The people who brought you Snapchat present a different view of the world through the lens of a camera.

On a late summer evening in Phoenix, a group of Alpha Chi Omega sisters sit in the stands of the Arizona Diamondbacks stadium and take selfies. They capture duck-face snaps with each other, with churros, and with each other with churros. A bored camera operator spots them in the outfield stands, and two middle-aged MLB announcers have a field day, mocking the women's youthful self-absorption.

"That's the best one of 300 pictures I've taken of myself today!" one commentator cracks.

"Here's my first bite of the churro!" chirps his co-conspirator. "Here's my second bite of the churro!"

"Peralta knocks it into center! . . . And nobody noticed."

The clip went viral because, from the perspective of the MLB broadcast crew, the students seemed disconnected from events on the field. But the sorority sisters weren't living their lives for the TV cameras. They were, in fact, having a great time at the game—via Snapchat.

Consumers, advertisers, influencers, media brands, and rivals are increasingly viewing the world through Snapchat's lens. In the past 18 months, the photo- and video-sharing app has released a slew of bold (and brazenly imitated) features, from absurdist digital masks to face-swapping to group chat, which have vaulted it to the vanguard of social communication. Snap, as the company is now known, claims more than 150 million daily users, and it reportedly exceeded its lofty goal to generate more than $300 million in revenue for 2016. Its introduction of location-based image enhancements, known as geofilters, and Spectacles, its sunglasses that record 10 seconds of video from the wearer's point of view, inspired genuine consumer fanaticism for augmented reality and wearable computing in a way that overhyped rivals from Magic Leap to Google haven't matched. As Snap is expected to go public this year, deconstructing the principles underpinning its products is more important than ever. After all, the only people who underestimate Snap are those who don't take the time to see what's right in front of their face.

When Snapchat rebranded last September to Snap, CEO Evan Spiegel proclaimed it a camera company. At first blush, it's a curious bit of branding—Kevin Systrom, founder of Snapchat rival Instagram, ardently argues that he runs a communications company—but Snap's framing is intentional. Camera technologies have driven some of the most important developments in media. In 1888, Thomas Edison's Kinetograph gave birth to motion pictures, and provided Edison with early control over the film industry. In 1957, NBC upgraded to color broadcasting, largely so its owner, RCA, could sell color TVs. Kodak, once one of the world's most valuable brands, continues to sell off imaging patents to a new generation of camera-obsessed companies, including Facebook, Google, and Apple.

Visual information is a conduit for the digitized relationships of the modern era, and Snap effortlessly navigates this confluence of image, communication, and entertainment. Its most impressive illusion is that its app design feels casual or even random, when in fact, it's a carefully thought-out experience, constantly being honed for maximum engagement. Whether it's offering up cartoon ghost Snapcode Stickers for you to add a new friend or puppy-nose filters to apply to your face, Snapchat's interface reinforces that it's for fun. "They treat their core product like a utility, and they aren't overly precious about it, " says Ryan Rimsnider, Taco Bell's senior manager of social strategy. "And if they are, they certainly don't act like it."

For the past two decades, user-interface design has put a premium on an intuitive placement of functions. By contrast, Snapchat forces users to play around. Its design operates like a speakeasy, requiring you to feel for the secret door or have a friend who knows the passcode to unlock the next room. Many of Snapchat's features, such as long-pressing on your face to bring up filters or being able to convert yourself into an emoji, need to be discovered. Adding people to follow, whether they're celebrities or your friends, is another clandestine game, one that rewards good creators rather than merely famous people. And Snap doesn't generally issue press releases announcing app updates, preferring that users are surprised when they find new features on their own. Snapchat is therefore free to experiment more aggressively than competitors with UI shifts and features—and even break its own rules without breaking the app. This is why Snapchat has been able to evolve from only allowing photos taken in the moment, which would disappear in 10 seconds, to adding Memories, which makes old content searchable, without a revolt.

Ultimately, what Snap offers users is control. "They just want to provide crazy tools that enable fans to create stories with no end," says Rimsnider. Take Snapchat's augmented-reality lenses. These silly filters solve an important problem: They give people something to do when they share. Puking a digital rainbow, one of Snapchat's photo enhancements, is a prop to overcome stage fright when messaging friends.

Stories, a collection of images and video that capture a user's day and last 24 hours, has become the centerpiece of the Snapchat experience. "Snapchat is the reality show about your life that you shoot and edit yourself," says Jason Stein, CEO of both the marketing agency Laundry Service and Cycle, a media startup. Indeed, some of the most renowned Snapchatters, such as Julz Goddard (better known as YesJulz), effectively use the app to produce a series starring themselves. "I was talking to different networks about a reality show, but I wasn't really excited about other people having creative control over my content and my image," Goddard says. "Then I was like, Wow, this Snapchat is incredible. Everyone in the world can have their very own television network."

Snap is watching what its users create and deploying those insights to woo Hollywood talent to embrace the platform as a new entertainment medium. The company is in talks with talent agencies and media companies to create scripted and unscripted "Snapchat shows" for the platform. The Snap twist, according to one Hollywood insider: The four-minute-long series would be divided into 10- to 60-second chapters, much like users' Stories are structured. When Snap internally produced its own test program—the election-year series Good Luck America—it even had the crew shoot host Peter Hamby off-center, at arm's length, to create the impression that he was filming himself. In dealings with traditional media partners such as NBC, which creates The Voice on Snapchat and a recurring Jimmy Fallon segment, Snap has offered shot-by-shot analytics from Good Luck America, showing how pacing that's too slow, or shots that are too dull, will lose viewers in the middle of a video. Ultimately, Snap sees user-generated and Hollywood content evolving codependently, with each building off the other.

Similarly, Snap's advertising business directly benefits from the tools it creates for Snapchatters. The design team that builds Snap's consumer features also creates its advertising products; every tool for marketers began its life delighting users. For example, Snapchat's Discover channels, which feature original content from media brands such as National Geographic and Vice, introduced the idea that you swipe up to learn more about a given story. "After months of training the behavior," says Kenny Mitchell, Gatorade's director of consumer engagement, "Snapchat then launched Snap Ads that allow for consumers to swipe up to get more info."

Snap's most intriguing ad product has been sponsored lenses, which has attracted the world's best brand marketers, including Disney, McDonald's, and Starbucks. For Cinco de Mayo, Taco Bell released a filter that turned people's heads into, yes, giant tacos. By most estimates, Taco Bell spent between $500,000 and $750,000 on a filter that was viewed 224 million times in a single day. That's double the views of a Super Bowl ad for one-tenth the price, and, unlike TV viewers, Snapchat's audience is actively using, sharing, and having fun with an ad.

Users are already accustomed to adorning their faces with gags to make their friends laugh, so it doesn't matter that the gag is sponsored. Snap goes so far as to measure what it calls "play time"—how long a user might toy with a giant taco on their face, even if they never take a photo wearing it. Because it's still valuable engagement. "They're really trying to make social ads suck less," says Winston Binch, chief digital officer of Deutsch North America, which works closely with Taco Bell's social strategy team. "They're not trying to reappropriate other digital advertising norms. They want to maintain the integrity of the experience."

In November, Snap introduced yet another strategy to make its platform even more addictive, capable, and advertiser-friendly: hardware. Snap Spectacles transform Snapchat the app into a brash sunglasses-camera that takes circular videos. Spectacles, or Specs, as Snap employees call them, eliminate that final point of friction of pulling a phone from one's pocket to capture life's spontaneity. They encourage sharing by design: When they initially pair with your phone, Specs actually film your first snap without warning. (After that, a tap of the frame initiates recording.) "Having a pair has already made a dent in the type of content I'm making," says Mike Platco, a Snapchat artist and influencer. "It has made me more excited to post 'in the moment' videos that are less focused on a large narrative and more about bringing my audience in on the cool stuff I get to do."

Recently I wore Specs during a Chicago birthday bar crawl, capturing scenes that I'd never have filmed with my phone. Walking into each dive felt Scorsese-esque as I filmed it, as if I was shooting my own Goodfellas, but grittier. With both of my hands free to stuff my face, I captured a late-night tamale run as a tube of masa flying right below the camera. If I wanted a selfie, I had to have one of those cinematic moments of staring placidly into a bathroom mirror. Unlike Google Glass, which prompted "Glasshole" bans at New York and San Francisco bars, Specs are designed to be nonthreatening. (A playfully twirling LED light broadcasts that they're filming.)

Spectacles ingeniously package this face camera into something that people might actually want to wear. "It's a classic shape reinvented," says fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff of the Ray-Ban–inspired shades, which come in black, coral, and teal. She thought Glass was hideous, but compares Spectacles to a party dress or shoes, an overt piece of flair that calls attention to its intent rather than hiding it.

Specs, which Snap conspicuously branded a "toy" when it announced them last fall, are likely just the first physical camera that the company will introduce. Reports have circulated that it has considered other forms of wearable cameras, as well as drones. Snap has already tested selling a number of pieces of official merchandise, such as beach towels and backpacks, that hint at how the company thinks about bridging the real and digital worlds. When Snapchat introduced official playing cards, they were more or less a normal deck of cards, save for one thing: They came with instructions for a game called SnapKings. To play, a group of friends in the same room sets the cards on the table, but the game unfolds on Snapchat itself. If you draw a 3, you are instructed to "Snap yourself while making your grossest selfie face." If you pull out a 9, you have to "Bust a rhyme for a 10-second Snap." Much as with lenses, the cards initiate a Snap session, transforming a mellow Friday night into fodder for an expanding universe of good times.

Despite Snap's relentless creativity and distinct perspective, its future success isn't assured. Facebook has been rapidly adding Snapchat-like features into Facebook, Whats­App, and, most notably, Instagram. The rise of Instagram Stories, the 24-hour video-sharing tool that blatantly mimics Snapchat Stories, precipitated Snap's decision to pursue an IPO, according to one source. "It definitely caught them off guard," says a person who does business with Snap. "It's a huge threat." With Facebook trying to choke off its rival's global expansion, investors could also inhibit Snap's progress by dogging its stock if user and revenue growth don't exceed the high bar Facebook set for social media.

But Spiegel and company understand instinctually that power has shifted. The kids know what they're doing. They know what they like. And Snap isn't afraid to tell media companies and advertisers, Hey, shoot this more like the kids do. What those career baseball broadcasters missed as they jeered the Alpha Chi sisters? Those duck-faced women were now the ones in control of the cameras, and they have countless stories to tell.

Additional reporting/writing by Jeff Beer, Claire Dodson, and Nicole LaPorte.

This article is part of our coverage of the World's Most Innovative Companies of 2017.

Etsy's ambitious new marketplace aims to make it easier for everyone to start creating, and selling, their wares.

Seja Brumley first started selling on Etsy in 2009. "At the time, I worked in corporate America but had a lot of creative desires, I guess you could say," Brumley told me. Her first outing was a handmade jewelry shop. But she soon realized that sourcing and creating supplies for her peers would be an even more fruitful venture.

"I opened up a supply shop for other people who make jewelry—other jewelry designers—in 2011, and that's really what took off," she said. Cut to 2015: Brumley quit her day job as a pharmaceutical sales rep at Merck to go all in on what started out as her side hustle.

For Etsy, which is transforming itself from a niche craft-seller website into a launching pad for at-home entrepreneurs, Brumley and her customers are the future of the business. That's why they've spent the past year creating Etsy Studio, a marketplace launching this April that is dedicated to selling craft supplies, and DIY tutorials. At the same time, Etsy is adding a new service called Shop Manager that will improve the seller experience.

It's the company's largest expansion ever. And while Etsy is still dwarfed by the likes of eBay and Amazon Marketplace, the Dumbo, Brooklyn-based company attracts a loyal following of 1.7 million active sellers who reaped $2.3 billion in sales in 2015.

"In terms of numbers, it's a $40 billion market opportunity," says Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson. "We really believe that we at Etsy are perfectly positioned to take advantage of that opportunity and really add something to craft supplies buying that we see is really missing—and that's a sense of joy and inspiration."

Etsy Studio will launch with 8 million items, and is optimized to assist makers in tracking down any supply they need—beads, yarn, cut metal—using search functionality that can sort by size, color, material, shape, weight, length, or width depending on the medium. Each listing also estimates preparation time, tells you where the product is shipping from, and offers additional information about whether the supply is handmade or recycled.

"With Etsy Studio, what we really want to focus on is giving people the ability to find exactly what they need," product management director Tim Holley explained. "This is different from the behavior or the needs that we see on Etsy.com today. If you're making a necklace [with wood beads], you probably need to know exactly how big [each bead] is—meaning, down to the millimeter, because you probably got some thread that needs to go through it."

According to Brumley, who has been beta testing the search capabilities on Etsy Studio, the results are superior to those she has used on other retail and wholesale sites. "I'll type in something like 'gold-filled clasp,' and 68 pages will come up," she said, "when really there's only four gold-filled clasps that they sell."

The simplified search results should help Etsy attract more creators to the platform. And if they still need a bit of inspiration, Etsy Studio will launch with 60 tutorials on everything from customizing a cutting board to creating a bezel setting for a ring. Each tutorial links to all the supplies required to complete it, giving users the option of buying all the products at once or picking and choosing which ones they need. Holley says that new tutorials will be published weekly, and that Etsy is planning to partner with bloggers and influencers to supplement their in-house writing team.

Ultimately, Etsy Studio aims to attract someone like me—an avid browser of Etsy who has long enjoyed making things, but isn't intrepid (or patient) enough to gather supplies from Michael's or Alibaba and pair them with a tutorial sourced from Instructables. For everyone who enjoys buying handmade wares, Etsy Studio offers an easy way to begin making them as well.

Power Tools

Along with building a funnel to attract more creators on the front end, Etsy is upgrading its back-end tools for existing sellers as well. Shop Manager, which launches today, streamlines management of a seller's Etsy sites in one centralized dashboard, from which they can manage their orders, respond to questions from buyers, and toggle between their various sales channels.

One of the biggest improvements in the new interface is that orders can now be easily filtered and organized according to ship-by dates, and each order is denoted with a thumbnail that includes, at a glance, any requests for customization that a buyer might have submitted with their order. Matthew Cummings, an Etsy seller who creates customized beer glasses, says that his Wholesale shop—another Etsy platform that connects retailers with Etsy sellers who wish to sell their products in brick-and-mortar stores—often went ignored because it required a separate login.

The introduction of Shop Manager addresses a pain point specific to Etsy: Its sellers are not necessarily tech-savvy. The less time they spend liaising with buyers and sorting through orders, the more time they get to spend actually making things.

One of Etsy's big advantages is that it is relatively easy to use—which might make selling on Etsy more attractive than building a stand-alone site using an e-commerce platform like Shopify, which boasts 325,000 merchants. But a Shopify site offers greater flexibility, which explains the impetus behind a number of Etsy's launches since going public nearly two years ago. To compete, Etsy has to both provide superior tools and differentiate itself from the competition.

The stand-out feature of Etsy has always been its tight-knit community. "Most of my customers are other Etsy sellers, so it's created this community of people who trust each other," Brumley said. "We know we're other makers, and we go to each other because we know, well, 'I'm not buying from this huge corporation. I'm buying from Seja, who's also a mom, and this supports her family and feeds her chickens.'"

Researcher Rachel Botsman talks about the sharing economy, its impact on trust, and how it has created the need for a new type of leader.

Rachel Botsman has spent over a decade thinking about the "sharing economy." As an an author and a visiting academic at the University of Oxford, Saïd Business School, who researches how technology is transforming trust, she's an authority on the subject. She's also one of Fast Company's Most Creative People. She is currently writing a book, due out next fall, about the new decentralized economies and how that has changed trust.

I recently chatted with her about what this means for the future of leadership. What follows is a transcript of our conversation. It has been edited for space and clarity.

Can you talk a bit about your current project and its background?

In 2009, I wrote What's Mine Is Yours about the so-called sharing economy. And there were really two aspects that always interested me about it. One was how you can take these idle assets and unlock their value through technology, and then the second was trust. This notion that technology could breed familiarity and enable strangers to trust one another was fascinating, and the start of something much bigger.

I started to research things like the blockchain and our relationship to artificial intelligence, and all these other technologies that transformed how we trust people, ideas, things, companies. I felt that there was a paradigm shift happening.

At the same time, it's hard to ignore the headlines that trust is really imploding. So whether it's banks, the media, government, churches . . . this institutional trust that is really important to society is disintegrating at an alarming rate. And so how do we trust people enough to get in a car with a total stranger and yet we don't trust a banking executive? So that's essentially what the book unpacks.

And what I've discovered through writing the book is that these systems aren't better—they still bump against human error and greed and market forces. It is very hard to have a decentralized system because you always end up with a center or a monopoly of power. What I find really frightening is this denial—and this is a leadership question—first of all [to accept] that trust is changing. And then the lack of organizations completely rethinking how you build trust, what you do with trust when it's destroyed, whether the basic principles are really changing.

Where did this new paradigm shift come from? Was it from these new companies creating different services? Or was it from more institutional distrust on the consumers' part?

It's a transfer. So societies can't run without trust, which is a really basic point; it is social glue. If it disappears or dissipates in one way, it's going to rise up in another form. And this has really taken hold in financial services, in everything from peer-to-peer lending to crowdfunding to Bitcoin. The system breaks down and it makes people open to alternatives.

And then the second part is the technology. This technology to transfer assets without intermediaries, to build familiarity, to find social connections with people. This brings us together in ways that have never been possible before.

When you see banks like Goldman Sachs investing in blockchain technology or other similar corporate moves, is that an example of companies trying to keep up with paradigm shifts or institutions trying to cloak themselves in the popular nomenclature to stay relevant?

It comes from a place of fear. It comes from an understandable place, of not wanting to be disintermediated. It's like, 'Can we embrace the technology that could be our greatest threat?' Goldman Sachs is a really good example because the cryptocurrency they're developing, the blockchain, is private. It's inside their walls.

They're trying to take a culture—this institutional idea that you can control trust, that it can be top-down and be linear—and apply it to this distributive ledger. And that's where we're going to run into a lot of problems: The architecture doesn't match with the ideology.

You said that despite the distributed model, there is still centralization. What do you mean by that? Could that change business models in the coming years?

There are two very different examples that illustrate the same problem. One example is that you start off with networks and marketplaces like Airbnb, where it's meant to be a distribution of power—let's empower people to make money off their homes. And then a network monopoly results, where Airbnb controls that market. And then commercial landlords become the dominant players on the platform, and rent is driven up as an unintended consequence. So that's an example of a marketplace that results in a network monopoly.

A second example is the collapse of the DAO fund, the crowdfunding experiment they did on the blockchain with Ethereum. [Botsman is referring to the Ethereum project, which created a peer-to-peer blockchain digital contracts platform. It was hacked in 2016 to the tune of $50 million. To fix that, its creator, Vitalik Buterin, decided to do what's called a "hard fork," which solved the hack by moving the funds, but it ostensibly went against the basic tenets the platform had originally created, which was being a decentralized platform where power lie exclusively with its users.]

And that's really interesting, because, what did they do? It ran into human problems, and Buterin decided on this hard fork. People had to make a choice: Do they stick with the original fund, or do they follow this new thing? And so even in these supposedly decentralized control systems, when something goes wrong, we still look for leadership. If you look at those 24 hours [when the hack first occurred], and everyone was saying 'Where's Vitalik? What's Vitalik going to do?' that's human nature.

So it's lovely to believe this libertarian ideal that you don't need a leader, you need a center, but it just doesn't work.

Do you think, organizationally and in a hierarchical sense, things will remain the same down the line, despite these new distributed economies?

This is where it ties to leadership. It really requires a different type of leadership where you understand how to get people to collaborate with different and sometimes misaligned interests. A good example of this is Gerard Ryle and his work with the ICIJ. He's the guy that got the 300 or so reporters to collaborate around the Panama Papers. They all work for their own media organizations; journalists like scoops. And yet he figured out how to get them to all work together. And he used complicated technology, but it was his leadership that meant everyone published on the same day.

What is frightening to me is I can count on my hand the number of people that really understand how to lead these types of systems.

In essence, does it take a new, very different kind of leadership in order to succeed with these decentralized systems?

That's exactly right. And many entrepreneurs I've met they think their role is playing digital God. And it's not. Yet that's what I find.

And then the other end of the spectrum is you speak to leaders at traditional brands—it's not a criticism, but I don't even know where to begin—who sort of form a blockchain team, and then they form a peer-to-peer marketplace team. Yet that's not changing the culture—that's not changing the way you interact with your customers.

If I were an entrepreneur looking to become a leader in this burgeoning sector, and I picked up your book and came upon your research, what is the biggest lesson you'd want me to learn?

As messy as humans are, technology cannot replace the role of humans in relationships. It's thinking about how you inject that humanness into the technology. You put people at the center; [understand] what that means without it being lip service. People are at the center of what you're doing, not the technology. What are the implications of that?

Wall Street is feeling good about Apple's one-two punch of devices and services. And buybacks? They help too.

What a difference a few months make. After hitting a low point in May of last year, Apple's stock has rallied back 47%, and it just hit an all-time high today. Shares catapulted past $134.54 a few hours ago, beating a previous high in April 2015.

So what's going on? Part of the answer lies in the fact that Apple has been buying back stock—6% of the total since September 2015, as CNBC's Eric Chemi pointed out. So there are simply fewer (read: more sought-after) shares on the market today.

But there's more to it than that. The real answers likely have more to do with Apple's future than its past. If anything, the company's fundamentals have gotten worse since 2015, and yet it's not hard to find analysts saying that Apple stock is still a good buy. Some expect the price to keep moving up this year, perhaps into the $160 range.

Tim Cook and company have been saying that Apple has "exciting products" in the pipeline, but today's confidence in Apple probably has little to do with such vague assurances. Rather, investors are feeling good about Apple's bread and butter—the iPhone—and possibly its growing "services" business, which includes Apple Music, cloud services, and the App Store.

Investors want to believe that Apple can inject a big shot of innovation and inspiration into the forthcoming iPhone 8. As news of the device has begun to trickle out, the belief has grown that Apple will deliver. This year is the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, and Apple is expected to reimagine the device in a big way.

Meanwhile, Apple's services business is gaining steam. Apple has a billion iOS devices in the wild, and each of them is a vending machine for Apple services, like music, video, apps, and cloud service. The services business brought in $7.2 billion in revenue in last year's December-ending quarter. That represents a growth of 18% from the same quarter the year before.

Cook said the services business contributed $20 billion in revenues in 2016, and Apple is trying to double its services business in the next four years. It's worth noting that in order to reach $48 billion in services revenues, some believe Apple will have to make an acquisition, possibly of a content company. Disney has been floated as a possibility, but so far Apple hasn't tipped its hand.

Returning To Form

Back in 2014, the iPhone 6 was a huge hit for Apple because of its new larger screen sizes and new design. That device ushered in a new era in Apple's history. Phone sales surged, and so did Apple's market cap. The iPhone still contributes roughly two-thirds of Apple's revenues.

But after the iPhone 6, investors saw a series of new phones that were variations on the same theme. The iPhone 6s and 6s Plus, and the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7s Plus, upgraded the iPhone 6's core components, but they also came in the same sizes, and used the same design and materials. In general, iPhone sales have tapered off since the iPhone 6. (There was a $400 iPhone 5 revival in there somewhere, too.)

Investors are clearly hopeful that the iPhone 8 will reverse this trend, but of course the vibrancy of Apple's iPhone business is closely connected to the success of its services business. In order for Apple to sell more services, the number of iOS users must keep growing. And that depends on Apple continuing to wow tech buyers with inspiring devices—mainly iPhones.

The Street is feeling good about this one-two punch of devices and services right now. The storyline will continue until the release of the 10th anniversary phone this September. Barring any unforeseen disasters (like a 35% tariff levied on iPhones built in China), it's easy to imagine Apple's stock continuing to gain steam at least until then.

When Trump's tweets are angry, the mood of his followers darkens too, according to an analysis by two political scientists at Penn State.

President Donald Trump has shown a unique ability to use Twitter as a way to connect directly with his followers.

His tweets show his supporters what he is thinking, direct and unvarnished. Less well appreciated, but apparent in our research based on new polling, is how Trump's anger and its targets are quickly adopted and internalized by large numbers of his followers. What he says, they say. What he believes, they believe.

How is it that Donald Trump's tweets have this kind of power? I contend that much of the explanation is in the power of memes.

Leaping From Brain To Brain

A meme is an idea, a catchphrase—"read my lips"—or even a tune or image that has grown into a cultural phenomenon. Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene" called a meme "a new kind of replicator" that leaps from "brain to brain" with a speed that we humans have not seen before. Dawkins recognized that in the new millennium, within the "nutrient-rich culture" of the internet, memes spread virally.

The internet allows all kinds of misinformation to spread. There was, for example, the widely publicized story that a Jewish couple in Pennsylvania had to pull their child from school because they were blamed for the cancellation of the school's holiday play.

Memes are not restricted to liberals or conservatives. But they can, I contend, help us understand the connection between Trump and his supporters. They explain the way falsehoods develop through conservative media, are amplified through his tweets, and are replicated in the words and thoughts of his followers.

Intuitively, you may have suspected that this had been happening. But a unique type of poll from Penn State's McCourtney Institute for Democracy allowed us to begin tracking the development and transmission of these memes.

How The Poll Works

Along with Eric Plutzer, the poll director and a professor of political science and sociology, I have been working for many years on the link between public opinion and public policy. The new McCourtney Institute's Mood of the Nation Poll is a scientific internet-based survey conducted for us by YouGov that poses a series of open-ended questions to a representative sample of 1,000 Americans.

Rather than selecting from a predetermined set of answers, half of the sample was asked to tell us in their own words what in politics made them angry or proud. The other half was asked about what in the news made them angry or proud. Answers to both prompts are combined in this analysis. All respondents were also asked what, looking ahead, made them hopeful and worried. Their responses give us a unique opportunity to witness the ways in which the public is imitating Trump.

The most recent poll took place one week after Election Day in November 2016. This was in the immediate aftermath of protests that erupted after the election and which continued for several days at colleges, universities and major cities across the country. In response, just two days after his election, Trump tweeted:

The accusation that protesters were professional—in other words, paid—was false. As The New York Times reported less than two weeks after Election Day, the charge likely started with a single fake news tweet about protesters being bused into Austin, Texas.

Russia Today, which has been linked to Russian interference in the election, also falsely reported that post-election protesters were paid by Democratic-supporting billionaire George Soros. These reports went viral among conservative websites and were repeated on television by Kellyanne Conway and Rudy Giuliani.

Our poll shows these claims were also picked up by and spontaneously repeated by Trump's supporters.

When we asked Trump supporters to tell us—without being prompted—what made them angry, one-third mentioned these protests. Another 11% mentioned the media. It is possible that the same people mentioned both; each response receives up to three codes.

That means that over 40% of Trump supporters were angry about exactly the issues raised in Donald Trump's tweet. And the sources of their anger differ quite dramatically from that of Hillary Clinton's supporters, who were overwhelmingly angry at Donald Trump, not at all angry at protesters, and in only a very few cases (less than two percent) angry at the media.

Another difference is that Trump supporters weren't just angry; they were very angry. Seventy-three percent of Trump supporters answering "the media" said they were extremely angry, as did 58% of those who said the protesters made them angry. Indeed, the protests consumed Trump supporters. Another 15% gave answers about groups and individuals who sounded an awful lot like those who were protesting, even if the protesters themselves were not explicitly mentioned. For example, a 27-year-old Trump supporter wrote that he was angry about "my idiot generation being sore losers."

These voters had a remarkably similar take on these protests, using words that reflect directly on Trump's tweets. Many respondents mimicked the idea that the protests were not spontaneous, but rather the result of professional organizing and a complicit media.

A 33-year-old Pennsylvania Democrat who voted for Trump vented his anger at the "The anti Trump protests! This makes me sick because I have seen proof that they are PAID probably by the Clinton admin or Obama. I'm sure not all of them but a good amount…"

Indeed, some of the Trump supporters who were angry at the protesters explicitly blamed financier George Soros. One 71-year-old woman from Texas brought many of these ideas together when she said she was angry at "the continual spin about the 'protesters' being 'afraid.' Many of them are PAID agitators from the DNC or SOROS orgs."

It is worth noting that within a day Trump sent out another tweet that was far more magnanimous, praising the protesters for their "passion" and predicting that "we will all come together and be proud."

We looked for evidence that this sentiment too was resonating in Trump supporters, but our poll shows no evidence that any of his supporters picked up on this theme. Perhaps Trump supporters are looking for validation of their anger, and are therefore more likely to incubate and spread memes that do so.

It is early in the Trump administration. We do not know if he will continue to tweet as frequently, or if his tweets will continue to convey such anger. But if they do, we are confident that his followers are likely to stay angry too. And therefore we are unlikely to see movements toward national unity that were morein evidence after other presidential elections.

Michael Berkman, professor of political science and director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, Pennsylvania State University This article was originally published on The Conversation.

CodeFights's new "Interview Practice" lets engineering hopefuls see the questions they'll likely be asked, and then rates their answers.

Imagine applying for a job and already knowing not only what questions you will be asked, but also how your answers will be rated.

That's the idea behind CodeFights, a skills-based recruitment platform for developers. Today it's launching Interview Practice, which is aimed at helping developers make the challenging leap from showcasing their coding skills to interpersonal interactions so they can be better positioned to land a job.

It's no secret that most companies hiring tech talent put candidates through a rigorous interview process. That can include multiple sessions at a whiteboard to solve complex coding problems in front of a panel of interviewers, as well as the more traditional Q&A sessions. While the hiring process for a non-tech-sector job averages 23 days, up from just 13 four years ago, tech jobs—among the most in-demand for several consecutive years—have longer waits than average. Software engineers can expect their interview process to take more than a month (35 days), and app developers and product engineers should expect 28 days of interviewing, according to Glassdoor.

For someone headed into an interview for the first time, such a process can be overwhelming and intimidating. That's where CodeFights comes in. The platform aims to give jobseekers a leg up by coaching them through the process in mock interview sessions.

This isn't a unique concept. Fast Companyjust reported on how job board Indeed is rolling out Indeed Prime by offering a select group of vetted candidates a talent consultant to coach them through interviewing and negotiating.

But CodeFights CEO Tigran Sloyan says Interview Practice has the secret ingredient to truly give candidates a leg up on their competitors: actual interview questions used at top tech companies. Sloyan says the questions come from CodeFights community members who have interviewed at these companies before.

"We have over half a million engineers on CodeFights and asked them to tell us what questions they have been getting during their interviews," he explains. Intel comes from companies like Google, Oracle, and others. Interview Practice is a collection of these responses categorized by company, topic, and frequency.

Again, such information isn't completely unheard of. Glassdoor, for example, has built a business around users submitting anonymous reviews of companies along with information about what it's like to interview at them. Sloyan says, "The biggest difference between CodeFights's Interview Practice and other sites like Glassdoor is that there is an integrated development environment where you can actually solve and discuss the questions and see others' solutions."

Sloyan says each question takes from 20 minutes to an hour to solve. He explains that currently there is only capacity for users to do one question at a time. Future iterations will be expanded to include several different questions from the same company, which would give the session a more authentic interview-process feel for the candidate.

"At the end of these sessions," he adds, "the system will tell you your chances of passing the real interview." Sloyan points out that the primary goal of Interview Practice is to help engineers be better prepared to handle technical questions rather than tackle behavioral improvements.

"The skills that coders often lack are the ones that employed engineers don't use day-to-day," Sloyan contends. For example, he says, during an interview, you might get asked to implement a linked list data structure and function to reverse the order of the nodes. "This is not something typically done in an engineering job," he says. "It's something taught in college computer science programs and is typically forgotten after working in the industry for a couple of years."

That's a particularly important tool to fight bias, especially from those hiring managers who are among the majority who believe that top performers come from top colleges, according to a recent survey by Indeed. A coder without an elite computer science degree wouldn't even make the first cut by a hiring manager who relies on software to automate the recruitment process and would unknowingly be discriminating against qualified, diverse candidates.

But we also know that as many as 88% of employers are allowing more candidates to complete their applications, even after they fail screening questions, according to a 2016 report by TalentBoard. Interview Practice would bolster those engineers' facility with critical skills found in traditional classrooms and allow them to progress to the next phase of the hiring process.

This latest initiative builds on several others that have grown organically from the platform. Fast Company has reported on CodeFights's Company Bots, which pits job applicants against a "company bot" (the original one was from Uber) to try to solve challenges as quickly as possible. CodeFights estimates the platform places about 20% of the users who connect with companies. The companies pay a fee of 15% of a new hire's annual salary.

So far, Sloyan says, it's a bit too early to tell how well this new service is working. "We have been running in beta for several weeks," he asserts, noting that the whole job application process can take up to two months, so no applicant has been through an entire cycle yet. Those who have, he says, have offered consistent feedback. "Interview Practice gives them the ability to understand what to really expect during an interview instead of trying to guess," he says. "CodeFights's hope is that we can fill this knowledge gap and help great engineers end up with great jobs."

Alexandra Van Houtte launched TAGWALK to take the pain out of fashion research and help industry players do their jobs more efficiently.

Alexandra Van Houtte spent her early career chasing down runway images. As a fashion assistant at the Paris offices of Numéro, Grazia, Glamour, and assisting on international editions of Vogue, she was tasked with researching looks from the four major Fashion Weeks that take place around the globe all year long. At each event, designers present hundreds of runway shows totaling many thousands of looks.

If her editor wanted a photo of a "red dress," Van Houtte, who's originally from the U.K., would spend 10 hours sifting through images of shows to supply viable options. "I'd have to go through every single show, screenshot-ing it and putting it into a folder," says Van Houtte, 27. "It took up so much energy. There are so many collections every year, so many styles, and nothing to sort them out… It was really tiring."

By her own admission, Van Houtte is "impatient." And she was frustrated. She saw efficiency in so many other industries but hers: Hollywood has IMDB. Academics have JSTOR. Lawyers have LexisNexis. Where was the transformative research tool for fashion?

"[The fashion industry] is so forward-thinking on so many things but when it came to sourcing out collections, it took so much time," she says.

After one too many nights poring over thousands of images of ruffles, Van Houtte decided to end the tyranny of runway research. She quit her job at Grazia in May 2015 to create TAGWALK, the world's first fashion search engine. Launched in January 2016, the site allows users to search Fashion Week collections by brand, season, fabric, style, city, and trend. Unlike shopping search engines, which present consumers with options broadly related to keyword searches, Van Houtte's startup is designed to help the fashion industry track down looks with as much specificity as possible, from runway shows in Paris, Milan, London, and New York that occur twice a year. It's like Google, but in Anna Wintour-speak.

Van Houtte envisioned a neutral resource where people could find every Fashion Week designer, big and small, established and up and coming. As the website explains, "TAGWALK is based on three words: fashion, simplicity, and rapidity." The idea was to build a database that housed every single look from each show as soon as it was presented, with multiple keyword "grades" for each image. For example, "denim" is one keyword. If a look is a full Canadian tuxedo, it would receive a 10/10 for denim, whereas a jacket with denim lining might get a 3/10.

The first step was finding a web developer. And from there... the initial six months were rough. "I did it all on my own," says Van Houtte, who personally contacted every single brand involved in Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks, requesting images to feed her growing database. It was, much like her assistant days, painstaking and tedious. She edited and tagged every single image by herself.

"That's 10,000 pictures that I referenced with my own hands," she says. Eventually, she hired a team of fashion experts to help her sort through the mountains of visuals.

Today, the process works more smoothly. TAGWALK has a Paris-based staff of seven, including five ex-stylists who, with help from an algorithm, tag each image. TAGWALK now saves time by purchasing the images directly from photo agencies, but the manual labor is still required to achieve Van Houtte's vision. While a computer can detect colors or specific items like a hoodie, it can't detect niche trends, like balloon sleeves.

"The human eye is really important," says Van Houtte. Sometimes an ensemble can look beige, but it can also be interpreted as another color, like blush. These are the details that can't be fully executed by a software program (yet). That means the TAGWALK team personally judges each look and decides on specific keywords, such as "circus" or "powder pink." Brands can also provide their own keywords (or subtract those they deem incorrect). It's a collaborative processes between Van Houtte's team and the fashion houses to help make the catalog as precise and user-friendly as possible.

Anyone can search the site, and if you type in, say, "Victorian," you'll turn up more than 230 runway images of Chanel, Gucci, Dior, and other big names synonymous with expensive. Related tag suggestions will include "Royal," "Princess," and "Tudor." Much like the internet as a whole, TAGWALK will lead you down a black hole that's at once confounding and fascinating.

"When I launched it, I was a bit naive," Van Houtte admits. "I thought it would really only help assistants... But the more people sign up, I realize it's the whole industry using it."

Searching the site is free of charge, but brands can pay $50-$250 a month to have their images included in the database—an appealing option for smaller, independent labels that don't have the budget to stage traditional runway shows, which can cost from $30,000 to $200,000. Today, the site has 7,500 subscribers, many of them buyers, merchandisers, editors, stylists, trend influencers, and fashion school students. Last August, TAGWALK had 3,000 unique visitors. By this past January, that number had tripled to 9,000 unique visitors—plus 400,000 impressions. "It's a whole spectrum of people I wasn't expecting," says Van Houtte. "It's a happy surprise."

TAGWALK also sells general user trend data to companies showcased on the site. "We can see, per brand, which looks are the most looked at in which country and how a brand's collection has been tagged in comparison to other brands overall," Van Houtte says. This data gives companies an idea which items have consumers buzzing and could be safe bets to stock in retail stores. It also provides an overview of how the industry is reacting to a collection.

Sophie Roche Conti, VP of Catherine Miran, a PR firm that works with labels such as Isabel Marant and Carven, welcomed the ease of TAGWALK. "It's incredibly obvious that it should have existed all along. It's just that no one took the time to do it," she says. "We have all of this data [from shows and presentations], all of this creativity, and somehow we couldn't organize it."

Shortly after it launched, Conti saw TAGWALK quickly spreading throughout the fashion community, both in the States and abroad. "It took over Paris really quickly," she says. "It's become the tool that everyone uses."

Before TAGWALK, Conti would spend huge chunks of time putting together trend reports for editors and buyers. Now Van Houtte's database does all the heavy lifting. "Having that information helps me better pitch editors," she says. "It's helped condense information in a way that's just so useful.

Conti can't imagine someone without a fashion background being able to pull off such an endeavor. The TAGWALK staff are fashion experts who know their Fendis from their Fords and are especially sensitive to emerging trends. On a recent day, the site's trends page highlighted everything from "White" and "Sequins" to "Extra Long Sleeves" and "Doll."

"It's specific, but it's user friendly," says Conti. "Even for the die-hardest of stylists, it takes a season for many to see what the trends are going to be."

Sophie Fontanel is a fashion journalist who previously wrote for French Elle and now writes for the weekly French news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. When Van Houtte first told her about TAGWALK, Fontanel had a sense that it would not only "change the industry," but also create a new way of deciphering fashion data. "It's as if finally the avalanche of show images were given space to breath and be seen," Fontanel says via email.

Moving forward, TAGWALK plans to expand its service beyond Fashion Week and start tagging other noteworthy fashion trends, like streetwear.

"We're focusing on what younger generations are looking at and what interests them," says Van Houtte. "It's important to brands." She's well aware how powerful social media stars have become. When they wear a particular garment and post about it, that sometimes generates more press and industry chatter than a traditional Fashion Week show. As top fashion executives are increasingly paying attention to social media personalities, TAGWALK intends to do the same and include their outfits in the database.

Soon, the database will also start collecting searchable images of models, tracking which models walked which shows, who walked the most, and who are the new faces to know.

"I want to take clever steps," says Van Houtte. She knows that somewhere out there, an assistant is poring over Instagram photos of streetwear stars and runway models, wishing there were an easier way to find the needle in the haystack.

"Even if you're really good at your job, you definitely can't remember 9,000 looks—it's physically impossible," says Van Houtte. Which is why she's glad she created something that does all the hard work, within seconds. As she reflects, "I basically created what I would've loved to have."

Could it be true? Hooking up with your coworkers might make you better at your job. Key word: Might.

Forget Tinder or Match.com; one of the best places to find romance is at the office. More than half of U.S. employees have engaged in an office relationship, according to the career website Vault.com, and 10% have even met their spouses at work.

Office romances are very common and for good reason, says Jay Starkman, CEO of Engage PEO, a human resource service provider. "People spend eight to 10 hours a day in the office, and it's where they're going to meet people," he says. "There is bound to be dating or romance or affairs."

Related: Ask The Experts: "Help, I'm Dating A Coworker!"

But is it a good idea?

The Benefits

A study done at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden found potential benefits to office romances.

"Many participants expressed their pleasure in going to work when they were in a workplace romance," the authors wrote in "Workplace Romances: Going to Work Is Amazing and Really Fun," which was published in the International Journal of Psychological Studies. "One participant said the relationship energized him to work even harder and another said this euphoria motivated her to work more."

Finding love at work can also have the advantage of knowing what you're getting, the report said. "Women and men talked about the safety of finding a partner in the workplace, and explained that one was more likely to get a truer picture of a possible partner at work than during a casual encounter with someone in online dating or at a pub," the authors write. "… the work environment allows you to get to know an individual before committing to a relationship."

Productivity might also get a boost, says April Masini, author of the relationship advice column, Ask April: "As in any new, romantic couple each person will try to please and impress the other to win them over," she says. "And when the couple has work as a connection, each person will try to be seen as better at their job as a way to impress their partner. That's why a little flirting, a little romance, and a little office intrigue that keeps people interested in work beyond the product, can absolutely be a good thing."

The Drawbacks

But Amy Nicole Baker, an associate professor of industrial psychology at the University of New Haven, isn't so sure. "There is evidence that workplace romances are positively associated with the participants' job satisfaction, but there is no clear evidence that workplace romances improve workplace productivity or help culture," she says. "In fact, coworker reactions tend to be negative with concerns over favoritism and conflicts of interest. My own work has shown that even a climate of workplace flirting is associated with less job satisfaction among coworkers, and greater levels of stress."

Starkman agrees. "(office romances are) out there and happening, but they aren't something that improves the workplace," he says. "I've heard opinions that they can work to improve productivity because the people will want to be successful and stay if office romance blooming. I think that's nonsense. People are more distracted, especially in early stages. And there can be drama if things don't work out."

Masini admits relationships that end badly invite problems. "It's easy to get distracted from work because of depression, anxiety, and simply seeing your new ex at work and overanalyzing communications—or miscommunications. It's easy for office productivity to fail under any negative circumstance, but especially when both parties in a failed romance work at the same office."

But it could have an upside: "The only time when this doesn't occur is when one or both people are competitive and try to compete with each other at work to win at office productivity by projecting feelings of having lost and wanting to win, from the failed relationship," says Masini. "Showing the other one just what they're missing in terms of office productivity is a win for the office manager."

What's A Company To Do?

From an employer's perspective, know that they're going to happen, says Starkman. "The old approach for many companies was to ban office dating as a way to avoid potential liability," he says. "I couldn't be more against that. It's like Prohibition; all the ban does is force the activity underground. People aren't going to stop dating because of a policy. It may have a little chilling effect, but that hurts culture because people end up sneaking around."

Some states have privacy laws that prohibit an employer from restricting employee behavior unless there is a conflict of interest, such as a manager dating a subordinate. "In this case, there does need to be a policy of disclosure and a plan in place," says Starkman. "This protects the company and is the only way you can operate these days." If your policy is written, be careful to make it gender neutral, adds Starkman.

And if you still decide to ban dating, be ready to handle the consequences. "What are you going to do—terminate otherwise good employees?" Starkman asks. "If you have a policy you have to apply it uniformly every time. A policy that bans it, however, is ignorant of human nature."

One startup founder on learning from his wife's career that "creative people are ruthless, incisive entrepreneurs" by necessity.

I'm the founder of a video marketing platform, but my wife grew up without a TV.

As a kid, Donna spent her days scanning Reader's Digest with her grandmother, reading "Laughter is the Best Medicine" together and testing each other's "Word Power." All through childhood, she wrote her own stories; today she's a fiction writer—basically the polar opposite of my job as the analytics-driven chief at the startup I cofounded.

But I've still learned a lot about creativity and the creative process from Donna, and that's translated into some unexpectedly hard-nosed insights about growing a startup. By necessity, creative people are ruthless, incisive entrepreneurs. Competition is intense, the market is tight, and getting noticed is always an uphill slog.

All romantic notions aside, being a writer—or a creative of any kind—is incredibly hard work, and I've learned firsthand that practitioners have plenty to teach the startup world.

Startups Aren't The Only Things That Fail (So Get Over Yourself)

By most estimates, somewhere between 75% and 90% of startups fail, but if you think that's hard, try being a book author. It typically takes six months to even hear back from an editor about your manuscript, and after that, by one reckoning, only three out of every 10,000 actually get published—not great odds.

So instead of struggling to get her book proposal noticed at a mainstream publishing house, my wife adjusted her game plan and began to crowdfund her novel independently. She was able to raise money quickly and ultimately publish her book—but only because she allowed herself to change course from her original vision.

In the startup world, too many founders fall in love with their original ideas, sit and wait for customers to come to them, then get disillusioned when they don't gain traction. But pliability early on can be far more valuable than blind persistence. My company, Vidyard, started as a video production company. But when customers starting clamoring for tools to monitor video analytics, we took a risk and made the switch. It completely changed our vision and business model, but we weren't too precious about either—and that probably saved us from a face-plant.

Creativity Is Nothing To Romanticize

It's no secret that creativity is fundamental to any successful workplace. The problem is that business people tend to romanticize the creative process. But ultimately, it's work—just a different type than what we're generally used to.

The reality is that creativity can rarely flourish without constraints. As gifted a writer as Donna is, she meticulously structures her narratives before the creative process kicks in. She almost has an algorithm for the emotional beats of a story, and sets an outline and deadline for each chapter before getting creative with the details. These rules help her channel imagination into tangible results.

I've learned that the same can apply in the workplace. Taking a cue from Donna's process, we now do something at my company called "Pitchyard": It's essentially product brainstorming, with tight rules and a timeline. Over two weeks, cross-functional 10-person teams draw up briefs for upgrades or totally new products. The results of this kind of "constrained creativity" have been eye opening. Recent sessions, for example, inspired ViewedIt, a new tool—already downloaded hundreds of thousands of times—that lets anyone make a video, with live screenshots, and share it via email.

Isolation Can Be A Killer

Donna struggled to find the time to write the latest chapters of her novel Where the Sun Sets while also juggling crowdfunding. The pressure of doing it all by herself was overwhelming. But instead of turning inward, she looked for help—and when there wasn't any, she started a video series interviewing other writers on their blockers and solutions. Sometimes when you're hitting a wall, the best thing to do is to carve out time to find support, not try and double down on your own.

That's proved a useful lesson for me, too. Founders are bootstrappers by nature. We think we can fix anything ourselves. But more often than not, the answer is already out there, if we're just willing to ask around and listen. When I was struggling recently with structuring a new round of financing, I opened up to a colleague to help generate some more ideas. Later, when we were rejigging our pricing model, we went out and spoke to other startups that were built on tiered pricing.

It's a simple fix—just talking—but a powerful way to break the culture of isolation that entrepreneurship seems to encourage and even valorize.

Know Your End User

A hard lesson that Donna learned quickly was that you write for an audience, not just for yourself. She'd dreamed of writing the next great young-adult wizard-based adventure, but the market was totally saturated. She realized she had to shift her sights, and now works on stories aimed at an underserved market of Baby Boomer readers.

For businesses, it's equally important to know your audience. You don't create a successful product in isolation, no matter how innovative it may be. As Salesforce's Peter Coffee and many others have insisted, innovation requires both invention and people adopting that invention. The Bay Area (not to mention our own backyard in Waterloo, Ontario) is filled with founders building new technology. But if you're not connecting with a user base, then you're not producing much change—nor are you making any money.

I don't want to conflate the world of fiction writing and the world of entrepreneurship, which are very different. At the root, however, doing either right depends on something obvious and downright clichéd but too often overlooked: passion. Your work has to come from a true belief in the product and an excitement for what you're doing—whether that's a novel or a video analytics platform. I'm grateful to my wife for never letting me lose sight of that lesson, either.

Michael Litt is cofounder and CEO of the video marketing platform Vidyard. Follow him on Twitter at @michaellitt

Orbital Insight founder and NASA veteran James Crawford on why it's time to shelve "moonshots."

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

It's tough to be NASA in 2017. The last time anyone walked on the Moon was more than 40 years ago. The Space Shuttle has flown its last mission, and the only way to get to the International Space Station is on a Russian rocket. News headlines are confined to the agency's role in studying climate change. Meanwhile, the commercial space industry is booming, throwing NASA's comparatively sluggish pace into high relief.

Now, as the Trump administration begins to shape federal agencies around its own agenda, NASA's future remains to be seen. It will be a few weeks before the budget that the White House sends to Congress reveals what might be next for NASA. But one thing is already clear: If the president aims for a grand, outer-space "moonshot" like some of his predecessors have, things aren't likely to go well. In fact, the best way Trump can revitalize NASA is by keeping it focused on not-so-flashy yet crucial innovations.

The Trouble With "Moonshots"

Each new presidential administration seems compelled to reset the agency's agenda, to put its own mark on the final frontier. In the 1990s, the mission was to build the Space Station as a precursor to visiting Mars. Then the George W. Bush administration decided to return to the Moon. The Obama administration targeted Mars once again—as well as manned exploration of near-Earth asteroids.

Any one of these moonshot missions would take decades to realize. But the odds of us attaining any of them shrink pretty much every eight years, when we change our mind about what we're doing and why.

To be fair, some of this is baked into NASA's DNA, ever since Kennedy's famous, "We choose to go to the moon" speech in 1962. It was a brilliant vision and speech, but as soon as we reached the Moon, we started debating what NASA's next big goal would be—without ever stopping to question whether the agency really needed to chase a new single big goal.

If the Trump administration shakes up NASA in the wrong way—toward yet another moonshot—we'll perpetuate a cycle that's kept the agency treading water for decades. Instead, NASA needs some time to focus on less high-flying work, namely developing the core technologies that will open up space for the next generation.

Big Dreams And Tight Budgets

Let's look into the future, say 50 years from now. Imagine humanity as a multiplanet species. We have thriving settlements in orbit and on Mars. Robots mine asteroids for water and rare elements. Daily hyper-spectral imagery is used to optimize agriculture and manage our climate. In-space manufacturing produces materials that are impossible to make on Earth. Space-based solar power stations beam green power down to Earth. Enormous telescopes capture images of planets around other stars and scour them for signs of life.

With the right investments, these sci-fi dreams are all achievable. But they all depend on new technologies that we haven't spent the time or money developing yet—like in-space 3D printing to fabricate large structures in zero-G, in-space refueling technology, and robotic means of harnessing outer space's in-situ resources.

It isn't that these advancements are technologically infeasible in 2017; it's just that none have yet had a chance to be demonstrated in space (mostly because, like most innovations, they aren't likely to succeed the first time—which means a lot of money for probably few immediate returns).

Caught between limited budgets and grandiose, moonshot visions, NASA doesn't have the tolerance for failure that ultimately drives progress. But if we make technological advancement the mission, then the only real failure is a failure to innovate.

NASA's Next Mission: A Four-Part Proposal

So here's a new mission for NASA that the Trump administration should seriously consider: Use the agency's $19 billion annual budget to make this green, multiplanet future a reality. With refocused priorities, NASA could develop technologies that will truly open the space frontier—all within a single presidential administration. Here's how:

1. Large-scale, in-space construction. The current Space Station was constructed by building modules on Earth and then bolting them together in space. But what if we could send up bulk raw materials and then 3D print the structure in space? By constructing in zero gravity, we could use a much less massive frame and greatly increase the total area of the structure.

Commercial space companies are rapidly reducing launch costs and ramping up to support weekly, or even more frequent, launches. So this kind of construction could be done with regular deliveries from Earth to an onsite team, not unlike a construction project in New York or Hong Kong.

This way, multiple big structures could be assembled in a short period of time—including space stations for dozens of astronauts to run experiments on everything from zero-gravity manufacturing to in-space biology; large telescopes capable of directly imaging planets around other stars; or in-space solar power stations capable of beaming power back to Earth.

2. In-space refueling. As Elon Musk is fond of saying, it would be crazy to fly from Los Angeles to New York and then throw away the 737 because we don't know how to refill the fuel tanks. But NASA is still treating its spacecraft that way. Just adding the ability to launch spacecraft with empty tanks, and then separately send up the fuel, would greatly reduce mission costs and risk. There's no reason we can't do this in principle, but no previous mission has ever deemed it worth the cost of trying to demonstrate that tech for the first time.

3. Local resource utilization. Pioneers of the next frontier should take a lesson from those of the last one, who never lived in covered wagons longer than it took them to build a log cabin. Mars and the Moon both contain raw materials for construction and the extraction of water and atmospheres. Many asteroids also house significant amounts of water that can used to synthesize rocket fuel.

This is one of the most important building blocks for in-space operation at scale. But space missions aren't designed this way—once again, because the technology hasn't been demonstrated before, so it's not something mission planners can depend on.

4. Developing human-robotic teams. We already know how to build self-driving cars on Earth, and construction and resource extraction in space will likewise be robotic. But complex manipulation and repair tasks will still require a human touch. Our in-space future will depend on autonomous robots remotely controlled by humans, plus some direct astronaut labor. We need to build out the technology for each of these modalities and show how they work together to accomplish complex tasks.

There are more than just these four technologies NASA will need to develop in order to truly open space up to the next generation. Others include in-space crop production, inflatable habitats, autonomous rendezvous and docking, and highly efficient ion thrusters, to name a few. But these are the best places to start, and with the right executive mandate, we can achieve all of them within the next decade or so.

Tomorrow's ROI On Today's R&D

This line of thinking leads to a very different vision for NASA—one that flies much closer to the ground, so to speak, at least for now. Instead of trying to get to the Moon or Mars using current technology, focus on developing the technology itself. NASA has done this for years in Aeronautics (the first "A" in NASA). The agency pioneered wind tunnels, worked through different approaches to air-traffic control, studied pilot fatigue and its role in air crashes, and, more broadly, built much of the core technology we take for granted every time we fly.

President Trump is all about shaking things up, and this approach to NASA would surely do that, while setting the agency up for real success. It would also cement U.S. leadership in space innovation and inaugurate a new era of public-private space partnership.

There are many things NASA does exceptionally well. Unmanned exploration missions continue to return spectacular results—witness the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the ongoing flood of data from the Mars rovers and orbiters. Science missions, from Hubble to WMAP, advance our fundamental understanding of the universe, and NASA continues to inspire generations of children who have at one time or another dreamt of becoming astronauts.

But we've reached a point where we won't be able to push ahead without investing in the next generation of tech R&D. If NASA leads the way on that, the commercial space sector will follow. Other nations will follow. More sophisticated NASA missions to Mars, the Moon, asteroids, and more exotic destinations will suddenly become both affordable and achievable. The space frontier will open—and it won't have taken another moonshot to do it.

James Crawford is the founder of Orbital Insight, Inc., one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2017.

Where government can't—or won't—help, there's GoFundMe, the crowdfunding platform that's turning us all into Good Samaritans.

Last summer, torrential rains dumped 7 trillion gallons of water on Louisiana, sparking flash floods and setting homes adrift. As images of devastation looped across the nightly news, on the crowdfunding site GoFundMe there were flickers of hope—in the form of digital payments. Moses Wells, a commercial fisherman in Edgewater, Maryland, started a GoFundMe campaign to deliver emergency supplies. "I'm raising money and donations to make multiple trips in a large box truck," he announced, and $2,381 poured in. In Boston, Louisiana State University fans raised $3,829 to help their bayou-based Tigers. In Texas, a Louisiana native organized an effort on behalf of his hometown: "Please help us as we are just Humans Helping Humans!" Donors responded with $12,403. By the end of the year, funding efforts for Louisiana flood victims had raised $11.2 million.

Humans helping humans has helped GoFundMe quietly become the biggest crowdfunding platform on the planet, responsible for more than $3 billion since its launch in 2010. It can now bring in as much as $140 million a month in donations, and generated an estimated $100 million in 2016 revenue. (A for-profit enterprise, it levies a 5% fee on campaigns, in line with other crowdfunding sites.) GoFundMe started as a bootstrapped operation that found its audience in the heartland by embracing virtually any personal cause, from honeyfunds to memorials. While coastal-centric crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo kept their focus on project-based campaigns, GoFundMe connected with families staring down foreclosure, medical bills, and tuition debt. Then, in the summer of 2015, investors, including Accel (which backed Facebook in 2005), acquired and recapitalized GoFundMe, seeking to build on its success and create a fundraising behemoth.

The key to this transformation has been GoFundMe's cultivation of a new kind of campaign organizer: not just people looking for funds for themselves, but the proverbial Good Samaritan who jumped in after the Louisiana floods. At a basic level, Good Samaritans translate into more campaigns and more activated social networks. Add up their efforts, and the impact is profound: a realignment of how charitable aid is collected and distributed, especially in the United States. GoFundMe can raise millions in response to natural disasters and major news events—$9 million for victims of the shooting at Orlando's Pulse nightclub, $7.8 million for protesters at Standing Rock, $3 million for Hurricane Matthew relief. In each case, the company provided distant bystanders with easy means to take action, and then worked behind the scenes to make their efforts go viral. Where the government and community organizations can't (or won't) help, there's GoFundMe. "The needs are gigantic," says chairman and CEO Rob Solomon. "If the holes weren't huge and gaping, GoFundMe wouldn't need to exist. We're this digital safety net"—with more than 25 million donors eagerly holding it up.

At a time when Twitter spats and Insta-glamour seem to dominate the hype cycle, GoFundMe has turned the old-fashioned value of neighborliness into an animating principle. "We're trying to encourage people to look around them and see who might need help," says Solomon, a former Groupon and Yahoo executive who joined GoFundMe as part of its mid-2015 reinvention. Under his watch, GoFundMe has stayed true to its heartland roots while becoming a tech-world star. "We talk a lot in Silicon Valley about technology changing the world," he says, "[but individuals] haven't been empowered to change their worlds all that much."

GoFundMe gives them control, thanks to a finely tuned product that optimizes for a "pay it forward" ethos. On campaign pages, for example, there is no simple Facebook-style "like" button, which would allow people to feel as though they're engaging with a project—without contributing to it. "Likes didn't actually help anyone," says chief technology officer Ujjwal Singh of GoFundMe's early experiments with the button. "It was an easy way out." Instead, visitors are given three options: donate, share on Facebook, or tweet. Similarly, in the automated emails that acknowledge donations, GoFundMe encourages sharing by telling people how much their promotion could be worth, in dollar terms, based on analyses of past campaigns. "That's had a dramatic impact on people sharing more," says Singh. When clicking "Post To Facebook" could be worth $100, it's hard to say no.

This idea—that a modicum of effort can produce outsize results—translates into a new, viral mode of giving. In November, Arizona teacher Lisa Fandrich started a GoFundMe page on behalf of 76-year-old Paul Lomax, whom she had often seen selling copper coins on a busy corner in the Phoenix heat. "Why is a man of his advanced age out here?" she recalls thinking. She pulled over to talk with him, and then turned to GoFundMe. She raised more than $30,000. "Our elderly are not making it," says Fandrich, who worries about Lomax's ability to care for his wife and his house, which is in disrepair. She attributes the campaign's success (she initially set a target of $5,000) to the public's hunger for good news. "People are so tired of the negativity on the news and social media," she says. "They want something to believe in." The site currently hosts 100,000 campaigns a month.

GoFundMe owes its explosive reach to its ability to widely disseminate the good news that's taking place on its service. "We view ourselves as a content-distribution machine," says Dan Pfeiffer, who joined GoFundMe as its communications and policy chief in late 2015, after serving as a longtime adviser to President Obama. Pfeiffer's mandate is to help campaigns achieve breakout growth by seeding stories about them on social and traditional media. "In a world where the internet is starving for content, GoFundMe has more than almost any company," he says. All he needs is a Good Samaritan at the center of the story: "The campaigns that go really big are the ones where strangers are giving."

Pfeiffer and his staff constantly monitor the platform for campaigns with a spike in shares or donations per minute. From there, they start pitching local press; as a story picks up, they reach out to a combination of legacy outlets (NBC's Today, USA Today) and share-friendly digital media, including BuzzFeed and Refinery29. When a story starts to fade, they find ways to bring it back—publishing a list of the top campaigns by state, for example. Last fall, $384,260 in donations poured in to establish a makeshift retirement fund for Fidencio Sanchez, an 89-year-old Chicago Popsicle-cart vendor, after the story was picked up by Chicago-area TV and radio, CNN, and more. In another era, in another place, a church or government program might have provided aging Americans like Sanchez with relief. No longer. "GoFundMe presents a more efficient and effective way to access help," says Pfeiffer.

GoFundMe's agnostic embrace of campaigns has served it well. While many organizers tug at the heartstrings (campaigns for children and pets consistently do well), just about any cause is fair game—even fundraising for an abortion, which the company previously banned, is now permitted within legal bounds. Increasingly, the crowdfunding service is a vehicle to push political buttons. A search for "Planned Parenthood," for example, returns campaigns to help the organization alongside pages dedicated to replacing it. Solomon isn't concerned. "We're a neutral platform that's empowering people to help people," he says. "It isn't up to me or the right or the left to be the arbiter of worthy causes."

In the coming months, it may become more difficult for GoFundMe to maintain this nonpartisan posture. But for Solomon, the current political environment—in which major government investments in struggling communities have been stymied by partisan gridlock and distrust—underscores the company's broader opportunity. In January, GoFundMe acquired nonprofit fundraising platform CrowdRise, which has built Facebook-style pages for its members, in a bet that millions more people are interested in defining themselves based on the causes they support. "I don't think we're going to solve [through public policy] the education problems, the medical problems, for years," Solomon says. "There's a populist movement around effecting change." And GoFundMe is its Good Samaritan.

This article is part of our coverage of the World's Most Innovative Companies of 2017.

In a series of events during New York Fashion Week, Nike solidified its status as a fashion brand.

In the mid-'80s, Nike released the Air Force One. It was the first sneaker to incorporate its pressurized air technology that absorbs shock to help athletes perform better. But, to everybody's surprise, the shoe became an instant fashion sensation on the streets of New York. They were so popular in Harlem and the Bronx that they acquired the nickname "the uptowns." "It's just one example of how sport and design collided," says Adrian Fenech, Nike's senior brand director for North America. "It created a bond between Nike and the New York City community."

At New York Fashion Week, Nike is paying homage to its roots in New York City with events throughout the week as part of its "New York Made" series. On Thursday, Nike revealed its collaboration with Comme des Garçon, which resulted in a re-conceptualized Dunk Hi shoe with a clear panel that allows wearers to express themselves through the socks they wear underneath. On Saturday, at Bergdorf Goodman, Nike had a party to celebrate Riccardo Tisci's new design: a Dunk made of high-end full-grain leather.

At the cult sneaker store Kith, Nike displayed a collection inspired by its 50 years of creating shoes for basketball players, featuring one iconic design to represent each decade. "We're listening to athletes about ways that shoes impact performance, but also hearing about their passion for luxury materials," says Fenech. "We've merged the two, responding to their day-to-day needs, as well as their style inspiration.

To cap things off, Nike unveiled a new version of the Air Force One designed by Acronym's Errolson Hugh, which retains elements of the iconic shoe, but incorporates futuristic elements like a quick-release fastener to make it easier to get into the shoe. "Errolson is all about form and functionality," Fenech explains. "The original shoe had heel tabs that allowed ease of access. But Errolson took that idea and moved it forward."

This concept of "moving forward" is a big theme at Nike. Fenech says that the company is trying to push the boundaries in terms of innovation, by creating high tech products that improve athletic performance, but it's also working to push ahead as a fashion brand. Mark Parker, Nike's CEO, began his career at Nike in the late '70s as a designer and believes that design thinking should infuse everything the company does. (To keep his own artistic instincts sharp, he still occasionally collaborates with designers Tinker Hatfield and Hiroshi Fujiwara on limited-edition sneakers as part of the Nike HTM Project.)

"Lab" Experiments

Nike is constantly working on deepening its fashion credentials. One place this happens is the Nike Lab, which Fenech oversees. This is where many of the experimental collaborations begin. When picking partners, he explains that it usually begins when he discovers fashion designers who already have a passion for the brand. But then, Fenech determines whether the relationship has the potential to push Nike into new territory. "We look for partners that can stretch us," he says. "We like relationships where it is mutually beneficial to learn from each other." These insights then trickle through the company, influencing the more than 650 designers who work at Nike.

But Nike also stays focused on the needs of its most loyal customers, who have always found ways to incorporate sneakers into cutting-edge streetwear looks, much like the New Yorkers who took to the Air Force One three decades ago. Then there's the sneakerhead community that is passionate about each new creation that Nike brings to the market. Fenech says that these consumers tend to be drawn to narratives about how shoes fit into culture and history. "Ultimately they're galvanized by stories," he says. "When we spend time with consumers in this world, it's all about collections of stories that connect our products with their day-to-day lives." The collection of shoes inspired by five decades of basketball was a way of speaking directly to this community and showing how basketball culture has helped inform fashion trends on the streets.

Nike also tries to be as specific as possible when speaking to communities. With 63,000 employees around the world, it's able to focus design on the cultural nuances of a city, country, and even particular historical events. Fenech says that New York Fashion Week gave Nike's designers an opportunity to think creatively about responding to the needs of fashion-forward New Yorkers, but at every big cultural or sporting event, such as the Olympics, there's an effort to create products that are relevant. At the 2012 Olympics, for instance, Nike developed Flyknit technology, made of ultra-light yarn, which was designed to improve athlete's performance and manufactured in a highly sustainable way that prevented waste; Nike was deliberately sending an environmentalist message at a moment of maximum global impact. The shoe quickly became a fashion symbol in its own right. "It was picked up as a trend and now allows us to push through new expressions of style," Fenech says.

In the end, though, while fashion and style are important, Fenech says that performance innovation must always come first for Nike to stay at the cutting edge. So it's a constant balancing act between investing in the slow, deliberate process of developing technology and keeping up with the latest styles. "We're very aware of trends, but in order to push forward on our innovation agenda, we work on long lead times," he says. "This means trying to tune into moment-by-moment trends as we go along with the help of athletes and collaborations with external partners. It allows us to try new things along the way."

Gallup's new report reveals why most people aren't engaged at work, and it's something their managers could easily fix.

Do you love your job? If you do, you're in the minority. According to Gallup's State of the American Workplace report only about one-third of employees say they're engaged on the job. While some people actively hate their jobs, most people (55%) are just indifferent.

Why are so many people just going through the motions? A lot of it comes down to managers' communication problems. On a big-picture level, most employees said that their company's leaders don't make them feel enthusiastic about the future. But on a day-to-day level, most employees said they know what's expected of them, but that they don't feel like they are recognized for doing good work.

But perhaps the most surprising reveal, considering that benefits are often used to attract and retain talent: Bosses are failing to communicate about everything from health insurance and 401(k) plans to paid time off and professional development programs.

And this is where the communication breakdown can lead not just to disengagement, but to turnover. Benefits (particularly health insurance and paid vacation) are often enough of a reason to switch jobs to get a better deal. Fifty-three percent of employees they polled said they'd leave a job to get better paid vacation time at another employer.

Gallup's analysis revealed that 51% of workers are searching for new jobs. Workers have more options than ever, the authors of the Gallup report caution. And this lack of communication could lead to big losses for companies. Gallup estimates that actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. up to $605 billion a year in lost productivity. As Gallup's chairman and CEO Jim Clifton writes, "If American companies were simply to double the number of engaged workers from one-third to two-thirds, spirited employees would reverse our seriously declining national productivity."

So despite knowing that benefits are what lure people to jobs and organizations that spend a lot of money polishing their brand image, Gallup's analysis revealed an ever-widening communication gap, proving (once again) that people don't quit companies, they quit their bosses.

Ransomware attacks have more than doubled in the past year, and small businesses are especially at risk.

Your computer has been locked. To unlock it, you are obliged to pay a fine of $500.

A day-ruining phrase like this is coming to a screen near you, and sooner than you might expect. One recent estimate says that even as malware attacks slowed, there were 638 million ransomware attack attempts last year, up from 3.8 million in 2015. Still, fresh research by AVG Business indicates 1 in 3 small businesses are still clueless about it.

Malware with names like Cryptolocker or Popcorn Time have enabled amateur hackers to operate what amounts to an old-fashioned extortion racket on a global scale, and a very lucrative one at that. According to IBM, cybercriminals are thought to have made an eye-watering $1 billion from ransomware last year. What's more, half of the executives who paid up handed over more than $10,000 to the criminals and 20% over $40,000. It has been estimated that in the first half of 2016 alone, one gang of ransomware hackers made an estimated $121 million.

Ransom-seeking coders and social engineers—the majority of them Russian speakers, according to Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs—initially targeted individuals. Then they moved on to small businesses, their corporate big brothers, and now hospitals, hotels, railways, the police, and government, where sensitive personally identifiable information is scarily abundant. More than a dozen hospitals have reported ransomware attacks in the past year, including Hollywood Presbyterian, which was told to pay $3.4 million if they wanted their data back. Last month, a police department in Texas reported that it had lost years of evidence after refusing to pay a ransom to hackers, while the Washington, D.C., police announced that it had discovered that many of the recorders for its CCTV cameras had been infected by ransomware, just days before the presidential inauguration. Earlier this month, the government of Licking, Ohio confirmed that its computer systems had been taken over by ransomware.

Small Businesses Are Especially Vulnerable

Despite the nature of these high-profile targets, an increasing number of ransomware attacks are being targeted at small businesses and startups, with ransoms ranging from $500 to $50,000. And the numbers are growing: Security firm Symantec estimates that the average ransom demanded in 2016 was $679, more than double the $295 demanded at the end of 2015. Small businesses can be better targets than bigger ones because they often don't have skilled staff or the time and money to devote to cyber defense. Many don't even realize the value of their own data. The research by IBM also suggests that executives are more liable to settle than individuals. In response, the FBI is urging victims to report attacks to them regardless of whether they paid so they can gain a better understanding of the scale of the threat in the U.S. and its impact on victims. Their advice is not to pay any ransom.

If hackers don't delete your data, they could leak it online or sell to the highest bidder. Another form of ransomware can take a screenshot or extract a particular file and upload it to the thief, who can increase the ransom based on what he sees. Or the ransom amount may start to increase the longer you take to pay it. Some cyber criminals have begun to give their victims a second option by turning them into hackers: Help install the same software on other peoples' computers, and if those people pay up, you get your data back.

More worrisome, ransomware doesn't take advanced technical skills to operate. The software can be bought off the shelf, or even rented: Ransomware-as-a-service allows criminals who don't have the technical expertise to rent an existing botnet of infected computers that can be used to infect new computers. The criminals then get paid a commission on every successful ransom.

Mac OS and Linux users aren't completely safe either, according to a new study by security firm PhishLabs. Though Windows is the most targeted operating system, more malware is being created specifically for OS X, Linux, and server operating systems. Ransomware attacks targeting Android-based mobile phones are still relatively rare, but they are also on the rise.

The so-called internet of things is also vulnerable, as are bigger things: This week, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology demonstrated a ransomware attack on a simulated water treatment plant.

The Cost

If you haven't protected yourself against it, a ransomware attack could mean life or death for your company. The U.S. National Cyber Security Alliance reports that up to 60% of hacked small and medium-size businesses go out of business six months after a cyberattack.

Rokenbok Education, a San Diego-based toy company, lost thousands of dollars while it struggled with an attack just before the holiday season started. Children in Film lost access to files stored on a cloud drive within 30 minutes of an employee opening an attachment they shouldn't have opened on New Year's Eve. It took a week to restore the data, even with backups. But there are no assurances: According to a report from security firm Kaspersky Lab, one in every five companies that pay ransom never get their data back.

The surge in ransomware attacks and reports of big payouts appears to be driving a rise in cyberinsurance offerings, a development that could help shore up general cyber defenses. During a full-day workshop devoted to ransomware at this month's RSA Conference in San Francisco, TechTarget reported, Jeremiah Grossman, chief of security strategy at SentinelOne, predicted that "there's going to be professional ransomware negotiators" helping insurance companies in the future.

Simple Errors

What hasn't changed much—and isn't likely to change in 2017—is how a computer is infected. Someone still has to open a dodgy email, visit an infected site, or download a dubious piece of software. Servers can be hosts, and by hacking into poorly protected internet-connected printers or even kettles, for example, criminals are finding clues to allow them to break into your systems.

"The basic problem is that small businesses don't often have the knowledge or bandwidth to deal with cybersecurity," says professor Mark Skilton, Warwick Business School, cybersecurity expert and author of The 4th Industrial Revolution: An Executive Guide to Intelligent Systems. "Even large retailers [and the police] with all the resources they have at their disposal can make silly errors that quickly become big mistakes."

Solutions And Defenses

Ransomware has proved to be a formidable challenge for most anti-virus software. Mark suggests, "There are two things that you can easily do. Protect your own data like you would any other valuable thing that you own. Encrypt it so criminals can't publish it online. The other approach is what I call the protection of the herd. Small business can't always afford the IT systems they need to stay secure. So, use a good public cloud service to provide you with a remote backup."

"It's easy to over-compensate on cybersecurity," he adds. "You also need to think about what is the proportional level for your company."

Another solution is provided by sites such as No More Ransom, which is run by the National High Tech Crime Unit of the Netherlands' police, Europol's European Cybercrime Centre, and two cyber security companies—Kaspersky Lab and Intel Security—with the goal of helping victims recover their data without paying a ransom. It also tries to educate users about ransomware and how to defend against it.

Still another solution is the free Windows app called RansomFree developed by the security firm Cybereason. This app protects a computer by watching for typical behaviors exhibited by ransomware behavior.

"Sometimes it's the simplest things that offer the best protection against ransomware," says Tony Anscombe, senior security evangelist at AVG Business. Anti-virus software is a good preventative measure, and making sure you regularly back up your data will reduce the impact if you are locked out of your systems.

Mark Skilton emphasizes the risk of "the human factor." "Increase your employees' awareness by asking them to think twice about clicking on links in a suspicious looking or unexpected email, especially if it's purporting to have come from a more senior employee who happens to be on holiday," he says. "Restricting who can see what on your system can also prevent malicious software from spreading. Don't assume the brand-name internet-enabled printers or machines you buy are protected. Check first."

Amid a growing wave of attacks, good cybersecurity for a small business isn't very expensive. Being held for ransom is.

The twice-a-year extravaganza still drips will glamour, but fashion insiders are finding new ways to improve it for the digital age.

Last Thursday morning, while employers all over New York instructed staff to work from home because of the blizzard that had descended on the city, fashion editors, buyers, and bloggers showed up en masse at Clarkson Square and Madison Square Garden. Not easily deterred by weather, they put on their sturdiest stilettos and scaled snow banks to attend the first day of New York Fashion Week 2017. "It didn't impact our turnout one bit," says Cat Bennett, managing director of fashion events at IMG, the company that produces runway shows for a third of the designers, including A-listers like Jeremy Scott, Prabal Gurung, and Oscar de la Renta. "Of course, in the background, my team and I were having a collective heart attack." But as Bennett points out, even when snow isn't fluttering down (and spoiling attendees' blowouts), New York Fashion Week is always an enormous, coronary-inducing undertaking.

In the '90s, it was strictly an industry event that involved a handful of key American designers—among them, Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, Donna Karen, and Ralph Lauren. Fast forward to 2017: 230,000 members of the fashion industry and the general public will attend as many as 218 unveilings of individual collections over seven days. That doesn't even include smaller gatherings that take place simultaneously, like Harlem Fashion Week and Small Boutique Fashion Week.

For those attending, those seven days require crisscrossing the city to catch one show after another. And for all this frantic rushing around, many people often feel disappointed that they didn't get to see everything they'd hoped. "It is a grind, and by that I mean 18-hour days," says Frank Zambrelli, who spent the last three decades designing for Chanel, Coach, and Judith Leiber before launching a bespoke handbag company, 1Atelier. "There's a genuine lack of consolidation now that once used to exist. It's become a tornado."

Veronica Kerzner, founder of Style Fashion Week, a separate event that puts together shows for emerging designers during the same week as NYFW, concurs. "You go through all of this chaos—the snow, the hoards of people—for an 11-minute show. Then you get up, you leave, and you go across to another part of the city to do it all over again."

For a sense of how enormous New York Fashion Week has become, consider this: The twice-annual affairs, in February and September, generate $900 million for New York City, according to an economic report prepared by Congress. NYFW has a greater economic impact than the U.S. Open (which brings in $700 million), the Super Bowl ($500 million), and the New York City Marathon ($340 million).

Even though it's a cash cow for the city, there's a growing sense that Fashion Week isn't working. For one thing, the event's raison d'être has fundamentally changed. It began as a way for designers to show their collections to buyers and fashion editors six months before the clothes would appear in stores. But the internet has disrupted this calendar. These days, presentations are often live-streamed, and designers are increasingly adopting the "see now, buy now" model, making their collections available online or in shops immediately following shows. The audience for the presentations has changed, too. Rather than serving as a trade show for industry insiders, they've morphed into glitzy, celebrity-heavy spectacles to create buzz for brands. "When I was at Chanel in the late '80s, Karl's shows were not the carnival that they are now," Zambrelli says. "The question is whether this is the best way to do the job."

Since the very purpose of NYFW has changed, does the event still need to happen over seven days? Could it take place outside of New York? Should it fully adapt to the digital age? Here, industry veterans weigh in on how NYFW is being reimagined.

The Snowball Effect

To understand Fashion Week in its current form, it's worth looking back at its original purpose. The very first iteration of New York Fashion Week as we know it began during World War II as a patriotic effort to shift the focus of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar editors away from French designers toward American ones. "Press Week," which took place at the Pierre and Plaza hotels, was a hit and helped people like Bill Blass become household names.

As more and more designers entered the fashion industry, they began to throw their own Press Week events all over the city at nightclubs, lofts, and restaurants. Eventually, in 1993, the Council of Fashion Designers of America decided it was time to consolidate the shows into a single venue: Bryant Park. (Lincoln Center was added later; most shows now take place at Clarkson Square and Madison Square Garden.) "It was an efficient way to show a collection," Zambrelli says. "As a buyer or an editor, you could see everything you needed to over the course of seven shows a day, for four or five days. It was all very civilized."

Back in the '90s and the early 2000s, runway shows hadn't changed much since Coco Chanel presented her collections to customers and a few members of the press a hundred years earlier. "They were, essentially, trade shows," Bennett says.

Fifteen years ago, consumers still had to wait six months before looks would appear in magazines and in boutiques. "The shows were really created to give insiders an early view," says Karen Harvey, a consultant and talent spotter for top fashion houses. "It was about getting the heads of fashion at Neiman Marcus, Barney's, Selfridges, and Harrods excited about what was to come so they could get their buyers prepared."

All of that has changed. First, fast fashion brands like H&M, Zara, and Topshop entered the scene and started churning out cheaper versions of runway looks so that by the time high-fashion collections arrived in stores, their impact was dulled. Technology also entered the equation. Fashion bloggers started posting reviews and photos immediately after the shows. Then, in an effort to retake control, brands and designers began streaming shows on their social media channels, opening the once exclusive event to the entire world. Fashion houses can now speak to consumers directly, bypassing magazines, department stores, and even bloggers.

In other words, everything about Fashion Week has changed—except the increasingly outdated, nearly 80-year-old convention of presenting the clothes themselves. "The new innovations are happening on top of the old model and framework," Bennett says. "It's morphing, but not totally transforming."

New Models

And yet . . . We're beginning to see signs of transformation on the horizon. Increasingly, designers are eschewing the traditional six-months-in-advance calendar and making their collections available for retail purchase right away. Last year Tom Ford showed his collection at an intimate dinner at the Four Seasons. While guests were enjoying the show, the very same products were already in stores, ready to go on sale the next day. Rebecca Minkoff, Tommy Hilfiger, Burberry, Vêtements, and Thakoon have all presented versions of the "see now, buy now" concept.

Not all designers can afford to do this, however. As Bennett points out, the new model places the burden on the designer to identify and manufacture garments that they are confident will sell. Traditionally, it was the buyer who placed orders based on a limited number of samples and paid for the production of the collection in advance, taking on the financial risk. "It's much harder for smaller or newer labels to play this game," she says.

But across the industry, runway shows are being reconfigured to place the consumer—rather than the buyer or editor—in the front row. The point is to entice the consumer to purchase outfits, sometimes from an inventory that has already been produced. "The benefit of a show still is the immediate reach that you have," says Zambrelli. "A single piece—an accessory or a shoe or a dress—can continue to have a life on social media for days. It's an incredible asset in terms of promotional activity and consumer engagement."

Fashion brands are putting more creativity into entertainment at shows, incorporating music and audience engagement in new ways. Last season, Rebecca Minkoff presented her collection outside, in front of her Soho store. The event turned into a street party, with attendees dancing to the beats of a DJ. The show was live-streamed on Minkoff's website, and people could buy the new clothes at the boutique and online. Meanwhile, Tommy Hilfiger took over Manhattan's South Street Seaport, where he created a carnival, complete with a Ferris wheel, food tents, and a record store. A runway was set up for the show, and items from his collaboration with Gigi Hadid were available for purchase.

"It's more than 'see now, buy now,'" says Harvey. "They're creating an explosive event. They're thinking about how you can engage with your customer directly and sell product in a more interesting way."

This season, both Minkoff and Hilfiger sat out NYFW altogether, opting to take their party concepts to L.A.: Minkoff staged an outdoor show at the Grove shopping center, while Hilfiger set up a fair in Venice Beach. Meanwhile, Opening Ceremony is also avoiding this week's Manhattan madness in favor of partnering with the New York City Ballet on a show at the end of February. Rag & Bone skipped the runway altogether and opened an exhibition of Polaroid photographs of the collection to the public.

To Harvey, these are all glimpses into Fashion Week's future—which is to say, it will no longer be one unified experience that happens in one place or at one point in time. "Is Fashion Week still relevant?" she asks. "I think as we know it, from the past, it's not."

Change Drivers

IMG's Cat Bennett is constantly working with designers to come up with creative approaches to shows. "What we're finding now is that the way that designers want to present their collections to audiences—from buyers to editors to the entire world—is becoming a personal decision," she says. "It's completely different for everybody, from soup to nuts. Our job is to give designers as many different tools as possible to be able to do that."

Some create unique pieces of digital content every month. Others set up pop-up shops to offer consumers an opportunity to buy some of the items presented on the runway. IMG recently acquired Made Fashion Week, a platform for emerging designers, and has been throwing hybrid celebrations that emphasize music and art so that it feels more like a festival.

Veronica Kerzner founded Style Fashion Week in 2011 as an alternative to the types of traditional shows that IMG produces. Her goal was to reimagine Fashion Week from the ground up, to scrap elements that weren't working and improve on those that were. Her organization began as L.A.'s official fashion week, but it has evolved to include presentations in New York, Palm Springs, and Dubai throughout the year. This year, Style Fashion Week's shows took place at the Theater at Madison Square Garden and largely showcased up-and-coming labels. Often, multiple designers will present their collections back-to-back to the same audience. NYFW, on the other hand, herds attendees in and out of presentation halls over and over, all day long. "The idea is for these designers to work together and share their networks," Kerzner says. "Whether the designer is looking to meet with buyers or sell to consumers or just generate brand awareness, we ensure that we have all these different facets so they can achieve their goals. But importantly, it's done in a way that is really fun."

For Kerzner, this means creating an event that takes into account the needs of the consumer as well as the needs of the industry. At her events, there are two distinct zones outside the main runway hall: a marketplace for buyers to see products and interact with editors, and another area for the general public to relax between shows. Audience members often stay for several hours or an entire day, so a welcoming ambiance is important. Last Thursday, for instance, violinist Miri Ben-Ari performed between shows to break up the day.

Still, no amount of innovative change is going to make the old-school approach to unveiling collections obsolete overnight. Every day, Bennett meets designers who spent their childhoods dreaming of their first runway show—the chance to find their place on a timeline with Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, and other great names from fashion history. Often, emerging talent simply wants the fairy tale: the classy venue, the bright lights, the rows of seats filled by influential members of the fashion community, the opportunity to walk on stage, greeted by applause.

"Even though it's totally not working on a million levels for most people, we're seeing that the runway show is far from dead," Bennett says. "It's still magical in that moment when you're sitting in the dark, then the lights come on and the models come out. There's still that special feeling that overtakes you. I don't think that's ever going to go away."

You sometimes have to change the game to make others want to cooperate.

Most businesses don't need to be sold on the value of cooperation. It seems self-evident, at least in principle. But in practice, not everybody is interested in cooperating. Researchers have found what every new kid on the playground learns all too soon—that those with more power are more inclined to be egocentric in pursuing goals, less empathic, less compassionate, and more likely to argue for dividing the proverbial pie in ways that leave them the biggest slice.

It would be nice if simply listening more empathically or talking things out could change their tactics. But it often won't, especially at work. Sometimes you have to make life worse, or at least riskier, for your more powerful counterparts in order to make them collaborate with you. And that may mean getting a little more confrontational—just not in the way you might think.

Let's Play Cards

Imagine you're playing a card game with one other person. Your and your counterpart each have two cards in your hands, a P and a Q. If both of you play P, you each win $1. If you play P and your counterpart plays Q, you lose $3 and she wins $3. If you both play Q, you both lose $1.

Now you've got to play nine rounds and come out with a higher balance than your opponent. (There are many versions of this game, some with four players, some with players in separate rooms, etc.)

I've run versions of this game thousands of times in more than 20 countries—with undergraduates, MBAs, executives, and CEOs. The most consistent mistake I see? Being too persistently cooperative in the face of ruthlessness. Too many of us play P repeatedly, staring with disbelief at an opponent who smiles and keeps throwing down Qs, maximizing their take. (After all, they were told to do as well as they could.)

Your best bet for changing someone's persistently selfish tactics is usually to respond in kind, by playing Q yourself. Why? Because that's the only way a counterpart's selfish or competitive behavior becomes costly to them in the short term, rather than beneficial—meaning they need to change tactics in order to get back in the black.

In negotiation speak, this is what's called a "game-changing move," a way to get the other side to collaborate by changing the way they perceive the relative costs and benefits of different tactics.

"Counter-Anchors" And "Positive 'No's"

Jill is a rising star in a creative agency. After being promoted to account manager, she finds herself reporting to the hardworking chief creative officer (CCO), a woman she admires. But the CCO, Treena, has an annoying habit of delegating major tasks late in the week. New to her role, Jill wants to prove herself, so she's left feeling compelled to put in long hours on Thursdays and Fridays that sometimes bleed into the weekend.

She starts to ask Treena for a little more lead time, but it doesn't work. She's simply asked to "do whatever it takes." Jill starts to feel resentful.

In hindsight, Jill might have deployed a "counter-anchor" earlier in the relationship with her new boss. In negotiation, an anchor is an opening number or principle that then becomes a powerful point of reference for subsequent negotiations. Jill might have confronted Treena's "whatever it takes" principle by naming a principle of her own, like the idea of "working smart" or building a "healthy, dynamic team" (as opposed to Treena's commitment to having her team just grind it out in the eleventh hour, all for the sake of a client).

Jill could also confront her boss by using what author William Ury calls a "positive no"—a no sandwiched between two yesses:

I really want to support you. I also need to be present with my family on weekends, so I can't do this work for you by Monday. But I'll brainstorm with you about other options for getting it done, if that's helpful.

Two Other Ways To Gain Leverage

Both of these tactics are subtly confrontational—Jill is pushing back, but only a little. She's begun to play Q, but it's a lowercase q. This way, her game-changing moves are subtle, and are more likely to lure Treena into a collaborative relationship than to backfire.

She has two other options in a similar vein. Jill can reframe the issue as a shared problem. Treena had implicitly framed it as a simple matter of getting work done quickly and at high quality. But Jill could turn it around this way:

I want to be sure we deliver great results to our clients quickly, while also making sure I'm not working late nights or weekends. Can we talk about how to do that?

Now there are two competing objectives that affect them both, not just one goal that affects only Jill.

Finally, Jill can look for ways to add to her arsenal outside of her relationship with her boss that can give her more power within it. This is useful just in case Treena proves unwilling or unable to change tactics. Maybe that means looking for jobs elsewhere or finding a new position within her firm. Or maybe it's scouting a different client to bring in—one that Jill will have more authority to manage herself, or one that won't be so demanding.

Developing a good alternative can be a powerful point of leverage. Armed with a potentially better option, Jill might be able to confront Treen like this:

I really love this job and hope we can work together for a long time, but if we can't find a way to reduce my workload around nights and weekends, it will be hard for me to stay.

People who think of themselves as pretty cooperative tend to avoid or give in when they're up against more powerful counterparts at work. But the fact is that using confrontation in these situations isn't about getting aggressive or being pushy. Do it right, and it becomes a subtle technique for prodding your counterpart back to the table. With a little resolve and a willingness to wade into conflict rather than shrink from it, you can actually build more collaborative partnerships than you'd otherwise think.

Hal Movius is president of Movius Consulting and author of the new book Resolve: Negotiating Life's Conflicts with Greater Confidence.

The electric car startup showed off its prototype vehicle, the Lucid Air, at a promo event in Los Angeles last week.

In a past life, Peter Rawlinson developed the Tesla Model S, one of the most iconic cars of the 2010s. These days, he's taking on quite a different role: chief technology officer of Lucid Motors, an aspiring Tesla competitor.

Lucid's prototype vehicle is the Lucid Air, which is billed in marketing materials as a "private jet on wheels" and will set you back more than $100,000. At a Los Angeles promotional event for the vehicle on February 11, Rawlinson showed off its highlights—acceleration that jumped from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 2.5 seconds, two electric motors with 1,000 horsepower, fully reclinable back seats, tablets, and touchscreens, an Alexa-style voice control system, noise-canceling technology inside the cabin, and a host of LIDAR and radar sensors for future autonomous driving opportunities.

Rawlinson boasted about the car's technology and the company's plans to get vehicles to customers starting in 2019. Lucid is currently accepting refundable deposits for the Air ranging from $2,500 to $25,000. The audience at the L.A. event consisted of a large number of Tesla and electric car enthusiasts (at least two guests cracked jokes about the parking lot being "a sea of Teslas") along with media and industry-watchers.

Until late last year, Lucid was known as Atieva, a company that got its start manufacturing batteries for electric buses and drivetrains. According to the Guardian's Mark Harris, two Chinese firms purchased an almost $100 million stake in Lucid: state-owned automaker Beijing Automotive Industry Holding (BAIC) and LeEco, which made its own splashy introduction to the U.S. market in late 2016. This past October, the company rebranded as Lucid after Recode obtained public documents with details of their new car. Other investors in the company include Venture Rockefeller and Mitsui & Co.

As for Lucid, it's following the Tesla playbook by premiering a high-end electric car as its initial model. The company's top brass includes more than its fair share of ex-Teslaites. In addition to Rawlinson, cofounder Bernard Tse (who departed the company in 2015) is a former Tesla VP, and its heads of sales, marketing, and supply chain are all Tesla veterans. Their engineering team includes many former Tesla employees as well.

The Lucid Air makes for an exceedingly fun test drive. As I rode in an engineering prototype as a passenger, the car accelerated to 50 miles per hour almost as soon as the driver stepped on the gas pedal. It flawlessly made hairpin turns in a parking garage, and the inside was amazingly roomy—for an electric car, at least. Even though this was a prototype in camouflage with many of the car's passenger bells and whistles stripped out, the sheer space the interior offered was impressive.

Still, Lucid faces an uphill climb: Tesla has a lock on the luxury electric car market in the United States, and doubters have to look no further than the current troubles of Faraday Future (which has investors in common with Lucid and also its share of ex-Tesla employees) to see what can go wrong for electric car startups. Lucid has to reassure customers that they will have their vehicles in 2019, and that there will be a robust charging network in place—and that's just for starters.

According to Lucid, the company plans to build a $700 million manufacturing plant in Arizona, which will begin production in 2018. Lucid also announced a battery partnership with Samsung this past December. Some 255 units are planned for customer sale in 2019, with the highest-end version, the "launch edition," selling for approximately $165,000.

Will your boss mind if you take on that side project? Are you sure?

Even though you love your day job, you've got some big ideas for a new passion project. Or maybe you're saving for a big trip and looking for cash flow outside of your career. Or perhaps you're trying to monetize a hobby you love.

Whatever the case, side gigs—no matter what form they take—are becoming a smart move both financially and career-wise. And the smartest people know there are a few questions you should ask before diving in if you're currently employed full time.

1. Are Side Hustles Even Allowed At My Company?

In an economy where 39% of working millennials have started their own gig on the side, smart employers understand that bans on outside projects can stifle creativity, push employees underground, and create a culture of distrust. They also know they stand to lose out on really exceptional and industrious people. After all, it takes some serious drive to add more work to your plate when you could spend your evenings lounging around instead.

But before moving ahead, you need to scan through the fine print on your contract and the company handbook to make sure you're in the clear legally. Read carefully to make sure there isn't a potential conflict of interest (more on this below!) or specific policies such as a non-compete clause. Look specifically for sections that discuss how long the non-compete applies, what type of work you are prohibited from doing, and whether or not the non-compete is only regional.

If you don't, you could be setting yourself up to get fired or worse, sued. Unless your side hustle is in the exact same line of work as your day job, it probably won't be an issue—but better to be safe than sorry.

2. How Do I Know If There's A Conflict Of Interest?

The simple, no-mess way to avoid any potential conflicts of interest is to set up a meeting with human resources or your corporate legal rep.

There's no need to go into specifics about the clients, the size of your projects, or what they are paying you. But a quick rundown of the basic information will help you avoid some of the major pitfalls, such as poaching your company's clients, unintentionally stealing intellectual property, or using their resources on your side gig (yes, including that work-issued laptop that you bring home to watch Netflix on).

3. Do I Have To Tell My Boss? My Company? HR?

If what you plan to do is allowed by your company, then there's no reason why you necessarily need to disclose your side hustle. But although it isn't legally necessary to tell folks, it's more than likely—with social media—that one of your coworkers will find out.

If your office is one where a Facebook discovery could lead to an awkward conversation with your boss, save yourself in advance by just giving them a heads up that you're working on something outside the office.

Use this opportunity to explain how the skills you stand to gain from your side hustle will benefit your employer, your project team, or the company down the road. Pitching your side project this way will temper your supervisor's fears that you've become disenchanted with your job and make him or her focus on the value of your entrepreneurial spirit. Who knows, they might even have some helpful advice or potential connections.

This will not only ease any anxiety you might be feeling about doing something sneaky, but will also prevent your supervisor from feeling that you were dishonest or shady with them. The last thing you want is them blaming a recent mistake on the fact you're not focused.

4. How Can I Make it Clear to My Manager That I'm Still 100% Into My Current Job?

Depending on who you're talking with, the term "side hustle" can come off as a dirty word. While rare nowadays, there are still those who think an employee won't be able to give his or her best effort at 9-to-5 job while also focusing on a part-time business venture. That by having a side project, you are in some ways cheating on your employer.

The best way to put your boss at ease is to have that initial "Here's what I'm working on conversation" and assure them of your commitment. Then, set strict boundaries for yourself and stick to them. Keep in mind that after this discussion, your performance at work might be viewed under a microscope, so you need to be sure you're on time for meetings, hitting your deadlines, and just generally firing on all cylinders.

And know this: No supervisor, no matter how open he or she is to your project—will be pleased if they catch you working on your own business on their dime, especially if you're not hitting all your goals at work.

It can be exhausting to put in a full day and then turn around to work on your side hustle all night. But because it can be such a rewarding way to gain valuable skills, supplement your income, or make you feel great, you should try to make it happen. Because if you do all of the above—checking to make sure you're not doing anything unethical or illegal and talking to your boss—there's nothing really stopping you.

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

Now you really need to remove those embarrassing photos from your page.

Starting today job seekers will have a new place to go when searching for the perfect position: Facebook.

The social network is now allowing businesses in the United States and Canada to post job openings on their pages, as well as a new jobs bookmark. Within Facebook—and Facebook Messenger—businesses will be able to track applications and communicate directly with applicants.

The feature has been in testing for a while now and is already being used by a few small businesses that have reported back success with the platform.

"It took three minutes to fill out the information and put it out there. Then someone saw the post, we talked, and it was done," Wendy Grahn, co-owner of the Chicago-based Lakeview Kitchen and Market said in a statement.

That ease both in making a job posting and connecting with potential applicants puts Facebook at an advantage over some of its competition. A recent study by ADP found that 14.4 million people have used social media when looking for a job. An astounding 73% of employers have hired people using social media at some point during the process, and almost half of employers, 42%, said that they thought the quality of the candidates improved.

With the new Facebook feature, jobs will show up in some potential applicant's Newsfeed, allowing employers to reach people that might have not otherwise been aware of the company of the available position. When an applicant clicks on an "Apply Now" button, a form will appear with some of their information pre-populated with the info they used when signing up for Facebook, making the process to apply as simple as posting the job itself.

The feature also makes it simpler than ever for employers to discover your unflattering Facebook posts. Applicants will be able to control what parts of their Facebook profile they choose to share with employers; however, the new feature means it's more important than ever to make sure your public posts on the social network are something you'd be willing to share with your future boss, because she's probably looking at them.

An anonymous agency staffer explains how Department of Labor employees secretly petitioned against Puzder's nomination.

A Senate committee will begin hearings this week on the confirmation of Donald Trump's nominee for labor secretary, fast-food magnate Andrew Puzder. And like most Trump cabinet nominations, Puzder is controversial.

Senator Elizabeth Warren issued a press release highlighting his "opposition to minimum wage laws and other vital protections for workers and families, and his company's prolific history of labor and discrimination suits." Oprah Winfrey threw some fuel on the fire by releasing to the Senate a (hard-to-find) video of an episode of her show in which Puzder's ex-wife leveled allegations of physical abuse.

But the most damning criticism may be from the current and former employees of the department Puzder hopes to lead. Shortly after his nomination was announced in December, an internal petition opposing Puzder's confirmation began circulating chain letter-style among current and former Department of Labor (DOL) staffers. One DOL staffer, who spoke to Fast Company on a condition of anonymity, says the petition originated in the Office of the Solicitor, where hundreds of lawyers work to enforce the nation's labor laws.

The employees of the Labor Department are hardly the first to disagree with their potential new boss. Their methods might not work in every workplace, but here's how DOL employees have managed to take a stand without putting their livelihoods in jeopardy.

Carefully Managed Dissent

Our DOL source received the petition email January 31st, but chatter within the agency about Puzder began well before that. (Trump nominated Puzder December 9th.) The discussions had been "uncomfortable," the source said, because everyone realized they might soon be reporting to Puzder.

The Labor Department comprises many agencies and bureaus responsible for a myriad of tasks, but its main jobs are compiling objective employment data, rule making, and enforcing labor laws. Solicitors Office lawyers carry that work into the real world, resolving cases and prosecuting offenders across the country.

Department of Labor staffers are prohibited by law from engaging in any political advocacy during work hours or on work property. So the petition email was sent via the personal email accounts of current and former agency staffers. Deciding who would be sympathetic to the cause was a delicate matter, which is why the email was distributed like a chain letter. It originated with a small group of people in the Solicitors office, then was forwarded to colleagues they believed held similar views. The email asked that each recipient send the letter to 10 other colleagues who might want to sign.

For the Labor Department employees who drafted, signed, and circulated the petition, the risks were considerable. But, as our source points out, for many in the agency Puzder represents such a threat to the core mission of the agency—to protect the rights of workers—that they were moved to participate anyway.

The email, which came to staffers with the subject line, "Concerns about Puzder," opens like this:

Dear Colleagues,
As we imagine many of you have also done, a number of us have recently been talking about how upset we are about President Trump's nominee to serve as secretary of labor. And we decided that there might just be something we can do about it in our capacity as private citizens.

The petition, it's hoped, will influence the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, which will review Puzder's nomination before it's sent to the Senate Floor for a vote. They hope to target Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of the members of the committee, who has already publicly expressed concerns about Puzder's fitness for the cabinet post. From the email:

We believe that a carefully drafted and measured letter . . . could potentially help to influence her vote. If Senator Collins were to vote against Mr. Puzder (assuming the democratic members of the committee also vote against him), the administration would have a choice of withdrawing the nomination or allowing it to go to the Senate floor with a negative recommendation from the committee. Faced with that prospect, the administration might well withdraw Mr. Puzder's nomination.

The email petition gave no indication of how many staffers have already signed. The originators of the letter say they will only send the letter to the confirmation committee if 200 or more current staffers sign. As of Tuesday, the letter had not yet been sent to the committee. However, since it's been shared with the media, sources within the Senate committee say that members are aware of its content.

What The DOL Could Look Like Under Puzder

It's the unpredictability of Puzder as labor secretary that's causing unease in the agency now, our source says. Democratic administrations favor a labor secretary who emphasizes legal enforcement of labor regulations. Republican administrations, on the other hand, typically appoint a labor secretary who emphasizes resolving regulatory breaches through non-legal means. But Puzder has no public service record to use as a bellwether to predict his future behavior. That, coupled with his professional and personal record, makes him an atypical—and unpredictable—appointee, to say the least.

The recent Labor rulings that Puzder would likely try to immediately change include an overtime pay regulation finalized last spring, the federal minimum wage increase that was a keystone of the Democratic platform, and updated paid leave guarantees that President Obama signed via executive order last year.

The Labor Department also enforces several immigration regulations. But Puzder's views on immigration don't line up neatly with Trump's—which makes the outcome there difficult to predict.

Nevertheless, Puzder is likely to win confirmation. "If they didn't defect over Betsy DeVos, they're not going to defect over Andrew Puzder," says Alec Levenson, a labor economist and USC's Marshall School of Business. "Unless they discover something else about him that isn't public yet.

"I mean, he doesn't look like evil incarnate," Levenson said, "but he doesn't mind if workers' lives get harder, either."