The world of work is changing pretty rapidly, but one thing has been pretty consistent over the past few years: Workers are feeling optimistic about their prospects. The U.S. economy keeps adding jobs at a healthy clip and unemployment remains at pre-Recession lows, making this a jobseekers’ market.
Here’s a look at the current state of the American workplace:
We’d All Like To Jump Ship
According to the latest Gallup report on the American Workplace, a record 47% of the workforce says now is a good time to find a quality job, and more than half of employees (51%) are searching for new jobs or watching for openings. That may be due in part to lack of enthusiasm for their current job. Only one-third of U.S. employees said they are engaged in their work and workplace and about one in five fault their managers for failing to motivate them. But they also say that their employers aren’t really giving them compelling reasons to stay, with 91% reporting the last time they changed jobs, they left their company to do so.
Other top reasons workers are jumping ship, according to Glassdoor, are company culture, salary, or getting stuck in the same job for too long. On average, a 10% higher base pay is associated with a 1.5% higher chance the employee will stick around.
Just don’t look at millennials solely as the job-hoppers. A new report from Namely, an HR management platform, analyzed data from over 125,000 employees that busted this myth. Baby boomers are most likely to switch jobs, with a median tenure of just 2.53 years.
We All Want To Work in Tech (Or At Disney)
Turns out that whether or not we know how to code, many of us are working toward jobs at major tech firms. This is evidenced by LinkedIn data based on the social network’s users’ actions including job application numbers, the number of professionals who viewed a company’s career page, and the amount of time people remained employed at each company.
The most-desired workplaces include:
Alphabet (Google)
Amazon
Facebook
Salesforce
Uber
Tesla
Apple
Time Warner
Walt Disney
Comcast
The reasons are consistent with Gallup’s and Glassdoor’s findings in that employees want to work for companies with excellent culture (this research was complied before Uber’s culture implosion), great salaries, benefits, and perks, and overall size of the staff.
We Will Be Using Our Phones Even More
We are all on our phones all day, and now the hiring process is increasingly going mobile. Nielsen found that texting is the most used data service in the world with an estimated 18.7 billion texts sent worldwide every day, while a recent survey from Yello found that out of the more than 1,400 adults under 30 surveyed, 86% reported feeling positive about getting text messages during the interview period.
We’re Doing More Work Remotely
The option to work outside the office isn’t a reality for all workers (looking at you, IBM), but Gallup’s report reveals that flexible scheduling and work-from-home opportunities are major considerations when an employee takes or leaves a job.
No wonder the latest FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analyticsreport found that the number of people telecommuting in the U.S. increased 115% between 2005 and 2015. That’s 3.9 million U.S. employees, or 2.9% of the total U.S. workforce, who reported working from home at least half of the time. The trend cuts evenly across genders but is most common among those 46 years of age or older.
More of Us Are Working Independently
The total number of self-employed Americans aged 21 and above rose to 40.9 million in 2017, up 2.8% from 2016. That’s about a third (31%) of the U.S. civilian labor force, made up of all demographics, including age, gender, skill, and income group, according to MBO Partners, a provider of technology for independent workers.
Thanks to demand for skilled workers, over 3 million of independent workers make more than $100,000 per year. For those who are not self-employed, wage gains have slowed, so more are taking gig work on the side. These occasional independents (those working irregularly or sporadically as independents but at least once per month) now make up a cohort of 12.9 million, up from 10.5 million in 2016.
According to the annual Project: Time Off report, things may be getting a bit better. The analysts discovered that the 7,331 Americans surveyed (who work full time and therefore get paid time off from their employer) took an average of 16.8 days off in 2016, marking the second year in a row of taking slightly more vacation days.
That still means that more than half (54%) of U.S. workers are leaving paid time off on the table. As Project Time Off points out, not only does this hurt productivity overall, as breaks from work are necessary, it dings the economy. “If Americans were to use that vacation time, it would generate $128 billion in direct spending, and an overall economic impact of $236 billion for the U.S. economy,” the report’s authors write.
Drilling down reveals there are marked differences between who feels comfortable taking vacation and who doesn’t.
Some States and Cities Are Worse For Vacation
Part of it may be due to where you live. The report reveals that workers in Idaho (78% unused), New Hampshire (77% unused), and Alaska (73% unused) take the least amount of vacation time. At the city level employees in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, CA, and Tampa, FL, are most likely to leave vacation time unspent.
The Gender And Generation Factors
Gender and job title also play a role in whether or not workers take vacation. The gender divide is pretty pronounced. Nearly half (48%) of men reported using all their vacation time in 2016, But the study’s authors note, “While women say that vacation is ‘extremely’ important to them, more so than men (58% to 49%), only 44% of women use all their time off.” Millennial women reported cherishing their vacation benefits, yet were loath to use them. Forty-four percent of those women under 35 reported taking less time off than 51% of millennial men.
Given their age and likely job title, this runs somewhat counter to the finding that senior leaders are less likely to use their days than non-managers (61% to 52%).
What gives?
The Fear Factor
Overall, the report’s authors write, “Fear of returning to a mountain of work remains the top challenge to taking time off (43%), followed by the feeling that no one else can do the work (34%).”
States’ Cultural Differences
At the state level, the survey found that Idahoans’ chief concern was making sure they showed complete dedication to their job and that they worried taking time off would make them appear replaceable. Nearly a third felt their company culture didn’t promote time off.
Workers in New Hampshire had similar fears, but were most concerned about how taking vacation would look to their bosses. A full 38% worried about this vs. 18% of all workers across the country. Alaskans cited the cost of taking vacation as a barrier.
On the opposing side, the states where the workers take the most advantage of their time off are Maine, Hawaii, and Arizona. The license plates of Maine proudly declare the state “Vacationland” and the Aloha state is a destination for travelers as well. Both states’ workers reported having good vacation cultures at their companies, while Arizona’s workers report less on-the-job stress than workers overall (61% to 70%).
Younger Workers Worry More
As for the gender and generational divide, the survey revealed that women worry more than men that taking a vacation will making them appear less committed to their job. The starker dividing line is among millennial workers.
Millennial women are quicker than their male counterparts to extol the benefits of taking time away from work. The women are more likely to say it helps prevent burnout (85% to 76%), boosts morale (84% to 76%), improves focus (82% to 72%), and renews job commitment (76% to 68%), the report found. But they’re also more likely (69%) to say that they either hear nothing, mixed, or negative messages about taking vacation than men.
Millennial men, on the other hand, were found to be better planners than their female counterparts. Fifty-seven percent say they set aside time to plan out their vacation for the year, compared to just 49% of millennial women.
Martyrdom Doesn’t = Advancement
These numbers indicate that millennial women want to be work martyrs. “Nearly half (46%) of millennial women say it is a good thing for their boss to see them as a work martyr, more than the 43% of millennial men and 38% of overall respondents who agree,” the report’s authors write. They also point out that forfeiting time for fear of appearing less dedicated doesn’t help anyone get ahead.
The workers surveyed who didn’t take vacation were not only more stressed on the job, but less likely to have received a promotion within the last year (23% to 27%) and to have received a raise or bonus in the last three years (78% to 84%). “This is on top of the $66.4 billion in benefits they lost by forfeiting time last year,” they note.
PayPal cofounder Max Levchin is originally from Turkey. Forever 21 cofounder Do Won Chang was born in South Korea. And former eBay president-turned-social entrepreneur Jeff Skoll started out in a far-off land called Canada.
Before any of them became industry titans shaping American culture, they were immigrants who eventually became naturalized citizens. The same is true of many modern American icons, from Hollywood stars like Liam Neeson (Northern Ireland) and Morena Baccarin (Brazil), to Noble Prize economist Daniel Kahneman (Israel), and Women for Women International founder Zainab Salbi (Iraq).
Toss in Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen (India), Sierra Nevada owner and president Eren Ozmen (Turkey), and Alabama U.S District Court judge Abdul Karim Kallon (Sierra Leone) and there’s a nice trend emerging: Those who come to this country seeking opportunity tend to take advantage of it.
Immigrants are twice as likely to start businesses as native-born Americans, and they or their children are responsible for over 40% of Fortune 500 companies, according to a Kauffman Foundation entrepreneurship report. In fact, there’s emerging evidence that when people become citizens they’re likely to be socially and politically active, which can shape society in a more representative way.
To honor that, the Carnegie Corporation released its annual list of Great Immigrants, highlighting the accomplishments of 38 highly influential, naturalized U.S. citizens originally from 30 different countries to show just how important their contributions remain to the country, and encourage those eligible for citizenship to attain it. Everyone named above is an honoree. You can see the full list here.
“The ability of Americans to assimilate, to become one–you know, the ‘E Pluribus Unum’–is such an important tenet of our country,” says Geri Mannion, the director of Carnegie’s Strengthening U.S. Democracy Program, who naturalized from Ireland. “We started this campaign to really highlight that most people who come here want to naturalize and indeed do. They make major contributions to every single piece of American society.”
The awards, which occur each July to tie in with Independence Day, first started in 2006 as an extension of the group’s voting rights work, which seeks to empower those least likely to vote to take more of a role in shaping society. That ties in nicely with the ideals of the philanthropy’s founder, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who started out as a poor Scottish immigrant. His famous quote: “There is no class so intensely patriotic…as the naturalized citizen and his child, for little does the native-born citizen know of the value of rights which have never been denied.”
Legal immigrants’ interest in naturalization has actually risen steadily over the last five years. Nearly 970,000 people applied in 2016. At the same time, nearly 9 million so-called “lawful permanent residents,”—basically, folks with green cards who have been here at least five years—are eligible but have yet to start the process.
That lack of participation shortchanges both the non-naturalized and country as a whole. According to statistics from Immigrant Legal Resource Center’s New Americans Campaign, a legal assistance and support group, those who naturalize end up making about 9% more per year than before they converted. On average, that’s an extra $3,200 annually, in part because they’re able to apply for certain college scholarships and federal and public jobs. That extra revenue is taxable, so if everyone on the sidelines jumped in, it would add more than $2 billion to government coffers.
On the society-building front, people are more likely to own stay employed and own homes after going through the process. Doing so isn’t exactly easy–there’s an English proficiency test and some crazy trivia–but there are other perks, too, like being able to bring family members beyond just your children into the country.
Given the anti-immigration rhetoric of the current administration, there’s another hedge, too. “It also gives you an important legal protection guaranteed to all citizens: You never have to worry about deportation from the United States,” notes this video explainer from New Americans Center, which is narrated over a cartoon that shows suited-up ICE agents knocking on people’s doors.
“It just makes our democracy better and it makes our country economically better,” says Mannion. Those interested in starting the process can start a free online application through CitizenshipWorks, one of the New Americans Campaign’s partner groups.
More than any of its mud-run competitors, Tough Mudder is known for the clever (and cleverly named) obstacles that define its events. There’s Augustus Gloop, a plastic shaft you have to climb up as water sprays down on you; Electroshock Therapy, a crop of dangling electric wires you have to run through; and Block Ness Monster, a rotating plank that’s submerged in water—the only way to get over it is to have other Mudders, as participants are called, heave your body up and over it.
These cheeky obstacles are a key ingredient to Tough Mudder’s success and brand identity, as I wrote about in a recent feature on the company, and are one of the reasons that it is still going strong—and expanding—as other obstacle-race companies fold. Mudders love not just challenging themselves to survive something like Electroshock Therapy, but seeing what new obstacles the company rolls out each year. Tough Mudder is dedicated to keeping its obstacle “menu” fresh, and typically about four new obstacles are unveiled each November at the 24-hour, World’s Toughest Mudder event in Las Vegas. Those obstacles then get introduced to other Tough Mudder races starting in January. This schedule means that Tough Mudder is constantly at work dreaming up new thrills for its customers. And the process by which it does this is both incredibly methodical and playful, highlighting just how seriously the company takes innovation.
Nolan Kombol, senior director of product at Tough Mudder, recently spoke to Fast Company about the five phases that transform a wacky idea for an obstacle into one competitors see on a Tough Mudder course.
1. Ideation, Or How Can We Torture Them Next?
To start with, Tough Mudder assesses the obstacles currently on the course, with a particular focus on what’s generating conversation. “We take in what people talk about,” says Kombol, “on social media, what they post about it, the pictures we see. We’ll develop a ranking of the health of the obstacles, and say which ones are serving a purpose, which one’s aren’t.”
Tough Mudder then asks a simple question: What are the needs of the product? “Block Ness Monster, which we rolled out last year and is now one of our most popular obstacles,” says Kombol, came from the company thinking about how to integrate more teamwork into the course. “The direction I gave was, how can we create an obstacle that takes not just two people but four to six people to complete? A lot ofthe obstacles we had were either partner-based or maybe just required two people to do it.”
2. Conception, Or Can We Actually Pull This Off?
“We’ve done these retreats where we’ve gone to a house in upstate New York and we spend two to three days pitching ideas,” Kombol says, though he admits, “we’re mostly playing around in the woods, trying to come up with fun ideas and how we might achieve the targets we set in the first days of ideation.” Once back in Tough Mudder’s Brooklyn headquarters, Kombol’s team tries to come up with as many concepts as possible to solve the need they think its courses can use. If they think an idea is feasible, they’ll create a “fairly detailed, 3D rendering of what that obstacle should be” to bring to Tough Mudder’s operations and safety teams to work out the structural details and think through all of the potential hazards, a process that can take anywhere from an hour to several weeks. “For a wall, it’s a pretty black-and-white process,” Kombol says. “But for something like Electro Shock, it’s much longer.”
“We build a scale model in a field, and in a private session with our team, we go out and test,” Kombol says. “We test at a farm in Pennsylvania, it’s a pretty open space where our team can dig, build obstacles, tear them down, and try out a lot of different things. We want to have a viable place where people don’t get freaked out by what they’re hearing if there’s a lot of noise or screaming. It’s obviously hard to do that in the middle of Brooklyn. We want it to feel close to what a Tough Mudder site feels like. It’s just about figuring out yes, this can scale and it will work.”
4. Beta Testing, Or What Do the People Think?
The company then invites between 50 and 150 Mudder veterans (and a few first-timers) to Pennsylvania to test the new obstacles. “They have to sign nondisclosure agreements and surrender phones and all of that fun stuff,” says Kombol. “They’re pretty good sports about it.” They participate in a run so they’re encountering the new obstacles as they would during an event. “They get to go back and brag the following year and say, ‘Oh yeah, I tested this and I made them change that’,” says Kombol.
Things can change quite a bit in this phase. “Block Ness Monster did about a 180 in the way it functioned,” he says. “When we first designed it, you had to walk along the top of the block—it’s a rotating block suspended in the water. The initial idea was that a team of four would all have to get on the block and balance each other in order to get to the other side. During alpha testing, we got that down. We were able to get across it, and it was a lot of fun. But in first half of beta testing, the participants who ran through it struggled with the balance aspect and coordinating with the group. There was a lot of discussion about who should be on the right side, who should be on the left side. It worked to a degree, but it wasn’t flawless. Part of the feedback that we got was, ‘We really all want to do this together. I don’t know why, but it feels like I’m pushing against this person (instead of working together).'” Kombol says that the purpose of the obstacle had been to stay dry. But based on the feedback, they decided, “Let’s put people in the water first. Have them start in the water, and go over the rotating block from the perpendicular direction. They lined up about 10 people wide and started rotating this block by themselves. While they were rotating it, they would grab on, and it would take some people over. Then more people would join in behind them. What happened was something we didn’t expect. It was a whole new experience, and yet the obstacle achieved what we wanted it to achieve. That’s exactly why we go through the testing process.”
5. Rollout, Or Show Time
“During roll out mode, or the first three to four events of the year, we’re watching the obstacles. At the Tough Mudder Half two years ago, we’d finished a new obstacle, Flying Squirrel”—a zip line to a crash mat. But in the field, Mudders weren’t getting that adrenaline high from completing the obstacle the way that Kombol had hoped, so Tough Mudder replaced it.
As for what new challenges Mudders can expect this November, Kombol is mum. All he’ll say is that the World’s Toughest Mudder event “will get a lot of focus this year. We’re going to attack that course, partly due to our partnership with CBS (which produces a series based on World’s Toughest Mudder), and knowing they’re going to be onsite. It’s a fun chance for us to show the world what we’ve got in our arsenal.”
About three years ago, my company tried an experiment: We declared a “no email day” for an entire weekday. The whole office powered down our inboxes completely. We didn’t just turn off alerts and notifications—we all set out-of-office auto-responses and went cold turkey.
It was such a success that we’re still doing it once a quarter. Maybe you should, too.
Think about all the miscommunication that happens when you text a friend, message a coworker on Slack or a similar platform, or email a client. Those misfires are just about inevitable. There are so many instances when someone reads an email and thinks a client is upset, or that a coworker or manager is mad—when really that isn’t the case at all. Maybe they were simply being direct or forgot to include an exclamation point.
But these small misinterpretations can cause a surprising amount of angst. You might spend half the day analyzing and overthinking somebody’s email: Are they mad? Did I write something that upset them? By scrapping emailing for a whole workday companywide, we wanted to see if we could cut down on some of these issues on a regular basis. Not only did it turn out that we could, but we’ve since gotten a lot better at live communication, face-to-face dialogue, and collaboration—all skills that the future of the workforce depends on.
How It Works
To keep this habit working well for everyone, we’ve had to set some ground rules: First, we don’t stick to the same weekday. We’ll look at our schedules and declare a different no-email day every time we do it. This helps give us the flexibility to actually stick to the regimen.
Second, email is off limits from 8 a.m.—5 p.m., except for two 20-minute breaks, but they’re meant to check for emergencies only—these aren’t active email periods. Anything outside of those nine hours is fair game.
And third, everybody on staff sets an out-of-office message explaining what we’re doing and asking those emailing to call us instead. Here’s an example:
It’s no-email day at LaSalle Network! Today we’re embracing live communication and collaboration. I’m here, just not in my inbox . . . call me! I want to hear from you! [team member’s phone number]
We regroup as a company afterward to talk about the pros and cons from the day.
It’s not perfect. We’ve had people who do get upset or don’t understand why we do it, but overall it’s helping build camaraderie among employees. And most of our clients and vendors have been really supportive.
We move faster. If we need to get in touch with a client, we don’t send them an email and wait to hear back—we pick up the phone. It can solve an issue or answer a question in a matter of minutes as opposed to waiting hours or even days for an email response. We don’t IM our coworkers, either, though—we swing by their desks or call them to get an answer or feedback.
It builds relationships. I’ve always believed in live communication—phone, in-person, or video. You’re able to have better dialogue because you can see someone’s reaction and hear the inflection in their voice. Relationships are built from real conversations, not endless chains of back-and-forth emails.
We’re more creative. Live collaboration allows us to be more creative. When talking through an issue, we’re faster at coming up with possible solutions and generating new ideas. If there’s something to resolve, we get together for a live brainstorm as opposed to creating a five-person chat group.
We learn faster. It’s easy to hide in your inbox, especially when there’s a client issue. The best results can come from picking up the phone to talk through something tricky with a client or vendor. It can truly make or break the relationship. It shows you care. It shows you’re not hiding and that you own it. Most of all, it shows they matter to you.
It encourages “CBE”: Something we practice internally every day is “call before email” (CBE). We even have “CBE” signs hanging above our desks, and this no-email day every week really puts that practice to the test (minus the email part, obviously).
We’re more energized and productive: For three years running, I’m still amazed that the energy in the office is electric on no-email days. People are up from their desks, jetting throughout the office to go talk with their coworkers or pick up calls. And we’re a lot more productive that way—we’re just more efficient and seem to get everything done faster.
Sometimes we need to be reminded of the great things that can come from in-person communication. I know this type of thing won’t work for every company, but it never hurts to experiment. If not a no-email day, there’s probably something you can do to give your whole team a jolt of energy on a regular basis—and it probably isn’t high-tech.
Tom Gimbel, founder and CEO of LaSalle Network, a national staffing, recruiting, and culture firm.
Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that LaSalle institutes a no-email day on a weekly basis, when in fact the company does so quarterly.
Goals or resolutions set on New Year’s Day typically emerge from great intentions, motivation, and commitment. So, why is it so notoriously difficult to stick to them? By now, research indicates that the percentage of people following through on those good intentions may be in the single digits.
But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still hope, says coach, speaker, and professional skydiver Melanie Curtis. Even if you’ve abandoned those January goals, the midyear point is a great time to reevaluate and make something happen before the end of the year.
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all answer,” she says. “When I work with leaders, the motivation comes from a deep place.” So when you’re trying to stick to superficial goals, it’s not going to work, she says.
If you’re still thinking about those abandoned goals and want to get back on track, try this seven-step approach.
Drop The All-Or-Nothing Attitude
Yes, you took a detour. So what? “We’re such an all-or-nothing society. It didn’t work before, so forget it,” says psychologist Elizabeth Lombardo, author of Better than Perfect: 7 Strategies to Crush Your Inner Critic and Create a Life You Love. “Drop the perfectionism and focus on what I call being ‘better than perfect’—which means take one step at a time.” Your slate is clean. Start over and don’t look back, she advises. After all, it’s better than just giving up if it’s something you really want to accomplish.
Find Your Reason
Motivational speaker and marketing consultant Simon Sinek is well-known for his emphasis on finding the “why.” Why do you want to accomplish the goal? Why do people do what they do? And that’s important, but a recent study by researchers from the University of Winnipeg and the University of Manitoba found that the motivation for achieving your goals tends to shift over time. In the early stages, study participants were motivated by hopes and aspirations—the positive aspects of reaching their desired outcomes.
However, once those people achieve some success toward their goals, motivation shifted to a prevention mind-set. So, early weight-loss candidates managed their food and exercise initially because of how they would look when they reached their goal. However, once they had some success, they wanted to prevent the disappointment that would happen if they didn’t reach their goal. That’s important to understand, because it’s a shift in thinking, and may change what you need to reach your goals.
Define The Obstacles
Take a hard look at what is standing in the way of achieving your goals. Trace back your steps and determine where you went off track, suggests David Naylor, executive vice president of motivation consulting firm 2logical. Was it an external factor or a result of self-limiting beliefs?
“The key to driving human performance is to help individuals let go, if you will, of the limiting beliefs that they’ve inadvertently locked on to through the course of life, and to embrace the beliefs that empower them,” he says. Whether it’s shedding your self-limiting beliefs or mapping out a way to overcome obstacles related to time, money, or conflicting priorities, identifying what’s standing in your way is the first step to overcoming it.
Stretch Yourself—But Not Too Much
Once you’ve dug into why you want to move forward and figured out how to overcome what’s standing in your way, think about what’s realistic by the end of the year. You’ve got less time than you had in January, but still enough to make meaningful change. So, think about the end point you wish to reach, and make it achievable—but not exactly comfortable, Curtis suggests.
“A too-low goal is demoralizing,” she says. “I would encourage people to look for that sweet spot of goal setting, where it motivates them forward because it’s challenging, while also not overwhelming them because it’s too large.”
Start Reverse Engineering
You’ve got the goal, and now you need to break it down. Back out the steps that you’ll need to make it happen so that you have a list, and assign deadlines to them, Curtis says, along with applying other good goal-setting practices.
Institute Accountability
Lombardo says that accountability is an essential ingredient for helping you stick to your goals. Find someone with whom you can check in, who will keep you “honest” about staying on track. Of course, as a coach, she helps people be accountable. But it doesn’t have to be that formal, she says.
“I know some people who, every Monday morning, they just pick up the phone. They’re in different areas of the country, but they pick up the phone and say, ‘Here’s the three things I said I would do, here’s what I did, here are three things I’m doing this week. How about you? Great, go,'” she says.
Take Stock—And Celebrate
As you move forward with your new sense of purpose and determination, be sure to stop and take stock of where you are, Lombardo says. Make your goals more fun by celebrating your achievements along the way. And be honest with yourself if you’re starting to feel like abandoning them again. It’s important to understand where those emotions are coming from so you can manage them and not let them derail your goals again. And sometimes, it’s just a matter of getting used to your new goals.
“I call it hot tub syndrome. If you put your foot in a hot tub and it’s really hot, you take your foot out, saying, ‘Oh, it’s way too hot.’ But if you keep your foot there for a while, then eventually it starts to feel good, and you keep putting more of your body in. Eventually, your entire body’s in except your head, and you’re loving every minute of it,” she says.
When new folks join a company, most are itching to get to work. They’ve probably been through a bunch of interviews and feel excited to dig into something new. It’s the same with hiring managers: After a long hiring process, making an offer, and setting a start date, they’re chomping at the bit to finally bring someone up to speed.
But here at MailChimp, we don’t let new hires touch any actual work for a full week after starting. That may sound inefficient, but since I joined the company five years ago, we’ve welcomed over 600 new employees and invested heavily in onboarding program. It’s paid off in boosting success across the company—it’s earned high marks from employees who’ve been through it, and our turnover rate is only 4%.
On day one, hires are greeted with bags of MailChimp swag and personalized notes from their hiring managers. We get managers involved right away in order to build relationships and reinforce a sense of community. Managers and their teammates also deck out their new colleagues’ desks—despite knowing they won’t sit actually sit at them for another seven days.
Next, they meet their “Chimpanion.” We developed this program, which pairs newbies up and with seasoned employees, after realizing new hires tended to stick with their start-date cohorts and their immediate teams. That made it tougher for new hires to make connections around the company. Existing employees volunteer to be Chimpanions—usually from a different department—and they’re in charge of walking the new hire around the office and making intros.
Where’s What, Who’s Who, And One Tiny Test
For their first week on the job, all new hires go through onboarding with our Education team. They meet with our Facilities, IT, and Benefits teams to learn all about our office and the perks of working at MailChimp. Throughout their first week, they’ll meet representatives from every department across the company to learn more about what everyone does and how it all fits together.
This can be a lot to take in, but we emphasize our internal motto, “Listen hard, change fast,” and our company values of humility, creativity, and independence.
Then all new hires also take a Birkman Assessment, which illuminates behavioral and occupational styles and helps teams figure out the best ways to communicate with one another. Our Education team guides them through understanding the results—there’s no “good” or “bad” outcome, just a personality profile—which are also made available to each new hire’s manager.
Afterward, we make a point of introducing new hires to key team members who can fill them in on the company’s history, priorities, and overall goals. New hires sit down with our Research team for a “Customer Chat” to learn about the needs and challenges of our customers. All new hires get trained in the MailChimp app (with the exception of new hires on our Support team, who spend six full weeks in training before they’re on the job), but everyone across the company goes through the Customer Chat to learn about the people we exist to serve.
Finally, we host a coffee chat and open Q&A with MailChimp’s cofounders, Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius. It gives new hires a chance to connect with the founders and hear about their vision for the company. Plus, we want new hires to feel comfortable from the get-go asking questions about where MailChimp is heading.
Do new hires know everything there is to know about the company by the end of this first week? Hardly! But nobody else does, either. A thread we try to weave through the onboarding process is the importance of asking questions and speaking up—and the inevitability of failure. We want all of our employees to feel like this is a safe place to make mistakes, so long as they learn from them. And once they know that, then it’s time to get to work.
Breaking It Down, Monday–Friday
A typical first week at MailChimp looks something like this:
WHAT: Détour, an 11-minute film shot entirely on an iPhone.
WHO: Apple, and director Michel Gondry.
WHY WE CARE: Beneath the veneer of dreaminess, there has often been a charmingly lo-fi, DIY aesthetic to Michel Gondry’s films. His Be Kind Rewind made this ramshackle aesthetic most manifest with a plot that involved Jack Black and Mos Def’s video store droogs remaking megahit movies on absolutely zero budget. Now, Gondry has forsaken fancy equipment himself for filmmaking with an iPhone.
Apple recently commissioned the visionary director behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and some of the greatest music videos ever, to showcase the possibilities of its flagship phone. Although several others have done impressive work with the same equipment, perhaps most notably Sean Baker’s fantastic feature Tangerine, recruiting a known visual stylist like Gondry makes a statement. (The statement is: this sandbox is big enough and sandy enough for anyone to play in it.) The resulting film is a typically eclectic short told mostly through the POV of a missing tricycle trying to reunite with its rightful owner.
This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.
If you’ve taken a sick day, contributed to a retirement plan, or received health insurance through an employer, you’re familiar with how America has delivered social safety-net benefits for nearly 75 years. Unlike in most other industrialized countries, in the United States these benefits are traditionally tied to the job rather than the individual. More and more, this 20th-century approach is failing workers in the 21st-century economy.
Today, as much as one third of the U.S. workforce is engaged in temporary, contract, or on-demand work. While this independent work can offer more flexibility, it can also reduce stability and predictability for those who work this way.
But while the nature of work in this country has been changing, private and public responses have lagged behind. The first 401(k) retirement plans, and the changes that made them ubiquitous in the workplace, didn’t come into effect until the 1980s. It’s been less than 25 years since paid sick days became widespread—not a long time in the grand scheme of things. And most of today’s highly valued on-demand platforms didn’t exist even a decade ago.
For a brief while longer, I can still claim to have spent more time in business than in politics. During those years, I launched businesses, failed at a few of them, and was fortunate to get in on the early days of the cellphone industry. What I learned from my setbacks is that experimentation is the only way to figure out what works and what doesn’t. And now it’s time for government to do the same.
As the independent-worker population continues to grow, we need to come up with ways to provide benefits that workers can carry with them from job to job. I’ve been advocating for a variety of pilot programs for delivering a modern and meaningful social safety net to these workers for some time. And in May, I introduced legislation that does just that—setting up a testing ground for local governments, nonprofits, and labor unions to receive funding and explore ways to provide portable benefits for independent workers.
These are benefits that would be tied to the worker instead of the employer. As individuals transition through multiple jobs or gigs, or dip in and out of part-time employment, they could carry these benefits across a day, a year, or a career. New models could vary widely to include benefits ranging from retirement savings, workers’ compensation, life or disability insurance, and sick leave to training and educational benefits, health care, and more.
The legislation I’ve proposed establishes a $20-million grant fund within the U.S. Department of Labor to incentivize states, localities, and nonprofit organizations to develop portable-benefits models for the independent workforce. This should accelerate experimentation at the state and local levels to better support a more independent 21st-century workforce. And businesses can fuel this innovation, too, by partnering with nonprofits and governments to test these same benefits.
Some companies and localities have already started experimenting on their own, knowing that the future of work will largely depend on their ability to become partners in our quest to define what a modern set of benefits will look like.
Recently in New York, Uber has taken a new hybrid approach to employee benefits, by supporting an Independent Drivers Guild—a first in the nation—formed in a way that maintains some of the traditional organizing principles of a union while bringing nontraditional independent workers on board. Last February, Washington state legislators introduced a bill that would create a benefits system for independent contractors, based on contributions from contracting companies and administered by qualified nonprofit providers.
Because definitions of gig work and freelancing vary, so do estimates of the number of independent workers in the American workforce—ranging from less than 4 million to as many as 55 million—but their ranks are growing, and it’s clear that we’re overdue for a relevant and modern system of social insurance to support them. If we can’t come up with one, when they hit a rough patch—and let’s face it, almost all of us do—there will be nothing there to catch their fall. And with new technologies and expanded automation emerging at the speed of light, now is the time to prepare for even more seismic shifts in the future of work.
It’s too early to tell what the right model for portable benefits will ultimately look like, but we’re already behind the curve. And one thing is certain: We’ll all pay the price if we can’t meet the American workforce where it already is today—let alone where it’s headed tomorrow.
Mark R. Warner is the senior United States Senator from Virginia.
Not too long ago, I looked at my LinkedIn profile and thought, “Wow, I’ve had my current title for a while now–almost two years.” It’s way longer than I’ve held any other position in the past before getting promoted. I started to wonder if there was something wrong with me, or if there was something more I should be doing to prove that I’m able to make the leap.
When I started asking myself what that next step looks like, I realized it’s not always bad to have the same title for a few years. To play my own devil’s advocate, there are of course times when it’s not a good sign. Let’s take a look at both scenarios.
It’s Okay To Have The Same Title If: You’re Getting The Opportunity To Lead New Projects
As frustrating as it might be to not receive recognition for your hard work in the form of a promotion, that doesn’t necessarily mean your teammates don’t lean on you for more advanced projects than your current job title would suggest.
Take a closer look at your current to-do list. Has your boss started trusting you with some really important initiatives? Do you feel that you’re still being compensated fairly? If the answer to both questions is yes, chances are that you’re punching above your weight class and that everyone around you recognizes it.
It’s Not Okay To Have The Same Title If: Your Responsibilities Haven’t Changed
On the flip side, you might have some soul searching to do if you’re doing the same tasks you were assigned in your first few months in your role. While a number of factors could be in play, chances are that you’re still doing those things because you haven’t proven to anyone that you can handle a little more.
If you’re unsure of how you’ve been performing, don’t be afraid to ask your boss for a little feedback to get a clearer idea of what’s really going on. You might not like what you hear, but you’ll know what you need to work on to take the next step in your career.
It’s Okay To Have The Same Title If: You’re Learning New Skills
Sure, it can be frustrating to be adding skills to your toolbox without a pat on the back from your boss or a raise. At the same time, it’s not as if you have to leave those skills behind if you decide to leave.
When you’re feeling frustrated, keep this in mind: You are putting yourself in a much better position to score a new (and more senior) role in the near future.
It’s Not Okay To Have The Same Title: If You’re Bored
Here’s the thing: If you’re bored at work and your responsibilities haven’t changed much over the past few years, you’re only doing yourself a disservice.
Are you seeking out opportunities for growth? Are you volunteering for things that are out of your comfort zone? If not, your lack of a title change is probably a reflection of your current effort level.
It’s Okay To Have The Same Title If: There’s No Open Job For You To Step Into
Unless you work for a handful of companies, your team probably doesn’t have an endless amount of money to promote people willy-nilly. You might be doing a lot of work–and a lot of it might be beyond your job description–but the truth of the matter might be that there’s simply no room to promote anyone right now. And while that’s frustrating, that’s in no way a reflection of your work. At some point, you’ll be recognized for your effort.
It’s Not Okay To Have the Same Title If: You’re Putting Off Applying For An Open Role
I will be the first person to constantly tell myself that I’m not qualified or ready for a promotion. It’s a comfortable place to live. But the downside to that mentality is that you’ll never put yourself in a position to find out whether or not you could have qualified.
Hearing “no” is never, ever fun. But if you’re constantly turning down opportunities to take a step in your career, nobody’s ever going to force you to do it.
The truth is that getting a promotion is a huge confidence booster, so it’s only natural to be anxious if you’re not getting one as quickly as you think you should. But take another look at your current work situation.
If you’re going above and beyond and truly think you deserve a new title, don’t be afraid to start the conversation with your boss. Uncomfortable with doing that? Check out these tips on asking for a title change. Don’t think that’s the best solution for you (or already tried it)? Well, then, it might just be time to start looking for a new job.
If you want to try growing part of your lunch inside your kitchen, one option is to drop nearly $200 on a smart garden that uses artificial intelligence to help greens or tomatoes grow faster (the device also requires the purchase of custom “plant pods” rather than just seeds). Another option: download a free digital file, take it to your local maker lab, and print out a garden that’s a little lower-tech.
Instead of sensors and machine learning, the Aquapioneers Ecosystem relies on fish. The small kit, designed to be constructed from plywood in minutes, has space for a standard small aquarium and uses aquaponics to grow food. At a little more than two feet wide, one foot deep, and about four feet tall–not counting the light attached on top–it can fit in the corner of a room.
As fish poop in the tank, microorganisms convert the waste into fertilizer for the plants. As the plant roots suck up the fertilizer, they naturally clean the aquarium. This cycle continues indefinitely. An LED light, designed to emit only the spectrum of light that plants need to grow, uses little energy. The process uses 90% less water than growing in soil and grows food as much as twice as fast. A crop of lettuce, for example, can be harvested in four weeks, versus seven to eight weeks in a typical garden.
The kit isn’t the first to make an aquaponic system small enough for a kitchen. Another, from the Bay Area-based company Back To The Roots, is tiny enough to fit on a countertop. But the new project is the first to provide an open source design. By working with maker labs–specifically Fab Labs, a network of more than 1,100 maker spaces around the world–Aquapioneers wanted to eliminate the emissions from shipping products from a central factory. The open-source files will allow others to also tweak the design, improving performance more quickly than a tiny startup could on its own. The company also wanted to make the kit accessible to anyone. Users only have to pay for materials and time in a maker lab (or, alternately, can pay a lab to make it for them). They also have to buy fish–the designers recommend using eight small fish, such as goldfish or guppies.
“We see it as a way to decrease our carbon footprint, and to enable anyone, anywhere, to download it and discover aquaponics,” says Guillaume Teyssie, one of the co-founders of the Barcelona-based startup. “Our mission is to help people eat better, so we’ve seen patents as a block.”
The startup, which launched at Barcelona’s Green Fab Lab, wants to help expand urban agriculture. Another design the company is piloting is a larger greenhouse–with a printable frame, it provides about 25 square meters of growing space–that could sit on city rooftops, producing more than 60 pounds of fish and around 660 pounds of vegetables a year. That design will also be available open-source. To make the business viable, since the kits won’t be sold, the founders are creating related services to sell instead; they envision entrepreneurs in other cities doing the same thing.
“We’re renting this kit inside offices of big companies that have open spaces and sterile environments where employees are stressed or bored,” Teyssie says. “Basically, we use the aquaponic ecosystem as a well-being and team-building tool.” In a pilot the startup is running with one company, employees build the kits in a workshop, watch the system work, and use the herbs grown inside to cook in another workshop.
The tiny kit doesn’t grow huge crops of food and is limited to herbs, greens, and strawberries. But the company sees it as a way to help people become more interested in urban agriculture as a whole and to reconnect with the natural world. “We’ve been fascinated by the ecosystem approach–this closed cycle and synergy between fish, plants, and microorganisms,” he says. “For us, aquaponics is a way to force us to understand how nature works.”
The startup is currently running a crowdfunding campaign to cover research costs and to finalize the open-source design, which will be released to the public shortly after the campaign ends.
Cybersecurity experts say the “NotPetya” cyberattack that disrupted computer systems around the world last week was most likely the work of a government intent on attacking Ukraine, where the worst damage was caused. If so, the episode raises disturbing questions about the shape of conflict in the information age–and about whether governments are adequately prepared.
Countries around the world are wielding cyber weaponry these days like never before. Russia is widely credited with previous cyberattacks on Ukraine. The ransomware used last week was based on software tools developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, and leaked by a hacking group in April. Governments like Russia and North Korea are almost certainly behind other recent cyberattacks. And cybersecurity experts generally credit the U.S. and Israel with developing one of the first cyberweapons, a virus called Stuxnet that targeted Iran’s nuclear program.
Should such attacks be considered acts of war? Will future conflicts play out on cyber battlefields as much as they do on physical ones? As Army chief of staff Mark Milley put it, “The first shots of the next actual war will likely be fired in cyberspace, and likely with devastating effect.”
While war is still conducted with fighter jets, assault rifles, and roadside bombs, the world’s governments and armed forces are increasingly bringing new kinds of weapons and information systems to bear. And these software-based systems may soon eclipse most others in the effect they have on the battlefield. At the very least, a shift is under way that will see software come to have a deeper and deeper impact on almost every aspect of conflict.
In short, software is eating the military, and it may just determine whether we win the next war.
[Photo: courtesy of Global Hawk]
Coding For War
I’m standing in an aircraft hangar in Palmdale, California, that’s longer than a football field, looking at the future of military surveillance and, in a very real way, of war.
Apart from the low murmur of engineers discussing flight tests and maintenance, it’s quiet around here–when a fighter jet isn’t roaring down one of the runways nearby. This is the high desert, test pilot country, not far from Edwards Air Force Base, where the most famous test pilot of all, Chuck Yeager, became the first person to travel faster than the speed of sound, in 1947. Yeager made that flight with two broken ribs, and was in such pain that he was unable to seal the cockpit without help.
But the aircraft I’ve come here to see has neither cockpits nor pilots. It navigates almost entirely without human assistance, and on glider-like wings 131 feet wide can stay in the air for 30 hours at a stretch. The hanger I’m in is owned by the Northrop Grumman Corporation, one of the biggest defense contractors in the country, but the plane–a Northrop design known as an RQ-4 Global Hawk–is owned by the United States Air Force. It’s got its guts hanging out at the moment, quite literally: Its dolphin-like forehead has been removed to expose a weather radar unit and satellite dish, and its belly is flat and bare, as if it’s sucked in its breath to show you its washboard abs.
This is what I’m interested in. The plane’s underside is studded with a handful of data bus ports and a dozen small metal fittings called Universal Payload Adapters, all of which allow technicians to swap in a variety of surveillance modules on short notice. The Global Hawk can fly an optical bar camera that carries several miles of unalterable high-resolution wet film, a SYERS-2C multispectral sensor (like that used on the U-2 spy plane), or a next-gen MS-177 sensor, meant to outdo the U-2.
Global Hawk Universal Payload Adapters [Photo: courtesy of Northrop Grumman]It’s cutting-edge surveillance stuff for sure, but what’s interesting about this plane is how quickly its spycams can be switched out. “Imagine downloading a new OS every time you get a new app on your phone,” says Scott Winship, VP for Advanced Programs at Northrop Grumman Aerospace. “You don’t want to have to go back and rebuild all the software in the airplane every time we change a payload.” But until recently, that’s exactly what you had to do. Now, thanks to a set of software standards known as the Open Mission Systems (OMS) architecture, what used to take two to three months of retooling and retesting now takes 12 hours or less. Instead of spending more than $200 million on an aircraft that can do one thing, Global Hawk customers like the Air Force, the Navy, NATO, and others get a multipurpose “smartplane” that can be quickly repurposed to fly a variety of missions, that can integrate new technologies with a minimum of effort, and which can provide data that a variety of military systems can consume.
While that may sound like common sense, building such robustness into the $600 billion enterprise that is the U.S. defense establishment is an almost unthinkably complex task. The Pentagon is making progress, though, in everything from unmanned surveillance aircraft to missile defense, cyberwarfare, AI fighter jets, intelligence analysis, robot sidekicks, and much more. The Global Hawk may have begun life as a conventional if powerful surveillance drone, but its modular nature and the technology that underpins it is the harbinger of a subtle but important shift in the way we approach national security.
Global Hawk Northrop Grumman [Photo: courtesy of Northrop Grumman]
Bringing A New Weapon To Bear
New technologies have always shaped the ways we go to war. From gunpowder in the 16th century to nuclear weapons in the 1940s to drones in the modern era, everyone from generals to grunts have sought the latest war-fighting advances as important tools of their strategic and tactical portfolios. Today’s conflicts are no exception.
But current developments look far different from the crossbow or the Gatling gun. It’s true that everything from autonomous aircraft to tricorder-like battlefield apps, self-aiming rifles, augmented reality visors, intelligence-mining algorithms, and much more are currently in development or deployed “in theater.” But there’s a bigger change afoot than the evolution in ways to monitor, safeguard, or kill people that each of these represents. Underlying all of them is a single enabling technology that is now being leveraged in the military more extensively than ever before.
That technology is, of course, software, which now touches more of the military complex than ever, in deeper ways: More and more weapons and surveillance systems rely on it; more and more tools are being created to take advantage of the possibilities it affords; more and more decisions are being made based on software algorithms that range from the relatively simple to the intractably complex; more and more developers are able to contribute to the vast libraries of code that the military runs; and more and more questions are being raised around issues like what constitutes a weapon and what constitutes an attack.
On the surface, this may seem like nothing more than the military entering the modern age. But look closer and it’s possible to perceive a dramatic shift underway in both the technology and the doctrine of war, in which software is becoming the pivotal element behind weapons and information systems, and is increasingly the thing that will determine who has the upper hand. Yes, there will always be one plane that flies faster than the rest, one tank that can take more punishment, one satellite that can see farther, one missile that’s more devious. But the real differentiator will be the capacity to bring information and computing capacity to bear, and to understand how tactics will need to shift to best take advantage of the new tools and techniques that commanders have at their disposal.
“More and more of what [the military] is doing is going to be software, and software-enabled,” says Pat Antkowiak, Northrop Grumman’s chief technology officer. “Throughout the [defense] community, there seems to be an awakening that this is all becoming much more fundamental. The potential for rapid integration and introduction of new capabilities built into a software framework, this is clearly part of the promise. This notion of being able to have rapid, highly automated prosecution of really complex tasks against an adversary who’s moving rapidly against you, that is certainly part of the benefit on the operational side.”
[Photo: courtesy of Northrop Grumman]
Laptop-Toting Soldiers
That benefit needs to be leveraged quickly. America is training up a new crop of cyber soldiers (see sidebar), but cyber warfare is already an active part of the “global threat environment” today. Software exploits can have much more alarming effects than encrypting data, exposing private information, taking down Pentagon email systems (as Russia was credited with in 2015), or even hacking elections. Last year, the Justice Department charged a hacker affiliated with the Iranian government with hacking into the controls of a small dam in upstate New York in 2013. The dam was in “maintenance mode” at the time, and so could not be operated, but the episode illustrates how potentially devastating such a cyberattack on the country’s infrastructure could be.
“Sometimes people tend to think this is just some form of mildly aggressive hacking, as opposed to very serious activities done by very serious people who want to do our country harm,” says Brigadier General Joseph McGee, the Army Cyber Command’s deputy commander for Operations. The armed forces are responding, as fast as they can. U.S. Cyber Command is still young–it was first established in 2009–and its 133 new Cyber Mission Force teams reached “initial operating capacity” only late last year. Many aren’t due to be fully operational until the end of 2018. But given the growing threat and reality of cyber attacks today, USCYBERCOM has had to put its teams into action as soon possible. They are now deployed in around 50 operations around the world, in a variety of offensive, defensive, and support capacities.
“We’re conducting operations right now against ISIS in northern Iraq and Syria, and in support of ground operations going on there,” McGee says. While laptop-toting soldiers aren’t the first thing that come to most people’s minds when they think of war in the Middle East, that image will become more common over time. Being effective in current cyber operations is critical to our ability to wage the wars of the future, McGee says. “There is an absolute seriousness to the conflict that is occurring now in cyberspace,” he says. “It is apparent to me that how we conduct cyber operations now will help determine how we operate in case [cyber] crises ever get to the level of true conflict.”
[Photo: courtesy of U.S. Army Cyber Command]
The Autonomous Algorithms Of War
As software-based weaponry begins to loom larger in conflicts around the globe, military leaders and policymakers will need to think hard not just about how to defend against such attack, but what the right way to carry them out will be.
One of the Pentagon’s latest attempts to put machine learning to work is dubbed the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (aka Project Maven). Established in April of this year, the team’s first task is to combat ISIS by helping process the vast stores of video footage captured by U.S. surveillance drones and other aircraft. As an initial step, Project Maven will “develop, acquire, and/or modify algorithms” to detect and classify various objects, and generate alerts based on the results.
Project Maven’s intent is to “reduce the human factors burden of FMV analysis, increase actionable intelligence, and enhance military decision-making,” according to Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work. Given that machine learning algorithms have already been used to help identify couriers working for militant organizations in Pakistan and elsewhere, with some success, it’s not hard to imagine Project Maven’s algorithms being used to help identify terrorists, and then “enhancing” a decision as to whether or not to attack them.
The vast amounts of data collected by military and government “ISR” (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) is certainly used to help commanders formulate tactics and plans. But so far, artificial intelligence systems haven’t been used to autonomously choose the targets of deadly force–at least, not in a context that’s been publicly disclosed.
Already, though, autonomous weapons systems can determine for themselves how to carry out their orders, even if they’re not yet determining what those orders should be. The Air Force’s “Loyal Wingman” concept envisions the conventionally piloted fighter jets of the future getting one or more autonomous wingmen that would accompany the pilot into combat. Another big defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, demonstrated this capability earlier this year with their Have Raider program, in which a fully autonomous F-16 flew simulated air-to-ground strike missions in support of a manned aircraft. While the Have Raider F-16 was “told” what its targets should be, it was also given the ability to autonomously update its plans based on new threats it encountered along the way, making its own decisions about how to reach and destroy its target without itself being destroyed in the process.
Most visions of autonomous weapons systems contemplate people being involved in some way. But the amount of information being collected and processed by military systems is already far too much for even a substantial team of analysts and decision-makers to synthesize and consume. And the reasoning used by sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to arrive at their conclusions is often notoriously obscure. It’s entirely possible that useful target-selection algorithms will be of a complexity that’s well beyond our capacity to understand and second-guess. After all, there’s not much value in software that does something a person could do just as well.
This is the kind of thing that gives rise to doomsday scenarios in which Terminator robots walk the earth, mopping up the remains of the human civilization they’ve just destroyed. And while that’s unlikely, it’s no stretch to wonder how much power we’re ceding to the algorithms we create–whether they’re used by weapons systems to target enemy combatants or by social networks to target ads.
Dustin Lewis
“More and more in war, as in other parts of life, power and authority are expressed algorithmically,” says Dustin Lewis, senior researcher at the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict. “This trend will almost certainly continue to increase in pace and in reach in terms of the number of countries and armed forces that are incorporating algorithmic systems into their military functions.”
As that trend continues, Lewis says, the designers of military and other algorithms need to keep in mind at least the minimum legal norms established by international law: “The stakes are extremely high.” Soldiers are trained in rules of engagement that let those laws shape the way they fight. As algorithms make more decisions not just about how to kill, but also who and when, will the engineers who create them be similarly trained?
Compounding the issue, most of us are already culturally habituated to defer to the algorithms we encounter daily, often without even being aware of them. “Where I find this concerning from an accountability perspective is the possibility that [autonomous warfare] systems be used and adopted whole cloth, without thinking through sufficiently the basic legal and other accountability concepts,” Lewis says. Google tells us which search results are most important; Facebook tells us what news to pay attention to; Amazon tells us what we might like to read, Spotify what we might like to listen to. How often do most of us question these pronouncements? How ready are we to make our own decisions once a computer is telling us who we might like to kill?
[Photo: courtesy of U.S. Army Cyber Command]
One Information Network To Rule Them All
Whatever the combination of human and machine at the controls, making effective decisions in conflict–or anywhere else–depends in large part on having timely access to critical levels of information and analysis. This too is a problem the Pentagon hopes to use software to solve, but its latest big steps in this direction have been ponderously slow and, according to some, less than brilliantly executed.
Considering that the DoD has nearly 3 million civilian, uniformed, and reserve personnel on its rosters, getting them all the right information in the right way at the right time is an almost unimaginably complex task. Individual organizations within the various commands have in the past dealt with this problem mostly by ignoring it: Many computer systems in use by today’s armed forces are unable to communicate with other systems even within the same branch or on the same military base.
In some cases, they’re nearly unable to communicate at all: Much of the nation’s ballistic missile defenses and nuclear bombers, for instance, still use 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate many operational functions, according to a 2016 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Individual weapons systems often represent their own information silos (or “stovepipes,” as the military often terms them). Data from a Patriot missile radar, for instance, can be used to aim and launch Patriot missiles, but is generally unavailable to other weapons systems that might be able to use it to enhance the nation’s defense.
[Photo: courtesy of Northrop Grumman]The Army is currently working hard to change this last case, bringing its air and missile defense assets into an “any sensor, best shooter” package known as the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, or IBCS. That system would collect and integrate data from a variety of sensors on the network, and use that information to choose from among a variety of weapons systems, prioritize and set targets for them, and launch attacks. But as of early last year, the Northrop-developed system was crashing several times a day, sometimes for more than 10 minutes at a time–making it tough to feel confident in its vigilance. Northrop and the Army have been ironing out the kinks since then, though various estimates put the system’s launch as late as 2018 or 2019.
Another piece of software that has seen its share of tribulations is known as the Distributed Common Ground System, or DCGS. In theory, this is a piece of “military-grade” enterprise software that should tie together information analysis and distribution across all the armed forces, integrating battlefield reports with ISR data from a variety of sources to give planners and commanders a comprehensive and actionable picture of the “battlespace” they’re concerned with.
The DCGS has been operating in one form or another since at least 1996, though the earliest versions of it took the form of Deployable Ground Stations that weighed 200 tons, were staffed by 200 people, and took half a dozen giant C-5 Galaxy military transport aircraft to move into theaters of operation around the world. These days, the system is considerably more mobile, but is implemented differently by different branches of the armed forces, and is badly in need of upgrade and integration across services and organizations–as well as a lot of UX love. Current versions of the software are so difficult to set up, use, and maintain, according to some, that commanders in the field often don’t bother with many of its functions, and sometimes don’t bother to set it up at all. Some branches have already begun moving to a more modern system–including instituting open standards architectures similar to OMS–but the road is long.
That’s not to say it isn’t important. Various branches of the armed forces are exploring handheld or visor-mounted tactical computers for use on the battlefield that would both help warfighters maintain closer communications with commanders and bring additional information directly to the front lines. But those devices will only be as good as the information and insights that flow through them, and right now that information is fragmented at best.
No less a light than Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who is also chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Advisory Board, has called for the military to develop its own centralized, Google-like data storage and retrieval system. And Peter Thiel’s secretive big-data company, Palantir Technologies, wants to build DCGS software so badly that it took the Army to court, where it won the right to compete for the contract. Many of Palantir’s contracts remain shrouded in secrecy, but its executives clearly see enormous value in such deals–so much so that they’ve taken a notoriously combative approach to winning DoD business. The relationship highlights some of the deep issues with the defense acquisitions process. Could great software that contributes to our national defense possibly result from such an adversarial relationship? We may yet have the chance to find out.
An Air Force Global Hawk flies an advanced MS-177 multispectral sensor test [Photo: courtesy of Northrop Grumman].
New Challenges, Uncertain Future
As software eats the military, it’s becoming clear that the defense establishment is only just starting to take advantage of some of the capabilities that software-based systems afford. It’s also just starting to come to grips with some of the complexity that such systems may present: None of it plays well together; all of it can be hacked; achieving a robust and intuitive design is just as hard as it is for any commercial application (and in many cases harder); and pitfalls and vulnerabilities can arise where you least expect it.
Just being able to update a software system without having to rethink things from the ground up is something of a new trick for the Department of Defense, strange as it may seem. Reaping the benefit of up-to-date software development practices isn’t something that’s limited to experimental autonomous fighter jets, of course. “Being able to upgrade, that’s really something that’s applicable to any platform that has any amount of software capability–which is really all of them [emphasis added] at this point in time,” says Renee Pasman, Lockheed’s director of Mission Systems Roadmaps for Advanced Development Programs.
Making all these systems work well together is no easy task. In fact, just making information from one system or branch of service easily available to another can be a challenge within the vast enterprise that is the Department of Defense–which employs more than 2 million uniformed and civilian personnel, and another 826,000 National Guard and reservists. And keeping the systems and software in use by that enterprise secure is a herculean undertaking in itself. Just maintaining the systems themselves is a task the military struggles with, and at a surprisingly basic level: Many military web pages are unavailable to the public not out of national security concerns but because they have bad credentials or lack current website security certificates.
In an age when we have the destructive potential to end life on Earth as we know it, the difference is not in weapons that can see farther, fly faster, shoot sharper. Those define the lock but they’re not the key. To a great extent, it will be the software that supports and underpins those systems that makes the difference to the fortunes of war. How that software is wielded will become at least as important as where and when the guns are fired and the bombs are dropped. While human ingenuity will always provide an edge (probably), maintaining a competitive advantage will be a task that’s accomplished as much in the realm of software as it is in hardware, and that will fall to different people than it has in the past. Let’s hope Pentagon leaders can keep up.
Two hours northeast of the sound-canceling “hush houses” of Palmdale, where newly developed jet engines are tested, lies the Army’s Fort Irwin National Training Center in the desert south of Death Valley. It’s here that America’s freshest cyber warriors are put through their paces and where troops are trained to use and respond to the new weapons of war: software tools that can disrupt the operations of a tank or an aircraft, take over the controls of a dam, bring down a power grid, or insinuate themselves into a communications channel in order to send a message that appears to come from a fellow soldier or commanding officer but which really emanates from an adversary’s HQ.
None of this is fiction; it is happening today, both on training grounds like Fort Irwin and on battlefields around the world. Of the Army’s 41 cyber mission teams, 34 are already fully operational, says Brigadier General Joseph McGee, Army Cyber Command’s Deputy Commander for Operations. Their top priority is defending military information and operations networks from attacks. But cyber operations have now become part of all phases of any military operation.
McGee says: “This is not just about us going in and knocking out an adversary’s capability. We also architect and defend the networks that enable us to do global operations. If you talk to our soldiers who are right now involved in combat operations, they will tell you that they’re on the cutting edge of what’s happening, both in terms of the combat operations and in terms of the technology. And they’re living in an operational environment that’s constantly evolving and changing.”
With the ability to do things like selectively target portions of an adversary’s power grid or communications network, the DoD’s new cyber assault forces could have a significant impact on the battlefield, potentially acting as virtual advance troops clearing the way for a “kinetic” assault by more conventional troops. But Pentagon commanders have yet to align on rules of engagement and best practices–or even what equipment is best to send teams into the field with. And with USCYBERCOM spanning something like a dozen commands across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, integrating the many disparate systems, training regimens, and command doctrines is another thorny problem that’s yet to be grappled with.
To help tackle such problems, the Army has created a new Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) that allows qualified civilians to join Army Cyber Command as commissioned officers, rather than having to enlist as privates with no real sense of what their operational area will become. The hope is that bringing cyber operators in at a higher level will help attract the kind of Silicon Valley-caliber software talent the armed forces are badly in need of. To get a sense of how seriously the Army takes this task, consider: The last new MOS the Army created was Special Forces, in 1987. For many branches, MOS codes are badges of identity and honor: it’s not uncommon to find soldiers sporting tattoos displaying codes like 19 Delta for Army cavalry scouts, or, perhaps most iconic, 0311 for Marine riflemen. (“This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine…”). Don’t be surprised to see a 17 Charlie on a cyber operations specialist’s arm before long. (“This is my laptop…”)
Producing up to 500 million pounds of oysters each year, the Gulf Coast region of the United States is a shellfish haven: The area accounts for 67% of the oysters consumed in the U.S. But each oyster slurped down leaves behind a shell, and recycling those shells—instead of sending them to landfill—could actually be the key to rebuilding a coastal region decimated by natural and manmade disasters.
Last October, the Alabama Coastal Foundation (ACF), a nonprofit dedicating to protecting the state’s coastal environment, teamed up with the waste-management company Republic Services to launch an oyster-shell recycling program in the region. It began with just a few restaurants: A designated representative from Republic Services would drive out at 3 a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays to collect shells left over by diners, and bring them to a nature preserve where they can aerate and “cure” for several months before being returned to the ocean. The program has since scaled up to 29 restaurants, and Mark Berte, the executive director of the ACF, tells Fast Company that interest keeps growing.
While it’s common practice among seafood restaurants to send their empty shells to landfill with the rest of their waste, a handful of regions are beginning to put the shells to more productive use by returning them to the ocean, where they become the building blocks of restored oyster beds.
For oysters to grow, they have to be able to attach to a firm substrate like rock. Along the Gulf Coast, oyster reefs form when young oysters attach to the left-behind shells of other oysters. But decades of over-harvesting, disease, and pollution have begun to decimate oyster reefs, 85% of which globally have disappeared. And in the Gulf region, disasters like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill have further wrecked the habitats.
By working with Republic Services to collect the discarded shells from restaurants, the ACF wants to contribute to the effort to revitalize the Gulf Coasts’ oyster reefs. In 2012, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) launched an effort to repair the Gulf region following the Deepwater Horizon spill, and as part of that has called for a $150 million investment in oyster-reef restoration, including the rebuilding of 100 miles of reefs. Doing so, TNC claims, will bring jobs to the region and ensure its shellfish industry will continue to thrive.
“The more shells they give us, the more oysters they can keep serving,” Berte says.
The ACF and Republic Services partnership is working toward that goal. Funded by a $243,000 grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the program has collected over 2.8 million oyster shells–enough to cover 5.5 acres in the Gulf. Each oyster shell returned to the ocean, Berte says, can become the habitat for 10 baby oysters. Additionally, adult oysters can filter around 15 gallons of water a day–significant for a region plagued with water-quality issues. Because oysters filter out sediment and algae from the water, they support a healthier marine environment for other species. By sucking up excess algae and nitrogen, for example, oysters clear the water and enable more seagrass to grow, which in turn will lead to healthier fish and crab populations.
The grant will last the ACF through the spring of 2018, by which time, Berte hopes to have scaled the program sufficiently to operate without the additional funds. While Republic Services is currently collecting shells without charging the restaurants, they’ll likely attach a fee to the service going forward, says Jennifer Eldridge of Republic Services. “With so many restaurants buying into the program, they’ll likely be willing to pay for it, like they pay to have their trash or recycling collected,” she says.
The idea of oyster-shell recycling programs, Eldridge says, has been around for several years, but only recently took off. The ACF initiative, which centers around Mobile, Alabama, was inspired by a similar project in New Orleans, run by the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, which has, to date, collected nearly 3,000 tons of oyster shells since launching in 2014. They, in turn, were inspired by a program in Galveston, and Fast Company has previously covered the efforts of the Billion Oyster Project in New York to use reclaimed shells to restore the city’s waterways and ecosystems.
But as these programs expand across the country, Berte says they’re remaining in close communication, and learning from each other. The ACF, in launching this program, also requires participating restaurants to join the Green Coast Council, which promotes sustainable business practices in the region. The oyster recycling program is one element of how the Gulf Coast’s restaurants can begin to work more cooperatively with the environment that fuels them. “We want to make sure they have skin in the sustainability game beyond this program,” Berte says.
One of the simplest, most talked about ads during this year’s Super Bowl was from Airbnb. There were no celebrities, Hollywood-sized special effects, or complex commercial narrative. It was just a collection of portraits–faces of men and women of all colors and nationalities–with these words: “We believe no matter who you are, where you’re from, who you love, or who you worship, we all belong. The world is more beautiful, the more you accept. #weaccept”
The need for more diverse voices was a continuing theme at Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in late June. Panelists at a private recruitment event held by Airbnb shared their stories of discrimination and mircoagressions. One person talked about being scolded for suggesting to a client that perhaps there should be a black person in their commercial, another said she’s been told she wasn’t black enough for one piece of brand work, but too black for another.
A group of 35 job candidates from 14 different countries gathered in a third floor apartment just blocks from the Palais to hear Airbnb executives talk about the complexities faced by companies that are striving to create thought-provoking work while attempting to diversify their ranks, and the pressures minorities face while navigating their way through innovative environments.
Since the Super Bowl, Airbnb has also launched its Acceptance Ring campaign, to raise awareness and support for marriage equality in Australia. But the Cannes event represents the company’s aim to truly embody its diversity goals, far beyond a marketing message.
[Photo: courtesy of Airbnb]After a panel discussion with chief marketing officer Jonathan Mildenhall, head of Airbnb’s creative department James Goode, senior creative Roger Hoard, design manager Vivian Wang, and head of social Jasmine Atherton, Airbnb co-founder and chief product officer Joe Gebbia shared some research on the power of diversity.
“We do believe in an inside-out culture,” said Gebbia. “If we hold our hosts and guests to an expectation of acceptance and belonging, it has to start within our company. Otherwise, how on earth do we have the credibility to hold them accountable, if we’re not doing it to ourselves?”
Airbnb has published its own diversity numbers, with 42.88% of its workforce being female in 2016. Meanwhile, 56.6% of the company’s employees were white in 2016, compared to 30.41% Asian, 6.47% Latino, and only 2.92% black.
Mildenhall sees Cannes Lions as a perfect jumping off point to help influence and inspire companies in both advertising and tech–two industries in need of increased diversity–to re-examine their approach to both recruiting diverse talent, and how they support those employees once they’re in the door.
Cannes Lions is known as a gathering place for the best and brightest talent the marketing and advertising industry has to offer, but the idea for Airbnb to combine its recruitment efforts with its diversity goals at the event began during an interview Mildenhall gave last year.
Mildenhall was asked what some of the big industry issues he was thinking about most. “And I started to waffle on about producing content at scale, using ad tech to make sure I was serving up messages at the right time for the right cause, and all that stuff every CMO is concerned about,” he says. “But then as I was speaking, I realized and said that, actually, I’m the only non-white, non-celebrity person on any of the main stages. And that’s offensive. So I said, where are the black people? Cannes Lions has to do better to make this an inclusive event.”
This triggered a year-long conversation and negotiation with Cannes Lions about how they could make the festival more inclusive, in supporting and encouraging its industry stakeholders–the brands, agencies, and holding companies behind its programming–to re-evaluate how they choose topics, awards juries, and more. But it was through his conversations with the festival that led Mildenhall to look closer at his own organization.
“It was in a meeting with Cannes Lions, when I realized, it’s okay for me to be banging this drum, but I have to act, and I have to act in a very high-profile way,” says Mildenhall. “We’re recruiting like crazy because we’re growing, and I want to build the world’s most diverse, and culturally surprising in-house creative team–why don’t we move my recruiting team to play a role here in Cannes? It’s a call to arms that says, if you’re really talented, if you’ve got a great book, and you’re a woman or person of color, then submit your book to us.”
After an open global call for applications, Airbnb interviewed 25 candidates in Cannes across various disciplines from 11 different countries, to fill five open roles at the company. But Mildenhall says what started in the south of France has opened the company’s eyes to the sheer scope and scale of diverse creative talent around the world, looking for a better opportunity.
[Photo: courtesy of Airbnb]He says that the ad industry has access to one of the most diverse talent pools in the world. “These networks have offices all over the world–sometimes hundreds of offices across places like Nigeria, Brazil, Shanghai–but they’re not working hard enough to move the talent around their networks, and to reach into the belly of their organizations and fast-track some of the best minority talent,” he says. “The talent base in places like WPP, IPG, and Omnicom, is one of the most diverse in creative talent, but they’re just not bubbling up or being exposed as much as I’d like to see.”
Part of that may come from the nature of agency business. Mildenhall says that major marketers have traditionally been more effective at recruiting ethnic minorities because the brands are buying the advertising services, not selling them. “A marketing director is not considering whether the ethnic profile of their marketing manager is going to be liked, respected, or accepted by the agency,” says Mildenhall. “But the agency leaders are thinking, ‘Is this young black guy going to be accepted by all the different types of clients I need my young creatives to be in front of?'”
This echoes a sentiment shared by a recent HP campaign, as well as marketing and ad execs Jayanta Jenkins (who also made an appearance at the Airbnb event), Geoff Edwards, and Keith Cartwright, in their own powerful Cannes Lions presentation on diversity and inclusion. That until there is an honest re-evaluation of inherent bias, the industry will continue to hire and promote people who look like itself.
Airbnb is in the midst of a global ad agency review, looking for its next agency partner, and Mildenhall says diversity is a key point of evaluation.
“The number one criteria, before anything, is that they need to present an authentically diverse team to us,” says Mildenhall. “Not just for the pitch, but integrated throughout your organization. Every single agency we’ve had meetings with, diversity, their progress and commitment to diversity, was the number one subject we discussed before we even looked at their creative. If more clients were like that, the change would be rapid.”
Airbnb’s global marketing director Alexandra Dimiziani says an event like this is just one part of how the company is aiming to be an example to others. The company has looked at how to change its recruitment process to eliminate as much bias as possible, to change the pools of talent they historically look at by starting to forge relationships with historically black and Latino universities to expand that pool.
“By no means have we cracked it, we still have so much work to do,” says Dimiziani. “It does really take a holistic approach. It’s not just about recruitment alone.”
As with the agency review, Dimiziani says the company has also looked to diversify its overall supplier network, to make sure it’s investing in female-owned, minority-owned, and veteran-owned companies.
Looking ahead to next year, Mildenhall hopes his company’s efforts pay off for not only Airbnb–which will hire five of those 35 candidates it gathered in Cannes–but also Cannes Lions, and the marketing and advertising industry overall.
“Wouldn’t it be fantastic if next year an agency like Ogilvy is presenting 50 ideas from their own pool of people of color? Or if Omnicom says, these are our best female creatives and look at the work they produce,” says Mildenhall. “If the big networks really start to celebrate and show the creative impact of their own women and people of color, if that starts to be an ongoing narrative of Cannes Lions, it will be a phenomenal achievement. That’s why it was important for Airbnb to not just talk about it, but do something, share with the industry the impact, and encourage the industry next year to bring their own actions that can start to forever change this debate.”
WHAT: The first ads for Heineken’s non-alcoholic “0.0” beer
WHO: Heineken,Publicis Milan
WHY WE CARE: Beer ads have gotten shockingly inclusive in recent years. Seth Rogen and Amy Schumer starred in a series for Bud Light that introduced the phrase “gender is a spectrum” to NFL fans last football season, Coors Light inspired beer drinkers with stories of hardship, and Heineken introduced bigots to the people they think they hate. But one group has been left out of the inclusivity bonanza in the beer ad world: Non-drinkers.
That’s to be expected, since it’s beer—but it’s a group that includes people who live with alcoholism, members of various religions, and others whom sensitive brands ought to be considerate of. And Heineken, in this “Open To All” campaign, is doing a good job of it.
The campaign’s 60-second spot sees people from all walks of life (and an alien, sure) make their way to the bar to crack a cold one—before the gravelly-voiced narrator realizes that, whoops, the “come-one, come-all” spirit of the ad leaves out those who aren’t drinking that night. The ad never openly references alcoholics or others whose aversion to a regular Heineken might be a long-term thing—it refers to “you, when you don’t fancy alcohol”—but the message that the good times every beer ad promises are available to people who don’t want to get drunk is a nice one.
The rest of the campaign, which includes eight ads showcasing a variety of people who might not want alcohol, reinforces the spirit of the first spot in a casual, low-key manner—which is, in the end, right in the spirit of inclusiveness.
Citi Bike, the New York City bike share system, launched in 2013 and by the end of this year will more than double its original size to 12,000 bikes and 700 stations. On peak days, ridership exceeds 60,000 people; annual membership numbers 115,000. But for all it’s done to get more New Yorkers cycling and speed the development of more bike-friendly infrastructure, the benefits of Citi Bike have been slow to reach across demographics. Just 18% of stations are located in zip codes where the median annual income is lower than $50,000, and 83% of trips start and end in Manhattan, where the impression that the majority of blue bikes are piloted by men in suits is due to the fact that men take around 73% of Citi Bike rides.
As bike share programs proliferate across America—there are now around 119, the majority of which have been successful—lack of equity has emerged as an issue. A new study out of the Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC) at Portland State University for the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC) dives into the data showing that white, higher-income populations are overrepresented among bike share users and uses findings from research in three cities—Brooklyn, Chicago, and Philadelphia—to advise on how systems could work to ensure they reach a more diverse user base going forward.
This report is part of a larger effort by TREC to examine equity issues and solutions in bike share programs around the U.S. A previous report, released in May, catalogued specific cities’ efforts to support equity through collaborations with the Better Bike Share Partnership (BBSP), a nonprofit coalition focused on making bike share programs more accessible. BBSP’s effect on the neighborhoods and systems featured in the TREC report include how Philadelphia’s Indego system located a full one-third of its stations in low-income neighborhoods and created a cash-based rental system, and Citi Bike’s recent $5-per-month (as opposed to $15-per-month) membership option for residents of New York City Housing Authority public housing.
But even with these incentives in place, and even as bike share systems like Citi Bike continue to expand into neighborhoods outside the city’s main business hub, membership and usage among lower-income people of color still lag behind more affluent people in those same neighborhoods, Nathan McNeil, lead researcher on the report, tells Fast Company. So the newest report from TREC looks at why: What are the specific barriers that low-income residents and people of color cite as to why they’re not using these systems? And how might bike share programs improve their outreach to address those specific concerns?
In compiling the report, McNeil noted that it was important to keep in mind the difference between barriers to bicycling on the whole, and barriers to bike share use. Solving one common barrier to bike-share use in low-income neighborhoods by adding more docking stations, for instance, does little to assuage the more pervasive concern 48% of residents had about road safety conditions. When Citi Bike was facing pressure in 2016 to expand to more diverse neighborhoods, like Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, the New York Times pointed out that the Citi Bike zones in Manhattan were well-served by protected bike lanes, which were much harder to come by in Brooklyn. McNeil cited research that sheds light on the concern lower-income people of color feel about welcoming bike shares to their neighborhoods: Another study found that around 54% of residents in that demographic did not trust that their government would step in to build bike lanes if the community requested them. In order for bike shares to expand successfully in all neighborhoods, cities must be willing to support and follow through on more equitable bike infrastructure developments.
But the TREC report also highlighted two bike share specific concerns that current and future programs could work harder to address. The first is payment method. The TREC study found that only 43% of low-income residents of color in the groups surveyed had a credit card, as opposed to more affluent white residents (98%); just 56% reported having consistent access to the internet. Both circumstances would make managing a bike share account difficult and create a barrier to using the system on a one-off basis.
Philadelphia’s Indego system’s cash payment method allows users to register online to receive a barcode, which they can then bring to a local convenience store to make a payment (similar formats are also available on a more limited basis in D.C.’s and Boston’s systems), but it’s still been tough to attract a more diverse ridership. “We heard over and over again that not knowing this was an option and not knowing how to use the system was a barrier,” McNeil says. Indego’s community ambassador program, which hires locals with roots in the communities that the system is trying to reach, is attempting to bridge that knowledge gap.
Apart from the payment barrier, though, around 52% of lower-income people of color had concerns about liability should a bike share get damaged while in their possession, as opposed to just around 10% of higher-income white users. “These figures reveal that concerns about price and being overcharged for a problem with the bike are related to both income and race,” McNeil wrote in the study. The solution: Follow the model of Chicago’s Divvy system, which set up a loss liability fund through its Divvy for Everyone program, which with a grant from BBSP offers discount memberships and cash-payment options for lower-income residents. While the fund hasn’t yet been needed, taking steps to ensure there’s a safety net, McNeil says, will help to encourage more people to use bike share systems.
While the TREC research project focuses on Brooklyn, Chicago, and Philadelphia, McNeil says that “there were more similarities than differences” in residents’ responses across all three cities, and as such, the information contained in the report can be more broadly interpreted and applied. “One of the great things about this research process was seeing how both community organizations and bike share systems are open to change and interested in better serving all communities,” McNeil says. He and the TREC team will be sharing the findings with bike share operators across the country, as well as at the North American Bike Share Association conference this November. “We know we have a lot of information here about potential barriers and things that will motivate people to overcome them, but it’ll be a process to take this and figure out how to make the right investments to address them,” McNeil says.
In the world of fashion, it takes a special alchemy of talent to run a company. You need a visionary, of course: someone who can turn the human body into a canvas and reimagine the way we dress. But you also need a businessperson who understands how to build an engaging brand on the internet, connect with customers on social media, and experiment with an ever-changing smorgasbord of apps and tech tools. It’s rare to find all of these skills in the same person.
Burberry has learned this the hard way. Since 2014, Christopher Bailey has struggled to manage both the creative and the business side of Burberry in the dual roles of CEO and chief creative officer. Yesterday, Bloomberg Businessweek announced that Bailey, 46, was turning over the role of CEO to Marco Gobbetti, who has spent the last six months as Burberry’s interim executive chairman for Asia, and previously served as the CEO of Celine.
In Bloomberg’s story, Bailey was chatting with Gobbetti over a casual breakfast when it suddenly occurred to the CEO that he would like to pass the role on to his more seasoned colleague. “It wasn’t a big decision for me whether I had a CEO title or not,” Bailey told Bloomberg TV last summer, when these decisions were being worked out.
But there was much more going on behind the scenes.
Christopher Bailey [Photo: Mike Marsland/WireImage]From the start, shareholders thought that asking Bailey to take on both roles was poorly conceived. “They should let Bailey do what he does best, which is design,” one investor said. “It feels like he has been overstretched in both positions.”
Since he became CEO, Bailey’s enormous compensation package has regularly made headlines and stirred up outrage among shareholders. Over the last few weeks, the U.K.’s Investment Association and the Institutional Shareholder Services, both of which advise fund managers, issued respective alerts about Burberry, urging shareholders at its annual meeting to vote against the company’s report on compensation, claiming that Bailey was being overpaid.
Back in 2014, Burberry faced an earlier shareholder rebellion due to Bailey’s compensation, which included a £1.1 million annual salary plus a cash bonus of up to twice his salary, a onetime award of shares worth nearly £15 million, and a £440,000 cash allowance. A full 52.7% of investors voted against his pay package, which made it one of the largest boardroom protests against executive compensation.
Burberry didn’t make any alterations to the pay package, but Bailey wasn’t able to collect all of it because the company’s fortunes sagged during his tenure as CEO. In 2015, Bailey did not receive his performance bonus after failing to meet the company’s profit target, which effectively resulted in a 75% pay cut down to £1.9 million. In 2016, that figure inexplicably increased to £3.5 million, even though sales were down. With the end of Burberry’s expensive experiment in fusing his creative and business roles, Bailey will receive a £10.5 million payout in shares before resuming his previous role at the company.
Revenue at Burberry has been in decline for three years in a row, which seems partly due to the brand’s lack of clarity about its own identity. Burberry sells a hodgepodge of products, from accessibly priced watches and scarves that cost a few hundred dollars to trench coats that go for upwards of $4,000. Products are available at thousands of stores, from Macy’s to Neiman Marcus, causing confusion about what the brand really stands for. Coach and Kate Spade have had similar problems with market oversaturation, resulting in the dilution of brand image.
But fashion brands can learn from Burberry’s mistakes. In many ways, the design side is meant to clash with the commercial side: Creative directors need to be able to think independently of the balance sheet, sketching out wildly ambitious collections and runway shows without worrying about merchandising costs and pricing strategies.
This is something that any emerging designer will tell you. Most fashion startups fail. Designers often have bold visions for their collections, but constantly run into problems with it comes to actually structuring a sustainable business that does not hemorrhage cash. That’s why companies like Brand Assembly and Assembled Brands have popped up to give new designers support with everything from balancing their profit and loss statements to launching an e-commerce platform.
“Many designers–I’d even venture to say most designers–aren’t wired to think about balance sheets,” Alex Repola, Brand Assembly’s cofounder, told me a few months ago. “But that’s okay. They often find a business partner who can lay out some guardrails for them.”
For Bailey, this business partner was Angela Ahrendts, who was CEO between 2006 and 2014, before leaving for Apple. She and Bailey formed a powerful partnership that was responsible for transforming Burberry from a stodgy 160-year-old brand that then became overexposed into an exciting, high-tech fashion label. With the two of them at the helm, Burberry grew quickly, generating $3 billion in annual revenue and expanding its employee base to 11,000.
Will Gobbetti be able to replicate this magic as Burberry’s CEO? We’ll have to wait and see. But one thing is clear: The classic luxury brand is ready for yet another makeover—and fast.
When Scott Keneally was reporting a story for Outside magazine about obstacle course racing (OCR) back in 2012, he had no idea he was just beginning his own journey into the world of OCR. The piece was about a legal battle between Will Dean, the founder of Tough Mudder, and Billy Wilson, aka Mr. Mouse, an eccentric Englishman who created a mud run called Tough Guy in the muddy plains of Wolverhampton, England. Wilson was the kind of character that any good journalist would be drawn to—a former British Army officer with a handlebar mustache who dressed in antique military garb—and after finishing his piece, Keneally decided to make a documentary film with the colorful bloke at the center.
The idea was to use Wilson as a starting point to examine the growing popularity of mud runs like Tough Mudder, Spartan Race, and Warrior Dash, all of which were attracting droves of Type A personalities looking to hurl themselves over walls, slosh through mud, and battle nature in other quirky ways in exchange for Facebook bragging rights on Monday morning.
But things didn’t quite go according to plan. Making Rise of the Sufferfests proved to be an endurance test in and of itself–one that Keneally barely survived. He ran out of funding for the film (which is available on iTunes, Amazon, and on Keneally’s website) soon after he started shooting. And as he was trying to build up his image within the OCR community as a way to help promote his project, he humiliated himself at a big race by not finishing. There was another bombshell: He found out his wife was pregnant with their first child, upping the pressure to complete the film. To Keneally, it was suddenly like he was in the middle of his own mud run. Only in this one, there was no way to turn back or pull a DNF—the (very pejorative) mud-run term for Did Not Finish.
Keneally recently spoke to Fast Company about how he ultimately pulled the documentary—and himself—together, in part by realizing that all of the challenges he was experiencing made for good narrative drama.
Fast Company: Although you were an experienced journalist, you’d never made a film before. How did you get it off the ground?
Scott Keneally: I got a little seed money from three people. It amounted to $30,000–$10,000 from each. That was enough to start production, pre-preproduction, and get me over to England to shoot Mr. Mouse and do some interviews with him. I had been spending a lot of time trying to build my Facebook community with the idea that if we could reach 10,000 fans, I could launch a successful Kickstarter campaign.
Which leads us to obstacle No. 1. Running out of funding at the very beginning. Very early on, within six months, I ran out of money. I probably put $5,000 into Facebook marketing, and I was paying a crew. [The money] didn’t get that far. I started a Kickstarter campaign, and it was a humiliating failure. The goal was to raise $297,000. We raised $34,500.
It was a 40-day campaign, and I knew within a few days of starting it that it was going to be a disaster. So I had 40 days to just squirm and prepare myself mentally to launch another one. Right as the Kickstarter ended, I started an Indiegogo campaign. That was a 60-day campaign, making it [in total] the 100 worst days of my life. That one had a modest goal, like $10,000. In retrospect, had I asked for $50,000 on the Kickstarter, perhaps I would have raised $100,000 or more. But no one likes to bet on a loser when no one else is jumping on board, and everyone is just sitting on the sidelines.
FC: Did that discouragement affect you?
SK: On the same day that the Kickstarter failed, I’d gone to Malibu to do a three-mile Spartan Race. At the time, I was what you’d call Spartan Famous. Everyone in the community knew who I was. Forty days prior, I thought I’d go to this event like a hero. I strategically ended the campaign that weekend. It was like, I’ll go to Malibu, it’ll be great, I’ll have the money. I’ll be a hero.
Instead, I go to Malibu totally humiliated. I always wear Sufferfest or Sufferclub team, so I’m pretty noticeable. On top if it all, I ended up having a pretty bad day out there. I quit. I did not finish the three-mile race. Which is relatively easy, not to mention that quitting is a huge no-no in the Spartan community. I can’t tell you how many memes there are: ‘Never quit!’ ‘When you’re going through hell, keep going!’ There’s such a stigma around quitting. So it was extra embarrassing. Salt in the wounds was every time I’d go on to the Spartan wall and see more memes about, ‘Do Not Quit!’
FC: It sounds like things couldn’t get worse . . .
SK: Within three weeks of the Spartan Race and failed Kickstarter campaign, I found out that Amber [Keneally’s wife] was pregnant. I was shell-shocked and terrified. I mean, we’d been trying to have a kid, but I didn’t think it would happen. So there was kind of a trifecta of fear.
FC: So now we’re at the part where we hear music and you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and charge off to victory.
SK: The Indiegogo campaign raised about $30,000, and that was enough to keep the dream alive. I went to Tough Guy [Wilson’s race in England] with a really good crew of about seven people, and we got a lot of key footage. But it still left me with the problem of not having enough money to finish the thing. So after I got back from Tough Guy, I spent about six months looking into branded content. My idea was to find a brand or company to sponsor this thing: The way Morgan Spurlock did with his film, POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.
I was hoping I could find a Reebok or an Under Armour to underwrite the production. I came closest with Fitbit. I got on a conference call with their marketing team. Then they asked me where the film would be distributed, and I didn’t really have a good answer to that. I never heard back from them again. I spent many months feeling like the dream was slipping away.
I tried any brand that would make sense for the space and didn’t have any luck. But ESPN had a production company that specializes in sports content. I sent the same deck, it was like a 30-page Power Point, that I’d sent to Reebok to this company, Echo Entertainment. The owner flew to town within a week and was really excited. He jumped on it. We partnered up pretty quick. He was the one who helped bring it to the finish line.
FC: The film is full of interviews with recognizable talking heads and thought leaders. How did you line them all up?
SK: Just persistence. Getting Jean M. Twenge, who wrote The Narcissism Epidemic, took the better part of a year and 12 unanswered emails. I left messages with her department at the University of California, San Diego. Finally, I sent her a work-in-progress trailer, and she liked what she saw, and finally I heard from her. Hanna Rosin was hard to get hold of because she’d had a bad experience with the last doc crew at her house. Tim Ferriss was difficult to reach. But that was how, for me, you sustain the team—with these little wins that happen along the way. For me, to have Tim Ferriss call me back was a buzz that lasted a month. So there were these little victories, these little bumps of encouragement, which sustain you over the course of making a movie.
FC: The finished film chronicles a lot of the challenges you were up against while making the movie. At what point did you realize that you’d be a subject in the film?
SK:Someone once told me that documentaries reveal themselves in the edit, and that was very much the case with this film. I didn’t go into this thinking my journey through mud or moviemaking would be a relevant or interesting part of the story. And to be honest, had the Kickstarter campaign worked out as I’d hoped, it wouldn’t have been. The production cycle would have been a year instead of three, and there wouldn’t have been any real struggle or time for growth.
But once we sat down with the footage, I was convinced the story would benefit from that personal touch. And when I say ‘I was convinced,’ I mean that quite literally. My production team had to convince me. As much as I love being the center of attention, I was really resistant to the idea of weaving myself into the movie. I didn’t want the film to be dismissed as a vanity project or an exercise in narcissism. But once they got me on board, I was all in. I copped to being a humblebragging narcissist in the film and put myself in the poster—twice. And while there are some hilariously scathing Amazon reviews out there, the vast majority of feedback we’ve received so far suggests we made the right call. Heck, we even made Hannah Hart cry.
FC: In the film we also see you commit to obstacle racing in a more serious way.
SK: Amber being pregnant made me think, I’m going to be a dad now. I really need to embrace this world I’ve been circling around, and dive into it and train, so that I’m not just showing up for races. Becoming more physically capable did make me feel more confident that I could be a good dad.
I’m squeezed into a side corridor at the elegant Westin St. Francis hotel in San Francisco during the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) annual conference in June. Sitting across from me is Vinton Cerf, whose moniker, “Father of the internet,” might as well be part of his legal name. In his signature style, Cerf wears a three-piece suit with pocket handkerchief, his white beard and hair closely cropped. Despite his raft of awards (including the ACM’s Turing Prize in 2004 and the Presidential Medal Of Freedom in 2005), and position as chief internet evangelist at Google, Cerf is disarming, modest, and often funny.
Cerf doesn’t demur the title Father of the Internet, but he emphasizes that he co-parented with others–especially Robert Kahn, with whom he has shared major awards. In the mid-’70s, Cerf and Kahn crafted TCP/IP, which became the internet addressing system that ensures a data packet created anywhere in the world gets to a computer, smartphone, robot, smart car, drone, or connected thermostat anywhere else in the world—although many of the gadgets now on the net weren’t even glimmers in a futurist’s eye at the time. “Bob and I didn’t know what applications would be feasible,” says Cerf.
Vin Cerf [Photo: The Royal Society, via Wikimedia]Cerf and Kahn also couldn’t anticipate the dangers the net would face in the 21st century. “The benefit of [the internet] is that voices that might never have been heard are heard,” he tells me. “On the other hand, we also hear from people whose messages we wish weren’t delivered—terrorism, misinformation, deliberate deception, and then there is malware and other kinds of things.”
Cerf, at 74, is still focused on the future—including ensuring that future generations can read, watch, listen to, and interact with digital creations of our time. Here are more of his thoughts, edited for length and clarity, on a broad range of challenges facing the online world.
Personal Responsibility Online
Now we’re facing the question: What sort of societal norms ought we invoke about behavior in the online world in order to create a society that we would want to live in?
I’ve always interpreted the social contract as the willingness of a citizen to curtail behavior in exchange for safety of society and stability for society. And at this stage in the game, we have an online society, which is still rather unmoved. And there are side effects that are societally rather significant. The reported Russian intervention in the election is just one example.
Educating Technology Users
My biggest concern is to equip the online netizen with tools to protect himself or herself, to detect attempts to attack or otherwise harm someone.
The term “digital literacy” is often referred to as if you can use a spreadsheet or a text editor. But I think digital literacy is closer to looking both ways before you cross the street. It’s a warning to think about what you’re seeing, what you’re hearing, what you’re doing, and thinking critically about what to accept and reject . . . Because in the absence of this kind of critical thinking, it’s easy to see how the phenomena that we’re just now labeling fake news, alternative facts [can come about]. These [problems] are showing up, and they’re reinforced in social media.
The Profusion Of Connected Gadgets
What are the criteria that we should apply to devices that are animated by software, and which we rely upon without intervention? And this is the point where autonomous software becomes a concern, because we turn over functionality to a piece of code. And dramatic examples of that are self-driving cars . . . Basically you’re relying on software doing the right things, and if it doesn’t do the right thing, you have very little to say about it.
I feel like we’re moving into a kind of fragile future right now that we should be much more thoughtful about improving, that is to say making more robust.
The Responsibility Of Programmers
As software becomes more embedded in everything that we do and rely on, the developers . . . will probably have to accept more responsibility for the way in which they function . . . So I’m expecting after various mishaps occur, some of which will lead to court cases, there will probably be an evolving view of software responsibility.
What I’d like to do is get ahead of the problem by getting programmers to feel a responsibility for making software that is robust, that arguably . . . preserves privacy, that resists tampering, protects against attack, and [provides] safety.
The Reliability Of The Internet
Imagine a house that stops working when the internet connection goes away. That’s not acceptable. So software has to work autonomously, even when the internet is not there. And a lot of what falls into the internet of things rubric is not designed with that in mind. There’s a twisted assumption that the internet is [always going to be] there.
The Limits Of Artificial Intelligence
Even playing a brilliant game of Go [a complex Chinese board game that Google’s sister company DeepMind recently mastered] is not the same as planning a vacation, driving in a car across town, figuring out how to do your taxes. There’s just a huge world out there that is not addressed by machine learning and artificial intelligence.
When you experience the world, you create models of it, and then reason about the models. So, an example: We’re sitting here in this room with a glass of water on the shelf. Your model of this is that it’s a container that contains liquid. So your use of this is not based on a specific glass and specific water. But it is a container of liquid, and you know that you can manipulate it.
Very few computer programs that we speak of as artificially intelligent have the ability to abstract models from the real world and reason about those models.
The “Digital Dark Age”
Our media for writing has gotten less and less [durable] as time has gone on . . . and you can certainly say that for digital content. We miss one of two things: Either we don’t have any readers to read the digital medium . . . or the bits that we preserve don’t mean anything anymore because the software that knew what they meant doesn’t run.
My big worry is that this digital dark age will be a consequence of losing the ability to correctly read or interpret digital content . . . And so we have to take specific steps to preserve that stuff . . . It’s not easy to get old software to run, because it may have been designed for a particular hardware platform that doesn’t run or exist anymore.
The Perishable Cloud
People are invested in the cloud, and part of that is that you don’t have any choice. That’s just the way products and services are offered to you. So I look at this, and I wonder if the cloud implementers will last 100 years, or 500 years, or even 20 years. And if they don’t, what’s the right thing to prepare for that?
At Google, we have a policy called the Data Liberation Plan, which roughly speaking, says if you put it into the Google system you should be able to get it back out again . . . But we still haven’t found, once you get the data out, what do you to with it, where do you put it, and how do you interpret it?
Despite everything he’s seen and created, Cerf is still enchanted by technology. Though he doesn’t plug his employer very much, Cerf admits being “in love with” Google Docs, which allows people around the world to work on the same document simultaneously. “So, they replicate copies, and they do it in real time,” he says. “I mean, how do they keep that in sync?!” His sense of wonder is palpable–and striking, given that Docs, like so many of the tools we use, build upon technologies that Cerf himself envisioned long before they transformed the world.
