Though he didn’t understand the significance of it during his childhood, Bob McKinnon’s hometown of Chelsea, Massachusetts was also where Horatio Alger–19th-century spinner of the rags-to-riches tales that built the sentimental backbone of the American Dream–was born. McKinnon grew up the son of a single mother, a bartender who relocated the family to a rural Pennsylvania trailer park after meeting and marrying a truck driver. His family was on food stamps and Medicaid. His brother became a factory worker; his sister a truck driver. McKinnon was the only one of his family to go to college. After a successful career in marketing, he founded GALEWiLL, a nonprofit organization that focuses on creating solutions to social issues and inequities.
That his own life story should closely ascribe to the structure of a modern-day Horatio Alger story is not lost on McKinnon. “I went through urban poverty and rural poverty, but I was really fortunate and worked hard and was met with success on a whole lot of levels,” McKinnon tells Fast Company. “And of course, going through this, you’re confronted with all these stories about the American Dream and how nothing holds anyone back. But you also stop and reflect and think: Numerically, I’m not supposed to be where I am right now.”
Cresting the heights of the American Dream is, in the popular imagination, often seen as a matter of brute-force bootstrapping: Who can work the hardest to overcome their odds? Who can persevere in the face of the harshest adversity? The roles of luck, or circumstance, or the invisible marionette strings of the job market and the economy are never considered, McKinnon says. Success in America is a marketed as a man-made phenomenon.
A new project from GALEWiLL and funded by the Ford Foundation, called the Your American Dream Score, deflates that idea that success–or lack thereof–is purely one’s own doing. The calculator is a part of a larger initiative, Moving Up: The Truth About Getting Ahead In America, which comprehensively examines the factors that contribute to mobility in America, and why changing one’s circumstances is far more difficult than the folklore leads up to believe (Fast Company has syndicated some of Moving Up’s articles). The reasons are myriad: wide disparities in educational quality, access to resources like healthy food, and social and familial support are just a slice. But too often, McKinnon says, when someone “makes it out”–like him–the only reason offered up is: “He worked hard.” When someone doesn’t make it out, the reason is: “He didn’t work hard enough.”
Using the Your American Dream Score, you see how many factors beyond the self-play into one’s outcomes. The five-minute-long quiz, developed by the firm Sol Design, first asks you to enter your demographic information, then moves into more personal questions: What personality traits would your friends ascribe to you? What was your family situation growing up? How has your health been your whole life? How about your friendships? Have you received government benefits?
You’re then given a score out of 100, with scores starting at 45 to reflect a baseline of individual effort. “We realized if we did not have that floor some might feel as if their own efforts were being discounted,” McKinnon says. If you score less than 53, that means you have all factors working in your favor and have less to overcome; 54-65, the majority of factors have been on your side; 66-79, you’ve had more working against than for you; 80 and above, you’ve been dealt a tough hand.
By getting people to think more holistically about the factors that contribute to success, McKinnon wants to break down what he sees as the two most harmful fallouts of the self-made-person mythology that still persists in America. “On the one hand, you have this idea of the American Dream, and that’s important to have in a way because it gives people hope,” McKinnon says. “But then I started wondering: Is it actually limiting?” Take a school that’s clearly underperforming, McKinnon says. “Instead of fixing the school, people can point to the two kids that made it out and say: Why doesn’t everyone work as hard as they do?”
And then there’s the fact often, people who “make it” forget the path they took to arrive where they are now. This phenomenon is called fundamental attribution bias, and it’s perhaps best explained by a 2012 study done by Paul Piff, a researcher at UC Berkeley who set up a rigged game of Monopoly, in which one player–determined by a coin flip–started out with twice the money as the other, and got to drive a model Rolls Royce around the board, while the opponent was relegated to an old shoe. While the player who started out with the most money invariably won the game, they never, Piff found, attributed their victory to their initial advantage–instead, they pointed to their superior strategy or skill.
This type of reasoning infects the American understanding of success, and McKinnon wants to put an end to it. “There’s a growing body of research that suggests that when people reflect in a more nuanced way on their own journey or other people’s, they become more grateful for the things that have helped them, they become more supportive of those who are struggling, and they more actively engage in ways to help people,” McKinnon says. By being more upfront about the substantial difference external factors make–especially those like food stamps and housing assistance, which people often avoid discussion out of fear of stigma–we can, McKinnon says, begin to turn more attention to supporting those very systems that make mobility possible.
Part of the Your American Dream Score’s efficacy, McKinnon says, will lie in its reach–Moving Up partnered with WNET, the flagship station of PBS which will host Your American Dream Score through its Chasing the Dream initiative, and is engaging celebrities and business leaders to ensure the web platform is publicized in all communities in America, where the tool can offer perspective on people’s circumstances. But the calculator also tells users what they can do with that perspective: At the end of the quiz, users are directed to a number of resources for support and further information, as well as volunteer opportunities and prompts to thank people in their lives. The Moving Up team will also be releasing a discussion guide for schools and other organizations to discuss the factors in a structured way.
Through getting that conversation going, McKinnon hopes to “begin to figure out how we can make more investments in these tailwinds–these things that we know do help people move forward,” he says. “But it has to start with figuring out how we can tell the story better.”
You could call last week’s WannaCry ransomware attacks a perfect storm. But maybe we shouldn’t pin the label “perfect” on something that owed so much to a confluence of venality, incompetence, bad decision-making, and wrongheadedness.
Also known by other names such as “WannaCrypt,” these assaults on Windows PCs–which encrypted unsuspecting users’ data, then demanded a ransom payable in bitcoin to restore access–didn’t need to happen at all. And government agencies and tech companies could overhaul policies in ways that could prevent future outbreaks.
WannaCry relies on a Windows file-sharing exploit allegedly discovered by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that allowed the code to spread across the internet from PC to PC like a worm. Once active, it could then deliver the payload to computers on the same network and randomly probe the internet for additional vulnerable machines.
The exploit was part of a set of Windows flaws that a group that calls itself the Shadow Brokers says it stole from the NSA and then tried to sell. Failing to get a buyer, the Shadow Brokers released the flaws openly in mid-April. Microsoft released comprehensive patches a month before that, clearly tipped off weeks or months in advance. But with the genie out of the bottle, criminal groups obviously set out to use the flaws to attack unpatched Windows systems.
Plenty Of Blame
Where to start pointing fingers? Pundits, ostensibly neutral news stories, and security experts are blaming individuals and organizations who didn’t install the patches. The National Health Service in the United Kingdom has outdated systems and was warned about the extent of the problems they might face months ago, for instance.
But that kind of blame displaces the structural culprits, making users the goats as usual. The NSA, FBI, and other U.S. governmental groups discover or pay to acquire zero-day attacks–ones which haven’t yet been patched by companies such as Microsoft–to use in their arsenal of spy tools. Despite official policies, these agencies don’t alert the affected software and hardware companies, thereby leaving software vulnerable rather than helping to fix it.
The fruits of that decision were laid bare here, because the NSA reportedly protected its tools so poorly that one NSA contractor apparently posted them insecurely on a server and an NSA employee allegedly copied them and brought them home.
This helps bolster those who believe no government should be trusted with retaining such secrets, because they’ll either get out–or they’ll be discovered simultaneously by malicious parties who could have been foiled had the agency worked with the companies with vulnerable products. Microsoft condemned the NSA’s practices Sunday.
Back in 2015, one of Apple’s arguments against providing a special version of iOS to the FBI that would allow that agency to attempt to break through passcode protection on an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters is that despite the FBI’s promise of keeping it secret, it would inevitably leak. Ironically, the FBI turned to an undisclosed third-party vendor that apparently had a hoarded iOS zero-day vulnerability to crack the phone.
IT Admin heads will roll this week, but on the bright side a lot of old XP machines will finally be replaced or upgraded! #wannacry#wcry
But like a lot of low-hanging malware, WannaCry relied on Microsoft’s long-running policy of releasing Windows with ports gaping open and various software services running by default, making the operating system more vulnerable to attack. That wasn’t a great idea in 1995, and has only gotten more dangerous in subsequent years. The company has become increasingly cagier, with Windows 10 considered one of its best-secured releases. (Windows 10 was unaffected by this particular exploit, and it’s robust enough that contemporary exploits largely target older versions of Windows such as Windows XP–Conficker remains one of the most active viruses–or vulnerable software like Adobe Flash.)
That original sin on Microsoft’s part continues to pay dividends for criminals and intrusive government agencies, despite the many opportunities the company had to push out updates that would have shut down unused services or guided users through figuring out what they did and didn’t need to run. The fact that services by default were accessible over the internet–even when they were intended only for local networks–remains appalling. That was bad software design when Microsoft started doing it, and it’s unconscionable that it remains true in older versions of of Windows while the company has focued on releasing newer versions of the operating system with better controls.
The Fact Of Life Known As Windows XP
Finally, the capper. Microsoft released patches for Windows in March, but the versions for Windows XP (and a few later releases) were only available to companies that had paid for special past end-of-life custom support. It took the spread of WannaCry for the company to drop that barrier and release them to all users on Friday.
Some companies, government agencies, individuals, and nonprofits lack the resources to upgrade from Windows XP to later versions, especially in the developing world, where XP was widely pirated. They may not have computers powerful enough to run more recent versions of Windows.
Even for groups like the UK’s NHS, among the world’s five biggest employers, installing patches is a disruptive process that has to be planned like a war effort to keep critical systems running, no matter how dire the risk. Security patches can break essential third-party software, so they have to be tested and rolled out.
It doesn’t have to be like this. WannaCry could increase the volume of debate about prohibiting the NSA, FBI, and other agencies from keeping exploits secret. The government claims it discloses most, but the Shadow Brokers seem to have put the lie to that. Disclosing all of them is now more clearly in America’s national security and business interests.
Microsoft can’t change the past, but it can help with the future. It could release tools for outdated systems designed to shut down services. On affected version of Windows, merely disabling a networking technology called SMB (an task beyond typical users’ abilities) would block WannaCry, for instance. On a broader scale, Microsoft could help disable the spread of worms by helping to secure the tens of millions of computers still running XP, and hundreds of millions running other versions prior to Windows 10. Most people and groups need almost no services running.
Operating-system makers such as Microsoft could also advance the fight against ransomware, which encrypts user documents, and thus doesn’t have to insinuate itself very far into an operating system to have a devastating effect. In most OSes, applications can read, write, and delete any file “owned” by a user years after ransomware began its rise. Specialized tools can restrict file access and require user permission and training, but they’re too complicated for most people. Some researchers have found effective ways to detect ransomware by identifying suspicious behavior, but these approaches aren’t integrated into anti-virus software, whether provided by an OS maker or third parties.
Blaming organizations and individuals for a combination of NSA exploit policies, Microsoft’s multi-decade security choices, and criminal deployment of leaked flaws seems rather rich. Government and operating system policy changes could have prevented or highly minimized WannaCry. Maybe the damage it’s already done will finally prompt change.
If you’ve ever tried to buy a concert ticket online, you know the feeling. It’s not easy to describe this rare blend of excitement and anxious dread: Will I score tickets to see one my favorite artists perform live in the flesh? Or will I slam into a virtual brick wall and, despite my stealthiest effort, stumble away empty-handed?
Ticketmaster knows how frustrating this experience can be and the Live Nation-owned company is desperate to find a fix. Verified Fan is an initiative launched by the ticketing giant earlier this year and is designed to thwart automated scalpers and put more tickets into the hands of actual fans. The results have been decidedly mixed, but it’s still early in Ticketmaster’s quest to solve an entrenched problem that is not just annoying for consumers–it’s expensive too.
“To some extent, the problem we’re solving is a problem of our own making,” says David Marcus, Ticketmaster’s executive vice president of music. “That problem is that we–both Ticketmaster and the industry–have for as long as we’ve been selling tickets, been selling tickets to consumers based on speed. You have a good that’s perpetually priced under market in a sales environment that rewards speed.”
This focus on timeliness has left the door wide open for ticket scalpers to devise software-based ways to compete with consumers when tickets go on sale. Tickets to see megastars like Adele, U2, and Harry Styles frequently sell out in mere seconds, only to show up on secondary websites like StubHub and SeatGeek with much bigger price tags–often thousands of dollars per seat. The use of these bots–capable of quickly snatching up tickets in bulk–is so widespread that former President Barack Obama signed a law called the Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act late last year banning the practice and making the auto-scalped tickets themselves effectively illegal under U.S. law.
Outlawing a behavior doesn’t necessarily lead to eliminating it. This is a reality the music industry knows all too well from a painful 15 years of illegal file-sharing. That’s why Ticketmaster started the Verified Fan program to speed us along toward a solution to ticket scalping bots. It’s something that, as the industry’s biggest primary ticket seller, it should have started doing years ago.
It’s not as though Ticketmaster hasn’t been trying. Scalping has intensified in recent years as a result of the convenience, speed, and easy exploitability of the internet. The company has invested heavily, Marcus says, in manpower and technology designed to thwart scalpers and bots, but as nearly any diehard Adele fan can attest, those efforts have not gone far enough.
How “Verified Fan” Status Works
“Verified Fan looks at the problem a different way,” says Marcus. “Instead of using technology to fight technology, why don’t we just change the game? Why don’t we take speed out of the equation and not make it about when somebody arrives at the front of the line, but more about who somebody is?”
The logic is simple: Verified Fan requires people to pre-register with their Ticketmaster account and request to be included in the sale ahead of time. Ticketmaster’s system uses its own proprietary algorithm–in concert with intel like past ticket purchases and social media data–to verify the identity and level of fandom of each person.
If approved, fans will receive a text message with a verification code (another step that confirms that you’re real) and an invite to buy tickets just before they go on sale. The process, complex as it may sound, is designed to throw up minor hurdles that only an ardent fan can overcome, in theory. Since the tickets are purchased by invitation, the usual swarm of bots is simply not there to spoil the fun. But even for this smaller mob of legit fans, it’s still a first come, first served race to snag a limited number of tickets.
The program has verified 1.5 million fans so far to sell tickets to more than 30 tours for acts like Mumford & Sons and Ed Sheeran. And the results are impressive. Overall, Ticketmaster reports a 90% reduction in the number of tickets sold on secondary sites when they’re sold through Verified Fan. A pair of arena shows on a recent hometown tour for Twenty-One Pilots in Columbus, Ohio, saw only 4% of their tickets wind up on secondary market ticketing sites. On the same five-venue mini-tour of Columbus, the band sold tickets to smaller venues like a small club and a two thousand seat theater–and saw virtually no scalping take place.
“In a high demand show like that, it wouldn’t be uncommon to see 30% to 50% of the tickets end up on secondary market,” Marcus says. “It’s accomplishing our goals and we’re surprised at how successful it’s been.”
To date, the feature has mostly been used for pre-sale campaigns in which a fraction of tickets is made available to fans before they’re sold to the general public. More recently, the company began expanding Verified Fan beyond the pre-sale stage, using it to sell all tickets to the general public for Harry Styles’s upcoming solo tour.
Lessons For The Future
The program hasn’t been without hiccups. Many fans of Harry Styles turned up empty-handed when the singer’s much-anticipated tour went on sale earlier this month and their verification codes didn’t work. Others simply struggled to beat out the flesh-and-blood competition for tickets. Of course, extremely high demand for a show is an obstacle that no system can easily bypass, with or without bots present. As expected, the social media response among Styles diehards was loud and fierce. In response, Ticketmaster issued an open letter to fans, clarifying that high demand was to blame and assuring Styles devotees that 95% of tickets went to fans, rather than bots. Styles’s management also asked Ticketmaster to review each purchase to ensure fairness and cancel any tickets that were purchased in violation of the rules. This was likely of little solace to some fans, frustrated at their inability to buy a ticket and cringing as they watched seats pop up on high-priced secondary sites.
Whatever may have happened with the Styles tour sale, the experience illustrated a challenge that Marcus already knew they had: Educating consumers. While Ticketmaster’s fan authentication tactics help keep the bots out, they also add a new layer of complexity and uncertainty to the experience of buying a ticket. Getting consumers comfortable with a change in an established process like this will undoubtedly take time–not to mention effort on Ticketmaster’s part.
“This is a huge paradigm shift,” Marcus says. “We have to get better at distributing the tickets and setting expectations around that.”
By necessity, the process is an evolutionary one. “Each tour, we push the envelope a little bit,” says Marcus. “We learn a little bit. And consumers learn a little bit. We’re only as a good as the last one.”
It’s a battle that Ticketmaster can’t fight alone, even if it is on the front lines. Smaller players like Eventbrite–which recently sold tickets to the Newport Folk Festival headlined by Fleet Foxes–have employed their own solutions to the scalping problem. Eventbrite uses its own on-site authentication to thwart scalpers during the purchasing process, combined with an integration with the fan-to-fan ticket exchange service Lyte to ensure secondary ticket sales are done fairly.
Artists apparently have a role to play too. Frustrated by rampant ticket scalping, country singer Eric Church recently canceled 25,000 tickets that were purchased by scalpers and then made those seats available to fans. Some people in the industry advocate raising the price of tickets in the first place to cut down on scalpers, but many managers and artists, like Church, are hesitant to exclude fans with an economic hurdle.
Streaming services might be able to help as well. Platforms like Tidal and Pandora have already experimented with concert ticket pre-sales (notably, Pandora now owns ticket seller TicketFly, which sells tickets to smaller and medium-sized shows). Spotify has been building out its own Fans First program, which offers pre-sale tickets (among other perks) to listeners who stream an artist the most. Spotify already partners with Ticketmaster for concert listing data, but a deeper integration between the two companies could help with the scalping problem by using streaming data to verify loyal fans in a more frictionless manner.
Verified Fan is still quite young and has plenty of directions in which to potentially grow. One possibility Marcus foresees is that the program could evolve into a more fully featured loyalty program that rewards fans in innovative ways. Ticketmaster’s own database of live event ticket purchasers is a pretty significant asset that can go a long way toward enabling something like that. And even in its limited, early rollout, Verified Fan has begun generating valuable data of its own.
“Getting demand data in advance is something that the concert promoters have never had,” says Marcus. “Knowing how many Harry Styles fans that want to buy tickets there are in every market before you ever put a ticket on sale has really interesting effects in terms of the way tickets get priced.”
If nothing else, maybe Harry Styles will book some extra shows the next time around.
Apart from the braggadocio and self aggrandizement we’ve come to expect, Trump’s latest boast about the classified intel he shared with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reaches into a national security danger zone. Of course, as the Washington Post report notes, a President has the authority to declassify information. But the implications of this latest round of communication calls into question the larger issue of the working culture that flourishes under a leader like Trump.
Although he’s never been professionally diagnosed as such, psychologist Dan McAdams did a thoughtful and lengthy exposition of Trump’s personality for The Atlantic that suggests he’s a narcissist. Such a personality is characterized, in part, by bragging (something Trump excels at).
In the workplace, corporate narcissism comes with an array of pros and cons. The upshot of narcissism can be a leader that’s viewed as visionary and charismatic. As Michael Maccoby observed in Harvard Business Review, “Today’s CEOs–superstars such as Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Jack Welch–hire their own publicists, write books, grant spontaneous interviews, and actively promote their personal philosophies.”
Yet as Maccoby notes, Freud shone a light on a narcissist’s dark side. Narcissists tend to emotionally isolated, highly distrustful, and rage against perceived threats. Achievements can feed feelings of grandiosity. (see this, or this, or this, or many of Trump’s other tweets).
Working For A Narcissist
Of course, a lack of trust in your boss isn’t exclusive to those working for Trump. The majority of the 33,000 people surveyed in Edelman’s “Trust Barometer” believe that their CEO was exhibiting unethical behavior. We’ve seen how leadership at Wells Fargo, Volkswagen, Uber, and others have all contributed to breeding corporate cultures that condoned unethical behaviors.
On the one hand, Trump’s administration is breeding a culture of leakers that surpasses anything we’ve seen during a presidential administration. As Jonah Goldberg, senior editor for the National Review, writes in the Chicago Tribune:
“After every meeting, participants race to their phones to put their anonymous spin on what happened. The reports read like parody. The Washington Post’s in-depth story on the Comey firing was based on the private accounts of more than 30 officials at the White House, the Justice Department, the FBI and on Capitol Hill, as well as Trump confidants and other senior Republicans.”
Goldberg chalks up part of the volume of leaks to the fact that not many who are working in the White House now have any prior experience working there which he says contributes to a “shocking lack of internal discipline and clear lines of authority.” Others may be doing it to save their credibility and careers if the whole administration takes a fall.
Alan Downs, a clinical psychologist and author of Beyond the Looking Glass, a book about corporate narcissism, believes that when a narcissist rises to leadership and earns the support of codependents, they may profess loyalty to the company but really only care about their own agendas. No matter how charismatic the leader, people eventually figure it out–and quit.
Maccoby finds that such leaders are rarely empathetic or emotionally intelligent. They aren’t into mentoring and are extremely competitive. Much of what we know about successful leadership is punctuated by the need to have soft skills to engage workers and make them loyal to their vision.
Experts offer advice for working with narcissistic bosses including stroking their ego and challenging them carefully. They also suggest staying on the boss’s good side–but know when enough is enough. Those who have bolstered Trump in the aftermath of his disclosures to the Russians haven’t exactly done this.
Dina Powell, a deputy national security adviser and H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser both called Russian leak story false. Steve Schmidt, a Republican consultant and former campaign manager for John McCain told Politico that they and others who’ve remained loyal to the President have had their credibility “completely shattered.” Schmidt said “Even people who have built up reputations for integrity over a lifetime of public service, they risk squandering it in this administration,” by “lying to the American people on issues big and small.” Their loyalty to him and its potentially negative consequences probably isn’t causing Trump to lose much sleep. We’ve seen how he thrives on pitting people against each other. But how long can a culture of every man and woman for themselves really last?
A leader is only as successful as the team he helms. One who continues to demand loyalty, yet offers no compelling reason to give it would be ousted in the corporate world. Just look at what happened to Steve Jobs. But Jobs wasn’t the President of the United States. It’s imperative that the person who runs the most powerful institution in the world needs to inspire loyalty as well as offer the same to his reports, but he’s also obligated to prove that loyalty to the institution he’s temporarily steering in the world.
Rosario Jimenez is 28, and for the past three years she has been a worker-owner of EcoMundo Cleaning, a cooperative home-cleaning business based in northern Manhattan. Before she joined the coop, “I was in a dark period of my life,” Jimenez tells Fast Company through a translator. She had moved to New York from Mexico, and was trying to take care of her three children while struggling to find a job and living in a homeless shelter. Her friend saw a flier for EcoMundo and encouraged Jimenez to apply; she did, and became a member.
Now, Jimenez spends around 30 hours cleaning per week–anywhere from three to 10 homes anywhere in the five boroughs–and takes home around $700 at the end of it. It’s enough to keep her in an apartment and her kids in school, but she says that she’s always looking to take on more hours.
A new platform called Up & Go will help her do so. Up & Go, which launched this month, is web app through which users can book cleanings with worker-owners from EcoMundo, as well as two other New York City-based coops: Brightly Cleaning Cooperative, and Cooperative Cleaning of New York. In form, it’s not unlike Handy–a streamlined, tech-enabled way to schedule and pay for a cleaning. But in principle, it’s vastly different: Up & Go retains the cooperatives’ original pricing, which is negotiated and decided by the worker-owners, the majority of whom are women from disadvantaged backgrounds. Another platform, called Coopify, which was proposed last year but not yet launched, takes a similar approach to translating worker cooperatives to the tech-enabled gig economy.
The purpose of Up & Go, says Steven Lee, a managing director of Robin Hood, New York’s largest poverty-fighting organization and one of the platform’s supporting agencies, is to bring these cooperative businesses into the 21st century and into competition with the tech companies like Handy and TaskRabbit that are transforming the residential cleaning industry.
“In a community around cooperative work, the way it’s typically done is by word-of-mouth referrals, by talking to others–what I call ‘phone-to-ear,'” Lee says. “So far, it hasn’t reached the ‘finger-to-screen’ audience–people who are used to more high-tech and mobile booking options.”
While coops like EcoMundo reach homes all across New York, the majority of their clientele is concentrated around the business’ headquarters in upper Manhattan, Jimenez says, where worker-owners can advertise the business at farmers’ markets with fliers–not unlike how Jimenez’s friend first heard about EcoMundo. For small businesses like the three coops that are now part of Up & Go, marketing has long been a sticking point, says Sylvia Morse, a project coordinator at the Center for Family Life (CFL) in Brooklyn, which has facilitated the development of several cooperative businesses in the city, and managed the process of bringing about Up & Go. “These coops were basically spending up to $1,000 to secure a single repeat customer through fliers, and relying on referrals to grow,” Morse says.
Robin Hood, meanwhile, has a history of funding coop development; that organization partnered with CFL to look into whether the tech-driven shifts in the gig economy could also support worker cooperatives. “Worker-owned businesses have a proven track record of providing a good living wage in a dignified setting–why shouldn’t the control the same technology that these larger competitors entering the home services space are using?” Morse says. Barclays came on board as funder and made an investment of $500,000 to develop the platform; CoLab Cooperative, a worker-owned digital agency, did the buildout.
Up & Go works much like a regular booking platform: It aggregates the schedules of workers across the three participating cooperatives, and users can either select to book from a particular coop, or all three. Because of the fair-wage ethos that accompanies the cooperative model, workers on Up & Go earn $4-5 more dollars per hour than other cleaning-industry workers in the area; Up & Go jobs yield around $22.25 per hour, as opposed to the average price of $17.27 in the region.
So while the platform’s services are more expensive, its organizers and the cooperative worker-owners are hoping the ethics will be a draw. As opposed to other home-services apps, which keep between 20% to 50% of the service price, Up & Go workers take home 95% of the cost; the remaining 5% is funneled back toward app maintenance, and the worker-owners remain in control of their scheduling preferences and their terms. While platforms like Handy are able to pay for subway-car-long advertisements, it doesn’t actually employ cleaners–it contracts out workers on a job-by-job basis, an arrangement that has resulted in little ethical oversight, short-changed compensation, and several lawsuits.
Though Up & Go is still relatively tiny–the three cooperatives represent around 30 members–its organizers see potential for it to scale up, both in New York and to cities across the country, and to reach other industries like dog-walking and childcare, where cooperative models are prevalent. Lee says he’s heard interest from coops in Oakland and Austin, but the first step will be establishing proof of concept with the small launch in New York City. “Once we get some traction, it is 100% likely that this concept will be able to take root among other cooperative communities,” he says.
Twitter’s stock is at the highest it’s been in six months thanks to a bit of big news this afternoon: Cofounder Biz Stone is returning to Twitter after a six-year hiatus. In a post on Medium–yet another company he helped start–Stone explained that his role would be “to guide the company culture, that energy, that feeling.” (Sure!)
But what does his comeback mean for Twitter Inc. the company? In the long run, probably not that much. Twitter has been plagued by lagging user growth for many quarters, compounded by well-documented abuse on the platform, and, more recently, declining revenue. Over the past few months, the company has made a concerted effort to create a safer, kinder platform for users, both prospective and existing–but change has been slow to come, save for an unexpected growth spurt this past quarter.
Wall Street might be optimistic, at least in the short term, but we’re not convinced Stone’s return will make much of a dent. Here’s why:
His Role Feels A Little Undefined
It’s not clear what, exactly, Stone will be doing at Twitter. On Medium, he described his role as such:
My top focus will be to guide the company culture, that energy, that feeling. This is where Jack, and Twitter’s inestimable CMO, Leslie Berland, feel I can have the most powerful impact. It’s important that everyone understands the whole story of Twitter and each of our roles in that story. I’ll shape the experience internally so it’s also felt outside the company. More soon.
According to Recode, he’ll report to Berland and “help with internal communications and morale at the company.” At first blush, it sounds like Stone will be a kind of cheerleader. (When I reached out to Twitter, they directed me back to Stone’s blog post.) Twitter lost its diversity head and HR chief a few months back, but it doesn’t necessarily sound like Stone will have a hand in those initiatives. Company morale is important, but whatever he might do to lift spirits internally, it’s not immediately obvious how that translates into a net positive for Twitter as a business.
Were Things That Great When He Was There?
The problems Twitter now faces were on the horizon when Stone left, as evidenced, in part, by the company’s reluctance to disclose user numbers. Twitter didn’t have a good handle on its raison d’être, and the company had already undergone a series of management changes. In September 2011, Twitter finally showed its hand, revealing it had 100 million monthly active users. But of those people, only 60% actually tweeted; the other 40% had not tweeted once in the month prior.
Stone’s job, during his tenure, was to sell people on Twitter. Twitter’s continued struggle with user growth indicates that’s a job that still needs doing. Whether it’s a job Stone can still do–that is, if it falls under his purview–is another question.
Remember Jelly?
After Stone left Twitter in 2011, he teamed up with fellow cofounder Evan Williams to head up an incubator called the Obvious Corporation, which gave way to Medium. In 2013, Stone took leave of Obvious to start yet another company, Jelly, which was initially branded as a visual Q&A app. Two years after Jelly made its debut, Stone relaunched the app in what he regrettably dubbed an “un-pivot.” A little over a year later, Jelly was acquired by Pinterest, and Stone joined the team as an adviser to cofounder Evan Sharp.
Stone is taking his talents back to Twitter barely two months after the acquisition, which makes you wonder if the decision was fueled by Jelly’s middling reception. Unlike Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who started Square after being ousted from Twitter, Stone hasn’t found the same success in his entrepreneurial efforts post-Twitter.
Snap, Instagram, And Facebook Still Exist
Twitter’s problems might not be new, but as Facebook’s growth shows no signs of letting up, and Snap continues to gain ground (a disappointing earnings report aside), it’s getting harder and harder to imagine how Twitter might broaden its role in the greater social media landscape. In his post, Stone wrote, “There’s something about the personality of a company that comes from the folks who start it. There’s a special feeling they bring with them.”
It’s true that getting the old band back together might boost morale. But the expectation that Stone’s return might infuse new energy into a company with Twitter’s baggage seems misguided, at best.
Many of the misconceptions you unknowingly cling to don’t do you any real harm. Your mistaken belief that the Great Wall of China is visible from space won’t jeopardize your professional success, let alone your survival.
Nonetheless, we all hold more false beliefs than we realize, thanks to what one brain scientist, writing last year for Fast Company, called“a powerful shortcut that our brains use every day,” known to researchers as “processing fluency.” What that means, in short, is that our minds are more receptive to information that’s easier to process.
One realm where this can do some damage is in public speaking. There are probably a few myths and misconceptions that can hurt your ability to communicate well. These are four of the most common.
Sure, having a dynamic personality can make it easier to become a great speaker, but your charisma alone won’t cut it. On the other hand, if you think you’re a soft-spoken introvert, or just think you have a pretty dull personality, that doesn’t condemn you to being a terrible public speaker. All it means is you’ll need to work at it. Speaking is one of those skills where talent helps, but practice helps more.
I once worked with a client whose son had just become a pro golfer at age 24. When I asked him how, my client told me that when his son was in grade school, a coach saw that he had talent and wanted to work with him. Later, in both high school and college, he continued to work with coaches who helped him get even better. So yes, he was born with natural ability. But he never would’ve become a pro without hard work and expert guidance. The same is true of just about any specialized skill.
While some people may have more natural speaking ability than others, nobody can become a great speaker with talent or personality alone. It takes practice and effort over time.
Myth No. 2: You Should Memorize The Most Important Parts
Lots of people think that if only they had more time to prepare a script–or at least memorize some key bits of phrasing–they’ll be much better speakers. Wrong.
Unless you’re a trained actor, memorizing what you’re going to say will only leave you sounding flat. Instead, you need to focus on speaking spontaneously–just with a little structure. This means having a rough outline in your head of what you’re going to talk about, but not a word-for-word script. The best speakers can talk spontaneously while staying within a coherent structure they’ve planned in advance. To get better at that, you first need to dispense with the notion that memorization is going to help you.
Myth No. 3: The Best Way To Connect Is With Emotion
While you may be able to find impromptu moments of inspiration every once in a while, it’s impossible to consistently fuel your presentations with emotion alone. Great speakers don’t need inspiration to be great. They’re great because they take their preparation seriously and are deliberate about every aspect of their speaking.
When I was a theater director, actors would often tell me in rehearsal, “Don’t worry, when I’m in front of an audience, I turn it on.” But take it from me–after working with actors for seven years, I never once saw anything on stage that I didn’t see in rehearsal. Similarly, you can’t just expect to psych yourself up when it’s time to speak. You need to practice, and you need to be thoughtful about what you’re doing. Spontaneity, energy, and emotion are all great–but they should never be an excuse to wing it.
Myth No. 4: You Need To Read Your Audience
A few years ago, I worked with a financial adviser who gave the same presentation to a new audience every single week. She came to me for help because her evaluations for these presentations were consistently terrible. She tried so hard to try to read her audiences’ reactions and do whatever she could to engage with them, but nothing seemed to work–she just couldn’t connect.
I helped her understand that instead of focusing on her audience, she needed to focus on herself. She needed to devote all her energy to what she was doing, not how her audience was reacting to it. Six weeks later, I heard back from her: “Anett, I can’t believe it! I got all 10s!”
When you’re speaking, don’t worry so much about how your audience is reacting. If you try to do and say whatever you think will elicit a response, you’re bound to lose your rhythm and fail. Yes, you can change up what you do depending on the size of your audience, but you shouldn’t try to adapt on the fly to every flicker or emotion or dip in attitude you might pick up on among your listeners. Instead, concentrate on your own habits and behaviors, and your audience will engage with you.
These four misconceptions are really common, but they’re often bigger barriers to effective speaking than lack of talent or preparation. So the next time you hear a piece of conventional wisdom about what it takes to be a great speaker, pause for a second to think about whether it’s really wise–or just conventional.
Your Aunt Cynthia has died unexpectedly. Our condolences. In her will, she’s left you $25,000. Now you want to invest it wisely, as in–not just leave it in a checking account that pays next to no interest. Ideally, you want to make a decent return, but you also want to be responsible about it. Cynthia was a good person who cared about animals, the environment, and everyday people. She didn’t like violence, or pollution, or dictators. She distrusted Wall Street, and you’re not crazy about it either. You want to invest the money sustainably, but maybe not in the traditional ways. What are your options?
The good news is there’s a widening array of sustainable and “impact” alternatives these days and they’re not all for accredited investors–that is, people earning more than $200,000 a year, or with a net worth of more than $1 million. Through screened mutual funds, “robo-advisers,” various forms of crowd investing, community investing, and even direct investing, you can hope to make money and make a difference at the same time. Exactly what risk and level of returns you can handle will depend on your stomach, your other income, and how you define “responsible,” “sustainable,” and “impact” (the terms are notoriously slippery, so watch out). But the options below, gathered from half a dozen experts, should give you the ability to diversify and accumulate, if, again, you’re lucky enough–RIP, Cynthia–to have extra cash to invest.
Public Companies
Publicly listed companies are the easiest type of companies in which to invest. They’re set up to accept money from strangers, and, as an unaccredited investor, your interests are legally protected. By contrast, investing in private companies with a social purpose is generally more difficult (though, these days, it’s getting easier).
There are lots of mutual funds that screen out activities you don’t want to support with your money, like companies that sell arms and tobacco, or that make money from gambling (the traditional no-nos). And some have track records of offering very good returns, known as “non-concessionary”–as in, you’re not making financial concessions to your ethics. “In the past, people said if I invest in a socially responsible way, I’m going to give up returns,” says Jane King, of Chicago-based Fairfield Financial Advisors, which finds impact investments for family clients, in an interview. “But I don’t think you have to give up returns to be socially responsible.”
King recommends funds like Parnassus Endeavor, which avoids fossil fuel-related stocks and targets employers with “outstanding workplaces.” Its portfolio includes Whole Foods and pharmaceutical firms like Gilead Sciences, and it posted an average return of 16.5% over five years by March 31 this year, and more than 25% in the last financial year. Another fund from the same stable, called Parnassus Core Equity, steers clear of weapons, nuclear power, and firms with financial ties to the genocidal regime in Sudan. Its portfolio features blue chip stocks like Apple, Intel, and Allergan and posted a 13.5% return over five years (12% last year). Both funds outperformed the S&P 500 over the same periods (in investment-speak, they delivered “alpha” returns above market index funds). The five-year average for standard mutual funds was about 12%.
For other mutual fund options, take a look at this comprehensive list from the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment (US SIF). It includes information like assets under management, fund age, and performance to date. If you want to hire an investment adviser for impact investing, Amit Bouri, CEO of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), a member association of foundations and investment firms, recommends asking the following six questions:
1. How familiar are you with impact investing, and what types of impact investments have you recommended for other clients? (Inquire about the track record of the adviser in making impact investments.)
2. Can you give me an example of how you build portfolios around social and environmental issues your clients care about? (Ask to see an example portfolio.)
3. How do you assess impact performance of funds you recommend, both at the time of investment and over the life of the investment? (Ask to see evidence that social impact is being assessed along with financial performance.)
4. Can you give me some evidence your recommendations go beyond negative screening into investment in positive solutions? (Are the portfolio companies avoiding harmful impacts, or are they looking to make actively positive contributions through their activities?)
5. How do you avoid investing with funds or companies that may be “greenwashing” and are not actually impact investments? (Ask advisers what they consider as greenwashing and how they seek to expunge it from your portfolio.)
6. Can you give me some examples of “close calls” you’ve made on whether or not to include something in an impact portfolio? (Asking about decision-making illuminates whether advisers have considered impact investing’s complexity.)
It’s important, says Bouri, to tease out those advisers with real experience and understanding of what impact investing is, and those who just claim experience and understanding. Also, there’s a difference between screening corporate activities you don’t agree with (like selling arms) and those actions that make a positive difference. GIIN defines impact investing as addressing challenges like sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, conservation, micro-finance, and affordable access to housing, health care, and education. It’s questionable therefore whether a fund that invests in Gilead and Apple, however well meaning, really meets the test of “impact” because they’re doing more to avoid harm than create solutions.
Meanwhile, a new generation of “robo-advisers” do a similar job as actual human advisers (or at least claim to). And, by employing algorithms to pick securities, they generally offer lower fees: 0.2% or 0.5% of your funds instead of a typical 1%. Impact-focused services include Aspiration, Impact Labs, Earthfolio, Motif, Grow, and OpenInvest. They have minimum starting investments ranging from $1 to $25,000 and either build their own portfolios, or have a fund-of-funds approach mixing other providers’ offerings. OpenInvest, which has a minimum of $3,000, offers the most customizability, letting you choose stocks and bonds based on what non-financial issues you think are important.
Robo-advisers claim to be democratizing responsible investing, and tend to target millennials, who, research shows, are more likely than previous generations to be interested in such investments. Aspiration, based in Southern California, has the most radical anti-Wall Street message. It lets you pay-what-you-want in terms of fees and gives 10% of its revenue away to charity. It currently has three products: two funds and a checking account. The Aspiration Redwood Fund offers fossil fuel-free investing and a screening for environmental, social, and governance factors (like whether firms have women on their boards, and whether they do public sustainability reporting). The fund includes stocks like Eli Lily, Ford, and American Express.
Peer-To-Peer Platforms
The options so far have all involved public companies, and public companies may not always be the best vehicles for progressive values. While Apple is a fantastic business that makes lovely computers, does well by its employees (most of them anyway), and uses renewable energy to run its data centers, it may fall down in other areas that you care about. Personally, it bothers me that it avoids paying taxes (while I have to) and that it produces tons of products that end up in landfills.
Having to meet the short-term needs of shareholders, public companies—perhaps inevitably–have to compromise on how much attention they can give other stakeholders, including the communities where they operate, their workers, the environment, and their customers. Witness, for example, how Wall Street reacted recently when American Airlines announced it was giving a raise to its pilots and flight attendants. Its stock got battered, and one prominent stock analyst complained: “Labor is being paid first again. Shareholders get leftovers.” Private companies don’t face that sort of pressure. They’re free to reward workers when they see the value of rewarding workers. (American Airlines argued that higher pay equates to better customer service and better long-term profits–which sounds like good business practice, rather than privileging anyone unfairly.)
“I have a lot of my retirement in mutual funds that are supposed to be impact investing, but when you really look at what’s in there, they might be companies that you’re not that proud to support,” says Jenny Kassan, an attorney who’s worked with many mission-driven entrepreneurs to raise capital. “It’s better than a random mutual fund. But if you want to have an impact, you might be better investing in a private company. There are few truly game-changing public companies because their shareholders are so demanding about quarterly performance.”
Partly because managers are tired of Wall Street short-termism, more companies are staying private these days. And some, like Method, Patagonia, and Kickstarter are becoming benefit corporations, a legal designation in 31 states and D.C. where companies agree to take account of a wider range of stakeholders. Others are choosing B Corp status, a third-party accreditation with a higher compliance bar. Unfortunately, though, few such companies are public. Only one benefit corporation is currently listed: the controversial Laureate Education, which runs for-profit colleges around the world.
Crowdfunding offers one way of investing in mission-driven companies. Last year, Wefunder, an equity crowdfunding platform, ran a campaign for the Force for Good Fund, which in turn invested in several B Corps owned by women or people of color. Wefunder cofounder Mike Norman points to several impactful projects currently on the platform, including Urban Juncture, which is remaking neglected areas of Chicago into hubs for “Black food and culture.” It offers a promissory note that pays 5% per year over 10 years (plus several perks, like a free meal for two at the Bronzeville Jerk Shack).
Small Change, founded by Eve Picker in Pittsburgh, funds “transformational” real estate projects. That means projects that promote walking and biking, sustainability, that revitalize neighborhoods, or that refurbish buildings of historical importance. You can invest as little as $500. This nice-looking odd-lot starter home in New Orleans, for instance, offers an annual 8% return (paid by the developer).
Wefunder is regulated under Title III of the JOBS Act, which came into force last year. It allows companies to raise up to $1 million from any number of unaccredited investors. Other crowdfunding sites are regulated under Title II, which is only for accredited investors (sites like AngelList for instance) or Regulation A+, which allows offerings of up to $50 million, but comes with a higher compliance burden for issuers (sites like StartEngine).
Wunder Capital, which funds midsize commercial solar projects, is currently open only to accredited investors. But Ilyas Frenkel, the company’s head of growth, says it should be open to all-comers by the end of 2017 (it’s currently filing its application with the S.E.C.). “The majority of solar deals are still financed by Wall Street investment banks, and average investors don’t get a chance to invest. Our goal is to open up these investments to everybody so they can put their money into a cause they believe in,” he tells me. Its projects include charter schools, a Salvation Army building, a Boys & Girls Club, and municipal buildings in Minnesota–deals offering returns of 6% to 11% a year.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of options to invest in compelling local businesses, though sometimes you have to be willing to suffer no financial returns and take your rewards in other forms. Investibule lists hundreds of opportunities, bringing together offerings across 20-plus funding sites. Those include Kiva, where you can make no-interest loans in small businesses, and Credibles, where you can invest in food businesses and get repaid in the form of food (the loans are pre-payments on cheeses, eggs, and fruit juices you will probably buy anyway).
Community Investing
While crowdfunding offers new ways to invest locally, there are older, better established options to make a difference in communities. They don’t offer the returns of mutual funds or robo-advisers, but they do offer authentic social impacts. Nonprofits like RSF Social Finance, in San Francisco, and the Calvert Foundation offer community notes with fixed returns over set periods. And instead of the compromises of public companies or crowdfunding, your money goes direct to meaningful projects, and you can get guaranteed, albeit small, returns.
The Calvert Community Investment Note, which dates back to 1995, has a minimum investment of just $20, and you can invest directly online. If you’re willing to lock up your money for 15 years, you’re guaranteed an annual 4% return (interest rates go down the shorter the term). For comparison, a 10-year U.S. Treasury Bond currently pays about 2.4%.
Through intermediary funds and direct investments, Calvert invests in expanding health care access in Africa and affordable housing in the U.S. (to name just two areas). For example, it lent catalytic capital to the Remington Row housing development in Baltimore, helping teachers stay in the city. (Calvert Investments, which offers screened mutual funds, is a related, though separate, company).
RSF’s Social Investment Fund has been operating since 1984 and has made almost $400 million in loans in that time, all to social enterprises. It has currently 137 outstanding loans across food and agriculture, education and the arts, and ecological stewardship, including a grass-fed beef co-op in Arkansas and a successful recycling business in Minnesota. The note offers only 0.75% interest, but your investment is liquid (you can withdraw everything after 90 days) and you’re guaranteed a return: RSF has never failed to pay its investors.
Don Shaffer, CEO of RSF Social Finance, compares the product (minimum investment: $1,000) to a six-month bank certificate of deposit (CD), and points to the community-affirming effects of the fund. Each quarter, its 1,600 investors meet with the loanee companies to agree the following quarter’s interest rates and return–a unique cooperative financial model. “If you’re someone who wants to participate in the farmer’s market of money, where you actually get to meet the people who are borrowing your money, there’s no one else doing that,” Shaffer tells me.
The Trillinc Global Fund provides trade finance and collateralized loans to small businesses in the developing world, from a chia seed exporter in Chile to a fish processor in Ecuador (it has a minimum investment of $2,000, though it’s currently closed to new investors). Community Capital Management, which offers the CRA Qualified Investment Fund, invests in real estate for social purposes, mostly through the bond markets. After Hurricane Sandy, it distributed Jon Bon Jovi’s investments aimed at rebuilding parts of New Jersey.
Meanwhile, the ImpactUs marketplace, which opened just this April, lists several other community opportunities, including a fund that invests in affordable multifamily rental housing and another in international micro-finance. The four vehicles available (minimums range from $3,000 to $50,000; estimated yields from 0%-5%) are open only to accredited investors so far. But others for unaccredited investors will be on offer soon, says Liz Sessler, VP of client engagement. “There’s a robust pipeline of private impact investments out there, and many of them are looking for this type of technology because it’s costly for them to build it on their own,” she says. ImpactUs, founded by several Community Development Financial Institutions and funded through philanthropy, is aiming to make it easier for retail investors to put their money into impact. It’s unusual in offering online service with the convenience and rigorousness of, say, a Charles Schwab trading account.
Or, you could try investing directly in companies. “If you know a business you love, you can approach them about making an investment,” says Kassan, the attorney. “Pretty much every state has laws that make it pretty easy for a small business to accept an investment from an unaccredited investor with minimal compliance.” You could talk to someone like Kassan who works with small businesses looking for money, but which, for legal reasons, are not allowed to announce their equity availability publicly. Moreover, many states allow direct public offerings that are exempt from federal regulations. They allow companies to solicit funds from their communities, rather than going through a financial institution that takes a hefty cut of the capital raised.
Can You Have It All?
The options above provide a range of returns, investment terms, and impacts, from small social enterprises to very large businesses. Many investors will choose to spread the risk from Fortune 100 companies at one end to something more homely, and concessionary, at the other end. It may be good to be wary of investments that claim you can have all the return and all the impact you like. Probably that’s only possible if you avoid slower-growing, socially important investments, like say RSF’s recycling company or Calvert’s medical loans in Africa.
Jenn Pryce, CEO of the Calvert Foundation, says the vagueness around terms like “responsible,” “sustainable,” and “impact”–some of it deliberate mystery-making by new players entering the space–isn’t a bad thing if it brings more funds and more investors into the industry.
“To engage a full investment portfolio responsibly, rather than carve out 5% or 10% [for impact], is very exciting. If we’re getting to that point by having language confusion about what is impact and responsible investing, that’s okay,” she says in an interview. “Some people are entering impact and responsible investing looking for alpha, and that is not the point. The point is to construct a portfolio with integrity around values that provide appropriate returns. In those returns, there’s a spectrum. It’s about a new way of investing people’s money, not necessarily about seeking alpha in the short term.”
For city mayors, dealing with the rise of gig economy startups has often felt like a game of whack-a-mole. Get a handle on how to regulate one company’s operations, and suddenly another appears.
That dynamic is finally changing–and for the better, says Alicia Glen, New York City’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development. “This is not about any one digital company,” she tells Fast Company. “When we started, it was a very company-by-company exercise. Now it’s clear to me that it’s more sector-by-sector.”
That shift in perspective is central to the policy framework that Glen plans to present today at the Sharing Cities Summit, a gathering of leaders from 22 cities around the world that will take place at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Athens, New Orleans, Seoul, Vancouver–each of the participants is grappling with the rise of platforms like Airbnb and Uber, and eager to reassert their regulatory authority through combined clout.
A dozen of the cities formed an alliance last year, meeting in Amsterdam to exchange ideas. “There’s a disconnect between federal policy and what cities need to be doing to make sure they get what they need,” Glen says. “It became pretty clear to me that having this discussion, city-to-city, would be incredibly valuable.”
Now she and her team will be looking to make those initial discussions more concrete through a daylong series of presentations and working sessions (sample case study: “Increasing Economic Opportunity for Gig Workers”). Themes will include fair compensation, health and safety standards, environmental sustainability, equal opportunity, and data security.
Glen does not expect participants to arrive at exact agreement on policy, particularly when it comes to striking a balance between tourists and residents. She notes, for example, that Amsterdam has instituted Airbnb “no-fly zones” for certain neighborhoods, to protect locals who were feeling under siege. New York, in contrast, has encouraged the growth of Airbnb in neighborhoods that are far from tourist meccas like Times Square. (Not without risk: Earlier this month, a German tourist staying at an Airbnb in Harlem was robbed and sexually assaulted.)
New York City has been conservative in some areas of gig economy policy, and more aggressive in others. Last October the City Council unanimously passed the “Freelance Isn’t Free Act,” to protect freelancers from wage theft; the bill went into effect this week. Meanwhile, shared dining apps operate in a gray zone and Airbnb has been in retreat.
“I want these companies to do well, I want these companies to hire a lot of people,” Glen says. “But I want to do it in a way where they understand that we have a legitimate interest in regulating them.”
Earlier this year I found myself waking up in sweat-laced anxiety for a week straight. I’d wrapped a month of high-stakes projects that put me at the top of my freelance career. I was financially secure, felt professionally accomplished, and had never been so flush with great projects. So why was I bolting upright in the middle of the witching hour?
During a 3:00 a.m. emergency journaling session (I’ve learned to think of it as paper therapy), I realized that in my efforts to please clients, I’d neglected the routines that had made me successful to begin with: making time to reflect, exercise, plan, and knock out real, focused work without any digital distractions.
My work required me to check email first thing in the morning. No a big deal–adults can adapt. But after a project ended, I continued to check it first thing. Other little rules and routines eroded while bad ones stuck around and worsened. Soon I found myself compulsively checking email, Facebook, LinkedIn, and my text messages up to 30 times a day. I felt like a junkie.
So I made a decision:
No Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn for a month.
Check email only twice a day (or only after four hours of solid work).
One round of text messages in the evening.
I wrote down each of these rules on a single sheet of paper. By the end of the month, this set of restrictions had led me to the highest productivity and earnings of my freelance career. Here’s how it worked out.
The first morning was cold turkey. I had to parry a thousand little thought-daggers, like, “Come on, Facebook isn’t so bad” or, “You probably have something really important in your inbox–why don’t you just check it real quick?”
But I bit the bullet and managed to plow through my work that morning without giving in. And four hours later, I reclaimed every bit of confidence that had steadily vanished over the last month–to my surprise, the mind-set change happened that fast. And I slept like a log that night.
To prevent a digital relapse on Day 2, I came up with a month’s worth of daily and weekly steps I could take to stick with it. Whenever I felt the urge to fiddle around on Facebook, I decided to use that as my cue to bust out my planner and find something more valuable to do.
If Facebook felt appealing at a given moment, it was probably a sign that my focus was fading or I was wrapping up one task but hadn’t moved on to another yet–so it was a natural time to hit “reset.” Within the first few days, this had become self-reinforcing. The more proactive decisions I made, and the more work I got done, the more confidence I gained, and the less dependent I felt on the digital comforts that had held me back.
By the end of the first week, I’d overcome every one of the digital addictions I’d set out to break. I’d also pulled in around $5,000 in new business–double my previous record.
How My Digital Detox Became A Lifestyle
I started my digital detox over three months ago and, technically, I’m still on it–though now it’s more of a lifestyle. My four-rule regimen has helped me keep my priorities straight and stick with the routines that make my happy and sustain my income. I’ve also discovered a few truths:
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social platforms gave me zero value as daily habits. Worse than that, they ate up my focus, which kept me from accomplishing as much as I could. I honestly don’t miss them.
Emails can always wait. This might not be the case if you work in an office, but for freelancers email is rarely all that urgent. If you work for yourself, the main reason you’re successful isn’t because you respond quickly to others but because you’re good at directing yourself. So I delay email until I’ve already behaved like the successful person I want to be–at least for a four-hour stretch. And if something really is urgent, my clients have my phone number. I limit email so it doesn’t limit me.
There’s no reason for text-alerts. Just like with emails, if there’s a true emergency, a person can always give me a call. So I turned my phone’s text-message push notifications off. This way I don’t need to worry about texts at all during my workday. If I check them once in the evening, my focus stays intact all day long, and so far I’ve found that I don’t miss out on a damn thing.
My first month of digital detoxing was so successful that I decided to continue it into a second month. And after the second month ended with higher confidence and more accomplishments under my belt than any month previously, I decided to go for a third. Now it’s just the way I live my life.
I’m more in tune with what I need to do to feel good about myself professionally. I’m less concerned about other people’s opinions. And I have more time and focus to do the things I actually love–like play beach volleyball and spend time with my family and friends. Now that I’m not constantly in a reactive mode, consuming social content and checking notifications all the time, I’m more fully present with the people and activities that actually deserve my attention.
These days, now that I’ve broken my lowest-value habits, I’ve eased up on my restrictions a little (but not a lot!) and have struck a balance for the long term.
Sometimes I’ll check my texts a handful of times when the need arises. I still shoot for two email checks a day–and sometimes none–but there have been days when I’ve dipped into my inbox five times in a day and didn’t wind up regretting it; the next day I went right back to the four-hour rule with no trouble. As long as I commit to a productive, reflective, and confidence-boosting morning routine, and as long as I stay goal-oriented, I don’t have to worry about these tools interfering with my life. Everything in moderation.
But one thing I’ve thoroughly cut back on is social media; I’ve learned it’s just not a part of my balance. In letting that habit go for good, I’ve forced myself to be more social in real life, like going out for coffee or lunch with friends, and scheduling more in-person networking time–things that actually enrich my life. I’ve passed on this digital detox recipe to my coaching clients, and one thing I’ve heard some of them saying already is, “I actually look forward to Monday more than Friday now.”
Because kicking ass is fun. And when you’re not distracted into digital oblivion, kicking ass is exactly what you’ll do. So start tomorrow. You might be surprised how far it takes you–I know I was.
Daniel Dowling is the founder of MillennialSuccess.io, where he shares action steps and inspiration for millennials and their employers. You can find more of his work on Entrepreneur, mindbodygreen, and Fitbit.com.
Not long ago, the brand marketing world caught bot fever.
Chatbots were the hottest new thing around, to both ease company resources while helping people get what they want–products, answers, pizza–more efficiently. But the technology was still primarily only realistically available to large companies with the budget and resources to build and maintain a bot platform. That’s where Reply.ai and R/GA saw an opportunity.
“We were looking at the numbers, and there’s around 60 million businesses on Facebook, which means there’s a lot of opportunity for businesses to create tools to better reach customers,” says R/GA San Francisco executive creative director Paulo Melchiori.
So the agency teamed with Reply.ai, a New York-based startup, to create BotBot, a bot that builds bots. The new platform helps anyone who owns a small business, no matter how tech-savvy, build a Facebook chatbot right from their mobile phones, through a simple chat interface.
While bot fever among major brands may be cooling, the goal for BotBot was to create a platform to simplify bot building and maintenance in a way that made sense for small business. A lot of the research went into figuring out the type of utilities that both small business owners and their customers would get the most out of. BotBot has three available templates–Ask Bot lets businesses answer their customers’ FAQs, Fitness Bot is for people to book classes at gyms and fitness studios, and Food Bot optimizes take-out and delivery orders for restaurants. More templates are set to be released every few weeks.
“There are other folks who have dabbled in templates, but this really takes it a step further and offers a level that really makes that value of bots to small businesses,” says Reply.ai’s head of business development Clara DeSoto.
Right now, there are limited options for companies wanting to build a bot. There are developer toolkits, which are largely out of the question for small business owners because it requires an engineer. There are full-service bot shops but they tend to be beyond a small business budget. DeSoto says BotBot offers a legitimate third option. “It’s really the first player in the space to take a completely different approach,” she says. “While we do have templates working on the back-end, it really is like an extra staff member to help them create something, without adding time and resources for them.”
Much like how companies like Squarespace has made professionally designed websites available to anyone, the goal here is the same for chatbot utility. “It is about the democratization of this new technology, helping small businesses help potentially millions of customers on Facebook,” says Melchiori. “It’s a win-win, because if we let small business take advantage of it, they get more business, but as consumers, it makes life more efficient, by being able to order more food or book more appointments through Facebook.”
Waymo and Lyft’s deal to put autonomous cars on the road is a piping hot drama amid Google and Uber’s legal battle over intellectual property (Waymo is Google’s driverless car division). But this feud may be cold, bitter, and forgotten years down the line–because if driverless cars enjoy widespread adoption, Uber and Lyft will likely become mere cogs in the autonomous vehicle machine.
I’m not the first to say it, but as the self-driving car space solidifies, it will likely take shape around companies that are actually making cars–not ride-hailing platforms.
“Ultimately, I still don’t know if it makes sense for any stand-alone ride-hailing service to exist since the switching cost for users is essentially zero and anyone can build out that platform,” says Navigant senior researcher Sam Abuelsamid, adding, “I think Lyft, Uber, and others will probably get acquired in time.”
The other night, I sat down with Ford chief technical officer Raj Nair to talk through what it will take to get to a world in which cars drive us. He says he believes there are five components to building a successful framework for autonomous vehicle business: large-scale manufacturing capabilities to build a flock of cars; a virtual driver platform that routes a travel plan; autonomous technology that allows the car to drive; a team to safely redesign cars to accommodate self-driving technology; and a way of managing vehicle servicing.
The number of people who own cars is slowly declining, notes Paul Asel, managing partner at Nokia Growth Partners in a recent report for CB Insights. In the last 10 years, U.S. households without cars have crept up from 8.7% to 9.2%. To make up for the loss in car sales, car manufacturers want to sell rides in shared autonomous cars.
Nair sees autonomous technology’s main value as providing consumers with a travel option that’s cheaper than car ownership. Self-driving cars have the potential to be cheaper than cabs and owning a car because there’s no driver to pay and no big price tag to pay down (though someone in this scheme will have to pay for maintenance).
Carmakers already have access to large-scale manufacturing and a big servicing infrastructure, though Nair says Ford will have to change its car maintenance system to support a network of rented cars (rather than individually owned cars). The company has also been working on autonomous car technology for roughly a decade and recently agreed to invest $1 billion dollars into Argo AI over the course of five years. It appears carmakers at large are leading the way in creating self-driving cars, according to Navigant Research. Its report claims Ford, GM, Renault-Nissan, and Daimler make up the top four companies in the self-driving technology space. The ranking is based on a variety of criteria including go-to-market strategy, execution, and technology.
What these giants lack is their own widespread and competitive transportation services. General Motors is currently building a car-sharing service called Maven. Ford has Chariot, a group commuter platform located in two markets. Both of these efforts are too small in scale to really provide the critical insight that will help them build the massive autonomous fleets they envision. To get access to that data in bulk, Ford, like other car companies, is open to partnering with or acquiring a relevant company, Nair tells me. The question is when?
Syncing up with an entity like Uber or Lyft might give Ford access to data, but there wouldn’t be an immediate financial payoff until autonomous cars start rolling out of factories. “Eliminating the driver cost is key to making it profitable,” Nair says of the future of e-hail. While Uber-style ride-hailing data is key to developing the kind of on-demand transportation platforms Nair foresees, he isn’t concerned about being a part of the first available ride-sharing network.
“It’s not really about who gets there first. It’s about who gets there with the right use case that really matches the need and who can scale that,” says Nair, adding “Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile.”
The argument against car manufacturers leading the revolution of cars that drive themselves is that carmakers may not be any good at running mobility services. Both GM and Ford have previously owned and sold stakes in car rental companies, unable to make those businesses work. But carmakers may have the most important component in the self-driving equation: the ability to make the cars themselves.
As driverless cars hit the streets, consumers are more likely to start off by borrowing them rather than immediately buying them in droves. Ride-hailing systems may provide the first avenue for self-driving cars to reach the masses, but it doesn’t ensure those platforms will own the market in perpetuity. Uber and Lyft have replicable technology and riders go where the quickest and cheapest rides are advertised. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick acknowledged as much in an interview with Business Insider last year. “What would happen if we weren’t a part of that future? If we weren’t part of the autonomy thing?” he pondered. “Then the future passes us by basically, in a very expeditious and efficient way.” The question of course, for Uber, Lyft, Gett, and all the other ride-hailing platforms, is: How do you maintain your value in the face of self-driving technology that will make your business irrelevant?
While Uber does have a partnership with Mercedez-Benz, it has largely approached this task through dumping money into building autonomous driving research labs. It has usurped researchers from Carnegie Mellon. It has acquired a contentious self-driving truck startup with roots at Google. Most recently it put together a lab in Canada headed by University of Toronto artificial intelligence researcher Raquel Urtasun.
Still, even if Uber were to create a compelling self-driving technology, what then? It could license the technology to car manufacturers or alternatively start making its own vehicles with the tech baked in. Manufacturing cars, however, is no easy feat, and Uber hasn’t provided much insight into how it will pull off owning its own fleet of self-driving cars. What that means is that even though Kalanick saw the tidal wave coming, Uber might still get wiped out.
Lyft, on the other hand, isn’t investing in building a driverless future, but it is working toward one. Lyft’s agreements to add GM and Waymo self-driving cars to its fleet could help it tailor its algorithm to better serve autonomous cars and the way that people use them–it’s a learning opportunity. “These partnerships will allow Lyft to work out how to distribute the vehicles for maximum efficiency and utilization,” says Abuelsamid.
A platform well-suited to self-driving cars may not ensure Lyft’s fate as a stand-alone company. Though its deals with car providers might not currently affect its bottom line, eventually self-driving carmakers will want a cut of Lyft fares. It will be their autonomous hardware that enables Lyft to offer cheap rides with an incredible upside–not having to pay drivers anymore. And ultimately, carmakers will just want to own the transportation service itself. In this way, with its multiple partnerships and its software finely tuned, Lyft could be an attractive acquisition target. Joining forces with another company also seems to be a route that Lyft is comfortable with. The company was at one point looking to be bought for $9 billion, according to a Recode report from last year.
Asel cleverly cited Amara’s law in his report. “Our tendency is to overestimate short-term impacts while underestimating long-term impacts.” Uber and Lyft may have multibillion dollar valuations bolstering them up, but that doesn’t guarantee their success. Autonomous cars still have many barriers to getting on streets, including a yet to be seen regulatory framework that allows them to operate. The technology is also not yet satisfactorily proven.
As the space evolves, it may turn out that car companies are the architects of the self-driving car ecosystem, while Uber and Lyft are just components. Even if driverless cars are what ultimately steer Uber and Lyft into sustainable profitability, they may only be able to hold on to it briefly as the companies that make autonomous cars tug away their users with comparable platforms or buy them outright.
These days, the attention is on the platforms, their battles for supremacy, and how they affect drivers and riders. Perhaps more attention should be paid, instead, to the companies actually building the cars.
A shocking number of people hate their jobs. They range from people who’ve simply lost interest in their work to those who realized soon after they started that they had made a terrible mistake.
To make sure you know what you are getting into before you start, you could simply log on to Glassdoor and ask around, or you could go full-on sleuth and employ some next-level investigation in your research. Ken Sawka, CEO and founder of corporate intelligence firm Fuld + Company, says that gathering and analyzing the right information can potentially save you from a bad job decision.
But what should you be looking for–and where?
What you should look for depends on what’s most important to you: advancement opportunities? Work-life balance? A collaborative culture? Sawka says that you should be clear about the criteria that matters to you, and then approach your research “very clinically and very critically” to determine whether the company meets them or not. The implications of taking such a structured approach “may point you to a decision on a job issue that you didn’t expect because it takes some emotion out of it,” he says.
So you’ve got your list of priorities. Where do you start seeking out the data to analyze? Even obvious places may have indicators that you’re overlooking.
Search For Small Hidden Clues On Social Media
When Kyra Mancine was considering joining building products company Oldcastle, Inc. as a social media specialist, she was determined to make sure the company was a good fit. Here’s her advice:
Step 1. Check out the company’s profiles on all platforms. Look for negative feedback from customers (but take it with a grain of salt because disgruntled people are highly motivated to spread the word, she says).
Step 2. Look for employees’ posts or photos of company events. Do the people look happy? What are they doing? Is it a company that holds many social events or does great philanthropic work? Mancine saw that Oldcastle did a great deal of work with Habitat for Humanity, which resonated with her commitment to giving back. She knew the company shared the same values she did.
Step 3. Look up key employees on social media. What are they posting? Have they put an ill-advised comment about their employer out for public consumption? Or do they appear to love their job?
“Also, look at the content that they post. Are they posting what they’re doing through their communities and about their projects?” she says. People who are happy about their jobs typically post about them. “If you’re looking for a place where they do a lot of social activities after work, or maybe they volunteer, they should be posting those types of photos,” she says.
Approach Your Network Strategically
Sure, you’ve mined your network for people who know people at the company, but are you asking the right questions, Sawka asks. Once you identify the college friend or colleague’s acquaintance who has agreed to answer some questions, think about what you really want to know, Sawka says.
“Here’s where the analytic part comes in. What we tell our clients to do when we’re using intelligence for strategy and decision making is list out your hypotheses. What do you suspect to be true, or what do you want to try to prove or disprove about the company we’re looking at?” he says. What, specifically, do you want to know about culture, pay, advancement, location, or degree of empowerment? Which contacts will be the best sources for each question? “Then I plan my conversations with members of my network to elicit information from them that will give me evidence or clues or hints about those hypotheses that are important to me,” he says.
Look For LinkedIn Stats
Sawka is skeptical of Glassdoor because he says that it may be skewed by people who have an ax to grind or companies trying to promote good reviews. Instead, he recommends using LinkedIn and its Premium Insights, which is available with some of the premium account subscriptions, to find out facts like where a company is placing hiring emphasis or how a company is structured. You can also get a sense of turnover by examining people who have held a position and left. “If their marketing department, for example, is showing on LinkedIn an average tenure of a year or nine months, that’s possibly a red flag. How come those marketing people aren’t staying that long? Versus a company where the tenure might be a little bit longer,” he says.
But this is also where it’s important not to make assumptions, he says. “You always want to think about the alternative explanation.” If the company has short tenures in management because it has excellent training and people often get hired away, that could be a strong indicator of the growth potential of the company, he says. For example, GE is well known as a breeding ground for senior managers. “You might look at GE’s senior manager ranks and see a lot of very senior people who’ve been there for a long time leaving at a certain point in their career,” he says. Use the analytics for clues, then go speak to people to get further explanation.
Take Google One Step Further
Obviously you know you have to Google any company you are considering working for. But, asks Mashaal Ahmed, founder of DC Career Coach, a career coaching firm, have you set up a Google alert for the company or key employees so that you capture what’s being said out in the world? In some cases, company websites can be so clunky that it’s easier to get to the information you want using Google. So search for “ABC Company” and “benefits” or “culture” to find both the company’s marketing messages on the topic, as well as what’s been said elsewhere, she says.
Check Public Filings
If the company is public, you can access its financials. Download 10-K and 10-Q forms to get a sense of the company’s financial health, Sawka says. This information can be more difficult to find when it comes to privately held companies, but Dun and Bradstreet (DNB) might have some information. You can look for rounds of funding that must be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and pull the business’s credit profile–unlike a personal profile, anyone can access a business credit report from reporting agencies like DNB or Experian for a fee.
“What I might do if the company is private is work into those intelligence-gathering conversations some questions or inquiries that would get to financial health. Do you have a sense, if you’re a supplier to the company, for example, do they pay their bills on time? Have you had any collection issues with them? On the customer side, are they more aggressive in receivables collecting than maybe is the norm for your industry, that sort of thing,” he suggests.
On Monday night, Donald Trump was still the President of the United States. Affordable healthcare was still in question. LGBT rights were still under threat by state lawmakers. But at the 21st annual Webby Awards, which honor internet excellence, it was far easier to be inspired by the creativity and diversity existing under this administration’s nose than it was to be discouraged.
The Webbys highlights the best and most interesting of the internet, which can often feel like a black hole of content. At this year’s ceremony, the Webbys recognized everyone from Solange and her pivotal record, A Seat At The Table, to Teen Vogue and its web series Ask A Muslim Girl, which won for best social education and discovery video. “People and the internet at large are having a really big reaction to what is happening in the world,” says Webby Awards Media Group CEO David-Michel Davies. “They’re taking notice and trying to do something about it.” To speak to the brevity of the internet, each Webby honoree was allowed a speech of just five words.
Fast Company spoke to creators and artists of all kinds during the ceremony, and the thread that tied them all together was a commitment to doing the work and pushing against boundaries in the world we live in. For Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, an author and entrepreneur who created the site Muslimgirl.com and starred in Teen Vogue‘s Ask A Muslim Girl series, it’s about recognizing progress as well as the ways our narratives fall short.
“Let it go down in history that we are marking our territory now when everything seems to be stacked up against us,” she says. “Our understanding of Muslims is still so generalized and typecast. There are voices even within the Muslim community that are getting drowned out. But there’s an interest in hearing real, authentic voices and passing the mic to people who aren’t represented.”
Others celebrated at the Webbys included the Internet Archive, an organization that preserves the history of the internet online. Brewster Kahle, who founded the Archive in 1996, has seen the internet constantly reinvent itself, from LiveJournal to Friendster to Twitter.
“We’ve got to make a step forward from alternative facts and post-truth,” Kahle says. “Let’s go and put the best of what we have to offer within reach of everybody. Let’s go and put published and reliable works in front of everybody. Let’s comment and debunk the heck out of things.”
The final award of the night was Best Social Movement of the Year, which went to the Women’s March. Its cofounders weighed in on how they created the sprawling movement while reaching as many kinds of people as possible.
“When we were given these positions we brought along more women of color and people with disabilities to the table. It became what intersectional feminism is supposed to look like,” says co-chair Linda Sarsour. “We like to say nothing we do is perfect, but that we are always being intentional to make sure the very voices that need to be heard most are there.”
CNN political commentator Van Jones, who was honored for his social media and news work during the election, has an idea for changing the way people interact online: break the algorithm.
“If I follow somebody on Instagram, it tells me, here’s three more people to follow and they’re just like the person I followed,” Jones says. “Here’s three more, here’s three more. Eventually, my feed is all people who are exactly the same. There’s no button you can push that says scramble it. The algorithm is driving us apart. We need something else.”
His five-word speech? “Enough red, enough blue. Purple.”
“We’re learning all the time, figuring out how to use new tools,” he says. “When you get a new smartphone or system at work, you need to gain new skills to use it. How you do that impacts your success.”
Unfortunately, there is a gap between conventional wisdom and facts when it comes to the process of learning, says Boser. “There are so many myths,” he says. “A lot of people don’t give much thought to the best way to gain new knowledge and skills. But learning is often a form of mental doing, and the more someone is actively engaged, the more they learn.”
Through studies and research, Boser identified several myths about learning that can make the process more difficult. Here are five misconceptions, and why you should stop believing in them:
Myth No. 1: We Have Set Learning Styles
You’ve probably heard about visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning. In a survey of more than 3,000 Americans, nearly 90% of respondents believe it’s better to receive information in your personal learning style. But once you start thinking about the idea, it falls apart, says Boser.
“It’s hard to learn soccer only by hearing it,” he says. “Like many myths, there is a bit of truth that lies behind it, but there’s no research to support learning styles. One major recent review stated simply that the authors found virtually no evidence for the approach.”
How to really learn: Instead, match your content to the process, says Boser. “Students should learn music by listening to music, while students should learn reading by doing more reading,” he says. In fact, the U.S. Department of Education recently told teachers to “make [their] own call on how to utilize learning styles in the classroom.”
Myth No. 2: Rereading Material Is A Good Way To Learn
Before you go into an important meeting, you might refresh your memory by reviewing your notes or proposal, but this passive approach to learning won’t serve you well. While more than 80% of respondents in Boser’s study believed that rereading is a highly effective approach to learning, research suggests that the approach is flawed, says Boser. What works better is an active form of learning.
“People tend to see themselves as a computer; data flowing past them somehow gets into their head,” he says. “That’s not how learning works. You need to make sense of the order to understand.”
How to really learn: Instead of rereading, highlighting, or underlining important information, turn the information into a quiz.
“Research shows that quizzing yourself is a far better way to learn,” says Boser. “After the end of a paragraph, ask yourself, ‘What is the author trying to say?’ ‘How is this different than other things I’ve read?’ ‘How does this relate to other material I know?’ When you’re making sense of something, you start learning it.”
Myth No. 3: Focus On One Subject At A Time
When it comes to learning a difficult subject, people often believe you should practice one thing at a time. If you’re learning to use a new suite of software, for example, practice one program one day and another the next.
How to really learn: Mixing it up, however, is a better approach, says Boser. “In mixed learning, you get a chance to see the core idea below it,” he says. “And when you shift details, you get a better sense of what it means.”
Myth No. 4: Your First Answer Is Often The Right Answer
In school, many of us were taught that if you put an answer on a test you shouldn’t change it, but you’re actually better off reconsidering, says Boser.
“People are overly confident,” he says. “Go around a room asking who the hardest working person is, and most people will identify themselves in that group. Also, if they’ve learned something from an article or TED talk, they think they know it. We actually need time to deliberate and reflect to understand something.”
How to really learn: While facts are important, how you use them is key. “To solve new problems and come up with ideas, you need analogies and systems of how things relate to each other,” he says. “Making that connection takes time. A study found that teachers who give three- to five-second pauses when explaining ideas have students who learn a lot more. The brain needs time to settle in.”
Myth No. 5: The Number Of Hours You Put Into Something Translates To Better Understanding
Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory provided a benchmark for becoming an expert, but this doesn’t necessarily translate to learning, says Boser. “Most of us drive every day, but most of us have not gotten better at driving,” he says. “Putting in a lot of hours doesn’t always mean you’ll become good at something.”
Like trusting your first answer, overconfidence plays a role here, too, says Boser. “There’s a long line of research that suggests people often overestimate their own expertise in just about every field, from driving a car to their grammar skills,” he says. “Or as one research paper put it, ‘people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence.'”
How to really learn: What works instead isn’t just time; it’s outside advice and input. For example, Boser hired a basketball coach to help him improve his game, and videotaped himself shooting baskets in the park.
“Don’t just ask a friend for feedback,” he says. “There has to be a social contract where the other person has to give you something. That’s why hiring coaches and tutors are so beneficial to learning.”
We meet Carlos Vasquez, the lead singer, drummer, and PR manager for the metal band Distartica, who lost his eyesight to glaucoma as a child. Ian MacKay is a cyclist who also happens to be paralyzed form the neck down, and who is set to travel 3,000 miles on the Olympic Discovery Trail by the end of this year. Meera Phillips is a 15-year old soccer player unable to fully use her natural voice as a result of Schizencephaly, which impacts motor control and speech. Todd Stabelfeldt is quadriplegic, but also a software engineer and successful entrepreneur. Andrea Dalzell is a nursing student and former Ms Wheelchair New York, who lives with spina bifida. Patrick Lafayette is a producer and radio DJ in New York, who has a vision disability. And Shane Rakowski is a middle school band director, who lives with hearing loss.
The campaign also includes an update of Apple’s Accessibility apps collection in areas of vision, hearing, speech, learning and literacy, physical motor skills, and Accessible Home With Siri, as well as hosting accessibility sessions in its retail stores to introduce people to these built-in accessibility features.
At a time when machines are getting smarter and more capable and traditional jobs are being replaced with looser forms of employment (from freelancing to gigs), America is agonizing over the future of work. Will there be enough well-paying jobs or “tasks” for everyone? Can we continue to depend on work as a universal provider, or will other forms of income have to take up the slack? Can we support growing numbers of elderly people who might not be able to work?
A year-long effort by the Shift Commission–a group formed by the New America Foundation and Bloomberg and involving 100 leading figures from technology, business, policy-making, and culture–took on some of these questions, imagining what the future of work might look like in 10 to 20 years, and, to a lesser extent, how we might prepare for that future.
Roy Bahat, founder of Bloomberg Beta, an early-stage VC fund in San Francisco, acted as one of two chairs of the commission. In an interview with Fast Company, he explains that the aim was not to make predictions for work’s future. Rather, the commission wanted to embrace the complexity of the topic and sketch out scenarios ranging from a world where there’s plenty of traditional employment and relative income stability, to one where there are scant gigs to go around and plenty of insecurity.
“The question is essentially unknowable–which is how dramatically and how quickly technological change will affect work?,” Bahat says. “Instead of trying to do another prediction, we asked if there was some other way of going about solving this? Once we got ourselves in this frame of mind, scenario-planning arose as a fairly obvious solution to that problem.”
Meeting in five cities, the 100 leaders came up with 44 scenarios, which were eventually distilled to four–each characterized by a popular game:
Rock-Paper-Scissors
This future imagines a local and sustainable economy that “prioritizes work in person-to-person interactions.” Amid increasing automation and a slowing economy, it involves less work per person and more tasks rather than jobs–a game of “fast, one-off choices.” The retail industry, for instance, has been refashioned by delivery drones, automated warehouses, and a hegemony of analytics. Many people work in the caring professions, looking after the elderly, sick, or young.
King Of The Castle
In this prospective economy, there’s also less work than now, but most of it continues to be in the form of traditional jobs, not gigs. Large companies dominate the economic scene, and there’s less economic dynamism as a result. (It’s “king of the castle” because as the “king” you have to knock down the other kids as they try to run up the hill and take over the castle, i.e. your job). It’s harder to start a successful business. People have jobs with larger companies, but, when they leave them, it takes longer to find another one. Fewer people work overall, leading to decreased consumer-led economic demand. The black market economy grows bigger, as people seek income beyond official work.
Jump Rope
In this scenario–which gets its name from a game of perpetual motion– there’s more work to go around, but it’s mostly in the form of tasks, not full-time jobs. People fixate on building “reputational rankings” for each gig they complete, blending multiple income streams. Careers are “self-driven, entrepreneurial, and constantly changing” and short-term work is embraced and supported through new processes of education, standardization and professionalization of skill-sets. There’s growth in artisanal goods as people privilege “work done by human hands.”
Go
This economy, meanwhile, is one where there’s more work overall and it comes mostly in the form of conventional jobs. People “embrace connectivity in every area of their lives (Go is a board game of infinite possibilities) and look for ways that machines can extend their capabilities through data-platforms, electronic devices, and virtual reality.” People get jobs as human coaches and psychologists, or as chefs and masseurs who use data to improve their colleagues’ productivity. There are plentiful roles for “augmentors” who insert data-gathering microchips into people’s heads.
Solutions
Though it tried to be open-minded, the commission did make certain assumptions about trends in the economy, mostly, Bahat says, because they seemed long-lived enough to be durable going forward. These were that the workforce will get older, that the economy will continue to be less dynamic than in the past (measured by business starts and the rate at which people move between jobs and between geographies looking for jobs), that less income will come from work (as opposed to, say, income from stock markets), and, fourth, that there will be a continuing divergence between the richest metro areas and the poorest.
The commission also assumes that artificially-intelligent machines will dominate increasingly, even if the consequences for work could vary a lot depending on how we respond. In the report, each scenario foresees robots coming to the fore in manufacturing and retail. Here, for instance, is what it says about the role of machine work in the “Jump Rope” scenario:
Most aspects of work, from food, garment, electronic and automotive manufacturing, natural resource maintenance, and medical analysis have been automated through a combination of robots, drones, and sensors connected to large AI systems.
The commission shied away from making recommendations because, Bahat says, too many trends are contradictory. Conference speakers may be fond of saying “the pace of change of accelerating” but this is belied by reduced economic dynamism. The rate of new business formation has fallen in this generation compared to previous generations, for instance, suggesting that incumbent companies are finding it easier to maintain their positions, not harder. On the other hand, many small businesses are unquestionably dynamic. See, for example, how WhatsApp grew from nothing to having more one billion users worldwide. “I think we live in a time of paradox,” Bahat says.
The most the commission offers by way of solutions is a “responses discussed by Shift Commission members” section. It features ideas like continuous professional education, tax credits for care work that’s currently unpaid or underpaid, wage subsidies for “socially necessary” eldercare, and a “cross-industry way to certify skills beyond a college degree.” Bahat says the commission also considered the merits of portable benefits (which are paid directly to individuals wherever they work and aren’t tied to traditional employment) and a universal basic income (an idea that Bahat personally has embraced).
Along with brainstorming scenarios and solutions, the commission also funded a representative survey of 1,000 Americans. It found a widespread need for solutions that improve the “stability” of people’s working lives. It found that 53% of us already “make different amounts of money every month, and that almost a quarter . . . cope with income that varies by the week,” suggesting volatility of income. Almost half of respondents said they would struggle to meet an unexpected expense of $100 or less.
At the same time, the rhetoric of work “purpose” or “meaning,” while attractive to everyone, is a luxury for many. Only people making more than $150,000 a year valued “doing things I feel are important” more than “earning as stable and secure an income as possible,” according to the survey. (Though, most people prioritize “doing things I enjoy.”)
If one was to criticize the commission and its report, you might say it’s a little bloodless and apolitical, in a broad sense. Wall Street and Washington D.C. are not mentioned at all, even though both surely have had, and will continue to have, plenty to say about work. The future of employment is not all a function of technology, demographics, and changing expectations around wealth, free time, and meaning. Perhaps because it wants a wide readership, the commission chose to emphasize structural and impersonal forces, not the decisions of executives and politicians, which are surely relevant too. Going forward, we’ll need to take account of all factors, not just the least controversial ones.
So you’ve worked really hard to make a name for yourself in your company (or industry!)–and it’s starting to pay off. People want to meet with you, have you sit in on meetings, and even speak to groups.
That’s amazing! The only thing that could bring you down is one tiny catch–you’re swamped. Not in the “today’s not a great day for an extended lunch” sense, but the kind of busy where you’ve worked through every meal in recent memory.
And whatever’s causing this uptick in work means it’s going to be a while before you come up for air.
Your first instinct may be to see if it’s possible to sleep even less and cram this opportunity in so you don’t miss out. However, it’s doubtful that you’re going to be able to take full advantage of it if you’re a zombie (or constantly distracted). In other words, you’re going to want to ask for a raincheck–the right way. Here’s how.
What To Say Now
The message you want to get across is that you’d like to say yes, but unfortunately, this isn’t the best time for you. The tricky part is: That’s the same thing people say if they want to decline, but think punting comes off nicer than a flat no.
To separate yourself from them, keep in mind that you have a totally different motivation. Their goal is to be nice–and hope the other person forgets about them. Your goal, on the other hand, is to share that you’re interested, but genuinely can’t make it work.
So be enthusiastic, and add in some details to seem even more sincere. It sounds like this:
Hi [Name],
Thanks so much for thinking of me to attend this conference/lead this meeting/share my work with [person]/meet up and discuss [something you’re passionate about]. In a typical week, I would say yes in a heartbeat!
Unfortunately, I’m pushing up against a major deadline/launching an initiative/covering for a coworker who’s away/leaving for an international trip, and have no flexibility in my schedule.
That said, I would love to be considered for this opportunity/meet up with [person]/be a part of [initiative]! Can I reach back out to discuss further in [timeframe]?
All the best,
[Your name]
This response makes it clear that, while you can’t be involved at the moment, you genuinely want to be in the future–so much so that you included plans to follow up.
What To Say Later
Saying you’d like to be in touch when you have more availability, and finding the time to reach back out are two different things. And yes, following up is the best way to show you really do want to be involved.
It sounds like this:
Dear [Name],
I hope this note finds you well. I recently returned from my trip/adjusted to my new management role/ finished unpacking my new place/wrapped [major project], and one of my first thoughts was that I wanted to reach out to you and learn more about [opportunity].
Do you have some time over the next week or so to discuss further? I’m available [timeframes] to discuss. I’m also always happy to get the conversation started over email.
Looking forward to learning more!
[Your name]
Again, including specifics about what’s changed and when you’re available shows you’d like to revisit the opportunity now that you have time.
Of course, this response assumes that your schedule actually opened up as planned. If the time frame you originally mentioned is coming to a close, and you aren’t able to make time, reach back out and say so. While you could say nothing and let them “take the hint,” a short, “Unfortunately, I’m still overextended and won’t be able to participate,” makes it clear you weren’t just leading them on.
In an ideal world, your schedule would magically allow for you take on all of the coolest opportunities. But that won’t always happen, and sometimes, it just won’t be feasible.
Everyone’s been there, so it’s likely the other person will understand. If you carve a few minutes to reach back thoughtfully with one of the responses above, you can keep the door open for when you do have more time.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
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