If you’ve ever had a miscommunication or failed to comprehend what someone else was trying to say, it could be that your perceptual languages are getting in the way. Discovered by development psychologist Taibi Kahler, perceptual languages are the different processes of how people communicate. The way people communicate often carries more information than the words themselves, says clinical psychologist Nate Regier, cofounder of the communication-coaching firm Next Element.

“Perceptual languages are filters through which we interpret the world,” he says. “Six perceptual languages exist, and while we’re capable of speaking all of them, a preferred order becomes set by age 7. We have a favorite, and it’s called our base.”

People who learn to listen for other people’s perceptual languages connect better with others and improve their ability to recall information, says Regier. The way to identify which language someone is speaking is to listen for common words and phrases. You can also download the free smartphone app PocketPCM for Apple or Android, which gives examples of perceptual languages and helps diagnose personalities.

Here are the languages, and clues for identifying each one:

1. Thoughts Language. Someone who speaks in the thoughts language likes to talk about facts, details, characteristics, and features. They ask questions about who, what, where and why, and they want things to make sense. This language makes up 25% of the North American population, says Regier.

“Telltale signs of this person is someone who starts sentences with ‘I think’ or ‘Research suggests,’” he says. “They ask questions about data and time. They want to communicate in a logical way that is orderly and systematic.”

2. Opinions Language. A person speaking with the opinions language is like a judge and the world is their courtroom, says Regier. “Opinions are very different than thoughts because the language is based on values and judgment,” he says. “They start sentences with ‘In my opinion’ or ‘In my view.’ They use judgment words like ‘should,’ ‘could,’ ‘would,’ ‘ought,’ and ‘must.’”

Ten percent of people use opinions as their base perceptual language, says Regier.

3. Feelings Language. A person who speaks with the feelings language uses their heart as a compass, says Regier. “They focus on feelings and emotions,” he says. “They start sentences with ‘I feel’ or ‘I care.’”

Thirty percent of people have feelings as their base language.

4. Reactive Language. The person who uses the reactive language doesn’t have a filter and doesn’t think before they speak “They just say stuff,” says Regier. Look for words like “awesome” or sentences that start with, “I love” or “I hate.”

Twenty percent of people have reactions as their base language.

5. Action Language. The person who speaks with the action language uses a lot of verbs. “These people want to know, ‘What are we doing?’ and ‘Where are we going?’” says Regier. “They say phrases like, ‘Let’s go for it’ and ‘Cut to the chase.’ Life is about taking charge and getting it done.”

Five percent of the population uses action language as their base.

6. Reflections Language. A person who uses reflections language doesn’t talk a lot, but when they do their language is passive and nebulous, says Regier. “They say things like ‘Let me reflect on it,’ or ‘In my mind’s eye.’ Their mental process is uncontrolled and completely open.”

Ten percent of people use reflections language as their base.

How To Communicate Across “Languages”

Once you identify someone’s preferred perceptual language, use it to improve understanding, says Regier. “If you have a thinker boss who asks a feeling employee what they think, the employee might respond with, ‘It feels good to me,’ but they’re not answering the question and there can be miscommunications or assumptions,” he says.

When communicating an important message, translate the information into the listener’s perceptual language. “Determine what content you want to convey, then adjust the process of how you deliver it so it can be heard and understood,” he says. “The languages have nothing to do with the content of what is communicated, but the words will sound different depending on language.”

For example, a thinker boss can improve team communication by tailoring the message to the listener. If she’s talking to an employee who uses action language, she can change “What do you think?” to “Bring me up to speed on what’s happened and what we should do next.”

Focusing on perceptual languages can help you improve your memory. “It’s based on what cognitive psychologists call the Baker/baker paradox,” says Regier. “The more different associations your brain can make with what’s being said, the more easily it can be recalled later on.”

Recognizing someone’s perceptual language also allows you to anticipate other things about them, such as their character strengths, motivations, and values, says Regier. “Likewise, if we tune into the perceptual language, we can pick up on more of what the person intends and means when they are speaking, and therefore remember more of what’s most relevant to them,” he says.

A person who pays attention and speaks the listener’s perceptual language is often thought of as a great communicator. Bill Clinton is a master of using perceptual languages and studied under Kahler, says Regier. “He used it all the time and really tuned into other people,” he says. “Clinton and Trump have similar leadership styles, but Trump doesn’t care how he affects or connects and Clinton really did.”

A few years ago, my to-do list was an endless source of frustration. At the end of every day, it seemed like it had more items on it than when I started. I never seemed to get it all done.

So, in an effort to understand what was going on, I began to track how I was spending my time and saw some interesting patterns emerge. As I learned more, I started applying a productivity-changing principle to my daily “get it done” list: time-blocking.

Time-blocking is essentially organizing your day in a series of time slots. Instead of writing a list of tasks that take as long as they take, with a time-blocked approach, each of these time periods is devoted to a task or tasks. It immediately lets you see where you’re being unrealistic about your time and keep yourself focused on what you’re supposed to be doing.

Giving every hour a job typically lets you make much more efficient use of your time, says Georgetown University professor Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. “This follows because it allows you to schedule work for the time where it makes the most sense—batching together small things, tackling hard things when you have the long stretches to make progress, and so on. The other advantage is that it provides you more accurate feedback on how much free time you actually have most days and how long certain recurring tasks actually take,” he says.

Why Time Block?

Organizing your day through time blocks instead of to-dos makes sense because of the discipline and order it applies to your tasks, says time management expert Kevin Kruse, author of 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management. Research by productivity blog I Done This found that 41% of to-do list items are never completed. In Kruse’s own research he says the high-performers he interviewed never talked about their “to-do lists,” but instead talked about their calendars and how they were organized.

Organizing your time instead of your tasks also has psychological benefits, Kruse says. There is also a psychological reason why time-blocking makes more sense. In what is known as the Zeigarnik effect, which basically states that we remember what we haven’t done better than what we have done, and uncompleted tasks weigh on us. “This can lead to stress and insomnia. However, when we have all of our tasks placed into a specific date, time, and duration, we sleep more soundly knowing everything that needs to get done is in its place,” Kruse says.

So, if you’re ready to give it a shot, pull out your calendar and keep these tips in mind.

Pay Attention to Cycles

Before you start slotting in tasks every 30 minutes or hour, think about how your energy and work both flow, says business strategist David Horsager, CEO of the Trust Edge Leadership Institute, and an avid time-blocker. Are there work cycles that could affect how much uninterrupted time you will have? And what times of day do you have the most energy or are best suited to do the tasks you need to do?

For example, if you know that Fridays are typically very busy in your office, you might want to allow more slack in your schedule than you ordinarily would. Also, if you know you hit an afternoon slump at 3 p.m., don’t schedule work where you’re going to need deep focus or creativity, as you’re likely to come up short, he says. Look at the times of day when you’re at your best and least likely to be disturbed and, as much as you can, plan your work accordingly.

“Don’t schedule a hard task in a time of day where you typically lag, and don’t schedule a big task in a small amount of time. Wishful thinking can’t change the reality of your schedule,” Newport adds.

Allot Enough Time

“We chronically underestimate how long things will take,” Kruse says. So, we are constantly running over our time allocations and not getting to the things we have on our schedule. Kruse suggests including time-block buffer zones. In other words, add one to three 30-minute blocks of time so if you run over, you can bump another appointment into the buffer zone. And if you are on schedule, you can use that buffer time to think and recharge, or to get a jump on another event, Kruse says. If you’re chronically running late, revisit the amount of time you’re devoting to your tasks.

Offload Distractions

You can be pretty sure that, as you’re being so productive in your time blocks, interruptions will try to take their toll, Horsager says. Do your best to eliminate them by turning off push notifications and, if possible, turning off your phone and letting calls go to voicemail. “I keep a stack of Post-it notes nearby so when I think of something else that needs to be done, I just jot it down so I remember it, then keep working on what I’m doing,” he says. He and his team also integrate a “power hour”—which is actually a “power 90 minutes”—where employees can focus on their work with no meetings and minimal interruptions, he says.

Make It Flexible

“People’s biggest misconception with time-blocking their day is that the goal is to stick with the schedule no matter what,” Newport says. A better ways is to rework your time blocks throughout the day as circumstances change. The goal is to make sure they you always have an intentional plan for the time that remains in the workday, he adds.

If you run in a race in London in the near future and pass a hydration station, you may be handed a small, bubble-like sphere of water instead of a bottle. The gelatinous packaging, called the Ooho, is compostable–or even edible, if you want to swallow it. And after two years of development, its designers are ready to bring it to market.

Three London-based design students first created a prototype of the edible bottle in 2014 as an alternative to plastic bottles. The idea gained internet hype (though also some scorn for a hilarious video that made the early prototypes look fairly impossible to use without soaking yourself).

The problem it was designed to solve–the number of disposable bottles in landfills–keeps growing. In the U.K. alone, around 16 million are trashed each day; another 19 million are recycled, but still have the environmental footprint of a product made from oil. In the U.S., recycling rates are even lower. The company hopes it can put a dent in that number by replacing the growing number of small bottles that are consumed on the go. Roughly a third of water bottles sold are a half-liter or less. Evian launched a 200-milliliter bottle, which can’t be resealed, in 2016.

The new packaging is based on the culinary technique of spherification, which is also used to make fake caviar and the tiny juice balls added to boba tea. Dip a ball of ice in calcium chloride and brown algae extract, and you can form a spherical membrane that keeps holding the ice as it melts and returns to room temperature.

Because the membrane is made from food ingredients, you can eat it instead of throwing it away. The Jell-O-like packaging doesn’t have a natural taste, but it’s possible to add flavors to make it more appetizing.

The package doesn’t have to be eaten every time, since it’s also compostable. “When people try it for the first time, they want to eat it because it’s part of the experience,” says Pierre Paslier, cofounder of Skipping Rocks Lab, the startup developing the packaging. “Then it will be just like the peel of a fruit. You’re not expected to eat the peel of your orange or banana. We are trying to follow the example set by nature for packaging.”

The outer layer of the package is always meant to be peeled like fruit–one thin outer layer of the membrane peels away to keep the inner layer clean and can then be composted. (While compostable cups are an alternative solution, many can only be composted in industrial facilities; the Ooho can be tossed on a simple home compost pile, where it will decompose within weeks).

The company is targeting both outdoor events and cafes. “Where we see a lot of potential for Ooho is outdoor events–festivals, marathons, places where basically there are a lot of people consuming packaging over a very short amount of time,” says Paslier.

Of course, that’s assuming that people embrace the idea of drinking from a squishy, jellyfish-like blob. The designers say that people have embraced the novelty in tests. And in some parts of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa, consumers have embraced similar (but trash-producing) plastic water sachets.

At a cafe, the packaging can be made on-site, so it also eliminates the need to truck bottled water long distances. “The process that we’re developing allows for them to be made on the spot, just before consumption,” he says. “If you think of a coffee machine in the cafe that makes the coffee just before you drink it, we’re working on something that would be about that size.” At events, the same process could happen from the back of a food truck. Each ball of water can be produced in seconds.

Since the Ooho doesn’t have a lid, the portions are typically small. “Once you bite a hole in it, you have to finish it in one go,” Paslier says. “We found that the ideal volume is a sip to a few sips depending on the application.” At a marathon, the size might be 50 milliliters, or a couple of sips; at a Starbucks, it might be 150 milliliters.

In a new crowdfunding campaign, the designers are raising money to finalize their manufacturing equipment and to work on development of a second product.

“We’re looking at other waste streams that could potentially benefit from having natural materials being thrown at them,” Paslier says.

When American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy let it slip recently that the next season of his FX series would be about the 2016 presidential election, the internet lit up. What better platform to tell the Donald Trump story than a series that FX president Jon Landgraf has said is devoted to “confronting our deepest fears”?

Murphy won’t be the first person to bring the new president to the small screen. The Good Fight, the CBS All Access drama that’s a spin-off of The Good Wife, has referenced Trump directly and explored topics like fake news and how a tweeting president frightens media corporations. And of course, daily news-based shows like The Daily Show and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert are having a field day with the endless shenanigans brewing in Washington–not to mention Saturday Night Live.

Related Article: Brands In The Age of Trump: A Survival Guide

Trump and TV make sense in so many ways. Indeed, the story has all of the elements of a made-for-TV movie, from its reality TV-star leading man to its underdog narrative to its endless supply of mini-dramas (the Russians have hacked our election!) that, at any other point in history, would appear ludicrous. But while producers like Murphy are seizing the opportunity to harness all of this sensationalism for TV, Trump is more often than not a conundrum for writers in Hollywood. Although the current administration has become Topic A in writers rooms–“It used to be people talked about TV shows when you got into work,” says Jessica Goldberg, creator of Hulu’s The Path. “It’d be like, ‘What happened on Homeland?‘ Now it’s like, ‘What happened in the news?'”–converting headlines into plot lines is more challenging than it sounds. In fact, just this past weekend, Homeland showrunner Alex Gansa told the New York Times that when his writers began crafting stories about Russia using fake news and social media to influence the U.S. election 14 months ago–well before Trump was elected–they worried the idea might seem farfetched. “That was the seminal idea of the season: What do you do in a transition period when a president-elect finds herself in an adversarial relationship with her intelligence community?” said Gansa. “Miraculously, that’s exactly what happened with the Trump administration.”

For one thing, TV writers typically work on episodes that won’t air for several months or more. So there’s a fear of focusing on news that won’t actually be news by the time audiences tune in.

“I feel like you start each morning with the headline and ask, ‘How can you put it in the show?'” says Goldberg. “But then it sort of fades through the day. All of a sudden your phone beeps and HuffPo is telling you about the new Trump tweet.”

Then there’s the question of how true politics actually is to a show. For a series like The Good Fight, it’s reasonable for the show’s political-minded, Chicago lawyers to discuss Trump and Clinton and even become embroiled in a legal battle related to the new administration–as they do toward the end of season one. But for family shows with a broader appeal, like NBC’s This Is Us, not so much. Says Aurin Squire, a writer on the show: “Because of the structure and the tone of the show, politics can enter in a more subversive, subtle way. But we’re not going to have an episode like on Blackish where people sit around arguing about the election. That’s not what the show is.”

Fast Company recently spoke with a number of TV writer-producers about the effect of Trump on TV, about how it’s affecting their shows, whether and when to expect “Trump fatigue,” and how it’s mainly “fancy people” who are upset about the election. Herewith are excerpts from the interviews.

A Punishing News Cycle

For the average American, keeping up with a Twitter-fueled news cycle that moves from immigration to climate change to cyber security in a matter of days, if not hours, is exhausting. But for TV writers, the rapid churn of headlines presents a more logistical challenge: staying fresh.

“It’s hard to figure out what you’d even put in because you don’t even know if something like Russia is going to be in the news when the show airs. That could not be a subject anymore. With Love (which streams on Netflix), it’s a year before anyone sees it. On most network shows, it’s three months later (that a show airs) at the quickest.”

Robert King (co-creator, The Good Fight): “There were stories pitched about the immigration ban, and the only worry we had was that it was burning too hot and was in the courts in a large way, and there was also a chance that Trump would rewrite it. So we didn’t want to get stuck behind the curve ball on that.

“So the story is more about a breakdown between the judiciary and the executive branch. What happens when there’s confusion about who’s really in control? Are we really on the verge of becoming a banana republic in that way? That seemed more getting to the core of the problem of what happens when there’s a disagreement between the judges and the authorities? We even saw that at JFK, where the border patrol was not obeying a judge’s order because they felt they were answerable to the president. So that kind of chaos and confusion is applicable to our show because our show also deals mostly with the law.”

Staying True To Character And Story

Regardless of how much Trump is being discussed among writers, politics doesn’t necessarily directly translate to the world of a TV show. Writers say they have to consider whether their characters would actually discuss politics, or whether current events would really impact them, in order to maintain authenticity.

Rob Long (executive producer, Kevin Can Wait): “I think the massive freak-outs (over Trump) with some characters would happen with more fancy characters. The freak-outs I see are almost entirely people in the 1%. I live in New York, in the West Village, and I have a lot of fancy friends and they’re generally freaking out. But I think normal people kind of always put politics in a much more secondary or tertiary, or whatever the word is for fourth-ary position.

“The family that we’re doing a show about is kind of a normal American family. They live in Massapequa, Long Island. It’s not even a bedroom community of New York. It’s way out there. It has a small-town feel, the kids go to public school, and they play high school basketball and lacrosse. And they have a local church that they go to, and that’s that. Only from the lens of a 310 (Los Angeles) area code are those things seen as potentially political. For most Americans, it’s, ‘That’s kind of how I am.’

“So I think if it’s true to your show and the characters, then I think you’re kind of obligated to do something about it, pro or con–though I can’t imagine anyone in Hollywood doing a pro-Trump show. But if it’s not, then it kind of feels like a side-swipe, left-field, we’ve got this soapbox, we’re going to use it.”

Nicholas Stoller (co-creator, The Carmichael Show): “We’ve been talking about Trump in jokes, and there’s an [upcoming] episode that’s all about supporting the troops where there’s a neighborhood guy who’s a jerk, and now he’s a soldier, and Jerrod is unwilling to give him respect because he’s a troop. There’s a lot of discussion about Trump in that.”

“Otherwise, however, season three–which premieres on NBC in May–will steer clear of politics, which is a shift from season two, which ended with an episode in which Jerrod’s father, Joe, admits he’s a Trump supporter–this was before Trump was the Republican nominee.

“In talking to Jerrod about it, I think a lot of African-American comedians would say, ‘Yeah, of course, this was what was going to happen.’ The show already presents, not a cynical, but an honest world view. I think for a lot of white, liberal Jews, after the election it was like, ‘Oh my god, the world has totally changed.’ But for a lot of African-Americans, it was, ‘What did you expect?’ So while it’s fun to talk about and important to talk about political issues, I don’t think there was a sea change in the way [the characters on the show] see America. I know, certainly, for Jerrod, he was the least shocked of anyone I know.”

Michelle King (co-creator The Good Fight): The show’s political story lines are “less about us wanting to make the show about politics than it is recognizing that we’ve got politically aware characters. In a sense, you’re following them. Because we’ve established Diane [Lockhart, the power attorney and show’s lead, played by Christine Baranski] as an ardent liberal. Most of the characters are liberals living in Chicago. Clearly, they were going to have a strong point of view on politics. So it’s following them rather than imposing our thinking.”

Teasing Out Ideas

But writers are also discussing ways to address political issues in more subtle ways. Goldberg says that The Path, which is about a religious cult in upstate New York, lends itself to many of the subjects that are being raised these days. The question is how to weave them into the show without being literal.

Jessica Goldberg:“One thing I feel, at least in the context of our show, is that you can talk about the issues. For instance, in season one we had a story in which the cult decided to take in some Honduran refugees who were being deported, and they got in a lot of trouble with the FBI. Now I wish we hadn’t done that in season one because now that story has a whole different–like we could really do that story now.

“Mostly our show is a big soap opera, but where it’s really exciting as a writer in the world, and as a citizen, is when you can tell these little stories about the intersection of faith and politics. Or why people need rules and structure, and why they want to give up their personal freedoms. Those kinds of story elements really resonate now.

Then again, she says, “There’s a part of me that like, it would be fun to see Hugh Dancy’s character (the cult leader)–I made a joke and said, ‘Maybe he starts going to a tanning booth.’ You know, just little inside jokes might be fun.”

Trop De Trump?

Another concern is wearing audiences out with talk of politics, given how they’re already being bludgeoned 24/7 by the news and social media.

Robert King: “We do worry about Trump fatigue and that people are going to get truly tired of all the criticism . . . I think the fatigue doesn’t even come from the shows yet to come, it comes from some very well-written, well-intentioned comedy shows that are basically The Daily Show descendants. Samantha Bee, John Oliver, even Colbert. Those shows are really worthwhile, but they’re also I think exhausting the audience, as the administration is exhausting the audience. So it’s more important to go after how the culture will be changing than to go after the president. And here’s the thing: Our show tries to avoid being earnest. And the difficulty when you are going to go against someone that the liberal audience is so against is that all you can be is earnest.”

Bill O’Reilly has just entered the Nose Pin Zone, where advertisers would have to clamp something over their nostrils in order to not smell the toxic publicity coming from his recent sexual harassment lawsuit revelations.

It started with a months-in-the-works New York Times article on April 1, which revealed that Fox News had settled about $13 million worth of lawsuits over the years to address female employees’ complaints about O’Reilly. It was something people sort of knew about the TV host and popular family-values book author/historian since his 2004 lawsuit, which occurred before social media existed. Following the online reverberations of the NYT article, the pundit’s show, The O’Reilly Factor, has been hemorrhaging advertisers at a rapid clip–and both Saturday Night Live and Last Week Tonight clearly smell blood in the water.

More than 60 advertisers pulled their support from The O’Reilly Factor by the time SNL got around to skewing the show over the weekend. In an already-viral sketch from the show, Alec Baldwin pulls double-duty to play his usual Donald Trump and also the embattled talking head.

There’s a reason this clip has been shared millions of times in one day. First of all, Baldwin is surprisingly fantastic as O’Reilly. He has the mannerisms down, specifically the emphatic, smug smile that spreads across the host’s face after he makes just about any point. And though it’s 90% due to a great makeup team, Baldwin looks the part too. Another reason the sketch is great is because it follows in a hallowed SNL tradition of scenes that reveal which Z-grade sponsors remain after a host’s controversial statements spur A-listers to bail. (See for instance this Rush Limbaugh skewering from 2012, after Rush called contraceptive advocate Sandra Fluke a “slut,” and worse.)

Perhaps the real reason the sketch worked so well, however, is because of the implicit point made by having the same actor play both Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump in a split-screen shot. Trump, who recently came to O’Reilly’s defense after the NYT article, calling him “a good person” who “didn’t do anything wrong,” has harbored a lot of sexual harassment accusations of his own. Casting Baldwin as both men paints them as two sides of the same coin.

SNL wasn’t the only show to lump both men together in covering O’Reilly’s woes, though. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did as well, albeit in a completely different way. First, Oliver went in on the pundit’s parent company. O’Reilly’s sexual harassment lawsuits are only the latest to rock Fox News recently. Last year, Roger Ailes was ousted when he couldn’t harbor his own series of harassment scandals. Oliver recounted the series of events to paint Fox News as a poisonous environment for women, whose long-simmering misdeeds are finally seeing sunlight. And then he sent in the cowboy.

Fans of Oliver’s show will have seen the “Catheter Cowboy” deployed multiple times in the current season of LWT. He’s part of a brilliant recurring bit on the show in which Oliver buys airtime on Fox News, the channel favored by our Commander in Chief, to get a message directly to Trump. This time, the cowboy was used as a harbinger to spread the word that, despite what the president may think, sexual harassment is in fact Bad and Wrong.

If it seems trivial for comedians to point out that sexual harassment is wrong, consider this: A lot of people knew that Bill Cosby had been accused repeatedly of sexual assault over the years, but they really started to care after the way a comedian pointed it out. 

Well, well, well, this is a welcome sight. In a new ad for Chobani, director Michel Gondry brings fresh fruit to life as musical instruments, to perform composer Jon Brion’s original arrangement of Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now.” It’s a fun, sweet spot that aligns perfectly with not just the brand’s image, but the director’s reputation.

This is the second commercial we’ve seen in the last few months using Bacharach’s classic–the other was Andra Day’s cover for Hyatt’s Oscars ad. But the fruit band in a field is an appropriately wholesome vibe for a company that uses no preservatives, only non-GMO ingredients, milk from cows not treated with the bovine growth hormone rBST, gives 10% of its profits to charitable causes, and known for its innovative management.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were treated to Gondry’s inventive imagination on a pretty regular basis, through both ads like Levi’s “Drugstore” and Motorola, music videos like Daft Punk’s “Around The World,” and films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep, and Be Kind Rewind. Late last year, he directed a spot for Bacardi, but it wasn’t exactly signature Gondry. Last week we got a hint that marketers were embracing his particular whimsy again with a new FedEx ad, so maybe this is the start of another run of branded Gondry fun. Here’s hoping.

For more on Chobani, check out the first episode of Fast Company‘s “Innovators Uncensored” podcast, with Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya.

A perennial discussion topic among philosophical, possibly weed-addled college freshman is about whether true altruism really exists. Do people perform philanthropic feats out of a pure desire to help others, or do they do it to assuage their own guilt, feel chuffed with themselves, and, much worse, to be viewed as a good person? The addition of social media visibility has only poured kerosene on the subject. And now that people are fired up about activism following the 2016 election, actual motivation and commitment are harder to parse than ever.

Over the weekend, Saturday Night Live grappled with performative activism on a corporate level and on a personal level, and delivered a master class in how not to be a good ally.

The centerpiece of this week’s episode, and the sketch everyone would be talking about if it weren’t for Alec Baldwin’s Bill O’Reilly, is this takedown of the Pepsi ad heard ’round the world.

The original ad, so infamous last week that describing it now is probably redundant, featured Kendall Jenner joining a protest movement, armed with a can of Pepsi. It was catastrophically received before it was pulled from the internet. Not only does the ad appear to be a coup for Coca-Cola, as many have rightly pointed out, it was a coup for RC Cola and any other lower-tier soda brands waiting to step into the big leagues. One might even say it was a victory for the alt-right and anyone else wanting to suggest that beneath the veneer of righteousness, the so-called resistance has a corporate-sponsored core. (The ad’s very existence kind of dovetails into the concept of “professional protesters,” which has been bandied about since the election, from the highest levels.)

The tragic flaws of the Pepsi ad should have been obvious to anyone involved in the making of it–how using Black Lives Matter iconography to sell Pepsi trivializes the movement, how using people from different cultures as props is not at all the same as celebrating them, and how showing the way riot police respond to Kendall Jenner completely ignores the double standard of how those police have historically treated people of color. In the SNL sketch, we see a fictional representative of the makers of the ad, played by Beck Bennett, slowly realize all of these wild miscalculations. His shame and embarrassment should be a slight balm to anyone whose head hurts from shaking it at that ad all week.

Of course, each of us is as individually fallible in matters of cultural sensitivity as global conglomerates like Pepsi. Another sketch from this week’s SNL skewered the rise of armchair activism, which is surely better intentioned than the Pepsi ad, but equally inefficient.

In “Thank You, Scott,” Louis CK’s hapless Scott is moved by all the injustice he sees in the world–but not enough to actually do anything productive about it. Rather than make phone calls, write letters, volunteer, or donate money, Scott shares an article on Facebook and adds “Black Lives Matter” to his Twitter bio. As he does so, a chorus of multicultural voices sings a song (mock-)praising all the Scotts out there for doing literally the least they can do.

Pepsi went through a show of aligning oneself with the resistance when its executives could have easily just donated the cost of the ad to various causes and reaped in positive publicity instead. The Scotts of the world want everyone to know they’re concerned about police shooting unarmed black people, but not enough to show up in any way that counts. Saturday Night Live may have some contradictions of its own that are tough to live down, but at least it’s inviting people to consider their own behavior.

For all its capacity for innovation and genius, Silicon Valley has yet to solve its traffic quandary. Throughout the Bay Area, roads have become a gridlocked hell; what should be a 20-minute drive up from San Jose to Mountain View, or across the Bay Bridge from Oakland into San Francisco, could very well take over two hours. One commuter, describing her trip through the region, told The Mercury News: “I really did shed a few tears.”

She’s not alone: According to a recent Bay Area-wide poll, two-thirds of the region’s residents are demanding a major investment to fix the problem, even that means higher taxes. Joint Venture Silicon Valley (JVSV), a nonprofit dedicated to identifying and solving the region’s issues, has been grappling with the traffic dilemma for years, and it’s now landed on a fairly radical but very comprehensive solution.

To implement the strategy, JVSV has authored a bill that could be introduced by local city councils with a simple-majority vote. The bill would enact a city-wide “trip cap” to limit the number of car trips through the region; companies within the city would be permitted a certain number of commuter vehicles depending on their size, and companies that exceed that number would have to adopt the commute-reducing strategies outlined in the FVC plan.

Local ordinances have a proven record of cutting down SOV commuting in the area: After Santa Clara County, home of Stanford University, introduced a trip cap in 2000, Stanford responded by slapping a parking fee of $4 per day on SOV commuters, and transferring that revenue toward public transit and carpool benefits for other employees. The Stanford scheme reduced SOV commuting by 25%–the same goal that JVSV hopes to achieve for the whole region—and saved the university $107 million in parking structures it would have had to build to accommodate its growth and employees’ commuting habits.

The way Fair Value Commuting works, Raney says, is by encouraging companies to increase the penalty on SOV commuting for employees, while offering a streamlined alternative. To clear up the roads, “you have to increase the price of driving in some way, because humans react well to sticks, and not so much to incentives,” he says. “But there’s also the fact that nobody wants to be inconvenienced.”

For the penalty aspect of the plan, FVC, like Stanford, would require companies to charge a fee of $3 per day to SOV commuter employees. That money would then be collected and put toward providing alternative-commute benefits to other employees (it’s the classic Robin Hood model, but for drivers). The “revenue-neutral” structure would give companies a way to incentivize non-SOV commuting without digging into their own pockets.

But how could employers determine who gets fined, and who gets the rebate? Raney says that while trip-tracking software is still being finessed, companies will be able to make use of data that comes from employees’ phone to detect how each person commuted. That “Enterprise Commute Trip Reduction” software would aggregate employee data into a dashboard, and automate commuter benefit programs. JVSV is working with transportation data management companies like Luum and RideAmigos to develop this technology.

With cities across the U.S. becoming more and more congested (the proliferation of ride-sharing services like Uber is contributing to the problem), it’s clear that a one-note, brute-force approach to mitigation won’t work: Fixing this issue will require flexibility, collaboration, and scalability, all of which, Raney says, FVC provides. And the Bay Area, he adds, is the perfect testing ground. “The regional and public policy in Silicon Valley and California is a big change agent,” he says. “It could end up being the biggest thing changing transportation in the next 10 years.”

Here’s more about the finalists in the transportation category:

Project Interzone
Project Interzone
It’s a foregone conclusion that–all of our best ride-sharing and public-transit developments aside–cities will continue to get more crowded. Instead of relying on standard traffic-mitigation strategies, Project Interzone suggests abandoning our traditional concept of linear time. It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, and the organizers, in fact, came up with the concept through developing a fictional scenario: A New York City divided–by an entity called the Department of Tim– into three time zones, each three hours apart. Project Interzone imagines gridlock relieved via a schedule spread out enough to disperse traffic flows, but not so extreme as to completely disrupt residents’ lives and relationships.

Civil Maps
Civil Maps
Beyond a standard GPS, self-driving cars will need a practically human level of sensitivity to navigate successfully through unfamiliar terrain. Civil Maps’ “location and augmented reality (AR) maps” translate the surrounding scene into 3D, data-driven maps that are updated in real time. Through crowdsourcing, the Civil Maps team will build out a centralized map collection that will apply to any to any environment at a low cost.

Smart City Challenge
Vulcan
Cities are major drivers of climate change, but also where the solutions are likely to originate. With his team at Vulcan, founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen created an incentive for cities to realize a more sustainable an efficient approach to urban transit: a $40 million prize to the winning city to re-imagine its transportation system. Launched in December 2015, the Smart City Challenge aimed to motivate cities to use data, technology and creative thinking to become more sustainable. Seventy-eight cities across the country submitted ideas, which ranged from electric freight trucks in Kansas City to a network of shared self-driving cars in San Francisco. The scope of proposals submitted to the Smart City Challenge represents the direction in which all cities need to head to curb climate change.

Otto
Otto
For decades America romanticized the life of a trucker: the open road, the freedom, the solitude. But conditions on the road have worsened, and driving has become increasingly unsafe for the people behind the wheel. Otto is developing self-driving kits that can be applied to any freight truck, improving the safety and productivity of drivers who often work exhausting hours to boost their earnings. Self-driving trucks remain alert, even when drivers are not fully, and by maintaining consistent speed and pooling shipments to carry a full cargo, Otto (which is currently being sued by Google parent company Alphabet for major theft of intellectual property) also aims to reduce the environmental footprint of long-haul transit.

AeroLiner3000
Andreas Volger Studio
Despite being known for its double-decker buses, the U.K. has shied away from double-decker trains. Though they’d increase transit capacity, engineers have worried that they won’t fit underneath the island’s bridges and tunnels, which were built much lower than those on the European continent. By taking a leaf from the aerospace industry, Andreas Volger Studio has developed a streamlined double-decker train that, like an airplane, forgoes comfortable standing room for the sake of design. On the lightweight train, as many as 700 passengers (a 30% increase over current trains) can sit comfortably, and increasing efficiency across the rail system will also cut carbon emissions.

On-the-Go H2O
Ford Motor Co.
With clean water in short supply in many parts of the world, and one in 10 people struggling to access it,  developing alternative ways to source it is crucial. Ford’s contribution: A reservoir attached to a car’s air-conditioner ventilator, which collects condensation that would otherwise drip onto the pavement. In an hour, one On-The-Go H20 system could collect 24 ounces of water—enough to fill four water bottles. In many developing countries, where there’s a scarcity of water and a fair number of cars and trucks, the device could deliver water to people in need.

Connecting Cities and Citizens
Mastercard
Commuting by public transit suddenly becomes a lot easier when you don’t have to wait in line to buy a ticket. Mastercard is working to help cities set up electronic payments for their transit systems. In 2016, commuters on New York’s Long Island Railroad and Metro-North trains gained access to MTAeTix–cashless tickets powered by Mastercard and Apple Pay. Since the system launched in August, over 280,000 new accounts were created; Mastercard will work with other cities to demonstrate how private and public sector can work together to boost transit ridership.

Hyperloop One
Hyperloop One
Hyperloop One is the transportation version of the internet–fast, connected, and disobedient of the barriers of space and time. Using a custom electric motor, Hyperloop One moves levitated pods through a network of tubes at speeds up to 700 miles per hour with no emissions. A trip between Sydney and Melbourne, which would ordinarily take five hours and struggling through two airports, would be condensed to 55 minutes. Teams at three campuses in Los Angeles and Nevada are currently demonstrating the system and planning the development of a 500-kilometer network linking Helsinki and Stockholm in 28 minutes.

Cobi
Cobi
Generally speaking, using your smartphone while cycling entails taking your life into your hands. But Cobi, a smartphone-powered bike system, does everything for you, from navigating to changing music to making calls, while you hold onto the handlebars. The smartphone attaches to a dock (which also functions as a charger) installed at the front of the bike; because it’s Bluetooth-enabled, the system responds to voice commands. The point of Cobi, according to the designers, is to making your bike as advanced and responsive as a car.

Supersonic airline
Boom
Traveling faster than the speed of sound, Boom Technology’s supersonic airline would cut travel between New York and London to three hours, San Francisco and Tokyo to five. The company is developing a fleet of supersonic aircraft, and Virgin has announced that they’ll buy the first 10 airplanes produced. By the next decade, Boom envisions a network of 500 routes; founder Blake Scholl’s goal is “to enable anyone to fly anywhere in the world in under five hours, for $100.”

RideCell
RideCell
Imagine if you could get across the city by hopping in a rideshare, switching to public transit, then using car-share to cross the last mile to work. If those systems aren’t integrated, that trip would be a logistical nightmare. By using RideCell–an adaptable, scalable transit aggregation platform–transit agencies, companies, universities, and car companies can develop an app that integrates all available transit options in a single place. RideCell offers consumers a streamlined way to avail of a variety of transit modes; for transit providers, it keeps people engaged with their services through making it much easier to integrate them into their commutes.

Parkarr
Parkarr
Anyone who has driven in a city knows the pain of circling, seemingly endlessly, in search of parking. Parkarr, a crowdsourced app that connects drivers looking for parking with those leaving those spots, wants to make that frustration a thing of the past. Anywhere from real-time to four days in advance, drivers can enter a location where they need parking; through the app, they receive an alert when a “host” (a driver leaving a spot) accepts their request. A GPS tracking system informs the host when the driver is close so the handoff can go smoothly.

The Smiling Car
Semcon
Before crossing the street, 80% of pedestrians will make eye contact with the driver at the intersection to make sure they’ve been seen. That very human interaction is impossible with a self-driving car, so the Swedish technology company Semcon invented The Smiling Car, which lights up with a smile to show it’s sensed a pedestrian, and will wait for them to cross.

The Green Engine
United Technologies
By developing a more efficient engine to power airplanes, United Technologies is ushering in a greener way to travel. Its engine, which took 20 years and $10 billion to develop, reduces fuel consumption by 16%, cuts particulate emissions by 50%, and reduces the aircraft noise by 75%. Reducing fuel consumption also cuts carbon dioxide emissions: Currently, commercial aviation emits 705 million metric tons of CO2 each year (2% of global carbon emissions). United Technologies’ engine would reduce emissions by 3,600 metric tons per aircraft each year.

BQXL: Brooklyn-Queens Crossline
Gensler
Public transportation in New York City was originally built with Manhattan as the focal point. But now that Brooklyn and Queens are rapidly developing as residential and business hubs, the lack of connectivity between the two boroughs is obvious. The design and architecture firm Gensler has proposed a 15-mile, high-powered rail line between the Brooklyn Army Terminal and Jackson Heights, Queens, that would link previously disconnected neighborhoods, spur development, and do by using existing freight lines, currently used at night to deliver waste to landfills. Gensler sees the BQX reworking existing infrastructure to support equitable development and create more accessible communities for people in the outer boroughs.

The Proterra Catalyst E2 Series
Proterra
Proterra saw that today’s electric buses can only handle about 45% of their daily mileage through cities without having to recharge, and decided that wasn’t good enough for our booming transit needs. The manufacturing company developed a battery that lasts for up to 350 miles while emitting zero tailpipe emissions. Each time a diesel vehicle is replaced by a zero-emission bus, CO2 emissions drop 243,980 pounds over the course of a year; the Catalyst E2 delivers a sustainable transit option without the inconvenience of having to stop mid-route to charge.

If you move to Berlin, you need a bank account to rent an apartment, sign a contract for a mobile phone, or deposit a paycheck. But for refugees and asylum seekers–who typically don’t have the ID cards that most banks require–it can be nearly impossible to get an account.

A new startup called Taqanu is designing an alternative. Instead of asking for standard identification, it uses something that almost all refugees do have: a smartphone. An app installed on a phone can track someone’s digital data, including social networking, to prove their identity. Users will also create a “reputation network,” asking friends and family to vouch that someone is who they say they are. The app also asks refugees to upload photos of any documents they have, such as papers from a refugee camp in Greece. As the app is used, it continues to collect more evidence of someone’s identity.

“Basically, our goal is to constantly authenticate someone’s identity through their bank account, and use someone’s digital footprint as the source of identity,” says founder Balázs Némethi.

He drew on his own experience of the challenges of opening a bank account in a foreign country, something that can be difficult even with documentation. Refugees and asylum seekers often have nothing more than a temporary ID issued by the German government when they cross the border. A passport may have been lost along the way, or, in some cases, sold (a Syrian passport has black-market value since Syrians have priority in the asylum application process).

A German law that took effect in June 2016 requires that banks offer basic services to everyone, including refugees. But most banks have been slow to comply–in part because of conflicting government requirements for the level of identification to prevent money laundering. International banks also have to comply with international anti-money laundering laws that went into effect after the 9/11 attack or risk heavy fines, which means that they’re even more reluctant to give accounts to someone with questionable documentation.

Without a bank account, an asylum seeker can’t safeguard savings, and everyday transactions become more complicated. In Germany, a bank account is also required to sign a contract (like a lease) and necessary for most employers.

If someone can’t be paid by a typical employer, they’re more likely to work in the informal economy, in jobs that may pay less or be unsafe. “If you don’t actually have an account to be paid wages, it keeps people working in the black [market] economy,” says Radha Rajkotia, senior director for economic recovery and development at the International Rescue Committee, a global humanitarian organization. “That’s a major constraint.”

The app can also double as an alternative to a credit score by providing proof of a user’s trustworthiness. Over time, the startup plans to also work with credit or microfinance institutions who can offer other services, using Taqanu’s ability to identify customers as a screening tool.

There may be some challenges in marketing the service to refugees and asylum seekers, even if they are eager for bank accounts. “They may prefer having a good old-fashioned paper document, whether that’s a passport or an ID card, over something that leaves a digital trail, because they don’t necessarily want their movements and transactions to be recorded,” says Rajkotia. “Particularly if they have been moving across borders, or if they intend to.”

The service may have to specifically market its ability to keep that data secure, she says. “Addressing it very head-on would be very valuable to refugees and to users of the service,” she says. “I think that reassurance may be challenging to provide if you are working with these kinds of financial and regulatory environments.”

Advisors from larger companies, such as Microsoft and Deloitte, are helping the startup navigate as it tries to bring its service to market (it’s also a finalist in this year’s Global Social Venture Competition). Deloitte’s team is providing pro-bono legal counsel. The startup is contributing to Microsoft’s larger open source decentralized identity initiative, and an expert from Microsoft has personally advised the company.

Buchner has advised the startup on helping potential partners understand that the project has wider commercial potential, not only humanitarian benefits. The approach is flexible enough “to enable greater financial inclusion across a wide demographic range,” he says. The biggest challenge the company faces is regulation.

“I’d say their number one challenge is governments and bureaucratic agencies being slow to adapt their models and regulations to enable new types of innovation that may not fit within the confines of rules that create a slew of unintended consequences,” he says. “These bodies have a duty to be proactive in understanding changes in technology to ensure organizations like Taqanu are freed up to pursue new ideas that could better the lives of people in need.”

Regulatory approval is a massive challenge to overcome, and though the company is in discussions with regulators, it’s unclear how long the process may take. “I am afraid the idea is good, but it’s all in the implementation and they don’t seem to have gotten very far,” says Kim Wilson, a lecturer in international business and human security at Tufts University who is currently studying refugee issues in Greece. “[Solving regulatory problems] is, of course, the problem, and if that were solved there would be a rush of fintech.”

In July, the company will present its concept central bankers and policymakers at a forum during G20 summit in Hamburg, a gathering of 20 major nations. “What regulators are really interested in is how a company can offer a product that they haven’t thought of because financial inclusion has been a huge problem globally,” says Némethi. “It’s interesting that they’ve always looked at the problem from a policy perspective and not a product perspective.”

The forum will also host a presentation from Banqu, a similar app. Banqu also uses blockchain technology to build digital identities for people without bank accounts. Both products could inspire governments to allow new services.

“Where there’s an interesting role for these kinds of new technologies to play I think is just in terms of showing how things could be done differently,” says Rajkotia. “In Europe and also in the Middle East, I think there’s a real opportunity for technology to show the path forward in terms of how policymakers might think about ID systems and provide proof-of-concepts of how some of these things might work.”

Can Jeffrey Tambor persuade you once again that Chipotle’s food is made with integrity?

That’s the goal of a new national marketing campaign from the Mexican-inspired food chain, which has been working to repair its image following a series of damaging food-borne illness outbreaks in late 2015. It’s Chipotle’s biggest ad campaign yet. And depending on how you count, it’s also its third or fourth major brand rehabilitation experiment in the year and a half since its food-safety incidents first emerged. That speaks to the sizable challenges Chipotle is still facing as it seeks to recover its once-roaring restaurant sales—all while moving the conversation around its brand away from food safety.

The new web and TV spots, rolled out Monday, feature comedians Jillian Bell, John Mulaney, and Sam Richardson, who are shown in separate ads entering a house-size burrito where Tambor’s voice instructs them to “be real” because, well, “everything is real” inside a Chipotle burrito. The comedians proceed to make comical confessions, and the ads each end with a new Chipotle motto, “As Real As It Gets,” an apparent reference to the company’s recent strides in removing artificial flavors and preservatives from its ingredients.

The implication, of course, is not only that Chipotle’s ingredients are real, but that they are realer than what’s on the menus of its rivals. As Chipotle has struggled to fix its reputation, fast-casual chains such as Panera have gone after the company’s ingredient-conscious consumers, to the frustration of Chipotle CEO Steve Ells, who recently questioned whether Panera is living up to its promises of serving “clean” food. Chipotle is also facing more competition from longtime giants of the industry. McDonald’s, for example, has started marketing the use of fresh beef in some of its burgers. (When I mentioned this to Ells once, he dramatically rolled his eyes.)

The new commercial spots join a number of similarly themed campaigns Chipotle has launched since 2016, including a beautiful animated short film called A Love Story to highlight its core, anti-Big-Food values; an ad campaign about how it treats its ingredients like royalty; and even an online game called “Spot the Imposter,” which lets players hunt for “industrial additives” that are “masquerading as real ingredients.” (The company also spent tens of millions of dollars in promotional offers and discounts to spur foot traffic in its stores.)

Related link: Chipotle Eats Itself

If there’s one uniting through-line in these efforts, it’s that Chipotle wants to remind you why Chipotle’s food is fresh without reminding why you forgot it was in the first place. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk. Chipotle can’t make food safety the central point of its marketing, but it also knows that any initiative to tout its improvements or resell its brand will be viewed through the lens of its food-safety woes. “It’s a big marketing challenge,” Chipotle’s chief development officer, Mark Crumpacker, told me late last summer. “When you’re excited to go out to lunch, you’re not like, ‘Let’s go to the safest place!’”

Chipotle, instead, has initiated a significant number of changes to its food-safety program, but it has been more strategic about informing customers about them. “Our food safety is not something that I expect to drive lots of people into the restaurant, but I do think it might erase some people’s doubts and allow future marketing to be met with less objection,” Crumpacker said at the time.

Is Chipotle at the point yet where new efforts will be greeted with less cynicism? It’ll likely take another quarter before we’ll see if the campaign has an impact on sales. For now, Chipotle will have to depend on Jeffrey Tambor and company to convince shareholders that there’s always money in the burrito stand.

I am, admittedly, worth far less than $610 million. So far be it from me to critique the business acumen of Shawn Carter—the rapper and entrepreneur better known as Jay Z—who Forbes says is worth about that much. But something about his latest move doesn’t seem destined for success.

Over the weekend, most of Jay Z’s albums disappeared from Spotify and Apple Music, leaving his own Tidal streaming service as one of the few places where fans could stream his most popular releases, like Reasonable Doubt and The Blueprint. (For reasons that are unclear to me, most of Jay Z’s catalog returned to Apple Music earlier today, but it’s still missing from Spotify.) It’s obvious what Jay is probably going for here: By pulling his music from the biggest subscription music streaming service on the internet, Spotify, he hopes to give fans one more reason to choose his struggling service, Tidal. But will it work?

The move comes at a moment of mixed fortunes for Tidal. The music service recently struck a deal with Sprint that boosted its value to $600 million and promised Tidal a wider audience through an as-yet-undefined music offering for Sprint mobile phone subscribers. It was a fortuitously timed partnership for Tidal, which has struggled to rise up beyond its self-reported 3 million subscribers, while Spotify breaks 50 million and Apple is catching up alarmingly fast. Earlier this year, a Norwegian newspaper accused Tidal of inflating its subscriber numbers, which may have been as low as 850,000 at the time of the 3 million subscriber claim.

So, shoring up exclusive access to music by superstar artists like Jay Z should help reverse the trend, right? Not if you’ve been paying attention. In fact, hardly anyone knows this reality more intimately than Tidal. The service, co-owned by Jay Z and 15 other high-profile artists, has made music exclusivity a central part of its strategy.  The company’s name is practically synonymous with exclusive album releases from big name artists like Kanye West, Rihanna, and Beyonce. While last year’s string of Tidal exclusives helped inject the company’s name into the cultural dialogue (complete with an SNL skit about the service), it did little to eat away at Spotify and Apple’s dominance. Indeed, the limited streaming availability of Kayne West’s Life of Pablo seemed to drive many people back into the arms of illegal downloading  even as it inspired others to go sign up for Tidal.

After half a year of high-profile exclusives, the recording industry seemed to change its tune about going along with the strategy last August after Frank Ocean snuck around his record contract with Universal’s Def Jam by fulfilling it with the short visual album Endless right before independently dropping another album, Blond, on Apple Music. This contractual sleight of hand—combined with the limited global reach of individual streaming platforms—reportedly helped push the already exclusive-weary Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge toward his new policy: No more streaming exclusives with Universal artists. UMG’s move seems to mirror an industry sentiment, since there have been so few of these types of exclusives since last summer.

New releases are a bit different from back catalogs. New albums can lead to a huge spike in listening by eager fans, while back catalogs help maintain a more consistent, day-to-day flow of streaming activity (and often, millions in revenue for well-known artists). Back catalogs are also, in theory, a selling point for music services. If you’re a huge Garth Brooks fan who owns an Amazon Echo, you’re likely to be drawn toward Amazon Music Unlimited with its exclusive access to Brooks’s catalog and cheaper monthly price for Echo owners. But by and large, this type of one-off catalog exclusivity doesn’t appear to do much to move the needle on subscriber numbers. Again, just ask Tidal. Until recently, Tidal offered exclusive streaming access to Prince’s entire catalog, but there’s no evidence yet that this move translated into millions and millions more Tidal subscribers, despite the shocking and unexpected death of the pop legend last year (death pretty much always results in a huge spike in sales, and more recently streams, for famous musicians). While Tidal certainly saw a jump in app downloads last April when Prince died and Beyonce’s Lemonade was released, the company hasn’t yet come out boasting much in the way of exciting subscriber growth in the last year.

So, despite new releases from megastars like Kanye and back catalog exclusives from legendary acts like Prince and Neil Young, Tidal still hasn’t managed to come anywhere close to the subscribers of even the second-place streamer Apple Music (which notably launched in 2015, three months after Tidal). So what makes Jay Z think his albums will make a difference, especially this late in the game?

It’s conceivable, though a bit far-fetched, to envision a Tidal-led coup against Spotify, in which some of Jay Z’s artist co-owners like Beyonce or Kanye West agree to start pulling their albums from other streaming services. With enough notable gaps in music libraries between services, this could become a more meaningful competitive difference between services. But between the contractual limitations artists have with their labels–not all musicians have as much control over their work, or where it is or isn’t available, as Jay Z does–and the fact that Tidal’s audience is so small, this scenario seems unlikely. More than anything, it would be ill-advised.

It’s one thing for a popular artist to to “window”–industry jargon for delaying or restricting–their releases from streaming platforms (as Adele did) or hold out on streaming altogether (as The Beatles did until late 2015). It’s quite another for artists to yank their catalogs from streaming services after they’ve already been available (hello, Tay Tay). As streaming grows, this type of maneuver naturally becomes more hostile to music fans.

Take Jay Z. As of right now, the rapper boasts 13 million monthly listeners on Spotify. That’s 13 million people who listen to Jay Z’s music regularly on Spotify (as opposed to more casual, occasional listeners) who suddenly have gaps in their music collections and grayed-out track titles on their playlists. For those listeners, this is an annoyance. Sure, some diehard Jay Z fans who were already considering a Tidal subscription might sign up for it, but it’s hard to envision many people doing that. Instead, some will supplement their Spotify listening with other artists in the service’s vast, seemingly unlimited sea of music. Others may get their Jay Z fix on YouTube. Some may pirate their favorite albums. But it’s safe to assume that a great many of them will never pay for two music services at once, since the content offering and features of most of these services are primarily the same.

This is exactly why new album exclusives are so problematic and unpopular: They may have a theoretical benefit for one streaming platform in its war against its rivals, but the strategy essentially uses music fans as pawns in that battle and gives them new, unnecessary hoops to jump through. In essence, it’s a bunch of very rich people duking it out for dominance and screwing up your party playlists in the process.

Jay Z’s disappearing act comes just days after Spotify announced a new deal with UMG that will allow the label to hold new releases back from Spotify’s free tier temporarily. It’s a compromise in which Spotify reverses its long-held protection of the free, ad-supported tier in order to placate the music industry, which has long been frustrated by the lower revenue generated by free streaming–the ad-supported tier earns more money for the labels. Giving artists and labels the option to “window” new albums (and who knows, perhaps back catalogs in future deals with the labels as well) from the free tier is a reasonable compromise that lets labels earn more from new releases and lessens the need for more listener-hostile exclusives and other industry turf war tactics. At least, let’s hope that’s the case.

Last fall, the sneakerhead community went wild for a pair of sleek $1,095 Desert Storm-inspired high tops. Within days, they were sold out in stores and started showing up on eBay for almost double their retail price. The shoes’ creator, Jerry Lorenzo, had made dozens of trips to Italy, where they were produced, to work on every aspect of the design, from the rubber soles to the quality of the leather, to the customizable straps and zips.

The success of the sneaker was just the latest accomplishment in Lorenzo’s relatively young career in fashion. Five years ago, the L.A. native was working in the sports industry when he decided he wanted to design clothing. In 2013, he launched Fear of God, a high-end masculine streetwear clothing line that he funded himself. The collection established his esthetic of simple pieces that have been elevated, like track jackets and pants that are lined in silk and finished with titanium zips; extra-long cotton t-shirts that drape just so; and ripped jeans made of Japanese denim with ankle zippers.

Fear of God quickly caught the attention of Kanye West, Rihanna, Kendall Jenner, and Travis Scott. And then, Lorenzo got another major boost when Justin Bieber tapped him to design the merchandise for his 2016 Purpose tour. The goods sold out almost immediately at pop-up shops around the country.

Despite his star-studded customer base, Lorenzo has a vexed relationship with celebrity culture and fame, including his own. He doesn’t want notoriety to distract him from his mission, which is to create thoughtfully designed clothing—and share his faith with the world.

A devout Christian who grew up in a religious home, Lorenzo did not pick the name “Fear of God” to be ironic. It’s plucked directly from the Bible and came to him as he was doing his daily prayer. He wants to use the brand as a platform to share his message of faith and positivity, but knows that fame can be a distraction that could cloud his vision. “I don’t want anybody to put a label on me so that they can now have the expectation of what they want from me,” Lorenzo says. “I never want my position to get bigger than my mission.”

On a recent morning, Lorenzo called me on his way to work to talk about fashion and faith.

Fast Company: You’re very open about your Christian faith. What does it mean for you to run an overtly Christian brand?

Jerry Lorenzo: I started the brand because I felt there was a void in the market. Personally, I felt that there were a lot of things missing in my closet that I wanted at the time. The thought crossed my mind to make something and put it out. But I didn’t have a foundation or a story to tell it on.

I felt as if the last thing the world needed was another cool clothing line. I wanted people to hear what I had to share spiritually. The world needed some positivity. But I grew up in a Christian home, and anytime you would think of a Christian clothing line, you automatically felt like it would be super corny. I never thought I would fuse these two things together.

But the idea for my brand came one day when I was reading a devotion that talked about clouds and darkness around the Kingdom of God. It talked about the layers to Him. For the first time in my mind, God was really cool. He was a dark image in my mind, but not in a demonic way—just dark in terms of the layers and depth to him. The kind of figure that is beyond our understanding. When you’re at peace with God, there’s a fear of God that’s a reverence. But on the flip side, when you don’t know God, there’s a literal fear. So I wanted my brand’s name to play on these two different meanings.

JL: I’m 1,000% okay with consumers just being into the design. I’m just as [resolute] in my spirituality as I am about whatever piece I’m creating that I feel is missing from your closet. That conviction can live on its own.

But from where I sit, I feel that providing solutions to your wardrobe is not enough. If you’re happy with that, then I’m cool, but if you’re looking for something more, than this brand is about something more too, if you want to go there.

FC: Speaking of the clothes, what drives your design?

JL: It started with pieces that I wish I had. Simple stuff: a basic t-shirt made of a drapey fabric but still felt masculine, referencing a basketball jersey. Or a short sleeve hoodie that had raw sleeves and zippers. Pieces that would feel so much better than what I had.

With sneakers, it’s the exact same formula. I used a Desert Storm military hiking boot as the inspiration for a shoe in my third collection. I thought if I could just change the toe on the shoe and make it feel more like a basketball shoe, it would be something I would wear.

Some guys, when they start buying luxury fashion, they start to dress less and less like themselves. I’m trying to say that you don’t have to squeeze into a Hedi Slimane silhouette if that’s not really who you are. You can get luxury and still be yourself and be comfortable in an oversized hoodie and ripped-up jeans. I’m trying to keep that same dude.

That’s why we’re doing a collaboration with [sports hat company] New Era. There’s nothing more masculine than a baseball cap. It’s not very high fashion, but we’re going to make it so.

FC: You didn’t train as a designer. So how did you break into the industry?

JL: I live in L.A., and we’ve got a thriving garment district downtown. A lot of my friends at the time owned streetwear brands like Crooks and Castles, Diamond Supply Co, and The Hundreds. They were providing propositions for what they felt was missing in the market. I thought if they figured it out somehow, I could just go downtown and figure it out. It never seemed like an impossible task. I just figured out how to make a pattern of a short sleeve hoodie with zippers on the side. I figured out how to buy fabric and materials, zippers.

When it came to shoes, I hit up my buddy Jon Buscemi [a luxury sneaker designer]. I asked him, “Do you have time to help me work on a shoe, you know, outside of running this million-dollar company you own?” He said, “I don’t have time, but friend to friend, here’s the developer you need to talk to who would help you see it through.” It was the assist of a lifetime. I met with a developer in Italy, took a sketch I wanted to make. A year and a half later, we had a shoe on the market.

I was very much self-taught. But I was just so driven. I lost a lot of money, but I always thought that what I was making was way more valuable than what I was losing at the time.

FC: You funded the first collection with your savings and use earnings from each line to fund the next. Why have you chosen not to take outside investment? 

JL: I don’t have any investors or partners to answer to. There are no goals to meet. Everything is based entirely on our convictions. But that means every collection is a risk. Every dollar that we make goes back into the business. And if we missed the target, we’ve leveraged our whole company. Every collection could be the end of our brand if it’s not successful.

It may freak me out. But believing in myself is all I really have. So I’m just constantly fueling myself and bettering the product by hiring a better production manager and using better fabrics. And I’m always trying to understand why it is that I like the things that I do. Why do I look so much to [sneaker designer] Rick Owens? Oh, it’s because it reminds me of [basketball player] Allen Iverson. As I understand deeper where my references come from, I have the reassurance that there’s a foundation behind my design. It’s not just based on trend, but on life experiences.

FC: Last October, you went to Skid Row in downtown L.A. and gave some of your top-selling shoes to the homeless. What motivated that?

JL: That just happened in the moment. We had between 75 to 100 pairs of these sneakers from a collaboration with Vans that were supposed to be given to celebrities and influencers. I was getting hit up by more people than I had shoes. I didn’t really know where to make the cutoff. Everyone that was so thirsty for the shoe were people that didn’t need them. At the same time, the shoes were selling for $100, but getting resold online for between $500-$700. I felt like the value or the purpose of the shoes was lost.

I thought, “Man, if I’m in a position to give, how dare I give it to someone that doesn’t need it?” I work in downtown L.A. and we pass these homeless people, sleeping in tents and sleeping bags, as we come into work every day. We were in a position to give and were ignoring these people that are around us. I just told my staff, we’re going to pack up all these shoes and clothing and give it to people who need it.

I felt as if it was necessary to record that and share that [on social media]. If you’re someone who takes that as self-promoting, then that’s okay. I thought that more people would be encouraged to go do something good. I know my mission.

FC: How do you feel about becoming a kind of celebrity yourself?

JL: The minute that I begin to celebrate in this position—or put value on the influence that we have—is the moment I lose sight of the bigger mission. I’m human, so negative comments hurt. I’m competitive and I’m trying to do the best that I can to have good sell-throughs at Barney’s. But I never want it to be more important than the mission.

If one buzzword has dominated management speak lately, it’s employee engagement. Satisfaction isn’t enough. We want people to bring their full attention, energy, and effort to work. We know that engaged employees perform better—and that their business units are more productive, more profitable, and less accident-prone.

Engagement is important to us, and we’ve used our data to understand what drives it at Facebook. Over the past few years, we’ve generated hundreds of questions and given them out in pulse surveys across the company. Time and time again, the ones we thought would climb to the top didn’t. The number one factor wasn’t having a best friend at work, being treated with respect, or having a caring manager. It wasn’t autonomy or work-life balance. Although many of these factors mattered, they didn’t matter most.

The single most important driver of engagement at Facebook is pride in the company. When people feel proud to work here they are more satisfied, more committed, more successful, and more likely to recommend us as a great place to work.

Pride plays a big role in our lives. Students take pride when they ace a test or graduate from school. Sports fans take pride when their teams win—soccer and basketball fans show testosterone spikes after a victory, and college students are more likely to wear school shirts after a football victory. Parents take pride when their kids make the honor roll or win the spelling bee…sometimes too much pride.

But when it comes to employee engagement, we’ve overlooked the importance of pride. When we talk about engaged employees, we usually focus on how people feel about their relationships and their work. Gallup famously found that people were more engaged when they had strong relationships—especially a best friend at work—and evidence suggests that people are more engaged when they’re working on tasks they enjoy. Although these factors matter in our data, we were surprised to learn that pride has an even stronger impact. People have a relationship with their company too, and that relationship plays a major role in engagement.

This isn’t just true at Facebook. Management researchers find that when people take pride in their companies, they internalize organizational goals as their own. Instead of focusing on their individual goals, they direct their energy toward doing what’s best for the organization. We’ve seen this come to life throughout our buildings. People view recruiting as everyone’s responsibility at Facebook—not just the role of the recruiting team—and they regularly scour their networks for candidates they believe can make Facebook better. Diversity has been similarly democratized. Recently an administrative assistant in our Seattle office organized a fireside chat with our CTO on the topic of diversity, stepping far outside her day job to do her part to build a company that truly represents the world we’re working to serve.

Having seen how important pride in the company is, we sat down to figure out where it comes from. When we analyzed our survey questions, three main factors predicted pride:

1. Optimism: How much do people believe in the company’s future?
2. Mission: How much do people care about the company’s vision and goals?
3. Social good: How confident are people that the company is making the world a better place?

These three factors drove pride across every function in the company—they mattered for people in technology, marketing and sales, and business roles. More than half of people’s feelings of pride in the company can be traced back to their feelings six months earlier about optimism, mission, and social good.

Optimism

Around the world, people take pride in companies that have strong identities. This means standing for something that’s distinctive and enduring. People judge their companies not just on their pasts but on their futures too. Even if you loved dinosaurs growing up you don’t want to work for one. In every part of Facebook, pride depends the most on optimism.

Optimism comes from being able to touch and taste an exciting future for the company. This is hard—leaders tend to think and talk in the abstract. When they paint a picture in words, it becomes easier to grasp. People feel optimistic about products that help to shape the future, not just inhabit it. At Facebook we’ve made big bets on virtual reality. Many of us outside technology were not clear about why this was important. That changed in April 2016, when our CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, gave a speech that brought the future to life. “When I was a baby and I took my first steps, my parents wrote down the date in a baby book,” Mark said. “When my nephews took their first steps, my sister took photos and videos on her phone so she could send them to us.” He announced that when his daughter Max took her first steps, he wanted to capture the entire scene with 360 video so they could “feel like they’re actually right there in the living room with us.” Now we could see how virtual reality would help people connect with meaningful moments on our platform, and we walked away more jazzed about it.

Mission

At Facebook our mission is to make the world more open and connected. We’ve had heated debates about whether everyone needs to be passionate about it. If we have an engineer who’s excited to make Oculus feel less virtual and more like reality, a tie to the mission seems like an afterthought. The same question applies to many of our business functions—if our lawyers and accountants enjoy their jobs and their colleagues, what’s the point of making a big deal about the mission?

It’s a big deal. Of all the pride that people feel in Facebook, 16% boils down to how much they identify with the mission. When people are committed to the mission their relationship with the company changes. Work is more than a job or a career—it becomes a calling. Instead of just doing their jobs well and helping their colleagues, they start to focus on how they can serve the company’s interests. One of our software engineers, Shaomei Wu, was in a training bootcamp when she was asked to fix a few bugs related to helping visually impaired people “read” text. Soon she was fixing more of them in her spare time and conducting research on how to make Facebook more accessible to people with visual impairments—which was increasingly important as the volume of photos and photos grew. “It was the first time I saw a blind person using technology to interact with the world as we do,” she said. “I decided we should do something to help.” Although it wasn’t part of her role, she started building a prototype for automatic text that describes a photo: “image may contain a cat smiling, outdoors, typing on a laptop.” She grew the effort into a 10-person team, transforming the experience that visually impaired people have on our platform.

These kinds of contributions are key—commitment to the mission isn’t just about leaders’ actions. New evidence shows that when newcomers first join an organization, they’re more influenced by low-level employees than high-level leaders going above and beyond to advance the mission. One evening not long ago an IT director named Steven Ruggiero posted a request to an internal Facebook group for help preparing old laptops for delivery to organizations in need. Within an hour and a half he had 45 strangers “volunteer personal time for mind numbing work they have no personal stake in. No questions and no benefit to themselves,” he shared. “I continue to be awed by our ability to fix what isn’t working.” Seeing peers living up to the mission can strengthen pride in the company.

Social Good

Social good is about showing people that the company’s work improves people’s lives. Small connections to end users can have a big impact. Adam conducted a series of experiments showing that when university fundraising callers met a single scholarship student who benefited from their work, they spiked 142% in weekly phone minutes and 171% in weekly revenue. This happens often with our global marketing and sales teams, who have regular exposure to their impact on users. The small business team shares stories of people who are affected by our work—like Holzconnection, a family business in Germany that sold loft beds, but was in danger of going out of business due to competition until his son who has “two left hands” convinced him to try digital marketing on our platform. And every Friday, a Facebook company-wide Q&A concludes with a story about someone whose life was positively affected by Facebook. Recently a Syrian refugee family living in Oakland talked by video about the value of Facebook and WhatsApp in helping them keep in touch with their family back at their old home.

In a recent survey across 18 tech companies, the five where the most employees found work meaningful were SpaceX, Tesla, Facebook, Apple, and Google. We think it’s not a coincidence that social good is a fundamental part of these companies’ missions. It’s not about corporate social responsibility—a side project that’s separate from core products and services. It is the products and services. Transforming space technology, conserving energy, connecting the world, leading a digital revolution, and making information universally accessible and useful.

Pride in the company is an engine of engagement. As Voltaire put it, “We are rarely proud when we are alone.” When we feel connected to something bigger than ourselves, we bring more of ourselves to work. We feel a sense of ownership at the office. It’s not just the place we work—it’s a part of who we are.

Lori Goler is the head of people at Facebook, Janelle Gale is the head of HR business partners at Facebook, Brynn Harrington is the head of people growth programs at Facebook, and Adam Grant is a Wharton professor and the author of OriginalsandGive and Take. 

“When people are engaged, they bring their full attention, energy, and effort to their jobs,” the Facebook team found in its research. “They perform better, and so do their companies. We analyzed surveys from our people to figure out what drives engagement at Facebook. We found that what matters most isn’t having a best friend at work, autonomy, or work-life balance. It is having a sense of pride in the company—and there are three factors that shape those feelings.” To read the full report, click here.

1. Believing In The Company’s Future

“Pride is fueled by optimism—being able to touch and taste an exciting future for the organization. People are proud to work at Facebook when they expect that the products they build will shape the world, not just inhabit it.”

2. Believing In The Company’s Vision

“Our data show that when people are passionate about Facebook’s essential mission—making the world more open and connected—their relationship with the company changes. Work is more than a job or a career: It becomes a calling.”

3. Believing That The Company Is A Force For Social Good

“When people can actually see how Facebook makes a difference, they find their work more meaningful. It makes them feel connected to something bigger than themselves, and they bring more of themselves to work.”

When Fast Company first wrote about Mark Zuckerberg, in the spring of 2007, he was just 22 years old and his young company, Facebook, had just 19 million users. Our magazine cover line, “The Kid Who Turned Down $1 Billion,” seems almost quaint in hindsight, given Facebook’s $400 billion market cap today and its 2 billion global users. But it was Zuckerberg’s first cover, and a lot has transpired since then.

I recently sat down with Zuckerberg at Facebook HQ—a sprawling campus that’s only a few miles from the company’s original Palo Alto offices but a world apart in scale and sophistication. Our meeting was not a nostalgic revisiting of the past, but part of an examination into what continues to drive Facebook in the present and what role it wants to play in the future.

Fast Company’s newest cover story highlights Zuckerberg again, a decade later, under the headline “Put Your Values To Work.” In recent months, many companies and company leaders have struggled to align their social, political, and business priorities. Zuckerberg himself has been forced to grapple with controversies around “fake news” and “filter bubbles”—one of many topics we touched on.

What follows is an edited transcript of our dialogue. While our cover story presents several different models for aligning a company’s values with its business, Zuckerberg explains here how and why Facebook’s core operations are mission-driven, what critics misunderstand about the company’s motivations, and why being a work-in-progress is part of the plan.

Fast Company: In mid-February you posted a long letter on your Facebook timeline entitled “Building Global Community.” What prompted you to address this topic?

Mark Zuckerberg: When we were getting started with Facebook in 2004, the idea of connecting the world was not really controversial. The default was that this was happening, and people were generally positive about it. But in the last few years, that has shifted, right? And it’s not just the U.S. It’s also across Europe and across Asia, a lot of places where folks who have been left behind by globalization are making their voices louder. That goes to the heart of what we at Facebook stand for as an organization, where our mission is to make the world more open and connected. I feel like someone needs to be making the case for why connecting people is good, and we are one of the organizations that I think should be doing that. You know, we talk about connecting everyone in the world and that is far from complete. We are almost at two billion people [at Facebook], out of more than seven billion in the world, so from our perspective we are earlier on in this than later. If you look at the arc of human history, hundreds of thousands of years, it is a story of how people have learned to come together in bigger numbers to do things that we couldn’t do separately. Whether that’s coming together from tribes to building villages, or building cities into nations, it has required social infrastructure and moral infrastructure, things like governments or media or religion, to enable people to work together. I think today we need more global infrastructure in order to unlock a lot of the biggest opportunities and solve some of the biggest challenges. So when you’re talking about spreading freedom or trade, or you’re talking about fighting terrorism, where a civil war in one country leads to refugee crises across multiple continents, these are not typically problems any one country has the tools by itself to go solve. I think we have a responsibility as a technology company at a pretty big scale to see what we can do to push on that.

FC: One view of business, epitomized by Wall Street, says that the purpose of a company is to maximize shareholder value and generate as much profitability as possible. Another view says that businesses and business leaders have a responsibility to take care of their communities. How do you think about that spectrum?

MZ: I think Facebook has always been a mission-driven company. I didn’t start Facebook as a business. I wanted this thing to exist in my community, and over some number of years I came to the realization that the only way to build it out was if it had a good economic engine behind it. I think that increasingly, especially with folks who are millennials, that [view] is going to be the default. You know, when I started Facebook, there were a lot of questions around is this a reasonable way to build a company. And then when more millennials started graduating from college and we went to recruit them it became very clear that they wanted to work somewhere that wasn’t just about building a business but that was about doing something bigger in the world.

FC: Just before Facebook went public, you posted another long letter, titled Founder’s Letter. You wrote there that ‘we don’t wake up in the morning with the goal of making more money,’ right?

MZ: Yes.

FC: You didn’t repeat that sentiment in the new letter. Why not?

MZ: Well, this wasn’t exactly a follow up to the founder’s letter. The founder’s letter was written for shareholders who are buying into the IPO to understand how the company operated. So it was much heavier on values and internal operation and principles of how we work, whereas [the new letter] was much more focused on mission. Less about how we work and more about what we’re going to do. I don’t think how we work has fundamentally changed very much.

FC: You didn’t feel like that needed to be repeated, because it hadn’t changed?

MZ: Yes. But you know, when you ask it like that, I do think these things always need to be repeated.

FC: Companies demonstrate their values in different ways. Howard Schultz at Starbucks might use his platform to pursue social agenda issues. You haven’t chosen to do that. At Salesforce, 80% of the employees volunteer time at nonprofits. You haven’t pushed to do that. Is there a Zuckerberg philosophy about how the business expresses its values?

MZ: I think the core operation of what you do should be aimed at making the change that you want. A lot of companies do nice things with small parts of their resources. I would hope that our core mission is the main thing we want to accomplish, in that almost all of our resources go toward that. When I want to do stuff like invest in education and science and immigration reform and criminal-justice reform, I do that through the Chan-Zuckerberg initiative [a nonprofit foundation that he started with his wife, Priscilla Chan]. It’s not that people [at Facebook] don’t believe in that, I just think what we are doing in making the world more open and connected, and now hopefully building some of the social infrastructure for a global community—I view that as the mission of Facebook.

FC: Are there areas where Facebook sacrificed or risked dollars in order to stay true to that mission?

MZ: My experience is that people often shy away from hard decisions for longer than they should because they are worried about some bad effect. People talk about, oh this is going to hurt in the short term but help in the long run, right? And my experience is that the long run always happens sooner than you think. For example, when we didn’t sell the company early on, we had the opportunity to make a lot of money. All these people inside the company were trying to make this case, you don’t know that [Facebook] is going to be as big as you hope. But the reality was after we turned down those offers, it wasn’t some 10-year slog. Within a year it was obvious that that was the right decision. There were a lot of cases in our history where we’ve made hard decisions, and it has ended up maybe hurting us a little in the very near term but generally ends up being pretty positive over time. I think even when you take stances on social issues, it might frustrate people who don’t agree with you, but in general people appreciate that you believe in something. People want business leaders to be authentic and stand for things. One of the most frustrating things I read is when people assume that we don’t do something because it will cost us money. If you take, for example, some of the debates that are going on now around the news industry and misinformation. There’s definitely a strain of criticism that Facebook [allows] misinformation because it will make them more money. And that really is just not true at all. I mean, we know that people in the community want real information. Whenever we give them tools to get access to higher quality content, they’ll always go for that. But at the same time, we also believe in freedom of speech. People should have the ability to say what they think, even if someone else disagrees with that. And freedom of speech is a funny thing because people always want freedom of speech unless people disagree with them. So I don’t know, I think often when you make decisions that aren’t exactly what people want they think you’re doing it for some underhanded business reason, but actually a lot of these things are more values backed.

FC: When you saw the spread of information or news that wasn’t true, was that a surprise? Or did you think that it might happen, but the positive benefit of being more open outweighed any negatives?

MZ: I still believe more strongly than ever that giving the most voice to the most people will be this positive force in society. But the thing is, it’s a work in progress. We talk about wanting to give everyone a voice, but then most people in the world don’t have access to the internet. So if you don’t have the tools to actually share your ideas with everyone, that’s not going to get you very far. We talk about giving people free speech but if they don’t actually, even in a country like the U.S., have the tools to be able to capture a video and share that easily, then there are limits in practice to what you can do. I just view this as a continual thing that every day we can come in and push the line further back on how many people have a voice and how much voice each person has, and we’re going to keep pushing on all of that. It just is this constant work. And at each point, you uncover new issues that you need to solve to get to the next level. Some people will say, oh you tolerate those issues. But the simpler explanation is that the community is evolving. We build new things, that surfaces new issues, we then go deal with those issues, and we keep going. Go back a few years, for example, and we were getting a lot of complaints about click bait. No one wants click bait. But our algorithms at that time were not specifically trained to be able to detect what click bait was. The key was to make tools so the community could tell us what was click bait, and we could factor that into the product. Now it’s not gone a hundred percent but it’s a much smaller problem than it used to be. Today, whether it’s information diversity or misinformation or building common ground, these are the next things that need to get worked on. It’s not like they are problems that exist because there’s some kind of underlying, nefarious motivation. I mean, certainly giving people a voice leads to more diversity of opinions, which if you don’t manage that can lead to more fragmentation, but I think this is kind of the right order of operations. You know, you give people a voice and then you figure out what the implications of that are, and then you work on those things. It’s just this constant work in progress. Giving the most voice to the most people can lead you to controversial things as well. There are laws in some countries that you’re not allowed to say certain things, and as a general principle we try to follow local laws. Do we agree with all of those? Not necessarily. There was a case in Pakistan a handful of years ago where someone tried to get me sentenced to death because someone created a [Facebook] group about encouraging people to depict the Prophet Muhammad. That was illegal in Pakistan but not around the rest of the world. We didn’t show it in Pakistan, but we didn’t take it down everywhere. Some people thought, hey that’s bad that you’re not taking it down. Some people thought, hey why are you taking it down in Pakistan? Our view is, we’re trying to give people as much of a voice as we can around the world, realizing that it’s not perfect at any given point in time but if we do our jobs then day after day we will be increasing the breadth of what people can do and fast forward 20 or 30 years and the world will be in a much better place.

FC: So flaws are always going to exist because there’s no perfection?

MZ: Yeah. And I think it’s fair to call them flaws because every system is imperfect. But I also think having this framework—that it is a work in progress—is probably a more realistic framing than, oh what you’re doing has all these flaws. I mean, it’s not wrong to say that it has flaws but I just wonder if that’s an overly negative framing, not just of Facebook but of any business or any system. You got here by doing certain things, and the world is a changing around you, and you need to adapt.

FC: The advent of technology through global culture has been terrific for folks in communities like yours and mine. But there are other communities that look at these changes—the rise of tech and AI and robotics and so on—and feel left out of it, scared by it. For those who are disproportionate beneficiaries of this technological ascent, do they have a disproportionate responsibility to take care of those who are being left behind?

MZ: I think yes but there’s a lot in what you just said. A lot of the current discussion and anti-globalization movement is because for many years and decades, people only talked about the good of connecting the world and didn’t acknowledge that some people would get left behind. I think it is this massively positive thing over all, but it may have been oversold. Which doesn’t mean it’s bad—it can still be massively positive—but I think that you need to acknowledge the issues and work through them so it works for everyone. Or else there is not going to be sustainable progress. I think in general in society the people who are the luckiest and most fortunate and have a position where they can help other people have a responsibility to do so. But even that aside, if you believe that this is a good direction, you have a responsibility to make sure it works for everyone because that’s the only way for it to actually work. Now there is a separate point in what you were saying around taking care of other people. I believe that a lot of the issues we’re currently seeing around the world are social questions of meaning and purpose and dignity and being a part of something bigger than yourself and are not only economic questions. Certainly the economic part is very big. But regardless of how well you’re doing economically, you’re going to have issues in your life, and you’re going to need a social support structure and community around you to keep you going. It may be that when things economically are going better some of those issues get papered over. It may be that when people are economically struggling they need a stronger social support structure. But it is always an important need, and I think we are overlooking the extent to which over the last 30 or 40 years some of the infrastructure for that social community has declined.

FC: And you don’t necessarily see technology as being an instigator of that decline?

MZ: Well, it predates the internet. It may be because of industrialization or things like that. But it’s hard to draw a line with the internet. When you ask the question of, do you have a responsibility to take care of other people, I think on the one hand, if you’re fortunate, yes, you absolutely have the responsibility. And if you believe that this is the direction that things should go in, you have a responsibility to make sure it works for everyone. But I actually think making it work for everyone means making it so that everyone has a sense of purpose and meaning and dignity, which you need to enable people to build for themselves. It’s not like someone can come in and provide that for someone else. You need to create the structures to enable that.

FC: At the very end of your letter you mention building a global voting system. You’re not talking about political voting. What is that about?

MZ: I was talking about collective decision making. One of the things that we have struggled with recently is how do we have a set of community standards that can apply across a community of almost two billion people. One example that has been quite controversial has been nudity. There are very different cultural norms ranging from country to country. In some places, the idea that showing a woman’s breasts would be controversial feels backwards. But there are other places where images that are at all sexually suggestive, even if they don’t show nudity, just because of a pose, that’s over the line. The question is, in a larger community, how do you build mechanisms so that the community can decide for itself and individuals can decide for themselves where they want the lines to be? This is a tricky part of running this company. In setting the nudity policy, for example, we are not trying to impose our values on folks, we’re trying to reflect what the community thinks. We have come to this realization that a bunch of people sitting in a room in California is not going to be the best way to reflect all the local values that people have around the world. So we need to evolve the systems for collective decision making. It’s an interesting problem. There are certainly going to be a lot more global infrastructure and global enterprises going forward, there just hasn’t been anything at this scale yet.

FC: And if a part of the global community says, for instance, Jews are not human and they should be put to death, it’s appropriate for that to be reflected on Facebook?

MZ: Oh, I think there are always going to be lines.

FC: How do you determine where those lines are? Those lines are being drawn by a bunch of people in California also, right?

MZ: This stuff is never perfect, but I think right now there is a lot of opportunity to improve a lot of people’s experience by creating more of a range. On nudity, for example, child pornography is never going to be allowed. It’s illegal, it’s wrong. So there is not going to be an option for that. But there are different ranges of what someone might think is reasonable to share, and might actually want as part of their experience, and we can open up a broader range of discourse. I don’t think having everyone conform to one line is necessarily ideal, but you are right that there are going to be other forces here.

FC: Is this job tougher than you thought it was going to be?

MZ: It is hard, and you never make everyone a hundred percent happy. But I think these are not zero-sum things. Often these decisions can get framed as you’re going to make one set of people happy and the other not, and I just think the most positive thing about technology is the ability to expand the pie, right? We might be able to have different policies for different places and even different individuals. There is no system around the world that can work like that today. And the thing that will enable that is technology. Depending on how controversial of a cycle we’re in, people might focus more on the positive or the negative, but in running a company like this you want to be a little more steady. You’re never going to get everything perfect, but every day you can come in and make progress and make people’s lives, on balance, better. And if you repeat that process for a very long period of time, the value compounds and you can make a very big impact.

Read More: Find Your Values

• Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, And The Struggle To Do The Right Thing
• Are You Proud Of Your Company?

What makes employees excited to come to work? At Facebook, the biggest factor isn’t a great manager or lots of perks or work-life balance. According to an internal study recently undertaken by the company’s HR department and Wharton professor Adam Grant, the key element of employee engagement turns out to be pride in the company. “When people feel proud to work here,” the authors write in the report, “they are more satisfied, more committed, more successful, and more likely to recommend [Facebook] as a great place to work.”

Below are a few things the team’s data revealed (you can read the full report right here):

• Pride is tied to three primary factors. The first is optimism—believing in the company’s future. The second is mission—caring about the company’s vision and goals. And finally there’s social consciousness—having confidence that company is improving the world.
• The team noted those three elements across the whole company, whether employees work in technology, marketing and sales, or other roles.
• Grant conducted experiments that showed the value of truly grasping how your work makes a difference. In his research, he found that when university fundraising callers met a scholarship student who benefited from their efforts, their weekly phone minutes went up 142% and their weekly revenue went up 171%.

Facebook encourages this sense of pride in various ways. For example, there’s a company-wide Q&A session every Friday, and it usually ends with a story about someone whose life was impacted by Facebook. A recent session ended with a video of a Syrian refugee family living in the U.S., who discussed how Facebook and WhatsApp help them communicate with family in Syria.

For much more on what the team discovered, check out the full Facebook study. 

In the days after Donald Trump was elected president, I found myself reaching out to chief executives of several key businesses that Fast Company has covered. The presidential campaign had convinced me that neither party’s candidate, and neither party, had a compelling vision for how our technology-driven culture could both energize our country and include all Americans. What I encouraged of these CEOs was to use their perches to fill that leadership vacuum.

There has long been debate in America about the role of the corporation. Is it a job- and wealth-producing marvel? Or is it a nefarious, rapacious beast? “Corporations aren’t to be trusted,” argues Ian Bremmer, president of global strategy firm Eurasia Group. “The presumption that America supports capitalism has never been true: The number of people who have capital and want to risk it is a tiny fraction. Most Americans just want to be treated fairly.”

What’s clear is that U.S. businesses and business leaders wield tremendous power. How they use that power will help define the future of our world. Some executives believe that the best way to exercise influence is to move into government from the private sector. Others see the spheres of influence within companies as their own points of leverage: The combined annual revenues of the 20 largest American businesses is more than $30 trillion, nearly double the gross domestic product of the United States. And these companies cross many borders. If you calibrate the number of lives that big U.S. companies touch directly—like Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion people in its user base—they have as much potential for impact as any national official.

So what might business leaders do with that influence? That question is at the heart of our cover story, which explores how executives like Mark Zuckerberg and companies from Airbnb to Uber are grappling with their roles. More and more companies are signing on to Pledge 1%, a commitment to dedicate 1% of their equity, their product, and their employees’ hours to nonprofits. CEOs like Marc Benioff, at fast-growing software provider Salesforce, are actively proselytizing that aligning a business with higher values, rather than solely pursuing maximum dollars, will actually boost financial performance in the long run. “You’ve seen the rise of more activist CEOs who stand for things,” Benioff says, “and represent their employees and their stakeholders in the same way a politician would represent the people who vote for them . . . What is your compound growth rate of good over the lifetime of your company?”

It’s possible that all of this is just a fad, and we’ll go back to a time when delivering profits and dollars to Wall Street is all that matters in the C-suite. But I hope not. Because some of the smartest people in the world run some of the most impressive, highest-impact businesses in the world. If they use those positions for something more than just making money, for making the human condition better across the globe, then anything is possible.

When startups and investors decide to work together, they enshrine the deal in something called a term sheet. It’s a nonbinding document that sets out equity shares and funding amounts, delineates control (like who sits on the board), and offers a template for actual legal agreements. Typically, they’re a dry recitation of particulars. But, according to James Joaquin, a serial-founder-turned-venture-capitalist, they could be something more exciting and expansive: a way to assert a company’s values before the struggles of the business make them harder to fulfill.

Joaquin, who cofounded impact investor Obvious Ventures, says term sheets are an opportunity to lay out how a startup intends to treat its employees, its position on the environment, its stance on diversity and inclusion, and how it plans to give money to charity when it becomes successful. And more companies should take that opportunity, he argues.

“Great founders have choices about who their investors will be. The term sheet is like a personality test or a dating service. If you can tease out cultural alignment early on, it pays huge dividends later,” he says. Though term sheets don’t offer legal certainty, they do send signals about a company’s reasons for being and the values it will uphold.

Joaquin started Obvious Ventures with Evan Williams, of Twitter, Blogger, and Medium fame, and Vishal Vasishth, a former executive with social business pioneer Patagonia. It subscribes to a philosophy of “world-positive investing,” which says companies needn’t concede profits to do good for the planet.

In drawing up world-positive term sheets, Joaquin recommends startups consider four main areas: core values; diversity, equity, and inclusion; sustainability; and philanthropy (he writes up an example here). Here’s a bit more detail on each of those:

Obvious’s impressive portfolio includes startups like Mosaic Solar, a crowdfunding platform for solar leasing, Diamond Foundry, which “cultures” synthetic diamonds (avoiding the conflict and environmental implications of natural diamonds), and Proterra, which makes electric buses. To Joaquin, they’re all examples of business that have a social purpose but also have potential to deliver decent returns (Proterra, which could get an IPO soon, was recently valued at more than $400 million).

“There is a large movement around how you measure impact as part of a justification of why you might have a lower return on [investment],” Joaquin says. “We think if you pick the right companies, all you have to measure is revenue and profits, because the revenue has some natural environmental and social impact.”

Some impact investors disagree with this have-it-all point of view. They say taking account of workers, customers, the environment, and communities often involves compromises. (It may also be easier to have to it all as a startup than as a public company.) But Joaquin’s world-positive term sheet offers another option for companies to enshrine their values from the outset, and set out how they expect investors to treat such issues. If you’re serious about doing good, it may make sense to do it from the beginning.

When Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg released a nearly 5,800-word open letter on February 16—the longest single post he had ever shared on his Facebook timeline—he introduced it with this simple phrase: “I know a lot of us are thinking about how we can make the most positive impact in the world right now.”

At that moment, many other businesses, from Google to Starbucks, were publicly fighting policies proposed by President Donald Trump, most notably in the area of immigration. But Zuckerberg didn’t mention the president or politics. Instead, he posed a broader question: “Are we building the world we all want?” Facebook, he argued, had a responsibility to help people.

It was a mission statement, shared just as discussion of business leadership’s relationship to government leadership was reaching a fever pitch. Facebook itself had been stung by critiques of its role in “fake news” and “filter bubbles.” Implicit in Zuckerberg’s letter was the idea that, despite Facebook’s vacuuming up of ever-larger piles of cash, its real purpose—its reason for existence—wasn’t to make money. It was to make the world a better place.

Such moralizing from a billionaire CEO can come across as disingenuous or naive. Zuckerberg devoted most of his letter to outlining how Facebook could be instrumental in “building a global community,” which of course isn’t too far from what the company’s business imperatives would dictate. Was it all just self-serving rationalization? Is Zuckerberg—and any business leader claiming that values matter more than dollars—simply a hypocrite? This is the tension underlying a rising movement across the business landscape. From automakers such as Ford and Audi to fashion houses like Gucci and Ralph Lauren, from health care firms to consumer-packaged-goods makers, companies are increasingly seeking to align their commercial activities with larger social and cultural values—not just because it makes them look good, but because employees and customers have started to insist on it. Some efforts are clearly reactions to the political environment and the divisiveness surrounding Trump; the impact of boycotts (witness #grabyourwallet) and buycotts can’t be ignored by CEOs or investors.

Yet whatever impetus the current political climate offers, the business community was moving in this direction well before a new president claimed the White House. An organization called the B Team, which includes the CEOs of major businesses such as Unilever and high-profile leaders like Richard Branson and Arianna Huffington, was launched several years ago “to catalyze a better way of doing business” (as its website puts it). Uber’s recent troubles are rooted in issues that long preceded its awkward dance with the Trump administration. Budweiser’s much-discussed Super Bowl TV ad about immigration had been planned for months; Audi’s Super Bowl spot highlighting the gender pay gap was almost two years in the making. Even Zuckerberg’s missive, it turns out, had been in the works for a year.

A practical question looms over this phenomenon: Does business have a higher responsibility to address social values, as Zuckerberg asserts about Facebook, or should the pursuit of profitability—maximizing shareholder value above all else—be the chief purpose of a company? Quickly chasing that question is another one, supported by many acolytes of this new movement: Is it possible that embracing values can actually help profits and share prices in the long run?

Related Video: Facebook, Uber, AirBnB: Are These Companies Givers or Takers?

These issues are roiling executive leadership at enterprises large and small, and in no place more prominently than in Silicon Valley. Which makes techland—and firms like Facebook and Uber—an ideal canvas on which to explore how values and value creation are being balanced and integrated in different ways right now. An experiment is under way in parts of corporate America to redefine the role of business in society. To get a sense of how this is playing out, and what it might portend for our future, we’ve looked at four leading tech companies with varied approaches, as well as a smaller business that’s feeling its way through the challenges. These case studies reveal just how much potential, and how much uncertainty, lies ahead.

The Zuckerberg Philosophy

Five years ago, before Facebook’s IPO, Mark Zuckerberg posted what he called a “founder’s letter” that spelled out the company’s philosophy for prospective investors. “We don’t wake up in the morning with the primary goal of making money,” Zuckerberg wrote. Instead, Facebook “was built to accomplish a social mission—to make the world more open and connected.” Among five specific values that the letter noted (including things like “Move Fast” and “Be Bold”) was this declaration: “We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world.”

I recently sat down with Zuckerberg to discuss this letter, and his latest one, in order to learn how his thinking might have changed over time. Facebook’s offices have grown to become a sprawling empire in Menlo Park, California, with bulldozers busily constructing new expansions. Building 20, where Zuckerberg works along with hundreds of the company’s 17,000-plus employees, features what may be the largest single-room office space in the world, a meandering wall-free topography stretching nearly a quarter mile that includes cafés, open-air meeting spaces, and an eclectic mix of colorful sculptures. Zuckerberg’s desk is in Area 3, near the midpoint of the building, one among many workstations. He greets me wearing his usual jeans and gray short-sleeve T-shirt, and we walk over to a glass-enclosed conference room just behind his desk. He may not have a traditional office, but this is where he holds product-review meetings and entertains visitors. We settle in on the couch and begin talking.

“I didn’t start Facebook as a business,” Zuckerberg says. “I built it because I wanted this thing to exist in my community. Over some number of years I came to the realization that the only way to build it out to what I wanted was if it had a good economic engine behind it.” In this way, he notes, “Facebook has always been a mission-driven company.”

The open letter Zuckerberg posted in February “wasn’t exactly a follow-up” to the founder’s letter, he says. “The founder’s letter was written for shareholders buying into the IPO to understand how the company operated.” The new letter “had a different goal, less about how we work and more about what we’re going to do.” What’s changed dramatically since 2012, according to Zuckerberg, is the rising skepticism about global connectivity. “When we were getting started in 2004, the idea of connecting the world was not really a controversial idea. . . . People thought that this was good,” he says. “But in the last few years, that has shifted, right? And it’s not just the U.S. It’s also across Europe and Asia. Folks who have been left behind by globalization are making their voices louder.” Zuckerberg explains, “I feel like someone needs to be making the case for why connecting people is good, and we are one of the organizations that I think should be doing that.”

As he talks about these things, Zuckerberg looks directly at me, rarely blinking. His focus is acute. I mention several of the ways that some corporations express their values—Starbucks committing to hiring refugees, for instance, or others that engage in charitable giving. But Zuckerberg isn’t steering Facebook toward external social action or philanthropy. “I think the core operation of what you do should be aimed at making the change that you want,” he replies. “A lot of companies do nice things with small parts of their resources. I would hope that our core mission is the main thing we want to accomplish: making the world more open and connected. Almost all of our resources go toward that.

“When I want to do stuff like invest in education and science and immigration reform and criminal justice reform,” he goes on, “I do that through a different organization, through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.” (He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, created CZI to make good on their pledge to give away 99% of their Facebook shares during their lifetime.) “It’s not that people [at Facebook] don’t believe in those kinds of things. I just think building social infrastructure for a global community [is Facebook’s] mission.” Within that mission, Facebook has created tools that enable charitable fundraising as well as societal support (like its Safety Check feature, which has helped people find each other during crises).

There is often skepticism when companies claim to be values- or mission-based, because near-term financial results seem to take precedence over other purported corporate values. When I ask Zuckerberg about this, he doesn’t acknowledge any disconnect between satisfying a higher mission and meeting financial goals. “People want business leaders—and all leaders—to be authentic and stand for things,” he says.

Then Zuckerberg brings up the fake-news controversy that hit Facebook in the past year—the contention that the company wasn’t vigilant in removing inaccurate, politically motivated posts by fictional news outlets because they generated ad revenue. His voice rises in intensity. “One of the most frustrating things is when people assume that we don’t do something because it will cost us money. Take, for example, some of the debates going on now around the news industry and misinformation. I mean, there’s definitely a strain of criticism [asserting] that Facebook [lets] people share misinformation because it will make [us] more money. And that really is just not true at all.”

The underlying value that drives Facebook’s content decisions, Zuckerberg says, is freedom of speech. “I believe more strongly than ever that giving the most voice to the most people will be this positive force in society,” he says. “Often when you make decisions that aren’t exactly what people want, they think you’re doing it for some underhanded business reason. But a lot of these things are more values-backed than people may realize.”

Zuckerberg does recognize that there may sometimes be unintended consequences to Facebook’s actions. “It’s a work in progress,” he admits. “At each point you uncover new issues that you need to solve to get to the next level. . . . It’s not like they are problems that exist because there’s some kind of underlying, nefarious motivation that led to them. I mean, certainly giving people a voice leads to more diversity of opinions, which if you don’t manage can lead to more fragmentation over time, but I think this is kind of the right order of operations. You know, you give people a voice and then you figure out what the implications of that are, and then you work on those things.”

When I ask whether Facebook has design flaws that might undercut its values and mission, he agrees in principle, but offers a clarification. “I think it’s fair to call them flaws, because every system is imperfect. But [thinking of it as] a work in progress is probably a more realistic framing. I mean, it’s not wrong to say that it has flaws, but I wonder if that’s an overly negative framing—not just of Facebook, but of any business or system. You got here by doing certain things, and the world is changing around you, and you need to adapt to keep going forward.”

Zuckerberg offers an example—not something momentous like Trump’s election (he studiously avoids political topics) but rather a more mundane area: clickbait, which at one point generated lots of user complaints. “Our algorithms at that time were not specifically trained to be able to detect what clickbait was,’’ he says. “The key was to make [tools] so the community could tell us what was clickbait, and we could factor that into the product. Now, it’s not gone 100%, but it’s a much smaller problem. And when I think about things today, whether it’s information diversity or misinformation or building common ground, these are the next things that need to get worked on.”

I then pose a moral question: Do successful businesses like Facebook, which have disproportionately benefited from the advent of new technology, have any special responsibility to help people being left behind by technology’s march? Zuckerberg looks away and pauses for several seconds, gathering his thoughts. “I think yes,” he finally says, “but there’s a lot in what you just said.” He continues, “A lot of the current discussion and antiglobalization movement is because, for many years and decades, people only talked about the good of connecting the world and didn’t acknowledge that some people would get left behind. I think it is this massively positive thing overall, but it may have been oversold. We have a responsibility to make sure it works for everyone.

“The thing that’s tricky,” he says, “is that I believe a lot of the issues we’re currently seeing around the world are not only economic questions. They’re social questions of meaning and purpose and dignity and being a part of something bigger than yourself. Certainly the economic part is very big. But I also think that regardless of how well you’re doing economically, you’re going to have issues in your life and you’re going to need a social support structure around you.” That’s why he is so committed to Facebook’s quest to build community.

Zuckerberg’s approach is a consistent and disciplined one: If everything the company does is predicated on the goal of connecting people, and if that goal is a higher-order priority than moneymaking or reacting to near-term political shifts or anything else, then long-term progress along that vector is what matters most. But it also makes him and his enterprise vulnerable: Any shortcomings in any part of the business reflect back on the whole and leave Facebook open to criticism. Zuckerberg clearly has a conscience (he’s not happy with how fake-news outlets manipulated his service), and he is devoted to constant improvement. Yet that won’t stop charges of hypocrisy. His challenge is to keep using complaints as motivation to make Facebook better, rather than getting defensive or pulling back.

As I walked out of Building 20, I found myself returning to a few sentences Zuckerberg had shared early on in our talk. He asserted that in the future, all businesses will increasingly need to tap into values and mission—that both consumers and employees will demand it. “Especially with folks who are millennials, that is going to be the default,” he told me. “When I started Facebook, there were a lot of questions around, Is this a reasonable way to build a company? And then when more millennials started graduating from college and we went to recruit them, it became very clear that they wanted to work somewhere that wasn’t just about building a business, but that was about doing something bigger in the world.”

His strategy for linking values and commerce through Facebook’s core activity is one approach to meeting that goal. There are more intricate ones too, as I soon discovered.

The Cult Of The Ohana

“I love to work at the intersection of capitalism, technology, and social justice.” Suzanne DiBianca, who was named “most talkative” in her high school graduating class, is animatedly telling me a story about how altruism and financial success go hand in hand at Salesforce, where she has worked for the past 17 years and serves as chief philanthropy officer. We’re chatting in an office on the 25th floor of Salesforce East, one of the company’s multiple HQ buildings in downtown San Francisco. DiBianca’s desk is in an interior space—as are all private offices in the building—but as you look past the adjacent workstations and out the windows, you can see the looming, still-under-construction Salesforce Tower, which is now the tallest structure in the city (it will open in 2018). The 25,000-person company is already San Francisco’s largest tech employer, with much future growth obviously in the works.

DiBianca, who helped launch the nonprofit foundation now known as Salesforce.org, begins by describing how one of the hundreds of volunteering activities that it supports also benefits the larger Salesforce community. “Every week kids walk down [to our office] from Chinatown at lunchtime, and people here will listen to them read aloud,” DiBianca says. “If you spend your lunch hour working with the children, you’ll come back with gratitude, with perspective on the world, inspired, and turned on. If you spend that hour out at lunch with a colleague, venting about what’s not working the way you want, you’re going to come back deflated.”

Like Facebook, Salesforce has long considered itself a vehicle for positive change in the world. But rather than point primarily to the core profit-making operation of the company, as Zuckerberg does for Facebook, Salesforce expresses its larger purpose first through philanthropy and the volunteering activities of its workforce. Yet this altruism, Salesforce execs contend, is indelibly linked to the business’s finances. As DiBianca puts it, “there is no distinction” between the company’s drive for growth and its social impact. “When you have people living their values every day, you’re going to create a heightened sense of teamwork, and a great company.”

Salesforce has, from its inception, been an unusual business. CEO Marc Benioff launched the company in 1999 around novel ideas that are now seen as gospel: that enterprise software could be delivered over the internet and as a subscription service. He also wanted to make philanthropy an integral part of the culture and, working with DiBianca, developed what they call a 1-1-1 model, which refers to giving away 1% of Salesforce’s products, of its employees’ time, and of its resources. (An initial 1% equity grant anchors the foundation’s funding.) Salesforce.org has bestowed more than $160 million in grants, organized more than 2 million employee volunteer hours, and shared low- and no-cost technology with more than 31,000 nonprofits and educational institutions. New hires at Salesforce participate in community activities such as sorting goods for a food bank as part of their orientation, and 80% of employees volunteer in their communities. (They get seven days per year of “volunteer time off” to take part in activities such as coaching Little League, building schools, and assisting at health clinics.) The company’s annual Dreamforce conference, which gathers more than 170,000 customers and partners, also integrates volunteer efforts.

This is all part of what Benioff calls the company’s “Ohana,” a concept based on the Hawaiian word for “family.” On a tour of the company’s HQ, Elizabeth Pinkham, who oversees Salesforce’s buildings and offices around the world, explains how the decor and layout are being designed to evoke the Ohana, including quiet meditation “wellness” corners where cell phones and laptops are discouraged. Thirty Buddhist monks were invited to join last year’s Dreamforce gathering and, says Pinkham, ended up being star attractions. “The Salesforce Ohana is a deep-seated support system we nurture inside our company,” an in-house blog explains. It can all sound a bit out there for a $60 billion seller of enterprise software. But fostering values has always been the point for Benioff. “I know that the work I’m doing is making the world better,” says the CEO. “Salesforce helps hospitals and schools and all kinds of nonprofits. Salesforce gives guidance to our employees to get out there and volunteer. And I think that’s why we have high levels of satisfaction in our employees and why we can attract people. We are creating an environment that gives them satisfaction in their work, not just financial gains.”

Salesforce.org may be “the heart and soul of the company,” in the words of Ebony Frelix—who runs its philanthropy programs, grants, and volunteering—but the Ohana reaches into Salesforce’s operational culture, too. Cindy Robbins, who oversees human resources, recalls how after she was promoted to her current post, she was surprised to discover that the company had never gathered data on how much female employees were paid compared to men in similar jobs. She went to Benioff. “I explained to him that we couldn’t lift up the hood on this and, if we found something, simply put it down again,” she says. “This could cost us real money to address. He said to go for it.”

The pay-gap study did indeed discover discrepancies (for some men as well as women, according to the company). Robbins is proud of how they responded: Salesforce instituted salary adjustments for 6% of its workforce, at an annualized cost of $3 million, she says. This January, Benioff said the company would implement another round of salary adjustments, with a similar cost, to align employees who had joined as part of acquisitions. “Some things we’ll do well and some things we’ll learn from,” Robbins says. “You have to be very intentional about working at it.”

Tony Prophet, who joined Salesforce as its first-ever chief equality officer late last year, points to a different example of the company putting its dollars at risk in support of its values. In 2015, Indiana’s then-governor, Mike Pence, signed the so-called Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which would likely have opened the door to discrimination against LGBTQ people. Employees at Salesforce’s Indianapolis office objected to the law and raised the situation with Benioff. The CEO then publicly threatened to greatly reduce its investment in Indiana (the company had maintained a significant presence in the state since buying local software developer ExactTarget in 2013). He tweeted that he was canceling programs that would require employees and customers to travel to Indiana, and promised relocation packages to workers who might want transfers. The law was eventually amended to protect LGBTQ rights, and Indianapolis remains the second-largest Salesforce office.

Salesforce has been criticized for not always following through on its values. For example, in the past some African-American employees have suggested that their concerns weren’t taken seriously enough by the company. A recent study in the academic journal Sage, focusing on corporate responsibility, reports that “the threat of hypocrisy is amplified for firms with stronger reputations” and that some companies choose to downplay their achievements to avoid tighter scrutiny of areas where they may be less proficient. The Salesforce leadership team seems undeterred by those risks. “We’re an institution in society, and we have a responsibility to do the right thing,” Prophet says. Plus, he argues, it helps the bottom line: “Over the long arc of time, when you do the right thing for the planet, it will be good for you as a business. People will want to work for that company; you’ll have a magnetic brand that resonates. It creates loyalty and affinity.”

While not every company will warm to Benioff’s program of Ohana, more and more are embracing his model of philanthropic engagement. “Trust in business is higher than trust in any other institution,” says DiBianca. How companies deploy that trust, she says, is critical. “I’m super optimistic about next-generation companies.” She’s referring to the growing number of businesses that have signed on to something called Pledge 1%, a commitment to mirror the 1-1-1 system that Salesforce pioneered. In two and a half years, the number of businesses committed has climbed to 1,600, from education upstart General Assembly to Australian software juggernaut Atlassian. “There’s all this incredible energy in [most companies] and you can unleash it for good,” says Benioff. “If you’re not unleashing it, you’re missing something. The ability to do it is relatively straightforward. All you have to do is open the door.”

The Airbnb Advantage

Are you a giver or a taker? That’s the question at the heart of Wharton professor Adam Grant’s best-selling book, Give and Take. Grant shows through empirical studies and anecdotes that “givers” (helping, cooperative, sharing individuals) are the most valuable employees within organizations, despite societal norms and corporate-reward systems that habitually favor individual-achievement-focused “takers” (who tend to rise quickly but ultimately fall).

When Grant is out talking about his book, he is invariably asked whether entire companies can be viewed as givers or takers. “Sure,” he says. “You can see what the values and norms [of a company] are internally . . . and the way it interacts in the world.” All this is “much more salient” today, he says, because “company behavior and claims are way more visible than before.” Plus, he adds, with “the drop in trust of government,” the role of the corporation in driving culture “is much bigger than it used to be.”

Givers, explains Grant, earn what psychologist Edwin Hollander called “idiosyncrasy credits”: By being helpful to others, they accrue trust that allows them to sometimes break from expected behavior. A company with “giver” attributes—“What can I do for you?” versus “What can you do for me?”—may get the benefit of the doubt in difficult moments. “Other companies are constantly skating on thin ice,” observes Grant (who works with businesses such as Facebook to help assess and improve their culture). “When the dots connect, people say, ‘Oh, that’s why I hate my job,’ or, ‘That’s why I love my company.’ ”

This paradigm offers a compelling lens for examining two tech-innovation siblings: Uber and Airbnb. Both are anchors of the sharing economy, both have had to challenge local laws to elbow their way in, and both have reached multibillion-dollar valuations while remaining privately owned. Their headquarters are based just a mile from each other in San Francisco’s South of Market district, and it might be natural to look at them as twins. But only one of them is perceived as a giver.

Uber has had a painful 2017. CEO Travis Kalanick has been embroiled in turmoil, first over his decision to join and then drop out of President Trump’s business advisory council, then due to allegations of gender bias and harassment at his company, all of which has inspired a wave of #DeleteUber protests. While there are many reasons for this crescendo of snafus, it is also true that Uber’s store of “credits” was low before these events unfolded. The ruthlessness that allowed Uber to build dominant market share and disrupt transportation as we know it also imbued its brand with an aura of by-any-means-necessary selfishness. The unflattering video that surfaced this year of Kalanick berating an Uber driver only reinforced those prevailing sentiments.

Airbnb has had its moments of trouble, too, in its confrontations with local regulators and around allegations of racial discrimination by its community of hosts. Yet Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has largely avoided any cloud of resentment (helped, certainly, by Airbnb’s eventual efforts to address the discrimination challenges). What separates these two companies can be illuminated by considering two recent occurrences: When Uber tried to support immigration demonstrations in New York–area airports by holding its prices down, it was swiftly denounced for undercutting striking taxis—it got no benefit of the doubt for what it claimed were altruistic motivations. Meanwhile, when Airbnb aired its “Accept” ad during the Super Bowl, it could have been pilloried for exploiting pro-immigration sentiment for its own business purposes. That critique never got traction.

I recently visited Airbnb’s headquarters, a beautifully rebuilt warehouse with a bright, open atrium and playfully designed studiolike work spaces. I met with Jonathan Mildenhall, Airbnb’s chief marketing officer, who was animated about a new internal study he’d undertaken with partners at ad agency TBWA\Chiat\Day titled “The Business Case for Creating an Iconic Brand.” The premise is that tech companies (with the notable exception of Apple) undervalue and underinvest in brand building, limiting their growth and impact. Mildenhall hoped to use the study to convince Airbnb’s internal stakeholders—CEO Chesky, other executives, the board of directors—that an ongoing commitment to enhancing the brand was a worthwhile investment.

Mildenhall is a charismatic, stylish Brit who came to Airbnb from Coca-Cola, where, among other things, he oversaw the diversity-celebrating “It’s Beautiful” Coke ad that originally aired in 2014 and also ran during this year’s Super Bowl. Mildenhall’s aspirations for Airbnb are ambitious: If Coke was the iconic brand of the 1980s, Nike defined the 1990s, and Apple ruled the 2000s, then his goal is to make Airbnb the brand of this decade. “I’ve got three years,” he says.

The study, which has been packaged into a colorful, graphics-heavy 73-page booklet, enumerates how brands can enhance asset valuations, push customer growth, provide pricing support, attract talent and partners, inspire employees, and “drive loyalty beyond reason,” as the booklet puts it. It is a rational, pragmatic pitch for building emotional appeal.

While Mildenhall, as a marketer, discusses all of this in terms of brand, it could just as logically be framed around values. (A central component in the study is “standing for higher-order values.”) Airbnb’s values revolve around “belonging”—its core product requires trust and openness to succeed, whether for hosts offering up their homes or for guests willing to stay with strangers. While Uber might, in the long run, replace its drivers with self-driving cars, Airbnb is inextricably reliant on people.

Airbnb’s “Accept” Super Bowl ad, Mildenhall says, was not a strategically developed campaign—it came organically out of the company’s values. Members of the marketing team had originally put it together for Airbnb’s own website, using pictures of employees and their family members and spending around $85,000 on production. When they showed it to Mildenhall, the Super Bowl was six days away. Could this work as a commercial during the game? He asked them to cut the video down from 60 to 30 seconds, which they did in 45 minutes. When Mildenhall presented Chesky with the idea of deploying it for the world’s biggest media event (Fox still had an open slot), Chesky’s only hesitation was whether an ad without additional initiatives behind it would come across as mere hype. So the day it aired, Airbnb announced a goal to provide short-term housing to 100,000 people in need over five years. It also committed to a $4 million donation to the International Rescue Committee, which helps refugees around the globe.

Uber’s challenge, aside from its CEO’s need to rehabilitate his own reputation, is that it hasn’t convincingly linked its core business operation to a larger social purpose. While ride-sharing can be seen as a conduit to having fewer vehicles on the road, cutting down on traffic and carbon emissions, it is Uber’s competitor Lyft that has owned that narrative—plus a more empathetic brand ethos to go with it. (Lyft scored points by making a big donation to the ACLU right after Uber’s travel ban–protest fiasco.) Behaving less ruthlessly may have hampered Lyft’s business growth, but the company has earned generosity credits that seem to be increasingly difficult for Uber to accrue.

Where Value Begins

Anne Raimondi’s office is not particularly impressive. Zendesk’s head of marketing works in a small, windowless square that’s adjacent to a few rows of open-plan workstations. It’s certainly a comfortable place: Her company, which is best known for customer-service software, offers the type of decor typical of a certain kind of San Francisco–area workplace, with blond wood,  communal work areas, and a loftlike vibe. Yet compared to the jaw-dropping environs of places like Facebook and Airbnb, it seems rather modest.

But within this relatively unspectacular locale, Raimondi—who is not a boldface name in the business community—illuminates a key aspect of running values-driven businesses better than any other executive I’ve spoken with. She talks about “stress testing” values—the idea that moments of conflict are when we learn what is really most important to us.

Raimondi got an early lesson in the integration of values and enterprise when she worked at eBay for founder Pierre Omidyar in the early 2000s. “He was super thoughtful on how an open, honest environment brings out the best in people,” she says. “He believes that people are basically good and that everyone has something to contribute.” And that fit smoothly with eBay’s business model of “a marketplace where people could trust—buying items from someone you don’t know,” she adds.

Since then, Raimondi has occasionally acted as an informal adviser to startups, helping them to construct their own values statements. “Culture is a living, breathing thing that evolves,” she says. “Culture becomes a reflection of values at each stage of an enterprise. They manifest themselves differently.”

The most effective values, she says, are useful in building strategy. “So many companies think of this as a check-the-box: ‘Okay, we need a values statement,’ ” she says. “They end up with things that are generic and watered down.” (Adam Grant echoes this point: “The research shows that most corporate values are the same—excellence, integrity, teamwork, and so on.”)

Among the values statements at Zendesk is “Keep It Beautifully Simple.” “That worked when we had one product, but as we move upmarket and take on more complex problems, it doesn’t capture enough,” Raimondi says. “So we’re discussing how to evolve.” Raimondi doesn’t see this as a weakness; instead, it’s a reality. “What are the different perspectives at different stages, and how do you use your values to make difficult decisions?”

What defines a business is not the words that a CEO or human resources department trot out, but rather the way the organization actually behaves. “If no executives are in the room,” Raimondi says, “how does everyone hold each other accountable? How do we challenge and make each other better?” Or as Grant says, company values “are lived, not just talked.”

Today, we are at a moment of stress-testing for business, exemplified by both Trump administration policies and reactions to them, but extending to more broad proportions. As trust in government and other institutions has suffered, businesses are expected to play an ever-larger role in leading culture, in the U.S. and around the globe. How business leaders tap that power—and express their values—will play a critical role in the evolution of our world.

Grant says that what ultimately differentiates givers from takers is our inner motivations, our intentions. Kalanick’s intention at Uber is murky; wouldn’t his business model be more efficient if every driver were replaced by an autonomous vehicle? Chesky’s intention at Airbnb is clearer: He really does want people to accept each other; that will, after all, push his business forward. The intentions at Salesforce are obvious: It believes philanthropy will help its Ohana both spiritually and financially.

As for Zuckerberg, there’s no question that his intention to connect the world is genuine. And if that makes him, his employees, and his shareholders a ton of money, what’s wrong with that? “In running a company like this, you’re never going to get everything perfect,” he says, “but every day you can come in and try to make people’s lives better. And if you repeat that process for a long period of time, the value compounds, and you can make a very big impact.”

Business has long been ruled by the short-term demands of Wall Street investors: quarterly earnings results, a rising share price. But when you think about it, that’s really a taker’s attitude. And maybe that’s starting to change.

Read More: Find Your Values

• Mark Zuckerberg On Fake News, Free Speech, And What Drives Facebook
• Are You Proud Of Your Company?

“Your timing is really funny because I’m actually putting my notice in on Friday,” a brand marketer I’ll call Tracey (she asked that we not share her real name) tells me. But it’s funny in another way, too, because the same day we speak, California officials are streamlining the state’s convoluted marijuana regulations, and Tracey is quitting her job to open a Bay Area dispensary.

This means she’s just set the clock on a big career gamble. “We have a decent amount of funding, so we really want to gain some traction by the end of the year,” Tracey says. And while her runway may prove slightly longer or shorter than these next nine months, the fact that she’s devoting finite resources to pulling off a passion career makes Tracey one of many people chasing more fulfilling jobs on tight timetables.

To learn what that’s like, Fast Company spoke with career-changers who are just entering a “deadline year,” right in the thick of one, or recently emerged on the other side.

Deadline Year, Day One

Tracey’s career in marketing up until now has followed a standard track, with roles at ad agencies and in-house ad departments. But after getting laid off at Airbnb last year, Tracey started dabbling with freelance work in the cannabis industry. “I was never really a big cannabis consumer at all, but I did study international human rights,” she says, “and the more I dug into what was going on and the kind of impact that it could have on these social-justice issues I care about, I realized this is a really good use of my time.”

So she spent the next six months single-handedly setting up a delivery service. She learned a lot and liked the work, but “it was really frustrating and lonely.” When Tracey was approached last fall for a job at a tech startup, though, she agonized over whether to pursue it. After dragging out the interview process, she eventually took the offer. “The safety of going back to what you kind of know was really attractive to me,” she says, but soon realized “it maybe wasn’t the best career choice.”

Tracey was discreet about her first foray into the marijuana business, worrying that the stigma might hurt her career. “But this second time around,” she says, “I want to be much more vocal about my feelings on the industry.” As she sees it, “Everything that’s happened with cannabis to date has been a really effective propaganda campaign,” so as a brand marketer she’s uniquely cut out to change the narrative—which finally feels like a meaningful outlet for her skills. “Telling more truthful stories about cannabis and the people who use it is really exciting for me.”

“I don’t think people who are in more mainstream industries understand how much of an impact they can have,” Tracey reflects, counting herself in that group until recently. “My mind has shifted a lot from, ‘Let me work for big tech companies that seem cool but I don’t have a connection to.’” If time runs out on the dispensary project? “We’re going to have to recalibrate and try again, because the problem isn’t going away.”

Related:3 Times It’s Okay To Change Your Mind About A Job Offer (Or  Your Whole Career)

No Going Back, Even If The Clock Runs Out

In the 15 years he spent in corporate roles, Darrin Murriner always had side projects, from real estate to a babysitting agency he started with his wife over a decade ago. Now the full-time head of a nascent talent-management business called Cloverleaf, Murriner says it’ll be lights out if the company can’t raise a seed round by summer. “We would be out of cash based on our current run-rate in July. That’s a pretty heavy deadline.”

Murriner fronted some of his own money to bootstrap both of the businesses he’s cofounded, so the experience of living within a deadline year isn’t unfamiliar. Still, he says, “We’ve known really great years financially, and I had to promise my wife we’re not going to be in this cycle the next two or three years”—even if that means Cloverleaf doesn’t get off the ground.

But like Tracey, Murriner says he can’t stomach returning to corporate life. He’s considered different plan Bs, including “one-off consulting projects, [but] the interesting thing is when I’ve done that, it has reinforced that feeling to me that I can’t go back to that corporate environment again,” he says.

That feeling is what makes Cloverleaf a such passion project for Murriner. A tool for helping employees avoid disengagement due to poor management, the company is a natural outgrowth of Murriner’s own experiences with office-bound work. Now that he’s left it behind, he relishes the “feeling of control and being able to dictate the outcomes, even if it is failure”—adding later, “It’s a feeling of being alive.”

Emerging Wiser On The Other Side

Zach Huckel-Bauer has just made plans to move back home to Maine, and next January he’ll apply for master’s programs in landscape architecture. A musician, Huckel-Bauer has spent the past five years in New York City, waiting tables and playing music (trumpet and vocals), a hustle that many artists are all too familiar with. The most income he’s ever made from his music in a given year is around $3,000; live gigs typically paid $20–50, and playing for recording sessions usually topped out at $100 per song.

So Huckel-Bauer set himself a deadline around two years ago, when his now-fiancée started grad school. At the time, the band he was playing with had just finished an album and was contemplating a tour. It was now or never; Huckel-Bauer even bought a car, planning to go on the road. Then the band leader backed out of the project.

It was around this time that Huckel-Bauer realized he might have to declare a loss from his music work on his tax forms for a fourth year in a row. When tax day came due, he did manage to squeak out a small profit, but netted a loss again the year after. “In a weirdly antiseptic way,” he says, “taxes had a part to play” in helping him realize that “this doesn’t seem like a viable business.”

“Purpose” is a buzzword that’s often (unfairly) hitched to millennials, suggesting that they’re looking for more—by some lights, too much—out of their jobs. But it’s the clear commonality in the experiences of all three deadline-year professionals I spoke to. A big reason Huckel-Bauer got into music was to spread a message. “When it became clear I wasn’t really reaching anyone other than the same people over and over again,” he knew he had to find another sphere where he could make an impact. So Huckel-Bauer is drawing on his carpentry skills and academic background studying public space to pursue landscape architecture instead.

As a musician, Huckel-Bauer learned there’s a cost to playing for free. “If you don’t set your rate then somebody will set it for you . . . [and] you’re going to be worthless by the time you want to get paid.” Still, he says, music taught him “there’s a lot to be learned from being open to opportunities,” which includes working for less than he’d ultimately like to in order to develop skills he can charge for later. Already Huckel-Bauer has installed a patio and pergola on his first client’s property.

Though he might’ve missed his deadline, Huckel-Bauer didn’t miss the chance to learn “how to find value in what people have to offer, and how to offer value to people,” a give-and-take that, as he now knows better than many, is the key to “working in the creative world.”