You already know about time "batching," but when those batch periods slide all over your schedule, they aren't much good to you.
My company recently surveyed more than 350 U.S. business owners on the biggest time-wasters in their workdays. The results weren't much of a shock, with email coming up on top (57%) by a three-to-one margin over phone calls and interruptions from colleagues, tied for second at 17% each. (Meetings brought up the rear at 9%.)
I've had the same email-heavy headaches, and probably you have, too. But the received wisdom, which is generally to set aside a couple times a day just for handling emails, doesn't always cut it. Those chunks of time devoted to email maintenance usually slide all over your calendar—they're seldom appointments that you make with yourself and end up actually keeping.
So I've tried something else. Instead, I've managed to designate a certain weekday—and, after a little more practice, two weekdays—where I can set aside a chunk of time to focus completely on one thing only. Those days stay fixed, no matter what. And when they come around each week, all I do is work on a single project for at least half the day—no emails, no phone calls, no meetings. Here's how it works.
A "Focus Day" is a bit of a misnomer. You won't necessarily focus on a single project all day long, but on a given day, on a weekly basis, you will have a three to four-hour block of time on your calendar to do deep, uninterrupted work. That could mean sitting down to write up that key proposal you've been procrastinating on, or scheduling a top customer visit and getting your pitch in order, or meeting with your leadership team to sketch our next quarter's goals.
What makes this different than task batching is that you schedule out your Focus Day far in advance. It's not just looking at your calendar and saying, "Okay, I'll carve out two hours for myself tomorrow for sure"—because tomorrow is way too late. Something else will inevitably pop up to sideline your plan. Instead, you need to have a recurring, definite appointment with yourself, blocked out on your calendar, week after week. That way, it's a lot harder to stand yourself up.
One of my business coaching clients sets aside Tuesdays as his Focus Day, blocking out 8–11 a.m. for his highest-value work every single week. Personally, I pick both Tuesdays and Thursdays as my weekly Focus Days. If you were to look at my Outlook calendar, you'd see a recurring appointment labeled "Focus Day" from 8 a.m.–noon on each of these days between now and 2020.
When you have a Focus Day, every non–Focus Day becomes a "Push Day." Your Push Days are all the other days of the week where you just push your normal projects another step forward. Interruptions come and go like always, but they don't do as much damage. If Focus Days help you create long-term impact, Push Days keep your day-to-day operations rolling ahead.
Here are a few tips to make this technique work for you, based on what I've learned helping hundreds of coaching clients adopt it over the past decade:
Don't designate the beginning or the end of your workweek as your Focus Day. Too many urgent issues usually demand your attention on those days. So if you work Monday through Friday, Mondays or Fridays should probably both be ordinary Push Days. It's usually easier to honor your Focus Day commitment if it comes midweek.
Even though you're doing solo work on your Focus Day, you'll need your team to help out—including by steering clear when you're doing your most focused work. So you've got to communicate.
Let your team know when your Focus Day falls and which part of the day you've blocked off each week for intensive projects. And share why you think that's so important; let them know why sticking to this commitment isn't just a personal time-management quirk, it actually helps the business succeed. You can even encourage them to see for themselves: Invite a few key team members to take their own Focus Days, too. You'll soon seen the productivity boost having a ripple effect.
On your Focus Day, it doesn't hurt to get out of your office completely, and away from distractions. Productivity expert Gloria Marks shared in an interview with Fast Company back in 2008 that one of her keys to getting focus time was to stay out of the office altogether. "I stay home," she said, explaining that "that's the only way I'm not going to be interrupted."
So if your company offers flexible hours, take advantage of them. And if you can't work from home once a week, try to book that small, underused conference room in your office. Or try grabbing a table at a local cafe around the corner from your work, so you can head back into the office quickly when your focus time is up.
Wherever you do it, make sure you're armed with only the materials you need to do your key work on your Focus Day. That running to-do list of other tasks? Leave it behind. That way, you couldn't work on them even if you wanted to.
Remember that Focus Days aren't about being off by yourself—they're about setting aside regular chunks of time to dig into your top value-producing activities. And for many people this can actually mean meetings, phone calls, or critical emails. Whatever most needs your focus, that's what you do—every week, without fail.
Trump plans to shred trade deals as Congress ponders a border tax. Expect inflation—and eventual voter payback.
Would you pay an extra $300 or $400 for your next iPhone?
That's roughly how much a border tax proposal being considered in the House of Representatives could inflate the sticker price. The plan, which has already earned some lukewarm support from President Trump, would abolish the current 35% corporate income tax and instead slap a 20% tax on American companies' imports but exempt their exports.
But the higher labor costs of assembling components and building smartphones in the U.S., not to mention the disruption of a sprawling and long-established supply chain in Asia, would still very likely cause some sticker shock as the prices of iPhones, Kindles, and other popular gadgets all but inevitably climb.
On Tuesday, Apple CFO Luca Maestri warned as much. It would be "very hard for us to imagine that a border tax would be good for the U.S. economy, because it would burden the consumer and the dollar would appreciate versus where it is today, which is already too strong," he told an audience of investors at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. "It doesn't yield a positive outcome."
Especially not for consumers who are used to low prices at Walmart and Target, where big price increases would likely extend far beyond just mobile devices to include lots of everyday products made overseas, from clothes to toys to toothbrushes. When Trump met with the CEOs of big retailers on Wednesday, many of them expressed their opposition to the proposal.
"If enacted, the House proposal would have profound implications for our guests and business, and at Target, we believe that anything that raises prices for families is not a good idea for America," a company executive told the Wall Street Journal. Companies aren't just looking to protect consumers' wallets, of course, they're also trying to defend their bottom lines. As Bloomberg noted, when J.C. Penney tried cutting back on discounts, customers fled and the company's revenue tumbled 24% in one year.
But maybe it's worth biting the bullet for the sake of the economy? Probably not. Despite reassurances from the proposal's backers, inflation would hardly be tamed by a slightly stronger dollar. Our currency is already quite strong, and it would have to really surge in value to counter the impact of rising prices. Even the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation, which supports the proposal, estimates that it might take some time for the expected adjustment in the exchange rate to counter inflation.
And inflation, after all, is now the main threat lurking in the background, threatening to overwhelm the economy in the next few years under our protectionist president. Already, U.S. retail sales rose more than expected in January, and the consumer price index, a key measure of inflation, saw its largest increase in four years, according to government figures.
Despite all this, the word "inflation" rarely if ever passes between the lips of lawmakers and business leaders on cable news. That's likely because it's been almost 40 years since it made Americans' lives miserable during the oil crisis of the late 1970s. By now, we're all so used to ultra-cheap gadgets and T-shirts that we're unprepared for its comeback. We pay about the same amount for clothing now as we did back in the early 1990s, and it's actually cheaper to buy a shirt here than it is in Haiti or Romania, according to the most recent World Bank statistics, from 2011.
Inflation also seems like a foreign concept to President Trump, who mentioned the word only three times in his best-known book The Art of the Deal, despite its being published just a few years after the U.S. economy had emerged from that inflation-plagued era. During his campaign, he fulminated about taxing imports and tearing up trade deals like NAFTA, while hardly giving a thought to the almost-certain likelihood of inflation. And for all his political instincts, Trump seems to not to grasp that any significant increase in prices will inflict pain on consumers and create widespread anger. After all, his hero (and his compatriots'), Ronald Reagan, rode to victory on the backs of voters outraged over Jimmy Carter's failure to turn the tide of inflation back in 1980.
But who can be surprised? Trump has never really ventured into retail, where you have to worry about attracting fickle shoppers with bargain prices. Maybe once upon a time, when he was selling two-bedroom homes to middle-class couples in Queens in the 1970s, he cared about affordability. But after decades of expanding his empire—first across the river to fancy high-rises in Manhattan and then around the world, from golf clubs in Scotland to hotels in Dubai—all that glitters for him these days is gold. As a luxury real-estate developer with occasional sidetracks into "premium" products like Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks, he's had the opposite instinct: Charge high prices for those aspiring to glamorous lifestyles, at any cost.
Trump has spent a riotous four weeks in office after sweeping into the White House on political headwinds few others could feel blowing. But the border tax proposal and his plans to torch trade deals may prove the new president's most damaging miscalculations yet. Failing to consider the impact of such measures on consumers could make him even more unpopular than he is already—and that's one thing that even a mogul like Trump may not be able to afford.
Hackers can gain access to corporate information in some creative ways, including through companies' printers.
Ang Cui is the CEO and chief scientist of Red Balloon Security, but from 2008 until 2015 he was a graduate student at Columbia University, where he spent more time thinking about laser printers than most of the people who used them. Cui wondered, in particular, whether he could hack into a corporate printer in order to steal sensitive business data, thinking if he could pull it off, someone with more than a merely academic interest in doing so could do the same.
After all, Cui noticed, printers were way behind the times. IT teams rarely change the admin passwords on printers as often as they should, and the software and the firmware used in printers—especially commercial printers for the home office—contain a lot of basic security flaws. The thing is, very few people see an office printer as vulnerable. They think they're enjoying what's sometimes called "security by obscurity": If no one notices the flaw, then it isn't there.
But many printers and copiers have one important thing in common—they often both contain hard drives. Unless that hard drive is encrypted (and many are not), it's possible to find out later on what's been printed. All this has been known for years. What Cui wondered was if he could essentially turn a company printer against its owners. Here's what he discovered.
To make things more interesting, Cui wanted to attack the printer's firmware code, the programming embedded inside a chip within the printer. Unlike traditional PCs and mobile devices, digital TVs and other "smart" electronics don't have the power or the processing resources to run a full-blown operating system such as Android, Windows, and iOS.
Instead, they use what's called "real-time operating systems" (RTOS), which are stored on individual chips inside the device (frequently known as "fireware"). These chips store only the commands needed to operate the system and not much else. And occasionally even these simple commands need to be updated by the manufacturer or vendor. Since that happens so rarely, many manufacturers simply don't build in the proper security measures.
Cui wanted to see what would happen if he hacked the file format that Hewlett Packard (HP) used for its firmware updates, and he discovered that HP didn't check the validity of each update. So he created printer firmware of his own—and the printer accepted it, just like that. There was no authentication on the printer's side that the update came from HP. The printer only cared that the code was in the expected format. Cui was now free to explore.
In one widely reported experiment, Cui found that he could do more than gain access to sensitive company information. He could turn on the fuser bar, the part of the printer that heats the paper after the ink has been applied, and leave it on, which would cause the printer to actually catch fire.
The vendor—not HP—immediately responded by arguing that there was a thermo fail-safe within the fuser bar, meaning the printer could never overheat. However, that was Cui's point: He'd managed to turn that fail-safe feature off so that the machine could burst into flames.
As a result of these experiments, Cui and his adviser, Salvatore Stolfo, argued that printers were weak links in any organization or home. For example, the HR department of a Fortune 500 company might receive a maliciously coded resume file over the internet. In the time it takes the hiring manager to print that document, the printer through which it travels could be fully compromised by the hacker's resume installing a malicious version of the firmware.
There are solutions here. "Secure printing," also known as "pull printing," is a process that makes sure documents are only released upon a user's authentication at the printer terminal itself, usually by using a PIN, smart card, or biometric fingerprint. Pull printing also eliminates unclaimed documents, preventing sensitive information from lying around for everyone to see. But companies grappling with cybersecurity concerns often find that when they plug one hole, two more pop up.
Building on his printer attacks, Cui found similar vulnerabilities in "Voice over Internet Protocol" (VoIP) telephones, typically used for conference calls. As with printers, these devices had major security vulnerabilities that were hidden in plain sight. Most VoIP phones have a hands-free option that lets you put someone on speakerphone. There's also an "off the hook" switch, which tells the phone when someone has picked up the receiver and when it's been put back with speakerphone till on. Cui realized that if he could compromise the "off the hook" switch, he could make the phone listen to conversations nearby via the speakerphone microphone—even when the receiver was on the hook!
Each time Cui has presented this research, using different VoIP phones, the vendor was notified in advance and ultimately produced a fix. But Cui has pointed out that just because a patch exists doesn't mean it gets applied. Some of the unpatched phones might still be sitting in offices, hotels, and hospitals right now.
Previously, researchers at Stanford University and in Israel found that even having your mobile phone sitting next to your computer at work can allow a third party to eavesdrop. The trick requires malware to be inserted onto your mobile device. But with maliciously coded apps available for download from rogue app stores, that's easy enough, right?
With the malware installed on your mobile phone, the gyroscope within the phone is now sensitive enough to pick up slight vibrations. The malware in this case, researchers say, can also pick up minute air vibrations, including those produced by human speech. Google's Android operating system allows movements from the sensors to be read at 200 Hz, or 200 cycles per second. Most human voices range from 80 to 250 Hz. That means the sensor can pick up a significant portion of those voices. Researchers even built a custom speech-recognition program designed to interpret the 80–250 Hz signals further.
And sorry, but wireless keyboards are vulnerable, too. Security researcher Samy Kamkar developed something called KeySweeper, a disguised USB charger that wirelessly and passively looks for, decrypts, logs, and reports back (over GSM) all keystrokes from any Microsoft wireless keyboard in the vicinity.
So just because you avoid bogus hotspots at cafés and airports doesn't mean you're much safer in your office. Someone in your office may set up a wireless hotspot, and your device might automatically connect to it. IT departments typically scan for such devices, but sometimes they don't. The point here is neither to strike fear into the hearts of modern office workers nor to castigate IT teams, which are often spread thin and doing the best they can. But especially as companies are struggling with a cybersecurity skills gap, a little heightened awareness around the office can go a long way.
More than a decade's worth of research shows there may be some hidden social upsides to screen time.
In a 2011 study at Stanford University, researchers asked a group of girls ages 8 to 12 by to surf the internet for up to five hours, then share how happy and socially comfortable they felt. The results weren't encouraging. The more time the girls spent online, the less content and at ease in social settings they became, compared to peers whose screen time was more limited. Two years later, a separate study found that the mere presence of a cell phone during a face-to-face conversation reduces feelings of closeness, trust, and relationship quality—even if the phone isn't being used.
The fear that our reliance on technology is preventing us from connecting face-to-face in real time is nothing new. And while the data pointing in that direction should give us pause, there's another story as well, about how technology itself can help us roll back some of the problems it's created. Geographically divided families who communicate on Skype, and deployed soldiers who read bedtime stories to their kids over FaceTime, know this already.
But it's worth pointing out that these aren't shabby substitutes for other forms of communication, they're new ones altogether. And they may hold the key for everybody to start using their gadgets in more human ways.
One of the most widely quoted studies on communication and technology has since been replicated and updated to reveal fascinating new insights. The original 1998 research, conducted by Carnegie Mellon's Robert E. Kraut, tracked the internet use of families with high school students. Kraut found that as internet use went up, so did the teenagers' incidence of depression. Social support and other measures of psychological well-being went down.
But in 2002, Kraut repeated the same experiment, this time paying careful attention to whether students were interacting with people with whom they had strong ties (close friends, family, etc.) or weak ties (strangers, acquaintances). By parsing how time was spent online—and with whom—Kraut found something surprising: The students who interacted primarily with strong ties showed a decrease in depression, a reduction in loneliness, and an increase in the level of perceived social support.
Another study of more than 600 Internet users found that half had turned online connections into physical interactions, and 22% of those later became serious relationships (engaged, married, or living together). And a two-year follow-up study confirmed that those partnerships were just as stable as relationships initiated the old-fashioned way.
Keith Hampton, a communications expert at Rutgers University, argues that the idea that we interact either online or offline is a false dichotomy. On balance, he's convinced that social media and the internet are actually drawing us closer together—both online and offline. "I don't think it's people moving online, I think it's people adding the digital mode of communication to already existing relationships," Hampton in 2015.
Hampton's research suggests that the more different kinds of media that people use in order to interact—phone, email, in-person, text, Facebook—the stronger their relationships tend to be. Similarly, in a 2012 Pew study of more than 2,200 Americans, 55% of internet users said their email exchanges had improved their connections to family members, and 66% say the same thing when it came to their good friends.
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When Peter Steppe create OEX Circle in 2015, an app designed to trigger greater human connection using phones, he was convinced technology was getting in the way of human interaction. The app encouraged everyone in a group to put their phones down on the table; and the longer the phones stayed there, the stronger the "flame" grew and the more points users earned. But before long he realized this approach wasn't solving the bigger issue. OEX Circle helped people to not fiddle with their phones, but it didn't necessarily encourage them to connect better overall.
Steppe concluded that perhaps a better challenge than finding ways to wean people off their gadgets would be to use them to connect in ways they otherwise wouldn't. So over the past year, he and his team rebuilt and rebranded the app under the name "Campfire," so it would feel "a bit like going outdoors, yet at the urban table," he explains. Campfire is designed to spur "in the moment," 30-minute daily doses of interaction with friends and family—all by phone. That theory will be tested when the app launches in the iTunes store later this month.
In line with the research, Steppe now believes that strong ties lead to the most sustained feelings of happiness. But he's also more optimistic about weak ties, since he sees them as seeds of new friendships. Here's to hoping they are.
Whether you're ditching law a degree right after earning it or leaving politics for a job in TV, don't be afraid to pivot early.
Growing up, my girl crushes swung between Judy Blume and Eleanor Roosevelt. I gravitated toward irreverent women who had stories to tell and history to make. Maybe because of this, I felt destined for a career in politics. As a campus activist at Northwestern University, I geeked out to all things political. I volunteered on Chicago congressional campaigns and Bill Clinton's first presidential run. I even ran as a delegate for the Democratic National Convention in 1992. Capitol Hill was my Hollywood, where wonky, earnest do-gooders who wanted to change the world were celebrated. Or so I imagined.
After college, I landed a coveted position as a Capitol Hill press secretary, working for a brash, ambitious freshman congressman from South Florida. At 21 years old, I was not only the youngest press secretary on the Hill but also the lowest paid, making a paltry $15,000 a year. I could barely afford a Metro ticket, but in my costume pearls and hand-me-down skirt suits, I felt drunk with importance as I strode purposefully through the Capitol's corridors, kitten heels clicking against the marble floor.
Two years on the Hill was all it took to realize I needed a career change—at the ripe age of 23. I decided I'd rather be covering the news than pitching stories to news people. Many new grads are advised not to agonize about having to course-correct when you first start out. After all, your 20s are about taking chances and moving in different directions. That may work for some, but for others, it can mean starting back at the bottom of each new industry. Before long, you'll be hovering around 30 and still hoping to find an industry you love.
But for me, a few pivots actually made sense, and when I look back, I see a through-line to my career. It's not random; it makes sense—and ultimately made me a more interesting and appealing job candidate. Here's how I pulled it off.
After quitting D.C., I moved to New York and hustled to get a job—any job—in TV. My first position was as an assistant producer on the investigative team at Fox's The New 'A Current Affair,' a tabloid show with a clunky name. When I interviewed, I sold myself as someone who knew how to pitch, package, and craft a story. I was on the other side of media now, but many of the skills I'd used on the Hill felt similar.
A year later, I jumped again, this time getting a gig at Dateline. At NBC, my Capitol Hill experience was valued. It gave me a certain gravitas and credibility. Once again, my experience in a different industry held currency.
Millennials are expected to have six jobs before they turn 30. And pivoting in your career, especially in the early years, is getting even more common; by one recent estimate, around half of global workers are expected to change jobs before 2018 rolls around.
But because switching jobs has become the new normal, it may be easier to pivot than ever before. One rule of thumb that's useful to follow is to stick with your gut. Assessing what you're really good at can help direct your move, even if it doesn't feel "strategic." It's not that you shouldn't be thoughtful about your pivot, but zeroing in on your strengths and with what gets you juiced is the first step to figuring out what to do next.
After graduating from the University of Michigan Law School, Debra Feinberg began her career in real estate law. Two years later, she was bored. Uninspired by her work, Feinberg was itching for something else. It was the summer of 2008, and she'd heard that the Obama campaign was hiring fellows to run field operations. This was exactly the change Feinberg needed. The position paid a small stipend to move to western Michigan and work as a grassroots organizer, setting up house parties and growing a network of dedicated volunteers.
"The day I got the Obama fellowship, I quit my job," Feinberg says. "It was a big risk. I sublet my apartment in New York and moved to western Michigan, which was a big shock—it wasn't Ann Arbor or Detroit. But it opened up an entire new world for me," she recalls. Realizing she was good at her campaign job, Feinberg decided, "when I come home I need to find a job that lets me do this kind of work. I'm not sure what that job is yet, but I have to find it."
After the Obama fellowship ended, Feinberg moved back to New York and answered a political job ad on Craigslist. The ad turned out to be for Vito Lopez, one of the most influential people in New York state politics, who was looking for a legislative assistant in his Brooklyn office. Some of the work involved real estate issues. Feinberg's background in real estate law, plus her campaign experience, made her a strong candidate. Feinberg got the job and ended up staying with Lopez for four years, ultimately becoming his chief of staff.
"It's crazy when I look back and think that having worked on the campaign and then answering that ad completely changed the course of my life," Feinberg says. "Having a J.D. from the University of Michigan is not what defined my career path, it's the other, untraditional moves that I have made."
When you're looking to pivot into a new industry but only have a few short years of job experience, there's a bit of old-fashioned career advice that still holds true: Pinpoint those "transferrable skills." These days, though, a lot can count as transferrable. Any areas of overlap from what you do now to where you want to go is the part of your resume you'll really want to dial up—especially if you can't afford to start out again at the bottom.
Yes, you will need to develop other skill sets, but what do you have now? For instance, you can spin "event planning," whether it's for a nonprofit or for weddings, into "project management." Marketing and writing skills are attractive to many industries. And in today's niche workforce, where companies from startups to digital agencies specialize more and more, having an expertise in finance, law, design, or even fashion can make you stand out.
Early in your career, you won't have an extensive network to lean on. But you have more connections than you realize. Back in 1973, Johns Hopkins sociologist Mark Granovetter found that the best job leads came from distant acquaintances—which he called "weak ties"—not close friends or family. That's because the closely knit groups you belong to are filled with people who know roughly the same things that you do. You need to get outside of that space, pushing beyond your core group. The weak tie is essentially the bridge to getting information.
In 2017, that theory is still sound. Fast Company recently spoke with a 26-year-old graphic designer who's less than a year into her job at Taco Bell, which she landed through a college acquaintance. The two weren't even "keeping in touch" in a one-on-one sense, Charlene Chand pointed out; they were Facebook friends, and when her former classmate posted the job opening on the platform, Chand dropped her a message saying she was interested. The rest is history.
Finally, a word of comfort: Mid-20s career crises are nothing new, but the rates at which young people are doing something about it are increasing. That means you're much less likely to face an automatic penalty for changing careers—even repeatedly—early on. Staying current and doing work that gives us purpose and fulfillment is why so many of us switch things up, and it can continue deep into our careers.
You don't have to reach a certain age or level of experience before that's "allowed." Take the risk. Don't let fear hold you back. You'll wind up someplace better, even if it takes awhile to get there.
Here's what leaders at GM, PayPal, SoulCycle, and Twitter wish they had known much sooner.
It's easy to assume that the most successful people are expert planners who knew exactly where they wanted to be at each point in their career.
That's rarely the case. Much more often, those folks were simply open to new opportunities from the very beginning—they took chances and learned to embrace what made them unique. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't have done a few things differently. I spoke with six executives at major companies like PayPal, GM, SoulCycle, and Salesforce to learn what advice they wish they'd gotten when they were younger.
"In today's heavily prescribed, overly programmed world, it's easy to believe—even at age 22—that you need to plan every detail of your future career," says General Motors CEO Mary Barra. But that's not the case.
"While planning for your future is great, the fact is, things change," says Barra, looking back. There are always new opportunities around the corner that you won't know are waiting there until they're right in front of you. "If you pass on them because they don't fit neatly into your current plan or because you're afraid, you could easily miss your best opportunities for growth."
Leah Sweet, VP of global product and engineering, planning, and operations at PayPal (which in full disclosure is my employer, too) says she wished she'd had more confidence earlier on. "I always assumed everyone was smarter than me," Sweet says, touching on a sentiment common to many women starting their careers.
But too often, the source of young professionals' insecurities later turn out to be their strategic advantages, Sweet has since learned. "People will always have differences—whether it's gender, culture, age, or something else—but that's part of the beauty of life." Embrace them, she counsels, don't run from them. "Instead, figure out how to use your unique differences to propel you forward."
Kris Miller, chief strategy officer at eBay, said she'd go back and advise her younger self to live and work abroad. "Over the course of my career, I have traveled around the world. I have always loved traveling to other countries, meeting new people, and experiencing other cultures. But I have never lived abroad," says Miller.
Had she done so, Miller believes it would've proved an asset, not to mention personally fulfilling. She urges younger professionals to go someplace new and set down roots. "Learn their language. Live in their shoes. View the world through their lens."
Not only does that expand your own perspective, says Miller, it can also help you grasp why consumer attitudes and behaviors differ around the world, which "can be helpful to becoming an even better global business leader and a more empathetic human being."
SoulCycle CEO Melanie Whelan wishes she'd focused on what made her happy rather than on others' expectations. "You may think you are supposed to follow a career path—to work in finance, become a lawyer, or study medicine," Whelan acknowledges, echoing Barra. And "oftentimes your perceptions of your path come from your family or friends"—people you trust and listen to.
But that can make it harder to find out what really matters to you, she says. "Figure out what makes you excited or happy, and go after a job that matches that passion," says Whelan. That may sound familiar or obvious, but it's easy to lose sight of when you're young and everybody's giving you their own bits of career wisdom.
"It's much easier to be all-in when you're excited about where you're going every day," she adds.
Suzanne DiBianca, EVP of corporate relations and chief philanthropy officer at Salesforce, wishes she'd been counseled to push for what she was worth right from the outset.
At some points in your career it pays to be patient, and other times you've got to "be decisive and push the boundaries," says DiBianca. But since your first few years in the job force often sets up your earning potential later down the road, it's important not to under-negotiate.
"Annual performance reviews are a great example of this," she says, especially "because many women in the modern workplace just say 'thank you' and don't ask for more compensation even when they deserve it—which is more than likely the opposite approach of their male counterparts."
The advice DiBianca wishes she'd heard earlier? "Always know your value and never settle for less."
Wherever you're working, don't ever forget that you joined for a reason, says Jessica Verrilli, Twitter's senior director of corporate development and strategy. If she could offer a tip to her younger self, Verrilli says it would simply be to "take initiative and follow your instincts."
Throughout your whole career, anytime you accept a job offer it's because "you had conviction about the leadership, the company's trajectory, the product, your manager, or your colleagues," she points out. That's useful fuel for creating opportunities for yourself no matter what your job description might be.
"Harness the energy that brought you there, and direct it toward having the greatest impact possible—even if it falls outside the strict boundaries of your role."
We aren't all motivated by the same things. Here's how to secure everybody's buy-in, in this order.
Something needs to change, and you think you know how. In other words, you've got a vision, and now you just need to sell it to other people. To help you out, there are two basic facts of psychology you need to know. First, persuading anybody of anything means connecting with what matters to them already. And second, when it comes to what matters to people—in other words, what motivates them—most people fall along a spectrum.
There are people who tend to be more motivated by preventing loss, while others are more driven by pursuing gains. Our relative positions on that spectrum aren't fixed; we tend to move along it according to circumstances. But when it comes to getting buy-in, it's useful to think of your audience as made up of two groups: "protectors" and "innovators." Here's how to win them both over, in this order:
For some people, the top priority is protecting what they already have. That means they'll fear that whatever you're suggesting needs to change may lead to something important being lost. For them, you need to remove the risk out of that threat.
You may be tempted to start by selling your vision based on what there is to gain, then end with reassurances that it'll all work out as planned. Don't do that. Start by identifying who the protectors are, and speak to their fears first.
When people focus on avoiding losses, they tend to regard a vision for change with suspicion. Like antibodies in the bloodstream that attack foreign organisms before they have a chance to spread, "protectors" will smother an idea that appears to be a threat before it can be considered for its merits.
So take the time to understand how these people define their teams' core strengths and values. Let them know you respect what they stand for and share their beliefs. Every organization has a competitive advantage that sustains its success, and that's the thing many protectors fear sacrificing. To show them you're just as committed to protecting it, you need to demonstrate what the real risk is by not getting on board. Explain that change is necessary because the status quo is already under threat.
Frame your vision for change as serving the purpose of staying safe and successful. If your vision is to introduce virtual reality (VR) for military training, you'd want to point out to protectors that combatants in the future will ultimately gain access to that tool. In order to maintain a battlefield advantage, it's crucial to explore the technology's possibilities early on.
Two things to keep in mind. First, you only have to convince the protectors that your pitch is worth considering. By pointing out the new normal—the inevitable change you're facing no matter what choice you make (or don't make)—your proposal becomes much less of a threat to the status quo. And second, every organization has invested in people who keep things as they are, and there are more of them in bigger, more mature organizations. So the more stakeholders who are incentivized to defend the status quo, the more protectors you'll likely need to win over.
Protectors are the gatekeepers to change. Once through the gate, it's time to connect with the "innovators" who'll help you push your vision forward.
These are the risk takers, those who probably ruffle feathers now and then, but keep their teams dynamic and agile. Innovators can be your champions because they want to be at the forefront of change. So as someone with a vision to sell, you may find the innovators easy to talk to. They are like-minded. They speak your language. Like you, they willingly point out that the status quo has flaws.
But be wary of this easy rapport—it can be deceptive. Innovators aren't as easily won over as you might think. You can't race ahead until you've engaged them properly. After all, organizations will only take so many risks, which means they'll only allocate so many resources to the few risks they do take. Great innovators understand this scarcity, and likely have ideas of their own. They know that taking on your vision means forgoing another one.
So just as with protectors, you have to start by finding out what matters to the innovators in your audience. But the difference is that they're more interested in what there is to gain in your vision: How it is new? How it can help them achieve their visions? How it can help them gain what they've been seeking?
Frame your vision as a shared vision. Help them see how they stand to gain in their own agendas. This means listening and incorporating what you hear. Let the innovators mold your idea. Don't cling to it inflexibly; they can probably make it better. So let them do it, and give them credit for it. Gaining credit for moving the organization forward is often what innovators crave. You lose nothing by giving credit. Credit is like fire; it grows brighter the more it's shared. And nothing will make you look better than to have the organization's most respected innovators rallying around you.
Their engagement is key for the long term. Selling an idea is simple compared to the uphill battle of implementing it. Successful innovators have learned they're only rewarded once a great idea is actually implemented and begins to prove itself. In order for that to happen, you need champions all along the way.
With the protectors on board first and the innovators energized second, now you can clinch the deal. You've just got to secure the right people with the right messages in the right order.
We aren't all motivated by the same things. And the bigger the company, chances are the more polarization you'll find along this spectrum. But the basic formula is the same: Start by showing protectors how they'll avoid losing ground, and then show innovators how they'll be better off.
Plex's media server software has millions of tech-savvy fans, but can it survive the decline of DVDs and downloads?
For digital media hoarders and pirates, Plex is a household name. The nine-year-old Los Gatos, California, startup makes server software for streaming media files from one device—usually a PC—to phones, tablets, computers, game consoles, and TVs. Millions of people use Plex to access their digitized DVDs, video downloads, MP3 files, and photos from anywhere. And the company's fanatical fan base has made it a profitable business through a subscription program for premium features.
But in the age of Netflix, Hulu, and Spotify, Plex's business isn't future-proof. DVD sales and media downloads are on the decline, and even piracy has been weakened by legal streaming options. So in late January, Plex made a big bet on its future. For the first time, the company dipped into the $10 million in venture funding that it raised in 2014 and acquired WatchUp, a startup that turns online news clips into personalized newscasts. Podcasts, children's programming, virtual reality, and even deep links into other popular streaming apps could be next, as Plex tries to move away from the bring-your-own content business. The hope, says CEO Keith Valory, is to provide users with a "central dashboard" for all their content, powered by unbiased search and recommendations.
"All of the stuff we're talking about is five to seven years' worth of work, and if we do a great job, we'll build a big, massive company out of it," says Valory. "But we realize it's a huge undertaking, and it's going to take time."
Whether Plex has that luxury is another matter. While the company has a knack for software, it has little experience working with content owners, and risks being outmuscled by larger companies like Apple, Roku, Amazon, and Netflix, all of whom are also trying to become the starting point for media consumption.
Plex didn't start out with visions of being a media juggernaut. Instead, cofounders Elan Feingold, Scott Olechowski, and Cayce Ullman were trying to solve a simpler problem: What's the best way to access your media files on a television?
In early 2007, Olechowski suddenly had a lot of free time after the secure email startup he worked for, PostX, was acquired by Ironport systems, which itself was acquired by Cisco a few months later. Having reclaimed his nights and weekends, Olechowski—a self-proclaimed nerd—took some hardware from a previous failed startup and began cobbling together his own media server for his family's ripped DVDs, music files, and home videos.
"I had this rack-mountable server behind my TV, hooked up into a VGA to component video input, and a keyboard hooked up," Olechowski says. "And my wife looked at me like, 'Dude, this is not the answer.'"
Eventually, Olechowski discovered XBMC, an open-source program for hacked Xbox consoles that played a wide variety of media files. Olechowski set out to create an OS X version for Apple's Mac Mini, which could play HD video and came with a TV-friendly infrared remote. Through the XBMC forums, Olechowski found Feingold, a programmer who'd been working toward the same goal in his spare time. They pooled their efforts to launch the Mac app, and along with Ullman, who'd been the CEO of PostX, created Plex about a year later, splitting off from XMBC to focus on building up their media server software.
Although Plex's founders kept their day jobs, the product gained traction over the next couple years, and in 2010 it became a real business. The company raised $1 million from several angel backers including LG, which put a Plex app on its smart TVs and Blu-ray players. Plex also started to sell a $5 iPhone app, and used the money to hire developers from its community. (Although Plex is based in Los Gatos, the company has a distributed workforce.)
The real breakthrough, however, came in 2012, when the company launched Plex Pass, a subscription service that includes free access to Plex's apps, early previews of new features, and a grab bag of other perks. To the team's surprise, roughly 10% of Plex users became subscribers.
"We were at a point where it was make or break . . . and frankly, it just did so much better than we expected that we realized, 'Okay, there's probably a business here,'" Olechowski says.
The Plex team at its Los Gatos, California, headquarters.
Plex started thinking more about the bigger picture in 2013, when Valory joined the company as CEO. Ullman had left the company for personal reasons a couple years earlier, and Olechowski and Feingold—who were comfortable in their respective roles as product head and chief technical officer—needed someone to lead the business. But getting Valory on board took some convincing, Olechowski says, since Plex couldn't pay him the type of salary he'd earned in executive positions at Ironport and Cisco, where the two worked together.
"He'd been playing in the big leagues, and this was definitely a garage band, starting to play some clubs and having dreams about the arena," says Olechowski.
Still, Valory had already helped Plex set up its business and secure angel funding in 2010, and he ultimately bought into the vision of Plex as a labor of love with massive potential. He took the job at what Olechowski describes as "way below market" rates.
"It's not just about money grubbing," Olechowski says. "This is about delivering something people love, and turning it into a business, and we want to keep that spirit alive. Keith got that."
Soon after, Plex started pitching its long-term strategy around Silicon Valley, telling prospective investors that the world needed a central hub for media. At the time, anyone who used an Apple TV, Roku, or Amazon Fire TV was still staring at a sea of apps; Plex wanted to make the actual content easier to reach, tapping into the same system it had built for managing people's own media collections. In 2014, Kleiner Perkins invested $10 million.
Still, Plex didn't pursue its own streaming content right away. Instead, the company spent the next few years polishing its existing apps and expanding to new platforms. The Plex apps for Roku, PC, iOS, and Android have all received overhauls over the last few years, and new apps have arrived for Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Apple TV, and Chromecast.
"You shouldn't be tied to one platform to get the content experience you want," Valory says. "Because that was such a crucial element of it, we decided, we've got to go broad, and we knew it would take a couple of years to do that."
Last year, Plex took a small step away from the bring-your-own content approach by launching DVR support, a feature that users have requested for years. By plugging an antenna or CableCARD into an HDHomeRun networked tuner, Plex Pass users can record local broadcasts and unencrypted cable channels to the media server, and play those recordings via the Plex app. In other words, it's a way to tap into Plex's video management features without the need for ripped DVDs or downloaded videos.
"It was this nice first step that took advantage of all of our server capabilities, and all the cool stuff that we've built, and it started to expand the brand," Valory says. "Now, it's not just my content. I can get more content in."
Plex makes a point of supporting every major platform—even Windows 10.
The next step for Plex is to begin to serve up content directly, starting with aggregated news from WatchUp. By adding a news section to Plex, Valory says the company will be responding to another longstanding user request.
"We think with the WatchUp assets, we're going to be able to make an amazing aggregated news app, and do that really well, because nobody else is," Valory says.
But Plex didn't just buy WatchUp for its content and technology. The company was also buying experience by bringing on Watchup founder Adriano Farano as head of content. Farano, a former reporter for Le Monde and Le Figaro, created WatchUp during a Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, and in an interview is quick to convey his respect for publishers. Rather than just scraping videos from the web, Farano pitched his app directly to media companies, and ultimately got 170 news sources on board. Some of those publishers even became WatchUp investors.
Since January, Farano has been trying to build relationships between publishers and Plex, facilitating meetings in New York and at the CES trade show in Las Vegas.
Adriano Farano and Keith Valory.
"We're trying to really understand with a lot of humility what those publishers are doing, and trying to work with them in order to preserve the quality of their content, and the quality of their monetization right now," Farano says.
Beyond just working with news publishers, Farano's job will include an expansion into other types of media. Jim Friedlich, a WatchUp investor and longtime publishing executive, believes Farano's ability to make inroads with content owners is part of what made the acquisition so alluring.
"For Plex, part of what they've acquired with WatchUp is these relationships, and they've got Adriano, who's very charming and has been doing this for some time," Friedlich says.
Farano's attitude seems to have already rubbed off on Valory, who also uses the word "humility" to describe Plex's new approach to content. In practical terms, he suggests that Plex wants to be generous with usage data and ad revenue sharing, and will give publishers the ability to deep link into their own standalone apps.
"The fact of the matter is, there are not a whole lot of technology companies that are approaching this with humility vis-à-vis the content owners and content publishers," says Valory. "We think there's an opportunity to go in and say, 'Look, we come at this from a humble place. We want you, the content publisher, to be our customer, and we want to do what's right for you.'"
Despite the positive energy, Plex is candid about its challenges.
For one thing, the company still has a lot to learn about what publishers want, and how to balance their interests against users' needs. "I think that's easy to say and hard to do," Olechowski says.
There's also the more existential fear that larger, better-financed companies could execute on the very things Plex is trying to accomplish. While Plex is trying to identify types of content where it can stand out, like news, there's no barrier to other companies trying to do the same thing.
"If Netflix decided they wanted to kick ass at news, well, Netflix is a lot bigger than us, they have a lot more resources, they have a lot more paying users. Could they do something kickass around that? They absolutely could," says Olechowski.
Even the notion of a central dashboard for content is becoming more commonplace. Universal search is now table stakes on all the major streaming platforms, and the ability to browse across multiple streaming services is starting to emerge on devices like Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV. Over time, the sea of apps might become less of a problem than Plex thought it would be.
"If I'm wrong, and somehow the content owners actually do all get disintermediated and abstracted away, there's no room for Plex," says Valory.
Either way, Plex probably can't sit still. According to Parks Associates, the average U.S. home spends about $3 per month on DVD purchases now, down from about $6 per month at the start of 2012. DVD rentals, video downloads, and video rentals have also fallen, while streaming expenditures have doubled, from about $4 per month to about $8 per month on average.
"In the long run, this is kind of a bet-the-company kind of move," says Brett Sappington, a senior director of research at Parks Associates. "Because if you look at the future, particularly in North America and Western Europe, are consumers going to continue to buy media? Transactional media services in North America have really fallen off."
For all the obstacles Plex faces, it does have some unique advantages.
Perhaps the biggest is Plex's previous work in getting onto every notable computing platform. So whether you use Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, Chromecast, or some combination of all the above, Plex can provide all the same content and recommendations.
"The ubiquity matters to customers," Valory says. "The promise is, people shouldn't be tied down to a given platform, and so we want to give people the ability to get all the content they want, from whatever source it is, organize it the way they want, and then get it on every device."
And while some third-party services do exist for sorting through streaming options—Reelgood, Yahoo Video Guide, and Fan TV being a few examples—Plex is going a step further by hosting content on its own. The hope is that services such as aggregated news or a killer video podcast player will help bring people in.
"We are a media player app. That's kind of what we do, and I think people come to us to get content. So we will have a lot of content, starting with news, and then other content you'll get through Plex," Valory says. "Deep linking and giving people the ability to send off to other platforms is part of that, but it's a spectrum."
Plex for iPad
Plex also still has the media server to lean on, and Valory stresses that it's not going away. For one thing, Plex Pass sales are an 85% gross margin business that's still growing, so Plex has been lining up more devices beyond the PC that can act as servers. Nvidia's Shield TV streaming box and WD's My Passport Wireless Pro hard drive work as Plex servers today, and Valory says some "really cool partners" are coming. Plex has even been testing cloud-based servers on Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft OneDrive, and is shooting for a public launch later this quarter.
"The neat thing about the server, and it always will be the case, is that it's very sticky," Valory says. "We don't want that to go away, because once they get in and they're using it, that's what gets them to use it for 14 or 15 hours a week."
But Plex also sees new use cases emerging from the server side that don't revolve around owned media. For instance, Plex has been talking to augmented reality and virtual reality companies about hosting their content on local servers.
"Those content files are so massive, in order to get the true quality of that, you're going to need a set of files somewhere in the home to be able to take advantage of that," Valory says. "One of the reasons these guys are coming to us is because we actually already built out most of the underpinnings of what you need to be able to do that."
In other words, there may be a scenario in which Plex remains primarily a maker of media server software, but that's clearly not the goal. Plex could take on another round of funding to help achieve its broader ambitions, and Valory doesn't rule out being acquired—provided the acquirer is just as zealous about being a central source of content on on every conceivable device. Plex at least owes its fans that much.
"There is a deep passion in what we're doing," Valory says. "You go look at the Twitter feeds, and go look at our forums, the level of passion and love in our community, it's just unrivaled. There are not a lot of companies that have this really strong, strong community. That is borne out of the fact that the guys who built this community are members of this community. They built this for themselves and really care about doing it right."
It's partly your personality, and partly the role that you're trying to shoehorn it into.
There's no way around it: Every significant human accomplishment is the result of coordinated group behavior—people working together to achieve a common goal. Of course, that reality doesn't change the fact that for lots of people, teamwork is like pulling teeth. Here's why, and what to do about it.
Psychologists know there's a universal human need to belong to groups, but they also know that people aren't always predisposed to working well with each other. Individual interests often sabotage team spirit. People's competitive instincts end up finding targets in fellow team members rather than rival teams.
In fact, even when we want to collaborate, the wrong expertise, incompatible values, or an unusual style could make just about anybody a poor match for a given team. Talented leaders are good at picking the right people for the right task, and inspiring them to set aside their selfish agendas to focus on the group's goals. Indeed, the ability to build high-performing teams is basically the essence of leadership.
But since good leadership is rare, you can't always rely on your boss to guarantee your team's performance. That's why it's helpful to know what type of role you're best suited to play in your team—and answering that question requires understanding your personality profile. Who you are determines how you interact with people in a group setting in more ways than you might imagine.
So don't just consider what a group's goals are and then pick something that seems like a good match for your skills. Make sure you also check that the team you're joining is a great fit for your personality. Three broad personality traits in particular can affect how well you work with your team, no matter what type of goal you're trying to achieve together.
Few personality characteristics are better predictors of team-related behaviors than ambition. On the bright side, ambitious people are naturally competitive, so they're usually able to inject a winning mentality into their teams, aiming high and pushing for results. But ambition also has a darker side, which can drive people to obsess over their targets and accomplishments, neglecting team morale.
When things go badly, it's often the most ambitious team members who blame others and get frustrated. And when they're motivated by the pursuit of power, they're the people most likely to challenge the leader's authority and compete with other team members for status. (In a way, Freud was right to point out that if you're in charge, your subordinates are always plotting to kill you.)
So the more ambitious you are, the harder you'll find it to manage the tension between getting ahead and getting along. The best way to channel your personality into productive teamwork is to focus your competitive streak on a target outside your team. Your natural inclination to get ahead of others isn't going away, but you can use it to motivate your whole team to beat the competition.
Innovation is rarely the result of solo geniuses; it tends to be the product of teams. These teams tend to be managed by creative leaders, but there's also a major personality trait that determines whether individuals fit in with these teams and how they contribute to those innovations—and that's openness to experience.
Openness is associated with intellectual curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity, unconventionality, and thrill seeking, making it a major engine of team creativity. Much like ambition, there's both a bright and a dark side to high levels of openness to experience. On the upside, it helps people challenge the status quo and conceive new ways of doing things. The more open you are, the more likely you are to embrace innovation and change. On the downside, too much openness will leave teams unfocused, struggling to get stuff done and prone to overcomplicating things.
A team full of open people will generate a lot of ideas and try lots of new things but have a hard time executing them. So someone with high openness to experience should stick with ideation and creative problem solving, leaving logistics to others.
The last main personality trait that makes a big difference in the success or failure of teamwork is conscientiousness. Conscientious people are reliable, dutiful, and diligent. They're great planners and excel in teams that are well-structured and rule-bound. They're also known for self-discipline and self-control, which helps them avoid distractions and perform well, even when they aren't intrinsically motivated by the task.
So if you're an especially conscientious person and tend to hate group work, chances are it's because you're more organized and disciplined than most of your teammates. In a world that worships entrepreneurs and "disruptive" talent, we tend to forget just how important conscientiousness is. Indeed, without it there's no project management, no execution, and no quality control.
In fact, unless most team members are at least moderately conscientious, anarchy will reign. For any social system to function, most people need to follow the rules most of the time. So if you find you're more conscientious than your team members, the ideal role for you is drawing up and enforcing the rules: be the planner, the deadline keeper, the details person.
While these three personality clusters aren't mutually exclusive, the psychological role that people usually display in teams tends to be a function of just one of them. For example, you may be the driving force that makes the team competitive, the source of inspiration for ideas, or the planner and executer who gets things done.
Naturally, teams are more effective when they have a balance of these traits, and when people find roles that are compatible with their natural styles. In that sense, talent is personality in the right place.
The chairman of the coffee roaster Illy talks about the future of business and why corporations need to care about sustainability.
Illy is perhaps one of the most recognized coffee businesses in the world. The Italian roaster has become synonymous with European espresso. It's been family-run since 1933 and has transformed into one of the biggest global coffee roasting companies. Founded by Francesco Illy, who invented what the company claims is the first "modern espresso machine," Illy now brings in hundreds of millions of dollars every year and is featured in thousands of cafés worldwide. Francesco's grandson Andrea Illy currently runs the company, and he has some lofty views on the future of business.
Illy works with dozens of coffee-producing countries and emphasizes that sustainability is its utmost value. Many coffee companies participate in the fair trade system of crop transacting, where certain certified growers participate and are promised a baseline wage that theoretically doesn't shortchange the farmers. But Illy uses a direct system where it cultivates its own relationships with coffee producers. This, Illy says, makes for better quality product as well as a better quality of life for those it employs. The company claims that its coffee growers receive on average, a 30% wage premium for working with Illy as compared to other fair trade systems.
I recently sat down with Andrea Illy and talked about his views on sustainability, the future of the coffee market, and what's next for the industry. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you explain how your system with growers differs from the overall fair trade system?
Fair Trade is based not on sustainability but solidarity. Which means that you pay an extra price on top of the official market price in order to make sure that there is enough margin. It's a purely purely philanthropic goal—like giving money to an NGO, which then takes care of the social needs of those populations. The consumer doesn't necessarily get higher quality in exchange of this premium price.
Illy believes that there is kind of a distortion of the offer and the demand. You have a price which is directly correlated to the value. If you distort the sell-value relationship then it doesn't work economically. It's a shaky model because now there is an excess of certified coffee compared to the consumption.
The other aspect that we didn't accept of this system was that the grower has to pay to be certified. They are the weakest ring of the long value chain. How can you ask the people who make an average of a few hundred or a few thousand dollars per year to pay maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to be certified? We are responsible for this fairness and sustainability of the produce that we give to the consumer because the brand is ours.
We take responsibility for our suppliers, because quality and sustainability are two different sides of the same coin. There is no quality without sustainability and vice versa. This is not about green washing. It is absolutely about strategy.
What will it take for the coffee industry to be truly sustainable?
There's still a long way to go before to make this industry really sustainable. Climate change is impacting coffee agriculture significantly. We did a study with Columbia University's Earth Institute. It found that up to 50% of the currently suitable land might not be suitable any longer by 2050. And by 2050 the demand will have increased to the point that we'll need to produce twice as much coffee as we do now.
What we need to do in order to avoid the price shock and the big social problems with those communities producing coffee are three things. One, change the economic practices. Two, develop more cultivars resistant to the effects of climate change. Three, migrate plantations with higher latitudes and higher altitudes.
Combined, this is a really challenging problem. Thirty years is nothing. Coffee is a perennial crop that needs four years for the plant to become fully productive and the average life of one coffee plant is 30 years. That means that we need to renew, in one cycle, most of the coffee plantations.
In order to accelerate this program we would need three core activities: The first is fundraising. We definitely need more money than there is now in the sector to address this challenge. The second core activity is knowledge transfer. We need cutting-edge science and technology. This means immediately addressing the problem of water management, irrigation, etc. And then, third, coordination.
Why should companies be focusing on sustainability?
Because the markets are so complex there is no way that any company can do something on its own. Collaboration is needed. Without the help of others you can't reach your own goals.
If we want to change the society we need to change now because (the ways things are set up) is systemically unsustainable. Businesses creates society, so to change society, we need to change the private sectors.
You think coffee can lead us there?
My dream is that one day coffee will become the official beverage of happiness. And if you cannot be happy if you are not sustainable. But the ultimate goal of sustainability is reaching happiness. So coffee is very much about that. It's about well-being, pleasure, health, socialization.
And there's an interplay with being the industry of happiness and creating a positive economy?
Oh, yes, absolutely. Think about the consumer response and how they behave. Competition usually follows trends. If you are successful in starting a trend with this idea of happiness, many others will follow. Eventually we'll have corporations shift away from being indifferent to issues like sustainability.
This is exactly what I think is necessary. Sustainability also became a fad. Everybody speaks about sustainability now. In 10 years, they will not speak about sustainability any longer. They will speak about something else. What do you have after sustainability? You have happiness.
It turns out freedom and flexibility may be worth more to workers than traditional employers seem to think.
Charlie Pabst is a graphic designer. Before going freelance, he had a full-time day job where he designed coffee shops all around the world. But each night, Pabst would come home and mock up logos and websites for fictional companies. At first, it was just a creative outlet. Then he started posting some of his designs online.
The initial response was positive. For the first time, he says, "in the back of my mind I thought maybe I could actually make a go of it." Pabst started hunting around for freelance work and eventually got hired to design a book cover for a connected client. The client was pleased, and promoted Pabst's work on his website, which reaches a few hundred thousand people.
It jump-started Pabst's freelance career. He quit his job, accepting lower pay at first in exchange for freedom and flexibility.
In that, Pabst is hardly alone. According to the latest data by Upwork and the Freelancers Union, the were some 55 million gig workers in the U.S. alone, accounting for 35% of the national workforce, up 2 million from 2015. Out of nearly 1,000 freelancers my company, Workplace Trends, interviewed last year, 89% had a full-time job before they started freelancing, while only 10% plan to go back to full-time work within the next four years—and that's even though a solid 26% found themselves forced into gig work involuntarily, through layoffs or insufficient income. The typical gig worker has five or fewer clients, works fewer than 40 hours a week, and usually works on contracts of one to five months.
In short, freelancing is popular, and even if many are taking up side gigs because they need to and not because they want to, it's clear that money is far from the only motivator. In fact, traditional employers should take note: The lifestyle perks are often so appealing that many will forgo income stability, benefits, and even higher pay overall in exchange for the freedom and flexibility they aren't finding at desk jobs.
Through multiple online surveys and direct conversations with freelancers, this autonomy is the top recurring theme. People become—and then remain—full-time freelancers mainly because they want to work when and where they want, and on a diverse set of projects that align with their values and passions.
Take Stefanie O'Connell, a personal finance writer, who spoke with me while freelancing from the mountains of Colombia. She's more than willing to work weird hours sometimes as long as that lets her travel. She says she's become a pro at shifting her lifestyle to accommodate clients' needs on the fly.
"I've created a flexible infrastructure through freelancing that allows me to adapt," she said. While money is important, especially as someone who writes about how young people can save it, she saw gig work as the path to a more fulfilling life—even though it was a financial struggle at first.
Travel perks aside, some freelancers also stick with it because it lets them choose which projects to work on. Colleen Cagney, a graphic designer based in Santa Monica, California, was working full-time and eventually quit in order to add more variety to her work. She took a pay cut to start, but Cagney saw it as an investment in expanding her skills more than she could at her corporate job.
"As a freelancer," she says, "I now have complete control over the clients I choose to work with and the jobs I take on." Cagney is grateful for giving herself the freedom of choice. When she became a freelancer, it also freed her up to spend more time with her husband. Looking back, Cagney hadn't realized how much her personal life had had to bend to the demands of her job, and freelancing has since improved their marriage.
It's not all upsides, though. The freedom and flexibility these freelancers opt for comes at a cost. In our study, 47% said they're still making less money now than they did as full-time employees. We even found that 63% earn less than $30,000 annually, far below the average U.S. living wage, which according to the career site Zippia varies by state but ranges between $45,000 and $68,000. So while that figure includes part-time freelancers with other sources of income, it's still a good bet that trouble making ends meet is a top reason why over a quarter of freelancers told us they are looking to get back into full-time roles.
Simon Green, a digital media consultant, says the stress of finding a steady stream of clients is considerable. "There have been periods when things get really dry and that's when the anxiety kicks in," he told me. And for Cagney, gaining more time for her personal life sometimes comes at the price of iffier work-life balance. "Sometimes I have to work irregular hours to meet client deadlines," she says.
And when you're essentially running an entire business by yourself, the administrative duties can gum up the works. O'Connell says she's sometimes frustrated by having to manage direct deposits, contracts, and invoices on her own. "Paperwork for freelancing is surprisingly archaic", she explains, and clients don't always make her life any easier since they all use different types of contracts and payment methods.
But for all these drawbacks, many still wouldn't go back to corporate life. After all, full-time workers at traditional companies all weigh the pros and cons of that type of work, too. For employers who are looking to keep their work cultures attractive, the data suggests that a little more flexibility and autonomy can probably go a long way. And as for freelancers themselves, their choices make it clear that what's long been true still is—across all types of work: that feeling happy with your job comes down to more than just your paycheck.
To mark its eighth birthday, WhatsApp is giving status messages a photo, video, and GIF-infused boost.
Eight years ago, the first lines of code in what would eventually become WhatsApp were being written. Originally, all the app let you do was post a status—a way to tell your friends that you were at work or traveling during the day and would be unreachable. Eventually, founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton decided to add messaging capabilities as well, and the app evolved into the powerhouse that it is today.
WhatsApp Version 1 from 2009.
"We lean on three principals: simplicity, reliability, and security," says Randall Sarafa, product manager at WhatsApp. "That's been our focus all along, that's the type of app we really want to build, and everything we've done has been in regard to that."
WhatsApp's official birthday is on February 24. But the company is celebrating it today by rolling out a new feature, Status, that's reminiscent of how it got its start. You've always been able to write a short status within the app to let your friends know what you're up to. Now it's taking the option a step further by allowing you to include photos and videos in a format reminiscent of Snapchat Stories and Instagram Stories.
Status launches today on Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone. The feature will initially be available in beta in France and the Netherlands, followed by the U.K. and Spain on the February 21, and Italy, Israel, and Saudi Arabia on February 22. A global rollout—including the U.S.—will follow those tests.
WhatsApp currently has 1.2 billion monthly active users who send a whopping 50 billion messages a day. That's dramatic growth even from last year, when the company had a mere 1 billion monthly active users who were sending 42 billion daily messages. All those users are also sending 3.3 billion photos, 760 million videos, and 80 million GIFs each day. Over the past year, the number of photos shared on the service has doubled and videos have tripled, a trend that encouraged the company to look at bringing these elements to status messages.
Similar to Snapchat and Instagram's Stories features, WhatsApp status messages last 24 hours and then disappear, and you can add to them throughout the day. For instance, you could post eight status messages chronicling your day of sightseeing in a new place. Anyone who views your status will see all eight.
Just like messages sent with WhatsApp, status messages are end-to-end encrypted. The app uses phone numbers rather than user names to connect people, so by default, your status messages are viewable to anyone whose number you have saved in your phone. But you can also set your privacy settings on a per-status basis, so one of those eight messages could just be viewable by just your best friends.
The app uses an algorithm to determine which status messages you're likely to want to open, so it can automatically download their content and make it ready to view as soon as you open a message. It might download a photo from your significant other immediately, but hold off on downloading a long video from that guy you went to high school with and never speak to until you actually open the post.
"We try to put ourselves in the shoes of people who are in another country and might not have access to the same cell providers that we do, or might not have an iPhone 7, or a brand new Android phone," Sarafa says. To that end, many WhatsApp developers use older Android phones as their personal devices to ensure that experience holds up, even if you're not using one of the latest and greatest phones on a fast network.
Given that both Snapchat and Instagram have seen their Stories features become phenomenally popular—and even Facebook is testing a version of the idea—it's not a shocker to see WhatsApp offer its own take. "I think it's a format that's being adopted by the industry broadly, and we see a lot of apps using it," says Sarafa. "As we adopt, we wanted to add a bit of unique flavor to it, and I think we did that."
One word that will never help your cause is "sorry." Here are eight others.
You're 96% sure that you're ready to schedule a meeting with your boss to ask for a raise. Or perhaps you're nearing the end of the job interview process and an offer is in sight. However, if you're like me, you have definitely put your foot in your mouth a time or two saying the wrong thing at the absolute worst moment. Doh!
Don't mess up. Don't mess up. No matter how many times you rehearse what to say, there's always that risk of fumbling right at the five-yard line. Instead of panicking, get prepared.
To coach us along in the salary negotiation process, we turned to Josh Doody, author of Fearless Salary Negotiation. "A salary negotiation is a collaboration, and a key ingredient of a successful collaboration is good communication," says Doody. "It's important to be very clear with what you communicate to avoid ambiguity, which could complicate things and slow the negotiation process."
Instead of Doody simply sharing the things you should say, he's here to warn you about the potential negotiation landmines to avoid when angling for the salary you deserve. Here are nine things to never say in a salary negotiation:
The most common question recruiters will ask a candidate is something like, "So where are you right now in terms of salary, and what are you looking for if you make this move?" Don't fall for it.
"I call this the 'dreaded salary question,' and it's tricky because it usually comes up early in the interview process, and most candidates don't think of it as part of a salary negotiation even though it is," says Doody.
"Answering this question by disclosing numbers can make it very difficult to negotiate effectively later on because it can box the candidate in. Once they disclose current or desired salary, the offers they get are very likely to be tied to those numbers. That can be very expensive if the company might have offered them a much higher salary than they disclosed."
Don't disclose your current or desired salary! "Recovering from this mistake can be tricky and each situation is unique. But one way to untether from those original numbers is to review the benefits package for deficiencies," says Doody. "If the health insurance offering, paid vacation, target bonus, or other aspects of the benefits package are underwhelming, the candidate can use those as reasons to ask for a higher salary to compensate."
Instead, try something like:
I'm not comfortable sharing my current salary. I would prefer to focus on the value I can add to this company rather than what I'm paid at my current job. I don't have a specific number in mind for a desired salary, and you know better than I do what value my skillset and experience could bring to your company. I want this move to be a big step forward for me in terms of both responsibility and compensation.
According to Doody, "negotiating is uncomfortable, and our natural tendency is to try to smooth the edges on a difficult conversation. Saying sorry could signal to the recruiter or hiring manager that you might be willing to back down, and that could be expensive. Don't apologize for negotiating."
"You want to continuously improve your situation throughout the negotiation and you do that by avoiding negative language and focusing on positive language. Instead of "No, that doesn't work for me" (two negative words), you can say, "I would be more comfortable with . . ." (a more positive expression).
Negative words slow things down and may put up walls that make collaboration difficult. Using only positive words is difficult at first, but you'll get better with practice."
While this may sound like the exact word to use when speaking to an HR recruiter, Doody insists it should be used with caution. "You'll often get a job offer that seems really appealing, and it might be far more than you expected. Your instinct in that case might be to just accept the offer because it's so good."
But is it too good?
"It's possible you underestimated your value in this situation. Instead of "Yes," formulate a counteroffer to see how much you can improve it. The negotiation should end with the company saying "Yes" to you. Once they say "Yes" to you, or you run out of things to ask for, then you are finished negotiating."
As in, "I can deal with that after I start." Procrastinators, this one's for you. "Sometimes it's easier to avoid uncomfortable parts of a negotiation by deferring those parts of the conversation until after you're hired. That can be a very expensive mistake because you won't have the same latitude to negotiate and improve your position once you're in the door. Push through the discomfort and get the best possible result now."
In expressions like, "Can we try . . .?" "'try' is a passive word that leaves a lot of wiggle room, and you don't want that," insists Doody. "It's easy for someone to say—honestly or not—"We'll try…" and reply with, "We tried and it just didn't work out." Don't ask them to "try" to do something. Instead, use more positive language like "I would be more comfortable with…"."
While this word seems counterintuitive because you are negotiating to get more, it's a word that is too general for a successful negotiation. Instead of asking for "more" salary or "more" vacation, this is your time to get specific.
"Don't leave things to the imagination once you're negotiating. Instead of "Could you budge on the salary?" say, 'I would be more comfortable with a base salary of $105,000.'"
Lastly, the word "want" can tank negotiations. Using it can undercut the entire premise of your argument that you deserve to be paid more and you deserve a more competitive salary. Go into a negotiation with facts and figures, making a compelling case. Start with printing out your results using a tool like Glassdoor's personal salary estimator, Know Your Worth. See what you base salary should be and see what the industry norms are.
"You could talk about what you want, which just isn't all that important. Or you could talk about what the company wants, which is not as potent as talking about what the company needs, which are the most important thing," adds Doody. "Focus on the company's needs and how you can help meet those needs so they can easily see your value and work to compensate you for it."
A version of this article originally appeared on Glassdoor. It is adapted and reprinted with permission.
The things you learn from having an illness have value—and one startup is trying to build an economy around them.
In almost every industry, internet startups have popped up to connect freelance experts with brands for short-term work opportunities. Now, a health care company is hoping that it can connect some of the most influential and underutilized health experts—patients—with brands that are willing to pay for their knowledge and connections.
Leanna Mullen has Gaucher's disease, a rare genetic disorder that is associated with a variety of debilitating symptoms, from lung disease to arthritis. Mullen, a New Jersey-based television producer in her late twenties, has built up a vast network in the patient advocacy community and has used her media platform to raise awareness of her disease. Several months ago, she was contacted by a research firm called BrandTrust regarding a survey into the mental health of patients with Gaucher's. She was told that the information would be be delivered to a pharmaceutical company, but she declined to disclose the company to me after signing a non-disclosure agreement.
If Mullen could recruit a diverse set of patients to participate in the research, she would be paid about 80% of a $10,000 fee. "I had the connections, and was able to recruit almost my entire demographic within two or three days," she says. Mullen was able to reach out directly to patients in closed Facebook groups and private forums, which would have been off-limits to recruiters. "Many people wanted to support research that will help make others' lives better," she says.
Mullen's name was initially floated to BrandTrust by a Boston, Mass.-based company called Wego Health, which has built up a vast database of patient influencers over the years. Wego's chief strategy officer, David Goldsmith, came up with the idea of connecting these patients directly with brands, after researching how other sectors, such as transportation and tourism, slowly adapt to new labor models as part of the "sharing economy" movement. He figured that health care was next.
Experts agree that the opportunity in health care hasn't fully been realized, compared to other sectors. "We have not seen a health company that has defined what a platform model looks like for the delivery of health care services nor the acquisition of talent," says Arun Sundararajan, professor of information, operations, and management sciences at New York University and author of "The Sharing Economy. "Wego is putting its stake in the ground with the latter."
With Goldsmith's new service, Wego Health Experts, brands can connect with patients for help with finding clinical trial participants, research and surveys, "awareness" campaigns, speaking engagements and so on. Goldsmith says some of these processes, such as clinical trial recruitment, used to take months and cost "tens of thousands of dollars," which typically went to third-parties rather than patients. But influencers like Mullen can often get the job done faster and for a fraction of the price, he adds. Wego makes money by taking a cut of the overall fee (in this case, the remaining $2,000 of the $10,000 offered via BrandTrust).
Compared to other industries, health care carries some unique opportunities, risks, and challenges. Nick Blum, general manager of Catalant, a company that connects big brands with freelance experts, stresses the need for full awareness of biases and agendas. "The key here will be transparency," he says. "Who has what relationship with whom, how does compensation flow, what incentives exist, and so on."
Mullen says she did not disclose in every discussion that she would be paid, as she figured that it would be obvious. "They're aware that there's usually some sort of headhunter," she says. Also, she figured that the risk would be low, as it was a survey rather than a clinical trial.
Bioethicists such as New York University's Arthur Caplan have some concerns about patients leveraging their influence on behalf of brands. He compares this approach to celebrities like Bob Dole and Barry Manilow appearing on television to tout pharmaceutical products they may never have used, ranging from Viagra to cholesterol medication. In the long run, he explains, there's always the risk that trust will be eroded.
Caplan suggests that guidelines should be formulated to clarify how patients should disclose conflicts of interest, if they're getting paid. That's particularly important if they're being asked to recruit for a potentially risky clinical study.
For her part, Mullen wouldn't agree to every project sent her way. She was willing to tap into her network for this project, as she could personally vouch for it having taken the study. And the money that she made helped her with expenses related to managing her disease. "For many of us, this could be an opportunity make others' lives better and become a part-time job," she says.
Since November, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood have seen their support skyrocket. Now, they're adopting new grassroots strategies.
Earlier this month, Jennifer Ande held an event in support of Planned Parenthood. She and a few dozen other people got together to make Valentine's Day cards that they would then send to their local politicians in support of the organization. She had received the tools from her local Planned Parenthood in New Jersey. Through that she brought together fellow supporters to write dozens of cards to politicians in support of the women's health organization. This was the first time Ande ran such an event.
As a cervical cancer survivor who relies on services like Planned Parenthood's, Ande has been donating to the organization for over 20 years, but something changed late last year. "My activism literally took flight on November 8 at 9:40 p.m. when I realized who was going to be the next president of the United States," she says. And she's not alone.
Since the election, organizations that support liberal causes such as reproductive health and civil liberties have been seeing a profound uptick in interest. This has translated into huge cash infusions. Donations to the ACLU have ballooned in the last two months, well beyond what the group generally sees within a whole year of fundraising, according to CNN Money. Planned Parenthood too has been seeing donations roll in. It won't give official numbers, but high-profile donors including Sheryl Sandberg and Elaine Wynn have donated millions of dollars in the last few weeks. Other groups that represent people affected by President Trump's proposed policies have been seeing bumps, too. The New York Timesreported last November that organizations like the Sierra Club and the Anti-Defamation League also saw marked interest boosts.
But people don't want to just donate. They, like Ande, want to help out, too. And so these organizations are figuring out new programming to keep these citizens involved.
One example is the ACLU's new grassroots activism program aimed at getting everyday people involved in the civil liberty defenders' work. The organization brought on Faiz Shakir, a former adviser to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, to be its national political director as well as to help lead this group. Shakir has also hired a bunch of digital organizers, many of whom worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign.
"There are a bunch of organizations on the right," Shakir says, that have similar programs. "The NRA comes to mind." These ideologically driven groups have used their power and money to bring about grassroots campaigns galvanizing their supporters. Typically, the ACLU hasn't worked in this capacity, it focused more on the legal side of its activism, but with this new cash infusion, it's ready to bring in as many people to its cause as possible. Shakir says had originally proposed a modest budget to get this program going. But after the ACLU saw more than $24 million donated in just the last few weeks, $13 million was budgeted for this new grassroots project.
The new program will bring together people who have pledged dollars to help out the ACLU as well as expressed interest in doing something beyond donation. It will offer resources for how to help its current legal battles as well as give information about events people can attend, like rallies or other political activities. The ACLU will also give people ways to do "counterprogramming" to the current administration's work. Shakir offers the example of asking people to go to a mosque and hold signs with positive messages, or shaking hands with immigrants at naturalization ceremonies. The hope is to create a coalition of people who support and fight for the ACLU in a way similar to how the Sanders campaign was able to bring together frustrated citizens using grassroots methods.
Similarly, Planned Parenthood is seeing a huge rise in interest. The women's health group sees a boost in interest with every election cycle—especially when a politician proposes anti-women's health legislation.
This year, however, the level of support is unprecedented. Since November, more than 400,000 people around the country have donated to the organization, says Planned Parenthood. "We don't have to explain to folks the urgent moment we're in," says Kelly Robinson, Planned Parenthood's deputy national director of organizing. More than the money, however, people want to help. Like Ande, Planned Parenthood offices around the country are being inundated with inquiries about what people can do.
Robinson has started a new program called Defenders, which offers people resources and instructions on how to help Planned Parenthood. "It's about giving individuals the tools they need to be the best advocates," says Robinson. Defenders launched earlier this month and saw more than 20,000 people sign up online within the first few days. Now there are over 50,000 "defenders" who have committed to taking action at least once a week to support Planned Parenthood.
Planned Parenthood has been a political target for its entire existence, and the organization has always offered ways for supporters to mobilize, including tools for events like the one Ande participated in, as well as other public events like rallies to help show support.
But Robinson says the Trump administration brings about something unique. "When this moment [of people offering their support] came after the election, we knew something different was happening," she says. Defenders wants to harness a "grassroots energy" and help individuals organize. The program offers ideas for organizing meetups, ways to contact decision makers, and other training opportunities so that people know the best way to advocate for Planned Parenthood.
For both the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, the work is just beginning. Legislation is being put in place to make direct access to women's health services more difficult—for example, the anti-abortion bill introduced in Oklahoma that resulted in a lawmaker describing pregnant women as "hosts." The ACLU too has already begun a bevy of lawsuits aimed at fighting Trump's executive orders; its most high-profile work is a series of lawsuits that focus on President Trump's recent anti-immigration executive order.
To keep up the momentum, these organizations will need to keep their supporters engaged. This will likely involve more of the grassroots organizing the ACLU and Planned Parenthood are currently doing. Robinson calls this approach "leading from the back."
"People voted again with their pocketbooks and their email addresses," says Shakir. And these organizations are going to make sure their supporters keep voting with their actions.
Dalian Wanda, Illumination Entertainment, and others are shaping the future of film and television.
Hollywood is in a major state of flux as it tries to keep up with people's changing entertainment habits. How we watch, what we watch, and when we watch—whatever it is we watch—has never been a less straightforward question, leaving movie studios and TV networks desperate to create content to serve those idiosyncratic needs. It's an environment that demands new approaches to how entertainment is both created and distributed.
The 10 companies on this list are bringing fresh ideas to the table, whether it's introducing more diverse voices to television or repackaging a fashion show as a multimedia event. These players aren't relying on tradition; instead, they're writing their own rules as they redefine what entertainment means and looks like in 2017.
Click on a company to learn more about why it made the list.
You may have researched common interview questions and rehearsed answers, but could your body be undermining your confidence—and your chance at getting a job offer? Body language can have more of an impact on your success than anything you say. A classic study from UCLA says up to 55% of our communication is nonverbal, and that's especially challenging when you're in a situation where you're likely nervous.
"When we feel threatened, our natural instinct is to cover up and protect ourselves," says Andy Mangum, speech communications faculty member at Brookhaven College in Dallas. "These nonverbal defenses suggest that we lack confidence. What a person conveys is not always what a person feels. Defensiveness is in the eye of the beholder. So, the key is to look natural and confident."
CareerBuilder surveyed hiring managers to identify the biggest body language mistakes they see in job seekers during an interview. Here's a list of five to watch:
Two thirds of hiring managers surveyed said poor eye contact could cost you the job in an interview. Failure to look someone in the eyes sends the signal that the candidate lacks confidence, says Crystal Barnett, senior human resource specialist at HR service provider Insperity.
In a one-on-one interview, this is an easy problem to fix; maintain eye contact as you listen to your interviewer. But what if you're in a group interview? "It is best to initially maintain eye contact with the person who asked the question," says Barnett. "In the course of responding, the candidate should also look at other interviewers to read their nonverbal cues and keep them engaged."
Nearly 40% of hiring managers say that failing to smile is a red flag for them during an interview.
"Fake it till you make it is a definite no-no when it comes to smiling," says Charlotte Westerhaus-Renfrow, clinical assistant professor of management and business law at Indiana University, Kelley School of Business. "Fake, insincere smiling is less favorable no matter the amount of eye contact."
Westerhaus-Renfrow suggests combining eye contact with a genuine smile to make a good impression, and it comes with a bonus: "Smiling during the interview reduces stress by decreasing the stress-induced hormones," she says.
Candidates who move around too much in their seats is distracting for 32% of hiring managers, according to the survey. Nervousness is normal during an interview, and this can sometimes result in fidgeting, so Michael Plummer, CEO of the direct-mail marketing firm Our Town America, looks for more body language clues when he interviews candidates.
"I have seen some folks so nervous that it overshadows the rest of their body language," he says. "Body language is only relevant within the context of the specific interview. I do notice if someone is noticeably shifty and things don't seem to be adding up. In those cases, I simply follow up further on references."
If you're a fidgeter, help yourself sit still by putting your feet flat on the floor and your hands in your lap.
People often believe crossed arms sends the signal that the person is bored, disengaged, or blocked, he says. "However, when I ask people why they may sit like this, the great majority of them say it is because they may be cold or that it's just a comfortable way to sit or stand," he says. "This sets the stage for people to easily write off a potentially excellent candidate during an interview or discount a colleague or client simply based on a misinterpretation of their body language."
Job candidates should pay attention to how they hold their arms, whenever possible. But hiring managers shouldn't always assume crossed arms is a bad signal.
For 31% of hiring managers, bad posture can cost the candidate a job offer. Mark Bollman, president of the upholstery repair franchise Creative Colors International, says it's his biggest red flag when he interviews potential employees.
"That suggests to me they are too comfortable or complacent and possibly lazy or not paying attention," he says. "Those are not the kind of people who would succeed in our business. We love folks who sit upright in their chair and keep consistent eye contact. That shows us they are eager, ready to learn, and excited about the opportunity."
Good posture coupled with fluidity is the key, says Dawn Rauhe, head of sourcing in the Americas for Alexander Mann Solutions, a talent acquisition firm. "Your posture, either sitting or standing, during an interview should be natural, not still or tense," she says. "When you have a point to make that is significant, lean forward; this indicates you care and want to make a strong point. After all, the best candidates can engage on all levels, including through their body language."
These Bluetooth buds stream music smoothly and filter out noise around you, but they're confining and run out of juice in a couple of hours.
For all the hype around virtual and augmented reality for your eyes, some exciting technology is also coming to your ears. Thanks largely to Apple's $159 AirPods, wireless Bluetooth earbuds are going mainstream. At the same time, the advanced audio technology in ultra-expensive hearing aids is trickling down to enable new consumer gadgets that tune how you hear the world. They show promise, but still need some work.
Doppler Labs is one of a few companies—others include Bragi and Nuheara—combining these trends into earbuds with a threefold mission. They stream music and calls from iPhones and Android phones, assist people with minor hearing loss, and aim to enable better than normal hearing by using sound filters to minimize distracting noise like chatter in a busy restaurant. In trying to achieve all three, Doppler's $300 Here One earbuds (available in black or white) make some compromises. They are not the best wireless earbuds—especially given their brief battery life—and they don't claim to be hearing aids. Nor do the Here One buds entirely nail the better-than-normal hearing that Doppler promises. But they offer a tantalizing hint at what that might sound like in the future—probably enough to entice early adopters.
First the basic stuff. The Here One fit snuggly in the ear canals, thanks to the included selection of silicon and foam tips in a range of sizes. The audio driver (speaker) in each Here One delivered strong bass, as in iTunes downloads of Metallica's "Master of Puppets" and Kendrick Lamar's "m.A.A.d city." But trebles sounded thin compared with Apple's AirPods—especially in the high female voices of "Helpless" from the musical Hamilton. With the AirPods, those notes were remarkably crisp. I handed Doppler's buds to my colleague Mark Sullivan, who found both the highs and midtones weak in comparison. He also craved more volume.
The comparison holds for phone calls. My friend Vanessa was impressed with how well she could hear me when I rang her from a busy café using the Here One; but when I called with the AirPods, she was startled at the clarity of my voice and lack of background noise. Doppler's CEO Noah Kraft is proud of the audio quality, but doesn't aim to compete only on streaming ability. "If you just want to run around with wireless headphones, there are other great products," he says, naming the AirPods.
Doppler successfully takes on the biggest barrier to Bluetooth audio quality: the human body. I tested the Here One, AirPods, and Nuheara IQbuds by walking with my iPhone 7 in my back pocket. With the IQbuds, the audio often degraded to a funky boing-boing sound as the signal broke up. Both the Here One and AirPods streamed smoothly with my phone in either back pocket—and even on a table about 50 feet away.
The main downside to Here One is battery life: two hours with streaming and a few more minutes with just sound filtering. (Exact battery life depends on filters used, says Doppler.) Apple claims up to five hours of streaming per charge, and I got a little over four. Nuheara's IQbuds also last about four hours for streaming and up to eight for just sound filtering. Kraft acknowledges the limitation, calling Here One an "episodic product" that isn't designed to be used for hours at a time. He believes that software updates will extend the battery life a bit. "I wouldn't say the battery will get significantly better," he says.
Like its rivals, Here One comes with a rechargeable battery-equipped carrying case. Doppler's case has enough juice to replenish the buds three times. It takes an hour to fully recharge them.
Of course the 0.2-ounce Here One buds are doing a lot more than the AirPods—constantly pulling surrounding sound from three microphones per bud and processing it so quickly that I didn't perceive a delay. Customizing the ambient sound starts with a volume control in the Here One smartphone app that ranges from -22 decibels of dampening to +6 dB of amplification. At the lowest setting, snapping my fingers registered as a faint tap; at max volume, it startled me. Low volume wiped out most of the noise in a busy café where I often work.
The app's sound filters dampen certain frequency ranges, like the rush of traffic in the City preset or the clatter and rumble of conversation in the Restaurant one—which works well for bars, too. The Crowd filter tamps down voices in the distance while keeping those close by crisp. All sound processing happens in the earbuds themselves; the app is for making adjustments. Tapping the buds enables basic functions like activating Siri or Google Now and accepting or hanging up a call.
I tried the buds over several weeks. When a place got exceedingly loud, I selected the Enhance Speech (Front) filter. With its multiple mics, Here One can determine the direction of sounds and focus on a location. The heavy audio processing made people sound like robots, but ones with good diction. I also tried the Enhance Speech (Back) filter for the parlor trick of eavesdropping on people behind me.
When I didn't want to hear a thing, I picked the Noise Mask filter, which filled my ears with soothing white noise. It blocked out people on either side of me in a café having obnoxiously loud Skype calls. The Airplane filter blocks out jet engine noise—at least a recorded simulation that Doppler provided. (I didn't go on any flights myself while testing the buds.) Short battery life limits the usefulness, though.
With the filters engaged but the volume up, The Here One buds can tune out annoying noise like traffic but let through important sounds like car horns. Doppler discovered a new customer segment when it was beta testing Here One: New moms who wanted to listen to music or podcasts but still also be able to hear their baby. That's an example of the "layered listening" Doppler offers—blending audio streams and real-world sound. Doppler is partnering with live entertainment sources like the Cleveland Cavaliers, New York Philharmonic, and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to layer in commentary that goes with the live experience.
The Here One app volume, menu, and filters screens.
When I handed off the buds to half a dozen friends to try, they got giddy with excitement when they could hear me whispering from five feet away in a packed bar. Within a few minutes, though, most people took out the buds, saying that it felt weird and isolating to have their ears stopped up. My friend Rachael said they looked like "little Bose speakers" in my ears and dubbed them "social condoms."
I had hoped that Here One would tame my aversion to loud places like packed bars, where I feel isolated by noise. But they introduced a new sense of isolation: the unnatural sound and feeling of having my ears stopped up. I got more anxious walking up to someone because I wasn't confident I would hear them or sure they would hear me. I instinctively yanked at least one bud out before speaking. Friends had the same reaction. Our impressions were similar for a close rival product, Nuheara's IQbuds, which we tried for comparison.
Making things worse is the occlusion effect: Vibrations in your body—from things like speaking, chewing, or walking—are magnified when the ear canals are filled. That artificial effect made me feel even more removed from the world. Doppler says it's working on audio processing to minimize occlusion.
The folks from Doppler, as well as Nuheara, are emphatic that they have not built a hearing aid. "To be very clear, Here One is not a medical device," says Kraft. But he says that they might help people with some hearing loss. It's a rhetorical balancing act. Only devices the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves as hearing aids can bear that title. However, the FDA wants to encourage unregulated devices called personal sound amplification products (PSAPs) as cheaper options for people with mild hearing loss—like the impairment of high frequencies resulting from age, rock concerts, or noisy work environments.
Doppler may be reticent about comparing its product to a hearing aid, but I don't have to be. I contacted Starkey Hearing, one of the biggest hearing-aid makers, and asked to borrow its brand-new, nearly invisible Halo 2 model. Starkey administered an audio test and found that I have mild high-frequency hearing loss—not surprising for a big-city 45-year old who has spent a fair amount of time at concerts, bars, and clubs.
With the Halo 2s tuned to boost those high frequencies, I heard things I don't remember having ever noticed: The sharp sound of glasses clinking, the rattle of keys as I type, my hand brushing over a satin sofa cushion. It wasn't that I couldn't understand what people were saying without the Halo 2. But I didn't feel as tired after having a long conversation someplace noisy. There was barely any occlusion effect, either. I felt more engaged with people, not slightly removed, as with the Here One.
One amazing feature of the Halo 2 is battery life: from five to eight days, each consisting of 16 hours use, with up to three hours of streaming. That's possible in part because of a custom-designed processor that consumes very little juice. The Halo 2's other amazing feature is price: About $6,000 for a pair, or 20 times the cost of Here One. (In fairness, this includes testing, adjustment, and follow-up appointments with an audiologist.)
Starkey's Halo 2
There may be another option soon. Starkey has a partnership with wireless earbud maker Bragi to upgrade its Dash earbuds with Halo 2 audio technology. The current Bragi Dash buds run for about four to six hours per charge for streaming music as well as fitness tracking. The new models, expected in a few months, will cost more. A price hasn't been set, but it will likely be a fraction of what the Halo 2 costs.
Our hearing has evolved over millions of years, and we are very sensitive to any changes in quality. It's probably inevitable that such a disruptive audio product like Here One would feel…disruptive. People get disoriented from virtual reality and augmented reality glasses—which are also in their very early days. Kraft admits that Here One has a way to go, and he claims that regular software updates will help. Here One has come close to succeeding, but that may not be enough for most people. And the last stretch could be the hardest for its engineers to achieve.
Having breakthrough ideas means priming your brain with lots of raw material for it to rummage through at random.
In the early 1890s, everybody wanted the newest technological marvel. Democratic and affordable, the bicycle could cut people's commute to work in half and enable them to enjoy the countryside on the weekend. Thousands of bicycle mechanics appeared as if overnight, looking to make bicycles lighter, safer, more comfortable, and easier to produce. They would tinker with ball bearings, rolled steel, differential gears, air-filled tires, and so on.
Many of these enthusiasts would later use what they'd learned in bicycle workshops to create greater transportation breakthroughs. Both of the Wright Brothers were bicycle mechanics. So was a man named Henry Ford, who watched mass production take hold at a time when cyclists began lobbying for better roads to be built. Before long, thanks to him, the modern automobile was ambling down them.
The more raw material you give your brain, the more connections it can make. It works a little like hitting "shuffle" on a playlist—the more songs you load it up with, the more surprised you'll be by the one that comes on next, which may lead you to think differently about both. Perhaps you'll get an idea for a totally different type of playlist, get inspired to write a song yourself, or even begin to think of music differently as a whole.
The human brain thrives on a wide range of ideas and experiences, especially those it isn't expecting to encounter. In order to hit upon something really exciting, it first needs to wander, meander, shuffle about. Here's how to help it.
When farmers sow seeds, they don't know which will germinate, which won't, and how many of those that do germinate will actually bear fruit. It's nearly impossible to ensure a 100% germination rate. So what do they do? They sow more than they need.
Cognitively speaking, you should, too. Just fill your garden. Or if you prefer the earlier metaphor, add more songs to your playlist than you can possibly listen to in one sitting. That means doing your standard research—to get a handle on the underlying principles, the schools of thought, the ways things have been done or attempted, and succeeded or failed—but it also means looking much further afield, and not knowing what you'll find.
Read books adjacent to your area of interest. If you're a scientist, try some science fiction to expand your imagination—or brush up on the history of philosophy, as a way to see the different modes of thought that held people in check. You might discover something about the limits of your own thinking. If you're a manager, read how the Mongols or the Romans structured their armies, and how they built common cause among soldiers from wildly different cultures.
If you read an article online, follow the links and see where they take you. You may end up down a totally unrelated rabbit-hole, and that's okay, because you don't know what might be of interest. You can't know. This can be frustrating to those of us who prefer working toward a clear goal and hate "wasting time."
But our brains don't share that frustration. If you want to lead it toward more breakthrough ideas, you've got to let your brain stumble around a little, create uncertainty—and only learn afterward whether it was exactly what you needed, or all for naught.
Popular mythology would have you believe that breakthroughs are a solo endeavor. But they seldom are. Most often, there are many contributors to major insights.
Talk to people doing the same thing as you are. Bell Labs, the famed research center to which we owe the transistor, the calculator, laser technology, UNIX, and many of today's most essential technologies, famously encouraged its newest junior members to knock on the door of Nobel Prize winners and ask questions of "the guy who wrote the book."
You should also talk to people doing something different but related. If you're a manager in a health-care company, reach out to a manager at a retail company or a hospitality company. If you're a business manager, learn about how to run a preschool. The garden-filling phase isn't just about extracting information from other people, though. You also have to share your latest challenges; give people the context behind the questions you're asking, the problems you're working on, what's making them so difficult, and what you're hoping to achieve.
Whatever you do, keep your mind-set open and unprejudiced; you never know who might have an interesting tidbit for you. Early components of breakthroughs don't look like breakthroughs—they look like miscellaneous pieces of information. One trick is to keep certain topics at the forefront of your mind at all times so you'll be more likely to notice when relevant pieces of information pass by.
Another trick is to draw people into talking about something they're passionate about. Ask them when they first encountered this passion. Did they always love it or did it grow on them? What is it about the activity that speaks to them? You may hear about the history of the thing, the nuances, the best practices. These are excellent ingredients to gather.
To develop his theories of relativity, Einstein didn't just lock himself in a room and think. He had a group of friends he talked with almost every night. They called themselves the "Olympia Academy": Michele Besso, Maurice Solovine, Conrad Habicht, and Einstein's wife, Mileva.
On warm nights, they'd walk the streets of Bern, in Switzerland, and sit on the riverbank. Other times they'd climb to the top of Mount Gurten, lie on their backs, look up at the stars, and talk until dawn. Then they'd amble back into town and sit at a cafe, fueling themselves with coffee and ideas.
While the Olympia Academy had very little structure, the members demanded total commitment. When Maurice Solovine skipped a meeting to attend a music recital, Einstein and Habicht went to his house, ate all his food, and smoked a pipe (Einstein) and cigars (Habicht) until the apartment resembled the inside of a chimney. Finally, they piled all his furniture and books on top of his bed. Such was the retribution for giving preference to bourgeois distractions over the Academy.
The group's members were from fields as diverse as poetry and philosophy, and it was these conversations that helped to break open how he thought so that he could then "break open the universe." In order to be innovative, Einstein first had to shift the way he actually thought—and that meant ranging far afield from physics.
Want to have better brainstorms and faster meetings? Reshuffle everyone's status and rank.
Status is powerful. Once a team gets working, any initial willingness to communicate can go right out the window if nobody feels comfortable disagreeing with the VP at the end of the table, or the new junior salesperson who might have something to say.
But our positions within a company are actually a combination of rank and status. Your job title and the responsibilities that go with it comprise your rank. But your status is given to you by other people, or taken away by other people (either to your face or behind your back). Most of the time, people with a high rank are granted a great deal of status by coworkers—that's the nature of a corporate ladder.
Status also depends on competence, communication, work ethic, leadership, and personal relationships, just to name a few variables. When team members all hold different ranks as well as differing statuses, it's easy for it to collapse under the weight of all the ensuing deference to hierarchy. To succeed, both rank and status must be leveled—at least for specific, strategic periods.
First, grab a normal deck of 52 playing cards. Divide it in half so you're working with only two suits: one red suit (hearts or diamonds), and one black suit (spades or clubs). Shuffle these cards.
Then assemble a team of six to 10 people. Everybody in the group selects one card from the deck, keeping it to themselves. At this point no one knows what their card means. Put the card face down, to the side. It won't be used in Round 1.
Round 1: Have the team huddle to come up with as many ideas as they can for a holiday party. The ideas should be detailed and cover all bases—food, drinks, entertainment, decorations, prizes, locations, and so on. This is a numbers game: The group must come up with as many ideas as possible in only 45–60 seconds total. Stop the ideation exercise after that time.
Round 2: Now have everyone turn their cards face up in front of them so everybody else can see it. Explain that the rank of one's card represents one's status in the group: Ace is the lowest status; king is the highest (the suit doesn't matter). Once each team member knows the status of the other members, the group continues the conversation—but this time, everyone is playing the status that's on his or her card.
As members interact with each other, remind them to be aware of the status of the person they're talking to. Give them three to five minutes for this conversation. Don't remind them that their task is to come up with ideas for the holiday party! Let them to take natural ownership of the progress of this meeting.
Chances are you'll watch things fall apart right before your eyes. People often fall immediately into the trap of using the whole time to emphasize their rank, drive their own agendas, and undercut every idea that isn't theirs. The group almost completely loses sight of the point of their time together, which is to come up with ideas.
Round 3: Now the color of one's card matters. Everyone with a red card aligns and agrees with each other; if you've got a black card, you're on the same page as other black-cardholders only. Then encourage the group to interact with one another and to actively form teams within the team. Have them fight for their team's ideas and put down the other team's ideas; in other words, lower the other team's status in the group while actively raising their own team's status.
Again, give them three to five minutes for this portion of the round. And once again, do not remind anyone that their task is to come up with ideas for the holiday party.
When time's up, there are probably a few people shouting at each other—the brainstorm has devolved into attacks and accusations. No matter what anyone has to say, no matter what ideas are being presented, everybody is fully consumed with proving their rank, working from their own motivations, and driving their own agendas.
Which round generated the most ideas? Whenever I've run this exercise, the answer is always clear: Round 1. Time after time, even though the group had only 45–60 seconds to work with, they got the job done. More ideas are generated in that round than in the second or third rounds of three to five minutes, and usually more than in both of those final rounds combined.
I'm always amazed by how quickly people slip from divergent thinking into convergent thinking without realizing that they had the power of choice: whether to use their rank as motivation to inform both individual and collective perspectives, or simply to drive their individual agendas. The team with a focused goal—where every member was equally valued—got the job done splendidly. The minute that individual agendas become more important than the mission is the moment the mission fails.
When I run this and ask participants which round felt more like the meetings everybody is used to going to, most people vote for Rounds 2 or 3. They exemplify what happens in too many workplaces: goals get knocked sideways by a room full of rank, status, emotions, personal agendas, and personal alliances.
Status and rank are powerful, but they aren't always productive. Few things squash open communication faster than a higher-up speaking from on high. There may be times when people do need to marry themselves to a specific agenda that's based on their rank and job title, but if that agenda doesn't fit with a team's agenda, the team suffers just as much as the individuals within it.
This article is adapted with permission from Getting to "Yes And": The Art of Business Improv by Bob Kulhan with Chuck Crisafulli (c) 2017 Robert Kulhan. All rights reserved. Published by Stanford University Press in hardback and electronic editions, sup.org.
