“Would I rather be feared or loved?” Michael Scott, Steve Carell’s character on The Officeonce mused. “Easy: Both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.”

Everyone has a different leadership style, and while some are clearly better than others, finding the one that suits you best isn’t always as easy as Scott would have you believe. So GetVoIP, a cloud communications company, put together this fun little flowchart to help. Start by answering the first question, “Are you friends with your colleagues?” and see which fictional boss it winds up pegging you to.

But don’t worry if you turn out to be a hapless Bob Belcher or an ice-cold Miranda Priestly. We’ll help you fit your typical management style to the right situations in the real world—now and in the future.

Women typically spend more time on household chores and caring for children than their male partners (something called the”gender leisure gap“).

However, that dynamic doesn’t apply to all households. Single fathers, two-father households, and dads who are making it a point to split home and childcare responsibilities evenly are finding strategies and approaches to split the load more evenly. Since working moms are routinely asked how they balance work and family obligations, in honor of father’s day we asked some busy working dad’s how they “have it all.”

Stay Organized And Communicate

Paul Rochford and his wife, Ellie, underwent a major life change when Ellie went back to work as a middle school teacher a year ago. Paul had worked as a school administrator and special education teacher over the past 20 years. His work has evolved to the point where he has more flexibility, while Ellie is trying to get her second career off the ground, so he took on the lion’s share of household responsibilities and childcare for their 8-year old daughter.

“I always said her job was always harder than mine, but now I proved it this year that [being] the stay-at-home (parent) is so much harder than working is,” he says.

The secret to making it work? “Google Calendar,” he says. The minute they’re aware of a new event, task or to-do, it goes in their digital calendar so nothing slips through the cracks. And constant communication needs to take place to keep everyone apprised of what needs to get done. He says one of the biggest challenges is all of the “little things” that Ellie knows from taking care of them for so long often go undone if he’s unaware of them. “I’ll literally put ‘change the air filters’ on Google Calendar. I’ll put every single thing on there as I’m learning about them, because I’m not going to make the same mistakes again,” he says.

Coordinate Responsibilities

Charlie Hinsch and Jose Neilsen mapped out their daily schedule of responsibilities based on their work schedules.

Neilsen is up at 4 a.m. to leave for work at his new bakery, Elite Custom Cakes, which is about two blocks away from home. By 7:15 a.m., he is back at home and takes care of getting their 8-year-old son off to school while Hinsch, an instructional technology coordinator for Virginia Beach City Public Schools, gets ready for work.

After his work day is over, Hinsch typically takes over childcare duties, since Neilsen has been up since 4. Throughout the day, they keep up a stream of texts to make sure that after-school activities and household needs are covered.

The couple also uses each person’s strengths to their advantage. Hinsch says he’s “the more organized one,” so he fields things like food shopping, scheduling appointments, and arranging for camp. There are times when he does have to call out tasks that he needs Neilsen to field right away. “I’ve designated certain things that he needs to take care of like the pest control or the car insurance,” he says. “Some things can be put aside until another time down the road, but if we have a water leak, this needs to be fixed now.”

Because Neilsen is focusing on building his business, Hinsch says their household responsibilities are somewhat uneven now because the bakery is so new and needs a lot of attention. As it gets more established, he says responsibilities will shift to be more even again. Being flexible about adapting for the long-term good of the family is another essential element in the process, he says.

“You just have to realize that it may not be fair today, it may not be fair this week, this month, or even this year,” he says. “We were able to figure things out, but right now it’s heavier on my plate because I have a steadier schedule. But it’s more about being understanding and knowing that this is for right now and things will change.”

Get In The Zone

While his children are now grown up, Robert Cichielo was a divorced single father able to spend much of his time at home with his children from the time they were ages 2, 4, and 6 years old until they went to college. An inventor, technology professional, and cofounder of etherFAX, a secure communications company, he says that he was rigorous about creating “time zones.” Within the inevitable chaos—unexpected days with sick kids at home, forgotten homework, or last-minute school projects—you need to find ways to block out time to get your work done, he says.

“Finding those zones, even if it was 2:00 to 4:00 a.m. or whatever it was, or from kids went to bed at seven and I would stay up ’til midnight or 1:00 a.m.—finding those zones where I could focus [was essential],” he says.

Being reliable and building goodwill with customers also gave him flexibility when he needed to make adjustments to deal with household or childcare responsibilities. By focusing on building strong relationships, he found it was less of an issue if he needed to tend to personal business during work hours.

“Now, if I have an issue, my child is in the school play, or he’s sick, or whatever, that trust—that relationship that I built and the communication I have with my customers—allows me to say, ‘Hey, Customer So-and-so, I’m having an issue today,’ and people, I think, when you give, or when you over-give, I think it gives you a lot of leeway,” he says.

Build Your “Safety Net”

When Scott Teel and his wife, Cami, moved from Charlotte, North Carolina to Denver last year to follow his career, they loved their new home, but missed their friends and family. Being new to the area and both holding jobs that sometimes require long hours—Scott is head of organizational development for Agility Recovery and his wife is an account executive for a local television station—is more difficult because they don’t have people they know well nearby to help care for their 2-year-old daughter. Recently, when Cami had a medical issue and went to the emergency room, they were left with few options.

“We were left basically asking a neighbor who we had never met to come to our house, and I quickly handed off our daughter to this person. We knew we could trust her, she was a pediatric nurse, and our other neighbors whom we had met recommended her, but we just hadn’t met her,” he says. To build their network of people, they’ve used the Nextdoor app and asked other friends to help them meet people.

Cichielo says that kind of support network was “crucial” for him. Working from home, he was often called upon to help neighbors. “I was seen as the super, if you will, in the neighborhood. ‘My sink doesn’t work’ or whatever, and I built relationships with the people around me,” he says. When you focus on building relationships instead of just asking for help when you need it, you’ll find that people are more than willing to give you a hand, he says.

Dividing household and family tasks evenly isn’t easy. But, by dividing responsibilities, remaining organized, and building both time for their priorities and a system of backup support, these fathers are making strides in the right direction.

Anthony Romero was the first one in his office on Wednesday, November 9, 2016. The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sat at his desk, which overlooks the Statue of Liberty from lower Manhattan, and wrote a combative letter to then–president-elect Donald Trump. In it, he vowed that “the full firepower” of his organization would be deployed against any attempts by the new administration to encroach on the Constitution. In the months since, the ACLU has blocked the two so-called travel bans targeting predominantly Muslim countries and launched new tools to help organize protesters and lobby lawmakers. It’s taken in $83 million in donations and increased membership fourfold to 1.6 million people. In Romero’s 16 years as executive director, the ACLU has often been on the front lines of cultural controversy, helping lead landmark fights against “don’t ask, don’t tell” in 2010 and for marriage equality in 2015. “We will get tested, and we will sometimes lose, but we will always be in the fight for the right reasons,” Romero told his staff on November 9. Here’s how he keeps the pugnacious 97-year-old nonprofit—which has challenged Republicans and Democrats alike—at the forefront of national affairs.

Lead With Empathy

Romero became executive director of the ACLU one week before the September 11, 2001, attacks. While he anticipated that the strikes might lead to increased nationalism and an erosion of civil liberties, Romero decided his first move should address the country’s mood. In a press release, he sounded a patriotic note, pledging that the ACLU would “work with our national leaders in their fight to bring those responsible for this tragedy to justice.” Though some ACLU staffers disagreed with this sentiment, Romero was laying the foundation for the nonprofit’s future efforts. “Our client, the American people, was grieving and stunned and afraid,” he recalls. “[I said to the staff,] ‘We have to make sure the public is ready to hear us.’ ” Once the Bush administration began to detain and deport immigrants, though, the ACLU jumped to respond.

Prepare For The Radically Unexpected

More than six months before much of the American public was blindsided by Trump’s election, Romero directed his staff to compile a detailed report on what a Trump presidency might mean for civil liberties. “Everyone was talking about Clinton, Clinton, Clinton. We had to have a Trump plan, because if he were to be elected, the challenges would be too great to [address] on the fly,” says Romero. The 27-page document, published in July 2016, took all of the candidate’s rhetoric on issues like immigration and abortion literally and seriously, and offered a clear defense against possible policy positions. The memo, which laid out the arguments that later persuaded judges to temporarily block the first immigration ban, has served as a practical playbook.

Attack From All Angles

Though the ACLU’s most visible campaigns have national implications, many of its legal battles are waged on the state level. Romero has poured resources into its 53 affiliate offices—especially in states like Texas and Ohio, where precedent-setting cases are often litigated—a strategy that helps the ACLU challenge issues through a variety of simultaneous lawsuits. “We can have one perfect case with the best clients, filed in the right jurisdiction,” says Romero. “[But] I think the right strategy is to file as many of these lawsuits as we can.” When the revised immigration ban was announced in March, the ACLU didn’t have to scramble to file new cases or find clients because it already had 15 legal actions in process in several states. The Maryland case that temporarily halted the ban just nine days later was one the ACLU had set into motion in January.

Use Momentum Wisely

To activate the ACLU’s growing membership, Romero tapped Faiz Shakir, a former adviser to Senator Harry Reid, to serve as national political director. In March, Shakir launched People Power, a site that suggests resources for political engagement and offers advice on organizing rallies. It debuted with a live-streamed town hall that gave the 200,000 viewers an overview of their rights as protesters and ideas for action. That kind of engagement doesn’t just keep the ACLU in headlines—it could also help win cases. “Judges live in communities, and so a lot of what [they] are responding to is seeing people in the streets, seeing the protests and the press reports,” Romero says. “Judges make independent decisions based on the law, but they look around at what’s going on around them and that changes their hearts and minds.”

Take two menu items: “slow-roasted caramelized zucchini bites” and “nutritious green zucchini.” Science says you’re more likely to pick the first. That’s just some of the findings in a new study that tested using different language to describe vegetables, which could be an important factor in the quest to get people to eat less meat.

“We know how we label food can have substantial effects on both what people choose to eat and the experience they have while they’re eating,” says Bradley Turnwald, a graduate psychology student at Stanford University and lead author of the study. (Some previous lab studies found that if you label food as healthy, people will rate it as less delicious, less filling, and less enjoyable than the same food without the label. Despite this fact, Turnwald says, most healthy foods are currently marketed with a focus on their health properties rather than taste or indulgence.)

The study is one of several to look at how to persuade consumers to eat more plant-based foods, either for health reasons or because of the environmental impact of the standard meat-heavy American diet. A shift to more vegetables and less meat would especially impact climate. If everyone in the world became vegan by 2050, according to a 2016 study, food-related carbon emissions would be cut 70%. Even if everyone simply ate less meat than projected, emissions could drop nearly 30%.

The Better Buying Lab, an initiative of the global research organization World Resources Institute, launched in 2016 to study how to accelerate the shift in diet that consumers say they want to make, using techniques more often used by corporate food brands to sell more products.

“One of the things that we noticed was that most attempts to try and change people toward eating more sustainable food rely on informing and educating them,” says Daniel Vennard, who leads the lab’s work. “Our research showed that education and information are helpful, but not the most effective tools at helping consumers change their behavior . . . consumption isn’t rational.”

Working with experts in behavior change, marketing, and advertising, the lab is currently partnering with companies like Google and Sodexo to test new language on menus. For 25 dishes from the companies’ cafeterias, the team generated 250 new names that are currently being tested in online market research. The best performing names will be tested on menus to see how much they can change what consumers buy for lunch. (In a separate project, the lab is also working with chefs to test new plant-based “power dishes” that it thinks can better compete with the most popular dishes with meat (of the 25 most popular dishes among the partners, 24 currently include meat.)

The Stanford researchers, who were motivated by health impacts, looked at menus from chain restaurants in another study, noting the adjectives used for standard foods versus healthy foods. “We were actually pretty surprised to find that in restaurants on the menus they describe their healthy foods using less tasty, less exciting, less indulgent, even less provocative words,” says Turnwald. “This is a big problem because people don’t think healthy food taste is good . . . how can we expect people to choose these healthy foods if they’re not described in a way that aligns with what we’re motivated to eat? Because we’re mostly motivated by taste when we’re choosing what we want to eat.”

In the latest study, the researchers pulled descriptions more commonly used for other foods (beans became “sweet sizzlin’ green beans and crispy shallots,” for example) to increase appeal. They also tested basic descriptions (“green beans”), descriptions that focused on health in a restrictive way (“light ‘n’ low-carb green beans and shallots”) and descriptions that focused on health in a positive way (“healthy energy-boosting green beans and shallots”). None performed as well as the “indulgent” descriptions.

Turnwald points out that the indulgent descriptions weren’t deceptive. “We don’t want to trick people,” he says. “People don’t like to be tricked, so that wouldn’t be a strategy that is very good and long lasting. But what we’re doing with the labels, we’re just changing what we have people focus on. So whether we said the vegetable was healthy or we said it was indulgent, it was true, we just shifted the focus toward the taste and indulgent components of the food.”

He sees language and marketing as a way to help change how Americans think about healthy food. “We may not only choose vegetables more when we think of them this way, but we might actually enjoy the experience when we eat them, too,” he says. “There’s some evidence that shows that being in an indulgent mind-set while you’re eating is actually better physiologically than when you’re in a mind-set of restriction. And then there’s other research that shows that if you make a healthy decision but you feel deprived you may eat more later on anyway. So here we really want to start changing this restrictive messaging around healthy food.”

“If you take one thing away from today,” Mark Zuckerberg announced in April from the stage of F8, Facebook’s annual conference for developers, “this is it: We’re making the [smartphone] camera the first augmented-reality platform.”

Facebook had already begun adding camera effects to its apps, letting users overlay objects, animations, and filters on their images—an unabashed knockoff of Snapchat’s popular AR-powered Lenses. With a new open platform where developers can create their own effects, art, and 3D games, Facebook is betting that it can become the go-to destination for AR experiences, a WeChat-like repository of third-party apps-within-its-apps.

After years of dormancy, the hype around AR is ratcheting back up. Beyond Facebook’s augmented ambitions (which include, down the road, a wearable device), there’s Google’s four-year-old Glass, Microsoft’s HoloLens, and the mysterious, well-funded Magic Leap—along with a rumored device from Apple. According to market research firm CB Insights, 49 AR companies have secured equity financing deals since last spring—a 75% increase from the 12 months prior.

They’re all vying to dominate a future where the separation between the physical and the digital is wafer-thin, and you won’t need a keyboard or a touch screen to navigate it. “Augmented reality is the next mobile computer, the next OS, the next social platform,” says Ori Inbar, founder of Super Ventures, a VC firm specializing in AR. “The smartphone is dead; it just doesn’t know it yet.”

What pieces of this hyperbole might actually prove out? Here’s our three-part guide to how AR will actually unfold.

Our Phones Will Be The Gateway—For Now

For the better part of a decade, developers have been promising to use smartphone cameras to enhance our perspective on the world. In 2009, Yelp introduced its Monocle feature, annotating users’ camera lenses with ratings for local businesses; a spate of similar apps followed, but none gained any significant traction. It was rainbow-vomiting millennials that pushed the technology into the mainstream, with the introduction of Snapchat’s addictive, selfie-enhancing Lenses in September 2015. By the following August, Pokémon Go had 100 million downloads, as people peered through their smartphones to hunt for Charmanders and Squirtles in habitats across the globe.

Related: Seven Ways AR May Change Your Life

The ability to replace your nose with a dog snout or capture a Jigglypuff lurking outside your favorite café may appear frivolous, but it’s actually profound—a clever way of easing consumers into augmented reality, without calling it that. Snapchat now has a promising advertising platform with its sponsored lenses, which can be tied to specific locations. Niantic, the developer behind Pokémon Go, created a hit that has generated an estimated $1 billion–plus in revenue. In the current rush to create the next big AR app—from multiplayer games to more practical applications, like interactive travel guides and shopping assistants—success may ultimately depend on the formula that these two companies laid out: social interaction grounded by superior location intelligence.

At the same time, smartphones are growing more sophisticated. Since 2014, Google has been developing its Tango platform, which gives mobile devices spatial awareness. Late last year, Lenovo released the $500 Phab 2 Pro, the first Tango-enabled smartphone. Using multiple cameras and advanced, motion-tracking sensors, the Phab 2 creates 3D maps from two-dimensional images. Train the phone’s lens on your living room, and Tango will know the lamp is six feet to the left of the couch. You can then use a Tango-optimized app from e-commerce giant Wayfair to see how a (virtual) coffee table looks between them. Lowe’s Home Improvement has a similar app, along with one that allows customers to use the phone’s camera to navigate its stores.

Such efforts are early, and their executions fairly crude. Lenovo’s embrace of Tango is more of a proof of concept than a groundbreaking device. But that may change quickly. The second Tango-enabled phone, the Asus ZenFone AR, lands this summer. And according to rumors, the upcoming iPhone 8 will also sport a depth-sensing camera to enable AR apps. Notably, Apple typically waits until a technology is mature—and consumers are ready—before incorporating it into a flagship product. “Once the iPhone has that [camera],” Inbar contends, “it will become a de facto standard.”

Wearables Will Be Refined In The Workplace

Despite the success of Snapchat and Pokémon Go, nobody believes the future of AR consists of staring into smartphones, chasing mythical creatures.

That’s because the phone is a less-than-ideal interface. “Let’s say you walk into a supermarket that’s enabled with augmented reality,” says Tuong Nguyen, principal analyst for research firm Gartner. “How many times during your shopping trip are you willing to take out your phone? How long are you willing to hold it up?” The biggest hurdle for AR, Nguyen says: “It needs to be built into the glasses I’m already wearing.”

Today, there are some 50 AR headsets in production, ranging from basic eyeglasses that can display 3D images to $20,000 industrial-strength helmets from maker Daqri. But none are small, cheap, or elegant enough for mass appeal. So for the next few years, AR devices will be found primarily in work environments, where their cost and appearance don’t matter as much. ABI Research projects that the AR market will grow to $96 billion by 2021, with 60% of that going to industrial and commercial uses.

Google Glass, for example, has found a home on the factory floor after failing to take off among consumers. Boeing uses Glass to display technical diagrams to workers assembling electric wire harnesses for aircraft, leaving their hands free to perform tasks. (When you’re cutting assembly time by 25%, nobody calls you a Glasshole.) And it’s not just Google Glass: Med-tech startup Scopis has made a HoloLens app to guide surgeons through spinal surgery. At Minneapolis’s Mortenson Construction, contractors can don a Daqri Smart Helmet, walk through a 3D model of a hospital under construction, and see where the plumbing will be routed before it’s actually in place.

Widespread industrial use won’t just change the way we work; it will inform future consumer-facing products. Just as industrial workers use AR to summon remote assistance during complicated maneuvers, homeowners who want to retile their bathrooms may one day turn to a pair of glasses for virtual walk-throughs and diagrams.

AR Will Surround Us

In the meantime, AR is continuing to pop up in everyday devices. If your car’s rear-facing cam shows you a squiggly red line as you’re about to back into a tree, you’re using AR. Smart mirrors are being rolled out at Sephora stores, to enable virtual makeup testing, and at Neiman Marcus, to let shoppers change the color of their outfits or try on prescription glasses. In the same way that “adaptive cruise control” and “lane-change assist” are leading us toward fully autonomous cars, AR will be insinuated into our lives one feature at a time.

Augmented features are also likely to seep further into inexpensive wearables, as seen in Snapchat’s video-capture Spectacles and wireless earbuds like Apple’s AirPods. Doppler Labs has already released its Here One smart earbuds, which let you amplify certain frequencies and filter out others—augmenting your aural reality. CEO Noah Kraft sees a future where AR exists naturally in your ear. “Say you’re walking down the street and all of a sudden Siri pops into your head and says, ‘Hey, your next meeting is running 15 minutes behind,’ ” he says. “In our world, that doesn’t distract from what’s going on around you.”

Still, bringing the sophistication and reliability of industrial applications to a device that fits seamlessly into our daily lives is a daunting task. The technical challenges are steep, and it’s unclear whether the public will embrace yet another wearable (and if the content will be good enough to convince them to)­. Nonetheless, Apple is reportedly plunging ahead, as are Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others.

For tech firms, getting skin in the AR game may simply be a matter of survival. Just as the internet and mobile radically changed the tech landscape, AR has the potential to create new giants while humbling old ones, says Piers Harding-Rolls, director of games research for IHS Technology, a London-based research firm.

The future, in other words, will be augmented. But by the time it happens, we might not even notice.

While Amna Al Haddad, a weight lifter from Dubai, was training for the 2016 Olympics, Nike offered to help optimize her performance. At the company’s Oregon campus, scientists used motion-capture technology to study her movements. During the process, Al Haddad realized her real need was much more elemental. She had searched for a hijab suitable for weight lifting, but nothing stayed in place. She settled for a single, stretchy scarf that she hand-washed nightly. “We have so many tools at our disposal,” says Megan Saalfeld, a Nike senior communications director. “[We thought,] This is something we can solve.” With Saalfeld in charge, designers set to work on a hijab that employs Nike’s collection of lightweight, breathable materials and ability to create products that are secure yet comfortable. The hijab, which is being prototyped, will be released next spring. It has sparked discussion at the company about what else Nike can offer women who dress conservatively—a style chronically underserved by the athleisure industry and its affinity for skintight cuts. From focus groups, Saalfeld learned the importance of balancing coverage and function: Testers asked Nike to hem one early hijab prototype, which hung below the chest, so that it would look more like something an athlete might wear. “They want the hijab to signal that they mean business,” says Saalfeld.

How will people use augmented reality? It may be easier to list the ways they won’t. Here are a few applications in the works, both playful and profound.

Ink-Free Tattoos

Not sure about that new tat? The InkHunter app lets you create a preview anywhere on your body before you make a more permanent mistake.

Engaging Ads

For the new Jamie Foxx–hosted Beat Shazam game show, Fox created AR-enabled billboards throughout New York that conjured a 3-D Foxx on viewers’ phones.

Related: Why Facebook, Google, And Snap Love AR—And What’s Coming Next

Virtual Salons

Sephora, L’Oréal, and CoverGirl offer in-store displays and mobile apps that let you see how makeup will look on your face without having to apply it.

Roadside Assistance

Smart windshields, which project information on where you are and where you’re headed, are becoming more common as automakers and startups alike find new ways to bring them to drivers.

Classroom Aids

Microsoft is working with ed-tech company Lifeliqe on HoloLens-based curricula, such as a virtual tour of the human circulatory system.

Remote Medicine

Startup Proximie allows experienced surgeons to view operations remotely and provide AR instructions to physicians performing them.

Seeing-Eye Humans

Aira makes smart glasses for blind people that send a video feed to a customer-service agent, who can tell the user what’s around her.

Hmbldt, a startup based in Los Angeles, wants to make medical marijuana as predictable as Advil. Now legal in 29 states, cannabis is increasingly used to treat conditions ranging from nagging headaches to Parkinson’s. But it doesn’t always deliver dependable relief: There are more than 700 strains, each producing a different effect, and taking the right amount can be tricky. “We know that [marijuana] has all these incredible benefits, but it’s really hard to tailor your experience,” says Hmbldt cofounder Matt Seashols.

To create more consistent medications, Seashols began by hiring scientists to identify which of the 483 known chemical compounds in cannabis are responsible for specific physiological effects, such as euphoria or drowsiness. The result: Hmbldt’s six concentrated oil formulas, which mix and match compounds to target specific conditions, including anxiety, insomnia, and pain. To deliver a controlled and “repeatable” experience, Seashols partnered with a team of engineers to develop a vaporizer pen that activates the formula and vibrates when a single, 2.25-milligram dose has been administered. The device is an improvement on standard pens, which don’t regulate dose, and on other methods of taking medical marijuana, such as joints and edibles. On the back of each Hmbldt package, there’s even a food-label-style list of ingredients that details the formula’s concentration of active ingredients like THC and CBD. The spare, earthy branding (courtesy of the design firm Anomaly, an early investor in Hmbldt) evokes the hypertransparent aesthetic you might find on organic packaged food.

Since Hmbldt launched in September, its products have been sold at more than 150 dispensaries throughout California. “People want something that resonates with them like the rest of the stuff in their medicine cabinet or kitchen pantry,” says CEO Gunner Winston. “For us, it’s not about getting high. It’s about health.

Space is a lot closer than it used to be. Companies like Planet and Spire are sending more cameras into orbit than ever before, providing an unprecedented near-real-time view of of every corner of the earth, from wheat fields in Egypt to glaciers in Antarctica. Here are five ways that companies are using this constant stream of data and images to bring more transparency and efficiency to different industries here on the ground.

Agriculture

A number of companies use satellite imagery to predict annual farm yields—mostly focusing on major crops like wheat, corn and soy—and produce estimations that are useful for farmers and commodities traders alike. But Vinsight, a small startup in California, has decided to instead focus on grapes and almonds, two of the state’s most valuable agricultural products. “Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t forecast those crops,” says Founder Megan Nunes. “We thought it made sense to apply the technology to a sector that really needs it.” Grape and almond farmers typically see a 30-40% error rate when they predict their seasonal outputs, Nunes says. With Vinsight’s technology, which uses machine learning to analyze satellite images, taking into account external factors like location, weather, and historical performance, farmers can get a yield prediction that is three or four times more accurate. That information, says Nunes, can help them save on labor costs, estimate their revenue for the year, and strike better deals with buyers.

Another analytics company, FarmShots, digs even deeper. The North Carolina–based startup analyzes specific fields and patches of farmland, studying factors like light absorption and land elevation to detect the presence of pests or diseases on individual fields. FarmShots alerts its clients when there’s a problem, and is currently building out its recognition algorithms to easily identify the cause, such as fungus or trapped rainwater. Through a recent partnership with John Deere, the company’s technology has been built into tractors and other equipment, so those findings can automatically direct machines on the ground. “You don’t want to put on an even coat of fertilizer,” says FarmShots CEO Joshua Miller. “We generate a map to instruct the machine to put less fertilizer on the areas that are healthy and more on the areas that are unhealthy.”

Shipping

Before the era of CubeSats, government-owned satellites tended to cover only the more populated areas of earth—leaving remote corners of the ocean in the dark. Shipping routes in the Arctic, for example, weren’t  covered by satellites or signal towers, which led to a dearth of knowledge about who was passing through and what they were doing. In March, Spire partnered with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and Ball Aerospace to monitor these blind spots. “The suspicion is that there’s more traffic there than we realize,” says Nick Allain, Head of Creative and Brand at Spire. “Whose water are they actually traversing? Where is an oil spill most likely to happen? Are ships meeting in the middle and sharing things they’re not supposed to be sharing?” The partnership will look to gather that information and come up with solutions that prevent black-market trading and make Arctic sea routes safer for shippers.

Farther south, Spire has used its capabilities to prevent similar dangers in the Indian Ocean. It works with the Indonesian government to cut down on illegal fishing activity by flagging ships that are in restricted waters, and is currently testing a new capability that can detect what kind of fish a boat is trawling for based on its patterns at sea. “By looking at the pattern, you can say, ‘Wait, they’re not supposed to be fishing for crab, they’re supposed to be fishing for tuna,'” says Allain. “It was hard to track that before.” Spire also provides its data to piracy forecasting companies, helping them keep an eye on risky spots in the ocean.

Emergency Response

When disaster hits—whether it be a tsunami or a mortar attack—satellite images can be a crucial tool for governments and aid organizations trying to assess the damage and direct relief efforts. Planet, which has launched nearly 150 satellites into orbit, uses its images to create maps that show an affected area  before and after a disaster, helping field workers quickly identify roads that have been blocked or important buildings, such as schools or hospitals, that have been damaged. “It can really increase the efficiency and the effectiveness of response efforts,” says Tara O’Shea, who heads up impact initiatives at Planet. “Rather than having to send folks out into the field to survey, which can be costly and time intensive, we can fulfill that need with our imagery.” After a hurricane hit Haiti last fall, the company jumped into action and produced before-and-after maps of the country within days.

Around that time, Planet decided to form a disaster response team focused on these efforts. Many aid organizations or community groups don’t have staff members with image processing and geospatial analysis capabilities, which are critical for turning the satellite images into useful information. “People on the ground just need a simple PDF that they can laminate and carry outside,” says O’Shea. To get those assets to first responders faster, Planet worked with the Digital Humanitarian Network to enlist about 20 volunteers from around the world; after receiving training from Planet on how to use its platform and work with its imagery, those volunteers were put on call, ready to respond to a disaster at any time of day. 

Environmental Research

For researchers, the implications of satellite imagery are nearly endless—they can be used to monitor everything from deforestation in the Amazon to the annual bloom of tropical plants. In April, Planet launched a new program to facilitate this work, opening its platform to anyone with a university affiliation. Scientists from Stanford to the University of Oslo use Planet’s images and data, as well as factors like snowfall and sea level, to track the movement of Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier, which is famous for shedding massive amounts of ice into the ocean each year. “It’s an area of intense scrutiny—it’s one of the hot spots in the cryosphere community,” says Joe Mascaro, a program manager at Planet. In Florida, Mascaro says, another researcher is using Planet’s platform to study the effect of an invasive ant species in India by surveying the health and population of Acacia trees.

Orbital Insight has also launched initiatives in this space: for the past two years, it has been working with the World Resources Institute to keep an eye on deforestation. By looking for warning signs, such as new roads being built in undeveloped areas, the company is hoping to prevent deforestation before it happens.

National Security

The U.S. government uses satellites for more than just keeping an eye on North Ko­­rea. The Defense Department recently granted image analysis company Descartes Labs $1.5 million to study food security in the Middle East and North Africa. “The US spends a lot of money surveying farmers, but if you go into developing economies, those numbers don’t exist,” says cofounder and CEO Mark Johnson. “Across the Middle East and North Africa, where it’s not cash crops but crops that sustain the population, there’s no good way of alerting people to a food shortage.”

To remedy that, Descartes is scanning farmland—both large-scale operations and smaller fields in rural areas—for early signs of famine, which can precede sociopolitical discord. That makes it quicker, easier, and cheaper to identify such regions and try to prevent conflict. “If we see a shortage, we can send in humanitarian resources rather than waiting for famine and unrest,” says Johnson. “We have all these pictures, and if we analyze them, we can send people in at the right time to the right places.”

Economic Development

In 2015, Orbital Insight partnered with the World Bank to study how well its technology could measure poverty rates and economic growth, focusing on a small part of Sri Lanka. The two organizations are now using those insights to test the technology in Mexico, using satellite imagery, machine learning, and survey data to gauge how many people live below the poverty line in different municipalities. “Traditional household survey data is the gold standard for accuracy in poverty measurement, but it is expensive to collect,” says David Newhouse, Senior Economist, Poverty, at the World Bank. Surveys are also conducted infrequently and often fail to accurately capture rural areas.

Using satellite imagery to analyze an area as large as Mexico will likely produce less accurate results than a household survey, Newhouse admits, but the frequency with which it can be done could still be beneficial. The Mexican government uses poverty maps to direct social funding, but those maps are only produced every five years or so, says Carlos Rodriguez-Castelan, Senior Economist and Poverty Global Lead at the World Bank. “With more frequent data, we could have a better picture of people moving in and out of poverty, and who really needs assistance in a particular area,” says Rodriguez-Castelan. “This could be a critical tool to better target governmental programs and investments towards those who need them the most, at a much more granular level.”

When the indoor-cycling startup Flywheel Sports asked Sarah Robb O’Hagan to be its new CEO in 2016, she didn’t have to think long about her answer. “I was like, ‘Absolutely not,’ ” recalls the executive, who had left her job as president of exercise chain Equinox (parent company of Flywheel competitor SoulCycle) earlier that year. At the time, she was writing her first book, and she wasn’t eager to return to the C-suite. But as Flywheel continued to pursue her, Robb O’Hagan grew more impressed with the brand’s focus on fitness, technology, and personal growth. Finally, she took the job.

Almost six months later, the New Zealand native is steering Flywheel in new directions. This fall, the company is moving into Peloton’s territory and launching its own line of stationary bikes, which come with tablet devices that let riders stream classes at home and compete against other riders’ stats. “You’re part of this global community of avid Flywheelers, and wherever you are, you can participate,” says Robb O’Hagan, who is also planning to open 5 to 10 new locations annually over the next few years (Flywheel currently has 42 studios around the country).

Robb O’Hagan did finish her book, Extreme You, which HarperCollins published in April. Featuring interviews with Angela Ahrendts, Condoleezza Rice, and others, it urges readers to embrace their faults. “Our culture celebrates everyone for their accomplishments,” she says. “But when we don’t show the struggles, the fails, and the years of self-doubt, we make it impossible for the next generation to believe they can get there.”

Best Recent Tech Development

“I’m a swimmer, so I love the Apple Watch Series 2. It’s so cool when you finish swimming and it sponges the water out.”

Worst Tech Development

“There are so many ‘fitness trackers’ that are really just accelerometers and sleep monitors—they’re not bringing anything new to consumers.”

Advice She’d Give Her Younger Self

“Relax a bit! Everything that happens in your career will add up, so don’t stress so much on the journey.”

Source Of Inspiration

“Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom. It’s an extraordinary story of humanity and resilience, and it gives you a giant dose of perspective.”

How She Stays Productive

“Morning workouts let me clear my head, get alone time, and think about what I want to accomplish that day.”

By many reports, 2017 is a buyer’s market for job seekers. In tech, the competition is especially fierce, as companies rise or fall from consumer favor or teeter under the weight of internal troubles (looking at you, Uber).

For example, LinkedIn just revealed its list of the top global companies based on the rates of applications and job openings, the number of people asking for connections within a company, and how long staff are sticking around. The top five:

1. Alphabet
2. Amazon
3. Facebook
4. Uber
5. Apple

All of the data was gathered through the 12 months ending this past February. (Note: Susan Fowler’s explosive blog post about sexual harassment at Uber was published on February 19. So next year’s list may look very different.)

Another way to take the temperature of which companies are winning the war for talent is to measure how their workers feel. Comparably, a compensation, culture, and jobs monitoring site, conducted a survey to find out. They asked current employees of the top five public tech companies–Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft–to rate their compensation, leadership, environment, team, ​retention, and opportunities for women and minorities​. Each company had over 2,500 responses from staff members.

Separately, Comparably ran the same stats exclusively for Fast Company on five other companies that have made news lately: Lyft, Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber, and Twitter. They stress the fact that it’s not an accurate comparison to the top five because each of the companies we chose has significantly fewer employee participants. Uber and Twitter have 125 and 150 responses each, Lyft and Airbnb have about 50, and Pinterest has 30.

Here’s what we found out from Comparably’s stats:

The Culture Trickle Down

Google came out on top for overall company culture scoring 71 out of 100. Facebook was a close second at 68; Microsoft at third place scored 66. Apple and Amazon rank at the bottom, but their scores were close to the others, each earning 65 out of 100.

We know that culture starts at the top and trickles down. Comparably’s survey revealed that employee sentiment toward the CEO, executive team, and managers at the company were highest at Facebook, which scored a 79 overall. CEO Mark Zuckerberg ranked the highest of the five chiefs with an 82. This complements a previous survey from Glassdoor where Zuckerberg garnered rave reviews and a 95% approval rating from his staff.

Facebook also topped the list for how employees feel about their coworkers and the way meetings are run. Google and Apple tied to nudge out the others on how employees rate the workplace environment and the time they spend their each day. And Google beat the other on how employees feel about going to work each day, the company’s future success, and perception by customers.

Overall, employees at the five companies we selected voted Airbnb the highest for culture based on compensation, leadership, team, environment, and sentiment. They scored 71 compared to last place Uber with 61. Airbnb’s Brian Chesky also came in first with a score of 80 while Uber’s embattled Travis Kalanick earned a 63.

The Best Places For Diversity

Apple is the best ranked company among women with 69 out of 100. Amazon was on the bottom with 61. Interestingly, Google’s female workers didn’t seem to feel all that badly about their employer in light of the Labor Department’s suit that charges the company with “extreme discrimination” against women. They scored a 66 to tie with Microsoft and Facebook. Apparently, Facebook’s claim that they’ve achieved parity and don’t need to produce a pay equity report to prove it hasn’t troubled the social network’s female staffers, either. 

Minorities rated their experience the best at Facebook and Google (both got 68) and Apple scored 63 out of 100.

Gender and diversity were not ranked at the five other companies because there weren’t enough responses.

However it’s worth noting that Pinterest hired its first diversity chief in January 2016, while Uber just released their diversity numbers for the first time in March following their sexual harassment investigation. Among the recommendations made by former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder and his firm Covington Burling suggested expanding the chief diversity officer’s role in addition to creating an employee diversity board, and having employees undergo implicit-bias training.

Salary And Benefits

Facebook ranks first for perks and benefits and employees of Google are happiest with their salaries. Pinterest staff gave the company an 83 out of 100 for salaries and an 85 for benefits, while Uber only scored 47 and 63, respectively.

Getting And Keeping Talent

Uber, unsurprisingly, scored lowest for employee retention which measures how successful the the workers think the company is at creating the kind of workplace that makes people want to stick around. Uber received 55 out of 100.

Amazon scored hightest for how successful the company is at providing valuable feedback, opportunities for mentoring, and a challenging work environment. Among the others, Pinterest was on top, with Apple and Uber at the bottom.

Another Look At Talent Flight

At the same time, Paysa, a big-data platform providing market insight about compensation and retention, ran its own annual analysis focusing on the flight of talent at 100 tech companies.

Paysa uses a proprietary machine-learning algorithm to track retention and flux of tech workers over time. If a company continues to hire from high-quality companies, their score will increase. If a company loses in hiring people from top companies, or starts hiring from lesser-quality companies, their score, and relative ranking, will decrease.

Fast Company reported on the winners and losers last year. It’s interesting to note how the same companies ranked by Comparably stack up to Paysa’s data on which ones saw the greatest loss or gain of their best, most valuable tech and engineering professionals. Uber ranked highly last year, and is still attracting talent from the likes of PayPal, Square, Dropbox, and even Google.

The data suggests that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter “are starting to see the flight of their employees to companies that are seeing dramatic improvements in CompanyRank,” according to Paysa’s blog post.

Lyft (#17) and Airbnb (#22) were among the top 25 companies that showed the greatest increase in attracting and retaining talent. Dropbox, Square, and Twitter staffers moved over to Lyft while Airbnb gained staff from Google, Square, and Twitter.

Google didn’t rank among the top because they logged a 50% loss in talent leaving for other companies over last year. Their workers made the leap to Facebook, Uber, Microsoft, YouTube, Apple, Amazon, LinkedIn, Dropbox. Similarly Twitter is showing a 36% decrease in talent. These workers headed to Facebook, Uber, Snap Inc., Apple, LinkedIn, Stripe, and Fitbit.

“Companies need to pay attention to where their best employees are coming from and whether their compensation strategies, HR practices, and treatment of employees, in general, are attracting the best people or driving them away,” according to Paysa’s CEO Chris Bolte. “Money always follows talent.”

The biggest stumbling block to widespread adoption of high-end virtual reality systems, in both the consumer and business markets, may be the relatively low-resolution screens today’s headsets offer–and that tomorrow’s headsets, and next year’s, and even the next few year’s after that, are expected to offer as well.

That’s the argument from Finland’s Varjo, a 19-person startup founded by veterans of companies like Nokia and Microsoft, that’s coming out of stealth today. And Varjo says it has the antidote, a system capable of generating nearly 60 times the resolution of high-end consumer VR gear like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, that it says will be available in limited numbers later this year and broadly by 2018.

Specifically, Varjo is planning on releasing an enterprise-quality virtual- and augmented-reality headset, compatible with Valve’s Steam system, which is where all Vive content is distributed. It will be capable of generating resolutions of 70 megapixels–with a catch. By incorporating onboard eye-tracking technology, the system is meant to know, with no perceptible lag, exactly where, in 360 degrees, a user is looking, and generate the high-resolution image there, and only there.

That’s a well-known approach, but Varjo’s implementation of it is meant to provide users with a far higher resolution than any other system available today.

The Quest For 220 Megapixels

Earlier this year, Nvidia’s general manager for VR strategy, Jason Paul, estimated it will take 20 years for VR systems to achieve enough resolution–about 220 megapixels–to match that of the human eye. Varjo claims its technology will get us closer than anyone else to that, and without waiting decades. To be sure, 70 megapixels is a far cry from 220, but when I got a demo of an early prototype, there was no doubt that Varjo’s technology was delivering an extremely high resolution, much better than what a Rift–onto which the Finnish startup’s technology had been blended–offers.

However, that demo did not include the eye-tracking technology, and the visible high-resolution area, solely in the middle of the screen, was fairly small, about the size of a couple of postage stamps side by side. Varjo promises that in the released version of its headset–which will cost an as-yet undetermined number of thousands of dollars–the high-res area will be substantially larger, even as it adapts to where a user is looking in real time.

Over time–likely years, the company says–Varjo also plans on releasing a consumer version of its headset at a price much more in line with the $500 to $800 that the Rift and Vive, respectively, cost. (Virtual reality is expected by some analysts to be a $38 billion industry by 2026.)

Varjo’s current demo, and its marketing material, are all about clearly contrasting the visual quality of its system and that of something like a Rift. That’s done by showing the difference between the two systems when looking at things like cityscapes, or the cockpit of a jet, or even just a living room with a lot of objects. On the Rift–or in screenshots provided from a Rift–things look somewhat blurry up close, or when magnified. With Varjo’s technology, those same things are crystal clear.

“We’ve been discussing with industrial car designers, and they want to be able to see the contours of cars, with [realistic] reflections,” says Varjo CEO and founder Urho Konttori of industrial VR use cases. “Now, they just see a blur instead of sharp lines.”

Konttori points to similar experiences for professionals in other industries, who would like to use VR as a design tool, but who feel they can’t because the visual quality isn’t yet there. That’s even true, he adds, on professional-quality mixed-reality systems like Microsoft’s HoloLens.

20/20 VR Vision

Varjo calls its technology, which is inspired by the human eye, “Bionic Display.” The eye sees in the center of the field of view at roughly 100 pixels per degree, while we register just one pixel on the periphery, Konttori explained. For its part, Varjo attempts to mimic the way the eye works with a combination of two display systems, one a context display, and the other a micro OLED display that provides focus. The system then utilizes an optical combiner to merge the two displays.

The company’s product, which it’s calling “20/20,” is being targeted at industries like architecture, real estate, 3D product design, simulator training, and immersive entertainment.

The 20/20 utilizes what Varjo calls video-see-through technology, which uses onboard cameras to capture, in real time, what’s going on in front of the user. That makes the system ideal for augmented- and mixed-reality, as well as for VR, the company says.

“It feels like a very unrefined experience, and still feels like a beta, and doesn’t feel like something you’re going to spend hours in,” says Fonseka. “I think what Varjo is doing could unlock the VR market.”

Fonseka is quick to note that he hasn’t seen Varjo’s full demo, so he can’t be sure the company can deliver what it’s promising. Indeed, he says that he won’t truly believe it until he sees it. As a veteran of a VC firm that has funded numerous hardware companies that have been delayed in shipping, he’s well aware that there are all kinds of problems that could keep the Finnish startup from fulfilling its ambitions, especially in the time frame it has discussed.

John Zacharakis, an independent product development consultant who has seen Varjo’s demo, is both impressed by what the company is promising, and wary of the challenges of delivering on that promise.

“I think it can do well,” says Zacharakis, “but the things they need to take into consideration are execution on the commercial side of things. As a product designer, I’m a lot more concerned about availability, viability, and supply chain.”

When the cast of MTV’s The Real World: Seattle moved out of its 11,000-square-foot loft in the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood last year, Kim Peltola and Amy Nelson moved in. Then they painted the lobby white and placed jars of fresh tulips at reception. Called The Riveter, the coworking space they cofounded borrows its name from the loft’s earlier incarnation as an auto-body shop, one of many that once operated on a strip called Auto Row. Now its walls are stacked with shelves of granola and copies of Grace Bonney’s In the Company of Women.

Seattle is home to almost 30 coworking spaces. Some cater to specific professions like finance or tech; many feature full-service bars. But only The Riveter, which opened in May, is just for women, and Peltola and Nelson envision it as offering more than just a place for female entrepreneurs to build businesses together. Unlike the few other women-focused coworking spaces (like Manhattan’s The Wing), it’s also meant to solve one issue many women feel pressured to let slide in the name of success: Wellness.

Before cofounding The Riveter, Peltola was a social worker and therapist, where she constantly met women who felt isolated, stretched thin, and on the brink of burnout. As Nelson explains, they “didn’t have a community and they weren’t engaging in self-care,” two problems that she and Peltola came to see as linked. So they decided to create a space that would promote productivity as effectively as wellness. After entering a pitch competition and winning, they raised $760,000 in a seed round and found three female angel investors to be part of the project.

A membership at The Riveter includes daily in-house yoga, and users of the space are encouraged to take breaks—there’s also a barre class onsite five days a week—and to end their workdays in time for a 5 p.m. meditation session. “As women, we wear a lot of hats,” says Peltola, which too often makes work-life balance impossible. “It’s really nice to be at a space where you can have your needs met right here, and then you can go home and be present—whether that’s for your child, your partner, or your other passions.”

An amazing, cathartic, beautiful afternoon at The Riveter with our very first fitness pop up featuring @thisisnatalie of @theclassbytt

A post shared by The Riveter (@theriveter_sea) on May 13, 2017 at 6:47pm PDT

One startup operating out of The Riveter is Armoire, a high-end clothing-rental subscription that found “brand alignment” with the coworking space, according to marketing manager Ali Driesman. Like The Riveter, she says, “Our company is founded by women, it’s for women, and we want to give them time back so that they can do incredible things with their life.” Working out of The Riveter also lets Driesman get in front of potential customers who share those values. At an influencer event held at the coworking space later that day, Armoire set up a selection of inventory for attendees to browse.

Like most coworking spaces, The Riveter wants to be flexible enough to attract independent workers, too. Its workspace rentals range from “floating desks” ($375 per month) and dedicated desks ($400 per month) to private workspaces ($750 per month), among other options. Paola Thomas, a freelance writer and food and travel photographer, started using the space in its first week, signing up for a 10-hour monthly pass ($75). Within its first two weeks of operation, The Riveter sold over 120 memberships.

The Riveter's very own Safehouse. A place for conspiring and champagne. A break for vinyl and dreams. #theriveter #coworking #seattle #startup #community #inviteambition #vinyl

A post shared by The Riveter (@theriveter_sea) on May 2, 2017 at 4:17pm PDT

Thomas agrees the wellness offerings were a big draw for her, and aren’t just an add-on. “It feels like a really inspiring, uplifting place. It’s nice to get up from your desk and just go downstairs and do some yoga and come back, rather than having to go somewhere. For me, I’ve been surprised by how productive I am here.”

Nelson and Peltola might not be. They see self-care as critical to surmounting the obstacles that women in the workforce and female entrepreneurs in particular face. In 2016, only 7% of the partners at the leading 100 venture capital firms were women, a likely reason why women received a paltry 2.2% of VC funding last year. As Nelson sees it, “One of the most powerful ways to change the ecosystem for women entrepreneurs is to create these spaces where people are connecting more, and hiring each other, and boosting each other up”–rather than burning out alone in a male-dominated pressure-cooker of an industry.

But to make entrepreneurship more accessible and hospitable to women, The Riveter might first need to widen access to its own services. Not every bootstrapping startup founder can scrape together $375 for a monthly desk rental, or would consider $75 for just 10 hours of use a good bargain. She might opt for a home office instead—where she isn’t likely to make the connections she needs—and attend her local gym’s yoga class, if she finds time to at all. WeWork, one of the more popular coworking spaces, costs $300 per month for a floating desk. Another Seattle-based option, called Makers, is $200 a month. Guest speakers at The Riveter’s intimate weekly talks have included luminaries like Sheryl Sandberg and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, which could unintentionally reinforce an air of exclusivity.

Almost ready to welcome Sheryl Sandberg to The Riveter! We cannot wait!!

A post shared by The Riveter (@theriveter_sea) on May 16, 2017 at 4:18pm PDT

To be fair, even other women-focused coworking spaces (of which there aren’t many) haven’t nailed accessibility, either. The Wing, a work and community space based in New York, costs $215 a month (on a 12-month contract), or $2,250 a year. But it isn’t certain that what professional women need most is daily access to mindfulness exercises. Some might rather get onsite childcare, a service that very few traditional employers offer (Patagonia is a notable, longstanding exception), let alone most coworking spaces, including The Wing. To its credit, The Riveter is already building partnerships with local childcare providers, according to Nelson, as well as “an online childcare swap, where members can swap childcare and time at The Riveter.” That might set it apart even more than its yoga offering does.

In surveys of professional women’s key priorities, flexible work arrangements top the list, and coworking spaces in general are built to offer that. But wellness perks don’t typically make the cut. Georgene Huang, cofounder and CEO of Fairygodboss, an employer review site for women, says wellness benefits never beat out things like compensation, health care, financial benefits, and paid time-off in its surveys of users; in fact, they’re rarely among the top five.

Yesterday was amazing! Thank you to everyone who came out for our soft launch. We can't wait to see you again today starting at 11am. #theriveter #womenworkwellness #seattle #collaboration #community #coworking

A post shared by The Riveter (@theriveter_sea) on Apr 18, 2017 at 7:21am PDT

“We are just starting off, so we’re learning,” Peltola acknowledges, pointing out that The Riveter is a for-profit business with a social mission. In the meantime, Peltola and Nelson are confident The Riveter can still help more women succeed in a startup world that’s proved forbidding to them for so long, and they’re hoping to reshape that world in the process. That’s why the space isn’t women-exclusive, only women-oriented. When I visited, I noticed four or five men working alongside the 30-odd women in the space. “We think it’s incredibly powerful for men to walk into a workspace built for women,” Nelson says.

She and Peltola hope to open 20 locations all along the West Coast. Eventually, they want The Riveter to normalize wellness in work—even to rebrand self-care as a productivity strategy. And not just for women entrepreneurs but for everyone, everywhere.

Alex Steffen is a planetary futurist, which means that he spends his days thinking about where our world is heading. Especially in 2017, that sounds like a prescription for anxiety: visions of mass extinctions, vanishing ecosystems, and rising oceans dominate popular conceptions of our climate future.

But Steffen is more clear-eyed. The potential for solutions, not disasters, is what motivates him, and by launching a subscription-based newsletter, “The Nearly Now,” he’s hoping to unite people moving toward the future with the same pragmatic optimism and enthusiasm for radical, yet doable, change.

Now, conceptualizing reaching our sustainability goals—which , according to Stockholm Resilience Center director Johan Rockström, includes leveling off global carbon emissions by 2020 and reducing them to around zero by 2050—feels daunting. But by using storytelling to convey how that’ll be accomplished, and what our world will be like when it is, Steffen thinks he can shift this massive undertaking from intimidating to something to get excited about.

“This is a newsletter for people who understand that the times have changed and now we need much more ambitious, much more innovative, maybe even more radical solutions if we’re going to be sustainable,” Steffen says. “And this newsletter comes out of the recognition that the audience I’m trying to speak with is ahead of the curve on sustainability, so the more traditional way of writing pieces for the general public, and so forth, wasn’t the right approach. I had to look at a business model that would reach people directly.”

The second category is “future stories.” Here, Steffen collects his imaginings of a California eight years from now, struggling to live on a planet in the midst of a climate crisis. “In San Patricio, A Community Struggles with Transformation” dives into the politics of a fictional California city in 2025 (cars boast faded Warren 2020 bumper stickers) as residents begin to lash back at the onslaught of eco-friendly developments ushered in by a progressive mayor. It’s fiction, but it’s also recognizable.

“One of the things that both foresight and future stories can do is help us face these changes—help us play and safely engage with things that otherwise might be beyond our grasp,” Steffen says.

The function of newsletter’s paywall, Steffen says, is pragmatic: He wants to make a living doing this kind of writing—like his latest project, a manifesto called “The Last Decade and You,” which states in no uncertain terms that everything we love is under threat unless we act swiftly and radically—and sharing it with interested people. In that way, he sees the newsletter at the center of a community of like-minded people who are keen to explore these same approaches. “The point is just to get this information to folks, and create the opportunity for them to cohere into a larger group of people who are both imagining radical change for sustainability, and implementing new ideas and enterprises,” Steffen says.

Find out more about “The Nearly Now” here.

In 2016, Facebook took in about $27 billion in ad revenue, second in the world only to Google’s monstrous $79 billion, and more than double the globe’s third-biggest advertising earner Comcast. So it’s understandable why the social network is an influential presence at the 2017 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

The company is hosting a whole host of panel talks, discussion sessions, and more, between its own beachside speakers series, and execs like Sheryl Sandberg talking about how creative mobile advertising work can help brands build communities around their mission and products.

But behind the obligatory show of the Cannes Lions stage, Facebook is also taking the opportunity to unveil new tools for marketers to use on its platform, and talk to both agencies and brands about where to go from here.

“This year in Cannes one area of focus will be how marketing is becoming more agile,” says Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s VP of Global Marketing Solutions. “To move at the speed of the consumer and drive results, marketers must test, learn and iterate much more rapidly than they have in the past, and it’s our job to work across the industry, to build tools and solutions that will help marketers succeed in today’s mobile world.”

Last year at the festival, Facebook unveiled Creative Hub, an online platform for agencies and brands to more easily create ads for Facebook and Instagram. This week they’re launching two new features for Creative Hub around a more efficient way to test and distribute the ads created on the platform.

Agencies have praised working with the Creative Hub, so these new tools should only improve their ability to create and distribute ads. JWT New York executive creative director Ben James says the Creative Hub has completely changing the way they present work to clients. “Because of this tool, I think we’re going to see creative work from agencies speeding up dramatically when they understand and use this tool. We were shocked at how we could so easily share work straight to our phones. We just can’t educate people about this fast enough.” 

Droga5 strategist Adam Van Dyke says these tools help them stay as up-to-date as possible on the ever-changing social media landscape. “The Facebook Creative Hub is a valuable tool that provides creative inspiration, helps us to understand the intricacies of each ad format, and allows us to easily mock up work for presentations,” says Van Dyke.

The first new Creative Hub feature will give marketers a snapshot of video results, insights advertisers need to optimize their ads based on real metrics, to make sure it’s perfect for the mobile feed. The second major development is the ability to create and deliver your ad, all from directly within Creative Hub, cutting out the time and, often, extra formatting of ads when being sent between creative agencies and media agencies or other partners. Both touch on Everson’s themes of agility and speed.

Graham Mudd, director of product marketing at Facebook says these tools not only help their marketing partners, but also Facebook itself make its ad system more efficient.

“The new tools allow a creative agency to test a campaign or work, then once it decides it’s good to go, allows it to bundle it up and pass it to the media agency who puts the budget behind it and executes the buy,” says Mudd. “Underlying this is that a connection has been made between the creative assets, the creative agency, the media agency and the advertiser, can now all be associated together in our systems, which we’re hoping will allow us to continue to build functionality that continues to connect these  areas of the (advertising) ecosystem.”

The theme of agility and speed continues in the company’s annual Creative and Client Council meeting, which puts two of Facebook’s advisory councils in one room to discuss industry issues both generally and how Facebook can help address them.

Facebook Creative Shop chief creative officer Mark D’Arcy says the meeting will involve new idea presentations, a look at the year that was, and a lot of discussion around the need for more collaboration between the clients and agencies of the world. In that sense it’s continuing a conversation D’Arcy spoke about here last year.

“We spend a lot of time in our industry talking about what we make–and Cannes is a perfect example of that–and I think one of the big conversations we want to have is around how we build, and the agility of how we build, and the way in which the creative process needs to look at other ways to come together,” he says. “How do we work at a greater velocity? How do we approach diversity? How do we approach collaborative credit? These are questions that come up in our industry around the globe. So we talk a lot about providing forums for these questions to be addressed.”

Last Friday, the plate tectonics of the e-commerce world shifted.

Amazon, the world’s biggest online retailer, acquired high-end grocer Whole Foods for $13.4 billion. On the same day, Walmart, which still dominates the realm of brick-and-mortar retail, acquired the online menswear brand Bonobos for $310 million. The move threw into relief exactly how fiercely the two corporations are competing for the American consumer by working to seamlessly integrate online and offline shopping experiences. By acquiring Whole Foods and Bonobos–brands with feel-good values that millennials love–they’re hoping to further tap into the yuppie market.

Related: Amazon’s Grocery Ambitions Are Far Bigger Than Whole Foods

In April, rumors began spreading that Bonobos might sell itself to Walmart. The news came as a surprise, since the two brands could not be more different. Bonobos, unlike Whole Foods, did not appear to be in financial trouble and had raised a total of $125 million to build brick-and- mortar showrooms around the country. “In some ways, it was a surprise even to me that we chose to take this route,” Andy Dunn, Bonobos’s founder and CEO, told Fast Company. “My fear has been that customer reaction—based on the perception of the Walmart brand—is going to change the nature of Bonobos.”

Ugh, not thrilled that I have a closet full of walmart clothes now. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I think about it.

— Boris Fowler (@borisfowler) June 16, 2017

When he founded Bonobos in 2007, Dunn’s goal was to offer high-end, stylish men’s clothing at fair prices, thanks to a direct-to-consumer, vertically integrated approach. Dunn spoke often about building a strong company culture, where the happiness of employees was a priority. Meanwhile, Walmart creates cheaper products for a lower-income consumer and it regularly comes under fire for the way it treats workers. “I don’t want to pretend that people aren’t going to disagree with (our decision) and are turned off by the Walmart brand,” Dunn says. “It was a huge part of the calculus for me.”

So what convinced Dunn to sell the company to Walmart? A big part of it seems to be Marc Lore, the former CEO of Jet.com, which was acquired by Walmart in 2016. Lore and Dunn have been friends for some time, and spent time discussing Walmart’s ambitions to scale up its digital presence. Lore now runs all of Walmart’s e-commerce operations and has been tasked with acquiring brands that will help drive innovation at Walmart. His first move was to acquire women’s e-commerce brand ModCloth. Some of Dunn’s anxieties about Walmart changing customers’ impression of Bonobos might be justified: After ModCloth was acquired, customers took to social media and the brand’s blog, writing vitriolic tirades about how ModCloth had sold out.

Deleting the @ModCloth app. I can't support you now that you are owned by Walmart,a company that is against living wages.

— magicshelle (@magicshelle) March 15, 2017

But despite these anxieties, Lore managed to convince Dunn that Bonobos would thrive within Walmart, even though the initial transition period might involve a few bumps. Lore made the case that Bonobos would have access to new efficiencies when it comes to supply chain, logistics, and shipping, and could reach a new type of shopper through the Jet.com website. Eventually, Dunn came to believe that the acquisition was the best way for a relatively small e-commerce brand like Bonobos to scale. “It gives us access to a massive new customer base,” Dunn says, though he points out that there are no plans, as yet, to sell Bonobos product at Walmart or Walmart.com.

Lore and Dunn also agreed that Walmart could learn something from Bonobos’s vertically integrated supply chain. Bonobos designs and manufactures all products in-house, which allows it to cut out middlemen costs. With the new deal, Dunn will be in charge of all of Walmart’s vertically integrated operations. While the scope of his job is still being discussed, it appears as if his areas of responsibility will include both Bonobos and ModCloth, which will increasingly sell its own products. Over time, Walmart may try to focus on owning more of its supply chain, and Dunn would serve as an advisor throughout such a process.

It took some time for Dunn to come around to seeing the acquisition as a good thing. As he was making the decision, he spent time at Walmart stores, which reminded him of shopping at the chain in his childhood. “I started talking to my mom about how much she likes shopping at Walmart,” he says. “I remembered growing up in Chicago and getting photos developed there. I realized that sometimes, in coastal cities, we develop a perspective on the rest of the country that maybe isn’t perfectly accurate.”

In stores, Dunn was heartened by how employees take care of one another. “(I saw) an employee fund that people were putting money into right after lunch for associates who are in need, for instance, if a spouse dies,” he says. “They were pooling capital for other people.”

While Dunn took the fund as a symbol of a close-knit community of workers in stores, some might see such a fund as a sign that Walmart does not adequately take care of its employees. Walmart is constantly under fire for paying workers low wages, fighting their attempts to unionize, and generally treating them as disposable. Two years ago, Walmart raised the starting wage of workers to $9 an hour and shortened the training program so that workers can move up to the $10 an hour bracket in three months rather than six. But these changes come, in part, as a response to years of worker protests and activism.

Dunn will now have to reckon with bridging that cultural gap. He got his first taste of it when the rumors first hit the press. While Walmart executives are used to holding off on talking to employees and customers about major decisions, Bonobos professes to be open about its actions. “The leak was hard for us to manage from a cultural standpoint,” he says. “We’re so used to transparency and we couldn’t say anything about it.”

Will a brand like Bonobos help change the way that Walmart, as a whole, treats its employee base? Dunn is doubtful, but hopes he will be able to make a difference. “I don’t know if I can improve things compared to what Doug Macmillan (Walmart’s CEO) and his team are doing,” he says. “We’re going to be a tiny corner in the overall Walmart family. I am proud of the culture at Bonobos and to the extent that that is helpful to Walmart, we would be honored.”

One of the hottest tech industries in recent years is also one of the oldest. The automotive industry helped completely transform American society by the mid-20th century.

The cultural and societal impacts of the automobile, in particular, were particularly driven by advancing auto technology in the 20th century—namely, more fuel efficient engines and cheaper components. Yet until a few years ago, the car itself had not seen truly evolutionary advancements for decades. That is, until a few select Silicon Valley companies and entrepreneurs began to apply their technologies and visions to the industry.

Perhaps no company has had a greater influence on the automotive industry in recent years than Tesla, the electric car company founded by the billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk. Tesla is quickly becoming synonymous with “electric car” and, not too far off now, autonomous self-driving vehicles. Elon Musk’s CEO star power and the company’s penchant for inventing products you never knew you always wanted makes it a hot destination for some of the most talented engineers in the industry, which is no wonder why internships at the company are among the most coveted in Silicon Valley.

So just what is an internship like at one of the top companies redefining the automobile for the 21st century? We spoke with Eddie Wattanachai Lin, who interned with the company for four months when he was 20 years old.

On His Internship Role At Tesla

I worked with mechanical and electrical engineers as well as data scientists and computer programmers in the service engineering department. I focused specifically on technical documentation and diagnosis of issues with Model S components. I also worked on the product development of internal widgets.

On How He Found Out About The Tesla Internship

I was recruited from my university’s FSAE team, Triton Racing on campus. A hiring manager was looking to fill positions late summer to fall, and my team sent out a resume packet. From there I was selected for an interview.

To be honest, prior to getting an interview, I was planning on attending medical school. I never thought I’d be working in automotive engineering, despite loving cars since I was 4.

On The Interview Process With Tesla

I had three rounds of interviews. The first interview was an HR phone screen and the last two interviews were technical. While they were phone interviews, the interviewers had some of my past work with them, which they really dove into. The interview itself closely followed the philosophy and ambitions of the company. By asking questions at all levels of a technical problem, you really can identify the people who are working on problems and those that are problem adjacent.

It was all a bit nerve wrecking in the half hour leading up to the interview, but I had already prepared everything I possibly could. It took me over 15 hours to prepare for the interview, and by that time, I had no idea what else to prepare. After getting into my past work and projects, I really settled in and clicked with all three of my interviewers.

On The Qualities That Helped Him Score A Tesla Internship

Above all else, I really think I demonstrated tenacity. The FSAE competition is one of the most rigorous, demanding collegiate competitions in the world. My experience on the team was filled with stories where despite the odds being stacked against us, we persevered. In addition to that, I had a wild experience working in a biofuel startup my freshman year. Somewhere between setting up and running my own lab, product development with extremely hazardous materials, and learning to drive a forklift, my interviewers were convinced I would go the extra mile.

Beyond that, I think some combination of humor and audacity is important.

On the Average Workday Of A Tesla Intern

My workdays centered around a few projects within the team as well as day-to-day issues. I only spent somewhere around 10% of my time in meetings, and the rest working with full-time staff on day-to-day issues. Like a lot of other interns at companies in the Bay Area, I was never treated “like an intern.” The quality of my work was expected to be indiscernible from that of full-time staff.

I also played a fair bit of ping-pong, drank a lot of chai, and ate a ton of Costco breakfast sausages. I must have eaten close to 15-25 sausages a day, coupled with a half-hour of caffeinated ping-pong while I was there.

On Some Of His Best Experiences As A Tesla Intern

I remember distinctly my first day, a full-time software engineer asked me to finish coding something that was to be pushed out in a firmware update later in the day. He rattled off a few instructions, told me to be careful not to ruin all the cars, and promptly ran off to a meeting. Needless to say, I was terrified.

Moreover, the people I met while at Tesla turned out to be intelligent, charming, and altruistic. They’re people I still consider very good friends to this day. I distinctly remember a few of the trips we made together, including road trips to L.A. and beyond. As it turns out, some of the brightest people I met there were also the most humble. If you’ve never seen a clever engineer make a self-deprecating joke, you’re in for a treat.

On Whether Tesla Could Improve Its Internship Experience

The experience was pretty much complete. It would have been nice if Elon addressed the interns in the speaker series, but I can imagine he had bigger fish to fry. If I’m honest, I do wish I got a chance to drive a Model S. It’s important to know how your product functions. I was told there was an “incident” immediately before I got there, which is why driving was on a need-to-drive basis, something that may have changed since I was there.

On The Lasting Benefits Of A Tesla Internship

Tesla has always been a scrappy company (making cars is quite expensive). I was happy with my compensation, but I wasn’t getting rich by any means. Anyway, money has never been a strong motivator for me.

Besides that, I think the experience really showed me that the world is as broad as you make it. Tesla is an amazing company in my eyes, but it was started and brought to where it is today by people with flaws and strengths, just like anyone else.

On What Others Could Do To Land An Internship At Tesla

1. Build race cars
2. Build race cars
3. Build race cars

Just kidding. Honestly, there are a ton of different ways to get there, but here are a few tips.

1. Your formal education is NOT enough. You’ll need to have pursued outside projects of some sort, or have significant work experience. It also doesn’t matter where you went to school.
2. Prepare like crazy for the interview. You have the power of Google at your disposal. You should know the ins and outs of the team, the company, the position, your interviewers, and commonly asked interview questions/challenges.
3. Understand what you’re signing up for. Elon calls those working at Tesla the “special ops” of the industry. You’re expected to do more with less every single day, and while that sounds sexy, it’s not for everyone.

Not every successful up-and-coming filmmaker can pinpoint when they knew they’d arrived, but for director Reed Morano it’s a no-brainer. It was the moment Saturday Night Live parodied Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which had Morano’s fingerprints all over it.

“I can’t even explain what that felt like,” Morano says. “You always see SNL parodying whatever is, like the pop culture phenomenon of the moment, and nothing I’ve ever been involved in has reached this many people.”

Well, not exactly. The forthcoming I Think We’re Alone Now, starring Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning may have a post-civilization setting–the leads appear to be the only two humans left alive–but that amounts to mostly just background information. While Morano’s recent choices make it seem as though she could possibly be an annihilation fetishist, the back-to-back dystopian projects are more the result of a coincidence in timing.

“I think it’s just that I like difficult psychological situations for characters,” she says. “If that’s the end of the world, so be it. It’s interesting to imagine characters in social scenarios where the rules are off. Like something so crazy has happened that a person can be a little crazy. That’s fascinating to me.”

The thread of people becoming unmoored by the constraints of civilization is what connects all her projects, rather than the end of civilization itself. For instance, Morano’s first film, Meadowland, featured Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson as a couple who spiral out after their child is kidnapped at a gas station and never returned. Despite not being as obsessed with the end of the world as she may appear, the director did pull out all the stops in her efforts to snap up The Handmaid’s Tale.

“I knew I had to get that job somehow, any way I could,” she recalls.

“It was easy to write a lot about it because there were so many elements, like how to differentiate the flashback scenes from the present and what can be revealed through their differences,” she says, “And pretty much everything I said I wanted to do is what we did in episodes one through three.”

Morano handily won the job because her ideas stood out from what the showrunner Bruce Miller and producer Warren Littlefield had been thinking. It was only the beginning, though. Later on, she proved that her vision for the uncivil future was alarmingly adept, with ideas like changing the outdoor farmer’s market setting where the handmaids were intended to shop to a regular modern supermarket.

As she was starting prep on Handmaid’s Tale, however, Morano got the script for I Think We’re Alone Now. It spoke to her on a submarinally deep level. Despite the post-apocalyptic element, it was quite different from Handmaid’s Tale. It’s a story about human connection. It’s about a loner after the end of the world having the chance to be stuck with one other person for the rest of his life. The setting may have parallels to Handmaid’s Tale, but the script also had a lot of humor. She decided to take on the project.

“Right now, there are a lot of things floating around that kind of feel close to Handmaid’s Tale and it’s like, as good as these stories are, I’m not going near them,” she says. “I’m sure people are going to find some similarities in my storytelling between these two, but I Think We’re Alone Now is very different–it didn’t want to be done in the same style as Handmaid’s Tale.”

“I think there might be a little fascination with the end of the world right now,” Morano says. “I was worried about Trump, that people might not want to watch if they thought Handmaid’s Tale was too relevant. Handmaid’s Tale is happening right now in Islamic countries. Maybe people don’t want to see that anywhere but in the news. But it turns out actually, for whatever reason, morbid curiosity, I’m not sure, people do want to see crazy shit–even as it’s happening in the world.”

My dad was a kind and gentle man. The only time I saw him flustered was when the phone rang during dinnertime. He’d snatch up the receiver and lecture the telemarketer on the other end of the line: “Do you realize I’m eating dinner with my family?!”

For many people, that’s pretty much what getting any random business call feels like in 2017. The phone, quietly and quickly, has gone from a business communication tool to an annoyance and anachronism. The average cell phone user in 2011 made or received 12 calls on their phone a day, writer Cari Romm recently reported at Science of Us; a 2015 study saw individual call volumes drop to six. I suspect the last two years have seen that total plunge even further.

Meanwhile, more than 400 million “snaps” are sent each day via Snapchat; other personal video-sharing tools like Instagram and Facebook Stories are gaining popularity, too. It might sound unconventional, but these quick video clips that are filling our social feeds might just be the ideal replacement for voice calls at work. But are businesses ready to embrace social video?

My company decided to find out.

Related:How Video Selfies Help Keep My Company Connected

Why We Built Our Own Mini-Snapchat

As a B2B company, we were constantly reaching out to customers to fill our sales funnel—by phone. And that just wasn’t cutting it. The more we thought about it, the less sense this made. What if instead of sending emails and making phone calls, we could send short videos back and forth? Given that we’re a video company, we thought this might be a good solution, but would our prospective customers agree?

We put together a browser tool for recording and sending quick-hit, low-production-value business videos via email: Record on your computer. Click to send. Done. These videos give you the human element and the visual cues of a direct conversation, but they’re non-interruptive and asynchronous. And since they’re fired out via email, there’s no need for tech-wary businesses to embrace a totally new platform (á la Slack) just to communicate with us. Plus, there’s a permanent record of communications (unlike the ephemeral videos exchanged via Snapchat).

Data from our own usage and early adopters suggests that short video might have a future in business communications. So far, adding video to a prospect email makes a response eight times more likely. Seventy-five percent of late-stage pitches that included personalized videos turn into closed deals. Our field sales teams now turns to video, and so does our customer support.

Related:Yes, Even Your Company Needs A Video Strategy In 2017

But the internal applications of short video are just as compelling. We’re seeing employees use the tool to deliver messages to one another that might be too complex or time-consuming for traditional email. Remote workers use video messages in lieu of text to feel more connected. On a personal note, I dash off weekly updates to the whole company by recording a quick video on my desktop. Plus, because the videos can also capture your screen, designers and engineers have been able to quickly record demos to suggest new features and share feedback.

The team didn’t start using videos like this overnight, of course. Even though we’re a video marketing company, it took time for some people to normalize the presence of personal video in a work setting and for others to get comfortable being filmed. But, as with Snapchat, everyone gradually realized the goal of these video clips isn’t to achieve filmmaking perfection—it’s to make a human connection. Our VP of customer experience, once camera-shy, became a convert after seeing how effective video can be at on-boarding users and sharing step-by-step instructions.

Upsides, Downsides, And Face-Time

To be clear, while I think this format is promising, I don’t think all phone calls are dead. It’s just that the idea of calling people out of the blue as a communication tactic has had its day. These kinds of calls are inherently disruptive—not exactly great for productivity, considering it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to your pre-interruption task.

That’s why asynchronous tools emerged in the first place—first email, then AIM and MSN Messenger, followed by Slack, HipChat, and the like. Not only are these platforms less disruptive, they also let recipients be more strategic in their responses. The drawback, of course, is that text communications are notoriously easy to misinterpret. (One study even found that participants were only able to differentiate seriousness from sarcasm 56% of the time—basically a coin-toss.)

Meanwhile, automation and the rise of bots makes your Twitter feed and your Slack channel equally easy to ignore. We’re reaching more people than ever, but we’re not necessarily moving them—no matter how good the AI on the other end may be.

That’s why short video has so much potential (and a big reason why Snapchat reportedly logs 10 billion video views a day). It’s human, it’s efficient, and it doesn’t interrupt you in the middle of dinner. Now, it’s almost like my emails feel naked without that added personal touch. I’ll append videos to our pitches for speaking engagements or throw them into conversations with brand influencers. I can even add one to my email signature. Now that technology has caught up, video might just give text a run for its money.

The issue of diversity and inclusion in the advertising and marketing industry is a hot topic at this year’s Cannes Lions festival, but one panel on Sunday added a twist to the issue by challenging the creative business community to not only aim for increased diversity in itself, but use its communication skills to improve the issue in broader society.

Three African-American executives took to the stage and told their individual stories of growing up amid advertising images and a media culture that too often identified them as “other,” and what inspired them to become a part of this industry. Then on a giant screen behind the stage appeared a long list of young black men, killed by police over the last few years, with little or no consequences.

It was after the tragic shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, in separate incidents in different parts of the U.S. in early July 2016, that Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners executive creative director Keith Cartwright; CAA creative executive Geoff Edwards; Twitter’s in-house global group creative director Jayanta Jenkins; and Amusement Park chairman/CEO/CCO Jimmy Smith came together to start The Saturday Morning Co., an organization aimed at inspiring, encouraging, and facilitating a creative response to societal problems around diversity and inclusion.

“We realized that, even though we’ve been friends forever, and held the positions we’ve held at respective agencies, we’d never ever all been together in a room,” said Edwards, who was on stage with Cartwright and Jenkins. “We tried to figure out if there was something we could do to help, but through creativity. How do we get away from this feeling of helplessness and turn it into something more positive and productive?”

The panel marked an international awareness launch of the year-old initiative, to include not just the creative community in the U.S., but to broaden it globally. Cartwright introduced the group’s concept of a Peace Brief, an idea that a coalition of creative people can rally around. The first one for 2017 is “The Police and Community They Serve–How Do We Reduce the Violence?” It’s an open call to anyone to submit ideas and creative solutions.

Cartwright said the idea of the Peace Brief revolves around the strength of coalitions, in this case with three tiers of participation: universities, business, and individuals. “Across that, what do you do?” said Cartwright. “You do what you do. Everyone in this room has a skill, whether you work in business or are a creative. Use that and submit your ideas, and what we’ll do is get it out into the world. Artists, make art. Fashion designers, create a line that speaks to the movement. Lawyers [and] activists, march [and] help pass legislation. Musicians, compose a song around the idea of our movement. Writers, write.”

Perhaps the most relevant and powerful message was the call-out to brands. If anyone knows the power of brands, it’s these guys. And to use that influence, through advertising and acts, can go a long way. They played video messages of support from P&G CEO David Taylor, and chief brand officer Mark Pritchard, as well as Twitter CMO Leslie Bertrand.

“Brands have power and the responsibility to shift perception,” said Edwards. “To put a message out in the world that helps create new stories to help shape our culture at large.”

To illustrate the point, Jenkins featured a few brands that have created messages that have broken through and become part of culture, like Nike’s “Just Do It.” And the classic tourism slogan for his own home state of Virginia, “Virginia is for lovers,” created by The Martin Agency back in the 1960s.

“It was for a state not necessarily known for bringing people together,” said Jenkins. “That line started long before social media, but it managed to make everyone, black or white, proud to be from Virginia. It started a conversation.”

Diversity and inclusion in their own industry has been an ongoing issue for decades. When asked what the biggest barrier is in 2017, Cartwright said people tend to hire those who look like themselves. He said it’s a perception issue, that when a person of color walks into a room, opens a door, and sits in a conference room, it often creates an unusual dynamic that gets in the way of hiring. Something HP has addressed in its recent video series on more inclusive hiring practices. “We have to get past that,” said Cartwright. “It’s always based in fear. Whatever that fear is, we have to find a way to push it out.”

The group used the session to put the call out to the creative industry gathered at Cannes Lions in the hopes they would get involved, being a group that is uniquely equipped to affect change more so than most.

“What we do every day affects the world,” said Cartwright. “You make an ad, you create something, a piece of communication, we’re professionals at changing people’s viewpoints and perceptions. This business is built on a particular structure to change and create a movement–sometimes it’s a brand or a product, why can’t it be about something bigger?”