Amid religious decline, two scholars examine neo-charismatic congregations that are growing faster than any other in the U.S.
In August 2011, more than 30,000 people cheered wildly as the then U.S. presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry—now secretary of energy in the Trump administration—came to center stage at "The Response: A Call to Prayer for a Nation in Crisis" at Reliant Stadium in Houston. Perry quoted from the Bible and preached about the need for salvation that comes from Jesus. He concluded with a prayer for a country he believed to be overwhelmed by problems:
We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government.
He then proceeded to ask God for forgiveness for forgetting "who made us, who protects us, and who blesses us." In response, the crowd exploded into cheers and praise to God.
Five years later, on April 9, 2016, and 1,500 miles away at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, tens of thousands of people gathered to pray for the supernatural transformation of America.The event consisted of more than 16 hours of healing sessions, worship music, and prophecy from some of the most popular Charismatic Christian leaders in the world.
While not directly affiliated, these two events and the leaders who organized them are central players in a movement that we call "Independent Network Charismatic," or INC, Christianity in our recently released book, The Rise of Network Christianity.
Based on our research, we believe that INC Christianity is significantly changing the religious landscape in America—and its politics.
INC Christianity is led by a network of popular independent religious entrepreneurs, often referred to as "apostles." They have close ties, we found, to conservative U.S. politicians, including Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, and more recently, President Donald Trump.
Charismatic Christians emphasize supernatural miracles and divine interventions, but INC Christianity is different from other charismatics—and other Christian denominations in general—in the following ways:
It is not focused primarily on building congregations, but rather on spreading beliefs and practices through media, conferences, and ministry schools.
It is not so much about proselytizing to unbelievers as it is about transforming society through placing Christian believers in powerful positions in all sectors of society.
It is organized as a network of independent leaders rather than as formally organized denominations.
INC Christianity is the fastest-growing Christian group in America and possibly around the world. Over the 40 years from 1970 to 2010, the number of regular attenders of Protestant churches as a whole shrunk by an average of .05% per year, while independent neo-charismatic congregations (a category in which INC groups reside) grew by an average of 3.24% per year.
Its impact, however, is much greater than can be measured in church attendance. This is because INC Christianity is not centrally concerned with building congregations, but spreading beliefs and practices.
The influence of INC Christianity can be seen in the millions of hits on manyoftheirweb-basedmediasites, large turnouts at stadium rallies and conferences, and millions of dollars in media sales. In our interviews with leaders, we found that Bethel, an INC ministry based in Redding, California, for example, in 2013 had an income of $8.4 million in media sales (music, books, DVDs, web-based content) and $7 million in tuition to their Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry.
According to the director of media services at the Kansas City-based International House of Prayer (IHOP), their website receives over 25 million hits every year from all over the world and is one of the top 50 websites in the world in terms of viewed video content (a million hours of watched video content per month).
As part of our research we conducted in-depth interviews with senior leaders, staff, and current and former participants in INC Christian ministries. We also conducted supplementary interviews with Christian leaders and scholars with knowledge of the changing religious landscape and attended conferences, numerous church services, ministry school sessions, healing sessions, and exorcisms. In all, we conducted 41 in-depth interviews.
Our primary conclusion is that the growth of these groups is largely the result of their network governance structure. When compared to the oversight and accountability of formal congregations and denominations, these structures allow for more experimentation. This includes "extreme" experiences of the supernatural, unorthodox beliefs and practices, and financing, as well as marketing techniques that leverage the power of the internet.
In our research, we witnessed the appeal of INC Christianity, particularly among young people. We saw the thrill of holding impromptu supernatural healing sessions in the emergency room of a large public hospital, the intrigue of ministry school class sessions devoted to the techniques of casting out demonic spirits, and the adventure of teams of young people going out into public places, seeking direct guidance from God as to whom to heal or to relay specific divine messages.
In addition to the growth numbers, the importance of INC Christianity lies in the fact that its proponents have a fundamentally different view of the relationship between the Christian faith and society than most Christian groups throughout American history.
Most Christian groups in America have seen the role of the church as connecting individuals to God through the saving grace of Jesus and building congregations that provide communities of meaning and belonging through worship services. They also believe in serving and providing for the needs of their local communities. Such traditional Christian groups believe that although the world can be improved, it will not be restored to God's original plan (until Jesus comes back again to rule the Earth).
INC beliefs, however, are different—their leaders are not content simply to connect individuals to God and grow congregations. Most INC Christian groups we studied seek to bring heaven or God's intended perfect society to Earth by placing "kingdom-minded people" in powerful positions at the top of all sectors of society.
INC leaders have labeled them the "seven mountains of culture." These include business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family, and religion. In this form of "trickle-down Christianity," they believe if Christians rise to the top of all seven "mountains," society will be completely transformed.
One INC leader we interviewed summed it up this way:
The goal of this new movement is transforming social units like cities, ethnic groups, nations rather than individuals . . . if Christians permeate each mountain and rise to the top of all seven mountains . . . society would have biblical morality, people would live in harmony, there would be peace and not war, there would be no poverty.
We heard these ideas repeatedly in most of our interviews, at events we attended and in INC media materials.
Most significantly, since the 2016 presidential election, some INC leaders have released public statements claiming that the Trump presidency is part of fulfilling God's plan to "bring heaven to Earth" by placing believers in top posts, including Rick Perry, who is currently heading the Energy Department; Betsy DeVos directing the Department of Education; and Ben Carson leading the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
INC Christianity is a movement to watch because we think it will continue to draw adherents in large numbers in the future. It will produce a growing number of Christians who see their goal not just as saving souls but as transforming society by taking control over its institutions.
We see the likelihood of INC Christians taking over the "seven mountains of culture" as slim. However, we also believe that this movement is sure to shake up the religious and political landscape for generations to come.
Brad Christerson is a professor of sociology, Biola University, and Richard Flory is the senior director of research and evaluation, University of Southern California, Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
Don't fear smart computers—these companies are using AI to prevent disease, predict food shortages, and more.
While artificial intelligence isn't likely to come for your job anytime soon (no matter how many dystopian movies say otherwise), AI and machine learning are already automating and improving many everyday tasks, like mobile search or the organization of your family photos. AI is also helping a new breed of companies disrupt industries from medical research to agriculture. Computers can't yet replace humans, but they can do a great job handling the mundane clutter of our lives. And that's why every major tech company is eager to hop on board.
Click on a company name to learn more about why it made the list.
Salary negotiations are stressful, but that doesn't have to leave you grasping for the right turn of phrase or stammering something you'll live to regret. Here's a guide to getting it right no matter which twists and turns the negotiating process takes.
"I've done some research, and it looks like the typical pay for somebody at my level is ________."
"According to Salary.com [or source of your choosing], the standard rate is ________." (Makes it about market rates, not what you're worth. Walk into the meeting well researched.)
"I typically get ________." (Useful because it provides a frame of reference.)
"I feel great about what we accomplished this year." (Such a team player, aren't you!)
"Based on [insert your best evidence for why you deserve it], I'd like to propose ________." (Still nice but to the point.)
"The standard inflation rate is ________. Based on my performance over [period of time] I'd like to discuss an increase of ________." (Great, you've done your research.)
If you feel you are doing the work of someone at a higher pay grade than you, make that your basis of negotiation. "I'm a second-year associate doing the work of a third year. I'd like to make my compensation commensurate with my output."
Remember: Keep emotions out of it. Stay data driven and fact based.
"I can't afford to live in ________." (Your boss doesn't care.)
"I have student loans." (Ditto.)
"I'm getting married." (Nope.)
"I'm trying to get pregnant." (Noooo!)
"I've been working overtime." (We all work hard.)
"This is what I want and I'll take nothing less." (Negotiation is about compromise.)
"I need ________." (Okay, but do you really need it? Try "I'd like" or "I propose.")
"I'm sorry, I just want ________." (Do not—repeat: do not!—apologize for talking about money.)
"I haven't had a raise/asked for anything since . . ." (Complaining will get you nowhere fast. If you really haven't asked for a raise in five years, mention this after you've made the case based on your work.)
"But I'm doing the work of three people." (If that's true, then kudos, you're killin' it. But try framing this as an accomplishment instead of a complaint. You need a raise to be made "commensurate" with your workload.)
. . . "This is higher than what we've budgeted for this role."
"I understand. I also believe I bring more to the table than the average candidate. [Insert how]."
. . . "We don't think you're ready for that role."
"Help me understand what I can do to be ready."
"We are thrilled to offer you (gut-punchingly lower amount than what you wanted)!"
"Thank you so much. I'm really excited about the opportunity, but—"
"What I'd need to feel comfortable accepting this role is ________."
"If you're able to match ________, I'd be eager to accept right now."
"I know that the typical salary range for this role is ________, and I'm really looking to at least match that figure. Are you able to get to that level?"
After an initial round of negotiation: "Unfortunately, we can only go as high as ________."
Stay silent for long enough to take a breath. Then say, "I appreciate your flexibility in trying to make this work. I really want this job, so I'm hoping we can see what we can do to make both sides comfortable." (No, you're not offering a back rub, you're talking about non-monetary items like stock, flexibility, benefits.) "How flexible are you with [insert benefit]?"
"I understand, and I am eager to accept. I'd like to set up a timeline to revisit the terms again in ___ months. Is that something you're open to?" (Sets a concrete framework for a potential bump.)
After multiple rounds of negotiation: "I'm sorry, but we can only offer ________."
Ask them what they can do to make up the difference. (Again: stock, flexibility, benefits, something else.)
"I understand. What if we set up a timeline to reassess in ___ months?"
Take it, and get to work. If an employer works to get you what you ask for, be appreciative and responsive. Sometimes, rapid decision-making is needed.
If you aren't sure:
"Thank you so much for the offer. I need a few days to think about it/weigh my options."
If it's still not good enough:
If it's a job you're in already:
Take what's on the table and ask if you can reassess in six months.
Take what's on the table and start looking for a new job immediately.
Walk away from that soul-crushing job and never look back. Of course, you've got to first ask yourself if you can afford it—and if it's worth sucking it up a little bit longer until you find your next gig.
If it's a job you're negotiating for:
Take what's on the table and ask if you can reassess in six months.
Say no as a tactic. Keep in mind: this only works if you're actually able and willing to walk away. But in a prolonged negotiation, it can be effective: sometimes it's the only thing that will make the person on the other end meet your demands.
Actually walk away. And when writing a formal "I'm out!" show your disappointment but be gracious so the door stays open: "I appreciate your going to bat for me. Unfortunately, I'm unable to accept at that amount, but I hope that we can cross paths in the future. Thank you and please don't hesitate to call me if anything changes." As Beyoncé says: The best revenge is that paper.
If they counteroffer with something good, take the job and get to work.
Email still has a role to play (even if it's a shrinking one) as teams embrace chat tools, says one HipChat manager.
I've built a career on building communication tools, first at Microsoft, then with my own startup, and now at the group messaging platform HipChat. I've also watched (and joined in myself) as users embrace Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, and FaceTime outside the workplace, similarly looking for more natural ways to connect.
That doesn't surprise me. Email was created 35 years ago out of a need to send messages over the relatively new internet, but it's never really felt like a natural way to communicate. It can turn a simple decision that would take five minutes to resolve in person into a weeklong exchange.
So why are we still using it? Everybody has their own answers, but as somebody who lives and breathes HipChat and believes email's uses will continue to shrink, here are a few of the times I still rely on it.
I find that email can still work well for one-on-one exchanges, but when teams try to communicate on email threads, it can quickly get overwhelming.
I've seen this happen for a long time. For example, if I send out an email to a whole team asking if someone has time to answer a customer, everyone needs to think about whether everybody else saw it, and the only way to confirm this is to "reply all." This forces every team member to keep up with the email chain until the task is finished, even if they haven't had a hand in it (and didn't need to). The cognitive burden in a case like this might seem small when it comes to just one email thread, but multiply it by thousands a week and it can consume all your time.
But I'll occasionally revert to email to discuss a specific issue with just one other person. Cordoning off that conversation in my email inbox sometimes works just as well as trading direct messages in HipChat.
Team messaging apps are all about immediacy, and the more that becomes the new normal, the more email starts to feel like running with 20-pound weights strapped to your ankles. Expectations of response times have gone from a few hours to near real-time, allowing teams to work closer to the speed of thought. That's useful especially at a time when teams are increasingly distributed and mobile. Common barriers to efficiency—like siloed email chains and individually owned documents—are easier to knock down with chat tools.
For instance, if my team is sorting through an issue together that's too complex to solve through text-based conversation, any team member can click a button in HipChat to "escalate" the text chat to video—to talk through the issue just like we would if we were all in sitting in the same physical space, even if we're not.
But when it's okay to wait, email still comes in handy. Not every issue requires escalation, an immediate reply, or any face time at all. And in fact, as instantaneous responses come to be more often expected, email's less-urgent pace can still be a bit of a reprieve.
At Atlassian (HipChat's parent company), we rarely use email to communicate internally. HipChat handles the bulk of our communication. But every employee still has an @Atlassian.com email address and uses it for very specific functions. One of the most obvious is as a public front door for people outside the organization to reach us.
Because the sender doesn't see my presence or have any expectations about my availability, I can decide when and if I should respond. That can be helpful because it allows me to devote more attention to the real-time chats taking place among my team.
Chat platforms still aren't that good (yet!) at long-form communication. For documents like a report that everyone on the team needs to receive and may want to file away for future reference, email can be a good option.
Still, even situations like this tend to run up against email's limitations: The message is local and only available to the individual, updates need to be recommunicated, there can be version-control issues, and search can be inconsistent and difficult. So while we've switched to more collaborative tools at HipChat in order to jump over hurdles like these, other teams still rely on email to circulate long reports. And when there are fewer internal email messages overall to compete with, those otherwise cumbersome documents are less likely to get lost in the shuffle.
If you ask me, communications tools like HipChat are the future because they offer the kind of expressiveness we're already gravitating toward in and outside the workplace. Especially for younger workers, increasingly dated tools like email feel like a step backward.You may as well hand them a landline phone and a big, heavy desktop PC.
In the meantime, though, email can still be useful. The more you start testing out a team chat tool, the more clearly defined your uses for email will become. This can help streamline and tame your team members' otherwise unruly inboxes. And in the mid- to longer-term, whittling down your uses of email can help you figure out which other functions and workflows you can automate in a collaborative platform.
In other words, by using email to catch the runoff of things you haven't yet moved over into chat, it can act like the training wheels your team needs to embrace a future with much less of it. This way, when email finally does recede into the background of your workflow (even if it never goes away completely), your team won't have relied on it for a while already.
Eva's Phoenix is a like a city within a city in downtown Toronto.
From the outside, Eva's Phoenix—a new teen homeless shelter in downtown Toronto's Fashion District—looks like a classic Art Deco brick warehouse. But inside, it's organized like its own city, complete with a main street, townhouses, common "squares," and more. The building is designed to reinforce the programming at Eva's, a pioneering nonprofit that has been combating teen homelessness through housing, education, and job placement.
Photo: Ben Rahn/A-Frame
Local firm LGA Architectural Partners has been working with Eva's since 1997, and this project represents the culmination of 20 years of lessons learned about what works, what doesn't work, and what's most important about creating a supportive space. It's not just about building space to house people, which is often the case with homeless shelters; it's about constructing an environment that, along with the right social programing, has the ability to help youth thrive.
"Most shelter programs offer a single overnight stay and provide open sleeping arrangements without much privacy," Dean Goodman, a principal and cofounder of LGA, says. "In contrast, for Eva's youth, the shelter is not just a place to stay, but is a place to change your life."
Photo: Ben Rahn/A-Frame
The model LGA and Eva's developed involves building a community within a community. This helps youth, who often lead solitary, isolated lives when they're homeless, become acclimated to the type of group living that most teens and young adults experience. (Think of shared apartments and dorms.) In addition to providing housing for up to a year, Eva's also provides supportive services—like substance abuse treatment, job training, and education programs—for full-time residents and youth who aren't living on-site. Additionally, Eva's practices a harm reduction model for substance abuse and is the only shelter in Toronto that's offering these services specifically designed for youth. The nonprofit operated three different locations: Eva's Place, a 40-bed emergency shelter; Eva's Satellite, a facility that specializes in substance abuse treatment; and Eva's Phoenix, which focuses on transitional housing. First opened in 2000, Eva's Phoenix was forced to move in 2011 to a new location a few blocks away.
"The building is nondescript, helping to destigmatize the environment in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood," Goodman says. "However, on the inside it's [designed to be] interesting, luminous, and inviting."
The 41,000-square-foot building is composed of 50 bedrooms clustered into 10 houses that each have their own kitchens and two bathrooms. The "townhouses," as LGA refers to them, flank a central corridor that's metaphorically thought of as a "main street." There's also a larger communal kitchen, a print shop, counseling rooms, and lounges interspersed throughout the building—intended to encourage activity in the whole building. Large skylights illuminate the interior and limit the need for artificial light.
Photo: Ben Rahn/A-Frame
Overall, Eva's Phoenix is about channeling a sense of home. "Much of the design for the youth underscores creating opportunities for developing critical life skills from cooking, to sharing bathrooms or living together—which homeless youth have often missed out on—hence the emphasis on house-style accommodation versus open bunks," Goodman says. "This presented some design challenges for us, for example, needing to find the most durable fixtures and finishes while striving to deploy them in a way that feels homey and non-institutional."
Still, they had to take some essential institutional measures. For safety and security, LGA eliminated closed and blind corners, built balconies that overlook the central corridor, and incorporated large windows throughout to maintain sight lines throughout the space. Additionally, the architects paid close attention to circulation so that the staff-only, resident-only, and publicly accessible spaces were situated in a way that naturally controls access.
Photo: Ben Rahn/A-Frame
LGA worked closely with Eva's and the youth it serves to develop the space and hosted workshops and design charettes to inform the final concept. The real proof of its success is what the people Eva's serves think of the shelter. We asked three residents—who remain anonymous to protect their privacy—about their experience by email. The things they like? Opportunities to learn skills in the print and construction studios and job placement after completing certificate programs; the central location near school and commercial businesses; and the non-hierarchical structure in the townhouses, which lets residents communicate more freely. While one person liked how bright the location is compared to other shelters, one person commented that it's too bright, even at night with some of the internal lighting, making it hard to sleep. Another said better window coverings would solve the problem. The previous location of Eva's Phoenix was larger and the smaller footprint means less storage and bedroom space, which some residents mentioned. Residents who have stayed in other shelters not run by Eva's shared a similar sentiment: They really like how the program and building let them live independently—and there's always enough food to eat.
Goodman doesn't think architecture alone is a healing force for homeless youth; however, it can help by creating conditions that are conducive to overcoming the physical and emotional challenges wrought by homelessness.
"Architecture can set the tone, reinforce an idea and allow it to flourish, but it's necessary for there to be a robust vision and program that leads the way," Goodman says. "In this regard, Eva's program and approach focuses on supporting the youth to succeed in their transition away from homelessness and also emphasizes the need for them to be active players in this process."
When the photo phenom found the courage to mess with success, growth went bang and innovation took off. Can it also burst Snapchat's bubble?
Sacrilege! In the spring of 2015, Instagram's leadership was cautiously exploring whether to make a major change to its wildly popular image-sharing service—one that would alter how the company defined itself. At issue: Should Instagram remove the restriction that all posted photos and videos be square?
A debate about squares versus rectangles might seem pedantic, even silly. But along with the app's hipster filter effects and its Polaroid-esque icon, that square border had been an Instagram signature, akin to Twitter's 140-character count. The shape so typified Instagram's elegantly minimalist sensibility that Ian Spalter, newly arrived at the time from YouTube as head of design, was aghast at the idea of abandoning it. "I just started here," he remembers thinking, "and now you're breaking everything?"
That August, Instagram steeled itself and began allowing users to post photos and videos at any aspect ratio. But rather than being freaked out by the change, Instagram's shutterbugs immediately began producing a greater variety of imagery, in higher quantities than ever.
Instagram founders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom
Looking back at the company's hard-to-shake loyalty to the original square format, "we might have been too precious," admits Instagram cofounder and CEO Kevin Systrom this January at the company's shiny new three-story headquarters in Menlo Park, California, which are decorated with jumbo-size Instagram photos and located a mile and a half from its former office on Facebook's main campus. His team's allegiance to its original design, he concluded, had been holding it back.
It's easy to understand why the company was hesitant to mess with its formula. The story of how Systrom and cofounder Mike Krieger went from coding Instagram 1.0 at a tech incubator on San Francisco's Pier 38 in 2010 to selling their startup 18 months later to Facebook for more than $700 million remains a Silicon Valley fairy tale. Today, thanks to the musicians, athletes, and other celebrities who use it, Instagram is a pop-culture powerhouse. It has been one of the 15 most downloaded apps every day for more than five years, and its value to Facebook—once accused by pundits of overpaying—has been estimated by analysts to be $35 billion.
"A big change happened when we decided to go non-square," says Systrom, who, with his close-cropped beard, chocolate-colored quilted blazer, and wooden water bottle, has a sense of style befitting the cocreator of a tool for sharing beautiful photography. The decision not only gave the company more confidence to change its app, but also inspired it to go much further in evolving the service. Systrom realized that if the company waited until there were signs that the app was in dire need of revamping, it would likely be too late.
Even designer Spalter, initally taken aback by the possibility that an Instagram photo might not have to be square, now looks at the shift as a moment when the company came to understand itself better. "It gave us more permission to try new things, to solve some problems we hadn't invested in solving," he says.
Instagram's icons, old and new
Embracing change when everything's clicking may be one of the hardest challenges in business. But Instagram has now reimagined itself on multiple fronts. It's built out Instagram Stories, an all-new element that puts it squarely in competition with Snap's Snapchat. It took the feature only five months to rack up 150 million users each day, the same number that Snapchat required a half-decade to reach. (Snap reported 158 million daily active users in December.) The fact that Stories took off so swiftly presumably helps explain why Facebook has since incorporated similar features into WhatsApp and Messenger, and is testing a version inside the Facebook app.
Instagram has also ramped up the ambition of preexisting features such as its built-in direct-messaging service and tweaked its classic photo- and video-sharing capabilities to allow for up to 10 items in one post. It even rolled out a redesign that ditched that cherished Polaroid-inspired icon, a transition that some users found more jarring than all the evolution going on inside the app itself.
Most important, the company has pulled all this off in a way that's both kept existing fans engaged and attracted new recruits at an even faster pace. The app, which announced in September 2015 that it had doubled in 18 months to 400 million monthly users, revealed in December 2016 that it added another 200 million in 15 months to close out the year with 600 million. (Snap does not reveal its monthly active users, so Snapchat and Instagram can only be compared directly using Stories.)
Among the things that Instagram has questioned about itself was its once-fierce proud dedication to lean staffing, which it clinged to long after becoming part of Facebook. "Building out a senior team was probably the best thing we could have done for the company," says Systrom. "You just have more hands on deck to scale the people side of the organization." Along with YouTube's Spalter, key executives who joined in 2015 and 2016 include head of product Kevin Weil (who had held the same job at Twitter), and director of engineering James Everingham and Stories product manager Robby Stein (both ex-Yahoo).
Just three years ago, the company had roughly 50 employees, up from 13 at the time of the acquisition. Now it has more than 500, with 40-plus positions open in areas from engineering to marketing to public policy. Already, it's eyeing the building across the parking lot from its new headquarters for future expansion.
Observers might be tempted to assume that Snapchat's emergence as a rival for teens' and twentysomethings' attention is what motivated Instagram to reimagine itself to such spectacularly successful effect. Systrom, predictably, doesn't position it that way. The threats he sees are more existential.
Every recent change the company has wrought, he says, sprang from the team asking itself: What would the company do if Instagram as we knew it suddenly stopped mattering? "Not that it's going to," Systrom quickly clarifies. "But what if? What kind of decisions would you make? That unlocked a torrent of creativity. It allowed us to be more risk-seeking than we would have been in the past. Ironically, it would almost be riskier to not do it."
Los Angeles Clippers point guard Chris Paul isn't afraid to use Instagram to own his gaffes. After Steph Curry knocked him off his feet, Paul posted a pic his pal Kevin Hart sent him, featuring Paul's falling form Photoshopped onto a Twister mat—and the image garnered nearly 20,000 comments. "I'm always trying to give people insight that we're more than just athletes," Paul says. Read more about how Chris Paul got to six million Instagram followers.Photo: Stephanie Gonot
To hear this from Systrom is a tad startling, given that Instagram became synonymous with photo sharing within months of its debut. But as the app closed in on serving a half-billion users worldwide, its designers came to believe that its purposefully stripped-down experience, originally built with artful photos in mind, was too limiting and formal. What had once been a creative constraint had become a straitjacket.
Today, Systrom says, the company's mission is "strengthening relationships through shared experiences." The idea underpinning this goal is that Instagram should offer users a more overt and unvarnished way to connect through the universal language of images—to broadcast moments and not just just-so snapshots. "A lot of times you're on the way to the airport, or you're at a campground, and [a photo] doesn't need to endure, because you're not actually sharing a photo: You're just communicating a status update of what you're doing," says product manager Stein, who has only been with Instagram since May 2016 but fell in love with the app as one of its original beta testers. "That [emphasis on experiences] wasn't always clear to us," Systrom says. "It wasn't always clear to Facebook. And it wasn't always clear to the world."
The very first Instagram photo, shot by Systrom in Mexico and uploaded to a prototype version of the app code-named "Codename" in July 2010
Instagram could have introduced its new interest in visual communication in any number of ways, but the company spent four months doing something nobody anticipated: It cloned a key Snapchat feature more or less in its entirety. Like Snapchat Stories, Instagram Stories, which debuted in August 2016, offers a set of tools that let you mash up full-screen still images and video snippets with overlaid text annotations and doodles—a medium more likely to result in something that feels endearingly rough-hewn. And just to reinforce the point that you're not creating . . . art, both Instagram Stories and their Snapchat forebears disappear after 24 hours.
Now, companies that blatantly knock off the competition often wind up with something that consumers couldn't care less about. Just ask Instagram's parent company, Facebook, which launched two Snapchat wannabe apps—2012's Poke and 2014's Slingshot—that were thuddingly unsuccessful.
Instagram Stories has avoided that fate by preserving a recognizably Instagrammy feel. When Systrom and Krieger were coding the original version of the app, they latched onto a philosophy they called "do the simple thing first"—an approach that was a necessity for a two-person company, and that remains an Instagram mantra today. (This being Silicon Valley, the new headquarters has a conference room named after the phrase.)
In the early days, "we would never add something 'just because,'" says Tim Van Damme, who became the company's ninth employee and first official designer in January 2012, two months before the Facebook acquisition. "We'd rather remove two things than add one thing." These days, Instagram is adding a lot of things. But it still tries to err on the side of straightforward approachability that helps users understand where they are and what they can do.
That's more or less the flip side of Snapchat, where figuring the interface out can feel like a challenge that admits you into a private club, albeit a rather large one. For instance, rather than being playfully enigmatic like Snapchat—which dumps you into a live view of your smartphone's camera the moment you launch the app—Instagram starts out by showing you friends who have posted new Stories. On Snapchat, when you peruse Stories, it can be tough to tell when one has ended and another has begun; to avoid that confusion within Instagram, Spalter's design team created a nifty rotating-cube effect that provides an unmistakable line of demarcation. Instagram Stories also lets you rewind a story in progress to catch a moment you missed, an improvement that Snapchat found interesting enough that it also adopted the feature.
"We didn't just blindly adopt a new format," says Systrom, who has been quick to give Snapchat its due for the inspiration—a rarity in an industry where companies borrow good ideas all the time and then behave as if they've invented a breakthrough. "We built on top of it."
And Systrom and company have kept on building: Instagram Stories has evolved more in six months than Instagram itself did in its first several years, with much of the change helping to distinguish it further from Snapchat. In October, the company made Stories more discoverable by adding them to the Explore tab within Instagram. The month after that, it started letting users add looping mini-movies, called Boomerangs, and name-check other members (who automatically receive an alert via Instagram Direct). In December, the team added stickers and a new hands-free mode.
For Instagram's employees, this new fast-forward approach to product development has required some adjustment. "December was exhausting, because of the amount of stuff that we were launching," says Amanda Kelso, who has managed the Instagram community—including worldwide in-person get-togethers called "Instameets"—for three years. "But it was awesome, too."
The biggest upgrade so far came this past January with the worldwide availability of Instagram Live, a video-broadcasting feature. A striking departure from any Snapchat offering, Live is unmistakably reminiscent of Twitter's Periscope, down to the hearts that flutter up the right-hand side of the screen as viewers like a video. In contrast with Periscope, however, Instagram Live is a feature inside Instagram Stories rather than an experience unto itself; videos go poof after 24 hours along with the rest of Stories.
Product manager Shilpa Sarkar says that when the company began pondering how to incorporate live video, it quickly decided to use the technology to accentuate its newfound informality. "Stories has become this authentic, pressure-free space to share," she explains. "It was sort of this 'aha' of, 'Oh, Live as part of Stories. Another way to share what you're up to right now.' " Below the surface, the feature takes full advantage of the video-streaming technologies that Facebook had already put in place for its own Facebook Live service, allowing Instagram to focus on getting the user experience right.
A snippet of one of Kevin Systrom's own Instagram Stories
The overarching goal of helping people share experiences helps Instagram avoid the unchecked sprawl of Facebook, which has tools for everything from checking sports scores to selling a car. "Someone on the outside who doesn't know all of this context could be like, 'Why are they just adding a bunch of features?' " Systrom says. "I don't think it would have worked [here] if it didn't hang together underneath some unifying concept."
As Instagram plots further evolution, the bet the company made on Stories—and the big payoff it's delivered—adds up to a template for product revamps still to come. As director of product management Blake Barnes puts it, "In a lot of ways, in order to make sure the product continues to feel the same way to people, the product needs to change itself."
The challenge will be ensuring that that ongoing evolution doesn't lead to feature bloat. "Hopefully, I won't let us get to a point where we have too much in one app," Systrom muses. "I pride myself—and I know we pride ourselves—on making Instagram feel simple, direct, and to the point. But the second you start serving hundreds of millions of people, there are a lot of use cases that come that you didn't have when you were serving 30 million people." The company will need to be disciplined, he says, about editing out its mistakes. Already, it's ditched Photo Maps, a little-used tool that plotted a user's snapshots geographically.
Instagram's expanded mission has done more than give its users options they clearly wanted: All those new features have kneecapped Snapchat at a critical moment. As the buzz around Snap's potential IPO was building throughout 2016—the company finally went public on March 2—the rapid embrace of Instagram Stories altered the narrative around Snap. In its S-1 filing for its IPO, released in February, Snap specifically called out Instagram's feature as a copycat that could hamper Snapchat's future market share. The document also included stats that showed its app's user growth having slacked off right around the time of Instagram Stories' introduction last August. For some investors, sentiment shifted from thinking of Snap as the next Facebook to hoping it can avoid being the next Twitter.
Though it's early to draw conclusions about Instagram Stories' long-term impact on Snapchat's fortunes, there are many reasons to believe that Instagram will continue to put an extreme amount of pressure on Snap. "Brands, influencers, and celebrities, especially, already had a large built-in audience on Instagram," says Nick Cicero, CEO of Delmondo, a social analytics provider and content studio. "And Snapchat is known as a difficult channel [on which] to build and grow an audience." Instagram also has a massive head start on attracting international users; Snap states in its SEC filings that it intends to focus solely on the largest international advertising markets.
Nowhere is Instagram's potency more significant than in the domain of ad sales. While Snap, which has 1,800 employees, released initial tools in January that help it offer advertisers self-service options for buying and placing advertisements, Instagram can piggyback on Facebook's well-engineered ad machine to do more than a 500-person company should be able to. "Productwise, we're super-autonomous," Systrom says. "And at the same time, we're able to plug into an infrastructure that scales."
Rising R&B sensation Jovanie uses Instagram like the teens, which makes sense given tht he's 15. His 155,000 followers get to see upcoming music, such as a single with Lil Yachty, as well as the videos that put him on Atlantic Records' radar. "Instagram Stories are great for being real with my fans," he says. "Plus I get way more views on Instagram than I do on Snapchat." Read more about why Jovanie loves Instagram.Photo: Elizabeth Renstrom
For years, Instagram was famous for not rushing things when it came to monetizing its users through advertisers—it took the company three years before it ran its first ad. "We were very meticulous about easing into it, about understanding what the community thought," Systrom explains. "And then we pushed on the gas, as soon as we found the model that worked. And the model that worked was hooking up into Facebook's system."
"When you place an ad, you can say, 'I'd like this to be on Facebook, Instagram, or both,' which is very convenient," says James Quarles, who heads Instagram's business operations (and is the only person visible at the company headquarters on "Tie Tuesday" who is actually wearing one). As a subsidiary of Facebook, Instagram doesn't disclose its own financial data, but research firm eMarketer estimates that it will earn $3.64 billion from ads in 2017—nearly double 2016 estimates. Snap, by contrast, generated more than $400 million last year and projects $1 billion in 2017 revenue.
Instagram's ease of advertising purchase has allowed it to attract 500,000 monthly advertisers. With such a diverse pool of marketers, the company can better target messages to each user's interests in a way that stands a chance at being relevant rather than annoying. "The more advertisers you have in the system, the better the ads get for each individual person in an auction-based system," Systrom says. "You have more candidates to choose from, so if your specific interest is fly-fishing, we can serve an ad that relates to that interest."
The fact that the service is both highly visual and social makes it a powerful marketing medium. "Instagram allows us to have a virtual conversation with our customers every day," says Lisa Pomerantz, senior VP of global communications and marketing for fashion and luxury-goods brand Michael Kors, which bought that first-ever Instagram ad in 2013. "It also provides an instant read on what they're liking, or not liking, at a particular moment." Michael Kors himself, she adds, sees the company's Instagram presence as the virtual equivalent of a trunk show.
Just five months after introducing Stories, Instagram began testing ads within the feature—which, since they commandeer the entire screen, offer marketers the sort of undivided user attention they crave. "We love how Instagram tells stories—it's 100% picture and video based," says Emma May, senior director of marketing for Turner Sports, which is experimenting with the format to promote its basketball broadcasts. "What we do from an NBA on TNT standpoint fits really well within that medium." According to a chart from a September 2016 Advertiser Perceptions report buried on page 114 of Snap's IPO filing, Snapchat rates first among digital ad platforms in satisfaction, but it trails Instagram and Facebook when marketers were asked whether they planned to increase their ad spend.
This competition between Instagram and Snapchat isn't likely to abate anytime soon. But this new, more daring Instagram is reminiscent of another company that exhibited a willingness to experiment, cloned other services' features, and moved into high-speed mode right around the time it turned six years old: Facebook. And that snapshot turned out suitable for framing.
The company first known for its location-based app is turning the nuances of consumer behavior into pretty charts.
What does your Saturday afternoon trip to the mall look like as data? This may not be something you've ever thought about, but plenty of retailers have. If websites and apps can track our every move online, why can't our real-world travels be graphed neatly on a chart too? Well, now they can.
Foursquare, the company first known for its location-based social app, is launching a new data dashboard that lets companies get a clearer picture of how people move around in the real world. Foursquare Analytics, as it's called, opens up the company's foot traffic data to retail partners like H&M and Equinox, giving them an up-to-date insight into how consumers are behaving in real life.
"We're kind of the Google Analytics of the world," says Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck. "We're measuring who's up, who's down, which demographics are going to which brands."
The dashboard spells out crucially important trends like customer loyalty, how frequently a given demographic group visits a given store, how foot traffic trends look in different markets, and even how a business's foot traffic compares to that of its competitors.
It's hard to overstate the value of this data to bricks-and-mortar retailers and other businesses. But it's something Foursquare has been aware of for a few years as it's built out a massive trove of geolocation data that includes not just a database of millions of venues around the world, but insight into how people move around between these venues. Foursquare has made its places database available via API since the company's early days. But in recent years, it's been filling out the human activity side of the data and building products and advertising-related tools around it. That's quickly becoming the core of Foursquare's revenue—indeed, its entire future as a business—and Foursquare Analytics is the latest piece of that puzzle.
Foursquare's built-in ability to make this shift is fortunate for the company, which saw a major dip in app usage after the controversial 2014 split of Foursquare into two apps and the neutering of some of its most beloved social features. While Foursquare City Guide and Swarm have since regained many of those users, the company's apps never quite lived up to the social media hype bestowed on Foursquare when it launched at South by Southwest in 2009.
Foursquare has built this dataset through rather inventive means. Of course, the bulk of the data comes from Foursquare's own eponymous city guide app and its social companion, Swarm. Users of these apps who have opted in to their in-the-background location tracking serve as a sample panel used to map aggregate behavior. The apps also help Foursquare keep its map of the world current. By relying on this smartphone-based methodology, Foursquare is able to map out these real-world trends without extra hardware like beacons or other geofencing tactics. This approach also makes the technology much easier to scale.
A growing sliver of the data comes in various shapes and sizes from Foursquare's partners, which integrate the company's data into their services, often (but not always) sending location signals back to Foursquare. This includes companies like Twitter, Snapchat, Apple, and Pinterest, along with about 100,000 other developers. Earlier this month, the company launched a new SDK called Pilgrim, which lets developers add the always-on locational awareness of Foursquare and Swarm to their apps.
All of this, combined with machine learning and data science under the hood—as well as external sources like census data, in some cases—helps Foursquare build out location-powered advertising tools like Attribution and Pinpoint. It also helps Foursquare pull off marketing tricks like accurately predicting iPhone 5s sales based on foot traffic trends. And now it's opening those smarts up to select partners.
"This stuff is done in archaic ways right now," says Glueck. "We want to be a big-data, really powerful way of looking at the real world economy. We think there's a ton of problems that can be solved this way."
From Kurdish shepherd to billionaire CEO: Hamdi Ulukaya turned milk into gold and created a model for 21st-century leadership.
Hamdi Ulukaya never planned to move to America, much less start a yogurt business that would make him a billionaire. Things so easily could have been different. He might have gone into Turkish politics or the family cheese-making business, perhaps even married the hometown girl who his mother claimed would be perfect for him. He thinks about it a lot.
Instead, Ulukaya got hauled in for questioning by the Turkish police one day, and his life went in another direction.
At the time, in the early 1990s, Ulukaya was studying political science at Ankara University. A Kurd who grew up raising sheep in the mountains of eastern Turkey, he had gravitated toward the contentious Kurdish-rights movement, attending demonstrations and publishing a politically minded newspaper. Though Ulukaya has always strongly disavowed violence and wasn't involved with the extremist group the PKK, he nevertheless attracted the attention of the Turkish government, which then—as now—sometimes harshly cracked down on activists. Ulukaya knew people who had been taken by the authorities and simply never came back. Was he about to be jailed? Tortured? Killed?
Name: Hamdi Ulukaya; Job: owner, founder, Chairman, and CEO of Chobani; Country of origin: TurkeyPhotos: Tim Richardson; Groomer: Rebecca Plymate at Art Department; stylist: Heather Newberger
More than two decades later, Ulukaya was in Twin Falls, Idaho, recalling that fraught era. The founder and CEO of the multibillion-dollar yogurt business Chobani was at the largest of his company's three manufacturing plants, where he had assembled senior staff to go over plans for the next year and beyond. Ulukaya is a quiet man with oversize features and a subtle magnetism that's occasionally punctured by an endearingly goofy high-pitched laugh. Unlike many CEOs, he radiates more warmth than authority, and his manner is unhurried, even when his schedule is hectic (his schedule is always hectic).
During a break from the meetings, Ulukaya had brought me to a local coffee shop, where he was drinking tea and sharing memories of his early years. Thinking back to that scary time in Turkey, when his budding Kurdish consciousness could have gotten him into serious trouble, he seemed easily transported, as if his old life never felt too far away.
Ulukaya was lucky that day in Ankara; the police let him go with a warning. But the incident left him shaken, and he knew that from then on, life in Turkey would be hazardous. He decided he had to leave. Europe, he thought, but then somebody he met suggested the United States. "I didn't know anything about America," Ulukaya recalled. "It didn't connect with me at all. We thought capitalism was the reason for the suffering of poor people. The guy said, 'Don't be stupid, go to America.' I looked at him and said, 'I would never go to that capitalistic place.' He said, 'You think Europe is better? You go to America and try to learn English.' " The man pointed Ulukaya to a service that helped students attend school in the U.S.
Four months later, in October 1994, Ulukaya arrived in New York City, a skinny young man with a small suitcase and $3,000 for living expenses, on his way to Long Island's Adelphi University. He spoke almost no English. "I was extremely scared," Ulukaya said. "I was aware that this was going to be very, very difficult. But I was excited."
What happened next is one of the business world's most unlikely stories: An aimless young anticapitalist immigrates to the U.S. simply because he needs a place to go, and through grit, determination, and eerie prescience about changing American tastes somehow builds a massive brand that eventually dominates the $3.6 billion Greek yogurt industry, besting international conglomerates such as Danone and General Mills. But Ulukaya has done more than that. He has begun to forge a new kind of business leadership, one that fuses competitiveness with an unusually strong sense of compassion.
In just the past year, he has launched a program to give away up to 10% of Chobani's equity to his workers and instituted a generous six-week parental-leave policy. No unions or worker groups pressured him; he just decided on his own. He also employs more than 400 refugees, which is proving increasingly controversial in the Trump era. Ulukaya's actions have brought both death threats and invitations to speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where in January he challenged other business leaders to take more responsibility. "You have to lead by example," he says. "Chobani can inspire a new way of business, a new way of work, a new way of innovation." Despite his newfound wealth and prominence, the activist spirit of Ulukaya's youth remains as strong as ever.
Beneath Ulukaya's relaxed charm, he is a fierce busi-nessman with an obsessive zeal for every detail of his expanding grocery empire, from pH levels to production-line operations to packaging. His first meeting at the Idaho plant last December was with VP of research and development Kai Sacher, a German-born food scientist with a penchant for cowboy boots and Western wear who previously spent 20 years working for Dannon. They met up inside the complex's R&D center, currently housed in a set of temporary trailers adjoining the main factory. Ulukaya, Sacher, and other members of the department gathered in a small room whose walls are lined, floor to ceiling, with glass jars of ingredients: coffee sprinkles, chipotle granola, honey-roasted sesame sticks, spiced walnuts, salted pretzels.
The R&D team had laid out a series of potential Chobani products for Ulukaya to taste—some of them iterations of current concepts, others entirely new categories. (One of these will likely debut this summer.) Ulukaya plunged a paper tasting spoon into the first sample, scooped a heap of product into his mouth, and stared off toward the opposite wall for several long seconds. "You're going somewhere with this," he finally said. The CEO then fired off several sharp technical questions, which might have been more illuminating if only I—like Sacher—had a master's degree in dairy science. He tried a bit more. Taste. Pause. Stare. "I don't think it's there," he said.
Sacher reminded Ulukaya that it had been less than a week since they hatched this idea over the phone, and the R&D scientists had worked all weekend to cook up a trial batch. (Product development in the food industry usually takes years.) "Yeah, yeah, I get it," Ulukaya said. "Good job. That's a fast turnaround."
At Chobani, "fast" is serious praise. Speed is both a guiding principle and key competitive advantage—a big part of how the company has, since it launched in 2007, muscled its way to more than 19% of the current overall yogurt market, hauling in some $1.5 billion in revenue in 2016. According to Nielsen, Chobani currently owns 36% of all Greek yogurt sales—a category that barely existed before Ulukaya came along and today accounts for 46% of yogurt purchases. Chobani now makes nine different product lines, including the popular Flips (yogurt with a "sidecar" of crunch-adding dry goods such as chocolate chips and nuts), along with several Mediterranean-style dips.
Chobani's high metabolism allowed Ulukaya to build the enormous Twin Falls plant in just 326 days, at a cost of $450 million, and it's how he continues to speed new products to market, keeping competitors off-balance.
Last year's big launch was a line of flavored-yogurt drinks, which the company decided to green-light in February and had on shelves by July. "I go with my gut feelings a lot," Ulukaya tells me later. "That got into our culture. We just go boom, boom, boom: fast."
Ulukaya's distinctive character has always defined how Chobani operates. Ask people who work closely with him, and they'll tell you that there are effectively two Hamdis: the driven businessman out to obliterate his rivals, and the empathetic humanitarian. "I'm a shepherd and I'm a warrior," he says when I ask about the two sides of his personality. "I come and go between those two. I'm a nomad, and nomads are the most real people. You can't pretend."
Working at Chobani means constantly toggling between each of these bosses. "He's an emotion-driven guy," says CMO Peter McGuinness. "He wants to grow the business and be a fierce competitor. But he's got a giant heart and conscience and wants to do the right thing, regardless of market share, money, all that kind of stuff."
Ulukaya's beneficent side shows up all across Chobani. The company's products are all-natural: no preservatives, only non-GMO ingredients, milk from cows not treated with the bovine growth hormone rBST. Chobani has always given 10% of its profits to charitable causes, and Ulukaya is eager to help the communities in which his company operates (in 2011, he renovated a public baseball field near his upstate New York plant, for example). Chobani also pays above-average wages, and that new family-leave policy offers full pay for any new parent, including foster and adoptive parents. Ulukaya has put a great deal of thought into cultivating a spirit of warmth and enthusiasm that most people wouldn't associate with working in a factory, and when you spend time at the company's plants, the positivity is obvious.
Then there's the other guy. "I hate my competitors," Ulukaya says. "I have to create an enemy, and I have to get rid of it, in a metaphoric way. I don't hate people; I hate the idea. We hate Big Food." Last year, Chobani released a series of hardball ads that went after its chief adversaries, Danone and General Mills. The commercials highlighted artificial ingredients used in some Dannon and Yoplait yogurts. "Potassium sorbate? Really?" said an incredulous voice-over in one spot. "That stuff is used to kill bugs!" After the campaign's targets protested, Chobani pulled the ads, and Danone and General Mills quickly won a preliminary injunction in federal court. Though Ulukaya can't comment for legal reasons, he does say that running the commercials was his decision.
There is, inevitably, some tension between these two Ulukayas. Sourcing all-natural products is expensive and complicated, which can hurt profit margins, and the company's aversion to preservatives led to a 2013 partial recall due to mold issues. But ultimately, these twin motivating forces tend to cohere. "If you want to have a modern brand, they're not at odds at all," says McGuinness. "The leaders of tomorrow more and more realize that having a strong head and a big heart is where you need to be."
Ulukaya has always had trouble sitting still, and rather than spend his time at a desk, he prefers to roam the floors of his factories, chatting with workers or even sometimes standing off by himself, watching cup after cup skitter down the line to get filled, sealed, boxed, and sent on its way. No matter how busy things get, he will often insist on making time during the day to walk outside and think, strolling through lower Manhattan near Chobani's New York City office or exploring the rolling hills around his original plant in upstate New York.
One afternoon during his Idaho trip, I joined Ulukaya as he took a head-clearing drive to the nearby Snake River Canyon, a breathtaking gash in the Twin Falls landscape that is home to the area's famed Shoshone Falls. He parked at a scenic overlook and got out to walk around, breathing deep in the cold air and snapping photos of a small roadside waterfall that had frozen midstream. Back in the car, his mood turned reflective. "There is not a day that goes by that I don't travel back to my childhood," he says. "Like the ice thing we just saw—you see something and it reminds you of home. It could be a light, a taste, a song. It reminds me of my mother's food or sitting around the fire, of us kids playing in the snow or watching the stars."
Ulukaya grew up in eastern Turkey's Erzincan province, where his family raised sheep and goats and made Tulum cheese. They spent winters in Iliç, a tiny town near the Euphrates River accessible only by a train that ran through twice a day. When the cold broke, the clan headed up into the Munzur mountains with their flock, roaming the high meadows and sending cheese back on horseback to trade or sell. Ulukaya's father, stern and traditional, was a respected leader in the community, and his mother, who didn't finish elementary school, was known for her empathy and generosity. It was a profoundly simple life. "If you're a little better off, it doesn't mean that you have more things," Ulukaya says. "It just means that you have more sheep."
When he was 11, Ulukaya went off to boarding school; even at that young age he was restless. "We were in this little town and had no interaction with outside," he says. "I always wondered what's behind the mountain—I would make stories in my head. I always wanted to go. So I left." High marks on a college-entrance exam won him a slot in Ankara University's prestigious Faculty of Political Science, where he enrolled in 1991. Then came his budding human-rights consciousness, that run-in with the police, and the subsequent plan to escape to America. Which is how Ulukaya found himself, at age 22, at a new school on Long Island, with little grasp of American culture and no clue how his life was going to unfold. "I. Am. Hamdi," he remembers repeating in his rudimentary English classes. "I. Am. From. Turkey."
Half of Ulukaya's $3,000 nest egg was gone after just a month, and to save money, he transferred to New York's public Baruch College, supporting himself by working for an Armenian rug merchant and pumping gas at a Brooklyn filling station. It was a low time for Ulukaya—missing his family, unable to return to Turkey, just trying to get through the next day, the next month.
At school one day, Ulukaya was told to write a paper in English about any subject he knew well. After class, his teacher stopped him. "You can make cheese?" she asked. It turned out she had a weekend farm upstate, and she invited him to take the bus up and give her a lesson. "I didn't realize America had farms," he recalls with a laugh. Ulukaya fell in love with the area, which reminded him of home. He persuaded his teacher to give him a job on the farm, milking cows and shoveling manure. He moved nearby and enrolled at SUNY Albany.
Ulukaya's business career began almost by accident. In 1995, one of his five brothers, Bilal, moved from Turkey to join him upstate, and at one point their father came over for a visit. The patriarch wasn't impressed with what passed for feta in the U.S., and he suggested the boys import the real thing from their cheese-making brothers back in Turkey. That plan didn't prove economically feasible, but Hamdi ultimately decided to make his own. In 2002, using seed money from family members, the brothers launched a little feta cheese company called Euphrates in Johnstown, New York. Within a couple of years, he had built it into a successful small business, generating enough income to finally feel a little comfortable in his new American life.
One evening in his Johnstown office, Ulukaya was working his way through a pile of junk mail, tossing most of it in the garbage. After he finished, he sat thinking for a few minutes, then grabbed the trash can and dug through it. He pulled out a flyer from a real estate company, now covered in tea leaves and cigarette ashes. FULLY EQUIPPED YOGURT PLANT FOR SALE, it read, along with a few photos of the factory, a Kraft Foods facility located about 90 minutes away.
Ulukaya picked up the phone. "It just was curiosity," he says. "If it was a year earlier, I would never pay attention. I was just feeling like, Okay, I can build a life here. I can survive." The price of the factory, he learned, was just $700,000, fully equipped. "I thought they left a zero off," he says. "I know what these things cost. It was impossible." But the figure wasn't a mistake. After all, what kind of lunatic would want to buy a faded, 80-year-old yogurt factory? "Can I come see it?" Ulukaya remembers asking the agent. "He said, 'Yeah, come tomorrow.' "
Chobani's New York plant is located in the tiny hamlet of South Edmeston, perched between the tranquil Unadilla River and a cemetery with graves dating back to the early 19th century. Built in 1920, the factory for many years produced Philadelphia cream cheese, which, it turns out, was never made anywhere near the Liberty Bell. By the 1980s, Kraft had refitted the building to make Breyers yogurt, until, in late 2004, it decided to halt production at the facility.
When Ulukaya showed up in early 2005 for a tour, the plant was in the process of shutting down. "The feeling was like somebody died," he says.The 55 employees, soon to be out of jobs, had little hope for a rescuer. "It was emotional," says Maria Wilcox, who at the time had worked in the Kraft factory's office for 21 years. "I had visions of the building with weeds growing up around it."
But Ulukaya sensed possibility. Dissatisfied with the thin commercial yogurts filling the shelves of American grocery stores, he often made strained yogurt at home—the delicious thick stuff he had eaten with every meal back in Turkey. Now he wondered: Could he turn "Greek style" yogurt into a business?
Ulukaya's lawyer was unenthusiastic. "He said, 'Hamdi, what are you talking about? You're telling me Kraft is closing the plant, and you are going to do something with it? They're looking for an idiot. You're the idiot.' "
Six months later, Ulukaya was holding the keys. Having funded the purchase with a loan from the Small Business Administration, now all he had to do was develop a product, learn how to mass-produce it, and somehow convince people to buy it. His first move was to hire back a handful of Kraft-plant employees, including Wilcox, who answered phones and eventually handled purchasing and other key tasks, and Richard Lake, the outgoing production supervisor. "Hamdi said that [the operation] was going to be twice as big as Kraft's was," says Wilcox. "I thought, Wow, okay. That's ambitious."
From the start, Ulukaya was determined to do things differently. There was the yogurt, of course. Greek-style brands such as Fage had been gaining popularity among urban food connoisseurs, who appreciated its nutrition profile as much as its taste: high protein, low fat, and less sugar. But to most of mainstream America, yogurt still meant the familiar runny stuff. Ulukaya's big gamble was that Walmart customers would love strained yogurt, too, if only they were exposed to it.
Another way the CEO thought he could differentiate his brand was through packaging. He decided to put the yogurt in European-style tubs, which are shorter and wider than American cups. And while most yogurt companies printed their logo and product info directly onto the plastic—resulting in a muted, washed-out look—he invested in brilliantly colored plastic sleeves that could be wrapped around cups at the factory. With its bold colors and sharp graphics, Chobani yogurt would prove hard to ignore.
In October 2007, the first cup of Chobani-brand yogurt rolled off the line, bound for a kosher grocery store in Great Neck, Long Island, which had agreed to make a trial purchase of 150 cases—not even an entire pallet. It took the small team 12 straight hours just to fill that first order. As the business grew, Ulukaya insisted on placing his products not in the organic specialty aisle—where imported (and more expensive) Greek yogurt was usually hidden away—but next to the familiar megabrands in the regular dairy case. This was initially a tough sell for grocers, but he pushed hard, and early believers such as Fairway and ShopRite discovered that when they followed Ulukaya's strategy, Chobani tubs really moved. From there, things expanded fast. "I knew it was never going to be about selling anymore," says Ulukaya. "It was about making. Can I make enough?"
The staff, about 30 people by 2008, worked frantically, sometimes pulling all-nighters to keep up with the orders, often grabbing naps when and where they could—chairs, countertops, floors—before starting the whole process over again. "The next five years, I never left the plant," Ulukaya says. "I don't remember anything I did—day or night—that wasn't related to yogurt." What kept everyone going, despite the crazy pace and background hum of barely contained chaos, was their CEO. "He always had a vision of where he wants it to go," says Lake, who still works at Chobani as a lead project manager. "We just figure out a way and make it happen." Between 2008 and 2012, the South Edmeston plant grew to 600 employees, cranking out as much as 2 million cases of yogurt per week. Chobani sold $1 billion worth of product in 2012. By then, it had completely remade the yogurt business. Danone and General Mills were initially unprepared. "We were so fast—so fast," says Ulukaya. "When the large companies woke up, it was already too late."
Today, a steady stream of trucks rattle up and down the two-lane county road that leads to Chobani's New York plant, delivering milk and fruit, and hauling away carton after carton of finished cups. A 160,000-square-foot warehouse and office complex now operate across the road, connected via a nifty covered bridge with a conveyer-belt system inside. You can still make out the white walls and blue awnings of the squat original building beneath the layers of contemporary industrial infrastructure, but the site's impressive sprawl of storage tanks and refrigeration equipment marks South Ed—as the factory is known inside the company—as a flourishing modern facility.
In early January, I made the 30-mile drive from South Edmeston to Utica, New York, to visit the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees. Located in an imposing 1930s brick-and-stone building that for many years housed a Catholic school, the refugee center is a crucial resource for displaced people, having helped resettle more than 16,000 refugees since it opened in 1981. Utica has long embraced refugees—people born in other countries now make up nearly a quarter of the city's population—and in recent years a steady stream of immigrants have arrived after fleeing war or persecution in countries such as Myanmar, Syria, Sudan, Iraq, and Bhutan. Some are fresh from conflict zones, while others have spent their entire lives in camps.
My trip to the center came less than three weeks before the inauguration of Donald Trump, and employees were nervous about the incoming administration's hostility toward immigration and refugees. (Their fears proved warranted: The MVRCR is now facing serious budget issues as a result of Trump's policies.)
Even so, the center's enthusiastic staff and bright, flag-lined main corridor radiated optimism—a welcoming atmosphere for people who've escaped often unimaginable hardship and face daunting challenges. Among other things, the center offers assistance with housing, immigration paperwork, and basic life skills: how to call 911, how to drive in the snow, sometimes even how to work a light switch or use indoor plumbing. Finding work is often a refugee's greatest hurdle; employment assistance, then, is one of the MVRCR's primary functions.
When Ulukaya called the center in 2010, they were thrilled to hear from him. At the time, the fast-growing Chobani needed more workers, and it had already hired extensively from the pool of former Kraft employees and other candidates from the immediate area. Ulukaya had heard that refugees were struggling to find jobs, and he saw a way to solve his staffing issues while at the same time help people who desperately needed it—people who reminded him of himself when he first arrived in the United States: nervous, uncertain, and unable to even communicate.
Employees at the refugee center were excited, but they warned that there would be obstacles—language, transportation, significant cultural differences. "I said, 'Well, these are easy to fix,' " Ulukaya recalls. " 'We can provide transportation, we can bring translators, and Chobani is a place where everyone is welcome. Look at me: I'm from a different part of the world. It's going to be okay.' "
The experiment started slowly—5, 10, 15 refugees, brought on initially as temps. Ulukaya hired buses to run back and forth from Utica, and while there were inevitable hiccups, the difficulties proved surmountable. Ulukaya would sometimes stop by to check on newcomers like David Tamba, a 31-year-old Liberian who moved to the U.S. in 2008 after spending most of his life in a Guinean refugee camp. Hired by Chobani in 2012, he still works at the South Ed plant, operating a case packer. "How do you like it here?" Tamba remembers Ulukaya asking him not long after he started. "Do you have any problems? Don't be scared. Just let us know."
When Chobani opened its Idaho plant, Ulukaya discovered that Twin Falls is also a big relocation destination, and soon he was applying what he learned in South Edmeston to a new crop of refugee workers. Today, about 30% of the company's 2,000 employees are immigrants, hailing from more than 15 different countries. About 400 are refugees.
Ulukaya believes that businesses can do more to foster and support community. Inspired by his experiences with refugees, in 2015 he launched the Tent Foundation, a nonprofit organization that, in addition to funding and organizing refugee relief efforts, is actively enlisting other companies to help deal with the human-displacement crisis. More than 70 firms—including Airbnb, Cisco, IBM, Unilever, and UPS—have signed up for the Tent Partnership for Refugees, agreeing to donate resources and hire displaced people, among other efforts. Ulukaya also signed on to the Giving Pledge in 2015, vowing to donate the majority of his wealth to help the cause.
While it's easy to see how all of this benefits the refugees, something less expected has happened since Ulukaya started hiring people from MVRCR: It has also been a boon for Chobani. "It's a good thing to do," he says, "and on the business side, it's a smart thing to do. These are the most hardworking, patriotic, honest people. They will give everything they have." The impact has gone way beyond just solving staffing shortages; it has proven to be a morale booster, contributing to a spirit of community—a feeling among employees that the company stands for much more than just profits. "It's hard to quantify in dollars," says MVRCR executive director Shelly Callahan, "but it's enriching in all sorts of ways that people don't necessarily think about initially. People are looking for more meaning: in how they shop, in what they do for a living. Hamdi is someone who recognizes that, while he's making a really good product, it's bigger than that."
In Twin Falls, I met two sisters in their early twenties who work the 2 p.m.-to-10 p.m. shift at the factory. Nisa, a production lead, and Amna, a filler operator, were born in a troubled country in the Middle East, and they came to Idaho in 2012, hoping to start over after years of dislocation and struggle. (To protect family members, they asked that I not use their real names or identify their home country.) Knowing that Ulukaya would be in town, they had surprised him at the office with a home-cooked lunch of traditional chicken and rice—a gesture rewarded with hugs from the clearly moved CEO. "He is like a magic, magic boss," Nisa told me as she watched Ulukaya scoop chicken onto a plate. "Every day life comes more easy and becomes more beautiful. Today we are smiling, and it's all because of Chobani."
Nisa and Amna's father, a policeman, was killed when they were young. Without a man in the family, they were vulnerable to harassment, and by the time they were teenagers they were being stalked by men who wanted to marry them. The more their mother said no, the worse it got: There were death threats and warnings of acid attacks, and armed men staked out their doorstep. The sisters were trapped, unable to leave even for school.
Their mother decided she had to get the family out of the country. She sold their house and found a smuggler who said he could get them to safety. Early one morning, dressed in black to avoid being seen, the three of them made their escape. Amna was 15, Nisa a year younger. It was the start of a 16-day journey—across multiple countries, through wilderness and over water, hiding out in crowded rooms full of strangers speaking unfamiliar languages, all with no idea where they were or what lay ahead. Finally, the smugglers packed them into a dangerously cramped secret compartment built into the back of a truck. There was no food, and breathing in the dark, windowless space was difficult. During the ride, a child next to them died.
At the Ukraine border, they were divided into groups. Nisa and Amna were in one, their mother in another. The smugglers said they would reunite the family on the other side and everyone would continue on to Germany. But once in Ukraine, the girls were dumped in a Kiev marketplace—filthy, starving, and terrified. "It was cold, we had no food," Nisa says. "I had fractured my foot [during the journey] and couldn't even walk. It was almost dark, and we just stood in the bazaar: waiting, waiting, waiting." Getting desperate, they decided to start approaching strangers, asking if anyone spoke their language, begging passersby to help them find their mother. After many hours, they met a man who was from their country, and he agreed to let them sleep on the floor of his kitchen for just one night. He lived with his wife and two children in a single room, he told them, and didn't have much space.
Nisa and Amna ended up staying there for four years. Though their illegal status made life extremely difficult, Nisa studied English and did some work as a translator at a refugee center. Things gradually got a little better, but they kept searching for their mom. "There was no news," Nisa says, crying quietly. "Coming today? Coming today? Coming today? Nothing happened." To this day, they still don't know what happened. "We are just hoping that she will be alive," Nisa says. "That is the most important thing."
At the refugee center, Nisa met a group of American visitors from the immigrant aid group HIAS, who offered their assistance. Working with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the relief workers helped guide the sisters through the vetting process and find them a new home. "They [eventually] told us, 'Okay, tomorrow you will fly to United States,' " says Nisa, who was 18 at the time. "We were so happy." They were reluctant to leave without their mom, but they couldn't turn down the opportunity to move someplace where they would be legal and, they hoped, welcome.
Nisa and Amna arrived in Twin Falls exactly a week after the first cups came off the line at Chobani's new plant, in November of 2012. Soon enough, they were both working at the company. The first time Ulukaya came by, Nisa had no idea who he was. There was a bit of water on the floor, and she asked the CEO to move so she could clean it. "He looks at me and says, 'What is your name? Where did you come from?' " she recalls. "When he asked me, I was so full inside I just started crying. He hugged me and asked, 'Why you are crying?' I was feeling so emotional. I told him where I came from, how hard was life for us, and now I start working here. He was like, 'Don't worry. You are in a safe place.' "
Ulukaya's commitment to refugees hasn't been without repercussions. After a right-wing website published several articles last summer that criticized Chobani, social media outrage ensued, along with calls for a boycott. Ulukaya even received death threats. He was undeterred, but he describes it as a difficult time. "It hurt me," he says. "I didn't want anyone to think anything weird about Chobani. Unfortunately, the online world is very weird these days. If anyone saw the people who are at Chobani and the opportunity we give and what kind of environment it is, I do not believe anyone would object. These are amazing people making great products and trying to do their best."
After The New York Times published a story about the death threats last October, Ulukaya arrived at Chobani's New York office one morning and found a big package waiting for him. It contained several hundred letters of support from strangers around the country. "Those letters," he says, "were one of the best moments of my life."
Later this year, Chobani plans to break ground on an elegant 50,000-square-foot office building in Twin Falls adjoining the Idaho factory. It will house a comfortable employee break room and cafeteria, an open atrium for town-hall meetings, and outdoor areas where workers can recharge. The Twin Falls plant is already the world's largest yogurt-making facility, with up to 2.5 million pounds of milk coursing through its 1 million square feet every day. Rising out of a 109-acre field, its crisp edges and smooth white walls would suggest a high-end suburban shopping mall were it not for the prominent Chobani logo high up on the front. Inside, the building's scale is hard to process, with a central corridor so long you can't see from one end to the other. Smartly uniformed technicians huddle around data-crammed screens and gleaming, impossibly complex machines—a scene more reminiscent of a Bond villain's lair than a factory making stuff called Almond Coco Loco and Coffee Brownie Bliss. Ulukaya still gets a little jolt of pride every time he drives past.
Ulukaya hatched the Twin Falls plant with Marc Abjean, Chobani's head of manufacturing and technology, in 2011. They roughed out plans on the back of a napkin over a meal at a cozy pizzeria near South Edmeston, which Ulukaya had used as an unofficial office during Chobani's early years. Twin Falls was a huge gamble—a way to increase the company's West Coast presence, but also an infrastructure investment that would allow Chobani to significantly expand its focus. "If we were wrong," Ulukaya says, "this was the end of the company." Cash flow got so tight, Chobani needed a $750 million loan from private-equity firm TPG in 2014. But the new Flip line, which the plant was specifically designed to support, took off. In 2016, Chobani shipped more than 24 million cases of Flips, and sales jumped 52% from 2015. Flip products now make up 40% of the overall "mix in" market.
The expanded Twin Falls operation is part of the company's next big transformation: from yogurt brand to what McGuinness describes as "tomorrow's food company." The idea is that Chobani's values—taking care of employees, using natural ingredients, doing good in the world—can be applied to any number of other food products. Overall Greek yogurt sales were flat in 2016 (the category declined by 1%, according to Nielsen), after growing by double-digit percentages for the past four years. Chobani intends to move beyond its core products—maybe even beyond yogurt. It's also looking to international markets: Chobani is now sold in Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and other countries. Eventually, McGuinness wants people to think of Chobani as "a health and wellness company: It can be what you eat, how you act, how you treat people in the workplace—it's a larger idea."
Still, the path from here will bring challenges. "The things they're moving into make sense, but they're going to find a lot more competition compared to the way they originally got momentum," says Randy Burt, a partner in the retail practice of strategy and management consulting firm A.T. Kearney. "Their competition is much more aware of them than they were in 2008."
One surprising area of possible expansion is Chobani's cafés, which serve exclusive yogurt concoctions (both sweet and savory) as well as Turkish-style simit sandwiches and other items. There are two outposts in New York City, including one that operates out of a Target. Another recently launched inside a Walmart near Houston, and McGuinness is hoping to have a couple more open by the end of 2017. It's easy to see how these sleekly designed brand advancers could rapidly spread throughout airports, malls, and office-packed downtown areas.
An IPO, which would enable much faster expansion of products and markets, remains a possibility, but the one thing Ulukaya says he won't do is sell Chobani outright. That is unusual. Most successful packaged-food startups eventually get absorbed by international conglomerates: Think Danone buying Stonyfield Farm or General Mills acquiring Annie's Homegrown. Ulukaya started getting approached by suitors even in the early days, long before Chobani was a multibillion-dollar business. "I'll be honest with you, I paused when somebody came and said, 'Hey, you could get billions out of this,' " he recalls. "You say yes and take the money and go away, or you say no and stay and struggle. I was making calculations: I could [spend] $1 million every two weeks for the rest of my life and still have money left. It's like, how do you spend $2 million every month?"
In 2016, Ulukaya was approached yet again, this time by PepsiCo. Chobani had been exploring the idea of selling a minority portion, but PepsiCo was only interested in a majority stake. Ulukaya decided instead to self-fund the next phase of growth. "They wanted to have control," he says. "Without going into details, that [would be] the end of Chobani. This company has never been controlled. It's the same with me: If you put boundaries around me, I'll try to break it. Chobani has always been free. And in that freedom, it will do the right thing."
But Ulukaya's insistence on independence is about more than just ownership. When he first heard those rumblings of big-money offers back in the early days, he had to think hard about why running Chobani meant so much to him. "For the first time in my life, I was doing something," he says. "Those years of journey were designed to come here and start this. I was amazed with myself, to be honest with you. That joy, that discovery of self, is so powerful that it is above and beyond anything. And you wonder: If I did this, where else can it go? What kind of impact can I make? I can't end it here. I just discovered this guy. I'm not going to let him go yet."
One afternoon, after spending several hours at the South Edmeston plant, I went for a walk in Columbus Corners Cemetery, which sits next to the Chobani property. I had just finished talking to two refugees who work in the factory, optimistic young men with tough histories who have found new lives working for a Turkish guy in rural America. It had just snowed, and fading gray sunlight glinted off of the factory's metallic milk silos. I followed fresh deer tracks through the aged gravestones, taking in names from a different world. Content Olney, Died 1811. Experance Loomis, Died 1813. Harvey Tuttle, Died 1833.
Wandering through the grounds, I couldn't help but wonder what these long-gone early Americans—buried in the shadow of the plant, some no doubt immigrants themselves—would have made of their neighbor Hamdi, that America-loving foreigner with huge ambitions and a generous heart. I thought about my own grandparents, themselves refugees, who came to this country in desperation and scraped together a future for their son, their grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren.
And I thought about Nisa and Amna, still scarred but starting to look ahead, to plot a life that might ease the path for their own kids and grandkids one day. The sisters are hoping to buy a house, and they plan to apply for U.S. citizenship this year. "These girls could be lost, damaged, wasted for the remainder of their lives," Ulukaya had told me in Twin Falls. "But they are the light of the plant. Yes, I built a $450 million plant and all that stuff, but the part I love the most is becoming this hub for building lives. Refugees have gone through so much, just like these two girls. And seeing them smile and full of energy, it's like a new world is created—while you're making a cup of yogurt! Nothing is more beautiful than that."
Rather than saddle students with debt, MissionU charges grads 15% of their pre-tax income for three years.
Some college students are there for the keggers. Others want to live amid the library stacks in a state of academic bliss. But the majority of students? They are there because they want to find good jobs.
Too bad colleges are failing in that regard—and in the process creating a national debt crisis and exacerbating the skills gap between employers and job applicants. As of 2012, there were 34 million Americans with college debt and no degree, according to the Department of Labor.
The problem, as entrepreneur Adam Braun sees it, is that colleges have no incentive to focus on jobs. His new venture, MissionU, a cross between boot camp-style learning and traditional higher ed, has been designed to correct that dynamic. Instead of staring down six-figure tuition bills, MissionU grads earning $50,000 or more will pay 15% of their pre-tax income for three years. In short, the business model reinforces the mission.
"If our students aren't successful, we're not successful," says Braun, who previously started education nonprofit Pencils of Promise, which builds schools in developing countries.
Success, in this case, looks like an entry-level job in data analytics and business intelligence at one of MissionU's hiring partners—companies like Casper, Harry's, Lyft, and Warby Parker. The path for a student to get there involves a rigorous application process and one year of tuition-free learning.
"We spend a lot of time training entry-level employees on the basics of how to work, whether it's collaborating, being proactive—even a basic understanding of statistics," says Warby Parker cofounder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal, who expects to add a "couple hundred" people to his 1,100 employees this year. With his support, Warby Parker is weighing in on MissionU's curriculum and will consider candidates from the first cohort of MissionU graduates next spring. In theory, a MissionU grad will be cheaper for companies like Warby Parker to recruit and train.
Career-focused models like that of MissionU, Blumenthal adds, are "not an indictment" of the liberal arts tradition. "It's important that people learn how to think. But in general educational institutions are not moving fast enough with the pace of change."
And students are paying the price. In 2016, more than 3,000 Americans per day defaulted on their student loans. All told, more than 8 million people are in default, to the tune of $137 billion.
"People are leaving their college experience absolutely crippled with insurmountable debt," says Braun. At one point, his wife, Tehillah Braun, was among them, with over $100,000 in loans and no degree. Learning her story opened his eyes to the scale of the problem. "I think the vast majority of people entering college are making a bad decision. The return on that investment, for that young person, is increasingly diminishing or negative."
The situation is indeed dire, especially for first-generation college attendees like Tehillah. Charter school network KIPP, which serves many students that fit that profile, has woken up to the sobering realities that its students face when they arrive on college campuses. A survey published in February revealed that nearly three in five KIPP alumni attending college were worried about running out of food, while two out of three had been unable to find jobs or internships relevant to their goals.
But it's hard to know whether higher education is in need of reform or revolution. Educational debt builds up in part because so many students are unprepared for college-level work, with one in four having to enroll in remedial classes during their freshman year (total cost: $1.5 billion). By some measures, the problem is even worse: According to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, 60% of students are "not ready for postsecondary studies." As college administrators are quick to point out, their institutions are being asked to solve a problem that they did not create. (MissionU will be able to avoid the problem entirely by skimming the best and brightest 19- to 25-year-olds from its applicant pool, for an initial cohort of 25 students.)
At the same time, researchers at Burning Glass Technologies have documented a phenomenon called "upcredentialing." For example, just 19% of existing executive assistants have a bachelor's degree—and yet 65% of job postings for the role now require one. The same is true of many middle-skill career pathways. In the Burning Glass account, contrary to Braun's, getting a B.A. is more important than ever before. Indeed, income data consistently shows that college is more than worth the high price to attend.
"We have too few college graduates," David Autor, an M.I.T. economist who has studied this issue, told the New York Times. Not attending college, in his view, is economically irrational.
The challenge for economists—and for students and employers—is separating college the signaling mechanism from college the learning experience. For decades, "college" has been a convenient shorthand for evaluating job applicant quality. But that may be changing, thanks to the glut of low-quality (even fraudulent) for-profit operators and the simultaneous celebration of elite dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg. All told, there is perhaps a widening opportunity for startups like MissionU.
"We are deep believers that traditional accreditation is not the only path to securing a job," Braun says. "Ultimately, the most important credential is your first job." (No "Lux et veritas" here.)
Braun has taken steps to distance MissionU from other for-profit institutions, structuring the organization as a B-Corp and raising $3 million in venture funding from top early-stage investors (First Round Capital led the October round). The single year that students attend is arranged into four distinct quarters: a foundational unit, focused on hard skills like project management and public speaking; a soft skills unit, which includes a period of personal exploration; a 12-week sprint focused on the student's area of specialization; and a project phase involving a real-world client, which results in the completion of a public portfolio. Students will come together in person roughly once a month, but complete most of their learning online in video sessions led by industry practitioners. The total commitment: 25-40 hours per week, allowing room for a part-time job.
In the spring, MissionU will face its first major test: helping students get jobs that will jump-start their careers. Its reputation, and business model, depends on it. (Students who fail to reach the $50,000 threshold will be free of their repayment obligation after seven years.)
And if MissionU graduates can't land a job at all? They will have no credits and no diploma. But, as Braun says: "You have a public résumé or real work, you have a set of industry certifications, you have a network of peers who are super ambitious career-starters, and you have us as a team internally deeply invested in your outcomes."
For many disillusioned 19-year-olds, that might sound like a pretty solid deal.
Apple will likely give iPad sales a shot in the arm with its new $329 model, hoping that many of them end up in your workplace.
Apple's refresh of its iPad line this morning is about more than just demonstrating the company's faith in the product—it's also about the company trying to crack the enterprise market.
It's a key move for the iPad business, and, arguably, long overdue. After all, iPad sales have been slumping in recent years, and for fairly obvious reasons. The tablet's sales are cannibalized on two sides. As iPhones have gotten bigger and bigger and more sophisticated, a shrinking number of tasks—mostly content consumption tasks—have required the larger screen space of the iPad.
And yet for more advanced content creation tasks, most people still turn to their laptops—which, in Apple's case, have been getting smaller and smaller, further infringing on the iPad's territory. (Apple sold 13.3 million iPads in the last quarter of 2016, a 19% drop from the same quarter a year earlier.)
But that's a dynamic that applies to the consumer space. It doesn't apply so neatly to the enterprise space. Many enterprise apps simply call for both mobility and well more than 5.5 inches (on the diagonal) of screen space.
There's room to move for Apple in the enterprise space, where clunky, hard-to-use and harder-to-look-at applications running on stationary computers are commonplace—despite the fact that most workers use far friendlier apps and devices in their personal lives.
In recent years Apple has been accelerating its push into enterprise via partnerships with players like IBM, SAP, and Cisco. The model involves Apple lending its app-building expertise to the partner to create specialized apps for enterprise clients. The partner then sells or leases to the client Apple devices on which to run the apps.
For example, Apple helped IBM create an app called Passenger+ for airline flight attendants. They use it to manage special requests and needs from passengers, deal with flight delays and connection issues, and to sell personalized upgrades and other products and services to individual passengers. The app's main screen provides a look at the whole cabin, then allows the user to zoom in for personal data on this passenger or that. It's a pointing and tapping app; it doesn't require much text input, so a physical keyboard isn't really necessary.
IBM MobileFirst for iOS
There are many such examples in the enterprise world. Apple and IBM worked together to create a patient management app for nurses. The app provides a detailed graphic look at all the patients in the ward at any given time and features notifications and alarms for those situations when patients need attention.
Similarly, a doctor might have a far easier time doing rounds with a patient list displayed on an iPad than trying to read vitals on an iPhone (even a Plus-sized one) or with a MacBook Pro, which is unwieldy. An ER doc does far better running the triage list on a small iPad for the same reasons: She needs a mobile device with plenty of screen space, but relies on input methods that don't necessarily require a keyboard.
iPads also work well in retail environments, especially when a sale requires some data entry or extraction, capturing customer signatures, or processing a credit card payment.
In the hospitality industry, more hotels are loaning guests an iPad to use as their personal control panel for the room. They swipe and touch to control entertainment, lights, and temperature in the room, and to order food and additional services from downstairs.
The iPad will also be better suited to some specialized consumer uses. The hotel suite has many of the same features as the Smart Home, a setting for which Apple is steadily growing a new ecosystem of apps and devices. Apple introduced its Home app last year (well after it started building the Home ecosystem), which is now a built-in part of iOS. It's mainly showed the app running on the iPhone; but as the number of connected appliances, sensors, fixtures, and other connected things start to add up, the larger screen of the iPad makes the job of controlling and coordinating all that stuff easier.
And there may be other specialized consumer uses or ecosystems we don't yet know about. The iPad might play a central role in Apple's Augmented Reality strategy for all we know.
At any rate it's clear that the iPad line is getting refreshed with more regularity that the Mac line. So Apple clearly still believes that there's a major role in the world for the device, whether it's in the workplace, or wedged between the iPhone and the Mac in the consumer space.
The streaming service's new curated bundle of live channels could represent the future of television.
Picture this: You're out to dinner with your in-laws and (reluctantly) missing the NBA playoffs. Suddenly, you get a notification on your phone: Your team just might pull off an upset. You're asked if you'd like to "watch now" or "watch later." After some internal debate, you wisely decide to tap LATER and, when dinner ends, start watching on the ride home. When you get to your living room, you flip on the TV and pick up where you left off.
This is the future of television as envisioned by Hulu. Until now, the 10-year-old video-streaming company has primarily been known as a place to catch up on network shows after they're broadcast. But this spring, it's launching a live-TV subscription: For less than $40 a month, viewers will be able to access both Hulu's deep content library and real-time streams of more than 50 broadcast and cable networks, including CBS, ESPN, and FX. The service will also include DVR-like products that work on phones, tablets, and TVs. The goal is to deliver, for less than half the price of cable, the best of live television with the on-demand functionality of a streaming platform—along with features that neither offering has ever seen before.
Hulu, whose streaming service of TV, movies, and originals has 12 million U.S. subscribers (compared with Netflix's 54 million), is charging into the most exciting—and daunting—new frontier in the multibillion-dollar entertainment business: the effort to save cable TV before it collapses under its own bloat. Twenty percent of U.S. households are now cable-free, and "skinny bundles"—as the industry unfortunately calls them—attempt to offer people who gave up on cable ("cord cutters") or have avoided it altogether ("cord nevers") an alternative. AT&T's new DirecTV Now service, which launched last November, notched 200,000 subscribers in its first month alone, and critics have lauded Sony's PlayStation Vue for letting users stream to more than one device at a time. But this nascent category is suffering from growing pains. Each service more or less offers the same broadcast and cable networks, making it difficult for consumers to distinguish them. Worse, Sling TV, the most established service with 1 million subscribers, and DirecTV Now have had trouble streaming content without embarrassing glitches. YouTube, the largest video service, is expected to launch its own bundle this year.
What's happening here is emblematic of how the internet transforms industries. Cable TV, like newspapers, once operated as a series of local monopolies. But now every content provider—established or upstart—has to fight it out with everyone else, with no built-in advantages, geographic or otherwise. As this competition takes shape, the winners will be determined less by the channels they offer than the features they wrap them in. "If the content itself isn't your differentiator," says Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins, "then you have to look to other things to compete." Hulu, then, is effectively back where it started 10 years ago: Its future, and that of its traditional entertainment partners, rests on reimagining the user experience and creating a bold new template for how we consume TV.
An elegant, easy-to-use interface has been a hallmark of Hulu's since its 2008 launch, thanks to founding CEO Jason Kilar, who maintained a near-maniacal attention to design. He ensured that Hulu has been thinking about the technical nuances of television viewing for nearly a decade—unlike, say, AT&T. When Hopkins became Hulu CEO in 2013, the former 21st Century Fox executive was expected to be able to smooth out the tensions among Hulu's corporate parents—Disney, 21st Century Fox, and Comcast (more recently, Time Warner became a minority owner)—that marked Kilar's tenure. He also had to brush up on his tech skills. Though steeped in television distribution, Hopkins was such a digital novice that Peter Rice, chairman and CEO of Fox Networks Group, welcomed him to Hulu by sending him a Steve Jobs uniform (black mock turtleneck, New Balance sneakers, faded jeans) and a copy of The Internet for Dummies.
Today, Hopkins is a model student. For the past two years, he and his team have been obsessing over the new UI for Hulu's network bundle, deconstructing everything from a screen's "information density" (how many titles you see at one time) and background color gradation to how much time it takes new users to complete the onboarding process (three minutes). The result is an elegant, recommendation-filled interface that's filled with poster art, one that's worlds away from the experience of pulling up a clunky grid of channels and deciphering hard-to-read text. In fact, browsing channels and titles is presented as a last resort. Instead, the new UI steals innovations from Netflix and Spotify and applies them to live TV: Users get customizable profiles, and Hulu surfaces content for them in real time. Some of its selections are users' own picks; the rest comes care of Hulu's predictive algorithms. To help educate these algorithms, the service has deconstructed programming to remarkably granular levels. Users can express a preference for everything from "fantasy anime" to "romantic K-dramas."
Hulu will also be introducing interactivity to the traditionally passive act of TV watching. Los Angeles residents, for example, will be able to receive mobile notifications about local, breaking news: a high-speed car chase, say, on the I-405, or a Dodgers game that's spilling into extra innings. Other kinds of personalized alerts will roll out later this year. "There's [more to] the social experience than just posting things to Twitter and Facebook," says Ben Smith, Hulu's senior VP of experience. He wants viewers to share with one another in a more profound way. Eventually you'll even be able to see which shows and movies your friends are watching, or (perhaps more tellingly) which shows they've started and then ditched.
These features are essential to elevate and distinguish Hulu's network offering. "It's really hard to come up with a skinny bundle that works economically and is broadly appealing to everyone," one digital TV executive explains. "While it's true that the average user only watches 10 channels, those channels are different for everybody." Hulu's partners think they have another advantage that its competition doesn't: Hulu's library of more than 3,500 shows and movies to pad out its live offerings. And then there's Hulu's own original content, which it's doubling down on in 2017, in hopes of landing its own Game of Thrones–like watercooler show (see "A Dramatic Entrance," previous page). "This idea of marrying live TV with a deep library," says Fox's Rice, "so you can watch either the latest episode of Empire or the first one—that's unique to Hulu."
For every media executive like Rice, who claims to be "agnostic" when it comes to competition between streaming and cable, there are others who are more reluctant to adapt a business model that has generated billions in profits for more than three decades. The media companies want transmission fees that are equal to, if not higher than, what they receive from pay-TV companies. They are also trying to build their own streaming apps. In his grinding negotiations with CBS, for example, Hopkins wasn't able to secure access to full, current seasons of some of the network's most popular shows, including NCIS; CBS is reserving them for its digital All Access product that sells for $5.99 a month. And, as of January, Hopkins said he was talking to Comcast "almost on a daily basis" in an effort to make NBC part of the Hulu package at launch.
With such headwinds, Hulu and its partners find themselves in a different version of the "trading analog dollars for digital nickels" debate that defined its earliest years. "I don't know how Hulu makes money at $40 [a month]," says media analyst Brandon Ross of the research and strategy firm BTIG. "If you sit and write down the names of the companies they've made deals with, and figure out what the content costs are, it gets me to $40 or over." Hopkins offers a more sanguine view: "I think profitability in these spaces is going to be relative." He points out that Hulu has effectively two businesses—streaming video on demand and live streaming—against which it can sell ads. "When you look at it holistically," he says, "we're going to be in pretty good shape."
For now, Hopkins would rather focus on the long view: "We're building this thing for 5 years, 10 years from now, because we just see this increasing opportunity for people to subscribe to a service like this." First, though, it'll have to captivate viewers. If it does, Hopkins says, "we've improved the experience of television"—and most likely changed it forever.
Across industries, impactful leaders can't be afraid to take a stand both in and out of the boardroom.
A few weeks ago, I got a LinkedIn message from Kat Lisciani, host of the Millennial Innovators podcast. She was asking how to pronounce my last name, wanting to cite an editor's letter of mine in an episode. I've just listened to the episode, which begins with an endorsement of my assertion that "business is the driving force for progress in our culture." It's quite flattering. Yet by the end, Lisciani is challenging me. Corporations have a role to play, she contends, but in the current environment, "all hope for the future rests on . . . the individual, the citizen."
I couldn't agree more. But I don't think these positions are actually at odds. Because while corporations are limited by their culture, structure, and rules, they are ultimately composed of individuals. And how those individuals act determines the character and impact of the company.
No one better embodies this potential than our cover subject, Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of Chobani. He is the most unexpected of leaders, a Kurdish immigrant who arrived in America two decades ago with little money, limited English skills, and a sense that capitalism and CEOs were rapacious and selfish. Since then, he has used the tools of capitalism to build an industry-redefining corporation, becoming a billionaire CEO in the process. He is now a devoted believer in the power of the marketplace, but he also feels a deep responsibility for his business to stand for something more than simply making money—including more equitable policies for employees and an embrace of immigrants, refugees, and others whose options are limited. As features editor Rob Brunner explains in his insightful and affecting profile, Ulukaya represents a new model of business leadership for the 21st century.
Many corporations and leaders are all too interested in gaming the system to get ahead, in posing and posturing for economic benefit alone—a practice that has become increasingly perilous. In a special report, senior writer Austin Carr unpacks how businesses from Google to Uber have been buffeted by controversy, demonstrations, and boycotts in the first few months of the new administration. What Carr's survival guide illuminates is how much easier it is to navigate times of change when an enterprise and its leadership authentically stand for something bigger than themselves.
The same podcast episode that mentions my quote coincidentally features two staffers at Charity: Water, an organization that is highlighted as one of our 2017 World Changing Ideas honorees. Founder Scott Harrison personifies how an individual's conviction can spread to an organization. Harrison began his career as a music promoter and by his own admission led a dissolute, shallow life. After hitting rock bottom, he headed to Africa to help doctors provide medical care in Liberia. His old friends in New York City thought it was just a phase and that he'd be back at the clubs with them, roaring into the night. Instead, he launched a radically new kind of nonprofit that has helped to reduce the number of people with no access to clean water by more than 100 million in five years.
Not everyone will give up everything to devote their life to a cause, nor is every corporation as overtly mission-fed as Ulukaya's. But we can all do better, aspire to do more. As Lisciani declares in her podcast, "So many times we fall into the trap of thinking, I don't have enough to do XYZ. I don't have enough people, I don't have enough funding, I don't have enough time, I don't have enough resources. But those are just the excuses we tell ourselves, to avoid inconveniencing our comfort, our pockets, or our schedules, to go out of our way to make the world a better place for someone else." If business is going to continue to be a driving force for progress, it's only because each of us as individuals makes the effort—and sometimes the sacrifice—to get it there.
Half of America's ground beef is consumed at restaurants, so Impossible Foods is using chefs to introduce the world to its meatless patty.
Chris Cosentino is known for his meat. At Cockscomb, his restaurant in San Francisco, the chef serves beef heart tartare and pig's head. But he also now serves the Impossible Burger, a plant-based patty aimed at meat eaters, not vegetarians. "You cook it like a piece of meat—you bring it to medium rare," he says. "It has the juiciness of ground beef, without the environmental impact."
Developed by Impossible Foods, a startup led by former Stanford biochemist Patrick Brown, who wanted to tackle the enormous environmental challenges posed by animal agriculture, the burger is made from ingredients that yield one-eighth of the greenhouse gases involved in meat production, require 95% less land, and use a quarter of the water. And yet it was designed to mimic every aspect of beef—how it looks, smells, tastes, cooks, and even bleeds. That last part is thanks to the addition of heme, an iron-containing molecule found in blood that enhances the product's flavor and color. In this case, it's made through fermentation. (Potato and wheat proteins make the burger chewy and juicy. Coconut oil fries like beef fat.)
Another challenge was actually getting it onto people's plates. "It was really important to us that the path fit the uniqueness of the burger," says marketing director Ashley Kleckner. Unlike Beyond Meat, which sells its alt-burger, alt–ground beef, and alt-chicken products in grocery stores, Impossible Foods chose to launch its burger last July at Manhattan's Momofuku Nishi, followed by a handful of other high-end restaurants. Not only is roughly half of all ground beef that's consumed in the United States eaten in restaurants, but chefs, says Impossible Foods COO and CFO David Lee, have a great deal of credibility among "the largest demographic purchasers of ground beef in the United States: Millennials."
On a recent night at Jardinière, in San Francisco, almost every diner in sight had ordered the $16 burger, which is served with a tiny, Instagram-ready "Impossible" flag on top. So far, the burger is sold out almost every night at every location where it is served. Meanwhile, the $2 billion meat-substitute market is projected to grow to $2.9 billion by 2021, according to Euromonitor International. Impossible Foods, which has raised more than $180 million from investors such as Bill Gates and UBS, is renovating a second production facility (beyond its current one, in Bridgeton, New Jersey) that will open in Oakland, California, this summer. By the end of the year, the company plans to have the Impossible Burger on the menu in hundreds of restaurants. Soon, more dishes might join it: Impossible Foods is also developing other products, including hyperrealistic substitutes for chicken, fish, and dairy.
Previously CEO at Gilt, Peluso leads the way forward for 105-year-old IBM.
Previously the CEO of Gilt Groupe, which was acquired by Hudson's Bay Company last year, Michelle Peluso was named IBM's chief marketing officer in October. Peluso, whose résumé also includes stints as CEO of Travelocity and global CMO of Citigroup, is now tapping into her consumer expertise to promote IBM's cloud and Watson cognitive technologies. "This might be counterintuitive," she says, "but I think of us as a challenger brand. We're at an interesting junction where B2B and B2C have blended. Expectations users have of technology and interactions with companies have shifted."
One of Peluso's goals is to apply lessons from her last job to IBM's culture. "At Gilt, you had designers, data scientists, marketers, and models coming together—the intensity of the left- and right-brain collaboration was awesome," she says. "That's part of what I'm trying to bring to IBM." Peluso is already introducing new practices. For example, teams now attend sessions during which they review and refine their work using only their mobile devices, which offers them a better sense of how consumers actually interact with the brand.
Given IBM's focus on the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence, Peluso will have to keep experimenting. "All of a sudden you have all these issues raised about the ethics of AI, what is it going to do for jobs, what kind of education and training we need," she says. "What IBM is working on will have an impact. It's a fascinating place to be. You have all the trust and history of IBM, and then you've got this whole new world."
"For better or worse, I have a brain that really churns. I've been thinking about ways to make sure I'm really present when I'm with my kids and work colleagues—slowing my incessant multitasking nature."
We're unprepared for the next flu pandemic. A near-future speculation by a top epidemiologist explains the risk we've tacitly permitted.
In an exclusive excerpt from Deadliest Germs, a new book on the threat of emerging diseases, epidemiologist Dr. Michael T. Osterholm and writer Mark Olshaker present a fictional tabletop-like scenario involving an influenza pandemic in today's world, with the virulence of 1918's H1N1 strain, which resulted in the deaths of 50 million to 100 million people. This scenario has been reviewed by colleagues in public health preparedness and business continuity planning. There is general agreement that it is realistic and possible. Keep that in mind as you imagine yourself and your family living through it.
At first, the doctors in the Shanghai metropolitan area think they're just seeing late-season flu cases, but their patients don't seem to be getting better. It is mid-April; influenza should be on the wane in China. It doesn't take long for physicians to realize that the hundreds of patients they are seeing in emergency rooms are presenting with conditions very different from anything they have seen before. At least 50 patients have died of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in the past two days; intensive care units in many hospitals in the area can no longer admit new patients—they are bursting at the seams. In many cases, the victims report they had been sick for only a day or two, sometimes only hours. The majority of the victims are otherwise healthy young adults and pregnant women.
Clinicians quickly recognize that these patients have a similar devastating illness to the 1,000-plus Chinese who had been diagnosed with one of the bird flu infections in the past several years. Still, this is different: In the past, bird flu cases occurred only sporadically by location and time, rarely with multiple cases in one family. Now, emergency rooms and even intensive care units in hospitals all over the Shanghai area are awash in desperately ill patients.
The worst fears of Chinese public health officials are realized when sputum samples from eight patients hospitalized in three different facilities are confirmed to have H7N9 influenza infection. H7N9—an avian virus by origin that made its first recognized foray into the human population of China in 2013—has now taken the last major step to becoming the pandemic influenza virus.
Meanwhile, more cases are popping up in other places. In areas of China where this strain has been previously detected, about a third of those who contracted the disease from poultry have died. But the birds carrying the virus don't get sick or, at least, they don't display any noticeable symptoms. Within days, cases of H7N9 influenza begin showing up in hospitals throughout much of China and even other countries in Asia. Many of the first cases outside of Shanghai had recently traveled to the city. This story has gone from one of relative obscurity to the No. 1 news story in the world.
Even before Chinese public health officials could confirm that the rapidly growing health crisis in the Shanghai area was the likely first sign of an emerging influenza pandemic, cases begin to show up all over the world. Almost all of the early cases had just recently returned from travel to Shanghai and neighboring cities and towns. But that changes quickly when hospitals in other countries receive cases that had never been to China.
An illustrated panel appearing in the Florentine Codex, the 16th-century compendium of materials and information on Aztec and Nahua history collected by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún. The drawing shows Nahuas infected with smallpox disease. Another epidemic of smallpox would ravage North America during the Revolutionary War.Photo: via Wikimedia
The WHO, the CDC, and other national health organizations around the world commence their methodical disease detective work. They identify the early cases that presented at each worldwide location and trace their travels back in the weeks before they became ill. Their investigation confirms everyone's worst fear: We are watching the early days of a quickly growing pandemic. No use closing borders; H7N9 has probably taken root in 30 or 40 countries by now.
The increasingly nervous experts know that you don't have to touch a sick person to contract seasonal flu as you would have to with Ebola, have sex or exchange bodily fluids as you would have to with AIDS, or get bitten by a mosquito as you would have to with dengue. All you need for transmission is to have someone breathe on you—in a shopping mall, an airplane, a subway, or even a hospital emergency room.
A Middle East terrorist group and a Japanese apocalyptic sect each claim responsibility for the outbreak. The terrorist statement implies that the strain was engineered by former Soviet bioweapon scientists and is a chimera, a combination of the properties of several strains. Both groups promise more engineered outbreaks to come. In response, the director of the CDC and the secretary of Homeland Security say that while investigations are still under way and all threats are being taken seriously, there is no evidence that the H7N9 outbreak is a terrorist action.
By now, the outbreak is universally referred to as the "Shanghai flu," except in China, where it is referred to as the "Western flu." The WHO convenes a group of influenza experts via conference call; this group is known as "the Emergency Committee." After meeting for less than an hour, the committee strongly urges the director-general of the WHO to declare the H7N9 emerging pandemic a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). At a press conference held immediately after the call, she does just that, declaring the situation a global emergency. The press conference turns into a shouting event with reporters demanding to know how the WHO is going to stop the spread of H7N9. There are no satisfactory or comforting answers.
In an impressively short amount of time, working in cooperation with labs in the United States, China, and Britain, the WHO announces that all biological and genetic evidence points to Shanghai as the source of the outbreak, where many millions of chickens are hatched, grown, and consumed each month.
Chinese health officials question the findings but say they are cooperating completely with international authorities to curb the spread in China and elsewhere.
Genetic analysis identifies a two-gene reassortment that may be the reason for the sudden human‐to‐human transmission capability of the virus. The one positive finding is that it is not resistant to current antiviral drugs. The makers of Tamiflu and Relenza go into round-the-clock production but cannot even come close to meeting demand. No vaccine matches this strain, so the U.S. government, working with the WHO, begins developing a vaccine strain of H7N9, to be shared with vaccine manufacturers around the world. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases states that he hopes to have an effective vaccine by September or October; that is a long five-plus months away. In less than a week, however, even though the currently available flu vaccine does not protect against H7N9, all available stocks are exhausted.
During an appearance on Meet the Press, the CDC director is questioned about H7N9 and asked if it is true that the virus has a 30% fatality rate. "While this was true in its limited clusters in China," he replies, "as it disseminates widely, we would expect it to attenuate as it goes through an endless series of human hosts, and the fatality rate should go down considerably."
"Does that mean the deaths we've been seeing from the disease will start to taper off?" the reporter asks.
"I can't say that," the CDC director concedes. "At this point, we still don't know what it is going to do. The best advice I can offer is to try to stay away from those who have influenza-like symptoms. Shelter in place if necessary. And if you have these symptoms yourself, or anyone in your family does, please stay home from work, school, or normal activities where you would interact with other people. Don't travel via public transit either if at all possible; this includes planes, trains, buses, and taxis."
It is now late May, almost six weeks since the newly emerging H7N9 influenza pandemic was recognized in China. At least 72 countries are reporting a rapidly increasing number of H7N9 cases and subsequent deaths. The general belief is that more countries have cases but have been reluctant to report them for fear of border closings and trade and travel restrictions. The best data we have on deaths is from the United States, Canada, and the European Union, where case mortality appears to be about 12%. So far, at least 12,000 people have died in the United States. Many of the dead are young pregnant women.
Now spot shortages appear in various industries, particularly those impacted by a large disruption in manufacturing in China. It doesn't help that workers at the major seaports and seamen and merchant marines on the 62,000 ocean freighters around the world are reporting an increasing number of ill workers and growing number of deaths. Worldwide, production slows on certain products that have numerous source parts, like computers and automobiles. As news of the epidemic's origin becomes a central part of the international news coverage, consumers are afraid to buy chicken or pork products, regardless of where they came from. Beef prices skyrocket as the supplies tighten.
Doctors' offices and emergency rooms are overrun with the worried well, and the task of physically separating them out from the sick becomes overwhelming. This becomes even more of a challenge as an increasing number of healthcare personnel are too sick to work. Patients demand antibiotic prescriptions even though they are told they are completely useless against viruses. Many who believe they have some knowledge of medicine counter that they want to protect themselves against a secondary bacterial infection. Hospitals are already seeing shortages of critical drugs and supplies. While the U.S. government has a strategic national stockpile for what are called medical countermeasures, or MCM—drugs and supplies needed during a public health emergency—the stockpile is quickly exhausted. An increasing number of frightened health care workers, including both doctors and nurses, are calling in sick. Their illness is fear, not infection.
Virtually every drugstore and pharmacy in the nation has had a run on Tamiflu and Relenza, and there are sporadic reports of break-ins and looting. Most stores have put up signs in their windows declaring that they do not have the drugs. The internet is flooded with offers for other agents that are effective against H7N9. The commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration warns consumers that there is no evidence that any of these work, and since they are unregulated, they may very well be harmful.
At the direction of the attorney general, the FBI sets up a special task force to investigate allegations of price gouging and black-market sales of antiviral drugs.
On Capitol Hill, chairmen of the relevant oversight committees call on the secretary of HHS and CEOs of the vaccine-manufacturing companies to determine if anything can be done to speed up vaccine production. Other senators and congressmen call for the suspension of flights to and from afflicted countries, only to be countered by experts who say that will no longer make any difference. Some call for trade to be cut off with China, but so many goods and products are already in short supply that this seems to be another useless or counterproductive recommendation.
In Germany, the CEO of one international pharmaceutical corporation is shot outside his home in an apparent assassination attempt, even though his company does not produce vaccines or antivirals. Around the world, other pharmaceutical executives beef up their own security, as fear and frustration turn increasingly to rage and violence.
By early June, the surgeon general has gone on television from the White House to urge anyone who does not need acute care to stay home and not further burden the hospitals. He gives the phone number of a 24-hour hotline where people can consult about their symptoms and see if they need medical or hospital care. Within minutes of the announcement, it is nearly impossible to get through to the hotline. The surgeon general also assures viewers that more Tamiflu and Relenza are in the pipeline, but the public will have to be patient.
Then the president appears, quotes President Franklin Roosevelt, saying, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," and decries the recent murders of physicians and pharmacists who were rumored to have supplies of the antiviral drugs.
The lead editorial in the next day's Wall Street Journal disagrees with the president, saying, "The only thing we have to fear is a rampant and deadly influenza epidemic for which this country was totally unprepared and which this administration has been far too slow to respond to." The editorial traces the 50% decline in American stocks since the beginning of the pandemic, with commensurate drops around the world, and the near collapse of the Chinese exchanges.
Attendance plummets at sporting events, theme parks, and shopping malls. Most public events are now canceled. Major League Baseball is considering temporarily suspending its season. Retailers and park operators have to lay off large percentages of their already diminished workforce. National unemployment soars above 25%, while certain industries can't find enough qualified workers. Many automobile dealers are now open only on weekends for new car sales, and their service bays are nearly empty. The Federal Reserve lowers the federal funds rate to zero.
Huge poultry farms are culled in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and producers worldwide say there is no reason to build up their stocks again until the pandemic is over, since consumption has tanked. Food supplies are getting tighter and tighter worldwide, even on the grocery store shelves of America.
Although some small towns and rural areas have been largely spared from the infectious scourge, by June a national survey shows that most people say they know someone who has died from the Shanghai flu. Several newspapers have taken to running a photo spread each week of local residents who have perished.
The president appoints a Shanghai flu czar to head a task force made up of the heads of virtually every possible federal government agency with an interest in vaccines, public health, and emergency preparedness. The American manufacturers predict they will be able to produce a steady supply of vaccine beginning in late September, but altogether this will cover no more than 40% of the population for the following five months. No other nation will commit to sending any of their supplies to the United States, given that they are in the same position.
With masks over their faces, members of the American Red Cross remove a victim of the Spanish Flu from a house at Etzel and Page Avenues, St. Louis, Missouri.Photo: via Wikimedia
The two countries with large production capacities—India and China—say that they can cover no more than 10% to 15% of their own populations. Early batches of vaccine from one Indian manufacturer turn out to be contaminated with a bacterium and must be thrown out. Everyone begins to realize that most of the world's population will never have an opportunity to get vaccinated for H7N9. And the question about how well the vaccine works in protecting people from H7N9 infection has not been answered, but it is the only vaccine available.
By the first week of July the casualty rate has started to decline. Within weeks, hospitals are recording only a few new cases. The CDC reports that though there are sporadic hot spots around the world, the flu appears to be abating. The stock market starts to climb, while analysts warn that this may only last until earnings season, when we will see how much damage the pandemic has done. The loss to worldwide gross national product is difficult to measure, but it is certainly in the many trillions of dollars. Everyone says it will take years to recover.
The CDC estimates the total number of cases in the United States at 31 million, or approximately 9% of the population. Of those, deaths totaled approximately 1,932,000, for a fatality rate of around 6%. Global statistics are not yet available but are thought to be at least as severe.
The president proposes August 1 as a day of public reflection and personal commitment, as well as a celebration of the fact that the nation and most of the world has survived its greatest challenge since World War II.
This ordeal has been a message that we all have to pledge ourselves to the common good. We should use both the many examples of great heroism and personal sacrifice and the instances of greed and incredible selfishness during the crisis as a moral compass going forward.
Public health leaders urge the president to postpone such a celebration. They warn that based on the history of previous pandemics, a likely second wave of illness could start in the early fall and actually exceed the number of cases and deaths that occurred in the first. Like the first wave, a second wave could last 10 to 12 weeks in the United States, or even longer. They say it was unfortunate that the world needed so deadly a wake‐up call to take seriously the impact of the influenza pandemic they had been predicting for so long.
Influenza news slowly disappears from television and is relegated to the back pages of newspapers. When the epidemic is mentioned, it is usually in terms of "economic recovery from the Shanghai flu pandemic."
It is late September when new cases start showing up at physicians' offices and hospital emergency rooms. The antigen tests quickly confirm H7N9 influenza virus, meaning that the outbreaks earlier that month in Cairo, Egypt, and Lahore, Pakistan, were not flukes.
A series of conference calls is launched by the White House, including the "kitchen sink" of federal, state, and local agencies such as HHS, the CDC, the NIH, the Public Health Service, the FDA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security (including the Federal Emergency Management Agency), and state health and emergency preparedness agencies, to organize and coordinate plans to get the new Shanghai flu vaccine distributed throughout the country. It is anticipated that the first vaccine will become available the last week of September in the United States and Canada, and the following week in Great Britain and parts of the EU.
The U.S. vaccine supply will continue to increase by late October, but it is unclear how much will be available, and it will be far less than needed. Anticipating the new stocks, government officials decide that large parking facilities, shopping centers, and stadiums will provide the best venues for vaccination. All sites will be supported by state and local police units.
Despite these precautions, when vaccine does arrive, many locations are overrun by masses of people, and when the supplies are quickly exhausted, the crowds turn violent. Though no one is killed, there are numerous injuries.
The WHO's director general, who five months before had declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, has no advice to offer other than to try to stay away from infected individuals. Surveillance suggests a mortality rate between 4% and 6% in those who contract the Shanghai flu in Western nations, but it is considerably higher in developing nations, where the health care systems have completely broken down. In addition to the influenza deaths, mortality from all other sources has doubled. In Central Africa, vaccine-preventable childhood diseases and TB are said to be out of control because of a lack of basic medical care and public health services.
Hospitals in the United States suffer another round of severe product shortages. They first experience a shortage of saline bags and disposable syringes, but soon supplies of basic lifesaving drugs dwindle. The American Diabetes Association warns for a second time in four months that unless insulin stocks are resupplied soon, people will die. Most hospitals curtail all elective surgeries until further notice. All mechanical ventilators in the United States are in use, but they can treat only a small minority of those who need them. Many others die, particularly the elderly. Again, healthy men and women in the prime of life suffer exaggerated immune system reactions. Pregnant women are especially vulnerable. As with the Zika virus outbreak, health authorities around the world recommend that women of childbearing age postpone pregnancy.
Food shortages happen even faster this time. Because of the run on food stores when the second wave was announced, shelves are largely bare, particularly of meats, dairy products, produce, and other perishables. Many stores close rather than risk looting or vandalism. There is little violence against drugstores this time, though, because it is common knowledge that they have no vaccine or critical pharmaceuticals.
When it is announced that the absentee rate due to the influenza is approaching 30%, there is fierce debate in Congress and in the media on whether to allow Mexican seasonal workers into the country to harvest crops. Conservative lawmakers worry that they will bring even more disease with them. The NIH director is called before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. The committee chairman reads statements in which the director has repeatedly predicted over the past five years that a universal influenza vaccine will be forthcoming, yet none exists. The director mumbles something about funding and commitment but has no real response.
In New York, the subway system has virtually shut down as commuters realize they cannot avoid being breathed on. The streets are essentially gridlocked with private cars. The director of the Environmental Protection Agency warns of dangerous levels of air pollution. It is difficult to estimate the daily loss of productivity, but it is clearly in the tens of millions of dollars.
The world's stock exchanges, which had been gradually creeping up since July, plunge again, giving up another large percentage of their already anemic value. The gross national products of all developed nations have decreased by nearly half and the world is officially in economic depression. The American unemployment rate reaches 22%—less than three points below that of 1933: the worst year of the Great Depression.
By now, almost every major city around the world is witnessing people dying in offices, in public buildings, and right on the streets. Morgues are overflowing with bodies and there is a worldwide shortage of coffins. Developing countries begin cremating corpses in large ditches that are then immediately covered over by bulldozers. In the United States and other First World nations, morgues are forced to supplement with freezer trucks, but the spot shortages of electricity and fuel are forcing some difficult decisions on disposal.
Certain right-wing televangelists state that Shanghai flu is God's punishment for straying from his ways. Public health leaders condemn this "dangerous and irresponsible fearmongering that can only distract us from our real challenges." They emphasize that "no one is responsible for becoming ill, but all should take whatever precautions they can."
The American president and the other leaders of the G7 nations meet via secure video link because of the concern about travel. They release a statement that the H7N9 pandemic "is the moral equivalent of war," with all the world's people engaged together in a mortal battle with a common enemy deadlier than any human adversary.
In most places, panic and civil strife have now given way to an overriding sense of resignation. Streets of major cities are close to empty. Stores, restaurants, and entertainment venues are closed. Researchers are more certain how the H7N9 changed into the pandemic strain, but to most of the public, the question seems largely academic. Vaccine stocks continue to trickle in and are quickly used, but so many people have suffered or died from the illness that demand is actually beginning to drop.
By the following June, when the pandemic has finally run its primary course, the worldwide death toll from the two disease waves is approximately 360 million, out of nearly 2.22 billion total cases. The average age of those who died is 37. While the percentage of those who have died around the world does not come close to that of those who died in the Black Death, which wiped out nearly a third of the population of Europe and the Mediterranean region in the 14th century, in terms of raw morbidity and mortality statistics, the Shanghai influenza pandemic is by far the largest catastrophe in world history.
The black death: Miniature out of the Toggenburg Bible (Switzerland) of 1411. It likely shows people suffering from smallpox.Photo: via WIkimedia
The preceding scenario is fictional but far from fanciful.
On May 10, 2016, the National Health and Family Planning Commission of China notified the WHO of 11 new cases of laboratory-confirmed human infection with H7N9 influenza.
Four of the patients had died and two more were in critical condition at the time of the report. The two in critical condition—a 23-year-old male and a 43-year-old female—had exposure to each other. Therefore, the WHO noted, "Human-to-human transmission between the two patients cannot be ruled out." Such infections with this virus, it warned, "are unusual and need to be monitored closely in order to identify changes in the virus and/or its transmission to humans as it may have a serious public health impact."
In the WHO's latest report, covering the period between February 24 and March 7, 2017, China and Hong Kong declared a total of 58 additional confirmed cases of human infection, with three clusters of "possible human to human transmission." Although "current epidemiological and virological evidence suggests that this virus has not acquired the ability of sustained transmission among humans," the report said the WHO "encourages countries to continue strengthening influenza surveillance, including surveillance for severe acute respiratory infections (SARI) and influenza-like illness (ILI) and to carefully review any unusual patterns, ensure reporting of human infections . . . and continue national health preparedness actions."
Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs
Few people see this more clearly than Ron Klain, who oversaw our international response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa:
. . . It seems likely that the world is living on borrowed time before one of these new infectious disease threats becomes the kind of global pandemic we have all been warned to expect. It is not hard to imagine that some time during this president's term, his or her national security team may be summoned to the Oval Office to discuss a catastrophic pandemic of historic proportions: more than 1 million deaths in just a few weeks in a far corner of the world, sparking the fall of several governments, giving rise to a violent regional conflict over scarce resources, and unleashing a refugee crisis as fleeing victims encounter panic and closed borders at every turn. Worse still, the president will be told, there is an increasing risk that such death and disruption may soon arrive in the United States.
There is no way to know how many warnings we will get before the events we have portrayed here become all too possible. They may not be far off.
Mike Osterholm is regents professor, McKnight presidential endowed chair in public health, and the founding director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota. Mark Olshaker is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author.
The clean-water organization is pioneering new forms of accountability for their projects.
Most philanthropic galas are designed to celebrate the year's accomplishments and generate a new round of donations. But for Charity: Water's annual Charity: Ball last December, CEO Scott Harrison had something unique planned. "There is a big binary risk," he said as he watched attendees who had paid $2,500 per ticket stream into New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "I'm either going to look very stupid in front of 400 people or maybe make them cry."
At the sound of a gong, minglers made their way from the entrance hall to a glass atrium containing the dimly lit ancient Temple of Dendur, candle-topped dining tables, and dozens of neon-yellow jerry cans, used to carry water in the developing world (and the company's logo). At each place setting sat a preloaded, locked iPad, displaying the name and photo of a single, custom-selected resident of Adi Etot, Ethiopia, a community of around 400 people in desperate need of clean water.
Charity: Water's mission, since its founding in 2006, has been to raise money to help local organizations in the developing world drill wells and pursue other water-pumping and -purification projects. So far, the group, which operates on a $40 million annual budget, has funded nearly 23,000 projects affecting 7 million people. The work, which must be completed village by village, is expensive—the average project costs $10,000 and serves roughly 300 people—and can get tricky. Historically, humanitarian aid groups have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on poorly planned or maintained projects that have broken down, according to the International Institute for Environment and Development, a global-sustainability research group. Charity: Water, which channels 100% of all public donations toward project costs, avoids that fate by carefully mapping its wells, monitoring flow rates (thanks to a new program that began rolling out in late 2015), and sharing the continually updated information online publicly, which has endeared it to high-powered Silicon Valley donors past and present, such as Jack Dorsey, Chris Sacca, John Doerr, Jonathan Ive, and Angela Ahrendts, many of whom participated in Charity: Water campaigns to use their birthdays as fundraisers.
As plates were being cleared, Harrison, a former high-end club promoter, climbed a small stage to share more about the group, including a video about life in Adi Etot. Afterward, he asked everyone to unlock their devices (password: "together") to see more photos and learn about their particular community member, and then to donate $30 in his or her honor. A big screen behind the dais filled with grayed-out photos of each person, which changed to color as attendees pitched in.
A few minutes later, the screen flashed a new scene, a live video from Adi Etot. It was after 10 p.m. in New York but dawn in Ethiopia, and attendees were treated to a real-time image of the sun rising over a giant drill surrounded by the local people whose faces they had just seen. The drill fired up and—for the first time ever there—unleashed a geyser of water that sprayed over the cheering people, an electrifying moment that would soon lead to a formal well being installed (and eventually transmitting data). The gala crowd cheered too, and then fell silent as they watched community members celebrate 6,500 miles away. After the scene ended, it was Harrison who had teared up. "I don't really have much to say," he said. "I'm glad that worked." Then he made his true ask: Why not $3 million, to help 100,000 people? "You don't get a handbag or a trip to Telluride," he said. "You get nothing out of this except knowing that you can truly, truly impact the lives of people thousands of miles away." After a moment, everyone began clapping and cheering again.
"The biggest problem with charity is that people don't trust charity," says Harrison on a winter morning at Charity: Water's offices in Tribeca, which feature several artfully arranged jerry cans. Harrison has rolled up the sleeves of his blue button-down. Since founding the organization out of a friend's living room in Manhattan after two years in West Africa documenting the impact of surgeries by traveling doctors with Mercy Ships, he and his growing team have been committed to transparency. When they first started paying for wells, Google Maps had just debuted, so they began tagging each completed project with GPS coordinates, which they uploaded to a public site along with photos and a map. Michael and Xochi Birch, cofounders of the social network Bebo, volunteered to develop the back-end fundraising technology further, and donations grew. Harrison wanted people to be confident that all of their contributions were going to water projects, so in 2009 he created the Well, a group of dedicated major donors who make multiyear pledges toward overhead. Today, the Well has 118 members and enough reserves to finance nearly two years of operations.
Early on, Charity: Water was just a fundraising organization. As its capital has grown, it has taken on a comanagement role, helping local partners with mapping, long-term planning, and strategic investing to make sure those doing the drilling, monitoring, and maintenance continue to have the machinery, staff, and training to grow in ways that will boost their impact.
Economically, it's hard to argue with Charity: Water's mission: Every dollar invested in clean water and sanitation efforts puts at least $4 back into the local economy, in part because people end up healthier and have more time to contribute to their communities, according to the World Health Organization. But practically, it can be difficult to prove that it's the clean water specifically that's responsible for the income boost, and not a new road or particularly good harvest.
GiveWell, a charity evaluator that ranks the effectiveness of philanthropic interventions, raised this exact caveat in 2013, noting that while poor water quality is known to be associated with disease, there haven't been enough randomized controlled trials to quantify the extent to which wells actually improve things. That echoed an earlier GiveWell report, specifically on Charity: Water, which stated, "We remain uncertain about the humanitarian impact of their work and the relative effectiveness of their partner selection process."
The judgment posed a risk to Charity: Water's future: There's an emerging class of donors, particularly in Silicon Valley, who practice so-called effective altruism, relying on GiveWell's reports to ensure they do the most quantifiable good with each investment. But Harrison found that donations weren't affected. "We shrugged our shoulders and went back to work," he says.
Still, he was determined to gather more precise information about how Charity: Water's efforts impacted health and water reliability. Also, the organization needed to get better at helping partners service projects—and learning from what was happening on the ground. At that point, "the only way to get information was from a guy on a motorbike with a phone and observational survey," says Christoph Gorder, who heads up the group's tech projects in the field.
Charity: Water pursued—and won—a $5 million Global Impact Award from Google in late 2012 that enabled it to develop, build, and install two types of lithium-powered sensors (and a dashboard system) so that it could keep tabs on water usage remotely. The first, engineered with San Francisco product and design firm PCH Lime Lab, was a plastic box that can be installed below the spigot of an Afridev well, the most common hand pump across sub-Saharan Africa. Inside, a stack of six capacitance sensors measures the level of water, which correlates to what's flowing out each hour. Once a week, that data is sent via a text-based GPRS message to a cloud-storage locker. A Charity: Water data team in New York, using the management tool Dispatch Monitor alongside reports from mechanics on the ground, can easily view the status of each well: Flowing, Needs Maintenance, Inactive, or Unknown. The sensors also use machine learning to identify patterns in usage, so if a well starts behaving erratically, it will emit a trouble signal. So far, 3,000 of these sensors have been installed in northern Ethiopia.
The second type was geared toward rugged, mountainous areas where, instead of drilling, mountain springs are capped and gravity-fed through pipes to a smaller network of community faucets. The new design, rolling out this year at 1,500 wells in Nepal, was created with Hong Kong–based manufacturer Cross the Pacific, and it features a small in-line turbine near the faucet to relay water flow. All blueprints are open-source and the data is being made public. Meanwhile, a third version is in development, for hand-pumped wells in India.
So far, the technology is working. According to Dispatch Monitor, 9 out of 10 of Charity: Water's transmitting wells in Ethiopia appear to be functioning correctly. Still, a quarter of the wells are sending data that never gets received because they are in cellular dead zones (hence that "Unknown" category on the dashboard). Charity: Water continues to send roving units of mechanics to those areas until connectivity improves.
At the Charity: Ball, guests spent the next 10 minutes punching donation sums into their iPads as Harrison remained onstage to urge them on. Every 15 seconds or so, the screen refreshed showing the evening's donation total and number of people the sum would help, goosing the pot once with a $500,000 remote donation, and again with a $1 million match from roughly 20 other donors.
The live video from Adi Etot had taken almost six months to plan, requiring coordination with Ethiopian government officials and Charity: Water's regional well-digging partner, the Relief Society of Tigray, or REST, based 100 miles away over rugged terrain in the city of Mekelle. Two months before the gala, a Charity: Water team had flown to Adi Etot from New York to document life in the farming community for both the video and iPad programming. With the help of a translator, they heard firsthand about such realities as how, during the dry season, women and children could spend all day making three-hour round-trips to collect water. This "has an impact on their education and their health," says Getachew Kalayu, the head of REST's planning and coordination department, which planned and executed the dig itself with a surveyor, hydrologist, and village elders. Back in New York, the event team rented iPads, trained volunteers to load them and deal with any glitches that might happen during the event, and then matched each guest with a specific community member according to factors such as gender and general age. Pregnant attendees were paired with other women who were expecting. There were numerous test runs of the live video itself, which, to the planners' delight, actually worked half the time. (It would only be a one-way feed, saving costs and eliminating the cruel potential of Adi Etot residents having to glimpse a sea of untouched water glasses.)
By any measure, the stunt worked. Charity: Water had raised nearly $3.2 million by night's end. The figure is not record breaking for the sector. But at a time when galas are often loss leaders, the evening was remarkable: It posted an 8-to-1 return on investment, and nearly everyone in the room contributed. "There is no question this was a fantastically successful event," says Anne Wallestad, president and CEO of BoardSource, a nonprofit advisory group that, among other things, works alongside other organizations to measure fundraising effectiveness. Other philanthropy groups have taken note. David Goldberg, CEO of Founders Pledge, which guides founders on how to commit to donating at least 2% of their eventual proceeds from exit, says that the model "is changing the way that we think about charity."
The morning after the event, Harrison sat on a couch in his glass-walled office. Above his perch was a whiteboard that listed the names of all the contributors to the Well. In the coming days, he would write down a few more. Staffers at Charity: Water were already back at work expanding the organization's data-collection operation to measure health, hygiene, and sanitation changes after wells were installed. It was also time for Harrison to start planning another gala. "I'm already terrified of what we are going to do next year," he said.
Take an infographic look at which studios passed on some of the biggest films ever, and the surprising options they didn't pass on.
Hindsight is not only infinitely more accurate than its opposite, sometimes it can be very painful. Especially when untold sums of prestige and money hang in the balance. For movie studios, the only way to learn this truth is the hard way.
Weighing any potential movie property involves a cold calculus of concept, cost, and collaborators. It's not always immediately clear one has a hit in their hands when those hands only hold 120 pages of words, and the assurances of their creator. Back to the Future, for instance, as beautifully explained by comedian John Mulaney, sounds like the most insanely misguided screenplay ever written. Only a very trusting executive at Universal could guess that Robert Zemeckis would have the vision to turn it into a high-grossing family favorite that spawned two lesser sequels. Of course, before that executive even had the chance to greenlight it, his or her counterpart at Columbia had already seen it—and given it a hard pass.
Of course, every time an executive closes a door, he or she opens a window. What's much worse than the inherent shame of rejecting a future all-timer, though, is when the world sees what didn't get rejected. The year that Back to the Future opened to phenomenal reviews and box office at Universal, one of the movies Columbia put out instead was Perfect, the aerobics drama starring a spandex-clad Jamie Lee Curtis and John Travolta. It flopped. Hard. If that information inspires any retroactive schadenfraude, then you are in for a treat.
Created by Printerinks, a new infographic called Hollywood's Missed Opportunities reveals just how wrong many major studios have gotten it over the years. Whether its opting for Perfect over Back to the Future, or Mixed Nuts over Pulp Fiction, this forensic examination of poor choices will make you reconsider ever decision you have to make the rest of the day. Take a regret-free look at the infographic below.
With a massive new incubator and bold environmental-protection projects, Paris is quickly becoming a beacon of innovation.
Fast Company: London and Paris have been cultural and economic rivals for centuries. Now, post-Brexit, Paris is angling to replace London as Europe's financial center. How has the dynamic between the two cities changed?
Anne Hidalgo: It's true that Brexit creates a new situation for London and Paris. There's competition, but there's also cooperation. We're both big cities with progressive mayors. [London mayor] Sadiq Khan and I thought that there might be a way to take advantage of this situation by offering London companies the possibility of setting up in Paris and Parisian companies to do so in London—we talked about it when he came to Paris in August. Sadiq Khan is someone I admire. His plan for his city is very humanist, and I work with him frequently on pollution [issues]. This partnership is very important.
FC: One of your strategies to attract business is the "Choose Paris" initiative, which establishes an information office for companies considering leaving London. Why should they choose Paris, as opposed to Frankfurt or Dublin?
AH: We're comparable to London in size, in cosmopolitanism, and in cultural makeup, which is no small thing. We're also just a stone's throw from London. And Paris is business-friendly. We're ranked fourth overall and first for living conditions in the [latest] Global Power City Index and fourth overall in the Cities of Opportunity Index. We have more headquarters of big companies than any other European city. We're ranked first in Europe for the creation of startups; we launch 1,500 startups each year in Paris. We now have 60 incubators in the city, with 15 new ones planned. We have 80 coworking spaces, 23 fabrication labs that work with prominent incubators like Cargo, the biggest incubator in Europe. [Paris's new] Station F will be the biggest incubator in the world and host 1,000 startups under the management of [billionaire telecom entrepreneur] Xavier Niel. So we're definitely in an advantageous position. Just a few weeks ago, a big bank [HSBC] decided to move its base to Paris, with 1,000 employees. It had its choice of big European cities, and it went for Paris.
Startup city: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg launches mega-incubator Station F in January alongside, from left, Hidalgo, Station F director Roxanne Varza, and Iliad founder Xavier Niel.Photo: Pascal Sittler/REA/Redux
FC: You mentioned Station F, a 34,000-square-meter converted railway depot in the 13th arrondissement that opens in April. Facebook is a founding partner and will have an 80-desk "startup garage" there. What does that mean?
AH: [Facebook COO] Sheryl Sandberg came to Station F and told us, "You have the equivalent of our Silicon Valley garages," which is quite true. Paris made the leap into the digital economy almost 10 years ago, and a central Parisian neighborhood called le Sentier underwent a dramatic transformation. Le Sentier used to be a wholesale textile neighborhood, but the merchants all closed one after another. We said that since the digital economy was really developing, we could make these industrial and commercial buildings in the heart of Paris available for this new, burgeoning economy.
FC: What are your hopes for Station F? How will you define success?
AH: Our [business-development sector] is very much linked to our universities and research centers. We have incubators that help create medical-based companies, for instance. Broadly speaking, I want the digital economy to work in service of the biggest challenge that our planet is facing: climate change. We can make Paris a home to green, ecological finance. We have to move toward becoming a smart city, toward open data, toward better managing our energy needs, looking for renewable, recyclable energy. So I'd like to see projects coming out of Station F that combine the digital revolution and climate change with the goal of saving the planet. Because really, that's what it's all about.
"We have to dare," says Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo of fighting climate change, "because tomorrow it will be too late."Photos: Paul Rousteau
FC: You've been tackling climate change since you started your term as mayor, in 2014. Former New York City mayor and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg has been a strong ally. He is the board president of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, and you are the chair. Has his environmental work, especially as a former mayor, been a model for you?
AH: Michael Bloomberg is a great visionary. He's unafraid, and he dares. And we have to dare. Big cities are responsible for 70% of greenhouse-gas emissions. We have a political responsibility, as mayors, to say, "We must act now." Because tomorrow it will be too late. The climate accord [among nearly 200 United Nations members] that was signed in Paris [in 2015] also gives Paris a responsibility to be at the forefront of the fight. I wanted to move very quickly with my team to fight pollution. Today, the industrial sector must invest in technology and new nonfossil energy. There have been great successes all over the world. In the U.S., Tesla's success should serve as an example to many entrepreneurs.
FC: You've already reduced the number of cars in the city, launched an electric car-sharing service, Autolib', and increased the number of green spaces. A massive subway-expansion project, the Grand Paris Express, and an electric tram-bus are under way. What do you think will be the next big innovation in cities' fight against climate change?
AH: I really believe in the development of river transport. Most of the world's big cities were built on riverbanks, an advantage we have to use to reduce our reliance on polluting cars. At the end of 2015, I supported a project called Sea Bubbles, carried out by French yachtsman Alain Thébault. It consists of developing small taxi boats powered by currents and solar energy. It is an environmentally friendly solution, without any harmful effects, and very functional. French engineers are making prototypes. Paris will be the first city in the world to test them out, next June. I plan to present this innovation to the American mayor members of the C40, during my trip to Chicago in mid-March.
FC: With Marine Le Pen a leading candidate for the French presidency, the far right is on the rise in national politics in France—and elsewhere in Europe, and in the United States. What does that mean for you, as a progressive, socialist mayor? Does it make your job more difficult?
AH: Populism is on the rise everywhere. And yes, mayors have a very important role . . . in challenging how our political parties operate. Governments at the mayoral level are on a human scale. When you make a decision as a mayor, you immediately see positive and negative effects. We're in direct contact with the population—with citizens, companies, NGOs. And we really are the front line on globalization, which I see as a positive. Personally, I'd much rather be optimistic, even if the world can be anxiety-inducing. American cities, which are often led by progressives, are going to be extremely important pockets of resistance to Donald Trump's populism. Donald Trump is not the one who's going to decide whether he applies the Paris Agreement or not. It's the cities.
Lifting spirits: Designed by architect Julien Beller, the welcome center of a temporary new refugee shelter is inflatable.Photo: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images
FC: Over the past few months, Paris has opened two new refugee centers (one designed by activist architect Julien Beller). Has your sense of responsibility to the refugee community changed since the Trump administration's attempted ban?
AH: Since 2015, tens of thousands of refugees, hoping to escape the war in their countries, have arrived in France. My duty, as mayor, was to set up accommodations in Paris to welcome them, to allow them to rest, to take care of themselves, to learn about their rights, and to begin administrative procedures that will help them integrate in France long term. We have helped more than 35,000 people. I was able to rely on the exceptional solidarity of the Parisians. My belief is that the diversity of our population is an asset. I know that many Democratic mayors share this vision. I've been closely watching their action in support of "sanctuary" cities for undocumented migrants. I salute the commitment of Bill de Blasio, Muriel Bowser, Edwin M. Lee, Rahm Emanuel, and many others. These mayors show courage and conviction. History will prove them right.
This interview was conducted in French and translated.
Education: Master of social work; master of advanced studies, social and union law; Institute of Labor Studies, University of Lyon
Nationality: French and Spanish. Hidalgo was born in San Fernando, Spain, and immigrated to Lyon, France, with her parents and older sister at age 2. "I am European," she says.
Political party: Socialist
Previous jobs: Worked as a civil servant overseeing labor law nationwide before joining then–Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's cabinet in 1997. She was first deputy mayor of Paris from 2001 to 2014.
Biggest priority: Fighting climate change, which she calls "the greatest challenge of our century. It encourages us to innovate in the fields of transportation, housing, architecture, and food. Investing heavily in this area means preparing for the future."
The McDonald's and Gatorade veteran joined Ulta in 2013.
In the past two years, Ulta Beauty, a salon chain and retailer carrying more than 500 cosmetics brands, has surpassed Sephora to become the nation's largest beauty merchant, opening more than 200 new stores, breaking ground on its first location in Manhattan, and upping its online sales by more than 50%. That's all good news for CEO Mary Dillon, but one of her biggest accomplishments isn't as quantifiable. Dillon, a veteran of McDonald's and Gatorade, summarizes the sorry state of Ulta's brand awareness when she took the helm in 2013 with a friendly impression of her target customer: "Ultra? What's that?" Though sales were satisfactory, a long association with tired strip malls and budget shopping had taken its toll. Dillon repositioned the brand, putting new stores closer to urban centers (she expects to open 300 more by 2019) and investing in technology to deliver online orders more efficiently. "We're a 27-year-old brand that I feel is just getting started," she says. Here are some of the strategies in her corporate-makeover playbook.
Though Dillon is an Ulta shopper herself, she still leans on tactics she honed at other companies, when understanding the consumer didn't come as easily (she recalls her dogless days marketing for Kibbles 'n Bits). Members of her team go on shop-alongs with customers, asking them about what they like and how they use the products as they move through the store. Dillon couples that intel with data from Ulta's robust loyalty program, Ultamate Rewards, to complete her picture of the customer. That understanding informs her decisions about how to market Ulta's more than 20,000 products for maximum impact.
Before Dillon's arrival, Ulta was known for its abundance of discounts and coupons. She has edged away from that blunt-force strategy, instead incentivizing customers to join the loyalty program, which allows her to tailor benefits to the shopper. The theory: Thoughtful freebies (some members recently received Urban Decay eye-shadow kits; others, a custom color-matched Clinique foundation) do more to deepen the customer's emotional connection to the store than a generic 15% off mailer. The strategy appears to be working. The program's 21.7 million active members now generate more than 90% of Ulta's overall sales.
About 20 times a year, Dillon makes trips to several stores around the country specifically to talk to associates, listening for what bubbles up. "I kind of collect these 'ahas,' " she says, remembering the time she heard staff members mention how long it took to unpack the boxes that came from distribution centers. She instructed the centers to reorganize the boxes, aligning them with store layout. The move enabled employees to spend more time with shoppers. "That's the kind of insight within the seams that's important," Dillon says.
Dillon believes building physical stores is critical to growth, but she's equally committed to improving Ulta's online shopping experience. One of her early triumphs was investing in a pair of distribution centers that dramatically improved Ulta's e-commerce processing times. "People want to buy online, and they want to come into the store and try things," she says. But she can also guide them toward new experiences. Last year Ulta debuted Glam Lab, a virtual try-on experience that allows users to upload a selfie and test products against their skin tones.
Ulta generates 2,500 new jobs annually, but Dillon isn't content to just create positions—they have to be fulfilling. During a management meeting early in her tenure, Dillon noticed that no one seemed comfortable asking questions—and the ones that were voiced were often shut down. Today, she encourages open feedback through a quantitative survey that goes out to the company's 30,000 associates, measuring how engaged they are, how much they trust management, and whether they believe their managers support their career development. The results help Dillon ensure Ulta's team members continue to uphold a culture of openness. "At the end of the day, especially in retail, you've got humans serving humans," she says. "And really, the more engaged and happier the associates are, the happier our guests are. It's not complicated."
Ulta's engaging in-store experience helped boost company revenue by more than 20% last year. Here are four ways the company changed its retail formula.
Salons: Ulta distinguishes itself by offering in-store services, including haircuts and facials. Recognizing that salon guests spend almost three times as much as other customers, Dillon moved the Benefit Brow Bar, a station for eyebrow shaping, to the front of some stores so that shoppers see services when they enter. Salon sales were up 15% in the first nine months of 2016.
Samples: Most beauty retailers provide products for customers to test, but usually only for higher-end brands. In a bid to lure shoppers into stores, Ulta offers samples for a wide range of products, inviting people to try on not just prestige makeup lines such as Estée Lauder and Nars, but also drugstore brands including Maybelline and CoverGirl.
Tools: Walk into an Ulta store and you'll hear the whir of hair dryers, and not just because of the salons. Many of the electronics the store sells, such as the new Dyson Supersonic hair dryer, are plugged in to encourage play. Even the low-tech tools, like makeup and hair brushes, typically have samples on display for customers to see and feel.
Reviews: As they browse the store's seemingly unlimited supply of eye shadows, lotions, and nail polishes, shoppers can use the Ulta app to scan any product's bar code. From there, they can read customer reviews, see similar merchandise, and save items as favorites. The app also tracks loyalty points and displays products and services in an appealing Pinterest-style interface.
With a tiny marker on every grain of cotton, Pimacott can keep labels honest. Now if only the rest of the industry would catch up.
Cotton is a dirty crop, often tinged with human suffering.
Consider the farmers in India, the world's largest producer of cotton. There, the crop is generally harvested on small farms, where families go into debt to buy seeds from Monsanto, a seed supplier that dominates 90% of the Indian market. As I've reported before, it only takes one bad year for a family to lose everything. This has led to an epidemic in suicides, with an estimated 300,000 farmers taking their own lives over the past two decades in order to spare their children the consequences of this debt.
Given devastating figures like these, many consumers understandably want to know more about the origins of the cotton they buy. A solution to that problem is not as far away as you think: Pimacott, the American division of the Indian cotton supplier Himatsingka, has been working on a technology that uses DNA tagging to allow you pinpoint exactly where your cotton comes from. As its name suggests, Pimacott only develops pima, a variety of cotton that is grown largely in the San Joaquin Valley in California and in particular regions of Peru. Because the company focuses on high-end cotton, it needed a way to assure customers that they were getting authentic and unadulterated pima, especially because raw pima might be brought overseas to be woven and turned into products.
Pimacott Cotton Farms[Photo: courtesy of PimaCott]
"In the industry, there was an increasing discrepancy between what was written on the package of a cotton product and what the material was actually made of," says David Greenstein, CEO of Pimacott. "There was no really good way to test, so there was less of an emphasis on ensuring the purity of the product. We decided that we were going to use technology to change the way that we source cotton and take control of our supply chain."
To do this, Pimacott has partnered with Applied DNA Sciences, a U.S. tech firm, to develop a DNA tagging mechanism for its cotton. The technology essentially creates a minuscule marker—much like a bar code—on every grain of cotton. "We apply it during a step that the gin has to do anyway," says Jim Hayward, CEO, Applied DNA Sciences. "Our goal is always to have no impact on the process."
This insertion process happens at the gin: Little molecules are released into the cotton and permanently bind to it. From this point onward, it is possible to place a piece of cotton or fabric under a simple DNA scanner to see whether the marker is present. "This concept of using DNA tagging and following it throughout the supply chain is encapsulated in what our brand is trying to do," Greenstein says. "It's a trust mark that is meant to educate the American consumer about the source of the material."
For this system to go into effect, Pimacott has had to start at the very source of the cotton, at the farm level. It has been working closely with its farming partners to incorporate this DNA tagging process into their system. Take Cannon Michael, a farmer who runs Bowles Farming Company in the Central Valley of California. Michael runs a progressive farm that is focused on sustainable practices. "California is a higher cost environment than any other cotton-producing region," Michael says. "We have higher regulatory costs than anywhere else in the world, the highest minimum wage, and the best worker protections. We have to compete on quality and consistency."
He is a proud grower of pima—among other varieties of cotton—so he was pleased that this new step would allow Pimacott to guarantee that the pima picked on his farm would not be blended with lower-grade cotton. "We spend so much time on our farm caring for that crop all year round, from the little seedling all the way to the final product," he says. "To think that we're producing this really high-quality fiber that was being diluted with lower-quality on such a massive scale—this blending and cheating—is so disappointing. Having a way to clean that up was invaluable."
Michael, whose farm is part of a collective of family-owned farms, already invested in the infrastructure for the gin. The new technology required a part of the gin to be updated and reconfigured, so they paid to upgrade it. But Pimacott is helping to defray the cost of the marking material. "It's sort of a group collaboration," Michael says.
Cotton is a vulnerable crop that is easily destroyed by insects, requiring farmers to douse their fields with pesticides. In developed countries, farmers have equipment and proper procedures to keep them safe, but in places like India, China, and Pakistan, small, family-owned farms have no such safety measures in place. Laborers exposed to pesticides have a much higher rate of cancer than the general population, and the chemicals are known to end up in the ground water, poisoning entire villages.
Conditions of cotton workers around the world are harsh. But in places like Uzbekistan, they are criminal. There are slavery rings that snatch people from their homes and families, putting them to work in cotton fields—a situation not unlike the slavery that contributed to the production of cotton in the United States a hundred and fifty years ago. It is estimated that 1.2 million Uzbeks live in slavery—4% of the population—because of the cotton trade. Many of them are children.
There was a time when cotton was milled close to the place where it was picked. Indian cotton, for instance, would be grown in one village, then taken to another nearby village to be turned into fabric, which would then be made into saris that would be sold to people in that region. But over the last few decades, the global supply chain has gotten increasingly complex, which makes it very hard to identify the source of cotton. Small farmers sell their crop to middlemen who consolidate the cotton and sell it on the global cotton exchange. Cotton from many countries is often mixed together, then taken to yet another country where a massive industrial mill will turn it into fabric.
Pimacott's Bed Bath & Beyond Duvet Collection[Photo: Seymour Templar, courtesy of Pimacott]
By the time the cotton fabric gets to clothing and home goods manufacturers, it is sometimes close to impossible to ascertain the source of the textiles. Last November, both Target and Wal-Mart came under fire for claiming to sell cotton bedsheets that were made of Egyptian cotton, but that were actually blended with lower-quality cotton. After several different customers filed complaints about the mislabeling of cotton products, Target sent a team of investigators to get to the bottom of where the sheets came from, painstakingly studying fibers under microscopes and digging into the complex supply chain for months, only to discover that 750,000 of its Egyptian cotton products had indeed been falsely marketed.
Target and Wal-Mart had purchased the sheets from a $3 billion Indian cotton conglomerate called Welspun, whose stocks went into a downward spiral after this scandal came to light. Target immediately pulled its $90 million in annual business; Wal-Mart and Bed Bath & Beyond followed suit. "The issue was about traceability, not about quality," said Welspun's chairman, Balkrishnan Goenka, at a press briefing in the aftermath of the fiasco.
Now that Pimacott has set up its system across the network of farmers it partners with, it will be able to work with manufacturers and retailers to market products as "Pimacott-certified." At present, it has an exclusive partnership with Applied DNA Sciences, but the DNA tagging technology is not complicated and could be easily replicated around the industry. The question is, will other cotton suppliers want to follow suit?
Lab Photo: Sampling of Pimacott for DNA Testing
The Cairo-based Cotton Egypt Association (CEA), which certifies products that are made from Egyptian cotton, is also investing in DNA tagging technology. Like Pimacott, the success of its business depends on building trust with the consumer and guaranteeing that products are pure. In April, it formally announced that it would be developing a DNA testing program, but one of the first companies that received certification was Welspun, the very company that was producing blended-cotton products. Target says that it will no longer rely on CEA's certification; Wal-Mart, for its part, says it would continue using it.
But for this technology to be truly powerful, it would need to go beyond the few countries that produce high-end extra-long staple cotton. Monsanto, which is the world's largest seller of cotton seeds—and dominates up to 90% of the market share in countries like India—could incorporate this tagging technology into its vast network around the world. This would allow manufacturers and consumers to trace the complex supply chain and assess the quality of cotton that is being used. However, it may have incentives not to do so. After all, many farmer suicides can be traced back to the steep prices of cotton seeds that Monsanto sets, and pesticide deaths can be attributed to the chemicals that Monsanto sells along with seeds. The company might want to stay away from technology that would identify it as the source of these tragedies.
For the time being, it takes a lot of effort to ensure that cotton purchased from developing countries is free of suffering. In India, a small number of organic cotton farms have sprung up. They're being driven by organizations like Chetna Organic, a co-op that helps 105 different farms and 35,000 farmers pool their resources, use organic approaches to reducing pests, and strategize about how to use money for the collective good, like setting up schools and medical centers. Chetna has also set up mills and manufacturing facilities, so the cotton can be immediately spun and turned into products, allowing it to stay on top of the supply chain.
Sukanta Nanda and his wife, Namrata, grew up in cotton producing regions in India but have spent the last few decades in the United States working for Microsoft. In 2014, after watching a documentary about the horrors that Indian cotton farmers experience, they decided they wanted to invest in India's organic cotton industry, so they launched a direct-to-consumer luxury sheets company called Syona Home, which targets American consumers who are interested in more ethical cotton products. They've worked with Chetna to produce a line of sheets that hit the market last year.
Namrata Nanda checking the quality of sheets at Syona Home's factory.[Photo: courtesy of Syona Home]
But the Nandas didn't want to take the word of Chetna about how workers were treated. After all, nothing is straightforward when it comes to cotton: Raw cotton goes through so many steps, in so many corners of the world, before it ends up in a pair of bedsheets. As Indians, they believed they were in a position to investigate each step of the process. "I wanted to go there and make sure the workers were treated well," Sukanta explains. "It can be hard to be sure when you're just talking to leaders of the co-op from miles away."
Over the last two years, Sukanta has spent days on farms and mills and factories, talking to workers, asking them about their lives. He's seen how his company's bedsheets are made from end-to-end. He believes this is what it takes, given the current cotton supply chain, to ensure that the cotton you're buying is ethically made. For now he's right: But in another world, one where DNA tagging technology is widespread, a maker of bedsheets wouldn't need to go all the way to the source to keep the cotton supply chain honest. Maybe then we could all sleep better at night.
