Now that graduation season is upon us, employers may see a surge of applicants vying for entry-level positions. And while there’s tons of advice for job seekers on how to stand out among a sea of candidates, a new survey by Yello, a talent recruiting software company, found that there are some aspects of the hiring process that companies could stand to improve.

The report, taken from a survey of 1,461 young adults between the ages of 18 and 30 who were either currently employed or had accepted full-time or internship offers, found that mobile phones are one of the most useful tools for the interviewing and hiring process.

Text messages, for example, may be the unsung hero of the communication loop. Yello’s survey data indicates respondents would welcome getting a text from a business, particularly because they’re so used to responding quickly to text messages. The report shows that 86% of those surveyed felt positively when text messages were used during the interview period, an increase from 79% in 2016.

More candidates are happy to do video interviews in lieu of traveling to meet hiring managers in person. For the second year in a row, three out of every four candidates said they appreciate the use of video technology in their process.

The most important thing for companies wanting to hire up-and-coming talent is speed. It’s no surprise candidates don’t want to wait too long to hear back from a potential employer and will try a number of ways to nudge the decision-making process along. Yello’s survey found that 74% of respondents turned down another opportunity because of a delayed offer, up from 69% last year.

As such, the report’s authors underscore: “Make sure that open positions, as well as culture and benefits information, are available to millennial and gen Z audiences where they are and when they are searching.”

At the end of a typical day, bakeries have so much extra bread that even food banks can’t use all of it. Here’s another way to keep it out of landfills: make it into beer.

Toast Ale–a pale ale made with roughly one slice of surplus bread per bottle–first launched in London in 2016. The beer saves loaves (in its first 15 months, the project recycled 3.6 tons of bread) and raises money for Feedback, a nonprofit that fights food waste. The organization is now brewing another version of the beer in New York City.

The beer was inspired by an ancient Babylonian recipe that uses bread as an ingredient, which Stuart discovered while visiting a Belgian brewery. It’s a process that is also sometimes used by home brewers. In New York, the biggest challenge was finding a microbrewery that could work on the project. Because of high rent, most craft breweries in the city are so small that they can’t take on additional production.

Chelsea Craft Brewing Company eventually agreed to work on the beer and brewed a pilot batch in March. The process is a little different than usual. “The biggest issue that the brewers have is that it’s got a lot of gluten in it,” says Pat Greene, director of brewing operations at the brewery. “That’s a scary thing in the first process of brewing… you have to be very careful because you could get a ‘stuck mash.'” To keep the gluten from binding together, small pieces of the bread are mixed with rice hulls, alternated with malt, and then hops are added. “The process went smooth as silk,” he says. “Not a hitch at all.”

The resulting beer is an American pale ale, a little more malty and hoppy than the U.K. version of Toast Ale, with a little more alcohol. The bread replaces about 30% of the malted barley that would typically be used in brewing. Because it’s part of the base malt that creates alcohol, the bread itself doesn’t really impact flavor; that comes from the hops.

Because the donated bread replaces other ingredients, the beer is slightly less expensive to produce than a comparable pale ale. The process also shrinks the environmental footprint of the beer. “There’s a lot of value in providing an input that is not a virgin raw material because grain for breweries is super land-intensive and water intensive,” Holtzman says.

Feedback hopes to work with other nonprofits around the world to brew their own local versions of the beer (the recipe is also available open-source).

Ultimately, the nonprofit also wants bakeries to throw out less bread, though that is a challenge. Flour is cheap, and for a bakery, it can be more cost-effective to bake extra bread in case there’s a last-minute order–even if those orders are rare. Retail bakeries also want shelves to look well-stocked all day long, and even a small bakery can end up with several huge bags of extra bread by the end of a day. “I think it will be a very long time before surplus in the baking industry ceases to be the norm,” she says. In the meantime, cheers.

People often fear that if they disagree with their boss they’ll get fired. But as a manager, let me reassure you that unless you do something extreme (like use NSFW language or publish a blog about what an idiot I am), odds are you won’t be let go for the sheer act of saying you see things differently.

In fact, the most common complaint I hear from managers I work with—and have felt myself—is quite the opposite. We want feedback from our employees. We hired you because we believe in you and your ideas, so keeping them a secret isn’t helping either of us.

Related: How To Calculate How Valuable You Are To Your Boss 

Now, to be fair, you want to push back in a way that makes you look helpful and thoughtful—and not like a know-it-all.

And I know what you might be thinking now, is that possible? Yes, especially if you know the four most common thoughts managers have when you disagree with them.

1. “I Wish You’d Done Your Homework—First”

Give me the benefit of the doubt when you learn about something that sounds wrong to you. Ask yourself, “What are the valid reasons my boss may’ve made this decision?” before building a case to argue with me.

Before correcting me, put yourself in my shoes for just a minute. If I feel like you’ve considered why I might think or feel the way I do, it’s easier for me to listen to your ideas.

Disagreeing with me is the easy part, recommending a better solution is the hard part.

This means that before you get to the constructive criticism, mention the merits of your boss’s approach. For example: “I can see where this would help us make our process more efficient, but I’m concerned about having enough time to do good work, so what if we adjusted [different] part of process?”

2. “Why Didn’t You Tell Me This Earlier?”

Frankly, I hear complaints and observations about my job all the time—including from my boss and our customers.

I most appreciate hearing from you when I’ve made a decision you don’t like that applies directly to your job. In fact, don’t wait to be asked. If my decision impacts you on a daily basis, let me know immediately. While I may stand by my decision even if you disagree with it, I want to know how you feel.

With that said, it’s helpful to remember that everyone has something they’d do differently if they were the boss. So share feedback that’ll help you do your job better (or be happier), but keep thoughts on nitpicky things that don’t impact you to yourself.

3. “Please Mind Our Surroundings”

It could be that our one-on-one check-ins are characterized by robust discussion and occasional disagreement—and that’s great. However, that doesn’t mean that you can always take that approach when voicing a differing opinion.

Related:Two Ways To Handle A Hopelessly Indecisive Boss 

If it’s during a staff meeting, remember that your colleagues are watching and set an example for them about how to challenge me. If we are with a client, I’ll be the most sensitive to you publicly disagreeing with me—not because my ego can’t take it, but because I don’t want the customer to lose faith in our organization. So if you’re not sure how the client will react when you correcting me, hold off on doing so until we are alone.

4. “If I Stick To My Decision, I Expect You To Support It”

If I hear you out but stick to the original plan, it doesn’t mean I wasn’t listening. More often than not, it means I’m considering factors that are external to your role, and that you may not be aware of—for all you know, my boss’s boss told me to do it this way.

I’m not looking for a team of “yes” people who never speak up. But I am looking for employees who trust me enough that if I push back on feedback, it’s for a good reason—and if they don’t support the plan, they’ll support me by going along with it anyhow.

The final thing I’ll confess is that sometimes I’d just like my employees to do what I’ve asked. It’s exhausting (for both of us!) if I have to defend every single decision, plus it makes me feel like you have no faith in my judgment.

If you’re still unsure whether it’s a good battle to pick, ask me. Say: “Are you open to a different opinion on this?” and give me the choice of opening it up for discussion. I’ll tell you whether it’s a good time to share a differing opinion, or if, this time, it’s better to let it go.

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

More From The Muse:

• A 3-Step Guide To Bouncing Back After Your Boss Says No to You

• 8 Surefire Signs You’re On The Path To Becoming A Real Leader

• 10 Ways To Get Your Boss To Trust You Completely

When Etsy went public in 2015, it faced a choice: would it stay meaningfully committed to its mission for social good and create a new platform for a more inclusive form of commerce? But after its IPO, the company largely continued on the same path, building an ultra-sustainable Brooklyn office, maintaining an ideologically driven work culture that was unusual in the tech world, and choosing to get recertified as a B Corp (a designation that requires meeting high standards of social and environmental performance and transparency).

Etsy now faces a similar choice. The company lost $421,000 in the first quarter of 2017, and on May 2 Chad Dickerson, who had served as CEO since 2011 (and as CTO before that) was ousted–along with the current CTO. The company also says it plans to cut 8% of the workforce. With investors and new leadership given a clear mandate to focus on profit, will Etsy lose its commitment to social responsibility?

The company’s stated (and as of yet unchanged) mission is to “reimagine commerce in ways that build a more fulfilling and lasting world.” Since its founding, the company saw itself as a more personal and friendly e-commerce alternative to corporate behemoths like eBay and Amazon. An early marketing poster featured a kid throwing a Molotov cocktail at a factory.

When the B Lab crunched the numbers to certify Etsy as a B Corp in 2016–studying a combination of the company’s policies for workers, the environment, customers, and the community–Etsy scored 127, more than twice the median for other companies.

In the tech world, it was known for a unique, “blameless” culture that supported workers in learning from mistakes, and an anti-corporate attitude. Some employees felt that going public was a mistake, as one former employee wrote in a thread on HackerNews on May 3. “Etsy was trying to be a company that put ‘people above profits,’ which is extremely difficult to do as a public company,” they wrote. “Market backlash against that kind of sentiment is severe.” Others argue that Etsy lost its indie soul long ago.

Dickerson addressed those difficulties in 2016, writing:

When Etsy went public last year, there was a lot of discussion about whether we could be both a public company and a socially responsible business. As I wrote at the time, “we reject the premise that there is a choice to make between the two. Etsy’s strength as a business and community comes from its uniqueness in the world and we intend to preserve it.” This remains true today. We’re in an era of great innovation when it comes to social responsibility and business, and we believe that all companies, no matter their size or what type of corporate structure they employ, can and should use the power of business to create social good.

But a former employee told Fast Company that the recent change truly felt like the end of an era–a particularly symbolic one because the new CEO previously held executive roles at eBay, often held up inside Etsy as an example of the type of company it didn’t want to be. When the news of the change in leadership came, employees and former employees rushed to praise the departing team.

It remains to be seen whether new CEO Josh Silverman, who was also CEO at Skype and Evite, will share that same commitment to the company’s non-financial values (Etsy declined an interview at this time, Dickerson is staying on as an adviser until the end of the month). But there are some reasons to believe that the company may continue on its socially responsible path, at least in part.

In major transitions in the past, some other socially-responsible businesses have managed to hold onto their values. Seventh Generation, known for selling plant-based soap and laundry detergent, faced similar questions when long-time CEO Jeffrey Hollender was fired by the company’s board.

“There was lots of concern both internally and externally, from employees and customers, as to whether Seventh Generation was going to stay aligned on mission,” says Gilbert. But under a new CEO, the company “increased its impact dramatically. I think that’s a pretty good example of a company of a decent scale and a significant amount of brand equity tied up in their sustainability story that was at risk in the transition.”

While the B Corp certification is voluntary–companies go through the detailed certification process every two years but can choose to stop–Etsy also has deeper involvement. The company worked with B Lab and Delaware legislators to create a new corporate structure called a “benefit corporation” that makes it possible for companies to focus on public benefit, not just shareholder value. B Corp certification requires that companies meet a certain legal standard; in Etsy’s case, as a corporation based in Delaware, it will have to become a benefit corporation by August 2017 if it wants to retain its certification.

“The new leadership has that in front of it as sort of a first test, if you will, about whether they’re serious about being the same type of company going forward as they have been in past,” says Gilbert.

Facebook-owned Oculus announced today that it is shutting down its virtual reality filmmaking operation, Story Studio, effective immediately in order to focus its efforts on supporting third-party VR content development.

In the blog post, Oculus head of content Jason Rubin wrote that, “Now that a large community of filmmakers and developers are committed to the narrative VR art form, we’re going to focus on funding and supporting their content. This helps us turn our internal research, development, and focus toward exciting but unsolved problems in AR and VR hardware and software.”

The move means the immediate shuttering of all Oculus Story Studio projects, including development of its fourth film, Wolves in the Wall, and continued work on its innovative content-creation tool, Quill. However, Oculus is planning on open-sourcing the Quill source code and encouraging third-party developers to continue work on it.

Despite the shutdown, there will be no layoffs at Oculus. Instead, every Story Studio employee will be given an opportunity to find a role elsewhere at Oculus or Facebook.

That includes Story Studio creative director Saschka Unseld. But it’s also hard to see someone like Unseld, a former filmmaker at Pixar, finding a satisfying role at Facebook, even though he will be given the chance to take on responsibilities in the company as a consultant or technical advisor.

The decision to shut down Story Studio, which has made the highly regarded films Lost, Henry, and Dear Angelica, will allow Oculus to devote more resources to programs like its VR for Good initiative, which provides resources, mentorship, and equipment to outside VR filmmakers.

Within the VR industry, shutting down Story Studio is likely to be seen as unsurprising, but as a bit of a disappointment.

“I think they had a very noble effort of trying to create a [VR filmmaking] community and fund people,” says Anthony Batt, a cofounder of the VR content developer and platform company Wevr. But “it didn’t seem as in line [to] what Facebook was doing. I think in a perfect world, they should be still doing that. They shouldn’t be closing it.”

Batt noted that while Oculus’s decision is good for companies like Wevr, because it removes important competition, it “may [still] seem negative to the [VR] industry.”

Importantly, though, Batt doesn’t believe the shutdown is due to any particular problems at Story Studio. Instead, he said he thinks an operation like Story Studio just didn’t fit into the long-term plans of a major technology company like Facebook, which focuses its energies on developing platforms and encourages outsiders to build on top of them.

In his blog post, Rubin noted that Oculus has last year pledged $250 million to fund external VR content development, resources that went toward numerous big-name VR projects, including “Robo Recall,” “Rockbound VR,” and others. Now, he said, Oculus plans to “carve out” $50 million from that fund to support “non-gaming, experiential VR content.”

In other words, the kinds of cinematic projects that Story Studio was known for.

At the same time, Rubin wrote, Oculus will continue to offer a range of resources—including mentorship opportunities, tutorials, best practices, and more—to outsiders.

The Story Studio shuttering comes not long after a series of management changes at Oculus, including the hiring of Hugo Barra as head of all of Facebook’s VR efforts, the stepping down of former Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe to run its PC VR operation, the hiring of longtime Apple vet Michael Hillman to head up hardware, and perhaps most notably, the departure of Oculus founder Palmer Luckey in the wake of a politics-oriented scandal and his being found to have violated an NDA in the company’s earliest days, a violation that cost Facebook $500 million in a lawsuit filed by ZeniMax.

To some, the studio shutdown, while making sense from the perspective that Facebook generally wants to build platforms and have third-parties develop on top of them, raises questions about its place in the larger world of technology.

“There’s something else that’s going on about original content,” notes Gartner analyst Brian Blau. “Google, Apple, Amazon,…and others are diving deeper into it, so I’m a little surprised that Facebook isn’t following that pattern.”

Oculus’s closest platform competitor in the high-end VR headset market, Valve, has been a game company that developed content internally, notes Blau. And in the game console market, most of the industry leaders have funded internal content studios.

“It’s happening around them,” he says, “so I’m a little surprised that they’re not doing something a little more substantial.”

Then again, Blau said, the move may well make sense from the perspective that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said over the years that the company doesn’t really want to be a content developer, and that any content creation efforts would be short-lived.

“So it sounds like it’s in line with what Facebook has said before…with what Zuckerberg has said before, and also seemingly in line with how they operate Facebook and the other properties,” like Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, adds Blau.

He adds that it’s possible the decision to close Story Studio may reflect Facebook’s internal thinking that the slow sales of VR headsets like the Oculus Rift means that spending money on content development isn’t the best use of their resources at this time. If that’s true, he added, “I wouldn’t put it past Facebook to have another [internal content development] plan sometime down the road.”

Following the announcement that Mike Pompeo, who had held the House seat in Kansas’s Fourth Congressional District since 2011, would assume the role of CIA director in Donald Trump’s administration, the state of Kansas announced the special election on January 24 and slated it for April 11.

The race was not expected to be close. Ron Estes, the Republican candidate, had the backing of Trump, Mike Pence, and Ted Cruz; Trump had taken the district by 27 points in the presidential election in November. At the start of the election, the democratic candidate, James Thompson, a Wichita-based civil rights lawyer, told his team that he would consider it a victory if they lost by 20 points. But on April 11, the closing polls showed that Thompson missed the seat by just 8 points.

Following the election, three tech industry veterans–Jessica Alter, Peter Kazanjy, and Ian Ferguson–teamed up to launch Tech for Campaigns (TFC), a platform that connects liberal and progressive campaigns with web developers, designers, social experts, and data specialists, who offer assistance and expertise free of charge. “It’s a skilled volunteer engine for the left,” Alter tells Fast Company.

TFC got involved with the Kansas special election around six weeks before the polls opened, and deployed a team of Silicon Valley-based experts to help boost engagement. It worked: TFC brought in a marketing pro and a social media expert to do audience segmentation and targeted outreach through Thompson’s Facebook and Twitter channels. Thompson’s Facebook page followers rose from 1,300 to over 10,000, and the average likes per post spiked from 20 to around 600. Engagement rates were 15 times greater that those among Estes’s base.

Down-ballot elections–like those for congressional seats or local office–are where change begins, Ferguson tells Fast Company, but those campaigns are often run on a shoestring budget, hovering around $1 million, as compared to the around $1 billion shelled out for presidential campaigns. “Often, they’re run by four or five people, who don’t necessarily have the in-house tech or digital expertise that a lot of folks in our networks do,” Ferguson says. TFC, Alter adds, has been working with races in Virginia, which is in the midst of a statewide election cycle. Trent Armitage, the executive director of Virginia’s House Democratic Caucus, told Alter that TFC has equipped candidates with resources and skills they would not otherwise have been able to access. “That was a real “aha” moment for us–realizing that we can step up and provide these skills,” Ferguson says.

After the inauguration, the founders circulated an informal Google doc through their networks to gauge interest among potential volunteers. In the first 72 hours, they had 700 people sign up to assist campaigns. The volunteer pool has since grown to over 3,000 tech-industry professionals, 60% of whom have never been involved in politics apart from voting or donating to campaigns.

The outpouring of enthusiasm, Alter says, comes from the same feeling that for her and her cofounders resulted in TFC: the desire to get involved in politics in a substantial, tangible way. For volunteers, working on a campaign does not require that they quit their day job or become the de facto tech staff for the duration of the campaign–volunteer assignments are given out on a project basis, and can be completed remotely. “Oftentimes, we’ll have multiple teams of volunteers embedded within the same campaign, working on multiple projects,” he says. “One group will be working on social, the other will be building a web site. The two teams will work in concert with each other, but separately, and over discrete periods of time.” If volunteers want to remain involved in the campaign past the completion of their original project, they also have that option.

While the volunteer base continues to grow organically in the tech industry, Alter says the organization is using this off-cycle year to position itself to assist in upcoming state elections, and continue outreach to campaigns. TFC currently has 18 volunteer teams deployed across 12 campaigns and caucuses; for 2018, they’re anticipating they’ll have several hundred teams working across the country.

For the three startup veterans behind TFC, the foray into politics has been surprisingly intuitive. “The way I describe campaigns in general is that they’re sort of like startups that just don’t have a dedicated digital team. They’re all doing a million jobs, and running a million miles an hour–we get the pace, and we can fill that missing aspect.”

The spirits want me to face my addiction to Sour Patch Kids.

I am sitting cross-legged on the floor of Colleen McCann’s Venice Beach home. Colleen is a shaman. Her loft is filled with crystals, many of which are organized into parallel lines to my left and right, as if I’m stationed in the middle of a spiritual runway. Colleen sits facing me, and between us, she’s fanned out a deck of Tarot cards, face down. I pick five. Colleen closes her eyes and quietly summons the spirits in the room.

I pick up a handful of multicolored stones, blow on them like they’re dice, and hand them to McCann. She blows on them too and recites a blessing that’s rooted in African shamanism. Then she closes her eyes again and meditates.

Before the spirits can tell me if I have a future as a billionaire entrepreneur, they take aim at my daily 3 p.m. habit—the one in which I consume a king-size pack of Sour Patch Kids in one sitting.

“What’s up with what you’re eating?” McCann asks. “They say there’s something weird you’re doing every day at a certain time.”

I confess to the power that sugary gelatin holds over me. McCann nods, signaling that she and her ghostly helpers are already aware. She says they understand the temptation (duh, it’s delicious), but they want me to knock it off so that I might free my soul from the shackles of high-fructose corn syrup and reach my full potential as a green juice-drinking grownup.

The scenario might inspire eye rolls, belly laughs, or heavy side shade, but for a growing number of consumers, crystals are no joke. The gemstones have been used throughout history, reaching back to ancient Egyptian culture, for their supposed therapeutic and beautifying powers. Now the glistening rocks once exclusively associated with covens and Stevie Nicks videos are flourishing in a massive mainstream business market.

McCann is booked months in advance, perhaps benefitting from the 40% increase in Google searches for “crystal healing” in the last four years. “Crystal shops near me” queries have spiked 35% since 2013, and to that end, nearly a dozen new crystal retail outlets have opened up in New York and L.A. in the past year. Even Target sells the rocks. Buoyed by the public’s increasing appetite for all things wellness and alternative medicine, the crystal fixation has infiltrated giant industries like beauty, interior decor, and everyday home goods. Savvy collectors are opening galleries that sell many millions of dollars’ worth of crystals a year.

In short, pretty rocks—many of them just like the ones you might have collected as a kid—can mean big bucks.

Because the crystal business is so varied and lacks a centralized governing agency, it is difficult to assign a fixed value to it. But expert collectors and dealers like Daniel Trinchillo make confident estimates. “This is a billion-dollar industry, easily,” says Trinchillo, who’s known as the “Indiana Jones of Crystals” for the 35 years he’s spent chasing down rare minerals all over the world. It was science, not mysticism, that first sparked his interest in the gems, and over the course of his career, his client roster has grown from geologists and naturalists to high rollers including fashion scion Chris Burch (of Tory Burch LLC) and Hunt oil heiress Lyda Hill. “I curate collections for billionaires,” Trinchillo says. The late Titanic composer James Horner was another top client.

For McCann, the reason for the boom is simple. “What we’re doing right now as a people isn’t working,” she says. Our fraught political climate, work overload, and tech dependency, she says, leave people “sad, scared, or nervous.” She believes crystals can “help people get back on track.” The practice of just sitting down and touching an element that comes from the earth, she says, produces a positive, calming effect.

And for the people building businesses around them, a pleasing ka-ching sound.

The Business Of Crystals

McCann considers herself a “spiritual influencer.” Everything she does is built on the idea of “crystal education,” which looks at how certain crystals can address certain ailments and serve specific personalities. According to belief, moonstone invokes creativity, citrine boosts energy, and amethyst treats addiction. As part of the $250 package I selected when I sought her services, she “prescribed” me a few amethysts. McCann also sells an $85 starter kit bag of “magically charged” crystals on Goop, where she’s the in-house shaman. You can buy a cluster of crystals for $5 on Etsy or eBay, but as McCann points out, these are not curated to a person’s specific needs.

McCann sees a variety of (predominantly young and female) clients for garden-variety therapy sessions, and she might perform the occasional crystal-assisted exorcism (“You never forget your first exorcism,” she says without irony). But the strongest aspect of the two-year-old business is the “intuitive business building.” Half of her clients are business executives from L.A., New York, Asia, and Europe.

“I may close my eyes and say, ‘Hey, you’re thinking of starting a new division,’ and they say, ‘How did you know that?'” McCann explains. “Or I’ll say, ‘I see a girl with red curly hair coming in—that’s the girl you need to hire.'”

She charges between $100-$1,500 per session and has seen her business triple in growth over the last year alone. Crystals are not a mere “trend,” she says. They are a “movement.”

“As a collective, we’re starting to reawaken to practices that have been here for thousands of years.”

For a long time, Askinosie says, most people associated their merchandise with “witches and mystical people wearing hippie outfits.” That association may still hold, but thanks to high-profile wellness figures like the self-help guru Tony Robbins, who wears an Energy Muse necklace every day, Askinosie and her partner Timmi Jandro’s customer base has expanded. Roughly half are entrepreneurs and business executives. Clients now hail from all over the country, not just coastal cities.

“When there are dips in the financial market, we sell out of our Money Magnets bracelets,” says Jandro, referring to the $88 accessory that promises to “bring wealth into one’s life.” She says business increases when consumers are stressed or anxious about the news.

“Whether people are buying crystals because they think they’re pretty or because they want the energy or just putting it in their house for artwork or decor—it’s serving different purposes for different people,” Jandro says.

Soon, customers will be able to read their musings on energy and more in the book Askinosie and Jandro are writing for the New Agey Hay House Publishing.

And you don’t have to follow the incense cloud to your local new age shop to get your crystal fix. You can sign up for one of the many “crystal of the month” clubs that have served devotees and collectors for years (The Hills‘ Spencer Pratt recently launched one of his own). Or you could just take a look at some of the everyday items around you. Chances are, there are versions of these items that are crystal-enhanced.

As is beauty from without. In the cosmetics industry, companies including La Prairie, Bliss, and Kora offer products mixed with quartz, and the boutique green beauty brand Herbivore Botanicals sells crystal-infused skin care products. In 2014, Herbivore Botanicals released its $48 Brighten Mask, formulated with crushed tourmaline sourced from Brazil. The product has taken off in the last year, outpacing the company’s other top sellers on its own e-commerce site and at Nordstrom.

Herbivore Botanicals product specialist Willie Freitas sees the popularity as a direct result of interest in crystal healing. The brand has since incorporated crystals into their marketing strategy and social media campaigns.

“People email our general inbox very often asking about tourmaline and its benefits,” says Freitas, “and whether we’re coming out with more gemstone products.” The answer is yes: More items will hit the market in the coming year.

With their glowing rainbow colors, crystals are an obvious fit for the home decor market. Plenty of people purchase the rocks to simply display in their home, but one interior design company has taken it to a whole new level (sometimes quite literally). The Cristalline, based in Los Angeles, specializes in “energetically balanced interiors and lifestyle,” which roughly translates to mixing feng shui with crystals.

Bell might suggest a layer of crystals installed underneath the floors of a home that previously housed a couple who went through a divorce, to “shift the energy of the space.” Consultations start at $500.

At first, Bell offered crystal fusion as an add-on service, but in the last year, clients have hired her for that specifically. She says her customer roster “easily doubled,” and that there’s been “a remarkable shift” in how crystals are perceived. Just a few years ago, when she mentioned crystals, people responded in a “hushed voice.” Now it’s all anyone wants to talk to her about.

One of Bell’s clients is Taryn Toomey, the founder and owner of the fitness craze The Class, an exercise regimen that melds together repetitive cardio movements, mindfulness, and screaming. Toomey commissioned The Cristalline for her New York studio, which now has a crystal grid beneath the floor to, among other things, balance the radiomagnetic waves emanating from the elevators. Clients aren’t aware of the sub-floor stones, but Toomey swears that, unlike participants at her L.A. location that is currently crystal-free, her New York clients can sense them, telling her, “‘Wow, it feels so good in here,'” she says. “People can feel it.”

Conscious Crystals, Quality Crystals

Bell says that her stones give off such good vibes because of their quality. Like diamonds, there are a variety of crystal tiers and compositions, as well as origins. Though crystals are technically mined, the process is smaller in scale than coal or gold mining, and there are no open-pit mines that span several miles. Handheld drills and minimal blasting extract outcrops of varying size, depending on the mineral. While large-scale copper and coal mines can extract 500-600 million metric tons per year, gem mineral mines hover at about 10,000-50,000 metric tons per mine. In comparison to other mining practices, it’s low impact, which means workers are not subjected to the same environmental or health hazards.

Even so, there are clean crystal mines, where stones are sourced under ethical, green conditions. Wegner Quartz Crystal Mines in Mount Ida, Arkansas (a region that boasts one of the world’s largest deposits of quartz), is one such outfit, running on a zero carbon footprint by planting trees to offset equipment exhaust. Founded in 1981, the company attempts to counteract one of mining’s biggest environmental issues—polluting water—through settlement ponds, solar energy, and reclaiming the mined earth so that it can grow trees again. Otherwise, says founder Richard Wegner, mining “becomes a wound in the earth.”

As a business, Wegner’s is thriving. Tourism to his property has increased 10% each year for the last five years—a significant increase for a rural area with a population of 1,000. On the wholesale side, Wegner says that every week the company picks up new buyers who are interested in the ethical nature of his approach. That makes sense. This is, after all, an industry based on feel-good sentiment.

“Just like you want eggs from a happy chicken,” says McCann, who purchases clean crystals exclusively (but is currently not a client of Wegner’s), “you want crystals that came out of the earth in a happy way.”

Still, even the most conscientious miners and dealers have to grapple with the reality that crystals are not a renewable resource. Wegner is conflicted about tapping into the limited supply of the 300 million-year-old stones, but cites a Native American philosophy that holds that crystals are here to help humanity and therefore belong in our hands. When he finds himself in possession of a five-foot formation with a wholesale price tag of over $30,000, he insists on selling it to a party that will put it on public display, like a museum, so that many people can enjoy it.

“No more [rare] crystals are being formed now,” he says. “It’s something we need to conserve. I’d equate it to investing in fine art.”

The Fine Art Of The Crystal Trade

To a sizable group of people, buying crystals is very much on par with investing in fine art. Daniel Trinchillo regularly sells rare pieces for $1 million to $10 million, and watches as they appreciate at breakneck speed. One client acquired a blue cap tourmaline in 2011 for $1.5 million, then sold it within two years for $2.5 million. The current owner is now fielding offers around $5 million. The value of rhodochrosite has also skyrocketed. A piece that went for $20,000 in 1995 now collects between $200,000 and $400,000, or even a few million depending on the rarity. 

In 2014, he took a break from excavating rocks in exotic jungles and sub-zero-degree locations in Russia to open his own gallery on Madison Avenue in New York City. Mardani Fine Minerals features collector’s items from the world’s top crystal regions, including Brazil, China, and Colombia, as well as some from Trinchillo’s own mines in Madagascar and Brazil—an investment he made because “demand is so high right now.” According to Trinchillo, the gallery makes between $25 to $40 million in annual gross sales, with profit margins varying from 20%-70%.

“Its a fun time to be in this industry,” he says.

Lenise Soren is a fellow traveler in the crystal business. She operates her own gallery on the other side of the country in Malibu, California—but compared to Trinchello’s Mardani, it might as well be on the other side of the universe. SorenityRocksMalibu is a new, 2,000-square-foot interactive crystal wellness gallery—the first of its kind—and performing arts sanctuary that is the physical embodiment of Soren’s deep belief in the mystical side of minerals. Opened in March, the space is a museum of crystal formations, many of them six feet tall, that look like they came straight out of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Inside, adults and children are encouraged to touch the dramatic rocks, some of which have price tags from $30,000 to several million.

Soren, a former actress who appeared in TV and movies in the early ’00s, surrounds herself with crystals at all times. She credits the stones for her excellent health (she hasn’t been sick in the last eight years) and her appearance. “[My partner and I] don’t look our age,” she says. “Even our cats don’t look their age.” She then declines to give her actual age. Her cat, however, is about five years old. He goes by Merlin the Crystal Wizard Cat.

Soren hosts a variety of events on her compound, from healing sessions for rehabilitated wolves (the canines snuggle with crystals) to crystal gong baths (meditation with gongs and crystals)—both of which I attended over a recent weekend, and both of which were packed with attendees young and old. She charges $30 for wellness treatments like the gong bath, which she offers twice a week. Special events like wolf therapy run around $150.

Soren is also Restoration Hardware’s “crystal designer,” which means she places stones throughout the company’s stores nationwide to “shift the energy” inside. As a “mineral therapist,” she guides corporate clients including The Gerber Group on how to rework their office spaces. She even manages clients’ “crystal investment portfolios,” helping them navigate the rapid appreciation of some of the rarest crystals on earth.

Like Soren, Energy Muse’s Heather Askinosie and her partner have clients who buy crystals primarily for the investment opportunity, with some of them seeing the value of their stones increase five-fold in a single year. She mentions one couple who invests in crystals in place of an IRA. And an increasing number of their Silicon Valley clients, she says, will spend thousands for a quarter-size piece of one particular rock: meteorites.

“Those are selling for $5,000—for a chip,” Askinosie says. “It’s big business . . . [Our inventory] is gone within 24 hours.”

Skepticism And A Crystal Bubble?

So yes, crystals are glistening shards of commercial opportunity right now. But is this a bubble? If so, how long before it bursts (or rather, shatters)? Will newer devotees grow tired of their gem silica and celestite geode and move on to something else? Will they stop believing in the otherworldly capabilities of these minerals?

It’s not as if the medical and science communities have ever given credence to claims of healing powers. A 1997 study by Professor Christopher C. French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at the University of London, concluded that the sensations people report when handling crystals were nothing more than the power of suggestion. He warns that people should never rely on these stones for serious medical concerns. “There is simply no way that they could work beyond a placebo effect and no evidence that they do,” French says via email.

And maybe that’s enough. When I ask Colleen McCann if crystal therapy is just a case of placebo effect, she is cagey, replying, “There are many ways to skin a cat.”

Trinchillo thinks if there is a bubble, it’s a young one, years away from popping. “The best objects are still so difficult to acquire,” he says. “[These crystals] are treasured by collectors, and there seems to be no end in sight as to what they’re willing to pay to acquire.” Putting his money where his mouth is, Trinchillo plans on opening five new Mardani Fine Minerals locations over the next few years.

“It’s both: It is trending and it’s here to stay,” she says. As the purring, five-year-old Merlin the Crystal Wizard Cat rubs up against a quartz 10 times his size, she concludes, “Crystals were here before us, and they’ll be here after us.”

Some people seem to have all the luck. They’re in the right place at the right time. They’re top of mind and chosen for the best assignments. And they just happen to make connections that end up advancing their career.

While luck seems like a random concept, it’s actually something that can be learned and increased, says Stephen Simpson, author of Get Lucky Now: The Proven 7 Secrets of Successful People. “If you open yourself up to the concept of luck, it often seems to find you,” he says. “A closed mind is one of the worse mind-sets to have.”

A London-based physician and “mind coach,” Simpson works with professional golf and poker players, helping them attract more luck in their lives. Through his research, he’s discovered that lucky people have similar practices and beliefs.

“A lot of these people do it unconsciously or had parents who were inspirational,” he says. “Others work at it.”

Whether you consider yourself to be lucky or not, there are things you can do to bring more health, wealth, happiness, and success into your life. Here are six activities that set the stage for lucky breaks:

1. Work On Developing Your Intuition

The most important secret to being luckier is developing skills of intuition, says Simpson. “Intuition, like any other skill, can be improved with practice,” he says. “Poet and author Robert Graves knew its value when he said, ‘Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.'”

Instead of fussing with poker chips or worrying about the other players, Simpson says lucky poker players listen to their gut feelings. “The next step is trusting your intuition and acting on it,” he says. “Very often, when I talk to poker players, they say that their first feeling often turns out to be the right approach.”

2. Set Goals You Can Control

A lot is written about setting goals, but Simpson says most people don’t choose the right goals. “They’re too big and too far away,” he says. “Even though we would like to think otherwise, we’re all kids, and we would all rather have instant gratification.”

In 2014, Simpson started coaching professional poker player Chris Moorman, who had a goal to earn more money. Moorman shared that he was irritated by the things people were saying about him, as well as the distractions that go on in a poker tournament, neither of which he could control, says Simpson.

“Instead of setting a goal to earn more money, he set the goal of controlling his mental focus,” says Simpson. “He committed to giving every single hand his maximum attention to avoid mistakes. The amazing thing is that two weeks later, he won his first live event and over a million dollars.”

3. Expand Your Circles

“In the business world, as in movies, the big breaks flow through contacts between people,” writes Max Gunther in his book, How To Get Lucky. “Not necessarily close friendships, just contacts–sometimes tenuous ones,” he explains.

Your chances of getting a lucky break are in direct proportion to the number of people you know. Develop a network of friends and acquaintances at home and at work. Attend events with the goal of meeting one new person.

“Luck flows along linked chains of people until it hits targets,” Gunther writes.

Thor Muller and Lane Becker, authors of Get Lucky: How To Put Planned Serendipity to Work For You and Your Business, say this kind of motion is a basic element of serendipity.

“To move is to shake things up, to break out of your routine, to find new ways to consistently meet new people and run into new ideas,” they write. “Motion does not discriminate based on experience, IQ, or educational background–it simply rewards energetic, spontaneous action.”

4. Be Open To New Ideas

While long-range plans are helpful, it’s important to not take them seriously, says Gunther. Lucky people permit themselves to be distracted by ideas that are interesting and exciting.

“The lucky are aware that life is always going to be a turbulent sea of opportunities drifting randomly past in all directions,” he writes. “If you put blinders on yourself so that you can see only the straight ahead, you will miss nearly everything. A plan can be used as a kind of guide into the future, but should never be allowed to harden into a law.”

Luck is often about making connections no one else has. For example, Arthur Fry, cocreator of the Post-It Note, learned about the adhesive technology because he happened to attend a lecture given by the inventor, Becker said in an interview with Inc.

“So, for anyone looking to activate their geek brain (the part of the brain that has many curiosities), take steps to advance your education–in whatever shape that takes,” he said. “Be alert and be present, even when you’re doing nonwork-related activities. You never know where or when inspiration will strike.”

5. Get Your Head In The Game

Being able to visualize your success is one way to obtain it, says Simpson. He suggests developing a mantra, a few sentences that can act like your game plan. “I’ve got this,” for example, or “Because I can.”

A mantra, or positive affirmation, provides a single focus point, removes past and future, leaving only the present and the now, and enhances intuition, says Simpson. It also deals with distractions, highlights what is possible, and builds confidence.

“Although the concept appears so simple, it is an extremely powerful tool for the subconscious mind.”

6. Turn Negatives Into Positives

No matter how lucky someone is, they will have to deal with adversity. Instead of ruminating over bad luck, look for the bright side or the new opportunity that presents itself.

“True champions in the world of sport define themselves by how they turn the most terrible negative into a positive,” says Simpson.

The old adage is often true: We don’t quit jobs, we quit bosses. Besides hurting your mental well-being and productivity, working for a bad boss can severely impact your health. Researchers from Harvard Business School and Stanford University found that the stress bad bosses cause can be as damaging as secondhand smoke. And those bad bossesmay also be making you sad, lazy, and fat.

Of course, many of us don’t have the financial or logistical freedom to just quit a job without a new one lined up if we get stuck with a bad boss. So what is one to do? You can of course learn to deal with the bad boss as best you can. However, as with most maladies, the best medicine is prevention. If you can learn to identify the warning signs of a bad boss during the interview stage, you can avoid that job and its potentially toxic work environment altogether. Here are the biggest red flags to look out for, according to a recruiter and management professional we spoke to.

Red Flag No. 1: Do They Lack Basic Respect And Manners?

“Even with my experience of interviewing, I’ve sometimes slipped up on what looked like a well-planned schedule at the start of a day blocked out for interviews and ended up running over and being late for the next interviewee,” says Sarah Dowzell, the COO atNatural HR. “Unexpected events can happen to the most organized of people, but how they react will tell you a lot about the person.”

This is often the most easily discernible red flag, says Dowzell. “Acknowledging and apologizing for being late to the interviewee is basic manners, and if the hiring manager doesn’t do this, what does it tell you about how they treat people?”

That’s something with which Richard Hanwell, associate director atThe Sterling Choice, a recruitment agency for global professionals, agrees:

Manners cost nothing. If an interviewing manager is checking their phone for emails or is taking phone calls, then they are unlikely to give the appropriate time in your prospective role if they can’t even do it when they are meeting you for the first time and should be looking to make a good impression. No matter how senior a manager is, they should respect the importance of recruitment and turn all technology off in order to make an engaging impression.

Red Flag No. 2: An Inflated Ego

“These are the are hiring managers who are more interested in talking about themselves than interviewing you,” says Dowzell. She points out that it’s easy to spot a boss with an inflated ego: If you ask them any questions about the team you’ll potentially be joining, their answers will often focus on them and their personal achievements rather than the wider team.

“The best example of the inflated ego I’ve come across was a candidate being told by the hiring manager that he’d looked at his LinkedIn profile, and then he asked why this wasn’t reciprocated,” says Dowzell. “This person does not only have an inflated ego, but they’re also needy. Who wants to work for a needy boss?”

Red Flag No. 3: Pronouns Matter

The best bosses are team players who realize the contribution and value of every single person in the group. But as many of us know, there are plenty of bad bosses who believe that successes are theirs alone, and failures are due to their subordinates. But how can you tell which camp your prospective boss falls into when meeting them for the first time? Hanwell says to pay attention to how they use pronouns in the context of the conversation.

“If your interviewer uses the term ‘you’ in communicating negative information—such as, ‘You will deal with a lot of ambiguity’—don’t expect the boss to be a mentor,” he says. “If the boss chooses the word ‘I’ to describe the department’s success, that’s a red flag. If the interviewer says ‘we’ in regards to a particular challenge the team or company faced, it may indicate that he or she deflects responsibility and places blame.”

Red Flag No. 4: The Boss Asks Inappropriate Questions

One of the worst red flags to keep an eye out for is whether the prospective boss asks you any questions that may potentially violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, or the Americans with Disabilities Act. “All of the legislations listed are designed to prevent discrimination in the workplace and mean that hiring managers should not be asking questions such as ‘Do you have children, or plan to have children?” says Dowzell.

She points out that despite legislation,75% of senior women in tech have been asked about family life, marital status, and children during interviews. “Arguably, a hiring manager asking such questions hasn’t been sufficiently trained, but if they’re displaying unethical behavior at this stage, what does it tell you about how this manager operates?” she says.

Red Flag No. 5: Signs The Boss (And Company) See You As A Lackey

Dowzell says that there are still plenty of bosses and companies that see their employees as little more than servants. To demonstrate this point, she tells me about the experience of one of the first people she hired for her company. Before interviewing at Natural HR, James had interviewed at a nearby larger business that had bigger budgets.

“James told me that after a great interview with a nearby company, he was introduced to a director who just happened to be passing as he was leaving the building, and all he said to James was, ‘First thing you need to know about working here, James: milk and two sugars!” says Dowzell. “That was enough to tell James all he needed to know about what his life would be like working for this company.”

Red Flag No. 6: The Boss Lacks Enthusiasm

Hanwell says the final red flag to keep an eye out for is whether or not you sense enthusiasm and passion from the prospective boss while they are interviewing you. “Measure this by paying attention to your feelings,” he says. “You should feel a sense of excitement when you consider working for them. But if you feel like the boss hates his or her job and doesn’t care, leave immediately. Chances are, the office is full of disengaged employees who are plagued by low morale.”

When Berlin-based education startup CareerFoundry flattened its hierarchy last year, all the company’s managers lost their titles. At that point, cofounders Raffaela Rein and Martin Ramsin thought it only fair to create a peer-based performance review and promotion structure. But that required salary transparency.

“If the team had to decide on promotions, transparency for salaries was sort of a necessity,” Rein says. She was nervous about the change, though, and rightly so: Once salaries went public, a few employees came forward to ask for raises, telling the cofounders they’d leave otherwise. Rein ultimately obliged, considering that the employees “had a point.” If she hadn’t thought they were valuable enough to pay more, she’d probably have let them go elsewhere.

CareerFoundry’s experience points up that embracing pay transparency is never just a matter of opening the books. It means reckoning with unequal pay and fielding complaints from employees who believe they’re underpaid, which might explain why only a handful of companies have taken the leap. We asked a few that have already weighed the pros and cons of transparent pay policies what there may be to gain—and lose—from implementing one.

Upsides For Women And Minorities, But At A Price

By now, the pitfalls that women and minorities disproportionately face when it comes to compensation are well documented. In fact, they were the main impetus for the equity crowdfunding platform Crowdfunder to introduce salary transparency. As long as that information stays under wraps, company president Steven McClurg says, “it’s very difficult to equal the playing field on pay.”

Still, not all employees responded favorably when Crowdfunder started publicizing salaries. Employees who were underpaid received raises and were “instantly gracious,” according to McClurg, but “it was the people that were overpaid that were like, ‘Well, why don’t we get raises too?'” Their argument, he says, was essentially, “We’ve been here just as long as these people have; we perform. Just because we negotiated a higher pay coming in and we constantly negotiate our pay doesn’t mean that we should suffer.”

It may come as little surprise that most of these employees were men, McClurg reports, and that most have since left Crowdfunder. This is a common critique—that salary transparency can lead to a lot of employees “lobbying for change,” including where it isn’t warranted. Employees who think they’re underpaid may feel dissatisfied and leave the company as a result.

Pay transparency doesn’t necessarily impose a ceiling on negotiations, though, since salary calculations take into account things like experience and location. But it’s easy to see how it might put off prospective or existing employees who worry their salaries will be capped. This also might explain why so many tech companies that now embrace transparency elsewhere—say, in regards to diversity—still hesitate to give salary transparency a try.

Related:Tech Employees Think Their Companies Are More Diverse Than They Actually Are

Attracting A More Diverse, Passionate Workforce

If the cost of offering a fairer shake to women and people of color is employee attrition elsewhere, some employers still see it as a net gain. Social-media management platform Buffer has long been a proponent of “radical transparency” in all aspects of its business, from diversity and revenue data to product roadmaps. (It’s also meant being up front about bad news, like when Buffer was low on cash last year and had to make layoffs.) In keeping with that policy, Buffer opted to publish its compensation formula and employee salaries not only internally but also to the public in late 2013.

It wasn’t an easy decision. Among other things, Buffer worried that the move might open its employees up poaching by competitors. But Buffer PR head Hailley Griffis claims the company actually saw an upswing in applications after making the switch. “When we put all of our salaries online, applications went up by 50% the next month,” she says.

For Buffer, this meant attracting employees who were actually a better fit and flocked to the company because of its values, not despite them. In fact, Buffer recently reviewed its employees’ salaries in order to evaluate its gender wage gap and found something surprising: Men at the company make 2.5% more than women do overall (compared with adjusted U.S. average of 5.4%, according to Glassdoor researchers), which Griffis claims is because Buffer has more men on its engineering team. But when Buffer compared salaries within departments, it found that female employees actually earned more than their male counterparts.

To be fair, most companies probably wouldn’t be comfortable with Buffer’s commitment to being publicly “transparent even when it hurts.” But just advertising the fact that there’s internal pay transparency can have a similar effect, McClurg points out. He credits the company’s embrace of transparent equal pay with creating a demographic ratio other tech companies can only dream of: “We now have more female developers than we have male developers.”

Employees Know Where They Stand

When companies make salaries transparent, they also have to explain how they arrived at them—which can be tricky. Even at CareerFoundry, says Rein, “a flat hierarchy still doesn’t mean everybody’s equal,” which means people will still get paid differently. Buffer determines pay through a combination of factors, including role, experience, location, and cost of living. And even when salaries are set through a public formula, certain criteria—experience, in particular—are still more subjective.

Related:Ready To Scrap Your Annual Performance Reviews? Try These Alternatives

But for the most part, conversations about pay are less uncomfortable when you know exactly how your salary has been awarded and can compare it against what your peers are making. “I’m personally awful at negotiating,” Griffis admits. “If there had been internal transparent salaries at my last company, where I happen to know that I was making less, maybe I would have been more comfortable asking for more.”

When CareerFoundry first posted its salaries internally, Rein says employees “rushed to see what everyone else was earning.” But after addressing those initial complaints from employees who felt they were underpaid, Rein says employees have rarely had grievances since, which she also attributes to the company’s biannual peer-promotion system. As for checking up on their coworkers’ salaries, Rein claims that employees are less inclined to do so now.

Making Fair Pay Possible Without Full Transparency

MarketGoo, a marketing and SEO platform for small businesses, seriously considered salary transparency, but eventually decided against it. MarketGoo is completely transparent internally about its finances, so disclosing salaries seemed like the obvious next step. But when MarketGoo put the question to its 15 full-time employees (“Do you think it’s important to know what your coworkers earn, and for them to know what you earn?”), the majority voted against sharing individual salary information.

“I’m not the owner of the culture,” MarketGoo founder and CEO Wences Garcia says. “It’s the team together that is creating the culture of the company and the values we want to reinforce.” Instead of transparent pay, MarketGoo is devising a formula to make sure salaries are fairly awarded, and Garcia says he’s open to reconsidering salary transparency as the company grows and the culture evolves as a result. Plus, being privy to company finances means employees are more understanding when it comes to compensation.

Of the companies I spoke to, Buffer is the largest, with 75 employees. There’s a likely reason why more sizable companies haven’t tried salary transparency: It’s more difficult to implement if sweeping pay inequity has long been the norm. One notable exception is Whole Foods, which has posted all salaries internally since 1986, barely six years after the company’s inception.

“Sometimes salaries at larger, older companies aren’t equal at all,” Griffis acknowledges. “If it’s the case that men have negotiated for more or are receiving larger bonuses, and women haven’t spoken up, it will not reflect well on them. I know there’s definitely some fear there, but I think putting in place a salary formula would solve a lot of that.” She adds that some larger companies post salary ranges rather than reveal exact salaries, to offer employees a bit more context.

But McClurg doesn’t see why bigger companies can’t adopt salary transparency. His previous employer, whose head count numbered around 2,000, had a standardized vacation policy that varied according to experience and title. “Some people lost, and some people gained, but at the end of the day it was rolled out across the entire organization,” he says. “It takes work, but I think you can get there. If a company did that with 2,000 people across a lot of different businesses, surely they can do the same thing with salary.”

Winning a one-time repatriation of foreign cash at a reduced tax rate might be the single most important policy objective for tech companies during Trump’s term—and the matter could be decided fairly soon. Tech companies like Apple and Microsoft keep large percentages of their cash holdings overseas as a way of avoiding the 35% income tax that would be levied against them if brought back home.

Trump promised a repatriation plan during his campaign, and his administration is still holding out for a plan that would tax returning monies at a much lower 10%. The chart below shows how much some of the biggest tech companies could bring back after the tax.

The current legislative battle over the health care bill can be seen as a prelude to the larger fight over tax policy in Washington. (The GOP is hoping to use savings from the health bill to help finance the tax bill.) And repatriation will be one of many line items in the tax bill that lawmakers will have to hash out.

Trump hopes the repatriated money would go toward investments in U.S. manufacturing that create jobs. But the tech companies have very different ideas for what to spend the monies on, sources tell me.

Some may remember that such a repatriation plan was tried back in 2004, and with arguably poor results. In fact the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations studied George W. Bush’s tax holiday in 2011 and concluded that it was a “failed tax policy.” Foreign monies were allowed back in at a low 5.25% tax rate, but the tech companies did not use it to build factories, but rather for stock buybacks and management bonuses.

However, Apple CEO Tim Cook seemed to make an overture to the Trump administration yesterday by announcing his company will invest a cool billion in companies that will create jobs in the U.S. He gave no details on the type of companies that will benefit, or about the types of jobs that will be created.

Cook announced the new fund during an interview with CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Wednesday. The Mad Money host asked Cook about the monstrous pile of dollars Apple has parked with its overseas subsidiaries, referring to the growing chorus of people wondering why Apple doesn’t do something interesting with all that cash—like buy Disney or Tesla, for example.

Cook told Cramer that under the current tax regime Apple would have to borrow money if it wanted to buy anything big. But that situation, whether real or overdramatized by the Apple CEO, could change quite soon.

At a time when the Trump Administration is trying to undo as much clean energy and climate regulation as it can, many corporations are traveling in a different direction. There’s a distinct divergence between government and Fortune 500 these days on renewables and global warming, and, in turn, a divergence between Trump, mainstream financial markets, and much of global public opinion.

Recently, we’ve seen iconic companies like Apple, Bank of America, Facebook, Google and Walmart make commitments for 100% renewable power (mostly solar and wind). And we’ve seen hundreds of others adopt Science Based Targets for climate change–that is, targets that accord with internationally agreed goals for reducing greenhouse gasses. We don’t know what long-term impact Trump’s climate-obliviousness might have–whether, for instance, it will normalize denial within American business–but so far he seems to have less dire consequences than environmentalists feared last November.

“There’s real liability in being associated with the climate denial of this administration, in particular for the consumer sector,” says Anne Kelly, policy director at Ceres, a nonprofit that works with investors and companies to promote sustainability, in an interview. “What’s encouraging to me is the companies have stood up and said ‘no, we’re keeping our goals in place, we want to stay in the Paris Agreement, it’s going to make us competitive if we support low-carbon policies’.” More than 1,000 companies and investors have signed the “Business Backs Low-Carbon USA” pledge calling on Trump to help limit global temperatures below an increase of 2 degrees Celsius and for a continuation of the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan.

Having said that, a new report from Ceres, WWF, Calvert Research & Management and CDP (the Carbon Disclosure Project) shows that progress on clean energy and climate goals is far from uniform. It’s true that many companies with no great love for Obama or Democratic politics are heavy investors in renewables and climate change action (companies like Walmart and Mars, for instance). But then commitments across wider American business vary widely. About half the 2016 Fortune 500 have set targets to reduce greenhouse gasses, or increase their energy efficiency or to up their sourcing of renewable energy. But that’s only a 5% increase compared to a previous report in 2014. While Apple, Bank of America and Facebook are making headlines, a lot of companies are still sitting on their heels.

The report shows big gaps between industries. At one end, 72% of consumer staples giants (like Procter & Gamble) have made one of the three types of commitment (energy efficiency, climate or renewables). But, at the other end, only 11% of energy companies have one or more target, down from about 25% three years ago. (Some companies, like Chevron, Tesoro Petroleum, National Oilwell Varco, Devon Energy and Marathon Oil, have actually dropped targets since the last report.) “There is a lot of awareness among consumers and a lot of demand, and [consumer-facing] companies are responsive to that,” Lance Pierce, president of CDP North America tells Fast Company.

Energy companies often say they need a “level playing field” before setting targets–for instance a regional, national, or international climate agreement that holds all sector companies to the same standard, Pierce says. Whether that’s simply a delaying tactic given that the current administration is unlikely to establish such a playing field is open to debate. Pierce says it could well be “disingenuous,” though he’s generally sympathetic to the complexity and “human fallibility” of big companies.”We understand that companies are fallible human institutions and that they need to get all their team onboard to make it work. On the other hand, a lot of other companies are doing it and setting a high bar for leadership, so there’s no reason why the other companies shouldn’t be doing it, too,” he says.

Other industries rank in the middle, with 60% of real estate companies, 57% of IT companies, and 30% of financial companies having at least one of the targets. “Consumer Discretionary” businesses in the Fortune 500, including several automakers, also saw a reduction in target-setting since the last report in 2014.

More positively, 210 companies globally now have science-based climate targets (eg through the Science Based Targets initiative). They include 10 Fortune 500 companies (Procter & Gamble, General Mills and Kellogg’s for instance). Also, 72 Fortune 500 companies have said they intend to set such a target within two years (Walmart is one of those). “They are raising the bar for what a standard should be,” says Kelly. “It’s casting doubt on those who, with good intentions, have set a target that was slightly more random. We’re now at a point where we can have legitimate targets to do with climate science.”

The report contains several recommendations, including that companies join corporate renewables groups like the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA) or RE100, which help managers work through the complexities of buying solar and wind power for the first time. Moreover, Kelly wants to see more states facilitate renewable production through portfolio standards that require utilities to invest in solar and wind (29 states have them so far). That would make it easier and cheaper for companies to buy clean energy if that’s what they want to do, she says.

“We should strengthen the renewables available in all 50 states, and deeply invest in research around battery storage and smart grids. The U.S. has invested in major public works in the past, like trains and highways. We need to do the same with modernizing the grid,” Kelly says.

This week, we learned what planning one of New York’s biggest fashion events really involves, how the ACLU’s meticulous preparation for a Trump presidency pushed the organization to the forefront of the resistance, and what Facebook looks for in its hires—from interns to product managers.

These are the stories you loved in Leadership for the week of April 30:

1. I’m Facebook’s Head Of People—Here’s What We’re Hiring For Right Now (And Why)

Lori Goler has been with Facebook since 2008. Over the years, she’s seen the company grow from just a few hundred employees to an organization of some 17,000 that’s ranked among the best places to work. This week Goler shared what the tech giant is looking for right now in all its potential new hires, whether a software engineer in New York or a financial accountant in Dublin.

2. The Networking Secret That Only Requires Writing Four Emails A Year

How do you maintain a strong network during all the times when you don’t really need it? As soon as your job search kicks into gear, it can seem a little awkward to just start calling loose connections out of the blue for coffee. Etsy’s Jason Shen has a solution. Here’s his technique for keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances by writing no more than four long-form emails a year.

3. I’ve Planned The Met Gala For The Last 8 Years, Here’s What I’ve Learned

As far as job stress goes, planning the Met Gala is pretty high up there. The star-studded New York event is one of the biggest evenings in fashion, and as a special projects consultant for Vogue, Sylvana Durrett is responsible for it all—from negotiating Rihanna’s performance fee to planning seating arrangements with her boss, Anna Wintour. Durrett shares how she does it all while maintaining her calm and juggling a super-busy life.

4. What To Do When Your Boss Doesn’t Like You Anymore

Your relationship with your boss doesn’t have to be so anxiety inducing. Like all relationships, it’s bound to go through ups and downs; the ups can make you feel on top of the world, but the downs can leave you paranoid about your job security. Psychologist Art Markman explains why that dynamic is totally normal—and what to do when you suspect that it really does need a major repair.

5. How The ACLU Is Leading The Resistance

When President Donald Trump issued an executive order late on Friday, January 27, 2017, barring citizens of several Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S., the American Civil Liberties Union was ready. Less than 12 hours later, lawyers for the nonprofit filed a lawsuit to block the order. One reason the ACLU was able to take such swift—and ultimately successful—action was because it had been preparing for months. In an exclusive look inside the organization, Fast Company‘s Kathleen Davis explores one of the most remarkable management stories of the Trump era so far.

WHAT: Nacido de Neuvo, an extremely timely short film about a border patrol agent and an illegal immigrant.

WHO: Los Angeles-based director Evan Kaufmann.

WHY WE CARE: “This whole situation seems very black-and-white,” utters a commanding border patrol officer near the end of this short film. It couldn’t be further from the truth–and that’s the point. Nacido de Neuvo, which translates to “born again,” exists inside the gray areas of America’s pressure-cooker immigration situation. It’s about as subtle as a chainsaw, but Nacido de Neuvo explores the human toll of border enforcement in a way that treats those on both sides respectfully.

The film instantly ground us in the moment, with a TV in the background airing footage of Trump at a rally, leading his followers in a chant about building a wall. But while Nacido de Neuvo is clearly a narrative response to Trump’s election, the immigration story it tells is not as simple as “open borders are good; the wall is bad.” It starts with white, semi-rookie border patrol agent Garrett getting partnered up with veteran Hispanic agent Ramon, who is so hardened by his years of duty that he’s completely unmoved hearing that a 12-year old girl has just been killed in a shootout while crossing the border. Eventually, the two run into some illegals, and a simple arrest is complicated by a pregnant woman giving chase. By the time the situation is resolved, tragically, viewers will have a lot to think about.

Nacido de Neuvo is powerful, extremely timely work from an up-and-comer to watch. According to Short of the Week, Kaufmann is currently working on a feature-length film in the same vein, so hopefully, we’ll be seeing more from him soon.

If you’ve ever Googled “diversity in tech,” you’ll get a smattering of headlines such as these:

• Tech Has A Diversity Problem, And That Problem Is Culture
• Tech Has More Of An Exclusion Problem Than A Culture Problem
• What If Tech’s Biggest Diversity Problem Is Silicon Valley Itself?
• Surprise! Industry Events Still Haven’t Fixed Tech’s Diversity Problems

Who’s Fixing Tech’s Diversity Problems?

Imagine how entangled this issue can be if there’s this level of contradiction and questioning in the headlines. “It took just minutes of searching to come up with these titles and more. What’s happened with this conversation? It’s supposed to be about people and something good. In many ways it’s become a bastardized, sticky conversation to have,” says Damien Hooper-Campbell, eBay’s first chief diversity officer.

“Add in the backdrop of the United States and the racially polarizing acts that we’re seeing happening across all of our cities. Add in the backdrop of what’s happening in the U.K. with Brexit. Add in the backdrop of what’s happening in Germany with refugees. This has not become the most fun discussion to have,” Hooper-Campbell concludes. But, he says, “It’s not for lack of trying to start the conversation.” The conversation just needs to evolve. Here’s his take on how.

Redrawing The Circle Of Trust

The intensity and complexity of the issues involved in conversations around diversity and inclusion has sent the tech sector in a number of different directions in search of meaningful change. Hooper-Campbell has noted some common patterns, from hiring diversity and inclusion leaders like himself to tracking demographic data and rolling out formal training programs. It’s not that Hooper-Campbell believes these investments of money, resources, and time is ineffectual—it’s just usually that they’re often applied in a silo without enough consideration of the human element.

To address that problem, Hooper-Campell brings up the phrase “circle of trust,” first popularized by Robert De Niro’s character in Meet the Parents. As a reminder, De Niro plays the cynical father—and former CIA agent—who believes no one is good enough for his daughter. “The boyfriend, played by Ben Stiller, is desperately trying to make a good impression, but he stumbles all over himself. The most infamous scene is when Robert De Niro corners him and introduces the ‘circle of trust’ concept,” says Hooper-Campbell. “He talks about how his entire family is in it, how he knows Ben Stiller is trying to get in the circle and that he’s watching him.”

Related:How These Seven Tech Leaders Are Tackling Diversity In 2017

“Most of the time, we don’t know each other,” Hooper-Campell explains. “Whether it’s at conference, at a company that skyrockets from 20 to 2,000 people, or on a commuter train, we are often in environments where we see but don’t know each other.”

As he sees it, the goal for companies is to draw wider circles of trust—faster. “The challenge is that even among those we see every day—for hours and hours at a time —we don’t get beyond those surface-level conversations. Even among those we know, we choose not to dive deeper when we’re at work.”

To change that, Hooper-Campbell believes, “We need to do what we very rarely do as human beings when we first meet each other. We need to be okay being politically incorrect for the moment as long as we’ve established an assumption of good intent. That allows us to get our real views out there and gives us permission to call BS when we see it.” Being in the circle of trust is like being in the exit row on a plane. You need verbal confirmation before proceeding.

Define Diversity And Inclusion—But Parse Them First

As Hooper-Campbell sees it, the point of the circle of trust is to quickly create an environment that is conducive and safe for open conversations about diversity and inclusion. And to do that, you first have to define the topic in your own terms: What does diversity actually mean to you?

It doesn’t have to be perfect prose—the process of sharing definitions is what’s powerful. “What I’m not looking for is what it means as defined by the dictionary. Or what it means as defined by what you think people want to hear or what the media says,” says Hooper-Campbell. “What does it actually mean in your world? That’s where I want you want to start.”

In group exercises, Hooper-Campbell suggests asking for volunteers to share their answers to that question. Let there be moments of silence, if they’re needed. As the leader, give your definition, too, but not before a handful of your people do. The answers will vary, but by starting diversity conversations this way, Hooper-Campbell has noticed that, at least conceptually, most us get what diversity means. In reality, “it’s everything,” he says. But often in the workplace, “this conversation narrows to be about only race and gender. While, yes, race and gender are very important aspects, diversity goes well beyond them. It absolutely should include them, but goes even further into hundreds of attributes.”

The next step, he suggests, is to define the other word: inclusion. “What does this word actually mean?” Hooper-Campbell asks his teams. “Again, I don’t want you to do what we typically do, which is just define ‘inclusion.’ Forget Merriam-Webster.” After organizing participants into pairs, he then prompts them to ask each other: “Dial back in your own life to a personal event when you felt excluded—regardless of when or why.”

“Now these conversations don’t have to be about race or gender or age or sexual orientation, but they absolutely can be—no judgment here,” says Hooper-Campbell. “This could be from when you were 4 years old and you didn’t get picked for the kickball team. This could be from earlier today when you realized that people at your company held a meeting and didn’t invite you. It doesn’t matter what it is. I just want you to talk openly and candidly with the person across from you about a time in your life when you felt excluded.” He adds, “Before you finish, come up with a couple of adjectives that describe how you felt at that moment. Go!”

Here’s an example of the types of responses Hooper-Campbell has heard:

I was fat as a kid. The things that I thought were important, like school, weren’t what others thought were important, like sports. The majority didn’t care about what I did. Whatever everyone thought was important was how people judged popularity. That was a multi-decade recurring theme for me. My adjectives are “loser” and “lonely.”

What’s Being Shared, What’s Being Said

The experiences shared through these exercises can bring teams together, says Hooper-Campbell. And in the process, they can make diversity and inclusion feel personal—not like an impersonal corporate initiative. Suddenly the stories that get voiced belong to the people you see often. It’s a step toward truly knowing them—and making them feel welcome.

But Hooper-Campbell also notes that it’s a crucial step toward getting more people involved in the conversation on, and commitment to, diversity and inclusion. While an experience of being overweight may never be the same experience as being excluded because of your skin color or your gender, it should help all of us get a bit closer to making “inclusion” less of a buzzword and more of a human experience.

Related:Tech Founders Still Don’t Believe Diversity Can Boost The Bottom Line 

“The point of this is there are people who are working for you right now, or are trying to work for your company, who feel this way,” says Hooper-Campbell. “If you ask for a show of hands of those who have ever felt excluded, you’ll see many, many more. Nearly every person has felt excluded at least once in their life.”

Then, after this exercise, Hooper-Campbell asks a final question: “How many of you have ever been responsible—intentionally or unintentionally—for excluding someone else? If people are really in the circle of trust, you’ll see just as many hands go up.”

A version of this article originally appeared on First Round Review and is adapted with permission.

During the second episode of Cha-Ching, a cartoon aiming to be the Schoolhouse Rock! of financial literacy, a young kid named Zul watches an ad for a remote control car on TV and decides he wants one. But when he asks his parents to get it for him, they say no. He has to somehow earn the money instead.

For most kids, this begs an obvious question: Why? After all, for them, money can be a pretty abstract thing—parents have it, kids don’t—but there’s little explanation as to where it comes from and what limits it.

Cue the omniscient rock-and-roll narrator, who breaks into song, leading Zul through the sort of only-in-cartoons highlight reel that first annotates every day items around the house with price tags, then shows his parents going to work to receive a paycheck with its own dollar signs, and brings it all home with some catchy verses. “I see an add on the TV / I want one of those cars in green / I see a tag on the box now / It reminds me that things ain’t free.” Lest viewers lose focus, the lesson is re-stated often in the chorus: “It’s got to be earned!” (That’s also the title of the episode.)

Not-so-spoiler alert: Zul totally earns the car by selling people apples already growing in his backyard. But the power of earning is just one economic principle being tackled in Cha-Ching. Each three-minute episode is arranged around one of four key themes: earn, save, spend, and donate. The goal, according to creator Alice Wilder, is to teach kids new ways to think about money, which will hopefully better prepare them for the future.

“Kids think they know certain things, but they don’t fully understand them because they don’t fully see them,” says Wilder, who is known for developing shows like Nickelodeon’s Blues Clues, which has been proven to develop critical thinking skill for kindergarten readiness, and PBS’s Super Why!, which helps address literacy issues for children with learning gaps. The issue is that most children are literal-minded, which makes it hard to grasp abstract ideas. “And for me as an educator, the beauty of media is that you can take concepts that are really invisible and make them visible,” she says.

In this case, however, Cha-Ching isn’t airing on a network. It’s part of a $3 million effort called the Cha-Ching Money Smart Kids program, which is now rolling out for free online and in grade-school classrooms around the country, complete with additional activity guides so parents can participate. The effort was developed by the Jackson Charitable Foundation to advance financial knowledge in partnership with interactive content provider Discovery Education and Junior Achievement USA, which works with schools to develop and deliver similar-themed teachings.

Through those partners, the foundation projects being able to reach roughly 1 million kids this year alone. To attract attention, they’re airing a public service announcement on the Discovery Family channel to re-direct viewers to available web materials. Junior Achievement is incorporating the effort directly into the third-grade curriculum at 15,000 schools.

If today’s youngsters are anything like the generation before them, they could certainly use some money management lessons. Baby Boomers are facing a retirement crisis, in part because they lived through an era where defined pension plans disappeared, only to underinvest in their individual 401Ks. “For the average American family social security only replaces 40% of their pre-retirement income,” says Barry Stowe, board chair at Jackson Charitable Foundation. “Almost anybody will tell you that you need to plan such that you are replacing at least 70% of your pre-retirement income in order to maintain a reasonable lifestyle. A huge chunk of Americans are not going to be able to do that.”

While Stowe says that Jackson has a handful of programs designed to address that immediate disparity he decided it’d be far more efficient in the long term to correct the thinking behind it, by reaching the next generation before they make such mistakes. “There is a new generation coming up and maybe we can get to some of these kids so that they will start doing things properly from the very beginning and won’t end up in this mess,” he says. “So that’s really the mindset. Let’s get to them. Let’s make sure that this never happens again.”

Cha-Ching has already seen success in Asia, where the foundation designed a different version to address issues of the rising middle class in the region. Those shows were longer and aired on the Cartoon Network in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Taiwan. All told, it reached 34 million households. There was also a school component, which reached 250,000 kids directly.

Of course, there’s a difference between being exposed to something and actually retaining it. To be effective, such programs have to be designed in a way that creates measurable change, something the U.S. school-based programs will be able to track by watching student’s in-classroom learning curves. That’s where Wilder comes in. She has a doctorate in educational psychology from Teachers College at Columbia University that includes the study of instructional systems design thinking—basically the science of how lessons can be designed in a way that allows kids to learn and retain them.

In her view, each episode had to be reverse engineered. The idea was to start with a takeaway in mind and then build toward it. “What do we want the impact of this story to be on kids’ lives?” she asks. “Once we know [that], we can go and design stories.” To that end, before ever designing the show Wilder first interviewed hundreds of kids to figure out their existing preconceptions around money and what questions they often struggled with. That helped shape her earn, save, spend, and donate framework, with each principle anchoring two episodes in the 12 part series.

But this isn’t really a financial advice cartoon. The lessons themselves are extremely broad, seeking to boost understanding about things like trade-offs and opportunity cost, rather than offering a clear path to riches and retirement. That includes differentiating between things like needs and wants, learning about the power of delayed gratification, and thinking about what-if scenarios (The titles for episodes 5 and 6: “Saving For Success” and “Just in Case”).

“What you do with your money is a personal experience, so it was never our intention to put our values on kids or families,” says Wilder. “It was always our intention to give kids and families the information that they need in order to fulfill their own values and goals”—and to provide conversation starters for adults. “Parents have a lot of these thoughts and ideas in their heads but they don’t necessarily know that that they need to talk aloud in order for kids to think about or the choices that they make,” she adds.

Catchy educational kids’ programming can be great at bridging that gap. In fact, new research by economists with Wellesley College and University of Maryland shows that, for decades, kids who watched Sesame Street–especially those in low-income homes–ended up more prepared for school than those who didn’t. (Exposure rates can be mapped through correlation with broadcast signal strength and coverage areas.) Another study, by the Children’s Media Lab at University of Pennsylvania shows that kids began to demonstrate an improvement in literacy after viewing just a few episodes of the PBS show Super Why!, and those who watched longer far outperformed their peers, and retained those gains over time.

For her part, Wilder continues to run the show’s content past kids in all stages of production to ensure the end result is fun and entertaining. She considers this her way to practically provide the same sort of gut-check that occurred in Big, that late-‘80s Tom Hanks movie in which a kid accidentally becomes trapped in the body of a toy company executive. “I wanted to be the adult in the room that thought like a kid and said, ‘What’s so fun about that?’” she says. “My goal and desire is to give kids a voice in everything we do.”

What if I told you the best way to give back to local communities and create a positive impact is by having the time of your life when you travel? Simply by making different choices–better choices–your next journey can help propel local economic growth, preserve natural resources and protect local communities. These “choices” don’t involve turning your trip into a volunteer expedition or even donating to charities (though definitely do those, as well). Instead, they’re about seeking experiences, companies, and destinations that positively affect local people.

Travel has the power to be the greatest source of economic transformation this world has ever seen. In the United States, one out of every nine jobs depends on travel and tourism. Globally, the travel and tourism sector supports 292 million employees, and the industry’s contribution to the world economy continues to rise every year, currently, it’s a $7.6 trillion dollar business, accounting for 10.2% of world GDP.

The problem is that for every $100 spent in tourism dollars, just $5 stays within the local economy where the tourism occurs. Sure, the last resort you stayed at may have showcased its commitment to sustainability by giving you the option to reuse your towels, but did you consider who benefited from the dollars you spent on your room? Or which natural resources may have been sacrificed in the process of its construction?

Next week marks the 34th annual National Travel and Tourism Week, a week that’s meant to celebrate what travel means to American jobs, our economic growth, and personal well-being. I say it’s the perfect time to do some self-reflection about your travel decisions, and book yourself some well-deserved time away. This, essentially, is what it means to travel better, and so I’m calling it the Travel Better Pledge. It’s a principle I’ve believed in since founding my company, G Adventures, 27 years ago. The goal is to inspire business and leisure travelers alike to make conscious choices that benefit the communities they visit, the planet–and themselves.

When you make choices based on these values, two things happen. The first is that you become an agent of social change, a conscious tourist whose decisions serve to enrich–not exploit–the local community and environment. The second is that you have more authentic and interesting experiences, deepen your understanding of new cultures and, at least in my experience, have the time of your life.

1: Do Your Homework

Before you go anywhere, read up on local traditions, customs and culture, and do your best to learn a few new words in the local language. Showing respect goes a long way, and helps you better immerse yourself in new cultures.

2: Go Where The Journey Takes You

When you arrive, open yourself up to new experiences you encounter along the way, the type of things you won’t find in the guidebooks. Ask the people you encounter for recommendations, emphasizing that you want to go where they go for dinner, not where the tourists go.

3: Spread the wealth

Whether you’re staying at a local hotel or a chain resort, take time to get out and explore. Visit different markets, eat at a new restaurant every day, and take local taxis rather than booking a corporate car service. I once bought a beautiful handmade desk from an artisan I encountered while exploring the Silk Road in Northern Pakistan. He told me it cost $200 to ship to Karachi, so I gave him $400 to make a desk and ship it to me. Two years later, I got a call from customs that a crate arrived for me at the airport. Today, that desk sits in my home office and remains one of my favorite pieces of furniture.

4: Choose your activities wisely

When it comes to booking activities, seek those that help improve the lives of local families, commit to environmental sustainability and help support local customs and cultures. Animal welfare should also be a consideration. Travel can be an amazing way to see and experience wildlife but focus on companies and vendors that prioritize animal rights.

5: Support social enterprises

For experiences, hotels and dining options, keep an eye out for social enterprises–like Bike With Purpose in Belize or The Chai Lai Orchid in Thailand–that offer amazing, immersive experiences and benefit the local people. In Cambodia, I always recommend the New Hope Vocational Training Restaurant; it’s one of the best meals you can find in Siem Reap and the proceeds support hospitality training programs for underserved people, including youth that often go on to even bigger jobs in the industry.

6: Avoid all-inclusive hotels

Massive all-inclusive resorts tend to consume massive amounts of resources. Plus, they cut you off from truly experiencing the local culture. Seek hotels that allow you to immerse yourself in the destination and that help support the local economy. One of my favorite spots is Café Cultura, a local boutique hotel in Quito, Ecuador that makes you feel like you stepped inside a Spanish painting.

7: Dine with a local

Make it a point to have at least one meal with a local person. Pick up the bill, and be prepared for the best stories of your trip. You may just make a meaningful connection that lasts well beyond the visit.

Bruce Poon Tip (@brucepoontip) is the founder of G Adventures, an adventure travel company. He is also the New York Times-bestselling author of Looptail: How One Company Changed the World by Reinventing Business. He has spoken at the United Nations and World Bank, presented at the headquarters of Apple and Google, and delivered keynotes at TED events and leading entrepreneurship conferences. In 2012, Tip was inducted into the Social Venture Network Hall of Fame.

If you live in Las Vegas, El Paso, or Louisville, there’s a particularly good chance that your job could be taken by a robot in the next two decades.

Using data from a 2013 Oxford study that found that nearly half of American jobs are at risk from automation–from truck driving and telemarketing to legal assistants–a new study maps out which cities are likely to lose the most jobs. (The next phase of the research will look at how the risk affects people differently based on age, race, educational level, and other demographic factors, and will break down data further by ZIP code).

Researchers at the Institute for Spatial Economic Analysis at the University of Redlands wanted to make the risk tangible and understandable through the new study.

“If I tell you that 50% of the jobs in the United States are at risk from automation right now, that’s a very different idea than saying, ‘Hey, here in San Bernardino, we’re facing x-percent automation risk,” Johannes Moenius, the institute’s director, tells Fast Company. “People know the social fabric, they know the types of jobs that exist here. Then it hits home, and people understand we need to do something. We can’t just wait for this to happen.”

While the last wave of automation took away some middle-class work–particularly factory and mining jobs–the current wave of automation will hit lower-income jobs hardest. Robots are already beginning to brew coffee, flip burgers, and bake pizza. Agricultural robots can pick strawberries and weed carrot fields. As many as 1.7 million truck driver could be replaced by self-driving trucks, as one of the early casualties of new automation.

“What we’re seeing is this wave of automation is going to specifically affect the less educated,” Moenius says. “There are lots and lots of them. Possibilities that we’ve thought about in recent years are now hitting the range where they become economically feasible. It’s just so incredibly fast, and it’s affecting so many jobs at a time.”

Just because the technology exists doesn’t guarantee that it will be adopted, but the map looks at what is possible. “We have to be very clear, being at risk of automation doesn’t mean that a job necessarily gets automated,” he says. “I can’t imagine that we suddenly have all poker dealers or all waiters suddenly replaced by robots. High-end restaurants will still have waiters because that’s part of the experience. But this tells you what’s the technical possibility. And specifically on the lower end of the food chain, whatever’s going to be possible to get automated, will get automated.”

The study maps the Oxford research about which jobs are most at risk onto employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 100 metropolitan areas in the U.S. Bubbles that are more red indicate a higher share of jobs at risk; the size of each bubble indicates how many workers were employed in 2016. In the Las Vegas metropolitan area, 65.2% of jobs are at risk. El Paso follows at 63.9%.

Three categories of jobs make up around half of the possible losses in the largest metropolitan areas: office and administrative support, food preparation and serving, and sales-related jobs. In certain areas, such as Riverside, California and Louisville, transportation jobs also make up a large portion of the losses.

Fighting automation won’t work, Moenius says. “If we don’t automate, China will do it for us, and we’ll have wage-reversal.” Instead, governments, industries, and educational institutions should be thinking about how to prepare, including retraining programs.

“I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all solution to this,” he says. “We really believe that each city will have to find its own way.” As cities rethink employment, they will also likely have to rethink land use. Moenius points out that in his own area, Southern California’s Inland Empire, people live next to the warehouses and freeways that support a logistics economy; as work shifts, that layout should also change.

If your own job is at risk (this handy calculator will help you understand), you can work on learning new skills. “Initiatives that try to foster stem education really go in the right direction, because if you speak math then you can learn how to deal with problems that we don’t even know are problems yet,” he says. “Problem-solving, spatial thinking, having an understanding of multidisciplinary issues–these are things that everyone who has to make a decision of what I should be educated in now [should think about].”

It is a criminal offense for Ivanka Trump to discuss trade in the White House.

The law forbids employees within the executive branch from participating in matters that affect their own financial interests. Since Ivanka still has full ownership of her brand, which imports clothes and shoes from other countries, it is illegal for her to discuss anything related to the apparel import business.

That includes a wide set of issues. She’ll have to excuse herself from any conversation involving trade, the proposed tax on goods imported into the country, and policies that aim to keep clothing manufacturing jobs here in the United States.

“The problem is that trade agreements cover a whole range of products,” says Richard Painter, a law professor and an ethics adviser to President George W. Bush.

In late March, Ivanka said that she would become an official government employee, serving as an unpaid adviser to her father in the White House. In her statement, she explained that she would be “subject to all of the same rules as other federal employees.”

Earlier in the year, she said that she would step away from running her own fashion brand, as well as from her management role at the Trump Organization. But she and her other family members still own the business. Her husband, Jared Kushner, who is also an official government employee, is bound by the same rules as she is, since the law applies not only to one’s own business but to their spouse’s.

This places Ivanka in a tricky position, one that even Donald Trump is not subject to, since the president does not have to abide by the rules of other White House employees. “This is a statute that applies to everybody in the executive branch but the president and vice president,” says Painter says.

Painter says that Ivanka has a good lawyer, Jamie Gorelick, who will advise her to stay clear of conversations that put her in danger of breaking the law. “The statute says you cannot participate personally and substantially in the matter,” Painter says. “Here, the ‘matter’ is clothing and trade with China. If trade comes up, it gets risky if she does much more than just sit there and say nothing.”

Of course, as the New York Times points out, Ivanka spends a lot of time in private with her father, discussing issues in the Oval Office with the doors closed. Under these circumstances, it’s unclear how Ivanka might influence national issues in ways that serve her own financial interests. If someone in the White House leaked that Ivanka or her husband were participating in any such discussions, the Department of Justice could get involved to investigate if a crime was committed.

Shortly before her father’s inauguration, Ivanka wrote a Facebook post saying that she wanted to be a force for good in the administration. She was particularly keen to focus her energies on the areas she was most passionate about, which she listed as, “the education and empowerment of women and girls; leveling the playing field for female entrepreneurs and job creators, and unleashing the potential of women in the workplace.” She just published a book entitled Women Who Work, in which she repeatedly refers to herself as a champion for working women.

Issues relating to trade will have a direct impact on a broad swath of the population, including women. Overseas, women often far outnumber men on labor-intensive factory lines. Here in the United States, trade discussions will have a big impact on the price of goods sold in stores. If her father passes the Border Adjustment Tax that will levy a tariff of up to 30% on products imported from overseas, the price of everything from T-shirts to fruit will go up, impacting families across the country. Women, who still earn 17% less than men for the same work, will be more adversely affected by these new price tags.

More broadly, Donald Trump campaigned on a platform of bringing jobs to America. If he follows through on these promises, White House policy discussions could influence whether the new jobs created impact the female workforce.

Painter points out that these are all areas where Ivanka–a woman in a male-dominated administration–could play an important role. But her current conflicts of interest make this impossible. “She’s an excellent person to take the lead on dealing with these sweatshops overseas and fair trade, which is something that Donald Trump campaigned on,” says Painter. “She can’t because she’s not willing to sell the clothing line.”

After many years studying hundreds of babies born on Kauai, Hawaii, beginning in 1955, psychologists Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith discovered something surprising. Of the children deemed “at risk” due to their family environments, a sizable minority exhibited no negative effects. Even more astounding, most of this “vulnerable but invincible” group had overcome these obstacles by their mid-30s. Instead of succumbing to delinquency, academic difficulties, and health problems, they’d “bounced back” from tremendous adversity. In the decades that followed, researchers like Norman Garmezy created a new field of study around the phenomenon, which they called “resilience.”

In business today, the term retains its developmental psychology origins; it’s still largely considered an individual trait. But if you’re looking to build resilient teams or entire organizations, it’s the resilience of all those relationships that may matter even more. After all, you can hire as many resilient leaders as you like, but they can quit and go be resilient someplace else.

Related: The Resilience Habit I Taught Thousands Of Army Drill Sergeants

Why Resilient Leaders Aren’t Enough

In professional workshops, resilience experts like to mention the British explorer Ernest Shackleton who, on his third expedition to the Antarctic, in 1915, had to abandon his ship—the Endurance—when it became trapped in the ice. And sure enough, it’s a great tale of actual endurance: Shackleton’s persistence and courage in the face of overwhelming odds ensured all crew members got home safely. Unfortunately, the story is a red herring for the way team resilience actually works today.

It’s no surprise that there’s a strong correlation between effective leadership and the characteristics common among resilient individuals—which include self-reliance, an internal locus of control, a growth mind-set, strong problem-solving abilities, and good interpersonal skills. Indeed, resilience experts at Sloan Group International reported in a recent presentation that, based on the available research, “people who self-select into a leadership role tend to have a higher ability to deal with stress and hold a high amount of resilience.” Vindication for the Shackleton model, right?

Sure, but that model may deliver fewer returns as the workplace evolves. The more distributed leadership becomes, and the more collaboratively teams are asked to work, the fewer chances there are for Shackletons to come along and save the day when things go awry. But all isn’t lost; it simply means shifting our focus from developing resilient leaders toward developing collectively resilient groups.

How? The first step is to start thinking of resilience more as a process than as an attribute or an outcome. We already know that resilience is predicated on a combination of internal assets and external resources—which makes it highly contextual. Unfortunately, you can never arm yourself ahead of time with a handy checklist of all the external stressors you’re likely to experience before entering a tough situation.

Nor has any research we’ve read detailed the precise ratio between an person’s temperamental qualities and the magnitude of environmental stressors against which they’re most resilient. As researchers Fergus and Zimmerman put it in a 2005 paper in the Annual Review of Health, all this “makes it difficult to identify universal promotive factors and raises concerns that asset lists may be interpreted to operate in the same manner for all groups, all contexts, or all outcomes.” Or in plain English: It depends.

Related: 7 Habits Of Highly Resilient People

Riding The Heat Curve

So where does this leave your team? Instead of focusing just on each team member’s individual skills and qualities, it’s more helpful to pay attention to how much pressure the whole group is facing. Keep piling on ever bigger sales targets or changing mandates from on high, and eventually, even the most resilient individual is likely to break down. In our new book, we refer to this experience as a “heat curve,” which models what tends to happen as environmental stressors intensify.

Here are three practical approaches to help increase team resilience:

1. Get to know each other before you try to work together. Make sure each person knows everyone else in the team as a person. We’ve seen even the most combative groups (including labor-management relationships) achieve amazing performance and ride the heat curve higher together when people share something personal and meaningful about themselves—not just their names, ranks, and years on the job. It’s amazing how simple and effective it can be to go one step beyond the usual icebreaker.

2. Opt for transparency. The economist Joseph Stiglitz once pointed out that “It’s trust, not money, that makes the world go around.” It’s easier to talk about building a culture of trust than to create one. But one good place to start is just by sharing as much as you know as soon as you know it with the entire group. Without this transparency, we tend to doubt each other’s motives. Team members need to know they’ll be supported when they take risks in uncertain circumstances—especially when things don’t go as planned.

3. Don’t waste time moving from talk to action. As Doug Conant, the former CEO of Campbell Soup, once said, “You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into.” Evidence creates beliefs. Which is why any effective leadership—formal or informal—is all about the things you do, not what you say. Instead of team members hearing that management empathizes with their challenges, their collective resilience depends more on actually getting the resources to overcome them.

Bottom line: Most of the time, we endure best when we endure together.

Michael Papanek and Liz Alexander are coauthors ofFrom Breakdown to Breakthrough: Forging Resilient Business Relationships in the Heat of Change.