iPhone sales have slumped, stock is down, and pundits insist Apple is a tech laggard. But the company may be stronger than ever.

Eddy Cue doesn't look like a man in the midst of his toughest year in decades. Sporting an untucked apricot camp shirt and blue jeans over camouflage socks and a pair of blue leather racing shoes from Germany, Apple's SVP of Internet software and services pulls up a chair at one of the marble-topped tables outside Caffé Macs, the employee restaurant at the heart of Apple's 23-year-old Cupertino campus. (The company will begin to move into its new "spaceship" HQ next year.) Cue dives right into telling me about his latest horror story:

The collapse, two nights earlier, of his beloved Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals, which Cue had the dismal pleasure of observing from a courtside seat. "Am I in mourning?" he asks of his team's loss to LeBron James's Cleveland Cavaliers. "You better believe it. I'm not watching ESPN, I haven't gotten onto a sports website, I haven't read a newspaper. When I turn on my TV, I only go to the DVR."

"Eddy, this is on the record," warns Craig Federighi, Apple's SVP of software engineering, from across the table.

"I've got no problem with that," replies Cue, who is such a Warriors fan that he was featured on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle after the team's comeback victory in the conference finals a few weeks earlier, in a photo that showed him screaming in red-faced celebration along with Stephen Curry. He leans over my iPhone, which is recording the interview, and enunciates his next three words to make sure they are loud and clear. "I love LeBron!" Then he gives way to a set of hearty and rueful guffaws.

It's 62 degrees in Cupertino, the sun is shining, the smell of cumin and garlic from the café's chicken masala special fills the air, and the chatter among the couple hundred employees enjoying their lunch seems lively and bright. Nowhere is there any hint that "Apple is doomed," as suggested by Forbes and other outlets, or that it is engaged in a "user-hostile and stupid" campaign against its customers (The Verge), led by CEO Tim Cook, a "boring old fart . . . a supply-chain supplicant" (culture critic Bob Lefsetz).

Under Cook's leadership, Apple has come to seem quite fallible to many people. Its recent products have seemed far less than perfect, at least compared to the collective memory of its astonishing iPod–iPhone–iPad run from 2001 to 2010. There are the public embarrassments, like its 2012 introduction of Maps, or those 2014 videos of reviewers bending, and breaking, an iPhone 6 Plus. Apple Pay hasn't become the standard for a cashless society, and the Apple Watch "is not the watch we expect from Apple," according to John Gruber, editor of Daring Fireball, the preeminent Apple-centric website. Then there are the design flaws: Apple Music has been saddled with too many features, as if it were something designed by, God forbid, Microsoft; the lens on the back of the iPhone 6 extrudes; the new Apple TV has an illogical interface and confusing remote control.

Perhaps, say the worriers, Apple is doing too many things at once, cranking out multiple editions of the watch, endless varieties of watchbands, iPhones, and iPads in numerous sizes, proprietary earbuds alongside headphones from Beats. Credible reports that the company is spending billions of dollars in R&D to explore the possibility of designing a car only heighten the fear that Apple is spread too thin. Steve Jobs had been the company's editor, proud of saying no to features, products, business ideas, and new hires far more often than he said yes. Apple's seemingly diffuse product line reinforces the argument that Cook is not as rigorous. (The fear has a worrisome precedent: During the early and mid-1990s, Apple's product line was a mess of marketing-inspired offerings, and both its reputation as a unique manufacturer and its business suffered.)

The criticism crescendoed last April, after Cook announced that, for the first time in 13 years, Apple's revenue had decreased by 13%, from the corresponding quarter a year earlier. Sales of iPhones had slowed even more, off 16%, an alarming development given that the smartphone accounts for 65% of the company's total revenue.

Meanwhile, the company's competitors seem to be jetting ahead. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have dazzled the press with announcements of upcoming products that will use artificial intelligence, or AI. Some, like Microsoft's Cortana, are software applications that promise to anticipate customers' needs in useful, personalized ways. Others are already packaging that ability in hardware; in less than two years, Amazon has sold more than 3 million Echos, its $199 canister that's a voice-controlled personal assistant. Google revealed plans for a similar product, Home, in May, to much fanfare. Critics look at Apple's five-year-old Siri, its voice-controlled agent, and cavil that the company has nothing as flashy to reveal.

So, is Apple doomed? Of course not. As John Gruber says, "Any conversation that uses that word is in silly la-la land." With Macs, iPads, and software applications and services, Apple isn't a one-trick pony like BlackBerry, to use an example cited by those most freaked out about the recent iPhone slowdown. It recorded $50.6 billion in sales during that "disappointing" quarter, more than the combined revenue of Google parent Alphabet ($20.3 billion) and Amazon ($29.1 billion) over the same period. Its $10.5 billion in profits outpaced not just the combination of Alphabet ($4.2 billion) and Amazon ($513 million) but also Facebook ($1.5 billion) and Microsoft ($3.8 billion).

"I don't read all the coverage on Apple that there is," Cook tells me a few days after my lunch with Cue and Federighi. "The way that I look at that is, I really know the truth." And he's ready to talk about it.

Traditionally, Apple execs give interviews only when the company has a new product to hawk. Often, Jobs would only cooperate with magazines that promised to photograph him alongside one of the company's devices. But change is afoot at Apple, and not just in the communications department. Apple has embarked on a mission to improve its four operating systems (for Apple TV, iPhone, Mac, and the watch), services like Apple Pay and Apple Music, and even the size of the iMessage bubble on your iPhone screen. It has redesigned the layout of its retail stores and its online App Store. It is making radical changes to maligned offerings like Maps, Siri, and the watch. It is wooing app developers in brand-new ways, knowing that their creativity is what enriches the $250-billion-per-year ecosystem that has been built on Apple devices. It is almost certainly exploring the possibility of manufacturing a car. These moves are the building blocks for the newest iteration of Apple.

Apple's future may look very different from its past, and Cook, Federighi, and Cue wouldn't have it any other way. "Look," says Cue, who somehow manages to look both like a man who just woke up and a compact ball of perpetual energy, "one thing you know if you've been in technology a while, you're only as good as the last thing you did. No one wants an original iPod. No one wants an iPhone 3GS."

Apple executives are careful to avoid suggesting that the company is moving beyond its founder's vision, but that's exactly what's happening in Cupertino. It's a subtle, evolutionary change. Cook is pushing Apple into a future that is bigger and broader than anything Jobs could effect during his too-short life. "I want Apple to be here, you know, forever," he says.

Those lulled by last spring's bad news into dismissing Cook and his team are likely to miss the scope of the company's ambitions and its progress in achieving them. While Amazon, Facebook, and Google may crow loudest about their bold ideas, Apple may well have the biggest role in actually defining our technological future.

Overheard During The Apple Freak-Out

Real reactions, culled from the tech commentariat, to Apple's tumultuous 2016. The Apple faithful have never been more polarized.

"Do you have more flaws than you used to?"

"Do I personally have more flaws than I used to?" Tim Cook laughs as he responds to my poorly phrased question. "I've always had flaws. Always!"

"Now we're getting where I wanted to go!" I tell him. "You can lie down for the rest of the interview."

Cook remains in an upright position, and when his chuckles subside, he answers the question I intended to ask. "Is Apple making more mistakes than we used to? I don't have a tracker on that." Cook, despite a job that's become more challenging during his five years as CEO, doesn't seem to have aged a whit. Having your company lose $180 billion in market value (which Apple has in the 17 months since I last interviewed Cook) should manifest itself in some way, but he is still trim and fit, his eyes lively, his good humor intact. "We have never said that we're perfect," he continues. "We've said that we seek that. But we sometimes fall short."

Indeed, the iPod, iPhone, and iPad—and the financial success they engendered—obscured the fact that Jobs oversaw almost as many flops as hits during Apple's resurgence: the circular, nearly unusable mouse that came with the first iMac in 1997; 2001's beautiful PowerMac G4 "Cube," which was discontinued after one year; Rokr, a music phone Apple released with Motorola in 2005; the iTunes social recommendation network Ping, and many more.

"The most important thing is, Do you have the courage to admit that you're wrong? And do you change?" Cook says. "The most important thing to me as a CEO is that we keep the courage."

Gadflies who scorn Cook's Apple for its imperfections also scold the company for being "behind" in whatever is the technology du jour. This is nothing new. "What tends to happen with Apple, not just today but in the 18 years I've been here," says Cook, "is that invariably some people compare what we're doing now to a vision or a product that somebody says they will create in the future."

Over its 40 years of existence, Apple has been seen as a laggard in music, video, the Internet, telephony, wireless, content creation, networking, semiconductors, software applications, touch screens, gesture controls, materials, messaging, news aggregation, social media, voice recognition, and mapping. (That's not even close to being an exhaustive list.) Nevertheless, the company has managed to survive by doing an unmatched job of integrating the most important of those technologies into products that eventually delight many customers. By the time Jobs died, Apple's innovation process—the way it accomplishes that job of creating, acquiring, improving, and integrating technology—was polished and proven. It was arguably Jobs's greatest gift to his successor.

Cook has built on that gift in a way that suits him. Apple's CEO is a deeply grounded man who has not been blinded by Jobs's brilliant legacy. Jobs only came to appreciate the incremental nature of innovation during the second half of his life; you get the sense that Cook understood and loved process from birth. This focus on detail is often mentioned as a weakness. But, in the five years under Cook, Apple's revenue has tripled, its workforce has doubled, and its global reach has expanded rapidly. That's a remarkable record. Cook has shown a great capacity for getting improvements from every corner of the company, and for then deploying those gains across a wider canvas of software, hardware, and services than Jobs ever had at his disposal. He will never be as flashy as Jobs, but he may just be the perfect CEO for the behemoth Apple has become.

One of the most underappreciated realities about Apple is that it has always been a company that learns on the fly. "I've always thought there are a number of things that you have achieved at the end of a project," Jony Ive told me and Brent Schlender in 2014 when we interviewed him for our biography Becoming Steve Jobs. "There's the object, the actual product itself, and then there's all that you learned. What you learned is as tangible as the product itself, but much more valuable, because that's your future."

This continual learning process is central to the way Cook manages Apple. He accepts the inevitability of flaws, but relentlessly insists that employees pursue perfection. "I twitch less," says Cue cheerfully when I ask about the difference between Jobs and Cook. "No, no, no, just kidding! Steve was in your face, screaming, and Tim is more quiet, more cerebral in his approach. When you disappoint Tim, even though he isn't screaming at you, you get the same feeling. I never wanted to disappoint Steve, and I never want to disappoint Tim. [Other than them,] I have that feeling with, like, my dad."

Perhaps the best example of this continuous improvement at work under Cook is the company's rehabilitation of its Maps app, which was universally scorned after its introduction in September 2012. Apple Maps' miscues were legion: Bridges seemed to plunge into rivers; hospitals were located at addresses actually belonging to shopping centers; directions were so bad they confused airport runways with roads. Apple didn't have a billion customers at the time, but it had more than enough to turn the app into a national joke. "Look, the first thing is that you're embarrassed," says Cue. "Let's just deal with that one fact of emotion. These things mean a lot to us, we work really hard, and so you're embarrassed. We had completely underestimated the product, the complexity of it. All the roads are known, come on! All the restaurants are known, there's Yelp and OpenTable, they have all the addresses. The mail arrives. FedEx arrives. You know, how hard is this?"

Cue, left leg jittering under the table, recounts how Apple regrouped after the mess. "What it causes you to do first is ask, How important is this? Is this a place where we need to triple or quadruple down, or did we make that mistake because the product's not that important to us? We had long discussions at the ET [executive team] level about the importance of Maps, where we thought it was going in the future, and could we treat it as a third-party app? We don't do every app. We're not trying to create a Facebook app. They do a great job. We decided that Maps is integral to our whole platform. There were so many features that we wanted to build that are dependent on that technology, and we couldn't see ourselves being in a position where that was something that we didn't own."

The changes didn't come easy. Shortly after the app's debut, Scott Forstall, a 15-year Apple veteran who was in charge of its development, was eased out. That was just the beginning. Forstall had overseen dozens of people working in relative isolation: Several thousand people now work on Maps. "We needed to develop competencies that we initially didn't appreciate," says Federighi, who looks like a cross between Sam Waterston and Anthony Perkins, with the silver hair and aircraft-carrier black eyebrows that have led Apple fandom to dub him "Hair Force One." "Maps presents huge issues relating to data integration and data quality, things we would need to do on an ongoing basis."

But the company did more than just throw numbers at the problem. Cook also forced his execs to re-examine, and change, the way they worked with development teams. Famous for being secretive, Apple opened up a bit. "We made significant changes to all of our development processes because of it," says Cue, who now oversees Maps. "To all of us living in Cupertino, the maps for here were pretty darn good. Right? So [the problem] wasn't obvious to us. We were never able to take it out to a large number of users to get that feedback. Now we do."

Apple now does public beta testing of its most significant software projects, something that Jobs never liked to do. In 2014, the company asked users to test run its Yosemite upgrade to OS X. Last year, it introduced beta testing of iOS, which is the company's most important operating system. "The reason you as a customer are going to be able to test iOS," Cue says, "is because of Maps."

Maps' critical notices have gotten markedly better, and although the most prominent tech reviewers still prefer Google, everyone acknowledges Apple Maps' vast improvement. (It's also far more popular on iOS than Google Maps.) But the enhancements that Cue and crew have driven affect more than the app alone. Maps is now integrated into many popular iOS apps, including Airbnb, Foursquare, Yelp, and Zillow. Improving a platform like Maps creates benefits for the ecosystems that sit atop Apple's products. "Maps is this core organizing structure for the physical world in which you interact," explains Federighi. "The map is a foundation for building all kinds of value on the platform, just as our operating systems are a foundation."

The duo won't discuss what's next for Maps, though many features are likely to involve giving the service more artificial intelligence than it already has. (Maps directing you to a different route from the one it first recommended is an example of basic AI at work.) Cue offers an example of something he'd like to see. "Let's say I'm at home doing email before work," he says. "I'd like Maps to tell me, 'Don't leave now. Your commute will be cut by 15 minutes if you stay home for a while.' That would be very helpful."

What Apple has accomplished with Maps is an example of the kind of grind-it-out innovation that's happening all the time at the company. You don't hear a lot about it, perhaps because it doesn't support the enthralling myth that innovation comes in blinding flashes that lead to hitherto unimaginable products. When critics ding Apple for its failure to introduce "breakthrough" devices and services, they are missing three key facts about technology: First, that breakthrough moments are unpredictable outcomes of ongoing, incremental innovation; second, that ongoing, behind-the-scenes innovation brings significant benefits, even if it fails to create singular disruptions; and, third, that new technologies only connect broadly when a mainstream audience is ready and has a compelling need. "The world thinks we delivered [a breakthrough] every year while Steve was here," says Cue. "Those products were developed over a long period of time."

Over the past year, artificial intelligence—broadly defined as the capability for machines to "think" for us by crunching loads of data—has become one of those technologies that capture the public's imagination, and all the action seems to be taking place somewhere other than Cupertino. At its recent IO conference, Google promised to reshape several of its products around AI, a move that has been hailed as visionary. The hottest consumer product with AI features doesn't even come from Apple—it's Amazon's Echo, with its hint of a world in which computing simply surrounds us. Who needs handheld devices when you can just ask questions of the air and have the furniture bark back answers?

A closer look, however, reveals that Apple's development of its most consumer-oriented AI service, Siri, is very much in keeping with the company's distinct and widely misunderstood approach to deploying new technology. Apple has been using various kinds of AI for years, for things like the personal recommendations available via iTunes since 2003. Siri was introduced in late 2011, nine months before Google Now and three years before Microsoft's Cortana and Amazon's Alexa.

Apple relies on a simple, two-pronged approach to develop Siri. It's one that makes clear why Apple doesn't worry about who's ahead or behind. What matters to company executives is how successfully Apple steers its own ever-improving product to customers.

First, the company works constantly to improve the underlying technology. As with Maps, Siri is the beneficiary of Apple's treatment of it as a continually updated online service rather than something refreshed only with a major OS upgrade. Customers have caught up to the fact that Siri can successfully answer a wider variety of questions: It now handles 2 billion queries a week, double what it did a year ago.

Second, Apple regularly seeks out new places where Siri can help those customers. On an iPhone, Siri handles voice commands and questions by tapping into apps and pulling out answers. In cars equipped with Apple's CarPlay dashboard-display system, it will recommend travel routes, find restaurants, and perform other functions. You can use Siri with an Apple Watch (presuming you haven't socked yours away in a drawer). You can also use it to control your television via the Apple TV remote.

Unlike Maps, Siri isn't replacing a real-world analogue. So, Cue says, "you're trying to determine what are the features, what are the ways it can work really well, what are customers looking for, and what are the things you can do that are going to improve their lives." Cue's thinking explains, in part, why Apple opened Siri up to app developers this summer, though only in seven categories: fitness, messaging, payments, photos, ride hailing, CarPlay, and voice calling. Let Siri shine where she'll be most valuable to users.

For now, Siri is as good as anything that's out there. Using one's voice to control Now is fun some days and frustrating on others, and reviewers say Cortana can be equally inconsistent. Alexa, the digital assistant within Echo, is to be applauded for the speedy way it answers many queries, but my son often shouts at it in exasperation. Alexa can also be used with the Amazon Fire TV Stick to control a TV, but it's not in cars.

If AI is becoming desirable to mainstream customers, Apple, the company that is supposedly so far behind, is better positioned than anyone to take advantage of an AI moment. None of its competitors offer both a wide range of products and a history of delivering great consumer experiences. Apple can put Siri to work in all kinds of existing services and products. Customers will see the impact this fall, when they'll be able to use Siri on their Macs. They will also discover more AI features in the Photos app, making it easier to manipulate and organize their pictures. Drivers with CarPlay are likely to see more AI in automobiles as well. Lacking such an extensive product ecosystem, Apple's competitors have less appealing choices: They must limit their use of AI, invent brand-new products built around the technology (as Amazon did with Echo), or rely on partners to incorporate the technology in third-party products.

Apple will occasionally push its customers past their comfort zone, as it might this fall if the iPhone 7 removes the headphone jack. But it never forces the bleeding edge on its customers. In late 2015, it quietly acquired a voice-AI startup called VocalIQ that is reputedly working on the next-generation Siri, but you can be sure that its technology will only find its way into devices when Apple believes it is truly ready. Artificial intelligence is an alluring concept—machines that think for us!—but it also could have unforeseen ramifications. Apple gives its billion customers comfortable doses of AI, because, despite the common misconception, it isn't a company for geeks.

"People like things they can do now, not just think about," Cook says. "I've been thinking about The Jetsons since I was a kid. But occasionally you want The Jetsons to come to reality. That's what Apple is so great at: Productizing things and bringing them to you, so you can be a part of it."

In the mid-1970s, when reruns of The Jetsons were still a staple of Saturday morning TV, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple Computer with the goal of selling a new kind of machine to an audience they measured in the hundreds. As the company grew, its mission broadened. When Jobs returned in 1997, he would tout the fact that Apple sold an "experience" that could not be matched by other manufacturers. At first, the experience was one of using a single computer in which the company's software and hardware was seamlessly meshed. Jobs hoped that the excellence of Apple's personal computers might bring in an additional 1% market share, an increase that would have stabilized Apple's financial health. By the time Tim Cook became CEO, this concept of an "Apple experience" had grown to mean owning and using a collection of three Apple devices (iPad, iPhone, and Mac) networked to one another and the Internet.

The experience now being sold by Apple has expanded far beyond that. As Cue says, grinning at the ambition: "We want to be there from when you wake up till when you decide to go to sleep." Cook himself is only slightly less brash. "Our strategy is to help you in every part of your life that we can," he says, "whether you're sitting in the living room, on your desktop, on your phone, or in your car."

It's impossible to understand Apple's future, and Cook's challenge, without acknowledging that the experience Apple sells today is not just a collection of devices, but a web of hardware, software, and services that is itself connected to other webs of apps and services made primarily by other companies. These other webs include everything from the "app economy," which already runs on Apple software and devices, to emerging ones such as the connected home and car as well as wearable computing. To achieve its goal of serving its customers all day long, Apple must do more than ensure that its own products work brilliantly—it also must attempt to make them work seamlessly with these many other disparate networks. It must be a notable, reliable player in ecosystems that it doesn't own itself.

Apple does an extraordinary job of extracting revenue from the worlds in which it already plays a role, and its future revenues will depend on this even more. Horace Dediu, an influential analyst now working with the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation in Boston, estimates that Apple customers deliver an astronomical $40 per month apiece to the company, versus the pennies per month that Facebook and Google collect, and the few dollars a month that Amazon receives. That's primarily a result of the expensive devices its consumers are buying. But subscription services such as Apple Music and iCloud storage are starting to deliver significant cash. Revenue from services now accounts for 12% of Apple's total sales, up from 9% the year before. In fact, Apple's services revenue exceeds Facebook's total revenue. And Cook says the company has just gotten started. "Oh, yeah. I expect it to be huge," he says, smiling, his Alabama drawl becoming more pronounced as he delivers the good news.

The iPhone's sales may have dipped for a quarter, but it is far from dead. Its ability to interact with other products is a strategic advantage, and it remains central to what analyst Neil Cybart already calls the "Apple Experience Era." "Your auto or your home may have dozens of microprocessors in them, but they're dumb products," says Dediu. "When the smartphone enters that environment, it gets integrated, and the vehicle [or the home] gets intelligent." Your iPhone is loaded with your personal preferences, as well as the latest software for managing the world around you, like apps for your thermostat and Philips Hue lightbulbs. Think of the way iPhone automatically connects via Bluetooth to your car's sound system, and you can start to imagine the role it could play as consumers accumulate more sensor-embedded devices.

The iPhone will continue to morph, in ways designed to ensure its place as the primary way we interact with and manage our technological experience for the foreseeable future. Apple will sell more devices, but its evolution will also enable it to explore new revenue opportunities. This is how Apple adapts. It expands its portfolio by building on the foundation laid by earlier products. That steady growth has made it broader and more powerful than any other consumer technology company.

It's entirely possible that Apple will never introduce a product as universally desired as the iPhone. That doesn't mean it won't continue to be a great company. "The iPhone entered a market that was the biggest on earth for electronic devices," Cooks tells me, as we're wrapping up our interview. "Why is that? It's because eventually, everyone in the world will have one. There are not too many things like that."

Then Cook makes another one of his points that can get lost if you don't understand the care he takes with every word. "It's hard to imagine a market defined in units—not revenues—that's that big."

In terms of unit sales, yes, there may never be another iPhone. But in terms of revenue, well, look at the industries that Apple is just now entering, or is rumored to be pursuing. Media and entertainment is a $550 billion global market. Global car ownership is a $3.5 trillion business. Annual global health spending is more than $9 trillion. And while Apple may not currently dominate any of these arenas, remember that analysts once thought Apple would have a hit on its hands if it could garner 1% of the mobile phone business.

As we're saying our goodbyes, Cook and I stumble into discussing health care, and he perks up again. "We've gotten into the health arena and we started looking at wellness, that took us to pulling a string to thinking about research, pulling that string a little further took us to some patient-care stuff, and that pulled a string that's taking us into some other stuff," he says. "When you look at most of the solutions, whether it's devices, or things coming up out of Big Pharma, first and foremost, they are done to get the reimbursement [from an insurance provider]. Not thinking about what helps the patient. So if you don't care about reimbursement, which we have the privilege of doing, that may even make the smartphone market look small."

One percent of $9 trillion is $90 billion. Even Apple might call that a pretty good business.

Apple music's head of global consumer marketing, Bozoma Saint John, gives us a taste of the passion powering the streaming service.

When I met Apple Music marketing chief Bozoma Saint John at Apple for an interview, she had just come from a photo shoot and she looked, well, fabulous. While she was wearing high heels (which put her up at around 6-foot-2 or so) and a shimmering blue dress, I'd soon learn that the fabulous has little to do with clothing. She practically radiates warmth and energy.

Saint John was relatively unknown in tech circles until she demoed Apple Music at the company's developer conference in June. Now, a few weeks later, she's the one part of the show many people remember. We're used to seeing Apple's laid-back middle-aged male executives on the stage there, then out walks a woman who, a few minutes into the presentation, was spinning the Sugar Hill Gang classic "Rappers Delight" and pushing 3,000 (rather stiff) developer types to clap, then rap, to the beat.

Boz (hard "o"), as everyone calls her, moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, from Ghana when she was 13. Her family lived in a house right across the street from the Air Force Academy. Picture a tall, black, female teenager placed in this setting. But instead of hiding from the things that made her stick out, she decided to embrace them. She had to, she says. When you talk to her in person, you get the strong feeling that Saint John has been owning her identity ever since. What's more, she's managed to do that without losing the natural warmth that makes her so likable.

Why hadn't we seen you before at an Apple event?

Well, darling, we're only in year two.

I don't know why it seems longer than that.

Listen, baby, we're just getting started.

Apple Music launched in June 2015, and at WWDC in June 2016 we saw a major new version of the product. Can you wrap up in couple of simple concepts the changes that were made, and the reasons for making them?

I think to simplify it, and that's probably the right word, it's simpler and easier. It's using intuition to organize music and make the experience that much richer and better. That's really what I tried to take the audience through.

It is really about the experience. It's like you as a music lover or not, you as a casual listener, probably have some of the [same] behavior patterns as someone who's like the super expert. You want to build something that's easy enough for a lot of people to use—those who are digging in crates and those who are like, "I just want to push play and listen to something."

The first version of Apple Music got mixed reviews. There were good things said, bad things said. How did your worldview change during that experience?

I think it is a motivator, makes you want to do better, find better solutions. All of us are human, so you react to it in that way where you want to make sure that whatever you are serving up is a great experience for everyone. Any criticism, you should pay attention to, whether you accept it and change or you take it and move on is the choice, but criticism is not a bad thing.

We should be paying attention to all of the ways that people want to listen to music, I mean, truly. Each point of interest is equally important as the other. I really like R&B from 1993, but I really like R&B that I just heard last week, too. How do I get served both of those things, because I am a complex music listener? By the way, you don't have to be a music-phile in order to have that experience. Even a casual listener at the end of the day does not want to listen to the same thing again and again and again. You do want fresh; you want to be served something. I have learned that the balance of all of those things between the security of listening, to everything I want to listen to, and being served something new, the experience of U.S. consumers or me as a consumer, all those things should be rated equally.

In Apple Music there's not a lot of algorithmic stuff going on in the curation. Do you consider that as kind of the ace in the hole, because it's all human?

Yeah, it's important, it really is important. Human curation allows you to have the emotion and feel music, because it is a very emotional thing. It makes you feel happy, it helps you when you are feeling sad, gets you pumped up, calms you down. You want me to keep going? Because I could preach. I think it is a very emotional thing and you should treat it as such. We as humans have that and we can express it.

Algorithms can't do that?

I don't know if I'd go that far, but, yeah, people who love music and have passion for it can curate it in a way that can connect to you as a human being.

How does Apple Music fit into the whole of Apple?

I want to listen to my Apple Music on my iPhone, I also want to listen to it on my iPad, I want to play it on my Apple TV, I want to be connected everywhere I go. It fits into the puzzle of everything that is Apple, and, therefore, it should not be seen as some sort of separate entity that is trying to find its way.

There is a grand tradition of marketing in this company dating back to Steve Jobs. Can you tell me what the difference was coming over from Beats? Did you notice a radically different approach to marketing once you got here?

I would say marketing here and marketing at Beats, maybe surprisingly, are very similar in that it's about following the passion point versus following some sort of created self-control expression. It is about what is the thing that you as a consumer want to know about, and then let me concentrate on the passion in order for me to communicate that thing to you.

For instance, if you did the spot with Mary J. Blige, Taraji P. Henson, and Kerry Washington, I would say that that is a spot that probably defies the way that people would do traditional marketing, which is that you have these three black women who are mature and who are listening to music much in the same way you do with your friends, and you don't look anything like them. The passion and the emotion of that interaction is universal.

What can you tell me about what you have learned about race and gender in corporate America? Some women and minorities have described the feeling of having to be twice as good to get where they want to go.

I always find that question quite funny, because I don't have another experience. The experience I have is this. This body, this is it. I don't have anything else to compare it to. Frankly, I think it is unfair to me, if I did it to myself, to say, "I wonder how this experience has been different to mine?" It would undercut my own successes and my own passion and my own journey. I really don't do that. This experience is what I have. Do I work hard? Hell, yeah. Am I passionate about what I do? Yes. Do I hope I have a future in this? Absolutely. Do I hope nobody gets in my way? They better not.

It is a difficult question to answer, and I have tried many ways to figure out how to answer it and I have come to the same thing, which is that this is it, this is the experience I have. To compare it to somebody else's would do me a disservice.

A new cybersecurity approach could keep your data safe.

The program coordinator at the Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County in California never suspected that an email she received earlier this year contained anything more than the corporate invoice it claimed. But as soon as she opened the attachment, malware began to encrypt data on her computer. The breach threatened to expose far more than just her personal files: In order to provide its customers with health care, immigration assistance, and other social services, Catholic Charities handles the medical and financial records of more than 54,000 people each year. Of all the cybersecurity systems—including firewalls and antivirus software—that the nonprofit had in place to shield those sensitive documents, only one flagged the intrusion.

The security breach was detected by the flagship product created by Darktrace, a U.K.-based cybersecurity company founded in 2013. Just days before the malware attack, Catholic Charities had begun testing Darktrace's pioneering new technology, the enterprise immune system (EIS).

Modeled after the human body's immune system, the EIS embeds in a computer network and learns what behavior is considered normal for that system. It can then spot suspicious activity and even work to slow an attack, just as the human immune system releases antibodies at the first sign of invasive cells.

Darktrace's immunity approach represents a compelling new take on cybersecurity. The $75 billion industry is under mounting pressure to evolve beyond traditional methods as dated systems have failed to prevent high-profile hacks on major businesses. With attackers increasingly relying on fast-moving algorithms to carry out highly sophisticated security breaches—such as those that have recently compromised major universities and hospitals—Darktrace is responding in kind, creating complex formulas that allow machines to continuously scan entire networks and register anomalies that other advanced systems may overlook. Its technology, built in part by former members of the British Intelligence Agencies MI5 and GCHQ, is intended to support—and enhance—existing systems.

Where most cybersecurity companies focus on teaching their technology to recognize the digital footprints of malware (which can quickly become outdated as new attacks emerge) or building firewalls to block intruders, Darktrace takes a more hands-off approach. Rather than rely on humans to feed them specific examples of suspicious behavior, its algorithms train themselves to find abnormalities—a technique that's known as unsupervised machine learning.

"The concept of Darktrace says that [as attacks become more sophisticated], you're not going to be able to keep the bad stuff out," says Vanessa Colomar, a member of Darktrace's board of directors. It's far more effective to figure out how to stop attackers once they're in. CEO Nicole Eagan says the EIS has been deployed in more than 1,000 networks worldwide, with clients ranging from a two-person hedge fund to a global bank. Once the hour-long installation is complete, the EIS searches for new threats while also examining the network for existing breaches. "Within the first and second weeks, we find things out of the ordinary in about 80% of the Fortune 500s we're deployed in," says Eagan. "It's things their legacy tools totally missed."

That success has helped accelerate the three-year-old company's growth. Of the companies that have registered for its 30-day free trial, about two-thirds have become paying customers. The company, valued at $400 million, now has 20 offices, including outposts in New York; Hong Kong; Warsaw, Poland; and Milan.

Darktrace's use of unsupervised machine learning comes with certain benefits: Since there are no assumed rules about what a hack looks like, attackers can't simply tweak their code to dupe the system. And since the EIS operates as an observer, there's no barrier that hackers could try to disable.

"What we're really passionate about is that there's no one algorithm that rules them all," says Dave Palmer, Darktrace's director of technology. "We've got a dozen different machine-learning techniques, all fighting to be the best representation for your specific setup."

Not everyone agrees that unsupervised machine learning is the best approach to cybersecurity. Supervised learning—the technique used by anti-spam filters, in which algorithms are taught to discern between junk mail and the real thing—can help eliminate false positives that sometimes result when an unsupervised system reacts to a routine change within a network. (For example, an algorithm might notice that data is suddenly being transferred to Dropbox and flag it as a security violation, when in fact the company just added Dropbox as an official storage tool.)

Avoiding such confusion is why some security companies take a hybrid approach of supervised and unsupervised machine learning. PatternEx, which launched in February, uses unsupervised learning to scan for abnormalities, then presents its data to a human analyst to distinguish true attacks from false positives. In a recent study, researchers from PatternEx and MIT found the system caught 85% of attacks, while delivering fewer false alarms than unsupervised learning alone. There hasn't been a similar lab study completed on Darktrace, though Eagan says her system—despite being totally unsupervised—typically generates five to 10 alerts per client per week.

Eric Ogren, a senior analyst at IT advisory firm 451 Research, says that most businesses will likely opt for the headache of false positives if it means a more secure network. "What's the bigger risk, that you chase down a false positive, or that someone makes off with your customer data?" he asks. "I think that within five years, unsupervised machine learning is going to be driving security architecture."

Intel made a $300 million investment to diversify its workforce, entrepreneur funding, and supply chain in 2015. Here's how it's going.

Tech giants in Silicon Valley are known for pursuing big ideas, changing the world through technology and, unfortunately, a fairly extreme lack of diversity.

But at least one company is taking proactive steps in addressing the problem. In January 2015, Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich made a bold pledge at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, allocating $300 million to increase diversity within the company and the tech industry at large.

Eighteen months later, the company is making progress on many of its initiatives, while others will require more attention in order to reach the company's goal of having a workforce that is representative of the U.S.'s working population by 2020.

Intel's Diversity Progress Report

In the company's mid-year diversity report, published today, female hires are down slightly from December 2015, from 35.1% to 34.1%. However, 25.4% of Intel employees are female, representing a new record for the company. Underrepresented minority hiring also increased this year, from 11.8% in 2015 to 13.1% in 2016.

"Our mid-year checkpoint shows that we've got more work to do," says Danielle Brown, Intel's ‎chief diversity and inclusion officer. "This year we have set the goal of 45% diverse [female and underrepresented minority] hires, and we're not quite there yet, at 43.4%."

Brown adds that the company is also striving for equal representation among the leadership ranks, as well as equal pay for equal work. Female leadership at the VP level or above grew from 17.6% in December 2015 to 18.7% today, with women representing 42.9% of new leadership hires. Underrepresented minority leadership roles also increased from 6.3% to 6.9% during that time.

"In our last report we did an analysis of gender pay parity, and found that our gender pay parity was at 100%," says Brown. "Not only have we maintained that gender pay parity at 100%, but we disclosed our numbers across race and ethnicity, and found that we achieved 99% pay equity between our counterpart majority employees and our under-presented minorities, and we have committed to closing that gap and reaching 100% pay parity by the end of the year."

Tackling The Retention Problem

This past February, as Intel was ushering in a wave of new diversity hires, Fast Company reported that many weren't sticking around.

African-American workers had a higher exit rate than the rest of the staff, and though the company had recently hired 11 Native American employees, 19 had left the previous year. Brown explains that many of the departures were part of a global restructuring effort that refocused the company on cloud and mobile technologies, but in the first half of 2016, 47 Native American employees, 607 Hispanic employees, and 261 African-American employees left the company, representing a combined 12.3% of the company's total exits this year. As a point of comparison, 4,590 white employees and 1,552 Asian-American employees left the company during that same period.

"To counter this, we are increasing our rigor and focus on retention and progression of our diverse employees and in 2016, launched programs including a Retention WarmLine to provide additional guidance and counsel to employees who are seeking support and development, or feeling frustrated with the challenges they are facing," said Brown. "We also completed a Multicultural Progression and Retention study of 15,000 employees that explored the barriers to retaining and progressing our diverse talent. A great deal of work needs to be done inside Intel as well as the broader tech industry to cultivate a fully inclusive environment that welcomes and embraces a broad set of perspectives."

The Business Case For More Diversity In The Workplace

While Intel has been making incredible strides toward gender and racial equality within its workplace, Brown says there has been some criticism by those who believe that companies should hire the best and brightest, without considering race, gender, or ethnicity.

"I wholly reject the notion that hiring a more diverse workforce means that in any way you're compromising your standards," she says. "Not only can you hire an amazingly diverse workforce into the tech industry, but when you hire that amazingly diverse workforce, you find wonderful, well-qualified people."

Furthermore, as Intel transitions from a PC-centric company toward a broader focus on cloud technologies and smart devices, Brown believes a more diverse workforce will prove advantageous in reaching new markets.

"As we're entering new markets, calling on new customers, creating new products, we want to make sure our workforce is representative of the consumers that we serve," she says. "We truly believe that will lead to more growth, more innovation, and better results. Not only is it the right thing to do, but we believe it's good business."

In fact, Intel recently commissioned a study called Decoding Diversity, which attempts to quantify the benefits of a more inclusive workforce. The study concludes that diversity leads to higher revenues, profits, and market value.

"In this report, it said that improving ethnic and gender diversity in the U.S. technology workforce could create between $470 billion and $570 billion in new value to the industry, and could add as much as 1.2 to 1.6 percentage points to the national GDP," explains Brown.

External Initiatives

While Intel has made incredible strides towards diversity within its own workforce it hasn't stopped there. A number of external programs are helping the company improve the talent pipeline for underrepresented minorities and women in the tech industry, while investing in minority-owned businesses and pursuing a more diverse supplier network.

For example, Intel has invested $25 million over the last 18 months into pipeline development programs that promote STEM education at the high school and university levels, and dedicated another $125 of the Intel Capital Venture Fund over five years toward investing in startups run by women or underrepresented minorities.

"We had committed last year to achieving $1 billion in annual spending with diverse suppliers by the year 2020, and to build up to that run rate this year, we set a goal of reaching $400 million in diverse supplier spending, and we're on track to achieving that goal," says Brown.

While the impact these investments have made are yet to be seen, Brown believes that Intel will have a strong impact on increasing diversity and inclusion in what has traditionally been a non-inclusive industry.

Says Brown: "I truly think it's important to invest in developing the tech industry's entire ecosystem if you're really going to change the game."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article stated the company was now 24.5% female. It is actually 25.4%. We regret the error.

In an interview with Fast Company, White House techies Jason Goldman and Josh Miller explain the idea behind the new mini-app.

Today, the White House is releasing a Facebook Messenger bot that allows users to send notes to the president.

Here's how it works: You open up the Messenger app on your phone (or the chat feature in Facebook.com) and type in "The White House" as the name of the "friend" you want to message. Alternatively, you can go to the White House's Facebook page and click the "Message" button. Either way, a series of screens (the bot) will appear that let you fill out a message to the president. Press "send" and the message goes straight to the Office of Presidential Correspondence—the White House department that collects and processes all communications from citizens.

There's nothing particularly earth-shattering about the bot. People have been sending messages to the president since the founding of the republic. This is just one more way to do it.

But while the bot itself might seem pretty simple, the fact that the White House is diving into Facebook bots so quickly (they were only introduced a few months ago) is a sign of how President Obama's administration is trying to improve the workings of government for everyday citizens—and get more people to participate.

Certainly, compared to other Messenger bots in the works, the White House one doesn't do a whole lot. Facebook launched the bots platform this spring to let brands and other organizations build mini-apps ("bots") that are integrated directly into Messenger. The idea is to aggregate a user's communications in a single place—rather than make them hop in and out of a bunch of apps for each brand they interact with.

Of course, Facebook also has its eye on potential revenue streams should a lot of commerce start flowing through the bots. KLM lets you get flight notifications and boarding passes inside its bot. Pizza Hut is working on one that lets you order food and keep track of promotions. Others let you check weather or order flowers. And one from the NBA featured game highlights during the league finals.

There are no such bells and whistles on the White House bot. There's no interactivity. There are no cute features. You can only fill out a message and send it. But that's okay, according to the bot's creators, Jason Goldman and Josh Miller, Silicon Valley-natives-turned-White House-techies, because that's all that was required for this particular use case.

Thousands of U.S. citizens reach out to the president every day—in the form of letters, phone calls, and emails. They share their worries about health care. They weigh in on housing policy. Some ask him to look out for their children in the military. Others let him know how he and Mrs. Obama have inspired them. The Office of Presidential Correspondence reads every single message and dispatches them to the appropriate office. "Getting very specific feedback from citizens," Goldman told Fast Company in an exclusive interview, is "a high priority."

"A lot of times [these messages] identify problems that might not have percolated up through the various agencies and bureaucracies," the president was quoted as saying in a White House blog post published today. "And more than once . . . these letters inspired action on real problems."

But it's 2016, and people increasingly communicate digitally, rather than on paper or even by phone. So it seems natural that an institution like the White House would develop new channels to let citizens communicate via their preferred mediums. And given how many people essentially live inside social networks (Messenger has 900 million monthly users worldwide), taking advantage of the new bot platform would seem like a no-brainer.

Government agencies, however, have been notoriously slow to keep up with evolving technologies. And even when they do, they don't always give a lot of thought to creating a great experience for users. (Need proof? Take a look at your city's website and count how many forms are available only as PDFs.) So the fact that the White House would embrace a new technology just months after it was launched—and not go overboard with unnecessary features—is a sign of the president's ever increasing commitment to stay in step with how people communicate today and his interest in hiring tech natives to show him how.

Goldman is one of the hundreds of people from the world of tech who have been brought to D.C. in the last few years to help government run better. (See our cover story from last year, "Inside Obama's Stealth Startup.") Goldman is best known as the VP of product at Twitter who shepherded the service through its formative years. He also did a stint before that at Google, working on Blogger. And after Twitter, he cofounded Obvious Corp. with Twitter's Ev Williams and Biz Stone, to fund, incubate, and develop new startups.

Last year, President Obama asked Goldman, who has an interest in helping people engage with government, to become the White House's first-ever chief digital officer and take over leadership of the White House Office of Digital Strategy.

The department was created soon after Obama took office, to continue the pioneering digital work his team had started during the 2008 presidential campaign. Before Goldman, the office had been run by people with backgrounds in political communications and strategy—disciplines which normally focus on how to shape and disseminate a politician's message. Goldman is the first to come from a product management background, a field which, in the world of tech, is responsible for focusing on a product's users—striving both to understand what they need and to create the best possible experiences for them.

Historically, a big part of the White House digital team's work has involved creating and broadcasting content to shape the president's narrative and drive his agenda. (Which they've pioneered so successfully that White House reporters have raised concerns about how social media is allowing the Oval Office to bypass the traditional media.)

The digital office is continuing with that work, but another "user" Goldman is bringing front and center are the U.S. citizens themselves. He's interested in putting more emphasis on what he calls "a two-way conversation"—not just broadcasting to Americans, but creating useful ways for them to communicate back. "I believe civic engagement with our government is our right and our duty," he wrote in a post on Medium last year announcing his move to the White House. All of that aligns with the mandate he received from the president: to find ways to "connect people [citizens] with purpose." "My job," Goldman wrote in the Medium post, "will be to use online tools to create meaningful opportunities for American citizens to participate in our government."

The decision to create the Messenger bot came after Goldman and Miller studied traffic patterns on WhiteHouse.gov. Miller is a 25-year-old startup founder and former Facebook product manager, whom Goldman brought into the White House as director of product, another first-ever position. (They got to know each other when Obvious incubated Miller's startup, Branch, which was acquired by Facebook in 2014.)

Studying traffic patterns is "a standard product management technique," Goldman said. It gives you insight into what users are trying to do and how your product can best serve them. "Tech folks and people from product management have a tendency to be very data-focused," he said. "That's a mind-set our team has brought to the work we do here."

While tons of pages of content had been built into WhiteHouse.gov—blog posts, videos, fact sheets—Goldman and Miller noticed that people mostly came for just two reasons: to go to the "Contact the White House" page and to fill out petitions. "If you look at where traffic is going," Goldman said, "it's really driven by a desire to connect."

So when Facebook launched its bot platform this spring, a bot seemed an obvious next project. Why continue to force people to come to WhiteHouse.gov when you could just let them give feedback from inside Messenger? Building something there fit with one of Goldman's user-focused goals: "meeting people where they are." Based on their research, Goldman said, the team could have decided to "build some new platform" on the White House site. But it made more sense to explore options elsewhere. "We know there's much more traffic outside WhiteHouse.gov," he said.

Plus, they're hoping that opening up a channel in a place where people naturally communicate with their friends could inspire more people to provide feedback to the president. "By going to new platforms," Miller wondered, "can we get people to consider sending messages . . . who've maybe never done it before, or maybe never even considered it?"

Goldman has brought that product management sensibility to other projects. Back in 2011, the White House launched "We the People," a site that lets people create and sign petitions. Once in Washington, Goldman looked under the hood and found ways to improve the user experience. He created a mobile version of the platform ("an overwhelming amount of the traffic on We the People came from phones, but earlier iterations of the site weren't optimized for mobile," Goldman wrote in a Medium post in April. "It's not hard to imagine how frustrating this may have been"). They also added more information to help people figure out if their issue was something that fell within the federal government's purview, so they wouldn't waste their time on something the government couldn't address.

They've also run Twitter chats with government officials on topics the public is interested in and brought officials to Facebook groups to answer questions on the Zika virus and opioid addiction.

Only a handful of people who use the new Messenger bot will likely hear back from the White House. That's consistent with what happens today. Feedback gets forwarded to the appropriate agency (if it's a plea for help) or working group (if it's feedback on policy). In some cases, the senders get an email, letter, or phone call in return. The president himself reads 10 handpicked notes every day, and personally responds to many of them. But because of the sheer volume, many people simply make do with radio silence. "We don't guarantee a response," Miller said. "But we promise you we're listening."

The Apple vets open up on the embarrassment that was Apple Maps' debut and more in this wide-ranging interview.

Fast Company: Let's start talking about Maps. How are you developing Maps, and how broadly might it apply as Apple looks ahead?

Eddy Cue, SVP of Internet software and services: The first thing to know about Maps is there's no one developing maps in a significant way except us and Google. There's Nokia, and then you've got TomTom, which is a relatively small company selling to cars. Even when you hear of a company like Uber doing that, everyone is doing it with a very narrow focus. We use maps in a very, very broad way, and so do our customers.

Another thing about Maps is that it just never ends. Every day, businesses are opening and closing, streets are changing, highways are being built. There are short-term things happening, like particular lanes closing, traffic, a bridge being closed. The whole thing is extremely dynamic, which makes it an interesting problem. Most maps that have been done today are almost old-fashioned. It's all been drive the road, take photos, do satellite images. The only argument has been, how often do you do it?

The advantage of us coming to this later in the game is that, yeah, we have to do some of that, but in order to stay updated we're trying to use the iPhone itself, and the data it's giving us. Let me give you a good example: a golf course. How do we know when a new golf course opens up? We're not exactly driving around looking for golf courses. But we know it's there, because there are all these golf apps that get used at a golf course. If we see that all these golf apps are being used at a particular location, and we don't show that as a golf course, we probably have a problem. You can discover that pretty quickly. It's not as if you need a year, or anything like that.

FC: Do you then have to drive by that golf course?

Cue: It depends. Some things you can do by just going on the Web and checking out whether a golf course exists at that location. You might look at satellite images to see if there had been construction there. In a worst-case scenario, you would have to drive by. You know, airports are the same thing. Runways get developed, but you don't always really know because many are private. Roads closing, bridges closing—these are really all data problems, because the truth is we don't really need anyone to tell us that the bridge is closing. The moment a bridge is actually closed, you can immediately see the effect.

Craig Federighi, SVP of software engineering: If all of a sudden the phones stop moving in that direction . . .

Cue: . . . and they start moving in a different direction . . .

Federighi: That's the kind of thing we do now. So you draw a distinction between that and personal information. Your device may learn your commute patterns, it may learn when you go to the office and when you go home, so that locally on the phone it could tell you that you need to leave early because there's a lot of traffic on your way home. Well, that's something that is personal to you and provides value to you, but we don't want Apple to know when you go to work. So we keep that intelligence on the device, but we can anonymously track things like traffic patterns.

Cue: Here's another thing about Maps: It's expensive. We have thousands of people working on Maps.

FC: Doing things like making sure that golf course gets in there?

Cue: It's that. It's building the architectures, doing the automation, the intelligence, the amount of data we're capturing. It's very, very expensive, and it doesn't have a direct revenue stream. So when I say it's only Google and us who are developing it, well, that's part of the reason why. You can't be a company going out and developing maps to make money; at least no one's figured that out.

FC: In the long run, is the service, to me as an Apple customer, simply that I will have up-to-date Maps of my neighborhood and wherever I drive? Or does it get much bigger than that?

Federighi: I think it already is. To Eddy's point, while Maps isn't a revenue-producing product itself, it's a platform. It's certainly an important feature in terms of the convenience it provides you, but Maps is a platform on which so many of our developers build. If you think about mobility in general, Maps is a core organizing structure for the physical world in which you interact. So many, many third-party apps incorporate mapping, as an understanding of where you are in relation to others, as a way to do all sorts of things—put photos on a map to help you relive a trip, get a heads up about when you need to leave, or see which of your friends is in a certain area. Just as our operating system is a platform or a foundation, having a map of the physical world is a foundation for building all kinds of value on the platform. Our Maps app is just one client of that underlying platform that's delivered there.

FC: What does it do to the development team, and to your plans, when something like Maps gets introduced and it's derided immediately. [Maps was introduced in September, 2012, to universal scorn.] Does that slow down what you were hoping to do?

Cue: Well, look, the first thing is that you're embarrassed. Let's just deal with that one fact of emotion. I mean, these things mean a lot to us. We work really hard, and so you're embarrassed. In the case of Maps, what it causes you to do is ask: How important is this? Is this a place where we need to triple down or quadruple down, or did we make that mistake because it's not that important to us? We had long discussions at the ET [executive team] level about the importance of Maps, where we thought Maps was going in the future, and could we treat it as a third-party app? I mean, we don't do every app. We're not trying to create a Facebook app. We think they do a great job. We always came back to the conclusion that Maps was not one of those. It's an integral part to the whole platform. There were so many features that we wanted to build that are dependent on that technology, and we couldn't see ourselves being in a position where that was something that we didn't own.

Federighi: So it was a triple down, and it was a huge learning moment for Apple. Maps presented us with some relatively new challenges, where we needed to develop competencies that we initially didn't appreciate, areas where we needed some depth, where we needed to take a new approach. We had great approaches for some of the other problems we'd been solving, but this one had some characteristics that meant we had to take some different approaches. So we had to ask: What do we have to learn?

FC: Was the development process of Maps very much in line with the development process of things you'd done in the past?

Federighi: More than it should have been. Maps is a huge data integration and data-quality issue. Eddy talks about the amount of data you have. You're getting data from a lot of providers, and some of that data is, or should be, changing every day.

Cue: It may not even be right.

Federighi: And much of it is inconsistent. You'll get a feed from someone who provides information about restaurants, and they'll refer to location in a different way, in terms of latitude and longitude, from your base map. There's a huge data-quality issue there, and I don't think we initially appreciated all the kinds of technology we would need to do that on an ongoing basis. Going through that lesson in a very public way gave us all the motivation we needed to say we're going to do this really well.

Cue: And look, we made some significant changes to all of our development processes because of it. For example, the reason you as a customer are going to be able to test iOS is because of Maps. We were never able to take it out to a large number of users to get that feedback. So, to all of us living in Cupertino, Maps seemed pretty darn good. Right? The problems weren't obvious to us. Now we do a lot more betas.

FC: You guys have a fierce history here, and there were all sorts of rules that were established during Steve [Jobs's] tenure. This sounds like a case where you were doing something you would not have been encouraged to do in the past.

Cue: No. When you look back, like everything else, it's easy to see the mistakes. Maps was a new area—not one where we have a lot of experience or expertise. It was important, but we were looking to replace an existing product [analog maps]. So we weren't looking to create something entirely new. So you're trying to replace one thing with another thing, and we kind of let the team we put in charge of it go off on their own. Now that you understand the complexity of Maps, you realize that it was a relatively small team, and we kind of isolated them in their own little world. We completely underestimated the complexity of the product. If you think of Maps, it seems like it's not that hard. All the roads are known, come on! All the restaurants are known. There's Yelp and Open Table; they have all the addresses. Mail gets delivered; UPS has all the addresses. The mail arrives. FedEx arrives. You know, how hard is this? That was underestimating. And then there was the quality part, of how you test and validate— that is also a big issue. It's an ongoing one. We've improved it significantly, and Google's improved theirs significantly, but it's still a problem that needs to be better. For both of us.

Federighi: But we are a company that has learned and adapted as we've gone into new domains, during Steve's time and after Steve's time. If you look at building mobile consumer devices and what it meant to market and retail those, we were doing lots of things we had never done while we were just the Mac company. Under Steve, that part of the business learned to adapt to that domain, and got really good at it. Under Steve, we got into silicon; we now design and build our own chips. The set of practices, disciplines, expertise, and management approach to releasing a chip that you're going to fabricate in the billions is a different discipline than the one you're going to use to design a Mac, or to sell something in retail, or to sell songs in the iTunes Store. So we had to develop that expertise in chips, because it was vital to the experience we wanted to deliver. Maps is yet another domain where we had to learn what we didn't know. And as we realize that a particular technology or approach is necessary to deliver new experiences, we're going to learn what we don't know and adapt our style to address it. There's not just one way to get things done here.

FC: Eddy, you told me that Siri was a very different case.

Cue: Siri is very different because it was new. When you're doing something that hasn't been done, it's a very different animal. You're trying to determine what are the features, what are the ways it can work, what are customers looking for, what are the things you can do that will improve the lives of customers. I think that's still the case with Siri. If you look today, things like Cortana and Google exist, yet there's still so much to do in that space. There are so many things you'd like Siri to do that it doesn't do quite do yet.

FC: Can you give me examples of things you're looking at with Maps?

Cue: Mmmm . . . [He shakes his head no.]

FC: Okay, I had to try. Maps are really interesting though. For years, they've been thought of as the possible overlay for all the information in the world.

Federighi: That's right. It's the organizing principle for the physical world.

Cue: Here's a problem Maps should solve: I'm about to get on a red-eye and go to New York. I don't go there that often, but I've gone to places I like. I never remember the name of restaurants. Today you solve that by remembering the type of food, and maybe the neighborhood, but there should be a better way of solving that problem.

FC: By knowing the history of where you've been?

Cue: Possibly. I mean, there are better ways to solve that problem than me hunting and pecking. Traffic, by the way, is another one. We do a lot of proactive stuff, but let's say I'm at work today. If I knew my commute would be cut by 15 minutes, I might stay at work an extra half hour. Maps should tell me that.

FC: [When a family member calls me at this point of the interview, Apple's Voice Memos app, which I've been using to record the interview on my iPhone, stops recording. I lose about five minutes of the conversation. When we get started again—using a different recording app—I ask about the flaw.] Somebody went on a rant yesterday about the possibility that the iPhone 7 won't have a headphone jack. Meanwhile, my recording just stopped after that phone call, which is annoying.

Cue: That's good, actually. That means there's still work for us to do.

FC: But here's the thing. Apple gets hit on two sides. There's one crew that thinks you're not as visionary as Google or other places, and another crew that hammers you for detailed errors like this.

Cue: I like the latter; I don't like the former. I'm okay with the latter.

FC: You're okay that there are mistakes, and that you have to fix them?

Cue: We have to be honest with ourselves. We're not perfect, and we're going to make mistakes. There's an evolving range of issues that customers have raised that we haven't addressed, but we'd like to address.

FC: There's a perception that there are more of these than in the past.

Cue: Well, there's more people, there's more devices, and there's more communications available. I actually think our products have fewer mistakes than they did in the past, and our data shows that. But, look, I tell this to my team all the time. When we were the Mac company, if we impacted 1% of our customers, it was measured in thousands. Now if we impact 1% of our customers, it's measured in tens of millions. That's a problem, right—things are going to be perceived differently. Our products are way better than they used to be, but there's a higher bar, and I'm okay with that. I think that is why we're here. That's why I get up every day. I like that people have high expectations of us, and that they care about little things that bother them, which, in a lot of products, they wouldn't bother about. With other companies, you think, that's about as good as it's going to be. With us, you want perfection; you want it to be the best. And we want that.

Federighi: A world where people do not care about the quality of their experience is not a good world for Apple. A world where people care about those details and want to complain about them is the world where our values shine. That is our obsession. If people were like, "That's good enough for me" . . . well, there are a lot of people who can provide that kind of experience. I think that we are focused on working hard every day to make it better. We make mistakes, things get out there, but we work incredibly hard to make things better and better. The bar does keep going up. The number of things you expect from your phone and your computer and the way they interact, and the cloud and services and the way the Internet works with them, the level of complexity goes up and up. But we're committed to getting better and better, faster than it gets harder and harder.

Cue: And the former thing that you said, well, that's our culture. We don't want to tell the world what we want to solve, what we're trying to solve. Why? Because we haven't solved it. Other than trying to make ourselves look cool or good, what's the purpose of that? I don't understand that part of it. So, yeah, there are a bunch of things we're working on that we'd like to solve—some we've been working on for years and we haven't solved, for that matter. I don't feel like we should be tooting our own horns that we're trying to solve that problem, when we haven't really solved it.

FC: This seems to go back to the popular myth about what happened here under Steve. You're seen as a breakthrough company, and people say that the Watch was supposed to be a breakthrough and it wasn't.

Cue: I think of us as a company that changes peoples lives with the products we build because they use them in significant ways. Call that a breakthrough—I don't know. Somebody will argue that we weren't the first phone. But we were the first ones to do that in a mass way.

FC: You once told me that you brought your family to the iPhone introduction because you knew that was incredibly special. Does the rest of the world expect you to deliver an iPhone every four years?

Cue: Well, I think the rest of the world thinks we delivered it every year while Steve was here. Those products were developed over a long period of time. So, people say the Watch isn't a breakthrough product. Well, neither was the iPhone, by the way. And neither was the iPod. Go look at the numbers; these were not a huge success right away. A $500 music player? How stupid are these guys?

Federighi: We couldn't have built the Watch if we hadn't been solving all sorts of problems on the phones in the first place. And the phone benefited from work we did when we thought we were trying to build an iPad. So, the expertise we developed on mobile silicon, and power management, and iOS were enablers to get that Watch on your wrist. In that sense, we're constantly innovating and iterating these products, to the point where the phone you have here on the table [an iPhone 6S] is dramatically different than the one we introduced when we introduced the iPhone [in 2007]. Since you can draw a line from one to the other, you think of them as the same thing, but this [iPhone 6S] is probably a thousand times faster. It can ID your fingerprint, it's the only camera you need, it can run apps—it's just a dramatically different device. That's the result of continuous innovation that puts you in a dramatically different place from where you first started.

FC: It's also much better because of how it connects to the rest of my devices, right? When you think of development, do you think of developing things for that ecosystem or for a particular device?

Federighi: We think in terms of experiences. We all use these devices every day, and we think about what we'd like them to do for us. Those aspirational experiences lead us down all sorts of roads technologically, to all kinds of problems that we need to solve. So we think, "Oh, we'd like your Watch to unlock your Mac," because we need to unlock our Macs every day. It doesn't start with, "Hey, we've been doing development in wireless and they want something to use their technology for."

Cue: There's another thing, too. When everything gets compared to the phone—and it does, and that's fine—if we do that, we'll always lose. The phone is a device that everyone on the planet has, and you can't say that about anything else. So, if we were to go solve the problem of flying a supersonic airplane, that might have significant benefits, but the number of people it impacts is tiny compared to the phone. That comparison is really hard. If I looked at it that way, I'd never do an Apple TV, because there aren't enough TVs in the world. So, might as well not do that! You can't look at it that way, and compare everything back to the phone. Then no other product should be created.

FC: In some companies there's an innovative side of the company and another where their main job is to sell a lot of the old standby. Is the iPhone becoming the "old" side of the business around Apple?

Cue: It's not going to become that. Look at the Mac. We still put a lot of effort into that, and it's 30 years old. If you look at OSX, same thing.

Federighi: The phone is this ubiquitous platform for delivering capability to our customers. It's the single best opportunity for us to innovate, and the single best opportunity for our developers to innovate into our ecosystem. So this is not "put that on maintenance while we go do something new." It remains a pillar of what we do, for as far as we can see. It's not the only pillar of what we do, but it remains the biggest value creation opportunity we have for our customers.

FC: Many people argue that you, Google, Amazon, and Facebook are all after the same thing in the long run: ownership of the customer throughout the day.

Federighi and Cue together: We don't think of it that way.

Cue: I love Facebook. We can't be everything. One of the reasons we've been highly successful is that we focus. We can't be great at everything; nobody's great at everything. I mean, come on. So, if you want to be great at something, you have to focus and do a few things. We've been lucky. We've had a few, and not just one. That's the only way we know how to work. So we don't want to be Amazon and be Facebook and be Instagram and so on. Why? Or Uber. Why? I think it's awesome that Travis and his team have done Uber on our platform. It would not exist without our platform, let's be clear. But great for them for thinking of that problem, and solving it. We would never have ever solved that problem. We weren't looking that way. We would have never seen it.

Federighi: It is an interesting, ongoing press narrative, however. To the extent that anyone anywhere does anything interesting, the question is: Why isn't Apple doing that; why is Apple behind in that? We aren't the Everything Company. We take on a very small number of things that we do very well, and we find that pretty rewarding.

FC: I don't know if you'll answer this, but supposedly the most important thing for any employee is their relationship with their direct boss. So how is your relationship with Tim different from your relationship with Steve?

Cue [laughing]: How is it different?

Federighi [smiling]: No difference . . .

Cue: I don't twitch as much, but . . . no, just kidding. I'm kidding. It doesn't change, in that they're both extremely demanding. Their approach is completely different. Here's a feeling that I have always had, and I wish I had it with my team. I never wanted to disappoint Steve. I never want to disappoint Tim. And I have that with, like, my dad. I was here with [former Apple CEO Michael] Spindler and those guys, and I didn't have it with them. That's a quality that makes them unique. Now, their approach is very different. Steve was in your face screaming, and Tim is more quiet, more cerebral in his approach. But you have the same feeling. And when you disappoint Tim, even though he isn't screaming at you, you get the same thing. [They both laugh knowingly.] That part comes through loud and clear.

The thing I love about Tim, and the key to his success, is that he's stayed true to himself, and never tried to be Steve. There are some qualities that he has that are better than Steve's, and Steve had some qualities that are better than Tim's. But he stayed true to what he is, and it's the best thing . He's made a lot of areas better and the areas where he's not sure, he's surrounded himself with people who do.

You know, both of these guys work [and have worked] harder than anyone at Apple. They [both put] everything they've got into this company, and to us, and that's a privilege.

FC: One venture capitalist I know said, "No one's motivated at Apple these days."

Cue: If you were in technology for a while, there are some traits that are very unique. Number one, the price of what you make is generally going down. If you're in any other business, the prices are going up. The second thing is that you're only as good as the last thing you do. Steve taught me this: He said, "Toy Story will be a classic for the rest of time." Nobody wants an original iPod. Nobody wants an iPhone 3 GS. I wake up every morning motivated because that's the world we live in. We can't ride on anyone's coattails.

Sometimes I think, if you're younger and you've only been at Apple, is that a problem? I try to tell them, if you look back 10 years at the top 10 companies in the world, Nokia was one of those. Where are they today? What happened? Did they sit on their laurels thinking, "Hey, no one's going to develop a better cell phone than us"?

Federighi: I think it's significant that upper management has lived through periods of austerity [1999 to 2001] and appreciates that this hasn't been a straight ride up. People who look at Apple's success and think we look at it as "okay, great, we're done" don't appreciate what's really going on here.

In an age where brands are desperate to attract devoted users, we look to companies that have created undeniable cult followings.

I got my hair cut recently at a barbershop in Brooklyn that's been in business for nearly 60 years. Angelo, who runs the place, has created a distinctive culture: music from the 1950s and 1960s, posters of Bogart and Sinatra, an impromptu bar in the back during the Christmas season. Two of the barbers, Vito and John, are brothers who know Angelo from their childhood days in Italy. John (who retired a year ago) once playfully identified the thinning hair on the crown of my head as a "Saint Anthony" condition—Saint Anthony being the patron saint of lost causes.

Angelo's has survived for six decades as much because of its personality as its haircuts. In that way, it is indicative of a wave of today's most high-profile businesses, fueled by cultlike followers. Most cell phones today can make calls, take pictures, surf the web, access apps. So why do so many people carry an iPhone? You can get exercise at any gym. So why are so many people enamored with SoulCycle? Understanding the alchemy of these success stories provides a powerful window into what defines competitive advantage in the modern era.

Editor-at-large Rick Tetzeli arguably knows more about Apple than any other journalist working today. He oversaw Apple coverage for years at Fortune and Fast Company, and then cowrote the New York Times No. 1 best-seller Becoming Steve Jobs. This summer, he persuaded Apple executives, including CEO Tim Cook, to sit down for an unprecedented series of interviews—Apple has historically been reluctant to cooperate with a magazine feature unconnected to the release of a specific product. What Tetzeli explores in "Believe" is a business that many of us instinctively connect with founder Steve Jobs but that actually has become a far different place. In recent months, many Apple watchers have contended that the differences from the Apple of days past are primarily negatives, underscored by a dramatic drop in Apple's stock price. Tetzeli points out how much those naysayers are missing. Apple's cult of believers—internally and among its billion-strong customers around the globe—provide unique advantages that give the company a strong chance of maintaining its prominence (and valuation) for years to come.

SoulCycle is a much younger, smaller business than Apple. But as Jonathan Ringen writes in "You Got Soul," the passion it engenders among users from Michelle Obama to Ariana Grande has turned it into a formidable prestige brand. Both alt-food purveyor Hampton Creek and clothing brand American Apparel have grappled with lawsuits and controversy (see "The Great Scramble" and "Can American Apparel Mend the Seams?") yet their perseverance owes everything to their communities of devotees.

Fast Company, too, is something of a cult brand—if you're reading this, you are likely part of a distinctive psychographic in business: optimistic, future-focused, open to risk and change. Our coverage, in print and digitally, is gauged to serve as inspiration as well as information, a badge that gives you permission and encouragement to question the status quo and strive for creating a better world. This community will come to life—and come together—this November at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in N.Y.C. and we hope many of you will join us there. Tickets are on sale now and the agenda is amazing, including speakers from Silicon Valley and Saudi Arabia. If you have extra time, you can even pop over to Angelo's for a trim. He'll take good care of you, even if you don't tell him I sent you.

Anesthesiologists' jobs look safer than radiologists' jobs. Here's why.

In H. G. Wells's classic The War of the Worlds, the narrator pauses a moment to rue the fact that he didn't react sooner to the arrival of an "intelligence greater than man's"—in his case, Martians landing on earth. Comparing himself to a comfortable dodo in its nest, he imagined those ill-fated birds also dithering as hungry sailors invaded their island: "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear."

And what about you? As intelligent technologies take over more and more of the decision-making territory once occupied by humans, are you taking any action? Are you sufficiently aware of the signs that you should? To help you get the head start you may need, here are the signs that it's time to fly the nest. All of them are evidence that a knowledge worker's job is on the path to automation.

1. It Involves Little Physical Contact Or Manipulation Of Things

If you don't have to touch your work or see your customer face-to-face in order to perform your job, there's less reason not to automate it. If you deal primarily in documents (as real estate and many other types of attorneys do, for example) or images (like radiologists), systems can digest that content and determine its meaning. If your job requires you to wrestle with something physical in unpredictable ways, it's not going away very soon. An anesthesiologist friend, for example, says he often has to move patients around a lot to clear airways, so he doubts robots will put him out of work.

2. It Involves Answering Data-Dependent Questions

We already know that analytics and algorithms are better at creating insights from data than most humans. They have already replaced some insurance policy underwriters and financial planners. They'll probably replace more, since this human/machine performance gap will only increase.

For example, a company called Kensho Technologies has created an intelligent software system called Warren, which can already answer questions like, "What happens to the share prices of energy companies when oil trades above $100 a barrel and political unrest has recently occurred in the Middle East?" The company stated that by the end of 2014, its software would be able to answer 100 million different distinct financial questions involving complex data.

3. It Involves Quantitative Analysis

One might think that quantitative analysts would be immune from job loss in the "Age of Analytics," but there are technologies that place their jobs at risk, too. Many quantitative analysts' jobs will be replaced—or at the least heavily augmented—by machine-learning systems. Machine learning is probably best used to augment human analysts and improve their productivity in analysis and model development.

But in some settings, such as online advertising, it's virtually impossible not to employ machine-learning approaches to generate models at the necessary pace. The number of models needed to target a particular consumer and a particular advertising opportunity easily ranges into the thousands per week, and the likelihood of a successful conversion (say, the customer buying the advertised product within a week) is about one in a thousand at best—meaning it's not worth human attention. Models generated through machine learning are the only possibility in this industry and a growing number of other ones.

Of course, it takes an expert quantitative analyst to design the machine-learning approach, but one such analyst can ultimately generate millions of models over time. If you're a quantitative analyst who understands machine learning, you may well keep your job. If you don't understand it, you'll probably be replaced by it.

4. Consistent Performance Is Critical To Your Role

Computers are unfailingly consistent; that's why they already determine who gets credit in financial services, for example. Where consistency matters in other job domains—insurance claims adjusting, financial stress testing, perhaps even judging crimes and issuing punishments—computers will increasingly take on the task. In insurance claims, for example, "auto-adjudication" can automatically evaluate and approve up to 75% of claims. Human claims adjusters are left to approve only the most challenging ones.

5. It Involves The Creation Of Data-Based Narratives

Jobs involving the narrative description of data and analysis were once the province of humans, but automated systems are already beginning to take them over. In journalism, companies like Automated Insights and Narrative Science are already creating data-intensive content. Sports and financial reporting are already at some risk, although the automation of these domains is on the margins thus far—high school and fantasy sports, and earnings reports for small companies.

Other companies, like AnalytixInsight, create investment analysis narratives on more than 40,000 public companies with its CapitalCube service. The job at risk in this case is that of investment analyst. Wealth management in financial services, which already relies on computer systems in many cases to determine the ideal portfolio for a particular type of investor, is also at risk. Wealth managers and brokers today often take automated recommendations and translate them into narratives for their customers. As customers grow more sophisticated and computer-literate, the translation function will be less necessary.

6. There Are Well-Defined Rules For Performing The Work

The easiest domains to automate have always been those with clear, consistent rules. Now rule-based systems can handle increasingly complex problems. If we were training for a career in financial auditing, for example, we'd be concerned. There are already some systems that automate key aspects of auditing. In tax preparation—a job that is entirely based on following complex rules—much of the work has already been taken over by systems like TurboTax and TaxCut for consumers and small businesses, and Lacerte, ProSystem, and UltraTax for corporate returns.

Think of these as the attributes of "dodo jobs"—those that are sitting there just waiting to be gobbled up by technology. It may be that we'll be left with fewer of them and not none; the most experienced knowledge workers in careers affected by these technologies may keep their jobs, while no new positions open up for entry-level workers. But for your own well-being, or your children's or grandchildren's, we'd advise you to run from them while you can.

This article is excerpted from Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby, published by Harper Business, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. It is reprinted with permission.

The former leader of the women's soccer team talks about taking on wage inequality and why retirement is like being fired—and being reborn.

Abby Wambach spent 14 electrifying years leading the U.S. women's national soccer team to Olympic and World Cup victories. She talks about taking on wage inequality, the importance of her image, and why retiring is like being fired—and being reborn.

In your soccer career, you scored more international goals than any other player, man or woman. But you've said that you don't want to be remembered only as a soccer player. Why is that?

I was able to go out on top, as a World Cup champion, and I'm so blessed to have been able to do that. That said, having had 30 years of experience playing a sport, I have kind of stymied my growth as an adult. I've been so transfixed and focused on this one goal of attaining championships and [being] my best soccer self. I don't regret it, because it offered me so many beautiful things. But when that gets stripped away, it's like: Did I love what I [was doing]? I loved representing my country, but there were parts of playing that were brutal—the injuries, the recovery from those injuries, always being on a diet, always traveling, and always pushing my body to its nth degree. What's important for me now is that I'm starting over. I have a chance at a second career, and that's both exciting and terrifying.

On your ESPN podcast, Fearless Conversation With Abby Wambach, you've talked of how retirement brought on an "existential crisis."

Retirement has been enlightening, but also really hard at times. Everyone experiences it, whether you get fired, or you're changing careers, or having children, and your life is completely flipped upside down. People don't talk about their hard times enough. Sometimes you cry, sometimes you're stuck, sometimes you drink too much. It's almost like recovery. I'm a recovering soccer player.

What did you learn about yourself in the process?

You have to accept that you're going back to the drawing board to figure out what you're going to be good at, what you're going to enjoy, what's going to fulfill you. I think that's especially [hard to do] with the level at which I played: I have very high expectations for my life. Not the lifestyle, but the successes, the goals, and the dreams. They're massive.

You've written your memoir, Forward, and you've got your podcast and a new role as an on-air analyst for ESPN. How do these endeavors challenge you?

The ESPN thing is a mind shift. You have to get into the mind-set of a coach rather than analyzing a game from a player's perspective, even though they want a player's perspective, on some level, from me. There are some nuances that I have yet to learn. And I will learn them. I'm very confident in myself in that way.

But I'm also trying out [other] new things. That's why I signed on with ESPN: They're giving me the leeway to figure out what I like. I have all these other projects [in the works] with my own businesses, starting up my new [soccer-training] camp, and creating a path centered around this revolution that I feel is happening around us. There's something in the air, around the women's movement, around equality, the gay movement, and I want to be a part of it. We have to start honoring each other's differences so that these tragedies [like the mass shooting in Orlando] stop happening.

Where do you start?

It's already starting in the things that I'm involved in, like working for ESPN. A Disney-owned company hired a gay woman with short hair who dresses androgynously. That is, for me, a telltale sign that I chose the right company, because they're not scared of someone pushing the boundaries. I'm here as a reminder that change is happening, but we still have a long way to go.

You've been very vocal since you retired about closing the gender pay gap in soccer. Why didn't you speak out about it more when you were playing?

When I retired, I realized, first of all, that I needed a job—I'm not a male professional athlete who'd signed massive contracts. I did just fine, but it's not lifetime kind of money. It [prompted] me to do this deep thinking. I got really pissed off. And then, as I was writing my book, I realized that maybe I didn't do enough when I was playing, when I could maybe have had more impact, to help grow the game and help this wage discrepancy get smaller and smaller. At the same time as I was basically regurgitating this emotion and information to put into my memoir, the women on the national team filed this grievance against U.S. Soccer for equal pay. And so—this is all part of what I was talking about earlier—it feels to me like there's this revolution happening.

There was so much good that came out of Title IX [the 1972 law requiring equal opportunity for women in higher education]. The idea behind it was driven primarily by women wanting to be able to educate themselves to become doctors. But the best side effect was requiring universities to have the same amount of female athletes as male athletes. If you look 20 to 30 years down the road [from that decision], I'm the by-product. I'm the direct by-product of women before me doing work to ensure equal treatment, to ensure equal opportunity. And what you find now is more women in sports, and more women in professional sports. That equalized things in a way that really did change the world, and now I want to do my part.

Your memoir is just being published. What was it like writing something so revealing?

It's been the most brutal and beautiful experience I've ever undertaken, professionally, because it's so personal. There's a public persona that I put out there for a lot of reasons, the first being that as one of 23 [players on the national team], I couldn't really speak my mind about all of my life. I was speaking for so many other women, and I didn't want my personal life to get mixed in. So now I get to shed some light on who I am.

You were arrested for driving under the influence in early April. You're a role model for millions, which comes with a certain amount of responsibility. How will you go about rebuilding trust?

I am just being myself. I'm not worrying about rebuilding trust because, honestly, if my fans have lost trust in me after making a mistake like this, one time, then that's their prerogative, and I won't judge them for it. They get to decide who they want to follow, who they want to idolize, and those are the consequences I have to live with.

In a statement after your arrest, you said that the truth would come out. What did you mean by that?

There's not going to be some massive, "Oh, wow, she didn't do it," sort of thing. No. I got into a car after I'd been drinking. I pled not guilty because I had to, then later changed the plea to guilty because that's who I am. But there are some nuances and pieces of information that make the why a bit more clear. For me, it's not about, "No, I didn't do it." It's about understanding the full picture before you cast judgment on someone else. People will see as they read my book that getting pulled over was the best thing that could have happened to me. I think that's a valuable lesson.

During your career, you delivered a lot of clutch plays under serious pressure, bringing home a World Cup and a pair of Olympic medals. Do you miss the adrenaline rush that comes from competing on the world stage?

There's a dopamine release into your system when you're extending your limitations day after day. It was almost like an addictive chase. I've gone snowboarding, I've played tons of golf. It's impossible to re-create.

A new survey of disaster apps finds many options—some prone to failure—and much more to come.

When a terrorist struck Nice, France, on July 14 a new French government app designed to alert people failed. Three hours passed before SAIP, as the app is called, warned people in and around Nice of the danger on the city's waterfront during Bastille Day festivities.

This aspect of the tragedy highlights an emerging element of disaster preparation and response: the potential for smartphone apps, social media sites, and information technology to assist both emergency responders and the public at large in figuring out what is happening and what to do about it.

A group I am in, with researchers from varied disaster-response backgrounds (including military, urban, wilderness, and hospital service), has surveyed what's already available on the market and found smartphone apps that can help providers and the public alike. Some help medical professionals deal with ordinary day-to-day work, viewing guidelines and medication databases, performing calculations, remotely monitoring patients' vital signs, and displaying radiology images. Others can help responders deal with chemical, biological, radioactive, nuclear, and explosive disasters, which is useful for members of FEMA teams like the one I'm on. Apps for the public help them prepare for disasters, notify them of imminent problems, reconnect them with family members, and even help keep track of pets during emergencies.

But as the failure of the French app during the Nice attack illustrates, communication is almost always a problem during disasters—no matter what kind of problem it is: weather-related, an attack of some kind, or even just a power outage. Effective communication, such as an evacuation alert as a hurricane approaches, can save lives. Unfortunately, as we saw during Hurricane Katrina, disasters can themselves cause damage resulting in communications breakdowns. This problem is best solved by emergency planners using the same strategy individuals figured out for themselves in Nice: create multiple independent systems to ensure connectivity.

Planning For Redundancy

In disasters, many emergency responders already anticipate communication failure and employ multiple systems. Hospitals, for example, handle most communication with paging systems and in-building intercoms. If those go down, doctors, nurses, and other staff can reach each other on their cellular phones. Should those fail, many hospitals keep closets full of radios charged and ready for use.

This principle holds true for social media and smartphone apps, too. The SAIP app's failure was due in part to its developer's lack of attention to redundancy, according to French news reports, as well as an accidentally severed fiber-optic cable and a software error.

Although the SAIP app failed, citizens were able to communicate via social media. Citizens of Nice took to Facebook to use its Safety Check feature to post that they were safe, and to make sure friends and family had checked in OK. This type of organic social media communication also happened after the Boston Marathon bombing: People near the explosions quickly posted Twitter messages identifying the location and specifics of events, as well as their own whereabouts and safety.

Most of the newest technologies in communication and disaster response employ this crowdsourcing technique. The FEMA app allows users to upload pictures and information about disasters, in addition to sending out information from the National Weather Service and other government agencies.

The ubAlert—Disaster Alert Network App works similarly, saying in its promotional material that it can "create the world's largest, most reliable, all-hazard disaster alerting network by combining data from global institutions and data providers with crowd-sourced user accounts."Many regional apps operate this way too. For example, the government-run Safer Ohio App has a "see something send something" function, allowing users to send in information about suspicious activity or even dial 911 directly from the app. Had the SAIP app been similarly equipped, its users could have been more rapidly informed by fellow citizens, despite the delay in the official notification process.

Storing Data In The App, Versus Online

When we did our analysis of smartphone apps for disasters, we found that many of the apps aimed at use by emergency responders did not use much communication. Rather, they were reference materials, such as guidelines for medical triage or references on infectious agents. For example, the WISER app from the National Library of Medicine is designed to assist first responders to emergencies involving hazardous materials. It offers information about various substances from the National Library of Medicine Hazardous Substances DataBank.

However, new apps are increasingly including communication features. In addition to connecting users to each other, they can ensure reference material is up to date. These functions primarily rely on Wi-Fi, cellular data, or Bluetooth connections. Smart app developers are including redundancy, like in the American Red Cross apps. Its Flood app, for example, lets users notify others they are safe via social media, text message, and email.

Creating New Communications Networks

Beyond building communications redundancy into apps, some companies are building systems that will allow responders and the lay public alike to communicate without cellular data or Wi-Fi. An app called FireChat, for example, can connect nearby phones directly via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. This allows the users to create their own network.

According to FireChat's developer, Open Garden, the app can combine multiple devices to create a real network, passing a message from one to the next until it reaches the intended recipient. This type of system can be an excellent substitute in situations where normal communications capabilities are limited.

This approach doesn't just involve smartphone applications. A device called a "goTenna" can connect to a smartphone via Bluetooth and communicate with other goTenna users up to several miles away. This works only between people who have goTenna devices, but is another way people can create what the company calls "people-powered" networks that do not need towers, routers, or satellites. The obvious downside is that only people with the devices are able to communicate—having just one during a disaster is not enough, and in fact the company only sells them in pairs.

In addition, there are devices emergency responders use that are also available to the public. Some members of my FEMA team use a Delorme inReach Communicator, which allows users to send text messages over the global Iridium satellite network. It's expensive, but in major disasters it is a potentially valuable backup link.

When communications break down in a crisis, it's a problem for emergency responders and regular people alike. With more reliable connections, responders can be better informed about the situations they'll face and the public can be notified of ways to help and how to avoid further problems. Sadly, disasters will keep occurring. But the future is bright for improved communication when they happen. It's even possible that someday smartphones may be able to monitor the environment automatically and contribute to disaster alert systems on their own.

Dr. Nicholas Kman is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at The Ohio State University.

This story originally appeared at The Conversation.

A privacy activist says the loss of the iPhone's last analog output could lead to a couple of anti-consumer scenarios in the future.

It's almost a certainty that Apple has removed the standard headphone jack from the next iPhone, which will be announced in a matter of weeks. The new phone will deliver sound through the Lightning port at the bottom of the phone, or via Bluetooth to wireless headphones. These are both digital outputs; the analog output of the headphone jack is probably gone for good.

This is good and bad. The end-to-end digital audio stack will allow for higher quality audio and some new features, but it'll also open the door for increased DRM control over music content by the record labels that own it.

"If Apple creates a circumstance where the only way to get audio off its products is through an interface that is DRM-capable, they'd be heartbreakingly naive in assuming that this wouldn't give rise to demands for DRM," Electronic Frontier Foundation special advisor Cory Doctorow told Fast Company in an email exchange Monday.

If a consumer or some third-party tech company used the music in way the rights holders didn't like, the rights holders could invoke the anti-circumvention law written in Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) did not respond to a request for comment.

Steve Jobs famously convinced the record industry to remove the DRM from music on iTunes; is there really any reason to believe the industry might suddenly become interested in DRM again if the iPhone audio goes all digital?

"Yes—for streaming audio services," Doctorow says. "I think it is inevitable that rights holder groups will try to prevent recording, retransmission, etc." Today it's easy to record streamed music from the analog headphone jack on the phone, and even to convert the stream back to digital and transmit it in real time to someone else. With a digital stream it might not be nearly so easy, or risk-free.

Doctorow says record-industry consortia could gather to make "standards" for DRM-locked audio, as the movie and TV companies have done (with Apple's cooperation) at the W3C. Such standards would let big tech companies (like Apple) interoperate with the music catalogs of the big record industry players.

But it might prevent smaller upstart tech companies from doing so. "It would prevent upstarts making new, revolutionary technology from entering the market, because all the audio would be locked with DRM," Doctorow says, "so entering the fold would mean toeing the line, or risking DMCA prosecution."

He adds: "I believe that Apple will not be the last company to come up with cool ways to experience, organize, and acquire music. It's natural that Apple would go along with initiatives that would stop the next Apple from launching the next iTunes, because every pirate wants to be an admiral."

Apple—or any phone maker going all-digital with audio—could reassure consumers by expressing a legal opinion that its audio interface is "not an effective means of access control" under DMCA 1201 and laws like it." It would, in effect, waive its option of invoking DMCA 1201 "no matter what pressures it faced," Doctorow said.

Jared Newman wisely points out that there's nothing new about digital audio connections from phones. Apple's Lightning and older 30-pin connector use digital connections for speaker docks and other accessories, Newman says, and USB speakers and headphones have been available for over a decade. And so far nobody's rushed into to impose new controls on usage.

Bluetooth connections are also digital. The difference is that an analog output had always existed alongside those digital channels, and now that analog channel—the headphone jack—is going away. If there's only one road leaving a major recreation area, you might be more tempted to put a toll on it.

The record companies might not be the only ones to worry about. From a legal point of view, Apple (or some other phone maker) could take advantage of an all-digital audio stack to impose competitive controls over other tech companies.

"There's the possibility that it could invoke anti-circumvention law to prevent competitors from introducing compatible products," Doctorow says. In this case, it could give Apple control over which kinds of headphones are compatible with the iPhone's audio software.

It could extend beyond headphones. Doctorow: "For example, they could say, 'Your audio mixer will only be able to decrypt our audio if you sign a contract promising not to allow any outputs on [the mixer] that we don't control, including analog audio outputs'."

"It could even do nakedly anti-competitive things, like say: 'If your device supports audio from an Apple device, it must not accept audio from a rival device from Amazon or Samsung'," Doctorow says.

To be clear, Doctorow is simply describing the possible consequences of the removal of the analog jack from phones like the iPhone. Apple is, in a technical-legal sense, opening a door; whether it walks through it or not remains to be seen.

And Apple certainly won't be the only company with an analog-free phone. In fact it's not even the first—Lenovo announced its Moto Z and Z Force phones, neither of which have analog jacks. For its part, the headphone industry, led by companies like Audeze and Bose, is gravitating toward headphones that plug into a USB-C or Lightning port, or are wireless.

Whether they be physical or virtual, battlebots factor heavily in our future, according to SIGGRAPH.

At the SIGGRAPH conference in Anaheim last month, virtual reality was, not surprisingly, the name of the game. Inside a massive "VR Village" that took up the better part of a mammoth convention hall, researchers and academics alike showed off their latest developments for virtual reality experiences. One of the most popular offerings? Another shocker: products that turn their users (figuratively or literally) into giant robots.

In The Future, We're All Giant Robots

Visitors to the SIGGRAPH exhibition floor couldn't help but raise their eyes toward the oddest, and most unmissable, element in the room: the 17-foot-tall Big Robot Mk. 1a.

A product of four researchers at Japan's University of Tsukuba, Big Robot is exactly what you'd think it is. It's a massive humanoid robot that users climb a staircase to strap into. Once they strap into the robot, they they control it with their body motions.

For the average person, it's the closest you'll ever get to becoming a giant robot.

According to Hiroo Iwata, the lead researcher behind the project, the inspiration for the project came from Japanese anime and manga like Gundam and Macross that feature large battlebots. The goal, he added, is "to develop the world's largest robot in which a pilot can ride and move."

Or Maybe We'll Be Virtual Battlebots

Just down the hall from Big Robot is another project. MechVR is a giant biped robot simulator where users strap into a custom amusement park-style control deck and control a virtual robot. Where Big Robot's all about the physical experience of piloting a massive robot, MechVR's all about giving a more detailed version of that experience in a virtual world.

MechVR's robots walk, run, and fly. The system's non-hydraulic moving system shakes participants around, jolts them, and gives an intensive physical experience. The team's creators at Clemson University use the system to create a more intense simulation than a player would experience playing a conventional video game or at an amusement park.

Victor Zordan, the project's lead, said, "You're a mech jockey, riding a robot, and that's something that doesn't exist in real world. We use a physical simulation similar to an engineering analysis of a car or an aircraft, but it's now a simulation of a biped large enough to carry a human."

In our conversation, Zordan noted the challenge of his team—which is, of course, from the educational world—creating an amusement-park style project. Zordan hopes that the techniques behind the project, in the future, can be used to simulate other types of experiences such as piloting a lunar rover.

The New, Weird World

Other projects at SIGGRAPH carried on the promise of a new, and slightly weirder future. Two NYU students, Deqing Sun and Peiqi Su, came up with Plinko Poetry: a life-size "Plinko" board inspired by The Price Is Right which generates poetry in real-time using words obtained from random Twitter feeds. Down the way, the Facebook Demtricator from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Benjamin Grosser invited users to use a Facebook stripped of all notifications and metrics, and to see if it was still as interesting.

But the virtual reality part is key. The big problem for VR vendors such as Facebook/Oculus, Samsung, Sony, and HTC is simple: There's no breakthrough product—no genius product like Tetris or Star Wars to sell users on the new platforms. However, in the meantime, VR will let us all be virtual robots.

The campaign of presidential candidate Gary Johnson lifted a Florida branding agency's web designs—but botched the execution.

He might not have much chance of winning, and he may not command the same attention in the news cycle, but there's another hopeful in the 2016 presidential election besides Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump: libertarian Gary Johnson, a socially liberal, fiscal conservative whose campaign rests on the idea that he can bridge the divide between the left and the right. Unfortunately, the branding of the Johnson campaign wasn't getting that idea across, so as a fun exercise, the Florida-based branding agency Spark decided to mock up an identity for him.

Then things got weird. Without crediting Spark or paying for the work, a contractor for the Johnson campaign stole Spark's brand identity wholesale. To add insult to injury, the contractor didn't even steal the work correctly. The execution was so bad, Spark felt obliged to publicly release a style guide to its own pilfered work, in the hopes that the Johnson campaign would start using it right.

In a statement to Co.Design, the Johnson campaign acknowledged the screw-up. "At the senior level of the campaign, we were completely unaware until receiving a media inquiry Saturday evening that our website contractor had seen and clearly used the concept and design ideas posted on the web by Spark," said Joe Hunter, communications director for the Johnson campaign. "Upon seeing the obvious connection, we immediately contacted Spark and have since had a very constructive conversation with them—hopefully with no hard feelings. It was never our intent to use anyone's creative work, spec or otherwise, without giving appropriate credit, and we regret that our contractor apparently failed to communicate our desire to use Spark's work. It won't happen again, and we look forward to continued conversations with Spark about putting their excellent work to good use in the campaign."

Between the time the Johnson campaign sent me that statement and I wrote this story, the official website for Gary Johnson has tweaked its design. For instance, it has a new color scheme. However, many other elements, including a two-color design and the use of fonts, remain identical.

Spark's spec work for the Johnson campaign began as a feature for the latest issue of the agency's regular publication, Stick Quarterly. The theme of the issue was "underdogs." "We noticed that Hillary and Trump are dominating the conversation," says Elliott Bedinghaus, Spark's vice president of creative, tells me in an interview. "Hillary, of course, has a very well-crafted brand. Trump, uh, not so much, but he's loud and gets attention. It got us wondering: What could a strong brand do for an underdog like Gary Johnson? Because in our view, he didn't have a brand, and was in desperate need of one."

Spark's spec identity for the Johnson campaign embraced the candidate's position as a middleman between the right and the left. The identity uses a background split between red and blue, with Gary Johnson's last name bridging the gap in purple. The "on" in Johnson is separated by the chromatic split from the rest of the word. Along with a short message from the candidate in white serving as a bold headline, Spark's identity quickly conveys to voters where Johnson stands on various political issues like border patrol, health care, abortion, and more. So, for example, an ad might literally read, "A big wall will only produce bigger ladders—Johnson on Border Patrol."

But that's not how the Johnson campaign is using it. As of noon yesterday, Johnson's campaign website had adopted Spark's red, white, blue, and purple motif— which has since been changed to yellow and blue—as well as Spark's choice of Hurme Geometric Sans for a typeface. But it ignored the central concept of the identity: that the way the red and blue split Johnson's name in half to show where Johnson stands on the issue. Spark thinks that a contractor for the Johnson campaign liked how it looked, but didn't actually get what made it work. This casual ineptitude finally prompted an exasperated Spark to put up a charmingly passive-aggressive website called "Hey Gary, Let's Talk," making all of their spec assets available for the Johnson campaign to download. If the designers were going to be ripped off, they wanted to at least be ripped off correctly.

Spark heard from the Johnson campaign after "Hey Gary, Let's Talk" launched. "They apologized for taking the work, and we're currently working with them to try to come to a solution," Bedinghaus says. "They've been humble, so it's been an amicable exchange." Bedinghaus says they don't want payment for the work—despite the exercise, their agency has no interest in getting involved in politics—just for that work to be acknowledged and executed properly. "What happened was surprising and upsetting to us, but our intent was to show that a brand can be a powerful force to create change, so by using it properly going forward on a national stage, we hope this will serve as a case study for our industry."

And hey, at least it was Johnson, not Trump who stole their ideas. "Based on the way he's managed other aspects of his campaign, and his history paying contractors, I think we can make some assumptions about how that dialog would have gone," Bedinghaus laughs.

[All Images: via Stick Quarterly]

There is no reason the Olympics has to be in a different city every two years—or that they have to take place in just one country at a time.

Between pollution, crime, budget crises, low attendance, and the eviction of an estimated 60,000 people to make room for Olympic infrastructure, it's looking like the 2016 Games, when the dust settles, are unlikely to be a clear benefit to the people of Brazil. This is a problem because the International Olympic Committee needs more host cities. No one wants to volunteer anymore.

The value proposition of hosting the Olympics goes something like this: A city invests billions to prepare and is supposed to earn back its investment and more in both tourism revenues and in benefits of the infrastructure after the event is long done.

But this premise has been collapsing. Costs to build stadiums and address security concerns are skyrocketing, as former Olympic venues sit mainly empty in cities that have hosted in the past. The cost for Rio's Olympics? Anywhere from $12 to $20 billion, while the projected revenue may not reach the $5 billion mark.

From Boston to Oslo, local movements have successfully opposed their government's bids—correctly judging that their cities could probably do better things with the money they would spend on the Games. So many cities have canceled their bids for the 2022 Olympics, in fact, that the IOC has been left with few willing choices. The Winter Games in 2022 will be hosted by Beijing, which isn't really a winter sports destination and which just hosted the summer games. But it had only one willing competitor in the end: Almaty, Kazakhstan, a smaller city in a developing nation that had little experience hosting big events. The incentives align so that the cities most interested are the more authoritarian—more interested in glory than costs and benefits to citizens.

People all over the world have been calling for reforms of the Olympic business model, and the IOC itself recognizes something must be done to reign in costs and make the event more attractive to cities again. As Chris Dempsey, a member of the team that defeated Boston's 2022 Olympic bid, told Harvard Business Review, the Olympics were originally structured in 1896 in a world that couldn't imagine TV, air travel, or the Internet. There's no need for a different, single city every two years to host such an event anymore.

What should be done? Some expertshave been talking about designating one or a small handful of permanent host cities that would take turns hosting each year, without having to build infrastructure from the ground up. Another idea is to extend the life of Olympic facilities by having the same city at least host two Games in a row. Both of these would be more financially, socially, and environmentally sustainable concepts.

An even better proposal, however, could simply be to get rid of the idea of an Olympic city itself, as the Guardian details. The World Cup is usually hosted by a single country, but the venues are distributed in many cities. Why not take that a step further and make the Olympics truly global? Different cities all over the world, or even just in the same region, could host different groups of events, like swimming or gymnastics, and it would cost a fraction of what hosting the full Games would come out to.

One argument against this is that the Games lose their grandeur, with everyone distributed all over the place. But very few people are there in person anyway, and the scale of the spectacle translates less well on a TV screen. This year, most people in the U.S. are watching a taped broadcast in prime time (not without some controversy), not a live event. The taped broadcast could be coming from anywhere—or multiple places.

The Games could even be more exciting in different locations than it is today. Instead of empty venues for obscure events, you could host sports in cities that actually care about them. Though Rio has few fencing fans, you'll actually find some rabid ones in France, Hungary, and Italy. Why not throw them a bone?

Have something to say about this article? You can email us and let us know. If it's interesting and thoughtful, we may publish your response.

Correction: This article originally stated that the IOC was having trouble finding cities to host the 2024 games, but several major cities actually want them.

Microsoft's employees are more innovative than Apple's, and Facebook's staff are less creative than most tech workers.

The giants of the tech industry have a lock on employer branding (think: quirky hiring practices, free food, and other perks that make work "fun"), but analysis of the personalities of their staffs presents a different picture of what it's really like in the trenches.

A study published today by Good&Co analyzed the psychometric data gained from anonymous personality quizzes completed by 4,364 tech employees of what they believe are perceived as the five most innovative companies in Silicon Valley: Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM. In total, the two-year-long study also analyzed 10 million responses from 250,000 users. Questions ranged from thoughts and feelings about networking to how they handle problems at work.

The study concluded that Facebook lags behind the others for cultivating a culture of creativity. Microsoft employees are more innovative than those at Apple. Both Apple and Twitter's corporate cultures are the most accurately representative of how employees perceived them. (No major conclusions were drawn about IBM's employees in the study, aside from being a point of comparison.)

By now we know that company leadership and employees aren't always aligned in their thinking about the workplace. Fast Company has previously covered the gap between the way each group thinks about a company's culture. Research from the Workforce Institute at Kronos and WorkplaceTrends indicated that part of the disconnect came from a disagreement between HR, management, and staff regarding who was in charge of creating and driving company culture.

Innovation's Leaders And Followers

The Good&Co report reveals that the discrepancy dividing these tech companies' true corporate culture from the one perceived by the rest of the world is often a result of timing. Facebook, for example, may be considered among the most innovative companies in the world, as it was the among the first social media platforms on the Internet, but the Good&Co study suggests that its early successes have resulted in a more conservative effort to sustain them.

"They've always had that reputation [of being innovative], and I think that now becomes a subconscious thing, that Facebook is innovative, but the current place they're in as a business doesn't require them to personally be innovative," Samar Birwadker, the founder and CEO of Good&CO, tells Fast Company. "They invented social networks, and there's always been this layer of innovation," he explains, "but with more pressure on revenue, and especially on mobile and ads, I think we're seeing a lot less risk taking and adventurousness by their employees."

Birwadker adds that a series of failed product launches, including Parse and Paper, have led the social media behemoth toward a culture of playing it safe. "In a way they're borrowing that innovation equity, or that halo effect they can get from [acquisitions] like Instagram and WhatsApp," he observes.

At the other end of the spectrum, says Birwadker, Microsoft is often perceived as less innovative, because the more established tech giant has lagged behind the growth of its competitors. That game of catchup, however, led the company to hire more creative and innovative employees, and encourage bold ideas that can help close the innovation gap. "The data tell us that in adventurousness, Microsoft employees tend to be neck in neck with Apple's, and much more adventurous than Google, Facebook, or IBM employees," says Birwadker.

"Microsoft has always made a lot of money doing things the right, traditional, organized way," he says, "but what they realized with the success of social platforms and companies like Google is that they need to focus on consumer first, whereas they've always been B2B." Birwadker says that this wave of innovative energy began in 2014, with the arrival of Microsoft's latest CEO, Satya Nadella.

The Same On The Inside

The discrepancy between the perception of an employer and the reality is significant, adds Birwadker, as it becomes an important indicator of a company's likelihood for success. "The way you experience a brand's culture is through their 'About Us' page, or a point of interaction with a recruiter, or in their ads," he says, adding that IBM, Facebook, and Google aren't necessarily providing the working atmosphere that is reflected in their recruiting materials.

Good&Co's data indicates that some of the most successful companies have internal cultures synonymous with their external expression. The tech giants that provide a working culture most closely aligned with their external employer brands, according to the study, are Apple and Twitter.

Apple, for example, is organized in a more hierarchical structure, which is reflected in the perception employees have of the workplace, while Birdwadker describes Twitter as "creative chaos," which is reflected in both the company's recruiting materials as well as the platform itself.

"You can't have 10 people in a boardroom deciding what the culture of the company is; it's defined by the people who already work there," says Birwadker, adding that employees who discover that their company's culture is different than advertised are more likely to leave.

Leadership And Persistence

The Good&Co study also reveals the most sought after attributes of the tech industry's most revered employers based on analysis of employees' personality traits.

"For managers, for example, being socially bold is really important, especially in the Valley, because people don't just buy into a paycheck, they want to believe they're following a leader who has both their interest and the team's interest in mind," says Birwadker.

Persistence was also a common trait across the industry. "A sense of curiosity is critical, but what we saw overall is that a sense of curiosity is much lower in managers than it was in employees."

Can machine learning help government agencies track down terrorists? A secretive arm of the business intelligence firm SAP says yes.

A specialized division of the business software powerhouse SAP (System Application Products) is building tools to harness machine learning and artificial intelligence for antiterrorist intelligence missions and cybersecurity—though details of how exactly the software has been used are shrouded in secrecy.

SAP National Security Services, which describes itself as an independent subsidiary of the German-based software giant that's operated by U.S. citizens on American soil, works with homeland government agencies to find ways to track potential terrorists across social media.

"One [use] is the identification of bad actors: People that may be threats to us—people and organizations," says Mark Testoni, president and CEO of SAP NS2, as the company is known. "Secondarily, once we've identified those kinds of players and actors, we can then track their behaviors and organizations."

SAP NS2 is also working with cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect to use some of the same underlying technology to track intruders and menaces in computer networks in real time, the companies announced this week.

And in the national security sphere, NS2's government partners—Testoni says he's not at liberty to name specific agencies—use SAP's HANA data processing platform to analyze thousands of terabytes of data from social media and other public online sources.

"There have been success cases, I can tell you," he says. "Unfortunately, I can't tell you about any of it."

Many experts have argued that social media has been key to the rise of ISIS and the spread of support for the organization around the globe. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is one of the politicians who has called on social network operators to take down extremist content, and agencies including the Department of Homeland Security have recently sought to study the technical aspects—and legal and privacy ramifications—of tracking publicly accessible social posts.

In 2003, federal plans for a massive global digital surveillance program dubbed Total Information Awareness came under heavy scrutiny due to privacy concerns, and the project was eventually defunded by Congress. But critics have said similar surveillance programs quietly continued at agencies, including the National Security Agency, with a level of secrecy that makes it difficult to judge their effectiveness or potential privacy violations.

In the case of SAP NS2, the underlying HANA system is designed to store huge quantities of information in memory, rather than on disk, for speedy access and processing. It organizes data by columns storing the same type of information from different records, rather than by rows corresponding to individual records, a time-and-space-saving technique shared by big data platforms from other vendors including Amazon and Oracle.

It also includes features for network graph analysis, automated machine learning, and sophisticated text processing that can extract meaning from written language, including online posts, according to Testoni.

This is useful when it comes to monitoring potential terrorists. "They're online communicating to their followers and recruiting using social media and digital platforms, so that kind of sentiment analysis is helpful in identifying those platforms and tracking them," Testoni says. "We're trying to help identify threats with customers, and once we find them, and we identify people and organizations, then it becomes a little bit easier because then you can potentially track them."

The tools can help analysts detect relationships between suspects and track data from multiple sources in real time, flagging anomalous patterns or feeding risk models that identify potential threats, the company says.

"You'd be looking for activity on social media, either known or potentially known accounts and others, and establishing the other connections that may be associated," says Testoni, adding that one partner tracks about 30 online sites in several languages.

According to the company, a HANA-based system has proven powerful enough to parse a large set of simulated military documents, extracting the people, places, and events described in them.

For ThreatConnect, HANA provides processing speed that helps clients keep track of potential security-related events happening on their networks in real time, while also reducing the number of false alarms about harmless noise, says the company's cofounder and CEO, Adam Vincent.

"It allows our software to be effectively super-powered around faster and more sophisticated analytics," Vincent says. "In particular, the ability to process more data in real-time and do real-time analytics on incoming events, so that we can filter out the noise faster. Most organizations today are getting tens of thousands of alerts every day—humans can't possibly comb through them all."

ThreatConnect's systems, which the company has integrated with HANA through a collaboration with SAP NS2, can help clients track cybersecurity the way such tools as Salesforce manage customer relationships. Ideally, they can replace more ad hoc methods that can leave security personnel struggling to stay up to speed, particularly as many companies are grappling with a skills shortage.

ThreatConnect also functions as an "expert system," effectively automating the thought processes that humans go through to determine which network activities are threats. This service will improve as the company integrates HANA's machine learning support.

Says Vincent, "What we're trying to do with this product is help the security professional do their job faster, and there's never been a time when that was needed more than it was today."

Forget herbal brownies and space cakes. Now you can get THC-infused sirloin and foie gras. How cannabis is getting the gourmet treatment.

"Just as we treat a glass of wine with dinner, this is how I'm treating cannabis—as an accent to the meal."

That's Chris Sayegh describing his approach to cooking. The Los Angeles chef prepares elaborate multicourse dinner menus, with foie gras custard, citrus-cured salmon, and pomegranate sorbet—all infused with cannabis extracts.

Sayegh calls himself "The Herbal Chef," which is, obviously, THC for short. "Everything is subtle," he says, describing his use of weed as if it were thyme. "That way, you can enjoy the entirety of the meal without getting overwhelmed."

For Sayegh and other chefs delving into the growing sector of high cuisine, cannabis is an equal member of the dining experience. No different from a bottle of Pinot Noir.

Legal marijuana is a rapidly growing industry. Sales in the U.S. are expected to hit $22.8 billion annually by 2020, even though states allowing recreational use are still limited. Colorado, Alaska, Oregon, and Washington are where you can buy weed without a prescription, although California may join that list this fall. And while cannabis has long been associated with food (you might be familiar with "the munchies"), stoned dining is now getting the luxury treatment. An increasing number of entrepreneurs want to cater to discerning palates.

For his dinners, Sayegh prefers to use THC extracts rather than asking his patrons to smoke joints. He sees no place at the table for soot, ash, or heat on one's tongue. In fact, he doesn't even want you to taste the cannabis. With a joint, he says, "Your palette isn't clean to taste the food, and to me, it's all about the integrity of the food. I don't want it to take away from the flavors of the dish." The use of weed in his recipes is a full sensory experience. "You're literally changing people's brain chemistry as they're eating," he says.

Sayegh hosts about six events a month in private homes and event spaces in California, with attendance ranging from 12 to 80, at $300-$500 a ticket. (If it's a sponsored event, the meal is free.) In the past four months alone, business has grown more than 400%. He sees this growth as a sign of "the culmination of everything"—a perfect storm of the rise of the foodie, the destigmatization and legalization of marijuana use, and the growing cannabis dining market.

Other venturers into the spacey food space include celebrity chefs. Top Chef star Hosea Rosenberg cooks seasonal, multicourse marijuana pairing meals for the Mason Jar Event group in Colorado. Unlike Sayegh's dinners, Rosenberg pairs more traditional edibles (primarily bars and candies) with (non-infused) dishes like pork roast with organic mustard greens, Western Slope apricots, Israeli couscous, and cherry cobbler topped with spiced amaretto ice cream and smoked candied almonds. Mason Jar plans these meals for "the cannabis connoisseur and the cannabis curious," with much of the experience dedicated to educating diners on different varieties. Rosenberg's events are so popular, they each receive as many as 10 sponsors (all from various sectors of the marijuana business), up from four just a year ago. Mason Jar is currently planning a 5,000-person event for 2017.

Who are these people, spending hours savoring their way through a groovy marijuana haze? A fair amount are tourists looking to enjoy the local recreational pot scene. "You get to try all these different strains," says Jane West, owner of Edible Events, which plans cannabis events in Denver. "It's no different than an entire weekend of wine tasting in Sonoma." Well, maybe there's one difference. "We can't guarantee you won't get cotton mouth," she says.

Private clients account for a large portion of business: Corporates eager to discover the emerging industry and individuals interested in testing the cannabis hospitality industry. Philip Wolf, founder of the culinary cannabis company Cultivating Spirits in Colorado, has two weddings planned this summer in addition to several dinners.

"Cannabis is a third layer to the dinner party," he explains. "You have your food, you have your drink, and now you have cannabis—it's a cool element to add."

Within just a year, Cultivating Spirits, which pairs food with marijuana that guests smoke via pipes, increased its dinners from one to four a month. Wolf serves dishes such as coffee-rubbed sirloin with wild mushroom risotto and cherry-port demi glace, matched with a nug of Tangerine x Flo indica hybrid. In the next year, they intend to franchise the experience and expand to California once they've secured more investors.

"I think it's going to explode," says Wolf, adding that he's witnessed a dramatic shift in consumer perception regarding luxury treatment of cannabis. "People are starting to trust that it's legitimate."

Not that the marriage of food and getting high is anything new. It's long been known that cannabis increases the senses, and therefore, one's appetite. "It enhances food just like wine does, so it's only natural that it's an exact fit with fine dining," West says. "Cannabis is much more multifaceted than alcohol . . . that's why there are so many chefs and food companies that want to work in this space."

And that's why edibles have been such a huge facet of the recreational cannabis sector. Gummy bears, candy bars, beef jerky—you can find marijuana-infused versions of almost every traditional snack food. But in the last few years, more unique products have been spotted on dispensary shelves.

"It's not just about brownies or cookies anymore," says Cy Scott, CEO and cofounder of Headset, a cannabis data analytics and market intelligence firm in Seattle. The company witnessed diversification across several subcategories of edibles, which now make up 7% of all sales of cannabis. "Now you're seeing brittle, honey, sugars, cooking oils," he says.

These lines can often be an extension of event planners' and chefs' businesses. For example, West sells low-dose cannabis products "expertly made for the new user," including an olive oil kit intended for home infusions. They come in rosemary and Meyer lemon flavors.

"I was thinking way too small with just events," West says. "This stuff sells itself."

Sayegh also produces a line of products: cannabis-laced marinara sauce, basil pesto, ketchups, and mustards. Still, he believes pot dining might remain a niche market. "I see it growing rapidly, then flattening out. Cannabis is not all about going all out all the time; it's about moderation."

He predicts that once the current high dining trend plateaus, the edibles market will continue to grow. "Edibles will become huge, that's the way of the future," he says. "Food is the way."

A new crop of companies are banking on this. Stillwater, a line of THC-infused tea bags, is one recent sponsor of Mason Jar Events. They provide Arnold Palmers, a mixture of lemonade and their black tea over ice. The organic brand's products contain 2.5mg THC (the state of Colorado has a recommended dose of 10mg), offering consumers what owner Melissa Bradley calls "relaxation instead of impairment."

Stillwater specifically wanted to create something sophisticated that would appeal to a more grown-up audience. After seeing how other companies were simply going after stoners, it set on targeting working professionals and, yes, moms. According to one Stillwater employee (who preferred to remain anonymous), "women are completely underserved by the market right now." Tea hits a sweet spot: It's functional, it's healthy, and it's a daily ritual many women swear by.

"For moms especially, there is a lot to be done during the day," says Bradley. "Children wake up in the middle of the night. Things happen. It's nice to relax, but if you're inebriated and life hits the fan, you need to be in the right mind-set to act." Describing the philosophy behind their micro-dosing business model,
she says, "Theres a level of personalization in the market that is yet to be tapped. We made something with ourselves in mind, something we would want to consume."

But how many cannabis lovers want that, really? Are users accustomed to getting the biggest bang for their buck by noshing on a THC-packed brownie going to shell out money for luxury goods with a low dose? "There's an interesting dichotomy in the industry right now," says Joe Hodas, chief marketing officer for the Denver-based Dixie Elixirs & Edibles, which sells gourmet chocolates, beverages, and mints. "There's a romanticized vision of this discriminating, high-end consumer that is willing to pay extra for the packaging and finer ingredients." In his estimation, this group is poised to grow.

Dixie's elevated line of products is meant to appeal to a refined palate. The goal is to appear upscale without scaring off consumers accustomed to a certain reasonable price point. The average Dixie chocolate bar retails for $15; the elixirs, which include flavors like Old Fashioned Sarsaparilla and Dixie One Watermelon Cream, go for about $17. For comparison, the average market price for a pot brownie ranges from $5-$10.

"We recognize our best play is not to say we're a luxury item; we [market ourselves] as a value item in the sense that we're offering really great quality that leads to great taste," he says. "But we're offering it at the right price."

Overall, the company has seen steady 25% revenue growth, year over year, since 2014. In addition, headcount has tripled in the last two years, and their market has expanded from one (Colorado) to six, with the addition of California, Arizona, Nevada, and Washington. (Not all products are available in all states, however.) Their elixirs are still the most popular, but the gourmet chocolates are quickly gaining speed as their second best-sellers.

Hodas believes there will always be a subset of consumers looking for high-end treats. Because as he sees it, who doesn't appreciate biting into something luxuriously delicious? As the press-shy Stillwater rep points out, "You could also just take a pill, but that's soulless. Ultimately, you want something that tastes good."

After pouring 100 hours into his wife's U.S. residency application, Sam Stoddard dreamed of an easier way. So he created SimpleCitizen.

Sam Stoddard spent two years in South Korea in his early twenties on a mission for the Mormon Church. An Oregon native, he was glad to immerse himself in a culture significantly different from his own. He learned to eat kimchi. He struggled with the challenging Korean language. His jaw dropped at certain local mores, like the fact that the elderly could cut to the front of long lines. For the first time in his life, Stoddard began to understand what it felt like to be the Other, and what it might feel like to be an immigrant in his own country.

"Taking the time to see the world through their eyes was a challenge," he says. "But it was one of the most rewarding things."

Stoddard returned to the U.S. in June 2008, and began his undergraduate studies at Brigham Young University in the fall of 2010. Once at BYU, he naturally gravitated to the small South Korean student population there. One day during his first semester, he was at a South Korean friend's party when he noticed a pretty young woman enter the room. Her name was EunJoo, but she went by Ally. She had chosen the name Ally because of the TV show Ally McBeal, finding that it usually took too long to teach Americans how to pronounce her name (it's un-JOO).

As the party progressed, the group began to play a card game. There was a feature of the game that Stoddard says is "common in Korean culture," which is that if you lose, there is "some sort of punishment, whether a slap on the wrist, or you have to do something embarrassing." For this game, the loser had to drink a gross, soupy concoction made of soy sauce, ketchup, salt, and a bit of kimchi. From the sight of it, Stoddard guessed "there was a week's worth of sodium in there."

EunJoo lost. Someone passed her the cup. She took one sip, then shook her head. She just couldn't do it.

She turned to Stoddard. Would he take the hit for her?

He took the cup, and drank it all.

"That was probably the initial spark," he says.

They began to date, and three years later, Stoddard got down on one knee and proposed. She said yes. He had just made the most consequential decision of his life. Though he didn't know it at the time, it set in motion events that would lead to his first startup.

"Even after the wedding, I was naive," he says. "I thought, 'She's married to me. Now, she's probably a U.S. citizen.' But that's not how it works at all . . . "

Stoddard had heard the term "green card," of course. But he thought it was something that just sort of happened: You get your permit to live and work permanently in the U.S. and then you apply for citizenship. To find out more, he attended a lecture at BYU that an immigration attorney was giving on the green card process.

The lawyer stood up on stage and went through a PowerPoint overview of how to apply. Stoddard took reams of notes on Evernote, but because of a glitch with the Wi-Fi, all the information he'd typed in disappeared. So he emailed the attorney, who told him he'd have to come in for an appointment to look at her slide deck. "That was the first point where I thought, 'Oh. This is going to be a little more difficult than I thought.'"

When Stoddard met the lawyer, she walked him through the complicated paperwork. He was an accounting major with an emphasis in tax, but these forms looked even more daunting than what he was used to. Then the lawyer mentioned her fee, $3,000, and Stoddard decided he would be filling out the forms himself.

Maybe it would take him a couple hours, he figured. He went online, looking for tutorials, and Googled "Turbotax for immigration," but found nothing that he trusted. He soldiered on for six months, steeling himself against horror stories he'd heard of family members being deported.

Once he got his paperwork completed, he called up the lawyer again and scheduled an audit for peace of mind. For $500, she would review everything to make sure there were no fatal flaws.

Stoddard went into the office, where the attorney immediately had her secretary process the check. Then she invited Stoddard in, glanced through the green card application, and swiftly pushed it aside. "Wow, you were really thorough," she said. Then she leaned in and started pitching him on why he needed to retain her for additional legal services in which he had no interest. "If you ever get divorced, it could be terrible for you . . . " she said.

Stoddard was exhausted and furious. He had been through months of tedium—over 100 hours of checking and rechecking his work, only to be shorn of $500 by a lawyer whose job could probably be replaced by . . . software.

"That was the lightbulb moment for me," he says.

Stoddard's struggle and frustration bore fruit in the form of a startup called SimpleCitizen. From early 2014 to early 2015, Stoddard, along with a cousin, began to research the market for a sort of "TurboTax for immigration." They interviewed other BYU students who were struggling with green card applications of their own. (There are many international marriages at BYU, likely the result of missions abroad.) They officially incorporated in February 2015, with $700,000 raised in seed funding, plus $400,000 in other prize and grant money. They're now about to graduate from Y Combinator's summer 2016 class.

With SimpleCitizen, Stoddard created the service that he and Eunjoo needed several years ago. He explains it as "an online platform that eases the complex, multiyear green card and citizenship process that 3 million people go through every year. The platform guides users through their entire application: users answer questions and upload supporting documents, and then SimpleCitizen translates the documents if necessary, and sends the application to be reviewed by an immigration attorney." SimpleCitizen promises "accurate, completed documents ready to submit to the USCIS"—that is, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Filing with SimpleCitizen costs $249, and the company claims to have already saved immigrant families almost a million dollars in legal fees.

Of our country's current climate toward immigrants, epitomized in the incendiary rhetoric of Donald Trump, Stoddard says, "It breaks my heart."

Uprooting oneself to a new country is difficult enough without being the target of vicious hate speech. So Stoddard hopes that he is doing his small part to relieve at least some of the sting of the process of becoming American—while also creating what seems like a viable business. Last November, the Washington Postreported that after a decade and a billion dollars spent to upgrade its system, USCIS had only managed to digitize one of the nearly 100 forms required. The agency currently processes over 56 million pages of paper per year, according to Stoddard.

His business aims to do much better.

These companies combine necessary training with fun activities that start team building from the first day on the job.

Most new hires spend their first few days on the job getting acclimated to the company, meeting their coworkers, and undergoing training. While these tasks are important, some companies like to immerse new employees in their culture by getting them outside and involved in activities that represent their values.

Here are eight creative onboarding practices businesses are using to engage new hires and help them get excited about their jobs.

1. Volunteering

Cornerstone OnDemand, a talent management software provider, brings all new hires to a three-day orientation at its Santa Monica, California, headquarters. While the program includes traditional activities like meetings with company leaders, new employees also get a chance to know each other and the company better by participating in a community service project.

"We work with children from the Boys and Girls Club to build and design skateboards and helmets," says Kimberly Cassady, vice president of talent. "Each kid was paired with a team of two to three employees, and together we built a skateboard and learned about each other," says Cassady. "It was a really cool mentoring opportunity," she recalls, "and it helped me get to know employees from other departments who I likely never would have met otherwise."

2. Selecting And Playing A Sport

True to its brand, new hires at the social sports networking app ATLETO meet with company leaders to participate in their sport of choice. This tradition applies to any new hire, from janitorial to new executives joining the ranks, and recently the company's new CTO took everyone paddle boarding.

"The idea behind this is for new employees to pick sports they are passionate about," says Nicolai Galal, chief creative officer and cofounder. Additionally, he notes, "This pushes executive staff outside of their comfort zone and leads to beneficial team-building experiences."

3. Rowing

Suffolk Construction, a national construction firm based in Boston, has a one-week onboarding program for its newest employees fresh out of college. The program includes a variety of leadership exercises, including rowing the Charles River with Community Rowing.

"We wanted our onboarding process to be more than just an overview of company benefits and policies," says Kim Steimle Vaughan, chief people and marketing officer. "Team rowing is ideal for demonstrating the importance of teamwork, communication, and camaraderie when working on a Suffolk team," she asserts. "We often say, 'We don't build buildings, we build people,'" Steimle Vaughan explains. "Team rowing exercises kickstart the Suffolk experience for our newest people so we can start 'building our people' right out of the gate."

4. Walk And Order (Everyone's) Lunch

Going out to lunch with your coworkers is a common joining activity for companies, but Guardian Removals, a storage company based in the U.K., puts a unique twist on the experience.

"We take all new hires out for a walk around our business park and eventually to a cafe down the road that we've been visiting for years," says Max Robinson, office manager. "We'll get the new hire to order food and drinks for everyone and see what they choose. It's a good laugh, and it gives us a bit of insight into their personality."

5. Shopping Trips

TINYpulse, a Seattle-based employee engagement software provider, has an extensive onboarding practice that celebrates the new employee every day during their first week. One activity tasks the new hire to purchase an object that they believe matches the company's values. The new hires present what they've found to the whole company during the company's biweekly staff meetings.

Dustin Gransberry, senior manager, sales operations and enablement at TINYpulse, believes there are three benefits to the exercise. "You let the new hires get to know each other through teamwork, they are able to practice their public speaking and presentation skills, and you help them create physical anchors to learn the company values," he says.

6. Feeding The Whole Team

Grabbing lunch for the office might not sound like a task that would be very fun, but at Bazaarvoice, an Austin-based consumer-generated content provider, new hires are given a budget and asked to provide food for the team.

"We've had good feedback from the new employees that it's a fun way to break the ice and meet their new colleagues," says Andy North, vice president of brand and communications. Besides getting to bond with others on the project, North points out other positives, such as making their purchases around Austin. "Meeting a significant portion of the office while serving the goodies, which have included donuts, breakfast tacos, cupcakes, chips and queso, and barbecue," is another plus, North says.

7. Walking Tour Of Successful Brands

New hires at Bedgear, a Farmingdale, New York-based manufacturer of performance bedding, are taken on a walking tour in downtown New York City to visit retailers that focus on customized products, such as Warby Parker, Asics, Samsung, and Chobani Soho.

"We like to show our staff the importance of how a memorable in-store retail experience gains customer loyalty," says Kristi Gulino, director of public relations for Bedgear. "Personalization at retail is so important for our brand," Gulino explains, "and this opens up their minds to customer engagement rather than selling just a product or service."

8. Taking Team Photos

The cybersecurity firm Distil Networks has offices in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. When a class of new hires completes its training program, the group heads to the White House or the Golden Gate Bridge, respectively.

"Wherever we are, we take a picture as a group, then print those pictures for each office and hang them on the walls for the entire company to see how and where we are growing as a team," says Kati Ryan, senior director of learning and development.

Employee feedback has been positive, Ryan says, with new hires connecting on a personal level, becoming more comfortable in the office, and reporting increased productivity due to an ease of collaboration with people in other departments.

Use these tips from top voice-over artists to make people want to listen to what you have to say.

Listening to some people is a treat. Even if they're just introducing other speakers, reading passages at a wedding, or addressing a meeting, you want them to keep talking.

Such vocal competence can seem like a natural gift, but talk to top voice-over artists, and you learn that sounding good out loud is a skill like any other. You can get better at it with time. Here are some ways to improve your vocal tone and delivery so that others will find listening to you to be a pleasant experience.

Know Why You're Talking

Counterintuitively, if you want to sound better, don't worry too much about your voice. "You can be stumbling, you can have the worst-sounding voice in the world, but you can still command rapt attention because of your story," says Adam Verner, a voice-over artist who has recorded hundreds of audio books and commercials.

Since content is king, take some time to figure out what you're trying to convey. Ask yourself: "Why did the author write this piece?" and "What is the conflict here? What is the motivation?" says Verner. "In theater, we call it the 'stakes,' as in, 'what's at stake here?'" he explains. Even if you're reading a corporate memo to your direct reports at a weekly staff meeting, you can massively increase engagement if you convey that you've thought about what's coming out of your mouth, and that you are using a tone that's appropriate to the situation.

Write Strategically

If you're going to be reading (or reciting) something you've written, you're in luck. You can proactively make the whole process easier for yourself by writing in the right style. "People don't tend to write intending for speech," says Verner. But they should. Even when people are reading something silently to themselves, they are actually saying the words in their heads. That means that writing that will sound good read aloud comes across as good writing, even if it is never read aloud.

Use Shorter Words

Vary your sentence length, though in general aim for shorter sentences you can march through on one breath. "Clarity, simplicity, is everything," says Donna Mac, a communications coach and broadcaster who has worked in radio for over 25 years.

Listen To Yourself

It is quite simple to record yourself these days. Just do a voice memo on your phone. Of course, just because such feedback is easy to obtain doesn't mean people avail themselves of it. Many people hate listening to themselves. That's thanks in part to the structure of our heads that makes our voices sound different internally than they do to others. But "98% to 99% of all voices are in the normal range," says Mac, and the point of doing this is not to sap anyone's confidence.

"It's kind of like looking at yourself in the mirror," says Verner. Most of us aren't supermodels, but "very quickly you come to terms with it," and use the reflection as a chance to present your best self. By recording and listening, you can see if something comes across as particularly grating or, alternately, if one way of delivering a phrase sounds much better than another.

Breathe

"Breath is highly important. What people tend to do is not breathe from their diaphragm," says Verner. The result of foregoing deep belly breaths is that a person's speech comes across as pinched and shallow. They'll have to pause in the middle of phrases or sentences because they lack the air to make it through to the end.

Proper breathing is a skill like any other, and "most business people don't have the benefit of three years of vocal and intensive breath training," says Verner. And, let's be honest, you're not about to get that training. However, if you're looking for an out-of-the-box way to invest in your career, a lesson or two with a good voice coach can help a lot in developing the breath support that makes a voice sound fuller and richer.

Slow Down

"We're living in a world that's so fast and furiously paced," says Mac, that if you want a secret weapon for being heard, "more times than not, it's slowing down." Slowing down gives you a chance to articulate your words and emphasize the ones that matter most. Even if you're reading something dramatic and exciting, you can convey that through shorter sentences, spoken at a measured pace.

Prepare For What's Coming

Often, when people get something to read out loud, they "practice" by reading it silently. This is not actual practice, in the sense of making you familiar with what the words will feel like coming out of your mouth. "The more times you read it out loud to yourself, the better you'll be," says Verner.

This familiarity will also help you get closer to the key skill of "reading ahead while performing behind," explains Verner. Top professionals are actually looking a few sentences ahead while conveying the meaning of what they are saying at the moment. This forward reading "smooths everything out," he says. When you know what's coming, it eliminates stumbles and pauses.

You can see this technique in action by watching a really good children's librarian read to a group of kids. She can show the storybook pictures around without unnatural breaks in the story, because she's read a sentence ahead and is repeating it back from memory.

End Strong

"When you get to the end of a sentence, end that sentence on a down note," says Mac. "Make sure you don't end your sentence with a question mark," she cautions (unless it is a question). Just complete your thought, she suggests, then, "stand in your powerful silence, and give your audience an opportunity to digest your information." Whether you're live or on a recording, that will help your message stick.