probabilities. Duke accepts that even after mitigating risk as best she can, she'll still only be right a certain percentage of the time. "When you're a poker player," she says, "you're always thinking probabilistically."
When Duke bought her boyfriend a coat, she put the odds at his liking it at 50-50. She said this helped her be prepared for him to not like it and for that to not be a big deal.
Easier said than done, right? Maybe not as much as you think. Owning your uncertainty starts simply by acknowledging how it's making you feel; those corollary emotions of fear and heightened stress are your tell-tale signs. You just need to consciously admit that you're experiencing them—which, since it's a such a negative experience, our instinct is often to deny and thus try to escape (it never works).
So instead, put it in a sentence and add something at the end that counterbalances the negative feelings you're acknowledging: Say out loud, "I am feeling anxious, and my life is very blessed." "I am overwhelmed, and that's okay." Cognitive behavioral therapists use methods like these all the time to help people reframe and accept emotions that people otherwise find overwhelming. In many cases, these exercises actually help decrease those emotions.
Evolution happened to imbue our brains with another strong tendency as well: A deep susceptibility to narrative. So pull up your local movie showtimes and look for the latest mystery or thriller—then grab a ticket.
You can pick up a book, too, just as long as you sit down with it for a while. When you get to the point when the mystery is about to be revealed, stop. (If you're at the movie theater, now's your chance to take a bathroom break or grab a soda.) Sit with whatever you're feeling for a moment. Notice how you want to know. Notice how your body feels, how your mind races. Notice if you are worried.
Now, go back to the story and see how it ends (or rush back to your seat so you don't miss the final plot twist and have to Google a spoiler-ridden recap on somebody's blog later). Then notice that none of your reactions had any effect on the eventual outcome. What happened, happened. You can also go through the story and weigh the probabilities of different outcomes as you make your way through.
Lastly, remember that we often tell ourselves stories, and they often make us feel worse, not better. We lay out a future of terrible things and then live in that future, even though none of the anticipated things have happened before and may never happen in actuality—it's a natural reaction. That doesn't mean they won't, of course. Sometimes, there really is a lion behind that shrub. Other times, it's just our lurking, disembodied worry that there might be.
So rather than spin stories about impending catastrophes, try to live more with what's actually happening, and less with what might. That's hard enough.
The lines in the sand that many parents draw between work and home in the struggle to balance the two may deprive kids of useful lessons.
My brother and I are incredibly different people. I always loved school; my brother just wanted it to be over. My highest level of education is a law degree, and my brother's is a certificate in marine engine technology. I like working with words, and he likes working with his hands. I'm a prototypical Type A, and he's much more go-with-the-flow.
But our work ethic is nearly identical. We believe in always giving two weeks' notice, only calling in sick when it's absolutely necessary, showing up on time, and going above and beyond. We were taught to dress for the job we want, not the job we have. We respect bosses and fellow employees alike. We've both known how to write a resume since we were teenagers, and how to go in and ask for a raise.
And I think the reason why is because, growing up, our parents talked about work at home—all the time.
As adults, there's a certain type of fellow parent who's easy to spot; We've all seen them, or even been them ourselves sometimes. The dad who's busy taking a business call at the ballpark and misses his kid coming up to bat. The mom who misses the school play because she had to work late that night.
Sure, many of the most pernicious work-life balance issues that parents struggle with aren't their fault and are largely beyond their control: stingy or nonexistent parental leave, few or no flexible hours, you name it. But to adapt, and to feel less guilty, we try to draw lines in the sand between work and home. No emails on weekends. No calls after hours.
But in an age where we're encouraged not to "bring work home," are we doing a disservice to the next generation? I believe there's a fine line between being present when you're with your children and compartmentalizing your work life and home life, to their future detriment.
Growing up, my parents worked in the same field, and the companies they worked for sometimes did business together. So there was always a lot for them to talk about, and I now know more about the printing industry than I'll ever need to.
But what I did need to know was how to handle conflict with a fellow employee, the types of behaviors that don't fly in the workplace, and what somebody might say in an interview that would lose them the job.
From my mom, I learned what it was like to be a woman in a male-dominated industry, and how to handle myself. I never worried about being the only woman when I worked in law or in sports, because my mom was the only woman in her department throughout much of my life, and it never seemed to matter to her—she found ways to adapt and succeed.
Those are all things I learned listening to my parents talk about work at home. Looking back, that upbringing didn't just help me navigate the professional world, it's also proved enormously useful to me as an entrepreneur.
But I wondered whether others who had similar experiences as kids felt the same way as adults. So I talked with a few people whose parents also discussed their working lives at home to learn what working parents should consider sharing with their kids as they get old enough to understand. Here's what they said.
"My mom and dad were incredibly hard workers," Amber Budd Peterson told me. Now the founder of a beauty atelier, Budd says, "They instilled in me things I considered 'simple things' at the time, but that I'm realizing more and more really aren't simple for everyone."
Some of the work habits we fall into intuitively aren't so intuitive—especially the ones entrepreneurs rely on the most, when there isn't a boss figure leering over your shoulder. You need to see those behaviors modeled as a kid in order to do them unthinkingly as an adult. Says Budd, "I show up early, I work hard, I don't call in sick when I'm not sick, and I have respect for my leaders."
"My dad worked in HR, and I have a very distinct memory of him talking to me about some of the tough decisions he had to make," says Allie Horner, a leadership, business, and life coach.
"He often had to help people who were just learning how to manage their own teams, developing them as leaders. That really rubbed off on me, and I noticed when he was helping me develop my own decision-making skills." That pushed Horner to think critically about choices she'd go on to help others make.
"He'd ask me questions to help me think about why I wanted what I wanted, and why I was doing what I was doing, rather than just telling me what he thought."
"My mom discussed her weekly paycheck amount, her rent amount, and her car payment," says Sarah Thompson. "I knew exactly what she paid for the three-family house she bought when I was 12, and how much she charged for the two apartments she rented out."
Thompson says her mother's openness about work and money led her to be more independent and improved her own financial health. She went on to earn her MBA, become an accountant, and work in corporate finance and accounting. But Thompson has since struck out on her own and now consults for marketing companies.
"What my dad drilled into us is that appearance matters, and people will judge you based on the way you look, dress, and how your treat people," says Carine Warner, a business and life strategist. "Always look the part, look people in the eyes, and smile."
"Growing up, says business consultant Vanessa Rende, "I watched my mom take on various business ventures, and part of that was watching her experience setbacks." But she's grateful her mother shared that with her. Looking back, Rende says it was "important that she let me see her experience the setbacks, because watching her handle them is what helped me develop my own entrepreneurial style of handling things."
Rende sees it as something of an early, inadvertent apprenticeship to her current career. "Watching her manage her business and handle the daily challenges sometimes really created a great foundation for my mind-set that I've carried into my personal life and businesses."
Kristi A. Dosh is a publicist and the founder of Guide My Brand. Formerly a finance attorney, she is also a nationally recognized sports business analyst and a published author.
A legal expert from the J+O Firm talks capital, patents, taxes, crowdfunding, and—oh yeah—remembering to form your company.
Thinking of finally launching that startup in this year? You'd be in for a ride even if the next 12 months weren't shaping up to be as change-filled as it appears they might. Crowdfunding laws are evolving, and the regulatory landscape is already shifting as the Trump Administration gets underway.
Fast Company asked startup expert and lawyer Christina Oshan, cofounder and managing member of the J+O Firm in Brooklyn, for tips on forming a company, financing, and other things you may not have thought of—but will definitely need to if you're getting a business off the ground in 2017.
What do startups need to do to set themselves up for success?
One of the most important things is actually forming the company, which is something startup founders sometimes forget to do. I always think of the scene in Silicon Valley where he gets his first investor check and he goes to the bank and says, "I want to deposit this," and the bank says, "You don't have a company." That's something we'll often see with founders. They'll think about trademarking their name, or they'll think about setting up their website before actually setting up the entity.
Lawyer Christina Oshan, cofounder and managing member of the J+O Firm in Brooklyn.[Photo: courtesy of J+O Firm]
Similarly, founders should remember to issue stock to themselves. Something that's really important is when you first start the company, the company is obviously worth nothing, so issuing your shares for nothing is an even exchange. But as soon as you start the company, you're inherently building value every single day.
So if, for example, you go on LegalZoom to form a corporation but don't actually take the steps to issue the stock to yourself, you'll be heads down building the IP, and then you get your first check valuing you at however many million dollars. All of a sudden you've set a price tag for what the company is worth. If you go to issue (stock to) yourself then, and if you don't pay equal value for those shares, you're going to have a hefty tax bill.
For example, if an investor says, "I'm going to value the company at $10 million," and you're saying right now that you own 100% of it but you haven't issued yourself any shares, then now your company is worth $10 million. If you receive shares that are worth $10 million, then you need to pay taxes on $10 million, unless you pay equal value for them.
Another important thing to consider is who you're starting the company with. It's a deep relationship that you're forming. While things are great in the beginning, things come up. For example, one of your cofounders might decide that they can't devote as much energy or time as they expected. Or they actually need to make a salary, they need to go get another job. So vesting is key—if someone decides to leave and not devote all of their time or any of their time, there should be a vesting schedule put in place so that they're not walking away with 50% of the company.
Are there any other errors you see startups making?
Another thing you'll see a lot of times is that as people are hiring or engaging service providers to provide little pieces of the business—for instance, if they work with an app development company—they'll forget to put an agreement in place that actually assigns the work that those individuals are doing over to the company. Or they'll make promises of equity grants or incentives, and they don't take the steps to grant that. Or they'll promise percentages of the company, which is a mistake.
It's really important to always promise a number of shares versus a percentage because 5% before raising financing is a lot less than 5% after raising financing. If you don't get around to actually doing the grant until post-financing, then all of the sudden you've given away a lot more of the company than you initially intended.
What about crowdfunding?
Everyone is anticipating that there will be a lot more of it in 2017. Founders should understand the implications of raising funds with unaccredited investors.
When VCs are investing, there is an inherent risk and time frame that they're expecting for the investment that they're making, and they understand what goes along with it. Whereas if you're raising with a non-accredited investor, they're going to be less tolerant to risk, and there will also be a tightened disclosure obligation that the founders might not be ready to undertake.
In addition, there are limits on the amount the non-accredited investors can invest in the company, so you're starting to look at a larger number of stockholders. Once the cap table starts to get bigger, there are inherent issues that come along with that. For example, if the company's exit opportunity ends up being an acquisition, they're going to have to go out to the stockholders and get consent to close the transaction.
Subsequent rounds of financing dictate how much consent you will need from stockholders, but often the acquirer will require a high percentage of stockholder consent to move forward with the deal—upwards of 90%. So if you have hundreds of stockholders that you need to sign a consent, it's often like herding cats to get people to sign something. All of a sudden that can really impact your ability to close a transaction.
When should startups patent ideas and file for trademarks?
It very much depends. For trademarks, you should always start with a trademark search when you're thinking about what name you want to go to market with. The first and foremost thing should be, "Is there anyone else that's out there that's doing it with this name?" —not only because it will affect your ability to get a trademark, but it will also help you avoid a potential problem down the road.
If someone comes to you and says you have to stop using their trademark, you'll have to rename everything. Founders become very attached to their names, and they would like to fight it, and that might be a misuse of time and effort that could have been avoided at the beginning. At a bare minimum, founders should always be thinking about a trademark immediately.
With a patent, if they're thinking that an idea could potentially be patented, they should talk to a lawyer first to see if there's a chance they could get one. It is very rare that I see that the things our clients are working on are the right fit for a patent application.
Is there anything startups should be watching out for with the Trump administration?
I think it remains to be seen. I think everyone is adopting a "wait and see" approach because we don't really know what he's going to do.
Aside from the political climate, there is a bigger move [by startups] to focus on the amount of money that you actually need, rather than the amount of money that you can raise. That goes back to founders understanding their cap table, and how much they're giving away (to their stakeholders). Something that you'll see early-stage founders do is issue convertible notes for friends and family, and they'll put a valuation cap in there that is lower than they should.
If they've (the friends and family) invest $1 million at a $3 million valuation cap, you just let one-third of the company walk out the door, and you haven't even brought on subsequent investors, you haven't hired your team. [You need to] understand exactly how much of the pie you're giving away as those early funds come in.
One first-time independent worker says his first year in business was a "trough of sorrow" because he grossly undercharged.
When you start working for yourself full-time, it's like taking a crash course in business ownership—but with no instructor and extremely high stakes. But if you can get past the one-year mark and still see a path ahead, it's likely because you've learned from the inevitable pitfalls of going in blind. Here's what five independents who've just finished their first year as "solopreneurs" said their biggest blunders taught them.
Stosh Walsh started working for himself as an organizational development consultant the way most first-time consultants do—by tapping his professional network. Things started off strong. An all-or-nothing kind of guy, Stosh felt encouraged by a steady stream of income. So he build a product in an adjacent market while continuing to volunteer on the side.
But contracts, proposals, and the sales cycle were foreign to him and took longer to wade through than he'd expected. And before long, he was running into delays with his product; collaborating with outside partners was a slow process. Hitting the ground running soon felt more like wading through quicksand. "You're up to your ankles, and you're moving, but soon it's up to your knees," Walsh says. "You realize you're soon not going to be able to move."
Then, eight months in, he got shingles. While his mind wanted to push forward, his body wouldn't cooperate. Walsh had to slow down—and he's grateful he did. These days he's still offering services and is building his product, but he isn't burning himself out in the process.
Lesson learned: "Everything takes longer than you think," says Walsh. "Hold your plans loosely. So much will change."
After leaving her job as the VP of digital strategy for a respected advertising firm in New York, Sharon Panelo quickly built her business by networking. But like most first-time independent workers, she struggled with an inconsistent income in her first year of working for herself.
During one particularly slow stretch, on her couch in her sweats, Panelo read ads promising her a $1,000 windfall basically overnight. She'd already invested in a pricey graduate degree from Columbia, but she was still intrigued and spent another $4,000 in educational courses. Those investments didn't pay off. Panelo realizes now that the anxiety of her first major income slowdown got the better of her. She had extremely marketable skills all along—she just needed to market herself better to smooth out the ebb and flow of her business.
Programmer Karl Weber went independent out of necessity during his wife's difficult pregnancy, which required his presence. He started his business with an existing client, and while it paid way under market value, the work kept him afloat without burning through their 401(k).
Looking back, Karl calls his first year a "trough of sorrow," mostly because he charged too little. Since he wasn't making enough money, he started doubling up on projects to bring in extra cash, but then he'd be overworked and miss deadlines. Things got so bad he was almost evicted a couple of times. Finally, he changed his rates.
Weber feared he'd drive clients away, but one actually gave him a bonus at the end of the project, and another told him point-blank to charge more. He ended up doubling his rates—twice—during his first year, bringing him more in line with his local market, at $50 an hour.
Lesson learned: "Charge a livable wage—it's at least double what you think it is," says Weber.
Though she'd saved nearly five months of living expenses and had six months of guaranteed work, personal finance writer Cait Flanders still worried she'd run out of money. That scarcity mind-set made her hesitate to say "no" even once. So Flanders accepted every offer she received and ended up working more in her first six months than she did when she was juggling a full-time job and freelance work on the side.
She started dreading work and resenting her clients and turning away her friends. She felt like she couldn't take a break. She didn't go outside and gained weight. It took about six months before Flanders finally realized she needed to make a change. She started scheduling a weekly day of adventure and said no to extra work from current clients. Her bank account is just fine.
Lesson learned: Trust your gut when it comes to accepting work from clients. If you really don't want to do the work, don't do it. You'll be happier, and the client will be happier going with a different freelancer.
Copyrighter and designer Beth Bogdewiecz went solo when she realized that money was one thing but time was something she could never get back. "Clocking in and out and face-time is such an antiquated way to work," she says. But as her own boss, time management didn't come as easily as she'd hoped.
Like many first-time independent workers, Bogdewiecz wasn't used to not having an office to go to or someone telling her what do. She didn't know how to prioritize or structure her schedule. And it wasn't just about when she worked, but when she didn't work. Bogdewiecz worried about losing a client if she didn't meet their time demands.
It finally came to a head when she was set to take a 10-day vacation and began to pack her laptop. She stopped herself, realizing it was ridiculous—she needed a vacation. Bogdewiecz went off the grid the whole time and didn't answer a single email. She didn't lose a single client, either.
Lesson learned: You're in charge of your business. Set a schedule that works for you.
Millennials at top employers—and the recruiters who hire them—explain how to land internships and entry-level jobs that don't suck.
Entry-levels jobs usually aren't much fun. They tend to involve a lot of drudgery that feels like a step down from the level of your work you did in college. Often when you're fresh out of school, you end up taking the first job that comes your way, no matter how uninspiring, because you're anxious to start making money (or, let's be honest, pay back your student loans).
But some people are lucky to land the internships and entry-level jobs of their dreams, or to quickly score positions at top companies within just a few years of graduating. How? Fast Company spoke to several of them—plus a few recruiters on the inside—to find out.
Kévin Lancelin admits that one of the reasons he landed a job offer from Nike before he graduated was cliché: "It was really about being at the right place at the right moment." An employee on the team he was interning on had recently left, and space opened up for him.
But that's only part of the story. Lancelin, an apparel designer for the brand's activewear line, NSW, had deliberately put Nike in his crosshairs years earlier. At Créapole, the Paris art school where Lancelin studied, it was considered standard practice to look for design work in France after graduating. But "I really wanted to go to the Netherlands to Nike," he recalls.
So Lancelin chose activewear coursework within his fashion degree program, and in his third year "built a stronger portfolio really based on the Nike atmosphere and values." Then he says he "aimed high and told myself, 'I have nothing to lose,'" and applied. He got it, and eight months later the internship turned into a job offer.
Looking back, Lancelin sums up his strategy this way: "I really studied to impress Nike."
"Wherever you can bring reality into something that you see as a problem or an inefficiency, those are the things that really stand out to us since that's what we do every day," says Hyla Wallis, a university recruiting programs manager at Facebook.
Hyla Wallis hires hundreds of interns at Facebook who later become full-time employees.[Photo: via LinkedIn]
Wallis leads the team responsible for hiring the more than 1,000 interns Facebook brings on board each year in the U.S., most of whom become full-time staff. What type of problem-solver does she look for? "We had a student who actually collected a database to show events or activities [and] volunteering opportunities within their community that they couldn't find [elsewhere]," says Wallis, "and they built something and shared it out."
Because everyone's coming through the door with minimal or zero work experience, recruiters and hiring managers have to look for other signs of what candidates can do. Any examples you can show a hiring manager of "something you thought of, you created . . . and got other people to use," adds Wallis, can help put you over the edge.
Six months ago, designer Charlene Chand joined Taco Bell's marketing team, where her job is to design restaurant posters and drive-thru menus that make the "Quesalupa" ("essentially a taco with a quesadilla as the shell") look maximally mouthwatering. Chand, 26, started her career in UX/UI design at smaller companies, but when a friendly acquaintance from college posted on Facebook about an opening on her team at Taco Bell, Chand decided to take the leap.
Taco Bell graphic designer Charlene Chand[Photo: via LinkedIn]
The standard networking advice for undergrads and entry-level job seekers is to tap your alumni network—which you should. But sometimes just keeping an eye on where your own classmates land—including those "loose connections" in your college network—is better than reaching out to someone who graduated a decade ago.
"Taco Bell is the first 'big' company that I've worked for," Chand says, "and giant corporate places are a bit scary." But the team she interviewed with seemed to like her small-company experience and assured Chand the work culture was intimate and close-knit. She says they were right. "Being a graphic designer at Taco Bell is fun—it's upbeat, it's cool, [and] it's catering to an audience that I'm familiar with. I've learned so much in six months."
Face it: When you apply to your first job or internship, your resume isn't going to be that impressive. Your real task is to show your potential, not your track record. That's where cover letters—otherwise reputed to be taking their last gasps—still matter.
When Landon Peoples, 23, applied to intern at Vogue, he recalls, "I was living in a dorm on the Lower East Side, going to a private Christian college. I had no prior fashion experience, no contacts. I also didn't study fashion," Peoples adds, "and I made a point of that."
"I looked at my favorite editors and people I always looked up to and none of them did either," he says. When Peoples was still in high school, he recalls, "I tweeted Eva Chen [formerly Teen Vogue's beauty editor and now Instagram's head of fashion partnerships] and I just asked her, 'What do I major in?'" Peoples says (paraphrasing) that she told him to "study something that you're already really good at so you can excel," and the rest just comes down to passion.
This was useful intel later on when it came to drafting a knockout cover letter for Vogue. Peoples knew it was his best shot at showing off his writing chops, his perspective on the magazine, and what he thought he could bring to it.
It worked. A second internship (at the beauty site Into The Gloss) and a few years later, and Peoples landed an editorial assistant gig at Refinery29, which soon turned into his current role as staff fashion writer. When he first applied, he did a little digging again, and found the email address of the fashion features writer. Then he sent her his application, too.
"I wasn't aggressive there either, though," says Peoples. "I literally was just like, 'I just did this, have a look.' I think that's key." Much the way he'd tweeted Chen, he says, "I kept it super short."
"I know that as someone new to the job market, people may not be able to point to prior experience and say, 'I can do this job because I've already done XYZ,'" says BuzzFeed recruiter Dan Geiger. "But a lot of entry-level hires tell me, 'working at BuzzFeed would be a dream!'—which is cool because it is a fantastic company," he says. But it's better to get enthusiastic about the specifics of the role, not just the brand.
"I also want someone to take the effort to really read a job description, pay attention to the fine details, and create an application that speaks to the job, as well as the company," says Geiger.
Taylor Smits, a recruiter at Refinery29, agrees. Gushing about the company, he says, "puts all the work on me . . . So rather than saying you are about to graduate with a marketing degree and you want to work at Refinery29, you should mention your ability to work with analytical data in Excel, Tableau, or Domo; your internship that taught you how to use Google Analytics; or how you learned to drive traffic to websites in college using Facebook ads."
"One approach focuses on what you want," says Smits. "The other focuses on how you can help my company. Which one do you think I want to see?"
Who wouldn't say they're "hardworking" and "results-oriented"? Unfortunately, those descriptors won't land you an interview.
We've all heard the saying, "You'll never get a second chance to make a first impression." This is perhaps most true when it comes to your resume. While many companies use screening software to screen resumes, recruiters are largely the first people you need to impress.
"The language or content of a resume can definitely tank a job seeker's chances of landing their dream job," says Jamie Hichens, senior talent acquisition partner at Glassdoor. "You have a limited amount of time to catch a recruiter or hiring manager's eye—use it wisely."
Filling precious resume space with verbose language or overused buzzwords can certainly backfire. So we tapped a group of HR and resume experts to give us the inside scoop on some of the most common words and phrases to avoid. Scan your CV to make sure you're not guilty of including any of them.
"Misspelled words [like this one] should never appear on your resume," says Elizabeth Harrison, client services manager and senior recruitment partner at the recruiting firm Decision Toolbox. "Read your resume numerous times, print it and take a pen to it and have someone else read it. One misspelled word can completely eliminate an otherwise strong candidate from consideration because it demonstrates lack of attention to detail."
"Popular resume templates and HR pros prompt job seekers to include a list of strategic skills on their resume," says Glassdoor expert Eileen Meyer. "From Java to Final Cut Pro, speaking Arabic to spearheading 150% growth, be sure to include not only the relevant skills that make you a perfect fit for the role, but also the skills that make you stand out. Take note, command of Microsoft Office is not a skill. It's a given."
"Is your career trajectory pretty straightforward and lacking major gaps between jobs? Then you probably don't need an objective statement," contends Glassdoor writer Caroline Gray. "If your resume is self-explanatory, there's no need to take up valuable space with anything that's redundant. Also, if you're submitting a cover letter with your resume, that should be more than sufficient in addressing your objective for your application.
Having "references upon request" at the bottom of your resume is a sign that a candidate is overeager. If a recruiter wants to call to know more about you, they will reach out directly. There is no need to point out the obvious. As one HR expert said, "everyone assumes we want references, but honestly, we can ask."
"Talking in first or third person reads weird—did someone write your resume for you? Just state the facts," says Hichens. Avoid "I," "me," "she," "he," "her," and "him." For example, write, "Led a team of four," not, "I led a team of four people" or "Jamie led a team."
This term, says Jennifer Bensusen, technology lead and senior recruitment partner at Decision Toolbox, has "been overused in the last five years." Like other cheeky titles that have come into wider use, like "ninja," it's best to avoid it—"unless you are truly a singing superstar, applying for a wedding singer or entertainer role that is!"
Bensusen says not to refer to "technology or systems you have touched or were exposed to but really don't know." For example, stay away from sentences like, ". . . a Software Engineer who dabbled with Python in college seven years ago but has been developing in .NET professionally since." In this case, don't add Python to your resume if you're not a pro.
Again, a candidate being on time is an expectation. "[Instead] craft a well thought out, concise resume with interesting content on accomplishments, KPI success or significant highlights with bullets on what you did," advises Bensusen. "Did you create efficiencies that saved the company big bucks? Did you hire a stellar team that accomplished world peace?"
"Stay away from the word 'expert,' unless you truly are," says Bensusen. Otherwise, "be prepared to be peppered with questions regarding your expertise."
Instead of saying you're accomplished, show it. "Accomplishments are currency when it comes to resumes," says Anish Majumdar, CEO of ResumeOrbit.com. "The more you have, and the more applicable they are to the job you want, the greater your perceived worth. This can have a big impact not just on whether you receive an interview, but how much you're ultimately offered. Front-load the accomplishment, then describe how it was achieved."
Nicole Cox, chief recruitment officer at Decision Toolbox, adds to that advice: "Substantiate your accomplishments with numbers," she says. Some recruiters prefer to see actual numbers (such as "cut manufacturing costs by $500,000"), while others prefer percentages ("cut manufacturing costs by 15%"). Either way, provide enough context to show the impact. If your objective was to cut manufacturing costs by 10%, make it clear that you exceeded the goal.
Majumdar gives this example, which explains not only what you accomplished but how: "Improved customer satisfaction 30% within nine months through re-engineering support processes and introducing new training materials to staff.'"
"Personal information about age, relationships, or children can expose you to discrimination," warns Cox. "Employers aren't allowed to ask for that kind of information, and you shouldn't offer." As Harrison notes, "These items do not pertain to the qualifications of an individual for a position."
"Often, careerists will write, 'Responsible for' at the beginning of a statement," says expert resume writer Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter, even "when a more powerful lead-in would" be better. "Instead of 'seasoned sales management executive,' write, 'regional sales manager for largest revenue-generating area, exceeding competitors by 25–55% in revenue growth, year-over-year,'" she advises. "In other words, strengthen the story through muscular verbiage and results. Lead with strength and energy."
"While many other words are misused or diluted by overuse, these are the weakest and most abused," says Barrett-Poindexter. "If your resume language or content is weak, unfocused, [or] rambling, you can obliterate your chances of landing that dream role."
A version of this article originally appeared on Glassdoor. It is adapted and reprinted with permission.
Voting with your wallet is an American tradition, but the aims and methods of boycotts have changed in unprecedented ways lately.
"Boycotts are as American as apple pie," says Shannon Coulter, calling it a tradition that started with the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Inspired by that heritage and motivated by her outrage over Donald Trump's political ascendance, the digital strategist launched her own boycott, #GrabYourWallet, on October 11, 2016. What began as a spreadsheet of companies connected to the Trump family has grown into an international campaign that's already claiming victories, such as Nordstrom, Kmart, and Sears dropping Ivanka Trump's fashion line all within the last week. Coulter's project is a prime example of how boycotts have changed radically in the Trump era—both in aims and methods. They are moving away from targeted campaigns with specific demands—desegregate buses, end sweatshop labor—to acts of political rebellion: Repudiate Trump, defund Breitbart News.
Changes in party affiliation and media consumption already underway for a decade have been supercharged by the unprecedented arrival of a president who is also a political neophyte and media personality. With a fiercely divided country capable of a hair-trigger response through social media, Trump's rise has led to these five new phenomena in economic protest.
Presidents have always had the bully pulpit, but Trump takes it to a new level with his pop culture celebrity and Twitter virtuosity. Going straight to social media, Trump can make bold claims and pronouncements that would never be acceptable in an Oval Office speech or State of the Union address. "What we're seeing now is politicians calling for boycotts, which we have not historically seen outside of perhaps the Civil Rights movement," says University of Texas at Austin professor Tim Werner, who specializes in corporate social responsibility and government policy.
Trump started as a candidate in July 2015, urging people to boycott Macy's after the retailer dumped his brand of shirts and ties because of his incendiary claim about "Mexican rapists." Now as a president, he can set his followers in motion with just a tweet, as he did when Nordstrom last week dropped Ivanka Trump's fashion line. "He didn't outright call for a boycott, but Trump supporters are calling for a boycott of Nordstrom precisely because of this call to arms," says Brayden King, a professor at Northwestern University who studies how activism affects corporations.
The Trump-inspired boycotts haven't had a financial impact; but boycotts almost never do, say King and Werner. The main goal is to generate publicity, which Trump certainly does.
Never has a U.S. president also been a consumer brand. Trump's name is on hotels, condos, golf courses, clothing, food, TV shows, and more—all targets for his opponents. #GrabYourWallet lists about 70 companies somehow tied to Trump—especially to the Ivanka Trump brand . The campaign's goal is, "to shop with a clear conscience and no bad memories," says Shannon Coulter, who started #GrabYourWallet after the pussy-grabbing and other sexist comments captured on the infamous Access Hollywood recording. (Other activists have created boycott-focused mobile apps that list companies connected to Trump.)
Ivanka became a bigger target because of how she reacted to the tapes, says Coulter. "After she not only went back out on the campaign trail but went back full-bore, I think that [people] were less willing to cut her that slack," she says. Major retailers that have dropped Ivanka's and other Trump family brands tend to say it's a business decision due to poor sales, but it's pretty clear that the boycott helped turn off potential customers. Nordstrom is just the most prominent on an ever-growing list including Nordstrom Rack, Bellacor, Jet, Kmart, Neiman Marcus, Rue La La, Sears, Shoes.com, and Zulify.
"I think it would be wildly unrealistic of me to expect large, publicly traded retailers to attribute their actions to the boycott," says Coulter. "However, I have absolutely no doubt that the boycott was instrumental in their decision to drop Trump products." The popularity of the Ivanka Trump brand has been plummeting at Nordstrom since October, reports the Wall Street Journal. "Maybe this is the one time when consumers are so politically polarized that it actually is affecting every choice that they make," says King.
Boycotts used to include specific demands, like for Nike to improve labor conditions; and about a quarter of them create enough pressure for the company to make concessions, says Werner. Today's boycotts, on the left and the right, instead are often political statements. There is very little the target can do to please its antagonists, other than to pack up and go home.
#GrabYourWallet isn't even targeting the Trump family, but rather companies that do business with them or that supported the campaign. Success means hurting Trump, not persuading him to rescind the travel ban, preserve funding for EPA, or nominate a different secretary of education. (However, Coulter says that #GrabYourWallet may evolve to leverage consumer pressure on other causes beyond Trump.)
Right-wing boycotts have also sought to punish, rather than reform. When Kellogg's pulled its advertising from Breitbart News, the outlet called for a boycott—which, unsurprising to boycott experts, did no financial harm to the cereal giant. That doesn't mean it failed. "I don't believe Breitbart ever thought that Kellogg's would come running back with its tail between its legs," says King. One goal may have been to intimidate other advertisers considering bolting, he says. "The other was that they just wanted to make a point. Breitbart thrives on taking political stances on issues that resonate for its readership."
That practice has made Breitbart the target of another spreadsheet boycott campaign called Sleeping Giants—a list of about 1,000 organizations persuaded to pull their ads from the news site. People who see Breitbart as racist and sexist probably aren't customers and can't do a traditional boycott. But they are trying to hit its revenue by taking screenshots of ads that appear on Breitbart and tweeting them to the advertisers. "A lot of these companies—almost everyone we reach out to—has said, 'Oh my God, I didn't realize it was on there!" says a Sleeping Giants organizer, who like all the members, remains anonymous. ("We're in a related field, digital marketing," he tells me, "and we don't want it to get mixed up with our clients.")
This inadvertent sponsorship is the product of programmatic advertising—services like AppNexus and Google's DoubleClick that automatically bid for slots and place ads on websites. Companies, universities, or other organizations don't pick the sites that their ads go on; but they can blacklist sites they want to stay off of, which the Sleeping Giants participants have done. The list includes progressive businesses like the Honest Company and Warby Parker, but also giant multinationals from 3M and Mercedes-Benz to Visa and Lenovo. AppNexus has blacklisted Breitbart from its entire network, as have smaller networks Rocket Fuel and TubeMogul. "Google's a big one," says the guy from Sleeping Giants. "We have not heard anything back from them."
Sleeping Giants was inspired by a boycott project called "Stop Funding Hate," which targets advertisers in British tabloids that publish race-baiting articles. Both organizations now expanded outside their home countries, to places like Austria, New Zealand, and Switzerland.
Already hammering at its advertising, Breitbart foes are now going after its online store, powered by e-commerce platform Shopify. On February 8, Shopify's CEO, Tobias Lütke, published a post on Medium saying that, for reasons of free speech, he was rejecting calls to cut ties with Breitbart. Now Shopify itself may be a boycott target, with pressure from activists groups like petition site SumOfUs. "We are looking into reaching out to Shopify employees and also companies that do business with it," says SumOfUs lead campaign strategist Emma Pullman in an email. "The #GrabYourWallet community is very happy to use the platform we've built to help shine a light on the fact that Shopify powers the Breitbart store and to inspire them to do otherwise," writes Shannon Coulter in an email.
The internet accelerates everything, and the speed it's brought to boycotts has been stunning—especially in the #DeleteUber campaign. But the media saturation that led to success in the Uber campaign may not bode well for other boycotts.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick angered Trump opponents by joining the president's Strategic and Policy Forum. Then on January 28, Uber made a temporary change in rates that people saw as undercutting an airport taxi strike supporting protests against Trump's travel ban. More than 200,000 people ditched the Uber app in protest, reports the Times, and downloads of rival app Lyft surged. On February 2, Kalanick quit the forum.
That's not a success likely to be repeated. Substituting Lyft for Uber was a no-brainer for activists. "There's no real trade-off between the two services, not to mention the drivers are the same people," says Brayden King.
Most boycotts are a lot harder and take a lot longer. The efforts to reform Nike's labor practices began in the 1990s and took years to get the company to implement changes. Will activists be able to stay focused that long, when other boycotts, also launched at lightning speed, keep popping up to compete for attention? "We're just overrun with boycotts at the moment," says King.
It's not just activists who are losing focus. So is the market. Given that most boycotts don't hurt sales much (even Uber seems to have bounced back), a boycott's biggest tool is bad publicity, which can affect stock prices. That's happening less, says King. There is plenty of media attention around boycotts, but it's diluted by the sheer number of them. "It's the only time I've ever said that," says King. "I think this month we may be starting to see boycott fatigue."
Would-be innovators have long been faulted for peddling visions of the future that only they want. Are we now paying the price?
This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.
Soylent, the meal replacement for those who consider eating an inefficient use of time, has been called many things, including "slurp sludge" and "healthy gloop." To its cofounder, Rob Rhinehart, it's "the future of food." Just not my future food. Because like many people—apparently including those who "hack" Soylent to make it more food-like—I enjoy cooking, eating, and the social rituals those things entail.
Who cares what one eccentric startup founder believes the future will look like? First, because he's hardly alone. There's no shortage of entrepreneurs who double as amateur futurists, declaring to the rest of us what's coming. Second, because what those folks imagine is coming more often reflects what they want than what most people need.
And what more people need is a greater hand in shaping their own futures. These days, we're already seeing what happens when enough people start worrying whether they even have one.
Last year, Singularity University's Peter Diamandis projected that fully autonomous vehicles would hit roadways "well within five years." Yet in studyafter study, most Americans across all age groups say they want to stay in the driver's seat. Even if we know that cars will likely be safer under the control of AI, many of us actually like driving. Reason doesn't always win out—people's irrational preferences do.
It isn't news that Silicon Valley's idea of the future is often out of sync with what makes most of us tick. The Segway that VC John Doerr once predicted would hit $1 billion in sales and become "maybe bigger than the internet" only sold 30,000 units. Because, according to one analysis, the company ignored customer satisfaction and acceptance needs. Like not wanting to look weird in public.
NYC-Expos World's Fair, 1939.[Photo: Anthony Calvacca/New York Post Archives/(c) NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty Images]
Today, with climate change topping the World Economic Forum's 2016 Global Risks lists, it's easy to feel grateful that the jungle road builder never got built. The point isn't to knock GM's mid-century execs. It's that there isn't much separating them from today's would-be innovators who haven't proved much better at identifying whether the public really wants or needs their future-defining "advancements." (And for every protest of, "But the iPhone!" there are dozens of other "innovations" that tanked.)
1964 New York World's Fair[Photo: Flickr user Don O'Brien]
Predicting the future, we already know, is big business. And why merely satisfy a need, the Steve Jobs-ian logic goes, when you can create one that people didn't know they had? Get ahead of a trend, and you stand to make gobs of money. Create a trend, and make gobs more.
If this type of charge has been lobbed as a generic broadside before, current events show its consequences are far from abstract, and they're growing.
It's not just that forecasts too often reflect a tiny elite's wishful thinking, it's that they often paper over uncertainty or downright ignorance. Take Donald Trump's surprise victory and the upset outcome of the Brexit referendum. Both were largely votes to reject the status quo at all costs, and prognosticators scarcely saw them coming. Psychologists know that people become more inclined to reject things when they feel all their options are bad—net dissatisfaction pushes us to opt out of everything rather than into something.
So when the workforce appears to be careening toward rampant automation, to take just one (not altogether groundless) popular fear, a future of endless freelancing may not strike people as an appealingly liberating alternative, however much they may wish to ditch their desk jobs. Just because you're seeing users flock to your sleek new freelance marketplace doesn't mean they're doing it because they want to. Someone who just got laid off and needs a quick paycheck isn't rushing to embrace her chosen future; her signup on your platform is your net gain, but not necessarily her career win.
That's why it isn't just frivolous or indulgent for a lighting company like Ketra, at least in BuzzFeed's description last week, to "suggest new problems with your lights that you didn't know you had, so you'll buy a new class of products that you eventually can't live without" (luxury commodities have been around since camels trekked the Silk Road)—it's actually counterproductive, in an Economics 101 sense.
It's not the task of every business to do the most good for the most people; that's government's job. But it is the function of every business to answer this question with integrity: "What problem are you solving?"
Why "with integrity"? Because Econ 101 poses that question simply for the sake of identifying a target customer segment. The world we live in now, however, begs us to think a lot harder and more urgently about collective problems in addition to consumer ones: climate change, the erosion of democratic principles, threats by stateless enemies. Want to make an impact on the future we'll all have to live in? Want to really innovate? Start by asking ordinary people what they want tomorrow to look like, then work backward from there.
This is why the familiar outcry for greater diversity matters so much, especially right now. Businesses have gotten much better at talking about inclusion and diversity, and many have made halting but real progress at matching that talk to action. But there's still a ways to go, and the pressure to do more is mounting. Companies need to reflect the world they're trying to reshape. When they do, they're better at seeing humans as something more than math problems, only knowable through trend analysis.
Because in reality, we're complex, inefficient creatures who seek joy, sociability, and meaning in our lives and in our work. Those things have always been trending. Lately, there's a lot that threatens them, and that's a problem that all the internet-connected coffee makers in the world can't solve, but that real food-guzzling, car-driving people just might.
A #Resistance cottage industry is capitalizing on hatred for the president with feminist fashion, angry sweaters—and even scented candles.
Donald Trump ran on an ambitious platform vowing to return jobs to U.S. citizens, but we doubt he had this in mind: Independent retailers are capitalizing on the president's record low approval ratings to sell creative, inspiring, and oftentimes humorous anti-Trump merchandise. From politically charged fashion to scented candles that really do stink, a #Resistance economy is growing strong.
"I didn't really have dreams of doing political sweaters," admits Rachelle Hruska MacPherson.
MacPherson is the founder of Lingua Franca, a New York City-based fashion line of embroidered cashmere sweaters that sell for $360 at high-end retailers like Saks and Net-a-Porter. The tops feature phrases like "Original Gangsta" and "Old School," items that were bought by stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Christy Turlington. It was a modest side business for the entrepreneur, who also runs the media company GuestofaGuest.com.
But with the election of Trump, Lingua Franca—which means "a common language"—took a sharp sartorial turn. MacPherson employs more than 30 immigrants, and her husband is half Mexican. The President's anti-immigration rhetoric hit home. It became personal, and with that, her idea of a common language morphed into something else.
And so she began producing custom-made orders with slogans like "We Are All Immigrants" "Power To The Peaceful," "Science Not Fiction," "Resist," and "I Didn't Vote For Him."
The reinvented line of sweaters quickly sold out, forcing MacPherson to reconsider her "hobby." MacPherson saw a thousand orders alone for the newly released "I Miss Barack" style in the last month.
"We're backordered on every single color and size," says MacPherson, who has gone on a hiring spree to keep up with consumer demand, which spiked following the inauguration. "People want them now."
MacPherson isn't alone in her accidental business boon. Americans are turning their side businesses into printing presses and succeeding at it. These entrepreneurs sussed out that the political climate has customers wanting to wear their frustrated hearts on their sleeves. Fashion designers, craftsmen, even piñata makers are witnessing how protests can be funneled into purchases.
Independent retailers can often take political risks that big brands can't. Retailer hubs such as Zazzle and Etsy reported a dramatic increase in political product listings during and following the election. Zazzle saw a 26% increase in political merchandise orders during the last six months, compared with those same months in 2012, reports a company rep. Meanwhile, an Etsy search for "anti-Trump" reveals nearly 5,000 products, while "pussy hats" range in the thousands.
Gauss Haus, which sells $12 knit hats on Etsy, has been swamped with "pink pussy hat" orders. Owner JJ Gauss sold more than 400 hats in January alone, with the day of the Women's March totaling $2,000 in record sales.
"My phone kept 'cha-chinging,'" Gauss said via email. "It was unbelievable. So many people had been inspired by the March, and they were coming to little old me…. I am very quick at my work, but I had so many in one day that I had to pull three all-nighters to get back on track."
While MacPherson hails from a very Republican family in Nebraska ("My Facebook feed is not an echo chamber," she says), the independent designer didn't hesitate to politicalize her fashion line. Her collection is her way of communicating her opinion to the public—in the way in which some use social media. It's a physical way of engaging in the dialogue that's captured our country. And many in her community, she observes, are finally keeping up with politics.
"We're fired up and outraged," she says. "There is a positive to that."
It's especially poignant for MacPherson since her employees are mostly female immigrants from countries like Mexico, Syria, and Iran. She deals on a daily basis with how President Trump's policies impact their lives. "It's been emotional," she admits, "there's a heartbreaking story every day."
As such, MacPherson felt it her duty to hire more immigrants in the last few weeks, going so far as to pursue partnering with agencies to teach refugees how to embroider. "Who better to be stitching these aspects?" she asks.
In addition, MacPherson donates the difference between market and wholesale price to a customer's charity of choice. So far, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU have been the most popular.
"It's totally changed my life," she says. "I feel a deeper connection to everyone buying these... we feel like we're doing something."
Fashion designer Joseph Robinson of streetwear line Joe Fresh Goods cites what he felt as Trump's "personal attack on Chicago," referencing the President's threats that he may soon "send in the feds," as one reason that inspired him to take aim at the President.
The Chicago-based designer has produced politically charged tongue-in-cheek T-shirts for a decade, but his current collections catapulted his indie line into more mainstream circles. The "Fuck Donald" capsule collection, which doesn't reference Trump's last name ("it could be about Donald Duck," insists Robinson, slyly), is his way of "getting people talking."
"Every time Trump does or says something crazy, T-shirts go on fire," he says. "And I'm pretty sure he's gonna give me more ammo every day."
Each batch of the collection sold out whenever the president was prominently discussed in the news. Robinson also has a collection called "Thank You Obama" modeled by Chance the Rapper. That one went viral upon its release, landing Robisnon in outlets such as Harper's Bazaar and the Washington Post.
"I look at myself as the CNN of clothes," Robinson tells Fast Company of fusing political sentiment with streetwear style. "I document what's going on in pop culture with Ts."
The Fuck Donald shirts were originally started as a joke, but after it performed so well, Robinson began producing sweatshirts and hats in the same style. Over 200 were ordered the night of the election. He's even considering making it its own brand. "I was ready to retire these four months ago," Robinson admits, but as the public's appetite grows, he doesn't see himself slowing down.
"My clothes are conversation starters," he says, "I feel like it's my civil duty."
One design repeatedly seen throughout Hillary Clinton's campaign and spotted at Women's Marches has been a T-shirt with the slogan, "The Future Is Female." It was a minimalist top that went viral in 2016, but the design came from humble beginnings: It was inspired by a 1975 archival image on the Instagram account Herstory, which chronicles lesbian culture.
Rachel Berks is the founder of Otherwild, a Los Angeles store, studio, and fashion line that represents feminist and LGBT designers. In 2015, she spotted the Instagram image and loved it. So she offhandedly ordered 24 T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan. They sold out within 24 hours.
"I saw there was a need and an interest in this messaging," said Berks.
Berks realized she had a unique opportunity to meld charity with commerce, and she began donating proceeds of sales. Since then, she kept a steady stock of the style, but consumer interest skyrocketed once the issue of defunding Planned Parenthood took hold in 2016. It then gained momentum during the later stages of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, selling thousands online and showing up on celebrities like supermodel Cara Delevingne. (In fact, just this week, Hillary Clinton voiced the statement in a newly released video)
Berks assumed interest in the shirt would die down after the election. She was wrong. November 9, 2016 was her biggest sales day ever.
"It was a total shock to me," says Berks, "I saw that people needed this rallying cry more than ever."
For Berks, it's a tangible way to support a cause she strongly believes in—and give hope to other like-minded women.
"In moments where people feel hopeless and helpless, they have this statement to stand and rally behind, but also they know their money is going towards a cause that needs their support," she explains. "It's more than just wearing a feminist slogan."
She soon expanded into various styles, including onesies for babies, for which sales far exceeded her expectations. In fact, "The Future Is Female" line performed so well that Berks was invited to a Planned Parenthood conference for donors who contributed over $25,000. The indie designer couldn't believe her little shirt could go that far.
"To be in that room that was filled with wealthy patrons, and then me—who is just this business owner who just had this idea and had the opportunity to watch it go viral and raise a lot of money for this organization that I deeply believe in, that was really, really special," she reflects.
Some take a different, more light-hearted approach. Comedy writers J.D. and Kate Dobson, founders of JD and Kate Industries in St. Louis, Missouri, funneled their political frustration into … wax.
In 2016, the married couple began lightly selling Putin-inspired candles on Etsy, as a joke, what J.D. refers to as "barely even qualifying as a side project." This past fall, they added an $18.50 "Anti-Trump Trump-Scented Candle," which seemed like a "natural companion" to the budding collection.
The Trump candle smells of a mix between meat and suntan lotion, and comes with an orange wig lid. "It smells bad," confirms J.D Dobson, "it's meant to."
In fact, they don't even recommend lighting it. Although, they report, some actually do enjoy the scent. ("There's no accounting for taste," says Kate.) Three dollars of every purchase benefits nonprofits working to help Syrian refugees, such as Doctors Without Borders.
It sold well during the holidays, but following Trump's win, sales soared. After the inauguration, they soared even higher.
"We never envisioned back when we started it of wanting to profit off this bad thing that was happening to our country," says Kate Dobson. "The good news is that we don't really profit off of it when you take into account how long it takes us to make those stupid wigs."
What would have easily become a gag gig has become a business that has overtaken their daily lives. One of the most challenging aspects has been the amount of time spent hairstyling.
"I thought it would be easy [to style Trump's hair] but it's surprisingly hard," reports Kate Dobson. "We hate it."
While their objective is to poke fun at Trump's image, they hope their products serve as a way to communicate their beliefs instead of trivializing national politics.
"We don't want to minimize or make light of what is happening," explains Kate. "We hope that we are using humor to be informative of what is happening in the country."
For consumers interested in a more literal interpretation of "Dump Trump," there are poop bags that sell for $12.
Annie Grossman, a dog trainer in New York, began exploring launching her own pet necessity line in May 2016. She first turned to her father, political cartoonist Robert Grossman, to draw the image that would grace her first product.
"I said, 'Hey, I know it's not the op-ed page, but would you mind making a picture of Donald Trump for a poop bag?'" she recalls. Her father was initially against it, as "he didn't want to be associated with excrement in any way."
Grossman finally got her father on board, but securing a manufacturer provided a different set of challenges—no American company wanted to fulfill her vision. "They were scared about getting into politics," she says.
This fall, she ultimately ordered 5,000 bags from China, which have now nearly sold out. There was no advertising or press, it was just word of mouth that had her product being sold in gift shops and pet stores across the country.
Grossman, a former journalist, certainly didn't see the poop bag industry in her future, and harbors complicated feelings on whether she wants to continue protesting Trump in such a manner.
"It almost feels like war profiteering at this point," she says. "It felt more like an art project than anything." She also questions, to some degree, the point of it: "I don't think it has really made any difference in the world."
But considering consumer interest, she will likely do another batch, perhaps even switching up the caricature of Trump. "I can only do it better now," she says of the business lessons she's learned. "Once you've imported 5,000 poop bags from China, the second's time gotta be much easier."
As for her father, he's finally come around. ("He's still a bit squeamish," she relents, "but I gave him a cut, so what's he gonna do?")
Navigating next steps in business is always challenging, but perhaps even more so when your business was somewhat accidental—and reliant on the political atmosphere. Many budding entrepreneurs are genuinely touched their products resonate with fellow Americans who harbor similar discontent with the current administration, but how long will that last?
"It depends on how long Donald Trump is our president," says MacPherson.
That day might not come soon, but till then, business will be its own kind of therapy; it allows these entrepreneurs to communicate their discontent in their respective creative fields.
"I felt more anxious when I felt I wasn't doing anything," stresses MacPherson. "I'm just using the tools that I've been given to have a voice and speak up against what's happening."
While the desire for an anti-Trump product might soon wane, these entrepreneurs are learning how to scale their companies and prepare for the next iteration of their business lines. The Dobsons, for example, are growing their candle empire, including commemorative smell-good editions to honor politicians like Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (it has "notes of maple and chai") or iconic American politician Aaron Burr ("smells of gun smoke drifting low in the Weehawken dawn").
"I don't see ourselves retiring on this, but we do see it as a growing portion of our income," says J.D. Dobson. "Now it's more than just a hobby."
The retailer's head designers aren't in the business of dictating trends, but respond to the needs and desires of their customers.
At J.Crew's New York Fashion Week presentation, which took place yesterday, the stage was a riot of color and prints: a camo button-up paired with a ballgown skirt, a rugby shirt with a military-inspired overcoat, gold strappy heels peaking out beneath a peasant skirt. A Scottish theme connected the looks, with plenty of kilts, and Fair Isle and tartan prints. But these classic looks were coupled with distinctly modern elements: bright colors, tulles, satins.
Much of this aesthetic was informed by Somsack Sikhoumuong, a J.Crew veteran who was named head women's designer last year after a stint designing for Madewell. He's been credited with infusing the flagship label with a much-needed boost of energy after several seasons in which the brand's classic look veered dangerously close to becoming stale and boring.
Sikhoumuong explains that he continues to be inspired by J.Crew's archive of patterns that pop up again and again over the years in catalogs: tweeds, Breton lines, English liberty prints. He's always putting his unique spin on them: In the show, he paired a blue lace shirt with camo pants, and a military jacket over a rugby skirt paired with a tulle ballgown skirt. Frank Muytjens, head menswear designer, has a similar approach to designing archetypal garments—the chino, the leather jacket, the trench coat—with his own unique take. "I love the idea that we are working within a framework that already exists," Muytjens says. "This is a challenge in the best possible sense. By tweaking a few elements, a trench becomes modern again or a chino in a different color becomes something fresh."
For the second time, J.Crew cast its entire New York Fashion Week presentation with real people rather than professional models. The 28 men and 34 women who streamed out ranged in age between 9 and 64, and were of all sizes and ethnicities. "The people in our show are not randomly picked out: They are people that inspire us," explains Sikhoumuong. "These are colleagues, customers, and friends whose personal style we admire and want to celebrate."
Before the show, J.Crew's design team presents each individual in the show with several outfit options, then they work together to achieve a look that both parties are happy with. "It's completely collaborative way to present a collection," Sikhoumuong says. "We would customize outfits to people's personalities. It was all about what they felt good wearing."
But this approach isn't isolated to the fashion week shows. Sikhoumuong believes that his role as a designer isn't to dictate trends, but to be in conversation with the people buying his products. This means paying close attention to the customer's lifestyle, the staples they are looking for to round out their closet, and their creative, unexpected ways of putting looks together. "I meet customers all the time," he says. "I'm very interesting in learning about the clothes they love and the clothes they feel great in. These are conversations that are happening 24/7."
In his own research, Muytjens has spotted a pattern among the men who shop at J.Crew. "Our guy loves old stuff," he says. "He loves the battered leather jacket that he's had for 20 years or the jeans he's spent 10 years breaking in. Those are the jewels in his wardrobe that he builds upon." With this in mind, Muytjens has focused on creating high-quality investment pieces in styles that won't go out of fashion. In the catalog and in the fashion week show, part of his goal is to convey new ways that these old pieces can come to life, by styling them slightly differently or combining them in new ways.
This is a different approach from other designers, who believe it is their job to inspire customers, not necessarily be inspired by them. Take Marc Jacobs, whose fall show was a goth fairy tale complete with spider webs embroidered on long black ball gowns, or Rodarte, which took hobo chic to new heights with complex dresses in a patchwork of vintage fabrics. Their shows painted fantasy worlds, several steps removed from customers' everyday lives. Sikhoumuong has a different philosophy. "There needs to be an aspect of fantasy to some of the pieces we offer," he says. "But heck yeah, our brand is relatable. It's possible to do both."
Sikhoumuong believes that J.Crew has always been focused on being accessible, rather than portraying an aspirational lifestyle that is out of their customers' reach. But social media has made this even more true, as consumers expect to be able to speak to brands directly and be heard. Even high-fashion brands are moving in this direction: Prada's 365 campaign brings new images every single day of year across social media to engage customers in new ways while Fendi's newly launch "F is for" campaign invites customers to share their thoughts with the brand. All of this conversation with customers will presumably find its way back to the design studio and impact the looks that emerge in the seasons to come. "Social media has made fashion more democratic," Sikhoumuong says. "You can't engage with your consumer if you're intimidating them."
So what do J.Crew loyalists want? They're traditionalists who veer toward classic looks: blazers, shift dresses, chinos, polos. To keep looks fresh every season, Sikhoumuong focuses on creating twists on these archetypal looks, combining prints and colors in new ways, mixing menswear and womenswear aesthetics, and interspersing the formal with the casual. He also believes that its important to remake beloved pieces with small tweaks. "It's never a big revolution from season to season," he says. "It's tinkering: An update can be the changing of a button, making something in a new fabric, or altering the length of a hem."
Sikhoumuong, Muytjens, and the rest of the design team look everywhere for inspiration for these subtle tweaks. They visit flea markets and museums for insight into looks that were popular in other eras. They're also taking cues from art, film, and photography. But they're also interested in how customers mix and match clothing in interesting ways. Sikhoumuong recently spotted a woman in a store wearing her father's old, oversize sweatshirt in a way that looked very chic. That got him thinking about how he could re-create a look like that for a future collection.
Who knows? The look—and the customer—might both appear in the next J.Crew presentation.
Here's what Amazon, Snap, Netflix, and others can teach us about innovation in 2017.
On September 4, 1921, my grandfather arrived in the United States, 17 years old, with just $25 in his pocket. He became a dressmaker, and in 1937 received a patent for what he called "a new, original, and ornamental design for a Dress Ensemble." While my grandfather has been gone for many years, I recently asked my uncle about the patent. He claimed that the actress Elizabeth Taylor once wore the dress it describes in a photo shoot for Seventeen. In many ways, my grandfather was an innovator. He launched his own business, and thrived in the teeth of the Great Depression. But beyond our family, his impact was modest. His business closed when he retired. It never achieved scale or left a mark on our culture.
This personal story underscores just how difficult it is—and how rare—for even a successful business to break through. Which is part of what makes putting together our annual 50 Most Innovative Companies list such a challenge. Our reporting team sifts through thousands of enterprises each year, searching for those that tap both heartstrings and purse strings and use the engine of commerce to make a difference in the world. Impact is among our key criteria. This year marks the 10th edition of our Most Innovative Companies ranking. Looking back on that history, there are plenty of eye-opening lessons (see my article "Ten Innovation Lessons of the Past 10 Years" on fastcompany.com). This year's list offers a brand-new slate of forward-looking ideas, from Amazon to Snap, Open Whisper Systems to Orbital Insight. My grandfather would be amazed by the radical, fast-paced changes of these companies. Here are 10 observations about the current state of the innovation economy.
Amazon and its chief, Jeff Bezos, have been defying expectations for more than two decades. The question is: How? Executive editor Noah Robischon sat down with Bezos, and what he learned points not to data metrics and rigorous processes—which Amazon deeply relies on—but rather to a willingness to embrace uncertainty, experimentation, and messy inconsistencies. Not everything in the Amazon world is orchestrated for perfection. Bezos doesn't just tolerate this; he enjoys it. What he understands is that each critical new idea may arise in a different way, from a different source.
Connecting to an audience is paramount for one's brand. These four CyreneQ, Manny Mua, Kenny Mitchell, and YesJulz are at the top of their game.[Photos: Cru Camara (CyreneQ), Ramona Rosales (Manny Mua), Lyndon French (Kenny Mitchell), and Eric T. White (YesJulz)]
When Fast Company's first Most Innovative Companies list came out, Snapchat didn't exist. Neither did Airbnb or Uber, Slack, or Spotify. The rise of these businesses illuminates the risks that established industries face, and how tastes in modern culture are shifting faster than ever. Younger consumers expect newer, better products all the time. That reality can't be ignored. And what starts out serving the youth will soon serve us all. As senior writer Mark Wilson notes in his terrific assessment of Snap, "The only people who underestimate Snap are those who don't take the time to see what's right in front of their face."
Six of the companies on this year's list are Chinese—more than we've ever had before. This was not a strategic objective of ours but a natural result of our bottom-up reporting. The days of dismissing Chinese businesses as mere copycats are long gone. As senior writer Austin Carr reports, an innovation ecosystem has taken hold in China that is arguably more competitive than Silicon Valley. Outfits like Alibaba and Tencent are so forward-focused, even the best U.S.-based businesses have to take note and—with increasing frequency—they find themselves playing catch-up. As one source tells Carr regarding the apps Alipay and WeChat, "There is no comparison with anything in the U.S. Maybe Facebook eventually gets there—maybe."
Historically, only a half dozen or so of our 50 Most Innovative Companies are repeats from the prior year. This time, 12 are returnees. That's because these enterprises continue to set the pace for their industries, showing agility and aggressiveness that makes them undeniable. Netflix opened up its platform to the majority of the world, and followed that up by adding offline viewing, a devilishly complex legal and business maneuver. Uber pulled a U-turn in its China business, only to double down on self-driving cars. Airbnb moved into bookings and is exploring ticket sales, and BuzzFeed took the germ of an idea, Tasty, and built a huge success. Google is disrupting photo storage, and Apple is delving deeper into chip making. Whatever distractions other businesses may face, these leaders seem impervious. They are setting their own course, and everyone else is being forced to follow.
Some changes are felt before they are seen, an underground tremor that puts us just a bit off balance. That often happens when a group of small yet creative players are deftly disrupting the same area. We highlight a quintet of companies—Glossier, Kenzo, Clique Media Group, Hypebeast, and RewardStyle—that use content as the engine for commerce. Elsewhere, we highlight Beyond Meat and Chobani, two examples of health-driven disruptions in the food business. One Medical, Medtronic, Celmatix, and Headspace point to a wave of coming tech-centered changes in the medical field, regardless of what policy makers do in D.C.
Some tech observers critique the way investment dollars are disproportionately allocated to startups aimed at rich, coastal, urban elites—and there's certainly some basis for that concern. But there are also plenty of groundbreaking operations in other arenas. Farmers Business Network, for instance, is pooling data and buying power for individual farmers to help them better compete with agribusiness. Simplify Networks is a Malaysian outfit applying sharing-economy ideas to mobile-phone data plans in the developing world: Why shouldn't people be able to sell bandwidth, that they've paid for but haven't used, to others? And then there's Orbital Insight, which analyzes satellite imagery to "understand what we're doing on the earth and to the earth," as founder James Crawford puts it. While Orbital's revenue largely derives from financial firms, it's partnered with the World Resources Institute to help with detecting and stopping deforestation.
Not every new venture is about making money. Some are about giving it away. Pledge 1% is targeting startups with a novel message: Along with setting aside a percentage of your business's profits for employees and investors, why not take a portion and give it to a cause? Another tactic is at the heart of GoFundMe, a crowdsourced fundraising utility that has applied the model of Kickstarter and Indiegogo to personal giving—and already generated $3 billion.
Who cares about mattresses? As it turns out, a whole lot of people. In just a few years, Casper, which sees itself as the Nike of sleep, has built a $200-million-a-year operation on just four products. Thinx is addressing a different need: menstrual leakage. CEO Miki Agrawal is attacking an unappreciated arena in our male-centric marketplace—and making millions.
Many of the businesses and services that we love are powered by unseen forces that are essential to their success. Netflix, for instance, operates on the back of Amazon Web Services, a $13 billion business inside the e-commerce giant. Twilio provides tools to app developers—also including Netflix. IBM has unleashed its Watson technology to bring AI capabilities to industries from professional sports to health care. MailChimp helps myriad small businesses operate with more sophistication and efficiency. And then there's Open Whisper Systems, whose security protocol not only underpins its own app but is helping Facebook provide its users with safer, more secure communications.
If there's a single thread that runs through this year's list, it's the importance of focus. Over the past year, the nation's political dialogue offered many reasons for uncertainty and pause. And yet the one sure recipe for obscurity in today's world is stasis. Culture will keep moving, and those enterprises that move with it—that attack their missions with fearlessness—will find themselves in the strongest position to weather whatever political or economic disruption comes our way.
If would-be founders stay in corporate jobs because they can't get insurance under the ACA, how will it affect innovation?
Earlier this year, Rich Robinson was entertaining two very different job offers. The first, at a large company, would mean stability and guaranteed health insurance. The other, at an early-stage startup, was a far more risky but exciting option to build a team from the ground up.
Robinson, a web designer based in Seattle, ultimately chose the steady corporate job. After President Trump took office, Robinson took note of Republican calls to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, President Obama's landmark health reform bill. He recalled a time, prior to the ACA, when those without employer-sponsored health insurance could be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions. "My wife is disabled and I have high blood pressure," he says.
The ACA has been subject to ample criticism, but many forget that it offers benefits to consultants, freelancers, small-business owners, and entrepreneurs. As Y Combinator chief Sam Altman recently pointed out, the passage of the bill instilled confidence in many entrepreneurs in his network to start companies. In many cases, these founders had chronic health conditions, like Dan Carroll, founder of the ed-tech startup Clever, who has lived with Crohn's Disease for a decade.
"We could see the ACA as a big step in separating having an employer from having health insurance," says Natalie Foster, cofounder of Peers, an organization that supports the sharing economy movement, and a former digital director for the Democratic National Committee.Recent statistics from Treasury Department show that one in five people who accessed health insurance from the exchanges created by the ACA were business owners or self employed.
With uncertainty about the future of the ACA, some experts say it is wise for would-be entrepreneurs to stay put in their steady jobs. That's particularly true for those who have health problems or rely on expensive medications. "With no cohesive strategy for the ACA, I'd suggest that folks stay very cautious right now," says Micah Weinberg, president of the Economic Institute at the Bay Area Council and a health policy researcher. "This is an example of the chilling effects that this environment of uncertainty will have on the startup economy."
Others say that entrepreneurs shouldn't be deterred, at least not because of fears of losing coverage. For now, the pre-existing conditions provision won't be touched. And in a recent interview with Fox News, Trump seems to have softened his language around repeal.
Jason Andrew, a broker who has spent more than a decade advising startup founders on their health benefits, says it's a question for each individual to answer for themselves. It all depends on the founders' "risk tolerance," he argues.
Andrew also points out that the ACA was no silver bullet for entrepreneurs. Many of his former clients were startup founders and consultants earning six-figure salaries, who didn't qualify for subsidies under the ACA. They bought insurance through the exchanges and many were faced with "rising rates and narrower networks," as insurers looked for ways to recoup costs.
For now, it remains to be seen whether a GOP replacement plan would offer protections, such as the pre-existing condition provision, in the long run.
Julia Lipton, who recently left her job at One Medical to start her own company, says she wasn't deterred at the prospect of losing coverage in a few years.
In the meantime, she bought health insurance through Covered California, the state exchange, and was pleasantly surprised by the range of options available to those who aren't making a steady salary. "For me, it wasn't worth missing the opportunity to fulfill my dream while I can," she says. "Sadly though, this is just another risk that entrepreneurs have to evaluate."
The White House and state legislators have made it clear they won't protect LGBT employment rights, but some businesses are fighting back.
This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.
Late last month, a leaked draft of an executive order from the Trump Administration hinted that the Oval Office was considering granting federal contractors a sweeping license to fire or refuse to hire lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people on the basis of religious belief. Two days later, amid intense public backlash, the White House said it had shelved the order.
But it was a clear signal that Trump and his allies considered compromising LGBT Americans' civil rights, and still might do so, despite overwhelming evidence that policies allowing businesses to discriminate are bad for those very businesses. So now companies face a test: As the government backs away from protecting LGBT workers, will their employers continue to step up and do so instead?
So far, there's reason for measured optimism. States that have passed anti-LGBT laws in recent years, like North Carolina, have suffered fierce blowback. By one estimate, HB2 has cost the state between $77 million and $201 million in tourism and tax revenue alone. It also cost Governor Pat McCrory his job. As a result, politicians and business leaders see North Carolina and McCrory as a cautionary tale. In fact, the NCAA now requires potential host cities and counties to fill out a questionnaire that includes this question: "Does your city, county/parish, and/or state have provisions that allow for refusal of accommodations or service to any person?"
While nondiscrimination laws may spook legislators, companies large and small agree that diversity is good for business. Good managers and entrepreneurs all know what gets results: Create a shared vision, build a great team, create an open atmosphere for creativity, and attract and retain great employees. And business owners know that they're most successful when they serve the public—and that means all of the public.
According to an April 2015 poll conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for the political think tank the Center for American Progress, two-thirds of small business owners said companies shouldn't be able to deny goods or services to LGBT customers based on the owner's religious beliefs. And 59% of small business owners opposed laws allowing individuals, associations, or businesses to legally refuse service to anyone because of their own faith.
Today, many corporations are putting these beliefs into practice by drawing up policies to protect their LGBT employees. According to the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index (CEI), 82% of Fortune 500 companies have explicit nondiscrimination policies covering sexual orientation and gender identity. And with transgender issues in the spotlight, many businesses are focusing on ways to support their transgender employees in particular. It actually isn't that difficult:
Update nondiscrimination policies. Make sure whatever protections your company has in place when it comes to gender, race, and sexual orientation also explicitly include gender identity.
Provide inclusive health care for employees. 50% of Fortune 500 and 73% of CEI businesses offer transgender-inclusive health care coverage.
Offer to educate. 86% of CEI-rated businesses have training programs that specifically include gender identity in the workplace.
Adopt guidelines to support inclusion. 387 major businesses have adopted gender-transition guidelines for employees and their teams, so there's already no shortage of examples for best practices (this organization has some useful resources).
Many of these inclusive businesses aren't located in blue-state bubbles. According to the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, five of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies with high scores for equality—including Chevron, General Motors, Ford, and Walmart—are headquartered in states with few legal protections for LGBT people.
Nor are companies moving forward alone; they're putting their money where their mouths are and urging governments to keep up. When businesses in Tennessee, Georgia, and Texas learned of discriminatory legislation in their states, they were among the first voices to reject that legislation. In response to a sweeping anti-LGBT bill, SB 6, the Texas Competes coalition of more than 1,200 businesses came forward to support LGBT protections. The group is now warning that Texas could lose up to $1 billion if the state passes the measure.
Tennessee Thrives, another coalition of businesses like the Hospital Corporation of America, FedEx, Jack Daniels, and Country Music Television, is calling on the state to oppose a proposed law that would allow mental health counselors to refuse patients treatment based on the therapist's religious or personal beliefs. And last year, the outcry against Georgia's proposed bill, HB 757, which would have given faith-based organizations in Georgia the option to deny services to LGBT people, came from giants like Salesforce, Apple, Microsoft, Disney, Intel, and Home Depot. All urged the governor to veto the bill. And he listened.
We're about to learn whether the business consensus in favor of diversity can win over state and government officials who oppose it. That seems like it should be a no-brainer, but it won't be easy. A newly released report by my organization, the Movement Equality Project, finds that the majority of states don't have laws protecting transgender people from discrimination in the workplace, housing, and public places.
And several states, like North Carolina, have recently passed anti-LGBT laws that support letting businesses turn away customers and even fire LGBT employees. More are now considering bills that would limit bathroom access for transgender people and make it impossible for them to update identity documents, among other restrictions.
But while state legislators and federal bureaucrats spend time worrying about who's using which bathroom, businesses can and must affirm what they already know works. By standing firmly against anti-transgender discrimination in the public sphere and creating a positive, transgender-inclusive environment in the workplace, companies can protect both their employees and their profits.
Because ultimately, this isn't just about the bottom line. When workers are judged on their skills and creativity, and not how they identify or whom they love, everyone wins. When our communities create level playing fields where everyone has the chance to thrive, that isn't "getting political"—it's the American dream, and it's good business.
The age of Trump brings new challenges for corporate image.
The first few weeks of President Trump's administration have been some of the most controversial in modern American history. From hastily withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to fast-tracking the approval of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, to barring citizens from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the U.S., some of the executive orders Trump has signed have resulted in protests across the country.
But it's not just Trump and his administration that have been the target of real-world and social media protests. Several companies have been caught up in the fray, most notably those who were perceived to be, at best, indifferent, and at worst, complicit with Trump's orders. Just ask Uber, who saw the #DeleteUber hashtag trending on social media after the company allowed drivers to pick up passengers at New York's JFK airport during the protests. Many saw this as Uber, whose CEO, Travis Kalanick, sat on Trump's business advisory council, trying to break up the one-hour strike New York taxi drivers implemented in response to the ban. Kalanick has since resigned from Trump's council.
And it's not just customers who are venting their frustrations over the Trump administration toward companies that appear to be friendly with it. Employees at some ostensibly Trump-friendly companies have vented their frustrations internally and even quit over their employer's involvement with the Trump administration.
All this begs the question: What is a company to do in a time of political turmoil and social upheaval? After all, many companies' successes—especially larger ones in the fields of technology, transportation, finance, and science—depend to a degree on their involvement with and relationship to the current administration in power.
With an administration that's polarizing, it can be difficult to run your business successfully and keep your customers (of all political leanings) happy. We spoke with several public relations experts in crisis management and company image to get their advice on how businesses can best navigate through a time of social and political turmoil.
While it's easy to frame responses to controversial administration actions in terms of politics, Micho Spring, chair of Weber Shandwick's Global Corporate Practice, says companies should frame their responses in terms of principle instead.
"Any response that a company or executive makes relating to current events should be grounded in the values that a company provides to society, and should be used as an opportunity to communicate those values to employees and customers," says Spring. "CEOs in particular are being seen more and more as builders of community among their employees and customers, and consumers are increasingly expecting executives to speak out on hot-button issues."
However, Spring warns that companies "should only respond and take a public stance when its values are directly related." But if they are, Spring says that companies should act fast, noting that an upcoming research report from Weber Shandwick found that 85% of global consumers say how a company responds to issues and crises is an important factor in their opinion of the organization overall. "Companies and executives need to be prepared to respond quickly to issues that are jeopardizing their values. Consumers put a lot of weight into a company's responsiveness, particularly in times of crisis."
Of course, it's not just customers that companies need to worry about. The future success of a company is intertwined with how well it is viewed by its employees, says Bradley Tubb, associate director at communications agency Battenhall. Companies must consider the impact that controversial policies might have on their employees. "Companies have a responsibility to protect their workers, and there is also an expectation that they will look out for their customers. This is where Uber CEO Travis Kalanick recently came unstuck, by failing to speak out against the 'Muslim ban' quickly enough. Clearly, there is an expectation that brands stick to their values and speak out against the administration if those values are seen to be under threat."
Spring agrees: "Protecting a company's image in the eyes of employees is equally important, if not more so, in today's environment of employee activism and engagement. They are the prism for a company's credibility among all stakeholders," she says.
"Employees increasingly want to work for values-driven organizations. Recent events, and especially those of this past week, show that employees want their companies to stand on principle. They expect company values to be communicated clearly to the outside world and acted upon. Culture has become central to the ability of an organization to attract and retain employees and customers. Companies that are seen as being on the wrong side of social issues today run the risk more than ever of losing the war for talent and facing significant consumer backlash. Particularly in today's environment, companies must put culture and values at the center of their risk mitigation strategies."
As the first two weeks of Trump's administration shows, change can happen quickly. That's why it's important for companies to think ahead and have plans in place for any potential risks that could arise from further executive orders that can be enacted with the stroke of a pen, says Don Baer, worldwide chair and CEO of Burson-Marsteller.
"Get ahead of the curve, if you can," says Baer. "We are living in what feels like an especially unpredictable and contentious time. Smart companies are not only preparing, they are working to get better intelligence about the small cadre of advisers and stakeholders providing counsel to or influencing key political and policy leaders, and they are finding ways to reach them, directly or through various communication channels, often with an assist from firms like ours."
Baer recommends conducting a risk assessment to understand your company's vulnerabilities and opportunities associated with taking a position, and says that if a government action is a direct challenge to what you do or presents a major ethical challenge for your customers, employees, suppliers, or other stakeholders, then you will more likely want to comment. However, if the action is not an affront to your company's values or those of its key audiences, then it will less likely require a response.
"Early interaction combined with accurate and effective messages and smart uses of various communications channels can often diffuse a situation before it becomes a problem," says Baer.
There's little doubt Trump's Twitter prowess helped him win the election. What's surprised many is that he has decided not to give up his personal Twitter handle while president. Instead, he tweets just as regularly and openly as he did before he took office. And it's the power of Trump's tweets that companies need to be conscious of, says Rob Flaherty, partner, chairman, and CEO of Ketchum.
"President Trump's use of Twitter creates a series of unprecedented dynamics and challenges for companies," says Flaherty. "As an outsider and avowed disruptor, President Trump reacts instantaneously to breaking news. He has taken on big companies, CEOs, Republicans, Democrats, allies, and enemies, and he may also praise and compliment some of those players. An endorsement can be a double-edged sword, so companies have to be constantly monitoring for mentions."
One such double-edged sword was the tweet Trump posted a little more than a week before assuming office. In it, he praised L.L. Bean after board member Linda Bean spoke out in support of Trump on television.
Before the tweet, L.L. Bean had been added to a boycott list of businesses that contributed to Trump's campaign or sells Trump-branded products. Hence, Trump decided to tweet his support of the company. Unfortunately, Trump's favorable tweet urging people to buy from the company likely only further polarized its potential customers.
For this reason, Flaherty says companies should consider out the various policy events that could occur in the next year and prepare background information and a position on each of them. "This will be important to put the company in a position to react fast," he says. "The longer the gap between a critical tweet by the president and a company response, the greater the risk of damage to reputation and stock price."
As for the tone of the response, Flaherty notes that every situation is different, but companies should be careful not to get defensive. "Also, tweeting factual information is better than tweeting at the president and including his Twitter handle," he says. "If you strike back too negatively, you may be escalating the news value of the moment and extending your time in the spotlight."
No more cluttered fitting rooms and messy racks. Reformation's founder wants to make buying a dress like buying a MacBook or Tesla.
Yael Aflalo, founder of the eco-chic fast fashion label Reformation, was in a curious predicament. About three years ago, business at her brick-and-mortar locations in New York and Los Angeles was blowing up, but the stores were so packed that the shopping experience was becoming downright unpleasant for guests.
"Our sales were soaring, but our Yelp reviews were in the toilet," Aflalo recalls.
Then it occurred to Aflalo that the problem had to do with the way traditional retail stores are structured. Couture brands, which schedule personalized fittings, can offer a plush, luxurious in-store experience for customers. But brands like Reformation, TopShop, and Zara are trying to grow their customer base and generate a lot of foot traffic. Stores are set up a little like self-service cafeterias, with customers rifling through racks, searching for their sizes, and carrying bundles of garments to a dressing room.
The floor plan of clothing stores only exacerbates this problem. Typically, the largest part of a store is devoted to storing racks and racks of garments in all sizes. Only a few outfits are displayed on mannequins or tables for customers to see. Dressing rooms are almost an afterthought—they tend to be small, poorly lit, and too few in number. In many cases, these uncomfortable rooms seem deliberately designed to get customers out as soon as possible. And yet, everybody has had the experience of queuing up to try out clothing. On the weekend, it's not uncommon to see long lines of customers snaking through popular clothing stores waiting to use the dressing room.
"Our store associates are always in survival mode," Aflalo says. "They're just desperately trying to clean up. They don't have the bandwidth to offer customers personalized recommendations, which is really what they should be doing."
Aflalo wanted to totally upend the in-store experience. As she looked around for inspiration, she found a couple of brands that had mastered the art of creating a high-end, high-volume retail experience. Tellingly, all the examples came from outside the fashion world. Apple, for instance, came to mind. "The stores are always so busy, yet they're always able to maintain a high level of customer experience," she says. "The floor isn't cluttered with boxes of products; there are just a few key items that customers can play around with."
Then there's Tesla. Unlike with traditional dealerships, there's no enormous lot with rows and rows of cars. Instead, there is a small showroom, with a single model on display, and flat screens where you can learn about the bells and whistles you can purchase. "I bought a Tesla in a showroom and it left a profound impression on me," Aflalo says. "Usually buying a car is so difficult and horrible. But buying a Tesla on a flatscreen monitor was so easy that I wondered if I was doing it right: I picked the color I wanted, entered my address, and swiped by credit card, then it was all done. My car showed up a month later."
She's used all of these insights to build out a brand-new store in San Francisco, which officially opens on February 21. The store radically reconfigures space. Rather than using the front of the store to hold racks of clothes, there are just a few best-selling outfits on display, giving the space an uncluttered, clean, minimalistic feeling.
"Across fashion brands, 20% of your styles drives 80% of your business," Aflalo explains. "Why not put out the 20%? This is a way of curating the experience for the customer."
Around the store, there are touchscreen monitors that allow customers to scan through outfits. When they find one they like, they can click on the size and it will appear in the dressing room, as if by magic. In reality, an associate will go to the stockroom to pick out the item in question and lay it out neatly for the customer. Since the whole process is automated, there's almost perfect inventory accuracy. (No more being disappointed when the system shows one sweater left in your size, but it's nowhere to be found on the racks.) Meanwhile, the computer system is gathering a lot of data about which outfits or sizes are popular and how long customers are spending trying on clothing. All of this can be used to make the store run more efficiently.
The real fun begins when you start trying on outfits. Since the front of house is so pared down, there's space to make dressing rooms larger. Aflalo also wanted to deck them out with plush materials and large mirrors, and importantly, lots of knowledgeable store representatives who can offer styling advice and size recommendations. Instead of rushing customers to make room for more people, the goal is to allow the customer to spend as much time as they need to try on outfits and style them just right.
Aflalo recognizes that this store is very much an experiment. She'll be gathering information as she goes along, making adjustments, and finding ways to improve. But she believes that to improve the shopping experience, she needed to rethink the brick-and-mortar store from the ground up, not just incrementally improve on the existing model.
And she's already planning improvements, including a more sophisticated touchscreen system that will merge the online and offline experience. "Imagine being able to just purchase an item on the in-store touchscreen and have it sent directly to your home," Aflalo says. "Or picking out a couple of outfits on the internet at home, and having them ready for you to try on when you enter the store."
A rapid expansion of Prime plus bold bets in the physical world are allowing the retailer to offer even more, even faster and smarter.
Picture your ideal neighborhood. What does it look like? Is it manicured, with buildings set in a pattern so that everything flows together, designed for perfection? Or is it gritty and spontaneous, the kind of place where a restaurant might move into the space that used to house a dry cleaner? Boxes bearing the Amazon logo can arrive at doorsteps in either of these environments, of course, but Amazon's founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, prefers the second type.
"I think neighborhoods, cities, and towns that have evolved are more interesting and delightful than ones that have been carefully top-down planned," he tells me when I meet him at Amazon's Seattle headquarters in November. "There's just something very human" about them, he says.
It's a surprising answer from a man known for his disciplined adherence to Six Sigma–style processes and data-driven decision making. But it's also revealing. Over its nearly 22 years, Amazon has moved into one sector after another and gentrified it, even if that meant tearing down its own existing structures. Amazon's Echo smart speaker rose on the lot where its Fire Phone flamed out. The latest version of Amazon's streaming music service, Amazon Music Unlimited, was constructed on top of its initial music store, Amazon MP3, which opened nine years ago. Amazon Studios' Emmy Award–winning original TV shows are built upon a crowdsourcing platform that the company first introduced in 2010 for aspiring scriptwriters. Even the company's fashion business—Amazon is now the second-largest seller of apparel in the U.S., according to Morgan Stanley—evolved from brand experiments in outdoor furniture (2004), home goods (2008), electronic accessories (2009), diapers (2014), and now perishables such as organic, fair-trade-certified coffee.
Unlike Apple, Google, and Microsoft, Amazon is not fixated on a tightly designed ecosystem of interlocking apps and services. Bezos instead emphasizes platforms that each serves its own customers in the best and fastest possible way. "Our customers are loyal to us right up until the second somebody offers them a better service," he says. "And I love that. It's super-motivating for us." That impulse has spawned an awesome stream of creative firsts. Just this past year, Prime Video became available in more than 200 countries and territories, following the November debut of The Grand Tour, Amazon's most-watched premiere ever. Twitch, the streaming video-game network that Amazon acquired in 2014, unveiled its first three original titles from its recently formed studios. Amazon invested millions in startups that will build voice-control apps for the intelligent assistant Alexa and give her thousands of new skills. The company opened two dozen new fulfillment centers, became the largest online store in India, and made its first delivery by autonomous drone in the United Kingdom.
Bezos's strategy of continuous evolution has allowed the company to experiment in adjacent areas—and then build them into franchises. The website that once sold only books now lets anyone set up a storefront and sell just about anything. The warehouse and logistics capabilities that Amazon built to sort, pack, and ship those books are available, for a price, to any seller. Amazon Web Services, which grew out of the company's own e-commerce infrastructure needs, has become a $13 billion business that not only powers the likes of Airbnb and Netflix, but stores your Kindle e-book library and makes it possible for Alexa to tell you whether or not you'll need an umbrella today.
Amazon is a singular enterprise, one that rises to the top of Fast Company'sMost Innovative Companies list because it has continued to be nimble even as it has achieved enviable scale. To truly understand how Bezos is meshing size and agility in 2017, though, you need to look beyond sales figures ($100 billion in 2015) and the stock price (up more than 300% in the past five years) and consider three initiatives that drive Amazon today: Prime, the company's rapidly proliferating $99-per-year membership program; an incursion into the physical world with brick-and-mortar stores, something the company has long resisted; and a restless rethinking of logistics, epitomized by a new fulfillment center an hour outside Seattle that features high-tech robots working alongside human workers like a factory of the future.
Our mobile-first, on-demand world finds its roots in Amazon's founding idea: that digital commerce will radically reshape our marketplace. The company's impact has already been staggering. In January, the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance conducted a survey of nearly 3,000 independent businesses, half of them retailers, asking them to cite the biggest threats they faced. Competition from chains and big-box stores, health care, finding employees, and rising rents all ranked near the bottom as modest concerns. "Way above everything was competition from Amazon," says ILSR codirector Stacy Mitchell. (The study also found that Amazon's expansion in 2015 led to a net loss across all businesses of 149,000 jobs.)
Despite all the twists and surprises in recent decades—all the newcomers with youth, funding, and can-do enthusiasm—Amazon remains the undisputed leader, a startup at heart still striving to remake our expectations. And to repeatedly remake itself.
Nearly all of Amazon's most recent innovations share a connection to Prime, which by some estimates accounts for 60% of the total dollar value of all merchandise sold on the site. Between 40 million and 50 million people in the United States use Prime, and, according to Morgan Stanley, those customers spend around $2,500 on Amazon annually, more than four times what nonmembers spend. (Amazon refuses to offer any hard numbers related to Prime membership—that would be competitor focused rather than customer obsessed, as the executives there say—but it will confirm that Prime members spend more and shop across a greater number of categories than other users.)
If you somehow manage to take advantage of every Prime membership feature, it's undeniably a good bargain. Along with free two-day shipping for millions of products, and tens of thousands of items available at your door in an hour or less through Prime Now, there is one-hour restaurant delivery, a free e-book a month (including the entire Harry Potter series), and ad-free viewing of a streaming video-game channel on Twitch—all included in the annual fee. You can get early access to Amazon's best deals, 20% off diapers, and unlimited photo storage. For a few more dollars, Prime can be upgraded to include unlimited audiobooks, grocery delivery, and a subscription to HBO that can be watched on Amazon's Fire TV streaming media player. More than 50 "benefits" were added for members around the globe in the second half of 2016 alone, says Greg Greeley, Amazon's global VP in charge of Prime. "I would like to say that the team thinks, 'Oh, boy, we'll take a deep breath here,' " he says. "But the way this company [is], it wouldn't surprise me if we continue to keep accelerating."
What Amazon Prime is selling most of all is time. Every executive I spoke to, when asked about how it all fits together, cites this desire to get you whatever you want in the shortest window possible. Stephenie Landry, the Amazon vice president who launched Prime Now in 2014 and has overseen its expansion into 49 cities in seven countries, explains that her business merely has to answer two questions: "Do you have what I want, and can you get it to me when I need it?" The rest of the customer experience is built around answering both questions in the affirmative.
The more products and services Amazon is able to cram into Prime, the more likely users are to renew their membership and buy more stuff, which gives Amazon more data about their tastes and what they are likely to buy next. That information is used to spin out new products and services, such as the Dash button, which replenishes popular items with a tap, and Alexa, which is built, in part, for shopping. "You can just say, 'Alexa, reorder toothpaste,' " says Bezos. "And it knows which kind of toothpaste." That's why he has repeatedly called Prime the company's "flywheel": a device used in engines that provides constant energy. It is both an accelerant to Amazon's forward motion and a beneficiary.
A sizzle video for Amazon Go, an automated convenience store being tested in Seattle.
Bezos says that people have been asking him for 20 years whether he would ever open physical stores. The answer, consistently, has been no. "I've answered pretty much the same way the whole time, which is that we will if we have a differentiated idea," Bezos tells me. Yet today, suddenly, Amazon has four concepts in the works.
Why the shift? In part it links back to Prime; retail stores offer a tangible lure for the uninitiated. But, as Bezos explains, Amazon's technological sophistication also now makes it possible for in-store shoppers to interact with its digital platforms in all-new manners. Monitoring the interplay is a classic Amazon way to spot new opportunities.
The first wave of Amazon stores is somewhat traditional: More than 30 pop-up shops showcasing Amazon's electronic gadgets—Kindle, Echo, Fire TV, Fire tablets, and Dash buttons—dotted the country by late last year. The next phase: expanding the highly curated Amazon Books stores—which showcase titles with a higher-than-four-stars customer rating alongside excerpts of reviews from the website—from three locations to eight. But it is the third leg of the company's retail experiment that begins to rattle expectations. Amazon Go is a convenience-store concept the company announced in December (it will launch publicly in Seattle in early 2017). After a shopper swipes a code on her mobile phone at the entryway turnstile, she can grab whatever items she likes; they are magically added to her digital cart and automatically paid for when she leaves, through her existing account. This ability to skip both the line and any cash register on the way out is made possible by Amazon's cloud computing, machine learning, voice control, and logistics know-how. It's also another example of Amazon creating a technology platform that could be sold to other businesses.
Finally, and more quietly, another grocery-store concept is also being prepped. Although no one inside Amazon is willing to talk about it, documents filed with local buildings departments in Seattle and the San Francisco suburbs of Sunnyvale and San Carlos show that the company is erecting stores in all three locales. (Construction at the Seattle location—where a Chinese restaurant once stood, on a busy commercial thoroughfare in the fast-growing Ballard neighborhood—appears to be nearly complete.) The documents describe a system that would seem to extend the AmazonFresh grocery service: Customers load their digital carts remotely and pay online, then schedule a physical pickup within a two-hour window. "When picking up purchased items, customers either can drive into a designated parking area with eight parking stalls where the purchased items will be delivered to their cars, or they can walk into the retail area to pick up their items," the filings say.
These stores are not likely to change the way most Americans get their cornflakes overnight. Still, Amazon has always been good at being patient—and incrementally improving its offerings. Since AmazonFresh launched in 2007, the service has slowly expanded to dozens of cities. The Amazon neighborhood continues to change.
Planted on the edge of a military base, Amazon's recently opened fulfillment center, in DuPont, Washington, looks from the outside like a generic warehouse, with a line of idling trucks snaking around the building waiting to load and unload product. But what's inside represents a huge advance in the way Amazon sorts, packs, and ships orders.
It starts with a "vision tunnel," a conveyor belt tented by a dome full of cameras and scanners. As each box comes off the truck, it is photographed and scanned on all sides. Image-recognition algorithms then sort each parcel based on variables such as the type of product or size and weight. What takes humans with bar-code scanners an hour to accomplish at older fulfillment centers can now be done in half that time.
Boxes are towed from the docks into the million-square-foot warehouse, sometimes by driverless vehicles. This facility handles the largest items that Amazon ships, which is why there's also a huge, 6-ton yellow robot on the main floor. It has a six-axis arm that could pick up a car with ease, but today it's mostly lifting pallets loaded 4 feet high with diapers and Keurig cups to the second floor of the warehouse where they will await shipping. The arm performs a constant, mostly silent waltz with an ensemble of rolling Amazon robots, which represent the next-generation offspring of the company's $775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012, and were only fully integrated into the fulfillment center workflow last year.
Amazon One, a Boeing 767, is part of a fleet of 40 cargo planes Amazon plans to roll out over the next two years.[Photo: courtesy of Amazon]
Once a package leaves the warehouse, it may end up on a Boeing 767 with the Prime Air logo emblazoned on its side. Bezos rolled out the first in a fleet of 40 wide-bodies last summer, which will be operated in partnership with two aircraft-leasing companies. In January, Amazon announced that the fleet would be supported by a new air hub in Kentucky that will employ 2,000 workers—a $1.49 billion investment, according to a spokeswoman with the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. The planes, like the thousands of cargo trailers that already sport the Prime logo, make Amazon less dependent on its partnerships with FedEx, DHL, and the United States Postal Service. And, pending FAA approval, those fully operational Amazon delivery drones might one day cut delivery time down to 30 minutes or less.
Amazon stresses that its new automated fulfillment centers actually require more human workers than the old ones did, because the warehouse can store a significantly larger number of products—which all still need people for boxing and general oversight (plus, someone's got to service those robots when they need repairs). The plant in DuPont, active almost 24/7, employs more than a thousand people full time. At stow station 1405, for instance, I watch a young guy with tattoos, a man bun, and large-gauge flesh-tunnel earrings grab item after item from orange robots, scan each one, and, after the computer gives the green light, send it to be boxed. Over the holiday season, Amazon hired an extra 120,000 workers at centers nationwide to help meet demand. This is what the future of American factory work might look like.
"I have the best job in the world because I get to work in the future," says Bezos.[Photo: Peter Hapak]
Amazon's business is not without its challenges. The company's imperative to deliver more stuff faster has racheted up its annual shipping costs north of $11 billion, reinforcing the pressure to wring efficiencies out of the company's processes and its people. In the run-up to last year's holiday shopping season, pilots who work for Amazon's Prime Air shipping contractors went on strike, demanding hiring increases to reduce their workload. It's no wonder that the blistering 2015 New York Times article about bruising work environments at Amazon remains in the popular consciousness.
Amazon is working to counteract this legacy. The company pledged in January to create more than 100,000 full-time positions over the next 18 months, and it's building a new headquarters complex in the heart of downtown Seattle. Five buildings and a 2,000-seat auditorium will surround a trio of glass-enclosed spheres that, when completed in 2018, will contain more than 3,000 species of plants and trees from around the world. There will be flexible, couch-filled work spaces and an "Expressions Lab," where employees can learn to knit or attend a "Bob Ross Paint Night." One floor will include a small outdoor dog park, and there will be several markets and cafeterias. Amazon is also funding an additional streetcar for the city, as well as bicycle paths leading to the three-block complex, which includes 1.7 acres of public space. "The biggest thing is probably just that we're not in a suburban campus," says Bezos, "which I think would change the vibrancy and energy of Amazon."
In November, Amazon released a video ad portraying a pair of aging friends—a priest and an imam—laughing, hugging, and then ordering the same knee braces for each other. It is a sensitive and moving vignette, portraying Amazon as a connector of cultures, the kind of compassionate business it has not always been given credit for being. The ad arrived just two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, so I ask Bezos what the company's role might be in bridging the divides that exist in the U.S. After all, he bankrolls the Washington Post, which went after Trump aggressively during the presidential campaign (and was an early and influential opponent of Trump's immigration ban). His answer is almost laughably narrow. "Well, I'll tell you one way that I don't think anybody is divided," Bezos replies. "Everybody wants fast delivery. Low prices. I'm serious about this. Our job is to provide a great customer experience, and that is something that is universally desired all over the world."
It's tough to argue with his words. And yet this Bezosian boilerplate is certainly less than the full story. Because Amazon is doing more than delivering our next tube of toothpaste. By using the "divine discontent of the customer as a North Star," as Bezos puts it, the company is energizing a culture of relentless progress. The neighborhood may be changing, but maybe that's good. Maybe that's what business in the modern era is all about.
Polishing off the bulk of your work before Friday all comes down to your work habits from Monday to Thursday.
We all often face the same problem: The workweek drags by at a glacial pace, while the weekend speeds past us before we even realize what's happening.
Mathematically, of course, it all makes sense. But what if you could change that? What if you could use your time so efficiently that you had all of your important to-dos wrapped up by Thursday?
Even if you can't actually pack up, leave the office, and take every Friday off (we wish, right?), wouldn't it be nice to know that you have that whole "bonus" day to stop putting out fires and instead get a jumpstart on next week—or even use that day to tackle those bigger ambitions that have been permanently parked in your backseat?
I know, it sounds impossible. But, skepticism aside, it's totally doable if you use your time effectively. In fact, numerous companies have actually begun instituting flexible or four-day workweeks for their employees.
So how do these people manage to pull this off? It's not as tough as you think.
You're aiming to view Friday as the extra day tacked onto the end of your workweek—a day when all of your weekly tasks are finished and you can finally have a clear head and a somewhat empty plate.
This means you'll want to avoid scheduling meetings, phone calls, and other important get-togethers on that day (unless it's just a casual coffee get-together with a networking contact). Instead, you want Friday to provide a large chunk of totally uninterrupted time that you can use however you'd like.
Dustin Moskovitz, cofounder and CEO of Asana, swears by this no-meeting structure—although he implements it on Wednesdays for his team. "With very few exceptions, everyone's calendar is completely clear at least one day out of the week, whether you are a maker or manager," he says in an article for Inc. "This is an invaluable tool for ensuring you have some contiguous space to do project work."
This intentional scheduling applies throughout your entire workweek. In order to set yourself up for an empty Friday, you'll also need to keep a close eye on your schedule during the other days as well.
No, you don't always have complete control over your calendar. However, it's important that you frequently check through your schedule to see how your week is shaping up. If you think you have far too many commitments and not enough time to actually work, you'll need to see what you can move around or back out of.
You start your week with the best intentions and a laundry list of things you're going to tackle in the office. But when Friday rolls around, you're shocked to realize that you barely accomplished any of them. You were too caught up in the emergencies that cropped up.
As Stephen R. Covey, the successful businessman and author, said, "Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent, and not enough time on what is important."
People who get everything wrapped up before Friday know the value of effective prioritization, and many of them use the time management matrix developed by Covey in order to take a step back and readjust their focus on the things that are critical, rather than time pressing.
There's often a big difference between how you're actually spending your time and how you should be spending your time. And if you want to have Friday reserved as free space, you're going to need to constantly evaluate your priorities and ensure that you're channeling your energy into the right things.
Of course, you're going to need to maximize every single minute of the days you actually do have. And that means minimizing distractions as much as possible.
If you can't focus at your desk with the office chatter and phone calls happening around you, try to find a quiet spot (or, if you're desperate, some noise-canceling headphones) so that you can get into a groove and zone in on whatever you're working on.
Another distraction you'll want to keep at bay? Emails. So close out that browser tab and resist the siren song of your inbox. You can even take a cue from Tommy John's CEO, Tom Patterson, and set an out-of-office message that lets everybody know you're only reading your emails at a certain time. That way, you won't feel as tempted to keep checking in on your inbox.
You might hear the word "shortcut" and assume that means shoddy work. But that's not what this strategy is about at all.
Successful people are always concerned with producing top-notch results—however, they also find little ways to save time in the process. So, take a page from their book and have a good, hard look at your routine. Are there places where you're spending a lot of unnecessary time?
Perhaps it's a document you're repeatedly drafting. Create a template so you always have the barebones in place. Is it an email you're always sending? Save a canned response so you don't have to draft the same message over and over again. Is there a menial task you need to complete daily or weekly? See if there's a way you can automate it.
These changes seem small. But, if you managed to save yourself 15 minutes each day between Monday and Thursday, that'd be an entire hour by the time Friday rolls around. See? It all adds up.
Cutting a day out of your week might seem like a sure-fire way to get far less done. However, that's not always the case. In fact, four-day workweeks have been proven to offer plenty of benefits—including increased productivity, higher levels of engagement, and happier employees.
Studies also show that longer hours don't always equal more tasks being accomplished. After a certain point, we check out, and our productivity either flatlines or takes a total nosedive.
So even if your office won't officially implement a compressed week, you can still roll up your sleeves, make the most of Monday through Thursday, and reserve Friday as a more low-key day when you can tackle bigger projects or set yourself up for success next week. After all, there's no better way to head into the weekend.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
8i unveiled its Holo mixed-reality app, and announced $27 million in funding to bolster its vision of 3D content-capture technology.
The holograms are coming, the holograms are coming.
At the Sundance Film Festival last month, moviegoers attending the premiere of Marjorie Prime, a movie starring Jon Hamm about a service that provides holographic recreations, were given the opportunity to hang out with an actual Hamm hologram. And those at next month's SXSW in Austin, Texas, will be able to watch a holographic Buzz Aldrin in a virtual reality film about Mars.
And later this year, just about anyone will have a chance to interact with realistic human holograms on their mobile phones.
That's all thanks to Holo, the new app announced today by the mixed reality startup 8i, which is a pioneer in what's known as volumetric capture, a technology that allows VR and AR content creators to integrate photo-realistic human avatars in their projects.
With Holo, 8i is hoping that a wide variety of creators, including musicians, celebrities, brands, and more will be able to release content featuring holograms. The idea, explained CEO Steve Raymond, is that those creators could "put a hologram of someone famous, funny, or talented, in [their own] environments and create [their own] short-form videos [to] share out to social."
The Holo announcement goes hand in hand with news that 8i has closed a $27 million B round of funding, led by Time Warner Investments, bringing the Los Angeles company's total funding raised to date to $41 million. Other participants in the new round included Baidu Ventures, Hearst Ventures, Verizon Ventures, and more.
The funding is intended to bolster 8i's efforts across all its initiatives, from VR to AR. "We've got a broad vision for 3D photo-realistic people and content that is bigger than just VR or AR," Raymond said. "It's really all 3D computing going forward, and that means we need to have the [most realistic-looking] people...and a cloud-processing capability that can scale, and distribution and content partners that can help us show the power" of the platform.
For some time, 8i has been testing a beta version of Holo on the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro, a device that features Tango, an AR technology created by Google. Later this year, 8i plans on releasing Holo publicly on Tango phones, as well as a selection of other mobile devices. At that point, the app will showcase holograms integrated into branded content from some of 8i's partners.
For now, all the holograms have to be created at 8i's own capture stage in Los Angeles, since that's where the company has all of its proprietary volumetric capture equipment and technology set up. But Raymond said that over time, because the company has built a cloud-based content capture pipeline, there's no reason other professional stages couldn't be set up, alleviating a bottleneck of content creation.
The long-term vision, he added, is that anyone could buy the equipment necessary to set up their own capture stage.
Fast Company talks with author Yuval Noah Harari, whose new book looks ahead and hazards a few guesses on what's next for humanity.
Yuval Noah Harari might be Silicon Valley's favorite historian. His last book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which detailed the entirety of human history and how Homo Sapiens came to dominate the Earth, was blurbed by President Barack Obama and Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg recommended it for his book club. And more than 100,000 students have taken Harari's online course.
In his new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Harari looks forward and hazards a few guesses on what comes next for humanity. These next chapters in our history range from the utopian to the horrific, he says. A growing gap between rich and poor could result in global warfare, humanity might create artificial life, or people might transform themselves into godlike creatures. In any case, the book says, both the tech industry and governments worldwide are heavily implicated in what comes next.
Fast Company spoke with Harari shortly before his book's U.S. release on February 21 about the risks of algorithms, how China will likely become a genetic engineering leader, and more.
Fast Company: What is Homo Deus about?
Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari: It's about a lot of things, but above all else, the potential future of humankind and of life in general. It's not a book of prophecy and forecasts. Instead of offering prophecies, what the book tries to do is map the different possibilities humankind is facing—the different challenges and dangers.
In the 21st century, it's obvious that we will see really amazing developments. I wrote this book in order to map and highlight some of the possibilities, including some of the most dangerous possibilities. This was in the hope of contributing to the public and political debate about what to do with these technologies.
When you speak to audiences from the tech world, what kind of questions do you usually get?
Most of the time there is a very real thirst for engaging discussions that aren't about the technological aspects. It's not about what artificial intelligence might be able or not be able to do in five or ten years. It's not self-driving cars being feasible by 2025, or any of these technical questions. I'm not going to answer that anyway.
But they're really concerned with the political and social and even religious and philosophical implications of such developments. In most cases, people in tech are not alienated or frightened by this type of thinking. They are usually fascinated by it.
Are there any questions those audiences should be asking?
There are two very important questions they should ask.
The first is whether the tech world understands human society well enough to really appreciate what technological developments are going to do to humanity and the world. I believe, in many cases, the answer is no.
The other big scientific question of our century has to do with the human mind and consciousness. We are making tremendous development in understanding the human brain and intelligence, but we are making comparatively little progress in understanding the mind and understanding consciousness.
So far, we don't have any serious theory of human consciousness. The widespread assumption is that somehow the brain produces the mind, somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness... but we have no idea how or why this happens. I'm afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that. They equate brain with mind, and equate intelligence with consciousness, even though they're separate things.
In human beings, as with other mammals, consciousness and the mind often goes hand in hand, but that's not the same thing. We know of other organisms that have intelligence but no consciousness (as far as we know) like trees. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and consciousness is the ability to feel things and have subjective experiences.
The fact that we don't understand the mind and consciousness also implies that there is absolutely no reason to expect computers or artificial intelligences to develop consciousness anytime soon. Since the beginning of the computer age, there has been immense development in computer intelligence but exactly zero development in computer consciousness.
Even the most sophisticated computer and AI software today, as far as we know, has zero consciousness—no feelings and no emotions whatsoever. And one of the dangers is that if we, and we are gaining the ability to manipulate the human body and the human brain, but we don't understand the human mind, we won't be able to foresee the consequences of these manipulations.
In Homo Deus, you discuss new religions coming out of Silicon Valley. What do you mean?
The basic insight is that religion isn't made in heaven, it's made on earth. If you don't like the word religion, you can replace it with ideology—it's largely the same thing. At the heart of both religion and ideology is the question of authority, and where authority is coming from. In traditional societies, like in the Middle Ages, people thought authority came from above the clouds or from the gods. In the modern era, authority came down from the clouds down to earth, and people thought authority was invested in individual humans. This led to the rise of humanism, and putting peoples' means and desires forward as the most important authorities in the world.
In the Middle Ages, the idea was that God knows us best of all and we should follow his commands and his representatives—listening to the pope, the priests, mullahs, and rabbis. In the modern age, we are told no one understands you better than you know yourself, and because of that you shouldn't listen to any external authority. We now see an ideological shift, a religious shift, but it's really a shift in authority. Humans are losing authority and authority is shifting to algorithms and external data processing systems that are supposed to know us better than we know ourselves.
Do you think the engineers working on these algorithms think about the long-term consequences of what they're creating?
No. I think some of them have some idea which may be right or wrong. But most of them focus on the immediate problems. And it's not like you have a single engineer that creates the algorithm that now takes charge of a self-driving car or education. Usually, the algorithms are created by entire teams or several teams, each working on a different part of the algorithm.
More importantly, there's also machine learning. It's a bit of a caricature, but to some extent you give an algorithm immense amounts of data and it learns by itself. You don't know what the resulting algorithm will look like. Even when you have it, you may not understand how the algorithm functions and makes a particular decision or a choice.
What we are trying to create at present are algorithms, at least in some fields, that are more intelligent than human beings. By definition you can't really predict what such algorithms will do and what the consequences of their actions will be.
You mentioned China being a breeding ground for new ideologies in the 21st century. Can you talk more about that?
Comparing China with the United States on the technological level, China is now rapidly closing the gap with the United States. But on the ideological level, there's a very big difference. The western world is very committed to and dominated by a humanist ideology developed in the west over the last two or three centuries. China, on the other hand, is far less committed to humanism or any other ideology or religion.
In terms of ideology, the official ideology is still communism, but it's no longer a communist country to a large extent. In some respects, it's far more committed to capitalism at the collective level—the pursuit of economic growth—and, on the individual level, to economic success even more than in the United States.
For ideas like extending human life indefinitely, or using biotechnology to upgrade humans, or AI to manage society, these kinds of ideas will have far less resistance in China than U.S.
You originally wrote the book in Hebrew, and then translated it into English?
I wrote Homo Deus first in Hebrew, and then got a lot of feedback from the Israeli audience—both lay people and experts in various fields. I didn't translate it into English; I rewrote it again in English. The English version is quite different from the Hebrew version. Many of the examples in the original book were taken from Israeli culture, and politics, and so on. I replaced those with many international anecdotes.
It's still easier for me to write in my native tongue. But, in some fields, English is so much richer than Hebrew for writing. I guess there are theories about how different languages construct different worldviews. You see, to some extent, a worldview embedded in the language.
For example, in Hebrew, we have no word for the mind. It's one of the most difficult words to translate into Hebrew. This is because of the religious and cultural background; Judaism was never very interested, and didn't give much importance to questions of mind. Whereas in Buddhism, you have dozens of different words describing different types of aspects of the mind. Translating Buddhist texts into English is very difficult because you have 20 different words which all get translated into the same word, "mind." Hebrew is more difficult because you don't have that word!
Is there anything you wish you included in the book after you wrote it?
All the time there are things I wish I added. My previous book, Sapiens was about the past, and the past is always there.
But when you write about the future, there are technological developments; every year there are these important changes and breakthroughs. Of course, I even made some small changes between the U.K. edition which came out in December and the U.S. edition which comes out in February. For instance, there was the famous Go match between Alpha Go and Beta Go that was too late for the U.K. edition but I added to the U.S. edition. I didn't predict Trump would be elected U.S. president, but I didn't try to predict such things.
Anything else you'd like to add for our readers?
The most important things to know, from a historical perspective, about these technological developments is that they are almost never deterministic.
Every technology can be the basis for very different social and political systems. You cannot just stop the march of technology—this is not an option—but you can influence the direction it is taking.
The idea of a particular technology, whether it's the internet, or genetic engineering, or artificial intelligence, mandating a particular future is a very dangerous idea.
This interview has been condensed for length and readability.
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