WHAT: “Still I Rise,” an art exhibition built around the unused confetti from Hillary Clinton’s election night party at New York City’s Javits Center.
WHO: St. Louis-based visual artist Bunny Burson (former executive director of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities during the Bill Clinton administration) created the piece that’s housed at the Bruno David Gallery in Clayton, Missouri.
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WHY WE CARE: To say that November 8, 2016 didn’t turn out the way anyone planned is an understatement. Enough words have been spilled on the matter to fill, well, basically the entire Internet, over and over until we’re desperate for a reprieve from the experience of reliving the 2016 election for the rest of our natural lives. Seeking out things like art and culture give our lives meaning when things stopped making sense about eight months ago. We live in fear of both the consequences of that night and of coming to terms with it, and of finding ourselves somehow feeling normal in a world that has proven itself to be anything but.
When struggling with the complex emotions that many Americans and people around the world have been experiencing since Hillary Clinton didn’t end up being the 45th President of the United States, words sometimes don’t do the job. The exhibit from Burson, though, reaches a place beyond words in a way that only art can. The confetti, which would have poured from the rafter at the Javits Center had Clinton won, now falls encased in glass, serving as a potent reminder of how small the grandest of ambitions sometimes turn out to be. But the words “Still I Rise” offer just a little bit of hope, too–that perhaps the next time a woman dreams a dream as big as the one Clinton had, she’ll meet a different fate. It doesn’t help us make sense of what happened, exactly, but it does speak to the feeling of loss and of what might have been.
Underwater in the Great Barrier Reef, after weeks of filming coral to manually build time-lapses–helping gather 50 or 60 shots a day, and spending hours in the water–Zack Rago scrawled a note and held it up to a fellow cameraman. “This is the hardest dive I’ve ever had to do.” The coral, alive when filming started, was dying as they watched. As he held a rotting piece of coral in his hand, the coral disintegrated.
Rago, a self-described coral nerd, is featured in Chasing Coral, a mesmerizing beautiful (and depressing) documentary now on Netflix. Like Chasing Ice, a 2012 documentary from the same director, Jeff Orlowski, it tells the story of climate change by showing some of its unambiguous effects.
As greenhouse gases trap heat on Earth, almost all of that heat has been absorbed by the oceans, raising it to temperatures that destroy coral. In 2016, because of warming oceans, the Great Barrier Reef suffered the biggest die-off of corals ever recorded. In one 400-mile section of the reef, an average of 67% of coral died. Similar die-offs are happening around the world.
The film follows coral bleaching–a process where corals expel the algae living inside them when it gets too hot, a step often followed by death–in Australia after attempts to capture it elsewhere, using custom camera rigs designed to stay underwater and automatically document day-to-day changes, failed both because of technical problems and because they hadn’t happened to pick locations that suffered extreme bleaching at that time. At one point, part of the team dives from a floating restaurant in the Great Barrier Reef, while people on board drink and dance, oblivious to the unprecedented changes happening on the reef below them.
That obliviousness is part of the point of the film: most people are only vaguely aware of what’s happening to coral reefs. The film explains both the basics of what reefs are (animals that can live as long as thousands of years) and what makes them unique (they host algae as tiny food factories to feed themselves; as reefs, they create structures that act like cities for aquatic life) and what makes them important (as nurseries for a quarter of marine life, they’re critical both for the natural world and for our food supply). Then it shows, in agonizing detail, how they die.
“I think the reality of the world is far worse than people think, and also far better than people think.”[Photo: XL Caitlin/Seaview Survey]The idea for the film came from Richard Vevers, a former ad exec who left an agency in London to become an underwater photographer in Australia. Over time, Vevers noticed that his favorite species (the “weedy” sea dragon) was disappearing, and he started to learn about the environmental challenges the ocean faces. He saw an advertising challenge; the public didn’t know what was going on. He founded a nonprofit, now called The Ocean Agency, to try to address that, and launched a project to photograph Google Streetview-like images of the ocean. As he started to see and document coral bleaching, he also happened to see Chasing Ice, which followed a National Geographic photographer who documents melting icebergs. He saw the parallels to his own work and approached Orlowski about making a new film. Vevers became one of the subjects of the film.
At first, Orlowski was overwhelmed by the challenges he saw in the ocean–from acidification to ocean plastic to overfishing–but he realized that coral bleaching could be the focus of the film. “As I learned about that, learned what corals were and what story was being told by the corals, that’s when I realized that this was a climate change story that was visual,” he says. Rago, a young cameraman who happened to have a lifelong love of coral, helped tell the story emotionally.
“We’re really wanting to get the film beyond the traditional audiences that watch this content.”[Photo: The Ocean Agency/Richard Vevers]At one point in the film, researchers at a conference are brought to tears by the footage. But the film ends with optimism: it isn’t too late to act, and some positive change is already underway. “I think the reality of the world is far worse than people think, and also far better than people think,” says Orlowski. “The state of the climate is far worse than the average person is aware of. The changes that we’re seeing in the ocean, the projections, all of it is pretty dismal when you look at it. At the same time, the changes in technology, and the advancing rate of the changes that we’re seeing is happening so fast.”
That’s not to say that all coral reefs can necessarily be saved–even with aggressive climate action now, many could be lost. Some researchers estimate that 90% of corals may be gone by 2050 even if global warming stopped now. But the film is also meant to be a call to action for protecting the rest of the world’s ecosystems.
“What we’re hoping to do is not lose other ecosystems down the line,” Orlowski says. “That’s what I’m hopeful for. We’re hopeful that we can prevent much worse damage in the future that right now is inevitable unless we take action. That’s where the optimism comes in.”
In addition to being on Netflix, the film is available for free educational screenings, and Orlowski is trying to reach as many people as possible. “We’re really wanting to get the film beyond the traditional audiences that watch this content,” he says. “For us, this was designed for everybody. It’s designed for the average Amercian, somebody who might be skeptical of the issue, somebody who might not know much about the issue. Hopefully, it can bring people into this story in a way that makes them realize and see and feel what’s going on.”
As the cofounder and CEO of a growing tech startup, I’m not going to argue against teaching kids how to write code. I couldn’t have started my company without my engineering background, and I rely on skilled developers and engineers to build our product every day. I also realize that pushing students into STEM fields may be one way to mitigate the threat of AI-driven job loss, while liberal arts degrees are still often seen as a surefire route to a job as a barista.
But the funny thing is that I’m still hiring more humanities majors than STEM grads, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Here’s why.
At my company, as at many tech companies, developers only make up 15–25% of our workforce. While tech businesses are booming, many of the jobs waiting to be filled require broader skill sets than just great engineering chops. And in my experience anyway, the truly irreplaceable jobs—not just of the future but of the present—are the roles that intermingle arts and science. My employees with humanities backgrounds regularly show they’re willing to learn new skills and try new things.
Think about the other roles that deal with developing and marketing tech products and services: Sales teams need to understand human relationships. Marketing teams have to understand what gets people excited and why. Internally, our HR teams need to know how to build a community and culture so the company can continue to thrive. The nuts and bolts of software development are just one small part of any successful tech company. It would actually be foolish to limit my hiring only to people with tech backgrounds.
“Making Stuff” Vs. “Making Stuff People Want”
My company was nurtured at Y Combinator, the investment program where I absorbed the mantra, “Make something people want.” My cofounder and I created a video-content management platform for businesses, using software as our building blocks. But I quickly realized that the “making” part was relatively easy; it was the “figuring out what people want” part that was hard. People will never embrace your product if you don’t understand their motivations and needs—what excites them or annoys them to tears.
Some of this intel comes from diving into the data about our customer base, kind of the way archaeologists examine layers of compacted stone and soil to understand human behavior from eons past. The first question that involves—”What am I looking at here?”—requires a STEM job (data science), but the second—”What does it mean?”—takes more of a “STEAM” thinker to answer (the “A” stands for “art”).
After all, the whole point of that data dive is to help us build an effective marketing campaign, which means predicting how a massive number of people will react and behave based on snippets of information we’ve collected. This level of qualitative analysis can’t come from the data alone. It requires instinct, critical thinking, and a deeply contextual understanding of human nature.
Even within strictly technical roles—including the product and engineering positions that form the basis of STEM know-how—a humanities foundation can be invaluable. Some of our software, UI, and UX designers come from a fine-arts backgrounds, for instance. Yes, coding skills are important there, but so is an understanding of usability—in other words, the uniquely human ability to draw upon experience to design an elegant solution that real people will actually find helpful.
Keeping Liberal-Arts Learning Alive
I want to make sure the right candidates keep coming in my door in the years ahead. If we relentlessly push people toward coding and STEM fields, there’s a real risk that the humanities grads will grow fewer and farther between. I don’t want that to happen.
On one level, re-embracing a genuine liberal arts education (as retro as this may sound to some) could be a start. Curriculums that encompass arts and sciences in equal parts may better equip students with the skills to reimagine and reshape a technological world, not just assemble it. But formal education is hardly the final fix. In the end, talk of “science majors” and “humanities majors”—or “majors” at all—feels increasingly outdated and arbitrary.
Ultimately, I hire people based on their experience, not on what’s printed on their diplomas, and I hardly think my company is alone in that. Recruiters and hiring managers understandably use majors as an imperfect shorthand for candidates’ skills, especially when filling entry- and associate-level roles, but that quickly becomes counterproductive. Hiring someone for a skill they developed five or 10 years ago at an academic institution is like assessing someone’s fitness based on a marathon they ran five or 10 years ago.
Learning—especially in an era of AI-accelerated change, where new roles emerge as quickly as old ones die out—has to be a constant, cross-disciplinary process. And it cuts both ways. Yes, humanities folks should upgrade their tech skills, even if that’s just through continuing education or some serious YouTubing (or even a little Sesame Street). But at the same time, people like me—an engineering major—need to consciously bring more humanities into our lives.
To make up for gaps in my formal education, I’ve started reading psychology and philosophy books with an eye toward better understanding human behavior, which is key for any successful entrepreneur (or person, for that matter). I’m also lucky to be married to an archaeology major turned tech product manager turned novelist, who shows me everyday the value of transcending STEM modes of thought and seeing the world a little more broadly.
While radical fixes like universal basic income may be one option for a shifting job market, this seems a Band-Aid at best. Yes, the jobs of the future will involve coding and tech skills, but the ones that AI won’t replace—and the ones that I’ll be hiring for—will require creativity, adaptability, and artistry in equal measure.
If you’re on LinkedIn and have a complete profile, there’s a good chance you’ve received “InMail,” the platform’s messaging feature for people who aren’t first-degree connections. Used well, InMail can be a powerful networking tool. Here at LinkedIn, we’ve seen interactions between recruiters and members increase 40% over the past two years, and InMail response rates are up 25% this year after an all-time-high in June. More people are finding jobs through the InMails they receive, and recruiters are being more thoughtful in the messages they send.
But with the overall volume of InMail rising, you’ll want to make sure the messages you send are actually getting read and responded to—and that goes for recruiters as much as for ordinary members who use LinkedIn for networking. So we dug into the data on the types of messages the most successful recruiters send on LinkedIn to find out which ones actually work. Here’s what we learned.
Simply sending personalized InMails instead of canned templates can boost your response rate by 15%. Unsurprisingly, sending a bulk message is a major factor in driving down response rates. So yes, you can use templates, but take the time to customize them.
I’m a yoga teacher in addition to my marketing role at LinkedIn. A few years back, a recruiter who also happens to be a yoga teacher got in touch and referred to both of our yoga careers. Here’s what it said:
Hi Neha,
I noticed on your LinkedIn profile that you’re a yoga instructor. I was recently certified as a yoga instructor as well, and value the importance of having a passion, outside of work.
I work for ABC company and we have just received funding that will allow us to grow our company substantially. We’re looking for a program manager to join our team. I love your experience in the tech industry, as well as your passion for work-life balance and think you can be a good fit. Would you be interested in a call?
While I wasn’t interested in the role, I took the time to respond and say thanks for reaching out. Mentioning things you have in common helps create an immediate personal connection and can boost your chances of getting a response. Folks who share a group in common with you, for example, are 21% more likely to write back. And referencing a former employer in common increases your chances of getting an InMail response by 27%.
This may seem cliché, but using the word “connect” tends to boost response rates for InMail. The same goes for mentioning that you’d like to follow up—using terms like “talk,” “chat,” “call,” etc. can all improve response rates.
But don’t go much further than that! Among the InMail recruiters send, we’ve actually found that phrases related to scheduling (like specific days of the week), salary, and sharing email addresses, all tend to decrease the likelihood of response. (That said, LinkedIn recently rolled out a video preview feature that lets recruiters add links to company culture videos, for instance, that candidates can watch in-app.)
Many recruiters like to ask candidates for names of other people they know who might be interested in a certain job—and that’s also a mistake. It reinforces the idea that it’s all about the recruiter, not the job candidate. Build credibility and trust first, and you’ll find the candidate more receptive to sharing referrals. Here’s an example:
Subject line: Let’s connect!
I came across your profile and was very impressed with your design background. I’m recruiting for a well-known pharma company in Philadelphia and wanted to reach out and see if you were interested in hearing about an Art Director role. If you are, would love to share more details.
If not, either way, great to connect!
Keep It Short And Sweet
As with email, brevity helps. Make subject lines snappy but short, and keep the overall InMail message between 200 and 500 characters.
Subject line: Connection opportunity
I’m a marketing manager at XX company and I’m eager to learn from people like you, with your background. I came across your LinkedIn profile and your path is very similar to the one I hope to take. I was wondering if you would like to connect and grab coffee sometime?
Believe it or not, timing doesn’t matter. While most people tend to send InMails in the middle of the week to avoid Monday madness, that Friday mental check-out, or the perceived weekend black hole, our data shows that response rates are pretty much even all week long. That’s because people tend to respond when they can, not right when you’ve sent your message.
Refer To Their Profile
Successful InMail typically makes it clear that the sender has taken the time to read the member’s profile. For recruiters, that means acknowledging somebody’s accomplishments and asking about their interests and career goals (this also helps you determine if they’re the right fit)—which is great all-around networking advice to boot.
Never ask for a resume in your first message, and never pitch a position that’s at a lower level than the candidate’s current role. Our data indicates that nearly 70% of members who started a new role in the past 12 months were either promoted or made a lateral move.
Subject line: Exploratory chat with X company’s leadership team
Hope all is well. I’m part of X company’s talent team. I came across your profile and was very impressed with your background. Your experience at ABC company, XYZ company, and background in product management is really solid.
Our product leadership team is very interested in getting to know your background. I was wondering if you might be open to an informational chat. I’d welcome an opportunity to get acquainted and create a platform for you to connect with folks here.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Target People Who Already Want To Hear From You
If you’re a recruiter or hiring manager, this one’s a no-brainer. Candidates who share content from your Career Pages are four times more likely to respond to your InMail than those who haven’t interacted with you. And users who follow your company on LinkedIn are 81% more likely to respond than people who don’t.
People who’ve already signaled interest in hearing about new opportunities by switching on LinkedIn’s Open Candidates feature likewise make for a captive audience; they’re twice as likely to respond to recruiters as the average candidate.
Some of these tricks and habits that lead to the highest response rates aren’t all that surprising. But like email, or really any other form of communication, it’s easy to get longwinded or sound unintentionally spammy when you’re reaching out to people you don’t know. So when you send your next InMail, take a cue from what the most successful recruiters do. And if you’re a recruiter yourself, you’re in luck: Your worst InMail habits shouldn’t even be that hard to break.
Neha Mandhani is a Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn.
A little after 7 p.m on Friday, July 7, a 20-year-old man was shot in Chicago’s Washington Park neighborhood–the first of 41 people shot in the city over the weekend. At 8 p.m., an 18-year-old was shot in Brighton Park, also on city’s South Side. Meanwhile, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood roughly halfway between both shootings, a group of 250 young people were gathering on the street. Their purpose: to spend the night protesting the city’s violence, at a location and time when violence was likely to occur.
The campout, organized by young leaders from the local community development organization The Resurrection Project, was the first of a series of actions planned for Friday nights on some of Chicago’s roughest blocks. The evening started with a peace march through the neighborhood, followed by speakers. As people lined up for food on a grill, they stopped by tables connecting them to community services like affordable housing. As it got dark, people started to play basketball, dance, and gather around a fire pit to talk.
“At around 12:30, we had about 50 people on a street corner in the South Side of Chicago to learn about Dr. Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolence,” says Berto Aguayo, a 22-year-old community organizer for The Resurrection Project. “You have that going on around the fire pit, which is kind of an unusual sight, that late at night.”
“I think a lot of residents–and young people, especially–were fed up with all the violence happening in the community.” [Photo: The Resurrection Project]The organization isn’t primarily focused on reducing violence; it aims to foster community “ownership” or involvement, develops affordable housing and community centers such as schools and senior centers, and helps low-income residents learn how to build wealth. It first started organizing the events, which it calls #IncreaseThePeace, in October 2016, after a 16-year-old girl was killed in front of one of the organization’s offices.
“I think a lot of residents–and young people, especially–were fed up with all the violence happening in the community,” Aguayo says. “So when this shooting happened that took away a 16-year-old girl, I think all of us collectively said ‘Enough.’ One of the things we said was, ‘Why don’t we camp out on the corner where the shooting took place?’ It was one of those things where we convinced ourselves that it wasn’t that crazy of an idea to camp out on one of the hottest blocks in the city.”
“Hot blocks” or “hot corners”–places where gang violence is likely to occur both because of the overall presence of gangs and because violence has happened at those locations in the past–are common in Chicago’s South Side, and some neighborhoods, such as Back of the Yards, have seen a recent increase in violence with automatic weapons. The blame is often laid on young people, and the group wanted both to change the narrative and to empower youth.
“It’s young people beginning to feel that they can be part of something, something productive,” says Raul Raymundo, cofounder and CEO of The Resurrection Project. “Because the image of these inner city tough areas is despair and powerlessness.”
“At around 12:30, we had about 50 people on a street corner in the South Side of Chicago to learn about Dr. Martin Luther King’s philosophy of nonviolence.” [Photo: The Resurrection Project]“I think this gained a lot of traction because it was youth-led,” says Aguayo. “That was one of the biggest things that was different. Too often we talked about community violence, and youth violence, especially, without young people at the table.”
The campouts, which usually last from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., are not isolated events; for a week leading up to each event, volunteers clean up the neighborhood and spend time on the street reporting problems like broken streetlights to the city, and knocking on doors registering voters and inviting neighbors to the peace march and campout. During the event, as people see the action and join in, the group uses it as a way to recruit new leaders for future events. Since the group first began organizing the events in October 2016, there have been seven campouts. Four additional campouts will happen this summer.
One young leader, a 16-year-old with a criminal record, is now volunteering to help the community and “advocating peace,” Aguayo says, after coming to work with the organization three months ago. Fifty young leaders are now involved with the campaign (the organization as a whole has 125 employees).
By playing soccer or breakdancing in the middle of the night, the group is reclaiming the street “when things are most likely to go down, and people are most vulnerable and scared,” he says.
The goal is to continue to grow. “With these campouts happening every week, we really hope to recruit more leaders, so they can help us with our peace efforts in the long term,” he says. “That’s what we hope to do: to make sure that we’re creating young leaders that will be helping us create a culture of nonviolence in our communities.”
The unsweet truth about the chocolate industry is that it relies heavily on child labor. More than 2 million children are forced to work in dangerous conditions on cocoa plantations in West Africa, according to a recent Tulane University report. More than 60% of the world’s cocoa supply comes from that region, farmed by about 2.5 million farmers toiling in countries like Ghana and the Ivory Coast. In some cases, small farmers enlist their own children as free labor to make up the shortfall. In others, children and adults are directly trafficked and enslaved by growers, a fate that by some estimates affects 90,000 people in those two places.
The problem is that while many chocolate makers may say they only want to buy from cocoa farms that use good labor practices, because the companies aren’t buying directly from farmers, there’s a middleman, which leaves the circumstances under which some beans were harvested obscured.
[Photo: courtesy Tony’s Chocolonely]To combat that, many chocolate companies pay cocoa traders extra to ensure their beans as fair trade, an industry term that’s something of a smoke screen: Technically, all it means is that the candy maker pays a little more than average market price to a trader, who in turn diverts the overage back to some of its suppliers that demand a more livable wage. But those traders generally batch yields from many different kinds of farms (the good ones, and bad ones) together. So the beans that end up in those fair-trade advertised bars might really have only been partly from a fair-trade source.
The other tricky part is that paying a little more for beans in the communities that need it isn’t the same thing as investing strategically in how to help those farmers. So it doesn’t necessarily encourage others to join in or fix their own cocoa farms. (Within the U.S. both Fairtrade America, an extension of Fairtrade International, and Fair Trade USA offer formal certification processes with different product seals. Only 3% of the cocoa industry by volume have adopted such social or environmental auditing.)
[Photo: courtesy Tony’s Chocolonely]Since hitting U.S. shelves last fall, a new kind of chocolate bar company is trying a different tactic: Making “100% slave-free” its central selling point. Amsterdam-based Tony’s Chocolonely features a wrapper with the brand’s name spelled out in large, cartoonish lettering. Inside, the chunky squares are divided unevenly to represent the inequality within the industry. Large six-ounce bars cost about $5 and are stocked nationally at World Market and REI stores, regionally at Whole Foods within the midwest, southwest, and pacific northwest, and in a growing patchwork of other grocery stores.
To meet that promise, company leader Henk Jan Beltman, who insists on being called “Chief Chocolate Officer,” had to rethink nearly everything about how traditional supply and production works. Rather than contract with international traders, the company deals directly with independent in-country farming cooperatives, which sometimes receive NGO support. All participants not only share practices to grow better crops, but agree to be monitored, ensuring instances of child labor are spotted and addressed.
[Photo: courtesy Tony’s Chocolonely]To avoid confusion, Tony’s has partnered with Fairtrade International to ensure their practices meet those standards. But the company pays a higher than average price for their beans and doesn’t charge noticeably more at retail. That means slimmer profits, about 3% of the price per bar.
To thrive, the company will have to grow the concept. The company contracted with roughly 2,800 farmers from five cooperatives in 2016—three in the Ivory Coast, and two in Ghana—to secure over 2,000 metric tons of beans, according to its annual report. Beltman says Tony’s, which is a certified B Corporation, clears north of $50 million in revenue and makes up 20% of the market in Holland.
[Photo: courtesy Tony’s Chocolonely]To encourage farmers to invest more in their own efforts, Tony’s also offers five-year contracts for growers, so that the farmers know how much they’re expected to produce, what the future revenue might be, and how to plan ahead. “We want to have the beans from the farmers that we know inside our wrapper,” Beltman says.
On the production side, the co-ops deliver their harvests to one central trader, CocoaSource, which transports them in bulk to one of the industry’s largest chocolate makers, Barry Callebaut, in Belgium. Barry Callebaut processes the chocolate in a dedicated part of the facility to ensure nothing gets mixed up, and then sends it to two dedicated pouring and molding operations—the company’s contracted chocolatiers—to shape and package the product.
[Photo: courtesy Tony’s Chocolonely]Much like Hershey’s, Tony’s Chocolonely is named after its founder, but with an additional play on words to hopefully encourage you to learn the backstory. It was originally started by a Dutch journalist named Teun “Tony” van de Keuken who, after investigating how slave-based beans were mixed up and melted down with everything else, originally decided to make an absurdist documentary about the injustice in 2004. Van de Keuken bought and ate some off-the-shelf bars and then turned himself in to the police, citing his behavior as helping finance criminal operations. Theatric aside, he wasn’t convicted, so he launched a chocolate company to prove there was another way to ethically manufacture.
“It’s the lonely battle of Tony to change the chocolate industry from the inside out,” say Beltman, a former Heineken marketing executive, who became a majority owner in late 2011. At the time, the brand was more of a niche Amsterdam-based product, in part because the logistics of making ethical chocolate really are quite difficult.
[Photo: courtesy Tony’s Chocolonely]Since taking over, Beltman’s concentration on farming collectives to secure more beans has grown revenue 30-fold. At the same time, Tony’s pays about 25% over the average market or “farm gate” price set by each country’s government, with part of the premium going back to things that co-ops can do to improve yield: planting more plants, sourcing fertilizer, teaching proper care and harvest methods. The rest is cash that goes directly to the farmer. (It’s a bulk business, so producers generally make a couple thousand dollars per ton of beans.)
On the sales side, the company contributes 1% of each purchase to a corporate foundation focused on improving childhood education and community awareness about the harms of slavery in the countries where it works. Tony’s is also a part of the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI), an industry group consisting of most major manufacturers that was founded in 2002 to encourage more child protections. The organization does its own awareness and lobbying, although because suggested production changes could affect bean price, not every member may be eager to adopt it.
[Image: courtesy Tony’s Chocolonely]In 2015, Tony’s became the first bar maker to fully adopt ICI’s child labor monitoring and remediation system, which was designed in partnership with Nestle. It employs third-party investigators to visit and independent audit participating farms at least three times a year, both to track violations and spot early warning signs or trouble, like if kids in the area are having trouble reaching school because it’s too rugged of a commute. That’s the sort of problem a local aid group could address before anyone gives up or is pushed toward early manual labor.
Throughout the company’s rise, Beltman has been extremely open about what’s working, and how he plans to grow. “We want to show them that if it works for us and it can work for you,” he says about encouraging others in the chocolate business to be more proactive. “If you do it right, there’s a real dignity in the product that you make.”
You’re looking for a job—which means you’re networking your pants off. Wisely, you’re focusing on contacting recruiters and human-resources folks in particular, and you’re (just as wisely) taking a two-pronged approach: paging through LinkedIn for all it’s worth, and piecing together the email addresses of the contacts you identify, whenever you’re unable to send them an InMail message.
You realize it’s a bit of a crapshoot, since a lot of the time, this means reaching out to people you don’t know, so it’s all the more crucial that you nail your introductory message. But how do you do that? Recruiters and HR professionals receive loads of unsolicited notes from jobseekers, and yours needs to stand out.
So Fast Company asked five recruiters which types of messages—via email and LinkedIn alike—make them reach for “delete”, and which ones they actually respond to. Here’s what they said.
What They Ignore
Questions that five minutes of research can answer. “Are you hiring?” “What jobs should I apply to?” “What’s the best way to apply?” These are all straightforward questions that take mere minutes to answer just by checking out a company’s careers page. If you pose an easy question to a recruiter, it sends the message that you may not be willing to put in the effort needed to perform at their company.
Anything too generic. Don’t fire off an obvious mass email—to a recruiter or anyone. While recruiters may rely on template emails themselves, that’s all the more reason why they’ll spot yours in a second. Sure, you might cry hypocrisy here, but the fact is that if you’re shotgunning canned messages and hoping for a response, don’t expect to get one.
Instead, do a bit of homework on the recruiter you’re contacting. Do you have any shared connections, alumni, or interests? “Personalized, tailored outreach with a warm intro is easier than ever with data at our fingertips,” LinkedIn’s VP for global talent acquisition Brendan Browne points out. That means there’s no excuse for errors. “I received a few recent ones saying, ‘Your experience at Google is impressive’—I never worked at Google.”
Show recruiters you take networking seriously enough to deserve their attention. Also, be sure to check the recruiter’s profile to see if they list the types of roles they recruit for (sales, tech, etc.) so you can target recruiters who actually work in your field.
Anything that makes them look up basic info on you. Just as you need to take the initiative to do your homework on them, don’t make recruiters hunt down easy-to-find data on you. When you reach out, always cover the basics: Say who you are, where you work, and what you’re looking to do next.
Anything too long. Don’t write an essay: Be brief and get to the point. “The great messages that get my attention are short, sweet, convey genuine interest, and clearly connect their background to our hiring needs,” says Duo Security senior recruiter Jasmine Burns. Pro tip: Adding hyperlinks lets you add more content and context without adding length.
Blanket requests for job-search help. Not all recruiters are the same. Agency and executive recruiters represent candidates and help connect them with employers; corporate recruiters focus mainly on hiring for their own organizations. That distinction matters. “I’m a corporate recruiter, not a headhunter,” says Pete Radloff, principal technical recruiter at the media analytics company comScore. “While I’d love to help everyone find a job, asking me to generically ‘help with your job search’ isn’t realistic.”
A clear objective, request, or call to action. Don’t be vague about why you’re connecting. On LinkedIn, it isn’t rude to send a connection request and then immediately follow up with an ask or a pitch as soon as it’s accepted. Same goes for email: Include a call to action in your very first message. Most recruiters are turned off by vague messages that dance around the point they know you want to make. Be clear about why you’re getting in touch and what you hope to gain.
Modesty. Check your ego. If you include awards or accolades on your LinkedIn profile, trust that recruiters will see them. Lead instead with your work and what you offer, otherwise it’ll sound like an oversell. As Lyst’s head of talent Matt Buckland puts it, “It’s important to maintain a calm certainty of your own skills and how they’ll benefit the company.” There’s a balance here, he explains: “Too modest and you risk sounding needy or desperate, too far in the other direction and you may sound arrogant.” So stick to the facts. “Tell us what you did, how you did it, and what you learned. Your skills will become obvious, and you’ll sound measured and confident.”
Messages that are personal, accurate, and specific. Be specific about the type of job you’re interested in (even if you haven’t spotted an opening for that precise role), and why you feel your background and experience would benefit the company. “I prefer [candidates being] very specific on parameters, such as why they’re interested in my company’s stage, location, and scope of job,” says Anna Ott, an HR expert at the incubator hub:raum.
Mentioning outright that you’re excited to work in an organization that’s in the middle of a “restructuring phase” or “growth/scaling,” Ott explains, combined with your “functional skills and/or industry expertise, helps me gauge alignment.” Recruiters get a lot of outreach emails, so the sooner you can get to your value proposition, the more likely your message is to be read.
A measure of polish. Your initial outreach is all a recruiter may have to make an initial assessment of you. That means typos, punctuation, and grammar matter. This shouldn’t really need saying, but recruiters say they encounter basic writing errors all the time. So take a moment to perfect your message. Proofread it twice—or even ask a friend for help—because you probably only have one shot.
On May 1, 2015, veteran Silicon Valley executive Dave Goldberg died of cardiac arrhythmia while exercising during a vacation in Mexico. The news made headlines, in part because he was married to an executive with a profile far higher than his own: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Stories about his passing noted that he was both respected and loved in the tech community, and had served as CEO of online survey platform SurveyMonkey since 2009.
Among the people on vacation with Goldberg and Sandberg was longtime friend Zander Lurie, an executive at GoPro and member of SurveyMonkey’s board. “We were talking about the upcoming board meeting, and big topics that needed to be addressed, and he died three hours later,” says Lurie.
Dave Goldberg [Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg]Goldberg’s death robbed SurveyMonkey of the leader who had done more than any other single person to steer it to success and define its culture, a deeply traumatic event that also had practical repercussions. Lurie helped run the company on an interim basis until HP executive Bill Veghte, a Harvard classmate of Goldberg’s, was appointed CEO in July 2015. But Veghte stepped down after only six months. “There was a strategy that he wanted to pursue that wasn’t fully aligned with the board, and he quickly realized this just wasn’t a long-term place that he wanted to be,” says Lurie. “To his credit, he raised his hand and said, ‘I think we should think about someone else.'” With Veghte’s departure, Lurie again stepped in at SurveyMonkey, this time as CEO, and on a permanent basis.
To this day, Lurie says, the loss of his friend Dave Goldberg causes “totally unpredictable waves of emotion that hit me.” But Lurie quickly adds that he feels “empowered and emboldened by what he built, and what I learned from him, and now taking it to the next level.”
Eighteen months into Lurie’s tenure as CEO, that next level is coming into view. SurveyMonkey is rolling out some changes–including both additional features and revised branding–that are designed to give it space to grow far beyond its loyal base of 40 million-plus customers. A big part of what’s new involves positioning the company’s suite of offerings as a way for businesses to satisfy curiosity about their worlds, rather than just conduct surveys.
How The Monkey Grew
The tale of SurveyMonkey is not a typical Silicon Valley success story. In 2009, it was a decade-old company that Ryan Finley had founded in Madison, Wisconsin, and then relocated to Portland, Oregon. It was doing well, but it was still a tiny operation.
“It had great retention and customer satisfaction and this ridiculous financial profile, just incredibly profitable, and there was no infrastructure,” says Tim Maly, now the company’s COO and CFO. “There were 14 people in the company, 10 of whom were in customer service.” Seeing an opportunity to build something much bigger, private equity companies Spectrum Equity Investors and Bain Capital Ventures acquired the company and hired Goldberg as CEO. (Maly, who had worked with Sandberg at Google, also joined at this time.)
In the years that followed, SurveyMonkey’s new management team turned the potential that the company’s acquirers had seen into reality. Still privately held, SurveyMonkey now has more than 670 employees. In 2016, its revenue was over $200 million, with a profit margin of about 30%. To an unusual degree, the company has bootstrapped itself into the big leagues: While it’s raised over $1.5 billion from investors, that money has gone to owners, employees, and acquisitions activity rather than being required to fund operations.
New SurveyMonkey board member Serena Williams and CEO Zander Lurie [Photo: courtesy of SurveyMonkey]
The Billion-Dollar Opportunity
As much as it’s grown, SurveyMonkey has ambitions to get bigger still. “There’s clearly an opportunity for this to be a multibillion-dollar revenue company,” says Maly. “The market for insights is measured in the tens of billions of dollars, and one of the great advantages we have is a huge installed base of SurveyMonkey users in companies, nonprofits, educational institutions, government institutions, and health care institutions large and small across the U.S. and around the world.”
Actually, SurveyMonkey is so well-established in its field–99% of the Fortune 500 are customers–that if you’re the sort of person who cares about surveys, such as a market researcher, there’s a pretty good chance you already use it. To level up, the company concluded, it needed to reach beyond this natural customer base and get a wider swath of businesspeople interested in what it had to offer, including those who don’t think of themselves as caring about surveys.
To help it figure out how to do that, SurveyMonkey did something that it’s quite adept at: It conducted a survey. When it asked customers about why they conducted surveys, they said it was less about reaching immediate conclusions than fueling curiosity.
“Curiosity is one of the things that CEOs need to have in their companies, and also one of the attributes they look for in leaders,” says senior vice president of marketing communications Bennett Porter. “And that’s really the essence of what people told us they use SurveyMonkey for: not to make a decision, but to have enough data to know they were headed in the right direction.”
Not being sufficiently curious, Lurie argues, is bad business. When a company faces unexpected problems, he says, “Often someone in management or a team in management or a CEO didn’t ask the questions and listen and learn. So we see this big opportunity to help companies turn those voices into actual data.”
That idea steered the company as it worked on a feature update and rebranding that emphasizes the value of corporate curiosity. It features new catchphrases like “Power to the Curious.” It’s less a pivot than the surfacing of something that was there all along. In fact, when Finley was naming his startup almost two decades ago, he chose the “Monkey” part to riff on the idea that apes are innately curious about the world around them.
A SurveyMonkey kitchen, decorated with “Goldie” signage from the company’s previous headquarters. [Photo: Harry McCracken for Fast Company]
Surveys, Streamlined
The new features that SurveyMonkey is introducing into its products are varied, but they’re all in sync with the curiosity theme in that they’re designed to remove the barriers that stand between a company and the relevant data it would like to collect.
For starters, SurveyMonkey is simplifying the process of creating surveys that people will actually be willing to complete. A new feature called SurveyMonkey Genius analyzes surveys and make recommendations that may increase response rate. SurveyMonkey president Tom Hale describes how it works: “What the Genius does is, it looks at your survey, and it takes the wisdom of the crowds, all of the surveys that have ever been run, and say, ‘This is what yields a good conversion range. This is what takes too long. This is when people drop out of the survey.’ We have all that data, and have done machine learning over that data, to give people insights about what works and what doesn’t work.”
SurveyMonkey also reworked the interface that people see when they take a survey for maximum efficiency, reducing the chances that someone will bail before completing one, especially on a smartphone. “It’s much cleaner, it’s much lighter, it’s more fluid, it’s more tablet and mobile oriented,” says Hale.
The company already offered SurveyMonkey Audience, a service that lets a company survey consumers without having to find the consumers themselves. (SurveyMonkey finds people of appropriate demographics–say, Latino women from 18-35–and induces each one to complete the survey by making a small charitable donation.) Now Audience is a self-serve feature built into the core platform, making it easier to use.
SurveyMonkey found its initial success because it was a versatile tool that lets you build just about any sort of survey. But many businesspeople don’t want to build any sort of survey: They want something specific to their particular line of work. With that in mind, the company has been building purpose-specific tools. SurveyMonkey CX, for instance, lets companies measure customer satisfaction using the industry-standard Net Promoter Score system, while SurveyMonkey Engage is for conducting internal employee surveys.
Timing-wise, the decision to play up curiosity lined up with SurveyMonkey’s move from its old Palo Alto headquarters, which was snapped up by Amazon, into a new building to the north in San Mateo, where 200,000 feet of space give the company room to expand. After the difficult process of recovering from Goldberg’s death, “Moving into the building at the tail end of last year was a really good fresh start for people,” says senior VP of human resources Becky Cantieri. “There’s always something invigorating about some new digs when you’re not sitting right on top of the person next to you.”
The new space at One Curiosity Way–it received permission from the city to adopt that address rather than the more mundane “3050 South Delaware Street”–is full of allusions to the value of intellectual curiosity, from framed factoids on the wall (“29% of adults say they’ve been splashed or scalded by hot drinks while dunking cookies”) to a library with real dead-tree books, to a room with knitting supplies, just in case anyone is inspired to learn to knit.
This being Silicon Valley, the conference rooms are named after things that have inspired curiosity over the centuries, such as Pandora’s Box and, inevitably, King Kong.
A rather large Curious George doll at SurveyMonkey, adopted from a toy store owned by an employee’s family. [Photo: Harry McCracken for Fast Company]
The Goldberg Legacy
It’s been more than two years since Dave Goldberg’s death, and, as SurveyMonkey has continued to grow, not everyone currently on staff was part of his era. But in ways both obvious and subtle, his impact persists. One vital ongoing connection to him is the presence of Sheryl Sandberg on SurveyMonkey’s board. “She has such deep caring for not only the people of this company and Dave’s legacy, but also making sure we capitalize on all the opportunities in front of us,” says Lurie.
As for Sandberg, she says in a statement to Fast Company, “Zander is a deeply curious person–and is helping to generate a culture of curiosity at the company. He’s empathetic and results driven. It’s this combination that makes him a great leader.”
Among Sandberg’s contributions as a board member has been introducing Lurie to her friend Serena Williams, who had never been a member of a corporate board, but joined SurveyMonkey’s in May. Lurie says that Williams’s competitiveness, savvy with marketing and social media, and interest in topics such as the gender pay gap will be valuable. “And she’s really curious,” he says. “She comes in here with notes and questions, and she wants to do as well here as she does in everything else she does.”
As an idiosyncratic but heartfelt tribute to Goldberg, the company retroactively named its simian logo/mascot “Goldie” after his nickname, then gave employees Goldie stickers and encouraged them to place them anywhere they wanted around the building. They’re stuck everywhere, from staircases to bookshelves, each one a small rememberance of Goldberg. There’s also a Goldie Speaker Series named after him–Reed Hastings, Arianna Huffington, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and other notables have participated–as well as less explicit tributes, such as Las Vegas-themed art in the game room, a nod to his love of the town.
As for Goldberg’s influence on the way SurveyMonkey is run today, “There are decisions I make that are probably very consistent with the way he would have done it, and things I do differently,” Lurie says. “He passed away in mid-2015, and things change very rapidly in this sector. So I don’t have a frame of mind like, ‘What would Dave do?’ As much as I appreciate what I learned from him.”
“He will always have an inspirational place,” Lurie adds. “But there’s no moping. I think Dave wouldn’t stand for it.”
This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.
The 2016 election laid bare multiple divisions in American society, but one of the biggest is geographical. In major cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, people are generally doing well (if not equally so), while many places situated far from urban business centers aren’t.
Many business leaders I’ve spoken to have been thinking harder lately about how to reverse political, cultural, and socioeconomic polarization. Some say more urban professionals from the coasts should move out to the middle of the country. Others might wish for corporations to relocate to suburbs and rural areas in need of opportunity, rather than continue the opposite trend.
But if businesses really want to create jobs in struggling parts of America—the places unfairly dismissed by some on the coasts as “flyover country”—and bridge political divisions in the process, the solution is simpler: Hire more people outside of big coastal cities. Just don’t ask them to move.
The most innovative companies have already committed to building more diverse workforces, knowing that that’s both an ethical and competitive imperative. Some have set clear hiring targets for demographic representation, occasionally even publishing them in order to keep themselves accountable. Why not take the same approach to geography?
As virtually every politician across the political spectrum will eagerly remind you, residents of places like Youngstown, Ohio, or McDowell County, Virginia, are pissed off—and they have every right to be, because their local economies have been shattered in recent decades while jobs funneled out to big cities or overseas. In one analysis a couple of years ago, 20 metropolitan areas were generating more than half the country’s GDP output, and there’s little to indicate much has changed since.
In fact, the low national unemployment rate of 4.9% masks a deeper problem: Many people who would otherwise be available for work have completely opted out of the labor market. The “official” unemployment rate is higher in some places and lower in others, but in all cases it excludes those who haven’t actively sought work in the past four weeks. What’s more, people are dropping out of the labor force or retiring despite a spike in health care jobs, many of which can be done from anywhere by just about anyone.
One explanation, as PBS contributor Paul Solman points out, is that those roles are typically “quite demanding, both emotionally and physically” and often constitute “low-end, low-pay” work. The same is true for many who do manage to stay put in the “employed” column by picking up part-time, low-pay jobs with few or no significant benefits.
It’s not that good work doesn’t exist: Just ask any hiring manager how hard it is to fill an open role. There are lots of jobs to be had, just not where many people actually live, particularly outside a handful of major metro areas. For years, even the best-intentioned tech companies have cited a bogus “pipeline problem,” claiming that there just aren’t enough qualified female engineers or African-American developers out there for them to hire. That’s never been the case—it’s just that businesses haven’t always known where to look, or looked hard enough.
Much the same goes for geography. If they’re willing to actually look, companies can locate top talent well outside the same crowded cities where they keep desperately hunting within limited, competitive local pools. Some top knowledge workers actually want to leave major hubs for smaller towns and rural areas where their dollars will go further—they just haven’t found employers that will let them. Maybe that means a Seattle company recruiting new, remote hires in small cities undergoing surprising tech booms, like tiny Bozeman, Montana. Or maybe it just means letting a top performer leave headquarters to keep doing her job remotely from someplace else.
When companies make even small shifts toward more distributed workforces, the outsize impact can be surprising. Thanks to the well-known “multiplier effect,” for every job you fill in (let’s say) Detroit, you can actually create up to 4.3 jobs altogether: The person you hire will spend the money she earns locally, creating work for lawyers, schoolteachers, dentists, retail staff, and restaurant workers. It’s the reverse for every designer and developer you ask to move from someplace else to work with you in your New York office; you’ve just taken her talent and spending out of another city that’s now that much less likely to flourish in the future.
Yes, It Requires Going Remote
None of this can be accomplished without embracing remote work. While major employers, like IBM most recently, have ended long-standing remote-work policies, employees already see flexible arrangements as the inevitable future of their working lives. What’s more, offering more remote positions can help companies meet their diversity goals; women are especially likely to cite flexibility as a top employment priority.
Requiring people to come to a set location at fixed hours is a remnant of the Industrial Age, and it’s time to let it go. The COO of one growing company explained in Fast Company last month how he’s helped assemble a workforce from 19 employees back in 2006 to over 400 today—all of whom are remote. It can be done. After all, outside of big cities, the talent you seek isn’t concentrated enough to fill an office tower. There’s no single magic town filled with talented web developers you can hire in one lightning recruiting session.
Instead, companies need to leverage all the technological advances of recent years to erase what researcher Steve King has called the “paradox of place,” whereby “even though the internet and connective technologies have made working remotely easier than ever, people and companies are increasingly clustering together in fewer locations, mostly in cities.” At my company, Upwork, our own team is distributed. Over the last year, we’ve had 250 remote team members in the U.S. spread across 209 cities in 38 states, and by 2020, we plan to increase that number by at least 40%.
I call on business leaders to join me in setting targets of their own. Commit to hiring your next team member in a smaller city, small town, or rural area. Then commit to doing this as often as possible for the next few years until it becomes second nature.
You’ll find there’s a lot of talent out there, including in places you haven’t thought to look. There are many people who’d welcome the higher rates a tech company could pay. Don’t be cheap, either: Offer San Francisco or New York rates, which won’t just feel generous to someone living in a less-expensive part of the country but can actually help jump-start those areas’ economies. You’ll be rewarded with great loyalty. You’ll gain access to new talent, new insights, and the increased creativity that greater diversity brings.
What’s more, you’ll be helping to distribute opportunity and—maybe—a small, badly needed measure of understanding.
For the past few decades, it’s been best known as Apple’s ad agency. The partnership between the Cupertino tech giant and TBWA\Media Arts Lab has been among the tightest ever between an agency and a brand. Read any Steve Jobs biography and you’re sure to find TBWA\MAL’s creative chairman Lee Clow.
A few years ago, the agency launched a separate social impact division called MAL\For Good that focused exclusively on marketing and advertising with a goal of making the world a better place. It’s most high-profile work won gold at Cannes Lions in 2015 for Conservation International’s “Nature Is Speaking” campaign, and the agency helped Laurene Powell Jobs launch the non-profit XQ Super School. Other campaigns include work for Chicago Cred, a job-training and anti-violence organization founded by former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, environmental law organization Earth Justice, Best Friends animal rescue, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and for-profit philanthropic organization The Emerson Collective. The agency is also creating content for the XQ Super School Live show, that will air on CBS, ABC, NBC, and FOX on September 8.
But now, aligning with a rising trend in both consumer culture and marketing research, MAL\For Good is expanding its scope beyond clients with a dot-org, and they’re aiming to help brands of all types use their marketing muscle to do some good while boosting their bottom line. While the agency says it wants to use its communication skills to help make the world better, recent studies suggest it’s also good for business.
A 2016 study by Edelman found 80% of global consumers agree that businesses must play a role in addressing societal issues. Unilever reported in 2016 that 33% of consumers are now choosing to buy from brands they believe are doing social or environmental good. Deloitte reported that 87% of millennials believe that business success should be based on more than just profit.
Wieden+Kennedy Portland and Nike Foundation alum Julia Plowman was named MAL\For Good’s managing director in February, joining global creative president Duncan Milner who moved over in October 2016 after leading the creative team at TBWA\MAL since 2000. Right now, MAL\For Good has 28 employees and is growing with its own offices on the TBWA\Chiat\Day campus. It’s also converting a monster tour bus that Mitt Romney used during his presidential campaign into the MAL\For Good HQ, a social impact incubator on wheels, connecting clients with creative communities.
“We’re growing because more and more brands are investing in social impact,” says Plowman. “We’re here to help them do it right, do it authentically. And that takes strategy, planning, and creativity. You can’t just knock-off authentic social purpose ideas; you have to build them deliberately and diligently. That takes real investment. And that’s exactly what we specialize in.”
After three years of helping a variety of organizations, Plowman says the time is right to expand the social impact agency’s work. Milner adds to that, saying it just makes sense as more brands put their values into how they do business. “When we started we were really focused on Laurene [Jobs] and Emerson Collective’s needs, so we did that for a while,” Milner says. “But now we want to look past that into the future. There’s a desire for us to grow and build on that work.”
It’s an interesting move, to create an entire agency with this focus, given how much work traditional agencies are already doing in this space. State Street’s “Fearless Girl” by McCann New York being the most high-profile example, but other award-winning work this year includes Ogilvy Brazil’s “Strong Girls” for Nestle, and Nomades Mexico City’s gender violence awareness campaign for Tecate. Or Nike’s “Equality” work from Wieden+Kennedy. And that’s just around gender issues and inequality.
The agency says the growth in consumer sentiment around social impact and sustainability is strong enough that it represents an entire new shift in marketing and advertising, much like how digital and then social media impacted the ad business. Before it became commonplace, there were specialists–and MAL\For Good sees itself as the specialist for social impact. The agency has worked recently with Starbucks and Toms.
“This is the forefront of a new focus–it’s important to show brands how they can do it,” says Plowman. “Marketing is changing. It’s becoming deeper, more complex, and more transparent. The work we do helps brands to communicate their values and beliefs outwardly, but also internally to employees. Ultimately, our work is about emotionally connecting a brand with its different audiences deeply.”
The key for any brand looking to do more with its marketing budget is to look at it as a long-term investment. Social impact is not a gimmick.
“Are you really in this or not? Your toe is dipped in but you’re not committing,” says Plowman. “You can’t change public schools, help health care or poverty with a one-off. These are long-term commitments.”
The first questions to ask when incorporating social impact with a brand are: what’s important to the brand, and what’s important to its audience? The Venn diagram between the two is a good place to start in finding where that brand can make the best, most effective impact.
“For me it’s always been about trying to find the truth, in the product, the opportunity, and work outwards from that truth,” says Milner. “It comes back to identifying that truth, what is authentic–let’s talk about that. Once you find that, and the audience it will connect with, then you have a path to follow.”
We may live in a digital world, but soft skills like communication, problem solving, collaboration, and empathy are becoming more valued than technology, says Paul Roehrig, chief strategy officer for Cognizant Digital Business, a business and technology service provider.
“People skills are more and more important in an era where we have powerful and pervasive technology,” he says. “It sounds counterintuitive, but to beat the bot, you need to be more human.”
When evaluating their hiring plans for 2017, 62% of employers rate soft skills as very important, according to CareerBuilder. But a recent survey by theWall Street Journal found that 89% of executives are having a difficult time finding people with these qualities.
Some blame technology and the emphasis on STEM for the demise of things like communication, but Roehrig, coauthor of What To Do When Machines Do Everything: How to Get Ahead in a World of AI, Algorithms, Bots, and Big Data, believes those skills haven’t diminished; they’re simply needed in larger quantities now. “As machines do more routinized and lower-value-add work, more people are needed to work in context of what automation and AI cannot do,” he says.
If you haven’t upped your emphasis on soft skills, maybe it’s time to rethink your workplace strategy. Teaching employees soft skills boosts productivity and retention by 12%, delivering a 256% return on investment, according to a study from the University of Michigan. Here are four changes to make in your organization that will help employees develop the skills you need to succeed:
For example, custom software creator Menlo Innovations pairs people to work on a project, then rotates them for the next project. “Moving people around helps people adapt and interact better with others, and it gets them out of their comfort zones,” she says.
2. Reward Employees Who Exhibit Soft Skills
Reinforce your values with the people you promote to leadership, insisting on behaviors such as curiosity and relationship building from managers, says Sharkey. “Leaders must act as coaches and developers of their folks so they are, in fact, building collaborative relationships along with those who work with them,” she says.
Make an effort to celebrate and acknowledge human-centric behaviors, says Roehrig. “Use performance reviews as a time to check in,” he says. “Acknowledge behavior you value, such as creativity, curiosity, or analytical thinking.”
3. Strive To Create A Diverse Workforce
Hiring people with other perspectives and backgrounds helps employees build empathy. Matthew Gonnering, CEO of the digital asset management firm Widen, takes a different approach by hiring people with developmental disabilities, such as Down Syndrome and cerebral palsy.
“Empathy increases self-awareness, because the clarity we see in another person’s perspective is often a blind spot in our own worldview,” he says. “In essence, empathy is the soft skill that gives our hard skills purpose. We can code a new product, but for whom? And why? Practicing empathy reminds us to ask those questions.”
Widen’s employees with disabilities not only complete their daily tasks; they create value that goes beyond occupational responsibilities, says Gonnering. “Most notably, they initiate conversations about topics they are passionate about, spread a contagious positive attitude, and demonstrate an appreciation for details,” he says.
For example, Andrew (who is in charge of the company’s indoor plants and popcorn service) often shares his experiences as a Special Olympics coach and player. “He is a fountain of knowledge on horticulture, and before you know it, you’re buying dragon sculptures from his art portfolio,” says Gonnering. “These interactions unlock our highest potential by teaching us to think empathetically, hold our attitudes to a higher standard, and find the lightness in situations that would normally cause stress.”
4. Start A Mentoring Program
If a new employee is lacking in a certain soft skills, pair him or her with a mentor who possesses those skills, suggests Tim Elmore, president of the leadership training and development organization Growing Leaders.
“Mentoring gives younger professionals the opportunity to talk candidly and learn from someone older and more experienced, in a relaxed environment,” he says. “Start small, and with a commonly neglected soft skill.”
For example, making a positive first impression is easy, but creating a lasting impression is much more difficult, says Elmore. “This is a matter of social intelligence—a soft skill business leaders often report is missing in their young team members,” he says. “They’ve succeeded in landing the job, but once they settle into it, they fail to uphold that same level of professionalism and maturity by gossiping about colleagues, showing and displaying their general lack of job etiquette.”
Select a group of influential workplace veterans who can meet with your young professionals on a weekly basis, Elmore suggests. “Discuss one topic each week, igniting conversation on social intelligence,” he says. “Some potential ideas are social cognition, self-presentation, and influence.”
Then let mentees become mentors. “Mentoring becomes a methodical part of your onboarding process, and young employees feel like a valued and needed member of the team,” says Elmore.
Soft skills are more important than you think, says Sharkey. “If you allow people to treat others with disrespect, then your culture becomes highly toxic,” she says. “Today, companies put value statements on the wall, but do they live them? If the bottom line is really profit—doing anything to make that profit—you will ultimately lose customers, talent, and your reputation in the marketplace.”
If you’re a Verizon customer, you expect the best considering those monthly bills. We live on our phones, keeping important contacts, financial info, and maybe even some photos you don’t want the world to see on our trusty devices.
So, when it was revealed last week that Verizon left PINs, names, addresses, and the account info from millions of customers out in the open for anyone to download, you can be forgiven if you thought, “WTF?”
What might make you even more mad: It wasn’t hackers behind the breach. It was good old human error—and a crisis many companies are facing: a dearth of tech workers with cybersecurity chops and the dizzying use of third-party contractors.
Verizon put the number of customers exposed at 6 million but the Mountain View security firm UpGuard, which discovered the exposed data on a publicly accessible Amazon cloud storage account, said it was as many as 14 million—and that it took the telecommunications giant more than a week to fix the problem.
“The long duration of time between the initial June 13th notification to Verizon by UpGuard of this data exposure, and the ultimate closure of the breach on June 22nd, is troubling,” UpGuard officials posted on their blog.
Verizon said no one accessed the exposed data in that time. “There has been no loss or theft of Verizon or Verizon customer information,” Verizon said in a statement.
The Verizon debacle joins a lengthy list of incidents where companies and government agencies have accidentally published people’s confidential information, a problem that experts say may be getting harder to fix as more companies their storage to the cloud.
Chris Vickery, director of cyber-risk research at UpGuard, found the Verizon data trove sitting in a critical data repository managed by a third vendor based in Israel. The repository had been misconfigured—a human error—leaving it unprotected.
Thanks to a chronic shortage of skilled tech workers, it’s hard to find employees with the necessary skills and training to consistently avoid such mistakes, Vickery says. Tech workers setting up cloud systems or in-house servers can misunderstand the settings on the software they’re setting up, or cut corners to make data more easily accessible within the organization.
“If you have a large amount of people using any product to store data, and that product allows for public access, then a certain percentage of people for whatever reason are going to turn on those public access settings,” he says. “It’s just the laws of statistics—you have sufficient number, somebody’s gonna do it.”
Modern cloud systems from vendors like Amazon and Google usually provide a variety of security options to suit customer needs.
“At least we know at the infrastructure level, often there are very rigorous procedures and policies in place,” says Mark Testoni, president of SAP National Security Services.
He echoes Vickery’s contention that the problem is with techies who are not properly trained in cloud security. The trouble is, with many cloud systems designed to be easy to use and set up, workers who haven’t received proper training can find themselves in over their heads, put in charge of systems they haven’t had the time or guidance to learn.
“The bar for entry is lowered, so there’s a lot of situations where people are put in unfair roles that they weren’t necessarily trained or hired for,” Vickery says.
Even software developers often lack formal security training, says Kayne McGladrey, director of information security services at Boulder, Colorado security consulting firm Integral Partners. And even those who do can face pressure to roll code out quickly from employers impatient to see new features and fixes in production, he says.
“Anything that reduces that time to value is pushed aside—and often, that’s security,” says McGladrey, who regularly gives talks on security issues for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, an industry group.
Training also doesn’t help protect against malicious employees who might deliberately leak data, of course, and it may be only of limited value if workers are victims of deception, like targeted phishing attacks. Some research has found that anti-phishing training is only of limited effectiveness, meaning a determined attacker can still trick employees into sending sensitive data where it doesn’t belong.
One potential solution is security software that can detect when information moves to unusual places or servers are configured in overly permissive ways. Vickery says UpGuard offers tools that would catch if a server were set to be publicly accessible.
Security companies are pouring serious money into that kind of software, but even that often requires someone to be monitoring for alerts of suspicious behavior. Companies generally aren’t willing to immediately block anything that gets flagged out of fear of false positives impeding productivity, but that means they need to be willing to expend the resources to have someone watching for security alerts.
“You don’t just provide the product, a magical box that you put in your building and it goes beep, and provided it goes beep, everything’s working,” McGladrey says.
Some help may ultimately come from insurers, as cyber-risk policies become more prevalent in business, Vickery says. If insurance companies drop clients who don’t follow security guidelines or refuse to pay out when they incur breaches, those guidelines are likely to be taken more seriously.
“People will do the minimum amount required to get the insurance and make sure their claim is not denied by the insurance company when they have a disaster,” Vickery says. “The insurance companies are going to be the regulators.”
Our team of dogged and dedicated reporters and editors spend months culling research on the world’s top companies. But this year—for the first time ever—you can submit your own organization to become a 2018 Most Innovative Company.
Here’s how you can put together the best possible entry for our team of Most Innovative Companies editors. (And don’t forget to download our MIC special edition and how-to guide here).
Identify Your Innovation Bucket Fast Company takes an expansive view of what constitutes innovation: Product innovation: We’re happy to celebrate a successful new entrant in the market that serves a previously unmet need, such as new lifesaving drugs from Gilead Sciences or Casper’s mattresses and bedding. Creative innovation: We gave the nod to the ad agency 72andSunny for breaking through the clutter with great work in a variety of media for clients ranging from Starbucks to Activision to Google. Sometimes, of course, an innovation hits several of these notes or belongs in a category we haven’t mentioned here. Business-model innovation:Warby Parker introduced try-before-you-buy to eyewear and has led the way in marrying real-world retail with e-commerce.
Focus On A Project Tell us about a particular initiative. It’s not enough merely to state that your product or strategy is innovative. The key is to isolate the novelty in what you’re doing and delineate how and why it’s different from what’s come before.
Be Concise, Yet Descriptive We are not accepting attachments of any kind, including presentation decks or visuals. The more detail you can provide in the space allotted, the greater the case can be made for your innovation. What makes you most excited when you think about what you’ve developed? Which of your features are your customers are buzzing about, either in communicating back to you or among themselves?
Share Your Completed Work If you’re an architecture firm, finished buildings will garner more attention than those in the planning stage. If you’re a pharmaceutical company, an FDA-approved drug matters more than a promising clinical trial. In-progress ideas will certainly be considered, but completing the work counts.
Choose Your Strategic Weapon Technology is transforming every aspect of our world. How are you using it to get a leg up on competitors? Or perhaps good design is your strategic instrument to best rivals. How have you designed a more engaging user experience to succeed? Similarly, sustainability or “corporate responsibility” can be powerful tools to use business as a force for good. How are you leading the way and driving the debate around workplace culture or being a steward of the earth’s resources?
Make It Timely Most Innovative Companies is not a lifetime achievement award. You need to cite a fresh innovation. That said, we certainly understand that not every company happens to have its achievements and the impact of those achievements sync up within the same calendar year. Ground your case in something from this year. The innovation you’re spotlighting could have happened in 2015 or even 2012, but perhaps this is the year we really saw it break through. Or perhaps you made crucial enhancements to the major initiative you introduced last year that elevated it to a new level of success.
Consider The Impact And Innovation We judge companies on a sliding scale of impact and innovation. Some companies’ innovations are so bold that they don’t need to show massive impact just yet. In our 2017 edition, we included admittedly early-stage companies such as Simplify Networks and Cheddar because we felt that the problems they were solving—access to wireless data and making financial news more accessible to younger audiences—were important. They both hit upon issues that were very much relevant in the culture, and given their novel approaches, we moved ahead. In other instances, it’s the result of previous efforts that wins the day, such as TaskRabbit achieving profitability in a market (on-demand services) where profitability has proved elusive.
Connect The Dots First, we want to see how your business has been positively affected by the innovation. You need to show how your company has generated more revenue and profit than it would have without introducing this initiative. Remember: Be specific! Beyond that, you improve your case if you show how your innovations are impacting your industry. Are other companies adopting aspects of your model to sell themselves? (e.g., “We’re the Warby Parker of shoes.”) Did Facebook or Google launch a feature to compete against you? Similarly, what kind of larger societal impact can you point to as evidence of your business and its innovations resonating widely? For example, in the past several years, Uber and GoFundMe first emerged as candidates for MIC when we noticed people using the company name as a verb and noun, symbolizing these services being woven into cultural conversation. Is everyone talking about artificial intelligence, mindfulness, or e-sports because of what your company is doing?
Frame Your Story In A Larger Context It’s important to consider innovation in the larger context of the year’s events. We love a good story and a surprising, perhaps unsung, contributor that’s shaping the future. As cybersecurity concerns have grown in society, it’s driven our attention to companies seeking to ameliorate that anxiety. Silent Circle, which makes the secure Blackphone, and Open Whisper Systems, which developed the secure messaging service Signal, have been featured as part of MIC in the past several years for that very reason. Perhaps the big story is merely what’s happening in your industry. If biocomputing is transforming health care, let’s say, how is your company participating in and, ideally, leading that movement?
Less Is More We know this is counterintuitive, but trust us: Focus on the thing that best reflects how your company approaches innovation rather than rattling off a laundry list of initiatives. If you feel compelled to include everything you did this year, you may weaken the case for the most notable things you achieved. Bring your biggest ideas to life.
Remember, submissions close Sept. 7. If you need more convincing, check out our top 5 reasons to enter Most Innovative Companies here!
After 10 years of building our annual most Most Innovative Companies lists by scouring the globe to identify companies on the cutting edge of their industries, we have decided to launch our first-ever submission form for our Top 10 lists by sector so that organizations can get their innovations in front of Fast Company editors.
True innovation is hard, and rare. It requires diligence and a dedication to risk-taking, to speed-of-action, to resilience. But fortunately, in the decade since our first Most Innovative Companies coverage, the appreciation for true innovation has grown. All around the globe, businesses big and small recognize that standing still is no longer an option, and that they must move if they want to remain relevant.
At Fast Company, we have moved with them, our coverage now spanning dozens of industry-, theme-, and country-specific lists. What defines a “fast company” is always evolving. Meanwhile, the threshold for what is special enough to merit attention has become ever more demanding. With the breadth of innovation expanding, our research process has been expanding as well—tapping into new sources, new data sets; identifying new patterns.
So we have instituted an application process for organizations that wish to be considered for Most Innovative Companies designation. While the ultimate decision and discretion will continue to reside with our editorial team, this will widen the candidate pool to reflect today’s expanding innovation efforts across the business landscape.
Here’s why you should apply to our first submission form ever:
Brand Exposure Each of our industry Top 10 lists will be featured in the magazine (a monthly readership of 725,000), and will launch here on fastcompany.com (more than 12 million monthly unique visitors and more than 40 million page views.)
Recognition As part of this community of innovators, there is year-round recognition of your organization’s achievements. Executives will be considered for speaking opportunities at Fast Company events and exclusive invitations to influencer-only parties and networking. There could even be opportunities to host Fast Company influencers at your innovative space.
Credibility If you are named to an industry list, your company will receive a verified company page on FastCompany.com that we will invite you to keep us up to date on. It includes a brief history of your company, as well as important statistics and milestones.
Attract And Keep Talent Public recognition of the team that makes your organization a Most Innovative Company helps you recruit and retain top talent.
Competitive Advantage And Fundraising
There’s a halo effect that comes with being named to the Most Innovative Companies list—particularly with fundraising and M&A. In addition, the public recognition of being on one of our industry lists can be a boost for your product sales and marketing.
Fast Company‘s annual survey of the world of innovation has become the premier chronicle of the businesses inventing the future today. We hope you’ll submit your company today.
When Syrian refugees leave their camps, they pack three items: food, water, and light.
The first two generally come in the form of packages from the United Nation’s World Food Program or other nonprofit organizations. The latter, however, traditionally came in the form of kerosene lamps, which are less than ideal. In fact, they’re often dangerous. According to the Word Health Organization, roughly 1.5 million people a year die from toxic kerosene fumes. In India, where the impoverished population heavily depends on kerosene, the lamps cause over 30,000 yearly house fires. In South Africa, 200,000 people are injured or lose property due to kerosene-related fires. Not to mention, kerosene users spend 30% of their income buying it.
“They can save that money for food, education, building homes,” explains Alice Min Soo Chun, founder and CEO of Solight Design, who created a unique alternative: a slim solar lantern.
The SolarPuff is a two-ounce, flat-pack solar lamp which quickly expands into a 4.5-inch cube. The lantern can last eight hours and easily recharges with clear sunlight. It provides enough light for refugees or people in impoverished areas to perform tasks at night, without instigating any dangerous fires or needing batteries. There are even different settings (high or low), and a blinking option to scare off wild animals or signal distress.
[Photo: courtesy of Solight Design]To some degree, we likely take light for granted, but 1.06 billion people have no access to electricity or clean sustainable lighting, according to the World Bank.
Chun explains how many Syrian refugees—often starving and sick—arrive by boat in the middle of night, at times when they cannot see where to land or how to safely disembark. They are handed lights by NGO volunteers to navigate the waters so they don’t crash into rocks. From there, they might need to walk up to 30 miles in the dark to arrive at a camp, where there are no lights. (Refugees without access to kerosene lamps often find themselves burning plastic trash, “which is even more toxic,” notes Chun). SolarPuff brightens the trek—and their new life.
“A lot of times the kids are suffering from trauma and they’re frightened, but when they’re handed the light, they perk up.” The popping element of the design, she explains, “gives them a sense of wonder.”
The SolarPuff has proven to be extremely useful in reducing camp crime, such as child kidnappings or sex trafficking. The small, nearly weightless design makes it easy to carry around (versus many other lamps, which are traditionally bulky and heavy.) Women, for example, use it go to the bathroom at night. On average in the past year, there was a 20% decrease in rape and sexual assault in camps, says Chun, since predators traditionally depend on darkness to execute their attacks. “With light, they can be identified,” says Chun.
With its sleek and cute size, Chun’s invention is also a best seller at design stores and museum shops around the country—making it simultaneously charitable and consumer-friendly. Ten percent of SolarPuff’s profits benefit refugees and people living in developing regions. As of July, Chun negotiated distribution for SolarPuffs in 25 countries and works with more than a dozen NGOs, including a refugee camp in Greece, an orphanage in Greece, and an organization helping stop sex traffickers in Nepal.
With the presence of light, refugee camps see s sharp decline in sexual assault, kidnappings and crime. [Photo: courtesy of Solight Design]
“It’s An Environmental Issue”
Chun has long since harbored philanthropist leanings. After studying architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, she started her own community outreach program for college students to design public projects in underprivileged neighborhoods. She knocked on local councilmen’s doors to collect money for park benches, playground planters, and community picnic areas.
That was not only the start of a lifelong passion for social good, but also of using the elements of design for effective problem-solving.
A love of design was instilled in Chun from a young age. She immigrated from Korea when she was just 4 years old. Her father was an architect and her mother was an artist who taught her how to sew. “That’s where the fascination with thin materials comes from,” explains Chun.
As a child, she learned origami, the art of paper folding, which would further propel an interest in design and serve her later in life. “It was always a hobby, but also inspiring because a blank page has the most potential to be anything, it just takes determined will,” says Chun of the craft.
Chun ultimately went on to become a professor of design and material culture at Parsons the New School for Design. Her inspiration for the SolarPuff wasn’t linear though, but rather a mishmash of events melded together.
One standout was her son being born with asthma, a diagnosis that plagues 25% of children in Manhattan—50% higher than the rest of the country, reports the CDC.
“It’s an environmental issue,” she says of asthma’s connection to air pollution from energy consumption. Chun cite studies of how humans gene pools are too early for such rapid change, which propelled her to take action in her own way. “A worried mom does better research than the FBI,” she says of how she delved into energy studies in an effort to contribute—in some way—to what she considers alarming environmental issues.
Chun’s research led her to solar panels (“solar energy is the most effective and efficient way of harnessing free energy,” she stresses), and because she was a material specialist while teaching at Columbia University, she was particularly interested in “trending” materials. “They’re getting thinner, faster, lighter, and smarter,” she said.
At an orphanage in Haiti, children learn and do their homework by SolarPuff’s light. [Photo: courtesy of Solight Design]
Putting Design To Good Use
Armed with her new knowledge, Chun began experimenting with solar panels, but with no clear direction where it would take her. One specific incident changed that: the 2010 Haiti earthquake that left 230,000 dead and 55,000 displaced.
Upon learning of the devastating news, Chun engaged her graduate students at Columbia University, where she served as adjunct assistant professor of architecture, in helping her shape a solar project to serve individuals in crisis. She turned her classroom into an innovation studio.
At first, the group came up with an inflatable solar light with a mouth nuzzle. The idea behind the prototype was that one could blow the item up, pop in a light, and see in the dark.
It was a start, but there were some issues. For one, the mouthpiece meant it would not be hygienic for groups of people to share in crowded areas. Also, the professor thought it did not meet her strict aesthetic standards.
“It didn’t really look like a lantern or a nice object that could sit on a table with dignity,” she says. “They were ugly, first ones are always ugly.”
Chun passionately holds that design matters in all areas of life. With help from her students, she continued to redesign the project, with various models and accessories, until she finally went back to her roots.
“I kept redesigning it until I used the principles of origami,” she explained of her childhood hobby’s surprising use.
Solight Design’s SolarPuff lanterns appeal to the design and environmentally conscious consumers while also providing lights to those in need. [Photo: courtesy of Solight Design]The inventor eventually settled on a pop-up model that neatly folded into 2.5 inches, thereby allowing up to 120 units to fit into a box. That alone, she says, is enormously helpful when it comes to delivering goods to large-scale refugee camps.
“You save enormous amounts of money for shipping, and you save space,” says Chun. For deliveries to Africa, for example, she notes how several competitors can’t scale because shipping costs are greater than the item’s cost itself.
With her students, Chun eventually founded a design-centric nonprofit called Studio Unite (which now receives 10% of every retail SolarPuff sold) that works in conjunction with her company, which she named Solight Design. In 2011, she began by field-testing her prototype in Haiti for a few years. Over 500 hand-made prototypes were sent to Haitian farmers in the central plains. Most of the recipients were women with children.
“When I first gave them the SolarPuffs, they started to sing and dance, saying this was a ‘gift from God,'” she says. “That’s when I knew I had to make this accessible to everyone.”
Despite the emotional significance she witnessed, Chun readily admits she wasn’t quite prepared for the rigors of a startup. She had been accustomed to the world of academia, with no real experience in running, let alone starting, a business.
“It’s very difficult being a single mom with three jobs,” she reflects, “and I didn’t know anything about being an entrepreneur… There were many times I could have given up but I didn’t because of my son.”
Solight Design gives 10% of SolarPuff’s sales goes to supplying lights throughout the world through NGO partners. [Photo: courtesy of Solight Design]
A Brighter, Cleaner Future
In 2015, after her manufacturable SolarPuff was ready for market, Chun started a Kickstarter campaign. The product’s mission statement to provide lights to those in need struck a chord: She raised $500,000 in 30 days, with over 6,800 backers.
There was a small profit the first year of her established company, but the startup only broke even in its second. She credits her success to her university background, which, above all else, taught her the importance of due diligence: “I research, research, research.”
What her former profession did not teach her though was the importance of business relationships—creating them as well as fostering them. By 2017, Solight Design established relationships with the United Nations, over two dozen countries, as well as 200 retail stores across the country that now carry the SolarPuff. You can find the solar cube in a Whole Foods market or in the MOMA design store, where it’s a bestseller. For NGOs and nonprofits, the Solar Puff is sold wholesale or in some cases, subsidized or free of charge.
Solight Design now employs 15 people part time and four full time. The plan is to expand in the coming year by pitching to investors and preparing for a Series A funding, as Chun has rather ambitious plans in the works. There’s more than just lanterns on the horizon.
“The real vision is I want to get everybody off the grid and stop using fossil fuels,” she says. To that end, the next project will be a home lighting system called XLight, which will have it’s own patented built-in battery phone charger.
As for the SolarPuff, imagine it in a much bigger, grander format: “Eventually I want to do a SolarPuff house that’s completely self-sustaining and off the grid and you’ll be able to sell your energy back to the grid.”
Till then, Chun continues to expand her lantern’s outreach, and even keeps tabs on the many refugees depending on her invention. She cites one young, female Yazidi refugee who arrived at a camp in Greece suffering from burns and hypothermia. After three months of healing at the camp, upon which she befriended Chun, the teen ultimately packed up her scarce belongings to find a more permanent home across European borders.
Chun didn’t hear from her in eight months. Finally, she received a note from her young friend. The refugee had arrived in Germany with only one belonging: her SolarPuff, which she photographed sitting on her new kitchen table.
“She made it there all by herself,” says Chun, “[With light], people are safer, they’re happier. It’s a symbol of hope.”
Here’s an idea: Think about ideas. Where do they come from? Is an idea the same thing as inspiration? How do you even get an idea?
Filmmaker Andrew Norton explores this endless abyss of abstraction in his short Where Do Ideas Come From? Visuals and text anchor voice-overs from creatives like author Susan Orlean, artist Chuck Close, and director David Lynch, thinking out loud about the idea of ideas. Below are some of the best nuggets of knowledge, but the whole video is definitely worth a watch.
David Lynch, director: “I get ideas in fragments. It’s as if in the other room there’s a puzzle–all the pieces are together. But in my room, they just flip one piece at a time into me.”
Robert Krulwich, co-host of Radiolab: “I don’t think that inspiration is a starting point. Maybe I’m a little suspicious of the idea. Like, in the beginning, there was nothing and then there was light. I don’t think I’ve had that experience. And for other people who said that they’ve had that experience I’m not sure I believe them. The thing that gets you going feels like an itch to me. It’s itch, wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder, got it! I didn’t hear inspiration in there.”
Chuck Close, artist: “I always said inspiration is for amateurs–the rest of us just show up and get to work. Every great idea came out of work. Everything. If you sit around and wait for a bolt of lightning to hit you in the skull, you may never get a good idea.”
Tracy Clayton, co-host of Another Round: “I think for me it’s mostly lightning bolts. I think that my brain is just such a vast landscape of just completely random stuff–unless it, like, grabs my attention, I’ll never see it. I can brainstorm and I can outline and I can sort of ready the room for the idea to make its entrance but until the idea is ready to reveal itself, I’ll just be sitting there.”
Ray Barbee, professional skateboarder: “Everything that has driven me to do what I’m doing is because I’ve seen other people do it. Most people start off by mimicking something but then it turns into their own thing because they don’t really have the ability to mimic it precisely. But what’s great about that approach is it can lead to originality from copying. Like, we just have our own fingerprint. And so in the process, it turns into a different idea.”
Lulu Miller, co-host of Invisibilia: “Inspiration is a little sucker punch to the brain. It’s a slap in the face. It’s a punch to the gut. It’s a waking up. It’s realizing the world has more majesty and mystery than your stupid little brain ever knew. My job as a storyteller is to showcase that wonder, to put it on a pedestal, and hopefully recreate it in such a way that the person reading or listening or watching can feel it too.”
Susan Orlean, author: “Whenever I finish a story, I go through a period of time where I feel like I will never again have an idea. I simply will never again come up with a notion that feels original and exciting and inspires curiosity. And I think the analogy to falling in love is really apt because most people, if they have a relationship and they just cannot imagine a situation where they would ever feel that way again, and then one day you fall onto something and it just looks you in the face and says I’m the one.”
Think back to the last time you encountered a difficult challenge at work–one of those problems that requires hard, long thought and perhaps some focused drudgery to break through. What did you do?
If you work in the knowledge economy, chances are you interrupted yourself several times along the way –checked your email, went on Facebook, got up and chatted with a coworker.
On average, employees who do the majority of their work on computers are distracted once every 10 and a half minutes. Twenty-three percent of those interruptions come from email, but the biggest source of interruptions by far come from…ourselves. Voluntarily switching from one task to the next without finishing the original task first accounted for a full 44% of work interruptions.
In the bestselling book Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that deep work – the kind of difficult tasks that draw upon all your mental reserves and require singular focus – is both increasingly important and increasingly rare in the modern workplace. As computers are able to automate more and more tasks, it’s the people who are able to learn new, complex skills quickly and perform consistently at a high level who will be the winners in the new economy.
But Newport’s book, like the vast majority of research and advice on the topic, focuses on the individual. Very little has been written about what companies can do to make focus an organization-wide habit.
Why Should Companies And Leaders Care?
In a 2009 study called “Why Is It So Hard to Do My Work?,” Leroy discovered that attention acts more like molasses than water; you can redirect it, but a sticky “attention residue” stays behind, fixed to the last task you were working on. That residue is particularly thick when you don’t complete one task before moving on to the next one. But even when you do manage to finish the first task, your attention continues to stay fractured.
It’s not just productivity that takes a toll when workers are constantly interrupted. Researchers have found that people attempt to compensate for all those distractions by working faster and faster, leading to “more stress, higher frustration, time pressure, and effort.”
This dynamic hints at the kinds of things today’s companies could be doing to create healthier and more productive workplaces. Yet the trend seems stubbornly headed in the opposite direction.
Focus: A Dwindling Resource In The Workplace
From large corporations to small startups –constant task switching has practically become a requirement of the job.
Open office floor plans that supposedly create moments of serendipitous collaboration are still common, particularly in the tech world, despite the evidence that increased noise and interruptions make it more difficult for teams to get work done.
Workers continue to spend an average of six hours on email in a day, according to one survey. Another study found that the average worker checks email 74 times a day. That’s nine times an hour in an eight-hour workday. Meetings, the corporate pastime that everyone loves to hate, still take up 15% of companies’ time, on average, with questionable tangible benefits.
Nimble startups scoff at the lumbering email and meeting cultures of their more traditional counterparts. But the much trendier alternative – real-time group chat–is arguably even worse.
Meetings consume a (theoretically) bounded amount of time. Email can (again, theoretically) be closed and only checked at certain times. Group chat, on the other hand, maintains a more or less constant presence throughout the workday (and often before and after the workday as well). One study of the most popular team chat app Slack found that people spent an average of 10 hours a day in the app (that’s 67% more than the average spent on email).
This new class of business apps mimics the instant messaging apps that people already use in their personal lives, further blurring the line between work and life. They’re more casual and fun than email. The chatty interfaces encourage one-line-at-a-time, real-time communication, with desktop and mobile notifications for each incoming message.
Each additional interruption, no matter how brief, comes at a price paid by companies and employees alike in lost productivity and increased stress. The pressures to be always available – in meetings and open offices, on email and group chat – create a harried culture of constant interruption rather than a sustainable culture of meaningful productivity.
What Companies Can (And Should) Do About It
Don’t get me wrong, collaboration and communication are important. So is building social connections in the workplace. But in most workplaces today, the balance between connectedness and focused productivity greatly favors the former at the expense of the latter.
So how do you start building a culture around deep work instead? Change is hard, but starting with just one concrete shift that rewards deep work over shallow work can cause a chain reaction in how a team approaches everything about their work. Here are some example deep work policies that companies are already implementing:
Set A Max Quota For Total Meeting Time Company-Wide
Start measuring and setting goals for lowering the total amount of time your team spends in meetings. It gives your team the opportunity to rethink which meetings are actually necessary and which could be moved to written communication or just nixed altogether.
Have Your Team Mark Off Time For Deep Work Time On Their Calendars
Elevate the status of deep work on your team by having everyone block out time on their calendars to focus on a single, important task. Hold that time sacred.
Have The Team List The Single Most Important Thing They Want To Complete Each Day
One of the challenges of focusing in the modern knowledge workplace is that work is often ill-defined. When everything seems important and urgent, it’s difficult to prioritize and focus on the things that have a real impact. Instead of having people list out every single thing they want to accomplish in a day or week, have them identify the one thing that they believe will have the biggest impact instead.
Limit Email/Group Chat Before A Certain Time In The Morning
Personal productivity experts have warned people against starting the day with email for years. Mornings tend to be the best time for focused, hard work when we’re fresh and haven’t hit decision fatigue yet. Why not make it a company-wide policy? Have your team experiment with waiting until 10 a.m. or even noon before checking their email.
Make Asynchronous Communication The Default
When immediate responses are the norm, your team’s attention will always be divided between the work at hand and the messages coming in. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Asynchronous communication – sending messages without the expectation of an immediate response – can free your team to disconnect fully to focus on their work and reconnect later to respond. Make clear to your team that delayed responses are not only acceptable, but the preferred way of communicating. Everyone on my own team at Doist knows that a response at any time within 24 hours is perfectly acceptable. Sure, communication happens a little more slowly, but a policy of asynchronous communication allows us get more work done overall. There’s never a doubt that deep work is the priority.
Yes, technology is awesome. It gives us the power to communicate instantly with anyone anywhere in the world. It makes fully distributed teams and flexible work-from-home policies possible. But when left unchecked, all the increased chatter can come at the expense of focused time for creativity, problem-solving, and learning. It’s time to swing the pendulum back in the other direction.
A version of this post originally appeared at Doist and is adapted with permission.
As a marketer, Gatorade is no stranger to creating entertaining, compelling ads. Look no further than “Be Like Mike.” Or one of the best Serena Williams ads ever made. Or the Manning brothers pranking college kids. Gatorade is also a pioneer in branded content, with 2009’s “Replay” series that gave small, local sports teams the chance to have a rematch of their biggest games.
Now Gatorade is once again aiming to push the potential of brand content with a new podcast series, created with Gimlet Creative, that features the superstar likes of Peyton and Eli Manning, Serena Williams, Matt Ryan, J.J. Watt, Karl-Anthony Towns, and more, talking about the lowest points in their careers. The Secret To Victory is a six-episode series that launches this week, and is tied into the brand’s overall campaign of the same name, that launched two weeks ago, and will include ads, the podcast, as well as some content in association with The Player’s Tribune.
The campaign’s anthem ad introduces the theme, but Gatorade’s head of consumer engagement Kenny Mitchell says that by being part of a larger campaign, the focus of the podcast can be on storytelling over selling.
“It’s not just about logos and brand mentions, it’s about telling authentic stories that connect well to what our brand is all about, and we feel this campaign, and this podcast series specifically delivers on that,” says Mitchell.
The first episode features brothers Peyton and Eli Manning talking about the trials and tribulations of their rookie NFL seasons, and how it steeled them to work harder and prepared them for success later on. Hosted by former NFL cornerback Domonique Foxworth, the stories are engaging and insightful, in an ESPN-meets-NPR vibe that works well.
Gimlet Creative creative director Nazanin Rafsanjani says there was never a moment where they had to sell Gatorade or talk about the brand. “They very much bought into the idea that these episodes had to stand on their own and can’t be all about Gatorade,” she says. “For them, it’s a new podcast, and for some of the athletes, it was new to them to be doing something for Gatorade that isn’t promoting the brand explicitly. It’s brought to you by Gatorade, but beyond that, there’s no real brand presence. And no one would listen to it if there was. That’s how we approach all of our brand podcasts–no one will listen to it if it sounds like an ad.”
Gimlet Creative, the branded content division for Gimlet Media, has also made brand podcasts for eBay, Virgin Atlantic, and Tinder. Podcasts have become a new avenue for brands looking to tap into a very passionate audience and a different storytelling medium than what they’ve most likely have been using. More than 57 million Americans tuned into at least one podcast a month last year, up 23% from 2015. And a recent study from NPR found that 75% of listeners took action on a sponsored message.
“The majority of sports stories are told from the perspective of triumph, and we thought it would be powerful, provocative, and motivational to show some of the best athletes in the world have lost and failed, and how they’ve used that experience as motivation to put in the hard work that led to their biggest moments,” says Mitchell. “With a podcast, you can have an in-depth conversation and really bring those stories to life.”
It also brought new logistics around commercial content to life. Mitchell says that the very nature of a podcast taught the brand valuable lessons for a new form of storytelling. When there are so many stakeholders involved–the brand, the agency, the athletes, the teams, the leagues–getting all the approvals and thumbs up you need to green light something gets a tad more complicated going from a 30-second ad to a 30-minute podcast.
“Just making sure everyone was aligned and feeling good about the content takes a lot longer,” says Mitchell. “If you’re an athlete, you want to listen to it, make sure you’re comfortable with the storyline. If you’re a team mentioned, you want to make sure you’re comfortable with it. So it’s a longer process. We learned a lot, didn’t take any shortcuts, and it certainly flexes a different muscle.”
The Secret To Victory debuts July 19, and can be found everywhere you get your favorite podcasts.
For the past three years, 23 out of Kenya’s 47 counties have been stricken with drought conditions worse than any previously experienced in the country; in February, the drought was declared a national disaster. Without water, crops have dried up and livestock are dying; in the hardest-hit regions, livestock losses have reached 80%. Bonaya Urthe, a herder who has lost 460 of his 500 goats, told The Guardian in April that “because animals are dying at this rate, it means that human death is also near.” The UN estimates that the number of people needing food assistance in the country has ballooned from 1.3 million in August 2016 to over 3.5 million now.
In rural Kenya, communities access water via boreholes, which are drilled down into the underground aquifers created by rainfall, and lined and covered to prevent pollution from reaching the water supply in the well. Kenyans extract water from the boreholes via a pumping mechanism, which can be powered by solar energy. With rainfall as scarce as it has been, the aquifers are drying up. However, because the boreholes are covered, there is no way for anyone using the well to know if it’s dried up before attempting to pump water out.
The SensorInsight system feeds data from the monitored boreholes into a mobile dashboard. [Photo: courtesy Oxfam Kenya]But a new partnership between Oxfam and SensorInsight, and internet-of-things system provider, is giving communities advance warning of when their wells are about to dry up, giving them crucial time to seek out an alternative water source. Implementation of the project, which has equipped over 400 boreholes with water-level-detecting sensors, began in September 2016; it officially launched at the end of June in Turkana and Wajir counties in northern Kenya, where the drought has dried up 40% of the water supply and will spread to more drought-afflicted communities as the year progresses.
The SensorInsight system feeds data from the monitored boreholes into a mobile dashboard, which can be accessed by both Oxfam Kenya workers and local water utility companies. Sumananjali Mohanty, country director for Oxfam Kenya, tells Fast Company that the sensors track data on flow rate per hour (picked up by a monitoring mechanism installed in the aquifer itself), the amount of sun received by the solar panels that power the pump, and power consumption, which denotes how much water the pump is moving. If the dashboard shows low flow rates, a lot of sunlight, and minimal pump activity, it’ll send SMS and email alerts to Oxfam and the water utilities that the borehole is close to drying up, Mohanty adds.
Once they have that information, Mohanty says, Oxfam and the water utilities can work with local borehole operators to ensure that the borehole is switched off, giving it time to recharge instead of continuing to pump a dry aquifer. The operators can then alert the community that their water supply will soon become unavailable (at least, until the SensorInsight system determines the water levels in the borehole are back up to functioning levels), and give them time to prepare alternatives. That could mean seeking out access to other nearby boreholes whose water levels are not so diminished, or requesting that Oxfam coordinate cases of water to be trucked in.
The operators alert the community that their water supply will soon become unavailable, and give them time to prepare alternatives. [Photo: courtesy Oxfam Kenya]While the SensorInsight system is not resolving the drought in Kenya, it will, Mohanty hopes, galvanize communities against it by giving them adequate time to connect with viable alternative water sources. Previously, Mohanty says, people whose boreholes suddenly dried up were pulling water unsafe sources like hand-dug wells or Lake Turkana, both of which heightened their risk of contracting water-borne diseases like cholera, outbreaks of which have been prevalent in Kenya since the drought struck.
The casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that European antitrust regulators have declared war on American tech giants.
On June 27, the European Union imposed a €2.4 billion (US$2.75 billion) fine on Google for giving favorable treatment in its search engine results to its own comparison shopping service. And Germany’s antitrust enforcer is investigating Facebook for asking users to sign away control over personal information.
In contrast, American antitrust enforcers have shown little interest in these companies. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) did open an investigation into whether Google has a search bias, but closed it in 2013, despite recognizing that it “may have had the effect of harming individual competitors.”
Anti-Americanism, however, does not explain these starkly different approaches. Europe targets homegrown companies with the same ferocity. Last summer, for example, the EU fined a cartel of European truck-makers even more than it did Google.
Instead, the divergence is explained by America’s abandonment in the 1980s of the theory that competition promotes innovation, which is still embraced by Europe today. America now seems to operate under the theory that competition threatens innovation by denying companies that develop a superior product the rewards of monopoly.
My research suggests that embrace of this new theory has led to under-enforcement of America’s antitrust laws, which may in turn have actually held back innovation.
Betting On Competition
The mission of antitrust law, first articulated by the framers of the Sherman Act in 1890, is to ensure that markets contain large numbers of equally matched competitors. That’s why Europe calls its own antitrust rules “competition law.”
The Sherman Act implemented this goal by prohibiting two things: “restraint of trade,” such as price fixing, and monopolization, the attempt of a powerful company to keep competitors out of its markets. European competition laws have a similar bipartite structure.
The EU case against Google falls under the second category, monopolization, or as Europeans dub it “abuse of dominance.”
One of the most important and difficult areas of the law of monopolization involves infrastructure, which can be anything from the roads that crisscross America to the engineering standards that mobile phones use to communicate. Great innovations, such as Google’s search engine, often become the infrastructure that the next generation of competitors need to access in order to create their own innovative products. But the infrastructure owner will often shut those competitors out, to maximize profits.
The goal of antitrust law would seem to require that its enforcers–the Department of Justice and the FTC in the U.S.–sue to force owners to share their infrastructure on reasonable terms with competitors.
If Google cannot earn monopoly profits on product search and sponsored links, will it stop investing in improving its search engine?
Getting the answer right is hugely important. Access to infrastructure may well have triggered the Industrial Revolution. A recent study shows that the abolition of serfdom in Russia in 1861–which broke up the monopoly of feudal lords over a very important type of infrastructure, land–greatly increased the growth of the Russian economy. The authors concluded that Western Europe’s abolition of serfdom at least a century earlier probably explains its subsequent economic dominance.
Until the 1980s, American antitrust enforcers followed this example by breaking up “feudal estates” when they got too big. In 1912, for instance, the Justice Department won a case that forced the owners of the only two railroad bridges crossing the Mississippi river at St. Louis–which connected numerous eastern and western railroad systems–to allow access to competing companies.
The bridges were a superior product, relative to railroad ferries, and the sharing requirement no doubt reduced the owners’ profits. But the Justice Department was willing to bet that intervention would not chill incentives to innovate. America has done OK since.
The Justice Department made the same bet when it filed its last successful monopolization case in 1974, making AT&T give up the local telephone networks that once ran copper wires into most homes in America. That allowed an innovative competitor, MCI, to use those wires to connect home and office telephones to the company’s pioneering microwave and satellite transmission systems, halving long-distance calling rates by 1990.
Betting Against Competition
The view of the Chicago skeptics who opposed enforcement grew in power during the 1970s, reaching a tipping point in 1981 with the election of Ronald Reagan, who appointed its advocates to federal judgeships and leadership roles in the enforcement agencies. That view has proven resilient to changes in administration ever since.
The courts implemented the Chicago view by embracing a rule, known optimistically as the “rule of reason,” that enforcement of antitrust law is warranted only if there is no danger of chilling innovation. As the Supreme Court put it, intervention should take place only after “elaborate study.”
I argue in a recent paper that when enforcer budgets are limited, the rule of reason is just a polite way of partially repealing the antitrust laws, because the rule makes infrastructure cases, among others, too expensive for enforcers to litigate. And enforcement budgets are limited. Although budgets have increased in real terms since the 1970s, they have declined relative to the size of economy.
Image: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND. Source: Author calculations based on data from sources including FTC, DOJ, MeasuringWorth.
Antitrust enforcement has, in fact, suffered. Apart from the Microsoft case 20 years ago, in which the goal of breaking up the company wasn’t achieved, no other major monopolization cases have been filed since AT&T in 1974.
And even when cases are brought, usually by private individuals, the rule of reason has proven a virtually insurmountable obstacle to success.
Has all this at least led to an uptick in innovation? You might think that the answer is “yes,” given that Google and Facebook were both launched in the U.S. in recent years.
But both–as well as their incredible innovations–are the products not of monopoly but of competition. Google won the search wars by creating algorithms that beat those of rivals, including AltaVista and Yahoo. Facebook innovated by improving on the social network concept that erstwhile rival MySpace helped create. Both companies flourished thanks to equal access to the internet—in other words, net neutrality.
Measures of innovation for the economy as a whole, rather than individual success stories, provide a more reliable, and less encouraging, picture. The talk of the economics profession these days is the current combination of soaring corporate profits with the absence of an accompanying uptick in one measure of economy-wide expenditure on innovation-business investment.
This outcome is exactly what you’d expect in an economy of large companies that generate profits from their monopoly positions, rather than by offering better products.
The Road Not Taken
Europe has not followed this path.
In the 1950s and ’60’s, when the foundations for current European antitrust law were being laid, American enforcers still believed that competition promotes innovation. The American emphasis on protecting upstarts resonated with a continent still recovering from Nazism, which used state-sponsored monopolies to maintain control. The EU case against Google is firmly in that tradition, as is the investigation of Facebook, which dominates another new economy infrastructure, social media.
Although the European enforcement actions will only directly benefit Europeans, they are a reminder to Americans of the road not taken.
Ramsi Woodcock is professor of legal studies at Georgia State University. This story originally appeared at The Conversation.
