You don’t have to look far to find one report or another declaring Lego one of the most powerful brands on the planet. Sure it’s got the toys everyone loves to build with, and the blockbuster movies–but it’s also got one of the most robust social media fan communities in the world. Part of that is just by nature of being the purveyor of the most popular toys on the planet, but it’s also due to a specific strategy.

In a presentation at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity on Sunday, Lego’s senior global director of social media and video Lars Silberbauer, broke down how the brand built and approaches that strategy. His team of about 50 people includes 35 to 40 different nationalities. “It’s really important that, if you want to act in a world that is constantly disrupting, you have to have as many different perspectives on what you’re doing right now,” said Silberbauer.

The two pillars of the brand’s social strategy are based on two core human social needs: the need to play and build together, and the pride of creation. Both of these foundation principles tie directly into perhaps the brand’s biggest strength, and not-so-secret weapon: the creativity of its fans. By facilitating, supporting, and promoting the efforts of its fans, Lego amplifies their passion to a global audience, further fanning the flames of fandom everywhere it goes.

Silberbauer outlined three examples of how they do this. The first is through a competition called First Lego League, a Lego robotics competition that’s not run by the brand at all, in which up to 70,000 kids worldwide against each other in building Lego robots that can solve challenges.

Second was the crowdsourcing platform Lego Ideas, where the brand invites people to propose and build new Lego sets. Like a branded version of Kickstarter, aspiring Lego designers have to get 10,000 supporters for their projects in order to be considered. And support isn’t a mere “like,” but a survey form.

.@LEGOIdeas to launch production of fan-created #SaturnV moon rocket model: https://t.co/V0XfY8AULQpic.twitter.com/kFYfMBwv7x

— collectSPACE (@collectSPACE) June 9, 2016

“It’s a platform that’s really worked well for a number of years now,” said Silberbauer. “Four new products come out of this program every year, pretty much with no marketing budget because the excitement and engagement have already been built up throughout the crowdsourcing phase.”

The third example was the Kronkiwongi Project. Now, if you’re asking yourself, “What’s a Kronkiwongi?” it’s because you’re a typically uncreative adult human.

“The insight behind it is that 98% of us were creative geniuses at age three, but the challenge is that only 2% of us retain that level of creativity,” said Silberbauer. “With this project, we wanted to reveal and celebrate, not that we get less creative, but the amazing openness and creativity that kids have. So we asked kids from all over the world to tell us what a Kronkiwongi is and to build one for us.”

“At the end of the day, no matter what we do, there’s always going to be creativity within the fan community,” Silberbauer continued. “And all of our outgoing stuff and brand messaging may just be obsolete when fans come up with some really cool stuff.”

Then he ended with a fan-made Lego recreation of Red Bull Stratos–branded content based on another piece of brand content–because why not.

Said Silberbauer, “This is just a constant reminder that no matter what we come up with ourselves, we always need to be humble toward the fact that the creative power of the crowd is just so much greater than ours.”

She’s the first female artist to hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart this year, with her new album Hopeless Fountain Kingdom. But Halsey isn’t just another cog in the pop star industrial complex, she’s an artist who carefully built a strong and passionate fanbase long before her songs were on the radio.

At the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity there are a lot of parties. Brands throw parties, agencies throw parties, the festival throws parties, and often those parties feature a hit artist or band. Halsey, however hit the stage at the festival not to sing but to talk about how she approaches her career, her songwriting, and, yes, her brand. In conversation with Ryan Seacrest for an iHeartRadio session called, “Authentic, Creative, Unafraid: How Halsey Broke Out,” she talked about her upbringing, her early days in the New York City club circuit, and how her fingerprints are on everything from the music, to the stage, to the videos, to the poster and flyers.

She told a story about when she first arrived at Cannes this week. A man stopped her on the beach and asked if she was here for the festival. She told him she was a young CEO that was here to talk to a group of other female CEOs. The man said, “You don’t look like a CEO.”

“Well,” she replied, “I am.”

I talked to Halsey after the session, about being a young, hungry businessperson with a growing enterprise.

CEO of Halsey Inc.

“It’s a weird thing to refer to myself as a product, but when you’ve gone past being a musician and artist, to a role model, where people are buying into your lifestyle, and what you represent, then you become a product people are buying into,” she says. “I never considered myself a CEO until recently. At first it was naivete. I thought every artist did everything themselves. I thought Britney Spears wrote her own music–I thought every superstar was designing their own live stage show, so I always just did those things. And I was with a team who didn’t know any better either–my manager Anthony [Li] was a 25-year-old kid from New Jersey when I met him. He’d never managed an act before. I’d never been an artist before, obviously, and we’ve built this thing really organically. He never told me no, because he didn’t know he was supposed to. And I just did everything myself because I didn’t have the resources to do it otherwise.”

Company culture

“I’m fortunate to just be surrounded by good people. A lot of artists have horror stories about their record company or management–I just love everyone around me. They’ve just facilitated my vision in a way that’s been nurturing and kind. I’ve had the same team around me from the start–from demos on SoundCloud to a number-one album–it’s the same people as it’s always been. They’re young, they’re hungry, they care about the fans, they’ve watched everything grow, and because they’ve been working as hard on this as I have, they feel connected to it.

Put in the work

Marketing one unique moment at a time

WHAT: The best 9/11 joke you have ever heard, not that there should be a system for ranking the best joke about the worst terrorist attack on American soil.

WHO: Kumail Nanjiani, in a clip from The Big Sick, an autobiographical film he co-wrote with his wife, comedy writer Emily V. Gordon.

WHY WE CARE: “Too soon?” That’s the question any comedian must ask herself before making a joke about a tragedy. Anthony Jeselnik made an insensitive tweet about the Boston Bombing on the day of, which he was soon forced to delete under pressure from then-employer Comedy Central. National tragedies make for tricky subject matter, ever in danger of inciting public ire. It’s likely, however, that even the #BoycottColbert crowd will get a laugh out of Kumail Nanjiani’s rock-solid 9/11 joke in The Big Sick, which is in theaters this weekend. As the comedian revealed to Marc Maron on a recent episode of the WTF podcast, it’s a joke that would never work on stage, but rather in the context of a specific kind of conversation. Given the cultural themes of The Big Sick, a film in which Nanjiani’s Pakistani Muslim parents cannot find out he’s dating the non-Muslim love interest played by Zoe Kazan, it fits in perfectly. To describe the joke any further would spoil it, so have a look for yourself in the clip below.

The Big Sick is out in limited release on June 23.

The fact that there are eight men in the world–including Mark Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos–who control more wealth than the world’s 3.6 billion poorest people, if nothing else, should inspire outrage. We envision these tycoons–and those just rungs below them on the economic ladder–hanging out on yachts, sipping gold-flecked champagne, blissfully unaffected by the rest of the world’s problems; we imagine them opening their wallets for luxuries like first-class airfare and private helicopters, while the rest of us struggle through patching together gig economy jobs and commuting on broken, unfunded subway rides.

If you want to fix the broken system that has caused this rampant disparity or interrogate what could be done to create more equity and opportunity for all, good for you. If you instead think, “that sounds good, as long as I am one of the eight people,” then you’ll love a new series of ad spots, created for the online investment platform E-Trade by their new contracted agency MullenLowe, takes the wealth concentrated obscenely at the top of the pyramid and dangles it in our faces to sell us something.

What they’re selling is the idea that by signing up for E-Trade and beginning your independent foray into investing, you, too, could become as filthy rich as the people swanning through their ad campaigns (results may vary, there’s a good chance you’ll lose your shirt).

In the videos, we see a lowly office worker, dismissed by a superior, sent spiraling into a wealth-fantasy soundtracked by Chaim Topol’s “If I Were A Rich Man” straight out of Fiddler On The Roof. But instead of wondering about the ethics of it all—do people as wealthy as his boss deserve to have their portrait painted, or attend pool parties in that end with everyone passed out in their finery? Does anybody? Should anybody even want to?—our hero leans in and opens an E-Trade account. “Don’t get mad,” the campaign says. “Get E-Trade.”

The other videos are similar—we see a guy shut out of first class on a plane attempt to claw his way there by signing up for E-Trade; we see a dude in an orange polo shirt dancing around with models on a yacht and we’re shamed into hearing that “the dumbest guy in high school just got a boat,” so why haven’t you? (It’s worth nothing that pretty much all of the stars of these spots are white men.)

By sending these ad spots out into the world, E-Trade is, essentially, perpetuating the American Dream fantasy that has already failed so many people, and remained inaccessible for many more. Sure, E-Trade bills itself as a discount stock brokerage firm, but it’s not free, and if your investment well runs dry, it’ll charge you up to $40 for insufficient funds.

There is no magic pill you can pop in the form of an E-Trade account to catapult yourself from average American to billionaire—nor should there be. When the wealth disparity advertised in these campaigns is both a symptom and a cause of America’s distressingly unsolved inequality crisis. Dismantling the system that enables these lavish lifestyles, not bringing more people into the fold and leaving behind the around 45 million Americans who live below the poverty line, should be the focus.

And if you want to invest, here are some responsible, sustainable ways to do so.

Secrecy is like a religion at Apple. It’s baked deeply into the DNA and culture of the company. So, when the Outline got its hands on a (leaked) recording of a product secrecy training session for Apple employees, it published the juicy details in a story today.

The training session was given by an Apple group called the New Product Security team–made up of former National Security Agency (NSA), FBI, Secret Service, and military people–that investigates leaks about upcoming Apple products around the globe. The group was formed after an Apple employee famously left an iPhone 4 prototype in a bar in 2012—the device was recovered and subsequently described in detail by Gizmodo.

The training session featured videos in which Apple employees can be heard talking about the need for secrecy. “When I see a leak in the press, for me, it’s gut wrenching,” one employee says. “It really makes me sick to my stomach.”

As a tech reporter I’ve witnessed Apple’s wall of secrecy firsthand many times. Sources with ties to the company often suddenly register a look of disquiet when asked about Apple, then nervously close down the conversation. Nobody wants to risk disfavor, and possible abandonment, by the world’s biggest tech company.

I have several friends who work for Apple, and we never talk about the company. If, for some reason, the conversation moves around to something related to Apple, I can feel the wall go up–time to talk about something else.

The Outline‘s story reveals that Apple has gone further with its secrecy efforts than most of us even imagined. Has Apple established a “culture of fear” among employees, suppliers, and contractors? I’ve heard different answers to this question from people in each of these communities.

Secrecy is arguably more important to Apple than to other companies because of the way Apple prices and sells its products. It’s true that Apple products are thoughtfully and meticulously designed, and its famously tight hardware and software integration pays big dividends in the final user experience. But Apple, in the cold calculus of features and specs, gets far more money for its products–and far higher profit margins–than its competitors.

How? Apple is in large part a product marketing company. The market value of the products is dictated by the way consumers can be made to feel about them. It’s often been said that Apple products are “aspirational,” that they have a way of conferring status on the owner. I believe that consumers truly do feel this way about Apple products in a way that they don’t do about, for example, Samsung products.

It takes a lot of marketing genius to build, cultivate, and maintain this reality. Secrecy and tight control of the narrative around new products are vital ingredients.

This approach worked during the Jobs era and, I’d argue, it still works, albeit in a slightly different way, in the Tim Cook era. Today’s Apple lives at the heart of a never-ending media windstorm, the subject of constant attention from 24-7 Apple blogs, general tech media, mainstream media, and Wall Street. It’s also a far richer and more powerful company now than in the days of Jobs.

These days, leaks play a big role in the buildup to a new product announcement, I’d argue. The full hype cycle around new Apple products—starting with the very first rumors and leaks—is a steadily building drama that leads up to the pleasurable suspense before the launch, the delight of the reveal, and (hopefully) the consumer’s decision to buy it in the days and weeks following the event. The leaks are like little splashes of gasoline that keep the fire building throughout.

Tim Cook said in 2012 that he intended to “double down” on product secrecy, but in general (there are some recent exceptions), Apple has had a harder time than it once did keeping news bottled up. In recent years, Apple events have had fewer and fewer surprises, even after Tim Cook talked about doubling down on secrecy. There was a time when, as a rule, almost nothing leaked.

While leaks can help build interest in upcoming products, they can also directly hurt the sales of those devices that are already on the market. Case in point is the upcoming iPhone 8, which will likely be unveiled next fall. Apple, of course, wants consumers to keep buying the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus that are available today, and not hold out until late this year to buy the iPhone 8. In fact, Cook said during Apple’s last earnings call with analysts that stories like this one have led to softer-than-expected sales of existing iPhones.

In the end, Apple’s obsession with secrecy and drastic steps to stop leaks may only perpetuate the problem by placing a higher value on the leaks. For people like me, details on unannounced Apple products or services are considered “big game.” Regularly breaking such stories can be a career-making habit for some tech journalists. Readers, it turns out, like to read about things Apple really, really doesn’t want us to know about. How truly useful this kind of journalism is remains a question for another day.

At least 13 staffers (out of a total of 170) have been laid off by Headspace, the app-based mindfulness startup headquartered in Los Angeles.

The layoffs came earlier this month amid a department reshuffling that has left employees feeling stressed out, sources tell Fast Company. The app, which offers users guided meditations and mindfulness exercises, has been considered one of the most successful companies in its space, with Forbesrecently estimating that Headspace was valued at more than $250 million.

But two people with direct knowledge of the situation, as well as recent Glassdoor employer reviews, paint a more muddied picture of the meditation technology startup and its internal company culture. The job cuts came right as the company launched the redesigned version of its app this month.

CEO Richard Pierson, who took over the company in March, confirmed the layoffs, telling Fast Company that 13 positions have been cut from the company’s marketing department, with further restructuring planned for the London team. Headspace also confirms that the customer experience team is being moved to the product side in a “strategic organizational shift.”

As part of that effort, the company announced earlier today that it has hired former Twitter VP Ross Hoffman as its new chief business officer.

Pulling Back On Marketing

Pierson says the layoffs were part of a shift away from having an in-house brand agency, which the company had been building in recent years. “We don’t need to invest in the brand that way,” he says now, adding that the company had put together a robust team as part of that investment in  advertising.

It’s not unusual for app startups to invest heavily in marketing as they pursue user growth, and Headspace appears to be no exception. Last year, the company began testing expensive ad pushes specifically targeting New Yorkers–including pricey subway advertisements. Pierson says Headspace’s efforts in New York were a marketing “test” which cost about $2 million, and added that the company has no plans for a big marketing push to accompany its most recent app relaunch.

Pierson insists that, though the company’s advertising efforts and marketing department hiring spree were a “strategic misstep,” Headspace is still doing well and claims the company has been growing healthily for the past year. In an emailed statement, the company says it feels strategically sound: “We feel very confident around our product and growth strategy, it’s not something we divulge in public settings–but our board and investors are very happy with where we’re taking the company strategically.”

A Competitive Relaxation Industry

Headspace was founded in 2010 as a meditation event business run by cofounders Pierson, a former marketing executive whose clients included body-spray purveyor Axe, and Andy Puddicombe, a Buddhist monk. In those initial years, the company morphed into the popular meditation app it is today. For the first few years Pierson worked as CEO. Then, in 2014, Sean Brecker took on the executive role as the business began to really grow, raising $30 million in a Series A round in 2015. Overall, Headspace has reportedly seen over 11 million downloads [Update: a company spokesperson reached out to say the company has logged 15.8 million downloads to date]—and it has hovered between the 9th or 10th position in U.S. Health & Fitness app download ranks since last November, according to AppAnnie.

Earlier this year, Brecker decided to move to the CFO role–and Pierson took over again as CEO amid what seems to have been a challenging time for the startup. For one thing, competition from others in the space was heating up—rival meditation app Calm surpassed Headspace in app downloads earlier this year, according to one source, who called that moment “a wake-up” for the company.

For his part, however, Pierson says he was not aware that Calm had outpaced Headspace in download ranks, and questions the validity of that claim.

SimilarWeb’s algorithmic “usage rank,” which ranks apps by taking into account downloads and active users, put Calm far ahead of Headspace for at least the last month–Calm’s health and fitness app usage has ranked between 67 and 75, whereas Headspace has wavered between 83 and 92. AppAnnie’s rankings also show Calm in the lead–it hovered around the number four and five spot for health and fitness download ranks compared to Headspace, which oscillated between nine and 10.

Cultural Woes?

Under Brecker’s leadership, employee satisfaction was relatively high and many staffers applauded Headspace’s open and communicative work culture, according to sources and Glassdoor reviews. The company hosted weekly all-hands meetings during which any question was fair game. “Everyone was so opinionated in a good way,” says one source, describing the work atmosphere under Brecker.

But lately, those meetings have taken on a different tenor. “When Rich took over, it would be crickets,” says one source, describing the all-hands meeting environments. The atmosphere feels more confrontational and less open, according to sources.

Comments on employer review site Glassdoor echo those sentiments. “For a company with a mission to improve the health and happiness of the world, we are not at all trying to improve the health and happiness of our world internally,” writes one reviewer. “You can’t cross the management. If you disagree or ask the wrong question, you will have a target on your forehead.”

Another Glassdoor post from earlier this week is headlined “Trainwreck.” In fact, of the 40 reviews of Headspace on Glassdoor, the bulk of the negative ones were written in the last few months.

When asked about the shifting cultural atmosphere, Pierson notes that he’s been at the company since the beginning: “it’s not like I stepped in out of nowhere.” Anonymous reviews, he points out, may be from disgruntled fired employees.

Pierson also claims that Headspace consistently takes great pains to foster a communicative culture. “We do as much as we can to have everyone have their voices heard,” he says, pointing to the weekly all-hands meetings, as well as anonymous surveys the company provides. “We take employee feedback really seriously.”

“I don’t think that any company or any culture gets it 100% right all the time,” adds the CEO.

Despite the layoffs, it’s clear employees still care about the product and mission. And Pierson doesn’t shy away from taking responsibility for the firings, adding that he regrets overhiring in the marketing department. The layoffs, according to him, had little to do with the individual people or their performance.

“It’s on me,” says Pierson matter-of-factly. “I made that call.”

Whenever there’s a big illegal weapons bust and the authorities talk about destroying the firearms, what does that mean? Where do the guns go?

The Humanium Initiative, by Stockholm-based agencies Great Works and Akestam Holst, recycles metal from weapons destruction programs and makes it available for commercial production–by brands, artists, and designers–to make their products a symbolic result of a less violent world. The project has won the Innovation Lion Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity.

Jury president Susan Lyne, president and managing partner of BBG Ventures, said, “We believed [Humanium] showed innovation at every stage, from concept to procurement to the supply chain to the business model to the partnerships.”

Out of an impressive short list, there were also two Gold Lion winners in this category. One is Google’s Tilt Brush, which allows artists to paint in 3D through a virtual reality application.

The other gold winner is “Los Santos Pride,” created by another Swedish agency, Stockholm-based Garbergs. It’s a free unofficial modification for Grand Theft Auto 5 that launched last summer, staging an indestructible pride parade within the game to celebrate Stockholm Pride.

You’ve certainly received the emails: There is a prince with $1 million dollars, and he wants to give it to you. Or perhaps it’s an astronaut or a military leader. Regardless of the tall tale, one part remains the same: All that’s required is a little cash up front for you to see a windfall later. The grift, technically known as the advance fee fraud, predates email, but the electronic version has become indelibly associated with Nigeria–one-fifth of all the reported scams originated from the country in 2014–and other cybercrime is popular as well.

But running online scams takes brains and technical know-how, so an organization called Paradigm Initiative is training disadvantaged young cybercriminals to instead build apps and online businesses. In a 10-week course, the students learn a host of entrepreneurial and tech skills, from money management to coding and web design.

“If you can hack a website in the name of committing a crime, then you can design a real website and get paid for it,” said ‘Gbenga Sesan, the founder and executive director of Paradigm Initiative. “There are people in our program who believed that crime was their only option–some said that it was their way of giving back to a system that disappointed them and didn’t allow them to get a job even after going to school.”

“We do this work because the Nigerian government has failed in its responsibility to educate properly. Our work is a challenge to the government, to show them a model that works,” said Sesan, a social entrepreneur who has worked as a consultant for the United Nations, Harvard, and Microsoft.

The idea for Paradigm Initiative stretches back to 1991, when a teacher forbade then-13-year-old Sesan from using one of his school’s few computers–because she didn’t think he was smart enough to figure out how. “That’s why I decided I was going to pay it back–to make sure no young person goes through what I went through,” said Sesan.

Sesan and his colleagues, who operate out of five offices across the country, don’t go out of their way to advertise to cybercriminals. The students find their way to the social enterprise through its collaboration with local governments, youth centers, and community outreach programs. Most students hear about Paradigm Initiative through word of mouth.

In 2008, a year after Sesan founded the company, a representative from Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission told Paradigm Initiative that they would arrest any students who openly admit to being criminals. Accordingly, Paradigm Initiative does not keep records of how many cybercriminals they have trained, though he says they’re not the majority of the organizations’ students.

In addition to tech and entrepreneurial capacities, the social enterprise trains students in basic “life skills” to help them thrive in an office environment–the formality of which is unfamiliar to many of Paradigm Initiative students. They learn how to interview for jobs, communicate with colleagues, and manage their finances.

Between 95% and 98% of each 90-student cohort complete the 10-week training, of which 70% to 75% go on to find work, pursue further training, or start their own business. Paradigm Initiative helps the students find high-profile internships with partners like the U.S. Embassy, Afrinvest, and DHL. Six months after graduation, each student must write a report detailing what he or she has worked on since leaving Paradigm Initiative.

Every Friday, students gather for a class-wide reflection, during which they talk about their progress and struggles. Sesan says the exercise helps keep the students motivated, which can be a difficult task.

“I grew up here, and what you’re typically told is that you won’t be successful because the system will work against you,” said Sesan. “People who have had unfortunate circumstances in their own life use that to discourage students. They have parents, uncles, and family members who tell them, ‘I’m 55, and I don’t even have a job. This is a terrible country.’ That’s what they grow up around. So it takes time to get through to them.”

Alexander Starritt is the editor of Apolitical. Jennifer Guay is a writer at Apolitical.

Women can now “have it all”–a career, kids, a social life, hobbies–but that means an awful lot of running around throughout the day. Many working women make four or five stops between leaving the house in the morning and heading home at night.

The fashion industry has responded to this by offering clothes that work in many contexts, like leggings that can be worn from a yoga class to a board meeting. But the handbag industry hasn’t been as quick to keep up with women’s busy, multifaceted lives. “I’ve discovered that bag designers are tasked with trendy bags to entice women to get a new one each season,” Jacqueline Harman, founder of the bag startup Coyn, tells Fast Company. “They’re less focused on creating functional pieces that actually fit into their lives.”

Last year, I tracked down and tested the best handbags on the market that are both beautiful and functional, designed to ease the transition from work to PTA meetings to gym classes to cocktails. Several of those bags were equipped with tech features like laptop sleeves or in-bag chargers. As I developed this year’s list, I asked readers for their thoughts and I learned a couple of interesting things. First, many women don’t carry a tablet or laptop, since they can get most of their work done on a smartphone. Second, even though they’re lugging plenty of stuff around, they want their bag to look sleek and compact.

I’ve incorporated some of this feedback into the 2017 list. While I did test bags from more established brands, I found that the best-designed models came from startups that spent time iterating on their prototypes and performing user testing in the same vein as a tech company would. The new list includes bags across price points and silhouettes, from camera bags to luggage, but all of them are designed to take you through your day without any fuss.

Your Starter Bag: Pop & Suki

Last year, British best friends Suki Waterhouse (a model) and Poppy Jamie (a TV presenter) launched an accessories company. Their goal was to create products that they wanted but couldn’t find. They started with two leather handbags–a camera case and a tote–that are meant to encompass all you would need for work and life. They’re priced between $200 and $250.

My research showed that most women are looking for compact, easy-to-carry bags that can fit a lot of small objects. I tested the camera bag and found it very practical. The 5.5 x 7-inch bag is roomy: It can fit a wallet, sunglasses, a phone, and a charger, without losing its rectangular shape. It comes with a shoulder strap, and you can purchase other strap styles to convert the bag into a waist pack or backpack. The classic silhouette ensures that it’s appropriate for even a formal workplace, but it is versatile, so you can carry it into the weekend, a date, or a party.

Pop & Suki also gives you the ability to customize in fun ways. I tried the camera bag in the brand’s classic “millennial pink,” but it comes in a wide range of colors, including black, white, and lavender. For $40, you can have your name, monogram, or preferred emojis printed on the bottom—a spot that isn’t always visible. You can also purchase a range of tassels, tags, and keychains. A good bet for young professionals with an after-work social life.

Most Versatile: Coyn

Jackie Harman, a tech executive, had spent years looking for a leather tote that she could carry every single day. It seemed like a fairly simple ask, but she couldn’t find one that fit the bill. There was always some issue: too big, too small, or not enough pockets (which inevitably leads to wasting time digging for keys). Last year, she quit her job in New York, moved to Los Angeles, and set up the bag company Coyn. She’s spent a year perfecting the design of her one and only product: a $345 full-grain leather bag that is made in Italy.

At 13 x 14 inches, the shoulder satchel can fit plenty without the wearer having to tug at the straps, which are thick and well-reinforced. For work, I loaded it with my laptop in the designated sleeve, along with books and magazines in the main compartment. There are smaller pockets for everyday items like chargers, wallet, makeup, and water bottle, and there’s a keychain strap. On the weekend, the bag miraculously transformed into a diaper bag. My daughter’s milk bottle slipped into the water bottle slot, while the main compartment fit diapers, toys, and snacks.

The genius lies in the bag’s ability to look big or small depending on how much stuff you’re toting around. For days when you don’t have so much to carry, you can fold the sides inward, creating a sleek square shape.

The Ethical Choice: Von Holzhausen

Fashion, as you may have heard, is the world’s second most polluting industry, after oil. While clothing brands like Reformation and Patagonia are leading the charge for creating more ecologically responsible clothing, it’s hard to find higher-end bags that are also eco-friendly.

Vicki Von Holzhausen is hoping to change that. She was an award-winning car designer for Audi and Mercedes. But two years ago, she decided to launch her own luxury bag company, using the same principles of design, functionality, and sustainability she learned from the auto industry. Her goal is to find the most responsible approaches to bag-making, without compromising on style or quality. Most of her bags are made of leathers that are by-products of the food industry and tanned in non-polluting ways. Von Holzhausen has also invented an entirely new material, called Technik Leather, that feels just like the real deal, but is completely animal-free.

Von Holzhausen has a minimalistic aesthetic, using muted natural colors and black handles with knotted cords. She offers a variety of silhouettes and sizes that cost between $395 and $795. I tested the $550 bag that is simply called the “handheld.” For work, I carried it like a satchel, which made it a bit more formal. Measuring 10 x 12 inches, it does not accommodate a laptop, but it easily fit a tablet, together with everything I needed for a full day at work, including gym clothes and a cardigan. The style of the bag carries over to the weekend, where I carried it as a cross-body bag using the strap.

Traveler’s Best Friend: Latitu

Women who travel frequently often struggle to find luggage that is both elegant and practical. For those focused on pragmatism, there are many new brands on the market–like Away and Raden–that offer good hardshell cases in a variety of colors. But if you’re in search of an attractive leather bag, you’re looking at luxury brands, such as Louis Vuitton or Givenchy, that cost several thousand dollars.

Jetsetter Tanya Pham just launched a new brand called Latitu that offers leather bags between $350 and $895 that are both feminine and full of little details meant to ease your traveler’s stress. The bags are made of Italian leather embossed with a crocodile pattern and plenty of studs.

She offers three different silhouettes: a backpack, a weekender, and a duffle. The latter two come with a leather pouch that can be used as an inside pocket or detached like a clutch so you can keep your passport and tickets in hand as you’re waiting to board. On the back, there is a pocket that you can slip onto the trolley handle of a suitcase. The duffle also comes with a hidden side compartment to store shoes or dirty laundry.

New Luxury: Senreve

Women who love toting around a bag from their favorite luxury label often find themselves trading aesthetics for functionality. Every season, Celine, Louis Vuitton, Hermes, and Balenciaga, among others, churn out new collections of beautifully crafted bags that tend to be lacking in extras like a protective sleeve for a tablet or laptop, or multiple pockets for phones and chargers. Often they are made from high-end leathers that scratch or stain easily, so wearers have to be careful about how they handle the bag.

Senreve cofounders Coral Chung and Wendy Wen, whose former careers involved stints at VC and consulting firms, were the very women who loved their swish sacks, but often carried a cheaper, more practical option when they traveled or went to a meeting. With Senreve, they’ve launched a collection of made-in-Italy leather bags priced between $495 and $895 that are designed to appeal to the discerning high-end traveler. The brand’s direct-to-consumer approach means that the bags are a tad cheaper than products of similar quality from other luxury brands.

I carried the Maestra as a backpack when I was running after my daughter in the playground in the morning, then as a more formal satchel when I went to a couple of meetings in town. I was able to fit my work items, plus my daughter’s snacks and bottle, without the bag looking bulky.

This year’s startups have all innovated in clever ways, but more importantly, they are listening to consumers. Designing for modern women’s needs, these brands are moving one step closer to that elusive pie-in-the-accessories sky: the perfect bag.

During his 15-year tenure in the U.S. Navy, former SEAL Chris Fussell found that the higher his rank, the more sidelined he felt. “As you move up a traditional, sort of bureaucratic structure, there’s a certain point at which you realize, well, I’m not really on the implementation or execution side—I’m not on the battlefield. I’m an operations person who’s overseeing multiple units that are out on the ground doing the job,” Fussell recently told Fast Company.

This type of movement away from the action is pretty common in civilian workplaces, too. With each promotion, you tend to get further removed from the day-to-day goings-on of your organization. As Fussell writes in his new book, One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams, “bureaucratic advancement means fewer peers, more span of control, generally an increasing information-pump function, and increased distance from the actual implementation of whatever it is the organization does.”

If Fussell was supposed to be an “information pump,” though, he felt like a jammed one—he realized that he’d become more of a bottleneck to his team than much else. But then he realized it wasn’t completely his fault.

Related:Chris Fussell On How To Spot The Hidden Influencers On Every Team

Moving Faster Amid Information Overload

It was an organizational problem. “The reality, as the battlefield taught us,” Fussell writes, “is that a 20th-century organizational system is simply insufficient for the speed of the information age.”

This was a lesson the military learned firsthand after the start of the so-called “War on Terror” in 2001. Early on, Fussell says, senior leadership began grappling with how to make the armed forced more agile and adaptable when faced with a decentralized adversary and a glut of data. Too much information was being disseminated too slowly, which meant changes in strategy trickled down too slowly, too. Eventually, Fussell recalls, his team was was holding all-hands videoconference meetings on a daily basis, trying to keep up to speed.

Now a partner at the McChrystal Group, founded by Stanley McChrystal (Fussell’s lieutenant general when he entered the Joint Task Force) [he was also McChrystal’s aide de camp in 2007 and 2008], Fussell now helms the organization’s Leadership Institute, where he finds companies facing similar problems as he did with the SEALs. One “core question” he says many still struggle with is, “How often are you really realigning yourselves on strategy? And does it need to be faster, based on how quickly your market actually changes? The answer is usually yes.”

But adapting faster in a data-saturated environment is hard. It often means regular strategic discussions, more transparency, and changing how information gets funneled through an organization—to prevent clogged information pumps and shield leadership from gobs of useless data. With these complicated challenges in mind, and drawing on his Navy experience, Fussell wrote One Mission to be as “as close to a practical guide to this sort of change process as possible.”

Helping Big Companies Stay Nimble

Fussell’s book includes case studies on various companies the McChrystal Group has worked with, from financial software firm Intuit to apparel giant Under Armour.

For Intuit, which owns tax-prep software TurboTax and personal finance app Mint, Fussell says the challenge was to consolidate the company’s various business units over the course of 2014 so it could unify as “one Intuit.” The company was worried about upstarts that were quicker on their feet. “For Intuit and these ‘legacies’—once insurgents in their own right—it was now a question of, ‘How do you take a company at scale and recreate the adaptability and intimacy of a startup?'” Fussell writes in his case study.

In the case of Under Armour, which Fussell and his team consulted with for a year starting in September 2014, the McChrystal Group helped streamline communications around the company’s supply chain. While the company’s supply-chain division may have felt like “the materials are on the boat,” Fussell explained, by way of example, “R&D realized that they want to make a change, and marketing finds out that the color scheme should be completely different, so the boat has to turn around.”

But once those parties started communicating more frequently, Fussell says, “they could see problems coming six months down the road and solve for them before it was too late.” In other words, the whole organization needs to pump information, not just a few key influencers.

Fussell says he usually works with companies that fall broadly into one of two categories. The first includes big enterprises like the military that have been around for years and want to “reverse engineer” themselves to recapture a startup-like energy. You could count General Motors in this camp; under CEO Mary Barra, the automaker has been trying to shake up its culture in order to lure top tech talent from the startup world. And then there are small organizations at “the tipping point,” says Fussell, who are often asking, “How do we maintain this culture as we scale up?” This has been a key priority for Facebook over recent years.

For companies small and large, old and new, the through-line as Fussell sees it is transparency—either introducing it into existing corporate structures or preserving it when a scrappy startup grows up.

It’s The Same Goal Everywhere: Win

Fussell says people often mistakenly think of the military as fundamentally different from other organizations, because the stakes are much higher when it’s a matter of life or death.

But in his experience, “That’s not really what most people wake up thinking about. The idea of losing is a huge negative, but not getting shot at or loss of life—that’s just a reality of the battlefield,” Fussell says. “Not to say that it isn’t important—it’s just not top of mind every single day with most of the thinkers inside the service.”

Instead, he says he’s seen more similarities between civilian and military organizations than differences, particularly when it comes to the challenges their leaders face. “What they’re thinking is, ‘I don’t want to lose,'” he says of senior military officers. “And that mind-set is very similar to industry, which is, ‘Hey, we’ve got a good organization here, and we want to win. We want to come out on top.'”

As Fussell points out, winning demands agility and adaptability, regardless of industry. It’s less about individuals’ own abilities than whether those individuals can come together and communicate with each other—and get better and faster at it all the time.

Behind two opaque white glass doors on a storefront on Manhattan’s 14th Street, a team of sous chefs is chopping, marinating, and frying food for the Flatiron lunch crowd. A young intern wearing a loose T-shirt and a red baseball cap sits among a collection of stainless steel appliances, a warming cabinet, preparation counters, walk-in coolers, and industrial-size sinks. He’s staring intently at a laptop. “He’s measuring the degradation of temperature over time for food items,” says J.J. Basil, the lead chef at David Chang’s new outfit, Ando, a ghost of a restaurant that has no physical dine-in location.

Chang is a serial restaurateur who has made his name on innovative comfort cuisine through the umbrella of Momofuku. In 2004, he launched his first spot, Momofuku Noodle Bar, and has since amassed a series of restaurants in New York City, Toronto, Las Vegas, and Washington, D.C. Now, with Ando, hungry customers can’t just come and sit down—or even order pickup. All the food is made to be delivered for $9-$12 in 30 minutes or less.

Related: David Chang Wants To Fuku You Up

Other startups have attempted low-overhead kitchens with a focus on delivery, but so far, there have been no breakout successes. Chang thinks he can make his concept thrive by doing what’s he’s always done: run restaurants. In his mind, Ando will succeed if he’s conservative in the number of kitchen hands he hires, arms his staff with efficient equipment, focuses on profitability off the bat, and constantly iterates recipes until something sticks. He’s hired top talent to pull it off, like chef Basil, a former sous chef at WD-50, and most recently, Andy Taylor, who was previously CEO of Hale and Hearty Soups.

Ando came into being in May 2016, and until recently, only serviced Manhattan’s Midtown East neighborhood. It’s since expanded to Flatiron. As Ando was growing, Maple, a similar food-delivery service (one that Chang invested in), was shutting down. And Maple is not the only fledgling delivery startup to fall. Sprig and SpoonRocket, two West Coast companies that have also gone kaput, were unable to solve the costly inefficiencies of building new technology, anticipating demand, and managing labor. Another company, Munchery, has struggled with high levels of food waste. Chang thinks the key to mastering food delivery without a storefront to lure in passersby is making delicious meals that people love. “If we can just make good food and get it to them fast, I think that’s the name of the game,” he says.

The Domino’s Effect

I meet Taylor at Ando’s offices near Union Square. The sparse office, which previously belonged to a real estate group, has a windowed partition in the front. Behind the wall, there are conference rooms, a small kitchen where two men tap away on keyboards, and an open space where a team of people sit at long tables, looking at large monitors.

Taylor sees delivery from nimble kitchens as the next wave in the technology-enabled conveniences that have become embedded in the lives of urban dwellers. Referencing the popularity of ride-hail services, he says, “If you’da said five years ago I was gonna stand on a corner, press a button, and then get into a stranger’s car to go to dinner, I would have said you were crazy.” In his lilting British accent, he continues, “But now it’s part of the culture, isn’t it?”

Taylor is known for growing chain brands. He was chief operating officer at Pret A Manger and expanded the brand in the U.S. from 11 stores to 33 in New York, and launched the brand in Washington, D.C., Boston, and Chicago. When he became CEO at Hale and Hearty, he was charged with revitalizing the company and building its reputation for homemade soups. The challenge he foresees at Ando is finding a core audience.

Related: An Exclusive Look At Ando, David Chang’s Top-Secret New Delivery Restaurant

“If you’ve got a big fat corner on Lexington Avenue, a lot of pair of eyes see it every day, and people just know who x-brand is,” Taylor says. “It becomes more familiar. We don’t have that luxury.”

His arrival at Ando makes a lot of sense, considering Chang’s inspiration for the new project isn’t any newfangled foodie service like Munchery, but rather, Domino’s. That’s not to say that he wants to make mediocre food mass-prepared to satisfy hungry sports fans or drunken college students. He’s looking at the way the pizza company is using technology—namely apps—to handle a high volume of orders. In February, Domino’s mobile sales made up 60% of its overall sales. The company is dominating fast food.

Tech To Support The Food

Even though on-demand lunch and dinner services are, at their core, food services, many have been the brainchildren of engineers and businessmen—”tech people,” as Chang calls them. These are people who don’t have experience in hospitality and team up with chefs to design a menu, but don’t necessarily value their ability to run a restaurant.

Chang has met a lot of individuals like this as he’s looked for partners for Ando. “One guy was like, ‘I can replicate your intuition. We don’t really even need you,'” he says. A lot of these food-service-without-foot-traffic startups have focused on the technology. Some engineers believe all they need to do food well are mobile apps that make ordering a meal as magically simple as hailing an Uber or Lyft.

Be at yours in 20 (ish) ????????????????????????: @thesweetlifeoflina

A post shared by Ando (@ando) on May 3, 2017 at 3:40pm PDT

But Chang thinks they have the equation wrong: It’s the tech that should support the food. And to gain a following, the food has to be good. So he’s building Ando like he would any restaurant: around a concept. But lunch, it turns out, is hard. These days, people are more concerned with healthy eating than they were 10 year ago. They’re also eating out less. And yet, according to research from the NPD group, delivery appears to be steadily on the rise, as more people work from home. This is especially true for food that’s not pizza. For these reasons, Chang and Basil are diligently researching and testing new dishes, trying to nail down the recipes that customers order again and again.

A little over a year after launch, Ando has yet to win over the masses. A less than savory review from Eater last year basically told Chang to do better on making meals for delivery. “I realize that some people think our food is bad,” he says.

But none of his other restaurants were successful immediately, and he doesn’t expect Ando to be any different. What’s important, he says, is that the staff stay lean (so to speak) while he and his team perfect the menu. Using another culinary metaphor to explain the importance of hiring only the number of people absolutely necessary, he says, “I always view everything through the whole analogy of salt to taste because you can never take salt out of the dish. You can always add.”

“A restaurant is about being profitable as soon as possible,” Chang adds. That same wisdom is not always true for tech startups. While some have bootstrapped themselves into world domination, those in the delivery space have received ample funding that’s allowed them to spend a lot of money to scale. Chang has always created his restaurants on a budget and thinks this approach has set up his various ventures for longevity. “It has to work,” he says. Why? Because his and his staff’s livelihoods depend on it.

The Art & Science Of Delivery

When he’s crafting a menu, Chang wants to appeal to a wide customer base, much like he does with the haute comfort food he serves at his many restaurants. He sees this more mainstream audience as his next big trial. This group can be just as difficult to please as foodies. “If you take a step back, you’ll realize that ‘challenging’ and ‘difficult’ is no longer on the margins of couture dining, but right down the middle,” he says.

Ando also comes with unique challenges that wouldn’t be issues in a sit-down eatery.

For one, Basil says he’s limited in the kinds of dishes he can make. At a quick-service restaurant, like Fuku, a cool bread-and-butter pickle can be paired with fried chicken inside of a buttery bun for contrast. But when that same meal is bundled up for delivery, the flavors meld together. “It’s the most challenging thing I’ve done so far,” says Basil, who during his time at WD-50, mastered such culinary marvels as an aerated foie gras terrine.

You only get one lunch break a day, make it count. ????

A post shared by Ando (@ando) on Jun 20, 2017 at 7:53am PDT

Right now, Ando is trying to make its name on sandwiches, salads, or bowls—healthy mixes of grains, veggies, and meats. Its current standout is a rich cheesesteak made with miso and chickpea paste that hardly resembles its Philadelphia originator and could put you to sleep if eaten in the middle of the day. Ando also has a green bowl with chicken and guacamole that is acidic in a way that foodies might appreciate. But neither of these are the knockout lunch hit Chang knows he needs.

“We’ve always taken this approach of trying to make mistakes and trying to make the right kind of mistakes,” Chang says. “You have to make it and then test it out and then tweak and constantly make iterations. That’s how we do it. I know it’s sloppy and inefficient, but I don’t think there’s any other way for us to figure it out.”

During his presidency, the late Gerald Ford reportedly asked the White House chef for the same meal each day—cottage cheese served with a dollop of ketchup.

That might have been the last time someone innovated on cottage cheese.

Popular sentiment has been less than enthusiastic. It’s ridiculed on health sites, with multiple fitness and body-building forums dedicated to the topic of how to make a spoonful of the stuff go down. Buzzfeed, meanwhile, ran an article titled “Cottage Cheese Is Fucking Disgusting.” Among the popular site’s chief complaints? “It tastes like nothing and sadness all at the same time.” (Over 70% of readers voted they “agreed” with the article.)

But the cottage cheese image problem is relatively recent. Roughly 40 years ago, the cottage cheese market was double that of yogurt. Today, yogurt is seven times more profitable than cottage cheese, according to Nielsen findings.

Love it or hate it, the thick milky food is packed with protein, vitamins, and calcium–equal to that of yogurt–and it’s poised to make a comeback. One company that is hoping to reposition the food from sad and lumpy to cool and tasty is Irvine-based Good Culture. They have launched a line of flavored organic cups in hopes of jump-starting the $1.1 billion cottage cheese category.

“This is a market ripe for disruption,” says Jesse Merrill, cofounder of Good Culture.

In 2014, the former VP of marketing at Honest Tea wanted to start his own company. He got his inspiration following a workout with his friend Anders Eisner, cofounder of Activate Drinks, which sells vitamin-packed sports drinks. The friends were eating cottage cheese when they realized their preferred post-fitness snack was far from satisfying.

“Most were watery or pretty slimy,” recalls Merrill. Other complaints high on his list were the ingredients—preservatives, additives, xanthan gum—and the large tub format that made portable snacking “a real hassle.”

“You always had to scoop it out for put into a bowl, then mix your own flavors,” he says. “No one was offering convenient on-the-go solutions.”

Presentation also left much to be desired. Big name brands such as Breakstone’s and Knudsen—both under the Kraft Foods Group umbrella—hadn’t updated their packaging in years. Knudsen still boasts a cozy 1975 hue of Pepto-Bismol pink, while Breakstone’s features a bland graphic of a spoonful of cottage cheese.

None of it was being presented in a particularly appetizing way or spoke to the modern day consumer, notes Merrill, who wasn’t surprised that “you had to look for the cottage cheese off in the corner somewhere” of a store. Just a few feet away, though, was usually an entire area devoted to various Greek yogurts: Chobani, Oikos, Dannon, and a dozen more—a sub sector that wasn’t commoditized until someone came in and made a premium product. The yogurt industry is, at current estimates, an $8 billion industry, according to a recent report by business analyst firm Sprout Intelligence.

The two friends had an epiphany: Why not put a better cottage cheese out there?

“We decided we want to be the Greek yogurt of cottage cheese,” says Merrill.

It's an olive kind of day. #goodculture

A post shared by good culture cottage cheese (@good_culture) on Dec 13, 2016 at 1:46pm PST

Making Cottage Cheese Trendy

Within six months, Merrill and Eisner executed their vision: a range of sweet and savory cottage cheeses with all the buzzword healthy trimmings.

The organic, non-GMO superfood would be sourced from grass-fed, free-range, so-called “respected” cows on a sustainable family farm in Wisconsin. Labels would feature simple ingredients that consumers would recognize: milk, cream, and water. There would be no additives, preservatives, starches, stabilizers, or milk protein concentrates. There would just be added sea salt to ensure a shelf life of 45 days (versus 100 days of its more chemical-reliant competitors).

“I wanted ingredients you could pronounce,” stresses Merrill.

They also restructured the consistency, opting for a thicker and creamier soft curd experience. The 100% recyclable 5.3 oz cups, meanwhile, feature a modern font and clear imagery of its trendy flavors: pineapple, strawberry chia, blueberry açaí, kalamata olive, and sundried tomato.

Merrill, a self-described “savory fan,” is particularly proud of the saltier flavors. Extending beyond traditional fruity flavors is the precise innovation he found missing from the sector.

“There’s a way to do savory right,” he explains, adding, “it just requires some heavier lifting.”

Merrill and Eisner personally funded it at the start, with later seed money provided by the Eisner family (Anders is the son of former Walt Disney Company CEO Michael Eisner).

By March 2015, Good Culture introduced their product at Natural Products Expo West, a top-tier food convention in Anaheim, California. Right away, the year-old startup picked up interest from a highly coveted retailer: Whole Foods. Within a few months, their cottage cheese was on West Coast regional shelves. By early 2016, it extended to nationwide Whole Foods. Each 5.3 cup sells for $1.99. (Chobani averages around $1.50 to $2, depending on location.)

Breakfast for dinner? Don't forget to top off your #monday with some our of blueberry #cottagecheese! ???? source: Pinterest ????????

A post shared by good culture cottage cheese (@good_culture) on Jan 30, 2017 at 5:55pm PST

“Yogurt sales were starting to mature,” explains Merrill of the product hitting peak saturation. “It was the right time for it.”

Within six months, the cofounders received a phone call from 301 INC, the new business development and venturing unit of General Mills, which predominantly focuses on emerging healthy brands. The branch, along with CAVU Venture Partners, led a $3 million investment round of strategic funding in May 2016.

That General Mills took interest is no surprise. Big food companies increasingly look to diversify into more health and speciality brands, explains Brian Todd, president and CEO of food industry analyst firm The Food Institute. General Mills recently took a minority stake in granola maker Purely Elizabeth, while Unilever purchased Sir Kensington fine condiments.

“It’s definitely easier for them [to get into food trends] via acquisition or investments rather than start up a new division,” says Todd. “And some of the these products have seen some sort of a market test.”

But 301 Inc. does more than just invest in Good Culture; the unit, says Merrill, is “very hands-on” in helping with sales strategies, distribution, and consumer research.

“We like brands that are developing and delivering health benefits in new ways,” John Haugen, VP and general manager of 301 INC, tells Fast Company. “This is not your grandmother’s cheese, and not your grandmother’s brand.”

Haugen explains that Good Culture is being positioned in the protein snack category. 301 INC.’s goal is to have Good Culture be synonymous with healthy snack alternatives.

In that sense, I wonder, was there any thought as to not even labeling it cottage cheese? (What if we came up with a new term, like “bubbly cheese,” “dairy pearls,” or “heaven’s pinballs”?)

“We did think about it,” admits Haugen. “[We thought], ‘well ,where should this product live?’ But the fact of the matter is, it is cottage cheese. It wants to be a next-door neighbor to yogurt…. There is an opportunity is to have [consumers] rethink the product.”

Clean living starts with a clean label! #NoPreservativesNecessary #goodculture ????: @healthyhomehelp ????

A post shared by good culture cottage cheese (@good_culture) on Feb 9, 2017 at 2:50pm PST

The Plan To Crush Yogurt

Part of Good Culture’s marketing strategy is touting cottage cheese’s advantages over its chief competitor, yogurt. With the tagline of “more protein, less sugar,” it heavily promotes the fact that its products have 19g of protein, versus 12g found in a traditional cup of Chobani. This disparity makes a difference to its core customer: the health and fitness enthusiast, the majority of which are millennials.

According to a recent report by PwC, 47% of those aged 18-34 have changed their eating habits toward a healthier diet, as compared to just 23% of those over 55. The definition of what constitutes a “healthy diet” varies, with millennials attributing more trend-based meanings (e.g. high protein, high vitamins) versus older consumers’ more traditional definitions (e.g. low fat). To that end, Good Culture stages tastings at gyms, marathons, fitness festivals, and fashion events, where the crowd is generally under 35.

The company also attempts to appeal to millennials’ conscious wallet. Good Culture donates 1% of the sale of each cup to nonprofits helping the environment. “We’re trying to live up to the Good Culture name,” says Merrill.

The multi-pronged approach has served the startup well. In 2015, Good Culture was in 300 stores. By 2016, it was 2,000. Today, the product is found in over 6,000 stores nationwide, including supermarkets like Publix, Sprouts, and Target, as well as in speciality retailers like Dean & Deluca and Murray’s Cheese. A company rep could not disclose financial details, but did confirm that sales in 2016 increased over 17 times versus the year prior.

Whole Foods is one retailer that has further increased its Good Culture offerings. While the supermarket chain sells other small brands in the cottage cheese category, it sees Good Culture especially promising. Whole Foods category manager Lee Robinson believes it’s the startup’s ability to take cues from other categories–such as convenient single-serve format– that have proven particularly successful.

There’s also Good Culture’s flavors, which Lee finds a “little more adventurous” than the average cottage cheese company. “[Whole Foods] customers tend to be on the early adopter side,” he says. “They are more willing to try new innovations in our store.”

Overall, fruit flavors sell the fastest, says Merrill, since “they’re more accessible to a wider group.” But the kalamata flavor is seeing substantial growth in stores like Whole Foods, thanks to what Merrill calls a “loyal cult following” of olive aficionados.

But Good Culture shouldn’t get too comfortable. Competition has solidified within the past year as more brands recognize an untapped market.

Breakstone’s now sells single-serve packs with fruit toppings, as do several up-and-coming startups. There are also plenty of new, interesting taste profiles on the scene. Massachusetts-based Hood Foods offers savory cottage cheese flavors like chive, toasted onion, and cucumber with dill. Artisa, produced by Ohio’s Smith Dairy Products Co., comes in raspberry pomegranate, peach and apple cinnamon, and black bean with salsa.

Last August, Israel’s largest food manufacture, Tnuva, released its American cottage cheese brand Muuna–with flavors like peach, mango, and pineapple–in Northeast retailers like ShopRite and Stop & Shop. Less than a year later, its sold in 4,000 retailers.

The international company wanted a piece of the American dairy market, but not necessarily the more competitive categories.

This green bean salad will be the perfect accompaniment to whatever you’re making for your BBQ tomorrow! Click the link in our bio for the recipe! #MDW

A post shared by Muuna (@muunacottage) on May 28, 2017 at 2:54pm PDT

“Everyone and their mother is in the yogurt business now,” says Gerard Meyer, Muuna’s CEO. Meyer most recently served as president of Sodastream USA.

Like Good Culture, Muuna ($1.49) comes in fruity flavors and single-serving cups. The Minnesota-produced product is quickly catching up to Good Culture’s success, although Meyer is quick to point out their distinctions: Muuna, for example, is “creamier”  than its thicker-based competition, and at $1.49, the non-organic item is bit more accessible to mainstream consumers. Overall, though, he believes competition only helps better adjust consumers’ view of the cottage cheese.

“I totally HATE cottage cheese,” writes one Muuna Facebook fan on the company’s page. “But I was very hungry after a tough workout [so] I decided to try the pineapple flavor–to my surprise it was very creamy and flavorful. I will be buying more.”

While it may seem like remaining employed after a company’s reorganization is reason for celebration, the reality is often not so rosy. A 2015 survey by research and training company Leadership IQ found that 74% of employees who kept their job after a corporate layoff said their productivity declined. Many report feelings of guilt, anxiety, and anger. Another 2016 study by the University of East Anglia in England found that even when companies are restructured without layoffs, restructuring has a mostly negative effect.

If you’ve been through a “re-org” and still have a job, getting over those negative feelings and finding your way is important for your future success, says Dave Popple, president of Psynet Group, an employee assessment firm. “If you survived a reorg, it is because your company saw value in you and believe that you can help them move forward,” he says. So, if you’re having trouble reconciling your feelings and taking advantage of the new opportunities before you, here is a seven-step plan.

Step 1: Recognize The Fallout

“The first thing is to understand what you’ve gone through,” says Neil Lewis, managing director of Working Transitions. The period leading up to the reorganization and the actual event itself can be stressful. Friends and colleagues may have been let go and your job or work environment may have changed, which can lead to feelings of sadness and loss, he says. Some people even feel “survivor’s guilt” for having kept their job while others lost theirs.

It’s okay to feel these emotions—pretending they aren’t there is just going to prolong the period until things start to feel normal again, Lewis says. If your organization offers resources to help you deal with the transition and related feelings, take advantage of them. You’re not alone in how you feel, Lewis says.

Step 2: Rebuild Your Confidence

Ironically, Lewis says that people who’ve left the organization and gone through job counseling and outplacement services may emerge more optimistic and feeling better about themselves than those who remain employed.

“They’ve rediscovered their transferable and marketable skills and attributes, then maybe got another job and that feels good, whereas the survivors are left behind, with the same old (and often more) work to do,” he says. It’s important to begin doing a skills inventory and finding ways to get excited about the work you’re doing again.

Step 3: Find Opportunities

After positions and roles have been redefined, there are often opportunities to take on stretch assignments or position yourself to build new skills, says Mitch Berlin, Americas operational transactions services leader at professional services firm EY. “If you’re part of a company that is being sold, for example, and let’s say it’s being sold to private equity buyer, it’s going to need a whole infrastructure that doesn’t exist potentially so it’s an opportunity for you to step up as well, into a new elevated role,” he says.

Seek out and volunteer for opportunities, and stay away from negative water cooler chatter. “That stuff gets back to leadership, and they know,” he says. As new roles are being formed and finalized, you can often find ways to get you closer to your long-term goals.

Step 4: Do A Gap Assessment

Berlin says you need about a month in any new role to truly understand what is being asked of you. After you’ve been in your redefined job for about four weeks, do a true gap assessment to determine if you have what you need to be successful, he suggests. Do you have the proper equipment and resources? Do you need additional training? Are you set up for success in your new role?

“And then be very clear with your manager: ‘This is what you told me what success is. I understand it. This is the team that I have. I need X, Y, and Z to be more successful,'” he says.

Step 5: Manage Up And Down

Just as you may be trying to figure out the emotions and implications of change, so are the people who manage you and the people you manage. Be sure to tend to those relationships and be sure that you’ve got a good understanding of what they’re asking and what their needs are within their new roles.

If you’re managing people who went through the reorganization, spend time with them to help them adapt and to calm their concerns about their jobs. You’ve got to help them get past survivor’s guilt and get them comfortable in their new roles, he says. “I think that the personal touch—I’m not talking about a lot of rah-rah sessions and team meetings and town halls, although those can be important, too—it’s really the personal touch, one-on-one with your direct reports, that is necessary at this time,” he says.

Step 6: Don’t Lose Your Contacts

Sometimes, employees are uncomfortable keeping in touch with the people who were let go. If those people were colleagues you valued, don’t lose them, Popple says. “Don’t be afraid to talk about them or to reach out to them,” he says. They’re an important part of your network and you may be feeling a sense of loss now that they’re not in the office. They may also be feeling forgotten, and hearing from you will likely be welcome. At the very least, connect with them on LinkedIn or other social media to keep in touch.

Step 7: Try to Embrace The Change

Once the dust has settled, try to find the silver lining in all of this change, Berlin says. Change is inevitable today, and those who are naysayers or who resist it are going to “find themselves on the wrong side of a transaction,” he says. Make the best out of the situation as you look for new opportunities.

“Those people are recognized by leadership and those are the people that are going to be rewarded for going the extra mile, for having the right attitude, for helping to be change agents for the organization,” he says.

WHAT: “You’ve Got This, Mom On!”, an empowering Yoplait ad that reminds moms not to take any crap from anybody. (Except their kids, whom they literally have to take crap from at some point.)

WHO: Agency Saatchi & Saatchi.

WHY WE CARE: “The first rule of motherhood: Someone’s always judging,” explains one of several narrators early on in the latest ad for Yoplait. What follows is a gleeful tour through some of the many behaviors moms are prone to that can cause strangers to do double takes. These include public breastfeeding, showing cleavage, bribing one’s children, and drinking wine, aka “mommy’s special juice.” It’s not exactly the hard-drinking heroes of Bad Moms, the surprise hit from last summer but more along the lines of the gently decadent podcast One Bad Mother. Overall, it’s a corporate-sponsored reminder to leave moms alone if whatever they’re doing is working.

You work in the tech industry, maybe at a small startup or at a giant corporation, maybe in Silicon Valley or maybe not. And perhaps you sort of even like your job—but only sort of. Once in awhile, something feels missing. You often think that you’d love to do something more meaningful, that makes a positive difference in the world.

Well, you can. Whether you’re a project manager or a developer, there are lots of ways to use the skills you’ve developed in the tech industry for a social mission. The nonprofit sector could be your opportunity to combine that experience with social impact in a way that makes you feel great–while still advancing your career.

Related:The Top Three Nonprofit Jobs Of The Future

Consider this: There are over 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S., making up 5.3% of the GDP. What’s that mean for you? There may be a wider range of mission-driven employers and roles within them than you think. In fact, nonprofit jobs are on the rise—they even kept increasing throughout the last recession. So if you’re thinking about a career move, here’s what you should know.

Nonprofits Need Tech Skills

In the tech industry, you’re expected to be vigilant about opportunities for efficiency and scale. Regardless of job title, most tech workers pick up some sort of experience working to find the tiny tweaks or the big changes that make your service the best it can be. That’s directly transferable to the nonprofit world.

Operations isn’t just about how to make your product or services better—it’s also about processes and workflows. Many tech veterans consider lean and agile approaches to be standard practices everywhere. But trust me, they aren’t. Even common things like daily standup meetings and fast, iterative production schedules are brand new in a lot of mission-driven organizations, which means they can all benefit from those with experience creating cultures based on nimble planning and implementation.

Then there’s the product side of things. Sure, everyone in the nonprofit world hears the words “project management” all the time. Many organizations even have a standardized process or tools for managing projects. Very few, though, think about their work as product management. Tech workers with experience in all that goes into packaging and managing nonprofit “products”—whether they’re services, programs, or applications—can be huge assets to the sector.

In fact, despite the tax-code language of “nonprofit,” these organizations do a lot of work raising funds and don’t actually have to avoid turning a profit. In the nonprofit sector, there’s a lot of investment to be raised beyond cash, too—from in-kind services and trades to long-time partnerships or even cost-share models. You can bring a wealth of benefits to an organization with your experience building relationships and raising capital.

Seeing If It’s Right For You

This doesn’t mean you’ve got to email in your resignation letter tomorrow. You can start by testing out whether changing sectors is a fit first.

Whether you’ve got one year or 20 under your belt in the tech industry, there are lots of nonprofits whose boards of directors you can join. Usually nonprofit boards fall into one of two categories: First, there are working boards, typically at small, grassroots organizations with small staffs, which means board members help carry some of the workload, whether that’s event-planning or community outreach. Second, there are advisory boards, more common among mid-size to large nonprofits, where board members primarily deal with governance issues and collaborate with staff mainly just via the CEO. Depending on your interests, skills, and available time, you can look for opportunities to join a board that puts your expertise to good use.

If you don’t have time or interest in that, you can always volunteer short-term. Many nonprofits have events that can only succeed thanks to the contributions of volunteers. These events are usually focused on program- or service-delivery or donor engagement and stewardship. Either way, volunteering with the direct work of the organization is a great way to see the mission in action and feel out what they might need. You can listen and learn without having to commit up front.

At a minimum, it never hurts to just start looking for a mission that inspires you. Sign up to get updates from an organization or two in your area or on a subject that interests you. Make a direct donation to support their work. Getting on a nonprofit’s list is a great first step. It means you’ll start receiving more information about their work, which can help familiarize yourself with their world. The better versed you become in what they’re trying to do, the easier it’ll be to spot ways to contribute—possibly even as a full-time hire.

There are lots of open positions in the nonprofit sector right now that are waiting for qualified people from other industries, especially tech-driven ones. So even if you aren’t ready to make a career change today, keep a lookout for smaller ways to get involved. You might even find what you’ve been missing this whole time.

Since Whole Foods CEO John Mackey agreed to sell his company to Amazon last week, he’s been telling friends he’s excited by the “cultural fit,” and that he’s optimistic about his “personal relationship” with Jeff Bezos. He told employees the “partnership presents an incredible opportunity to take Whole Foods Market’s mission and purpose to new levels.”

Mackey is apparently relieved no longer to be fighting activist investors like Jana Partners, who criticized the company’s branding and analytics strategy, and for whom Mackey could barely hide his disdain. “These guys just want to sell us,” he told the Texas Monthly recently,“because they think they can make 40% or 50% in a short period of time. They’re greedy bastards.”

Raj Sisodia, who wrote the book Conscious Capitalism with Mackey and has spoken to him recently, says being taken over by Amazon is the best way out. “It enables Whole Foods to continue to be a ‘conscious’ company, and it takes away some of the short-term pressures on them,” he says in an interview. “They were constantly looking over their shoulders at these activist investors who have no agenda other than short term return.”

Mackey and Sisodia argued in the book that corporations had come to be seen as “greedy, selfish, exploitative, uncaring” in the early 21st century. Their cost on society was too high: they were taking too many natural resources and externalizing too many negative impacts. Though corporations are great engines of progress, they had allowed their ethos to be corrupted, Mackey and Sisodia said. Instead of being creative and producing value, companies had played other games to make money, either with Wall Street, or by engaging in rent-seeking or anti-competitive behavior. Conscious capitalism–where a firm has a purpose beyond profit–is the best form capitalism can take, they argued. It gives precedence to its workers, vendors, customers, and community as much as shareholders, thus creating a holistic interdependence.

But while this positive vision of what companies can be has been increasingly accepted, it wasn’t enough for Whole Foods. In selling to Amazon, Mackey is taking a third path that he hopes will preserve some of these values, instead of being chewed up by Wall Street or being chewed up by a rival.

“He wouldn’t just sell it to the highest bidder,” Sisodia says. “With any other acquisition–with a Kroger or the [other] supermarkets–it would have meant squeezing margins, laying off a bunch of people, cutting back on the foundations that Whole Foods supports as part of a movement.”

Can Conscious Capitalism Survive?

Selling to Amazon raises questions about the future of the “conscious capitalism” agenda that Mackey established at Whole Foods and hoped, as Sisodia says, to grow into a “movement.” Will Amazon safeguard Mackey’s and Whole Foods’ more enlightened attitudes and programs? Does Amazon’s acquisition represent a mainstreaming of Whole Foods’s philosophy, or perhaps a diminution of it, proving that Whole Foods couldn’t get any bigger on its own?

“Conscious businesses have trusting, authentic, innovative and caring cultures that make working there a source of both personal growth and professional fulfillment,” Sisodia and Mackey wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2013, laying out their philosophy. “They endeavor to create financial, intellectual, social, cultural, emotional, spiritual, physical and ecological wealth for all their stakeholders.”

Amazon, by contrast, isn’t known for mollycoddling its stakeholders. It has a reputation for squeezing its suppliers, like Walmart before it, and for pushing its workers harder than most (in, one notorious case, warehouse workers suffered heat exhaustion and had to receive medical attention). Amazon hasn’t had much of a purpose beyond being extremely good at serving customers. It’s not part of the conscious capitalism group of companies that also has Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, Patagonia, Container Store and others as unofficial members.

Mackey is different from many of the other CEOs associated with the ethos of conscious capitalism, a “right-wing hippie” and “a rare bird,” according to the New Yorker. Mackey is into Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Ayn Rand in a way that Yvon Choinard at Patagonia and Howard Schultz at Starbucks probably aren’t. And Mackey, like Bezos, is fervently anti-union (on ideological grounds, not because he doesn’t believe in looking after workers).

When Sisodia, an Indian-American marketing professor, was searching for businesses for his 2007 book Firms of Endearment–about companies operating with purpose–one clearly sat atop the vanguard list. “The poster child company was Whole Foods,” he says. “They represented everything we were discovering about a different philosophy of business.”

Mackey read the book and in a 2009 interview with Fast Company, he mused on how to move corporations “to refocus on purpose instead of profit.” When the interests of employees, customers, shareholders, suppliers, community, and the environment are aligned, profits and social good become possible, he says.

But Bill George, who wrote the foreword to Conscious Capitalism, thinks Mackey forgot about two key stakeholders: customers and shareholders. Whole Foods’ performance on Wall Street was sluggish, prices remained too high, and Mackey was too preachy about his food choices: he didn’t give people what they wanted when they wanted it.

“He had a zeal about what was healthy, he wouldn’t offer consumers choice,” George, a veteran Harvard professor and author, says in an interview. “For instance, he wouldn’t offer brand name diet soda, and I think he paid a high price because people aren’t willing to shop at two different stores.”

“His principles are very good,” George adds, “but he failed to apply them because he didn’t adapt to changing customer needs . . . He had an evangelical zeal focusing on his core principles, but not for listening to his shareholders.”

George says Bezos will focus on getting Whole Foods more competitive on price. And that could lead to job losses and productivity changes in the workplace. “Bezos is going to be focused on taking market share, which is what he’s committed to [Amazon’s] shareholders,” he says.

Alexander McCobin, co-CEO of the Conscious Capitalism Institute, on the other hand (and perhaps not surprisingly) doesn’t see any “indictment of conscious capitalism” in Whole Foods falling to Amazon. “The reason Amazon wants Whole Foods is for its conscious capitalism. That’s been the success that Whole food has had over the long term,” he says.

But in selling Whole Foods to Amazon, Mackey gives up on shareholder capitalism or leaves it to someone else to handle. And the episode makes you wonder if conscious capitalism–where all stakeholders are taken into account–is possible when the needs of shareholders inevitably finish on top.

For all his genius in building a 460+ store network and generating more than $8 billion a year, Mackey ultimately failed to square the needs of shareholder capitalism with the needs of conscious capitalism. And the future of Whole Foods, now in the hands of a quite different company, is uncertain.

Ever since the launch of Twitter’s Periscope in March 2015, the live video service has used hearts to let viewers to show broadcasters in real time that they like what they’re seeing. Now those hearts have even more meaning: they’re worth money.

Starting today, Pericope is launching three new “Super Hearts” that viewers can give broadcasters. The floating hearts pop up during a broadcast just like their existing counterparts, but–like the pinned comments of YouTube’s Super Chat feature–have a financial amount tied to them.

“Hearts are Periscope’s signature,” said Sara Haider, director of software engineering at Pericope, at a press event previewing the new feature. “On the broadcaster side, it feels like the roar of the crowd. They know that their viewers are engaged in what they’re doing and that they’re loving what they’re doing.”

Instead of buying hearts that are worth a specific financial donation to a broadcaster, Pericope is instead using a complicated combination of coins, hearts, and stars to get the job done. You’re still donating money, but unless you’re a math whiz–or maybe even if you are–you’ll have no idea how much you’re giving.

Everything starts with the purchase of coins. Just like the digital currency you’re used to in games and other apps, coins are purchased in bundles and are cheaper if you buy them in bulk. 3,500 coins are $2.99, while you can pick up 63,656 of them for $49.99.

Coins are then used to purchase “Super Hearts,” three different tiers of hearts that you can use within Periscope like traditional hearts. Each heart costs a different amount of coins to buy and looks a little different when you use it during a broadcast.

33 coins gets you an enhanced heart, larger than Pericope’s traditional heart. 66 coins will get you a heart with your face on it, but subdued in color, and 111 coins will buy a heart with a full-color picture of your face and a sparkle animation around it.

The first time you use a Super Heart you’ll get a shout-out in the video comments for doing so. Afterwards, comments you make will also have a flare icon on them, so broadcasters know that it’s a comment from someone that has chosen to financially back them, potentially leading them to give your question or message more attention. There’s also a live leaderboard showing the top Super Heart givers during a broadcast.

Hearts that broadcasters receive are converted into stars at an undisclosed rate that accumulates within a broadcaster’s account. One heart does not equal one star. Instead, stars are a whole different type of currency within the app–one that broadcasters can turn into actual cash in their bank accounts.

Currency Calculations

While the whole process seems overly complicated and obscures how much money you’re actually donating to a broadcaster, Haider contended that the coin/star/heart system was designed to be intuitive, since users are likely already accustomed to similar in-app purchasing setups in other apps.

“Given that the individual value of a single heart is a fraction of a cent and the app store isn’t going to take a transaction that’s a fraction of a penny, we’ve done what a lot of other apps do, especially in the gaming space,” she said. “We’re following a model that we think viewers are familiar with.”

Broadcasters will receive about 70% of the revenue that Periscope receives after subtracting app-store and transaction fees, the company says. While the act of giving and receiving Super Hearts is available for all Periscope users, in order to receive money, broadcasters will have to apply for the “Super Broadcaster” program. They can do that once they’ve accumulated 185,000 stars, which works out to about $175. If you’re an exceptionally popular Pericope user that broadcasts daily, then that might happen relatively quickly. If you’re not, then you might wait a long time (or forever) for that first direct deposit.

Over time, however, Pericope says that the goal is to allow everyone on the platform to be a part of the program. “What we really liked about this solution, which we really involved our community in coming up with, is that it feels native to Periscope,” Haider said. “It really plays on what Periscope is already about, which is the interaction between broadcasters and viewers and that real-time love and feedback in that ecosystem.”

Some of the most successful people in history have relied on morning routines to help them start their day consistently. From Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, who famously starts her day with an hour of tennis, to author Cal Newport, who heads outside for a walk first thing, morning routines help artists, entrepreneurs, politicians, and CEOs control how they start their days.

A morning routine gives you a chance to start with positive momentum that will carry you through the rest of the day. It also gives you a chance to set your priorities and focus on what’s most important to you.

Rather than letting other people, emails, and notifications interrupt you all morning and start your day reactively, creating a morning routine gives you the control to start your day in the way you want to and to prioritize what you care about most.

So what should your morning routine look like? It depends, of course, but there are some common aspects of a morning routine that can get you started and help you figure out what will work best for you.

1. Overcome Sleep Inertia

Obviously the first part of your morning routine will be waking up. But even if you’re well-rested when you first wake up, you’ll still face sleep inertia. That’s the groggy feeling you get just after waking up, which makes your eyes feel heavy and makes you feel like going back to sleep is the best thing to do.

Building elements into your morning routine to help you overcome sleep inertia more quickly can make it easier to wake up and get started with your day.

Related:8 Productivity Experts Reveal The Secret Benefits Of Their Morning Routines

In a 2014 Matter article, Dr. Allison Harvey of the Golden Bear Sleep Research Center told journalist Kevin Roose that the best ways to overcome sleep inertia may be the R.I.S.E. U.P. method:

• Refrain from snoozing
• Increase activity for the first hour
• Shower or wash face
• Expose yourself to sunlight
• Upbeat music
• Phone a friend

When Roose tried this approach, he felt “alert and awake mere minutes after waking up and maintained my energy levels throughout the morning.”

Roose’s implementation involved using an alarm clock that lit up his bedroom with bright light, washing his face, running to an upbeat playlist, and scheduling calls with colleagues from 6:30 a.m.

2. Clear Your Mind Through Writing

If you find yourself feeling scattered or unfocused first thing in the morning, writing can help you clear your mind, deal with what’s worrying you, and prepare to focus on the day’s work. Expressive writing has been found to improve memory and sporting performance, lower blood pressure, and even improve immune function.

Journaling about work can also improve your performance and motivate you to work harder, as well as help you clear your mind so you can take in new information more easily.

If you’re not sure about starting a journal, a more specific process of daily writing called Morning Pages might be for you. According to a 2014 HuffPost blog, Author Julia Cameron created Morning Pages as a ritual to help her clear her mind every day before starting work.

The process is simple: write three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing longhand. That is, with a real pen on real paper.

Cameron says three pages is important, because it’s long enough that you’ll get past your initial top-of-mind thoughts and discover deeper, more interesting thoughts and ideas after the first page and a half. She also says writing longhand is important, because the idea is to not censor yourself, which is a lot easier on a computer where the backspace key is just a tap away.

Entrepreneur Chris Winfield managed a 241-day streak of writing Morning Pages. As he writes in his blog post, it has helped him come up with new business ideas, become more in-tune with his intuition, and work through issues that felt overwhelming.

Morning Pages aren’t for sharing, or even keeping. Cameron suggests throwing them out or keeping them tucked away in an envelope, rather than in a journal or notebook you’ll re-read. By never looking at your Morning Pages again, you’ll hopefully feel more free to express your thoughts without judging yourself.

3. Start Your Day With Positivity

It might sound obvious, but starting your morning routine with something you enjoy adds some positive momentum to your day. Many of us fall into the trap of reacting to negative news, emails, or customer support issues first thing in the morning, starting our day with negativity and setting ourselves in motion with negative momentum.

When entrepreneur Jason Zook realized he was starting every day negatively by checking his email and catching up on negative news on Twitter, he decided to swap this routine for a new, intentionally positive morning routine.

Related:6 Ways Highly Successful People Stay Positive 

These days Zook starts by checking Instagram, where he enjoys positive photos and updates from his friends. Then he makes coffee and reads some Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. For Zook, these activities make him smile and help him relax for the first short part of his day.

Of course not all of us want to do InstaCoffeeHobbes in the morning, but you can create your own positive morning routine by finding activities that make you smile to start your day with. Maybe it’s a hobby you enjoy, like knitting, or listening to a favorite album, or playing with your kids, or doing a crossword in your newspaper.

4. Do What’s Important To You

While starting your day positively will help you control the feeling of your day, a morning routine can also help you find time to prioritize projects you care about that you don’t always have time for.

Entrepreneur and author Taylor Pearson suggests using your morning routine to build momentum in all the areas of your life you care about. He writes in his blog post, “This then is the purpose of the morning routine: You should get one ‘small win’ to create momentum in each life domain that’s important to you.”

Try making a list of all the areas of your life you want to work on every day. This might include your own business or side projects, keeping in touch with friends and family, stretching your brain, or staying fit and healthy.

For each area on the list, add one action to move it forward to your morning routine. This way, you’ll start your day by working on the areas of your life that you care about most, setting the tone for your day.

To recap, here are four ways to get you started on your own positive, productive morning routine:

• Overcome sleep inertia
• Clear your mind with writing
• Start with positivity
• Take action toward your goals

Once you’re up and running, you can adjust your routine based on your lifestyle, your goals, and even make it more flexible to account for times when you’re traveling or extra busy. With a little tweaking you can develop a personal morning routine to set you up with positive momentum to carry you throughout the rest of your day.

A version of this article originally appeared on RescueTime and is adapted with permission.

Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg took the stage at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity with Airbnb’s chief marketing officer Jonathan Mildenhall to talk about the importance and responsibility of building global communities on mobile platforms, and the best ways for advertisers to tap into them.

“We know we have a really big responsibility,” said Sandberg, in the session moderated by Wieden+Kennedy chief creative officer Colleen DeCourcy, a 2017 Fast Company Most Creative People In Business honoree. “A responsibility not just to help people share and connect, but to build community around things that are good. Around kindness, around empathy.”

For Mildenhall, the idea of community is not an abstract marketing term, but something that’s essential to Airbnb’s core business. “We are nothing, absolutely nothing, without our community,” said Mildenhall. “We use technology to connect people offline. Without our community there is no Airbnb, there is no brand.”

DeCourcy sees parallels between what many marketers are aiming for today around the idea of community, and what iconic brands have always known. “Companies are moving from selling a particular product or service, into providing this idea of community and connection,” she said. “We see it more and more in the work. I know we at Wieden+Kennedy lived that with Nike for a long time. It was never just about selling the product, it’s about helping people reach their human potential, it’s about self-actualization, it’s about communities of athletes. So it’s a timeless concept that I think has become more real now than it ever has been.”

Of course, ultimately, these companies must find a way to connect their brand community to the bottom line. The conversation eventually turned to how the most successful brands and platforms are approaching mobile advertising.

Sandberg said it’s essential for brands to create more natively mobile advertising that grabs our attention in the first couple of seconds. “We talk about it as thumb-stopping creative,” she said. “It gets the brand out there pretty quickly, you can test and iterate. You can run an ad on Facebook and Instagram to a huge number of people, and you can test it and iterate and keep evolving. You measure results, not seconds. What people care about is, these people saw my ad, these people didn’t, here’s what drove our business.”

She said that the mobile advertising audience in the U.S. is like a Super Bowl every day. “So you can do the Super Bowl-like brand ad, and then you can target the next ad on Instagram or Facebook to the people who watched that video. Taking advantage of that power is so important,” said Sandberg.

As an example, she pointed to two different campaigns. One was Chevy’s “New Year, New Roads” that combined video, chatbot and more to help people around the world keep their New year’s resolutions. The other was a three-minute film for Kleenex.

Despite its length, Sandberg says the Kleenex ad still qualifies as thumb-stopping creative, and it drove results. “We measured it all the way down the funnel and this ad on Facebook resulted in a 4.2% in new buyers into the Kleenex brand,” said Sandberg. “There are a lot of things we can measure–how many seconds people watch the ad, whether the sound is on or off–what matters is at the end, there are 4.2% new buyers into the brand. It’s pretty incredible.”

For Mildenhall, one trend he’s seen as a result of the growth and evolution of mobile, online communities, particularly around brands, is the significant engagement levels of user-generated content. Airbnb is seeing up to six times more engagement for its user-generated content on social media than advertising video.

“The job for brands is to lean into what your community is creating, and then curate that, and put paid investment behind it,” said Mildenhall. “It’s very important to let your community have their voices, ideas, and expressions be baked into the overall brand narrative.”

The pursuit of ever better creative content is one discussed constantly at Cannes Lions, but Sandberg said the key is also to remember the primary target. “At the end of the day this (ad) community’s job is to drive our businesses,” she said. “Explain our purpose, but also drive sales.”

When you think of Virgin Mobile, chances are the first thing that comes to mind isn’t a high-end mobile carrier. Owned and operated by Sprint–which licenses rights to the Virgin Mobile brand in the U.S.–the company is known for selling low-cost, prepaid Android phones in places like Walmart. But today the company is attempting to turn that perception on its its head by rebooting itself as an iPhone-only carrier that caters to higher-end consumers.

Part of Virgin’s decision to move to iPhone only is based on its experience thus far with the phone on its network.

“What we found with the iPhone is that customers who buy the iPhone tend to be our best customers,” says Virgin Mobile CEO Dow Draper. “There’s probably multiple reasons for that, but one thing we also know is that people who buy the iPhone call [for support] a lot less, and they tend to be a lot happier. It’s where we wanted to take the brand, a much higher customer-satisfaction space.”

By moving the brand to iPhone only, it will ensure that everyone is using the same operating system, which Draper expects to make solving customer service issues much easier. He likens the move to the way Southwest Airlines’ fleet is standardized on Boeing 737 aircraft.

iPhones New And Old

The iPhones available from Virgin Mobile will include both new models and–coming this fall–discounted “preloved” models that have been turned in by Sprint customers. Customers can purchase an iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s plus, or iPhone SE. And these phones will be available somewhere Virgin Mobile phones have never been before: Apple retail stores. The cheapest new model will be the iPhone SE at $279, and customers will have to pay up front rather than having the option to do so via monthly installments. For a carrier that’s traditionally appealed to people on tight budgets, that’s a gamble. (Virgin will continue to sell low-end Android devices in Walmart, Target, and Best Buy, among other retailers through the end of this year, and will support them for the life of their phones.)

Virgin Mobile is catering to the thrifty-minded with aggressive promotional pricing for wireless service, which will continue to be prepaid. Customers who buy an iPhone and sign up for service, which the company calls joining the “Inner Circle,” will be able to get six months of service, including unlimited talk, text, and data, for $1. For those who sign up before July 31, that promotion extends to a year of service for a buck. After that initial time, you can stick with the carrier for $50 month, or take your unlocked phone elsewhere.

You also get a ton of Virgin perks. Inner Circle customers get a free round-trip companion ticket to the United Kingdom on Virgin Atlantic, a free one-night stay in a Virgin Hotel, discounts on Virgin America and Alaska flights as well as Virgin’s wine club, and 20% off the Virgin Sport Festival of Fitness in San Francisco in October.

The synergy with other Virgin-branded enterprises is part of a goal to make Virgin Mobile more, well, Virgin-y. “We’re repositioning the brand a bit to bring it more in-line with the other Virgin brands in the U.S.,” Draper says, specifically Virgin Hotels and (the doomed) Virgin America. “It’s not super ritzy, but it’s definitely not a low-income brand position.”

“What we’re trying to do here is come up with something that’s disruptive and gives people really no reason to not come in and try,” says Draper. “We think the partnership with Apple and our connection with the other Virgin brands will really help us move the brand up and appeal to a slightly different customer segment.”