Drill sergeants teach soldiers to react in tough situations. This resilience expert showed them why handling good news matters, too.
"Ma'am, I'm a 36-delta, a pathfinder, and this is my buddy here, he's a 68-whiskey, ma'am."
This was the precise response I got from two soldiers I met during my first resilience training with the U.S. Army. I'd simply asked them, "What do you do?"
It was 2009, and I'd recently left my law practice to join a team of University of Pennsylvania researchers. Our job was to teach resilience skills to soldiers and their spouses, and during my nearly four years with the project we collectively trained more than 20,000 soldiers (both non-commissioned officers and officers).
Over a 10-day seminar, we introduced service members—many of them drill sergeants—to what's called the "train-the-trainer" model. Once they graduated the course as MRTs (master resilience trainers), they were required to return to their units and teach the same skills to their fellow soldiers. Here's a look at the piece of that training that had the biggest impact.
The soldiers often arrived with a minimal understanding of what resilience is, so we started each training with an overview. "Resilience" is defined as a person's capacity for stress-related growth, and there are two key aspects to it.
The first is durability—effectively managing life's everyday stressors and challenges, like running out of a meeting at the last minute to pick up your child from daycare, or surviving horrendously long TSA lines at the airport without flipping out. The second is bouncing back—the capacity to recover effectively and grow from life's biggest adversities, like death or divorce.
Your resilience grows when you focus on developing specific skills in the following three categories: thinking differently, connecting more, and staying energized and motivated. Those may sound pretty abstract, so here's how each one works in practice:
1. Thinking differently. In order to develop resilience, you have to understand how you think about adversity, stress, and challenging situations. Our team taught the soldiers to understand how to think more flexibly and accurately about stress, framed around the "three P's" from American psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman's work:
Personalization
Permanence
Pervasiveness
Basically, what that means is that anytime something goes wrong—whether it's a flat tire or something far more serious—pessimistic thinkers explain the stress like this: "This will be around forever, it will impact multiple areas of my life, and it's all my fault." In other words, they personalize it and see the fallout as being permanent and everywhere.
Your explanations can range from optimistic to pessimistic and fall along a continuum. Seligman's research has shown that consistent pessimistic explanations are associated with an increased likelihood of depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and helplessness. So the goal of thinking differently in resilience training is to push back against this type of pessimistic reasoning.
2. Connecting more. I learned a new term working with the soldiers: "battle buddy." A battle buddy is another person a soldier can count on in any type of situation. Developing high-quality relationships is critical to living a happy, healthy, and resilient life because of the benefits they provide. Resilience experts typically identify four: they're empowering, they provide a sense of trust, they let you be your authentic self, and they're built on respect.
3. Staying energized and motivated. Resilience demands incorporating recovery into your daily routine. "Recovery" is simply the process that brings your functioning back to pre-stressor levels. You've recovered when your work-related strains are reduced. That means that it's often not enough just to go home and take a break. Optimal recovery is a combination of both internal recovery—the short breaks you take while you're at work—and external recovery, how you spend your time after work, on the weekends, and on vacation.
Finally, staying energized and motivated also means being connected to a source of meaning. People who believe that their lives have meaning and purpose share a whole host of healthy benefits: They're happier, feel more in control over their lives and more engaged at work, and they report less depression, anxiety, and workaholism.
While we taught many skills to the soldiers, one of their favorites (and my personal favorite) was a technique that I first learned in my master's program. It's a relationship-building habit called "active constructive responding," based on Dr. Shelly Gable's work. Her research shows that how you respond to a person's good news is just as important for your relationship as the way you respond to that person's bad news.
Gable and her team have identified four different response styles to the sharing of good news, which we taught to service members—many of whom, it goes without saying, were trained to deal effectively and rationally with very bad news.
1. Passive constructive. You offer distracted, understated support, which kills the conversation. Think of how many times you're preoccupied with your smartphone when someone tries to share good news with you. This reaction leaves the sharer feeling misunderstood and unimportant.
2. Passive destructive. You one-up the person, ignore their good news, or take over the conversation and make it about you. Many people inadvertently use this response style when they have good news that's in common with the sharer's.
3. Active destructive. You get negative when the person shares good news, and leave them feeling angry and even embarrassed. If you're truly concerned about what somebody takes as good news (but you don't) spend a few minutes "actively constructively" responding to it, then pick a separate time and place to have a follow-up conversation that's more critical.
4. Active constructive. This is the only response style that builds solid relationships. You help the sharer relive the good news by showing an authentic interest and asking questions. This benefits both of you because it generates positive emotions; both people walk away from the conversation feeling better.
The soldiers would practice this skill with each other and their families each night, and the impact was profound. After all, this isn't something many of us think about doing intentionally. Many of the soldiers I worked with later said their relationships with their significant others, their commands, and especially with their kids changed soon after implementing this habit.
Stress and adversity is a consistent theme of life. Simple tools will help you become more resilient to both the small and large adversities life throws your way.
Paula Davis-Laack is a speaker, lawyer, and expert on work-related stress, burnout, and resilience. Follow her on Twitter at @pauladavislaack.
With a thoughtful rebrand, the popular platform is putting a friendlier face on medicine.
When health care platform Zocdoc launched almost a decade ago, it didn't give much thought to its logo, opting for a traditional, conservative design that cost just $80. Since then, the site—which connects patients to doctors and manages appointments—has blown up into a business valued at $1.8 billion, expanding to reach more than 60% of the U.S. population and working with large hospital systems such as New York's Mount Sinai. In 2015, the company decided it was time for a rebrand, and it tapped global design agency Wolff Olins to reimagine its overall look and feel. The result is friendly and human-centered, complete with an anthropomorphic logo that turns the letter Z into an expressive, emoticonlike face. Wolff Olins North America president Tim Allen explains the changes.
What are the problems with the branding used by traditional health care companies?
There are all these familiar visual cues like shields and crosses. Everything is blue and green. It is all about security and authority, which are needed in this market, but it's gotten unbalanced. There's also this inherent hierarchy that happens: You're the patient, we're the caregiver. For Zocdoc, we were trying to create a partnership between patients and health care providers and create an identity and an architecture that expressed that.
Central to your solution is Zee, an adaptable avatar that expresses human emotions like perplexity, happiness, and relief. What was your approach?
We wanted to make the logo dynamic, responding to the patient's needs and emotions. Zocdoc wanted something a little more grown-up, but still retaining that spirit of being smart, caring, intuitive, and compelling. Health care is too often a frustrating and bewildering experience. Zocdoc is on a mission to cut through that confusion, so we reimagined the brand experience from the patient's perspective, aiming to make Zocdoc a place of trust and ease. We created a visual identity that could put a smile on your face when appropriate.
How important is design in shaping the future of the health care industry?
At the root of design is the process of solving problems with creativity. There's no way to take on the new health care challenges of affordability, access, obesity, wellness, or preventive care without design. Functionally, you're designing for people so that they can achieve goals. Emotionally, you're hopefully creating a sense of wonder and delight.
The architect behind the new National Museum of African American History and Culture explains how he captured "an extraordinary journey."
For its first 72 years as the nation's capital, Washington, D.C., was a slave territory, and the five-acre tract on which the new National Museum of African American History and Culture sits once contained a slave market. So even before the ribbon was cut or the foundation laid, the building, which opens September 24, was already firmly rooted in the geography of America's most inhumane and violent institution.
Yet instead of sadness, David Adjaye, the museum's lead designer, saw celebration. He knew all about slavery, segregation, and lynchings, as well as more current reminders of that shameful legacy, such as the killings of Trayvon Martin and other innocent black men, women, and children. But Adjaye wanted to capture a broader view. "I refused to see the African-American story as tragic," says the Tanzanian-born, British-raised architect. "Instead, it is an extraordinary journey of overcoming, and shaping, what America is."
That idea was a touchstone of the building's design; the $540 million, 400,000-square-foot structure is literally encased in the symbols of African-American triumph. From the visually striking exterior to the carefully designed exhibit-hall environments, Adjaye and his team—in collaboration with architecture firms the Freelon Group, Davis Brody Bond, and SmithGroupJJR—have created what he calls "a spatial narrative," by which he means that the building itself tells the story of the African-American experience.
Located on the National Mall near the Washington Monument, Adjaye's metallic, multitiered structure consists of three inverted box shapes that thrust upward. Inspired by Yoruban caryatids—traditional wooden sculptures of female figures found in East Africa that are often topped by box-shaped crowns—the design is meant to recall both the head wraps worn by many black women in the U.S. and hands raised in praise or prayer, a common symbol in African-American spiritual life. "I was fascinated with how these [shapes] were connected," says the much-lauded architect, who has constructed prominent buildings such as the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo. "It was so uncanny to make connections between the Yoruba caryatid and modern expressions in black America. They became clues to the architecture of the building." The lattice exterior, which is made out of 3,600 bronze-colored cast-aluminum panels, references ironwork patterns created by 19th-century enslaved workers in New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina—an homage to the skill and the unpaid labor of these craftsmen.
Making history: Tours of the museum begin underground, then rise into sunlit galleries as the subject matter grows more uplifting.[Photo: Alan Karchmer]
Established in 2003 by an act of Congress, the museum is being overseen by founding director Lonnie Bunch III, a longtime Smithsonian executive. Adjaye, whose group beat out hundreds of other firms for the commission, was named lead designer in 2009, and construction started three years later. While the building was in progress, Bunch and his team—in consultation with historians and luminaries such as Oprah Winfrey and Colin Powell—amassed around 34,000 artifacts, mostly from private collectors. Ideally, the curators want to create dialogue and "complicate questions of race, agency, and history," says deputy director Kinshasha Holman Conwill. "The hope is that people will leave here transformed and wanting to learn more."
That seems likely. During a preopening tour in June, when the interior was still essentially a construction site, the space exuded a solemn dignity. Workers wearing hard hats were guiding cloth-covered display items into various exhibition spaces, and the partially completed rooms were full of shipping crates and dangling wires. But things were far enough along to offer a sense of what the experience will be like. The overarching idea is that a visitor's journey through the museum mirrors the rise of African-American people's position in society. Exhibits begin three levels underground, where low ceilings and a lack of natural light create a somewhat claustrophobic effect. That heightens the emotional impact of galleries such as Slavery & Freedom, which displays a 16.5-foot cotton tower, artifacts from a wrecked slave ship, and two log cabins, including one that housed enslaved people on Edisto Island, South Carolina. As you move upward, rooms feature a lace shawl owned by Harriet Tubman, Emmett Till's coffin, a plane flown by Tuskegee Airmen, and the original Soul Train sign. The exhibit halls are much more than just expertly curated trips through time: They resonate because America has still not decisively resolved the complex issues that make the museum so necessary in the first place.
One of the most powerful moments comes about halfway through, when museumgoers arrive at a room called the Contemplative Court. This is the point where underground galleries give way to aboveground halls with high ceilings and picture windows, where the museum focuses on more-optimistic topics such as sports, music, visual arts, hair, and style. The Contemplative Court's sunlit stone benches and soothing water feature offer a space "to reframe what you experienced and contextualize it," says Adjaye, who hopes visitors will sit for a few minutes and reflect on the nation-shaping hardships they've just seen. "Then you move on up into the light."
Despite VR's huge promise, here is why the technology has a long way to go.
Last summer, Pokémon Go instantly transformed augmented reality from a geeky-cool niche concept into a mainstream phenomenon. But if you really want to experience AR's world-changing potential, you can't just download an app and start chasing after Charizards. Serious augmented reality—and its cousin, virtual reality—finally arrived this year in the form of several impressive products that could mark a big evolution in how we connect to the digital world.
Microsoft's AR device, HoloLens, started shipping in March (it's currently available as a $3,000 developer kit; the company says a cheaper consumer version is in the works). The headset, which vaguely resembles ski goggles, layers 3D digital imagery on top of your regular field of vision, creating a seamless blend of the real world and computer-generated content. Meanwhile, Facebook's Oculus Rift and HTC's Vive—also released in early 2016—offer fully immersive experiences that place you inside stunningly convincing virtual worlds. At $599 and $799 apiece, the strap-to-your-face screens are as pricey as they are exciting. "We've all used mice and keyboards and touch screens, but AR and VR represent a new way of interacting with information and digital services," says Lewis Ward, an analyst at IDC. "We're not sure what we're going to find yet in this new UI paradigm, but it could turn out to be as disruptive as touch screens have been in the past decade."
Each of the three devices is a technical feat. Invented by a teenager in his Long Beach, California, garage, the Rift solves problems that had bedeviled engineers and designers for decades, such as motion sickness–inducing interfaces and bulky, uncomfortable hardware that prevented extended use. The Vive's biggest achievement is its pair of headset-linked handheld controllers, which are easy and intuitive to use, making the experience exponentially more engaging. And HoloLens nails the dizzyingly complex challenge of stuffing a 3D projector and room-mapping camera into a lightweight, wearable device that doesn't need to be tethered to a separate computer.
As tantalizing as these platforms are, there are still some significant barriers to widespread adoption. The Vive and Rift need to be hooked up to powerful, expensive computers in order to work, pushing their true cost into the thousands of dollars. And HoloLens currently suffers from limited processing power and a relatively small field of vision. To put it another way, none of these products is likely to be the iPhone—a breakthrough technology that immediately and radically remakes the landscape. Instead, they seem more akin to Steve Jobs's original Macintosh computer. When it arrived in 1984, the Mac failed to catch on in the broader market. But its many widely imitated features—most notably its mouse and transformative graphical interface—went on to define personal computing for decades.
Even if the HoloLens, Rift, and Vive don't themselves grow into the kind of mass-appeal gadgets that inspire mainstream acceptance, the breakthrough solutions they offer could lead to generations of ever-more-sophisticated VR products. And to be sure, the devices make you gasp with wonder when you use them for the first time; it's one thing to read about the promise of virtual reality, and quite another to experience how utterly transporting the technology can be. "The demo that got me was Medium for Oculus, which lets you sculpt in 3D," says designer Rob Girling, whose firm, Artefact, is building developer tools for VR. "It feels like [open-world building game] Minecraft times 1,000, times 10,000. But it still feels like a demo."
Ultimately, that's the biggest early issue with AR and VR: The content currently available for these platforms seems intended to showcase the promise of the devices rather than to provide fully realized and satisfying experiences. But more meaningful interactivity is tantalizingly easy to imagine. Augmented reality could one day become a normal part of everyday life, feeding us a constant stream of information about our environment. More immediately, we could start seeing practical applications such as AR how-to manuals that layer instructions on top of tricky projects, making experts of us all. And VR, in addition to potentially transforming the gaming industry, could, for example, let us watch NFL games from the point of view of our favorite team's starting quarterback. "The killer app has yet to come," says Jake Barton, a designer whose firm, Local Projects, creates immersive digital experiences. "But what happens when you get the Spielberg of VR?"
A new venture aims to help people control their disease—and change behavior in ways that will help keep the disease from controlling them.
Verily, Alphabet's life sciences group, is investing big in developing technologies for the millions of people worldwide with diabetes.
Verily announced today that it is teaming up with pharmaceutical giant Sanofi to fund and spin out a new venture, Cambridge, Mass.-based Onduo, which is focused on helping clinicians and their patients manage the disease. The companies have tapped a new CEO to lead the startup, trained emergency-medicine physician Joshua Riff, from United Healthcare-owned Optum.
Onduo's team is focusing initially on type 2 diabetes, which is the most common form of the disease.
It's still early days, but Riff tells me that he intends to integrate a suite of novel and existing hardware, software, and services to address a variety of challenges for those with diabetes and ultimately improve patient outcomes. "There are lots of solutions that only solve one problem," he says. "We're taking a step back to find out the problems that a person with diabetes wants to have solved."
For companies like Verily, formerly known as Google's Life Sciences, the timing is right to focus on diabetes. The disease affects some 29 million people in the United States alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2012, the total cost of managing diabetes in the U.S. was put at $245 billion.
And that's not to mention the potential complications associated with the disease. "What I have seen is the many downstream consequences of this disease," says Jessica Mega, a cardiologist and Verily's chief medical officer. "Clinicians are concerned about eye disease, kidney disease, heart disease, depression."
A variety of technologies have hit the market in recent years for patients with diabetes, including apps and wearables, to help them track their insulin levels, get healthier, and manage their medications. But even with this battery of new tools, the disease is still overwhelming for many patients. "We see a huge daily friction," says Riff. One of the problems is that these technologies don't connect to each other, in many cases—that's a problem that Apple is also trying to solve with its HealthKit platform—and that it's still highly expensive and time-consuming to manage the disease.
Without providing specifics, Riff says that the goal of the company is to help patients with diabetes in every aspect of their care, from taking their meds to organizing all the information that flows in via the apps and devices they use. Another area of focus, which he describes as a big gap that has not been adequately addressed by the health system, is to incorporate tools geared toward behavior change. "We're also looking at factors, like nutrition, activity, and quality of life, that led up to to the problems," he says.
Indeed, ample research studies over the years have found that the lack of primary and preventative care has led to hospitalizations and other avoidable outcomes for patients in the U.S.. Some health-technology startups are starting to bridge that gap, such as Omada Health with its online/offline program focused on preventing the onset of diabetes among those who are at high risk for the disease. These initiatives are only just starting to gain recognition, in the form of reimbursement, from both public and private insurers.
Verily's smart contact lens project
According to Riff, Onduo will work with the "best in class" technologies on the market, rather than focus on building a crop of entirely new ones. But the company might incorporate Verily's experimental contact lens, which aims to monitor glucose continuously and painlessly, when the time comes. It remains to be seen when and if that product (it's a holy grail that others have tried and failed to accomplish over the years) will hit the market.
In the coming months, Onduo will partner with Sutter Health, a not-for-profit health system in Northern California, to test the platform with clinicians and a cohort of patients. At present, the company is still in the process of collecting user feedback to ensure that it's addressing real needs.
"We don't want to create technologies in a black box," Mega says. "Through this partnership, we have the right diversity of people who can help shape that direction."
Procedures for sifting through data to verify findings are necessary in any industry. Astronomers recently discovered their limitations.
The scientific community was abuzz recently when it was widely reported that Russian astronomers, along with an Italian researcher, had recorded a signal that was, as of then, unexplained.
After looking into what exactly was detected—something from the solar system HD 164595 some 94 light-years away—the Russian astronomers issued a statement explaining that the signal was most likely not extraterrestrial.
But organizations focusing on the search for alien life, such as the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute and the Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) Institute, are continuing to look into the event. Part of the reason is because the signal was received over a year ago, on May 15, 2015, according to a SETI blog post.
At the time, though, the discoverers didn't immediately alert the SETI community, a breach of long-established practice and protocol. How did that breakdown happen?
One reason SETI's protocol likely sputtered is simple. Even though the drafted document has been written and revised for over two decades, the nine rules researchers are supposed to follow when they receive what they think may be an extraterrestrial signal don't necessarily conform to the dynamic nature of the field. Technologies are constantly changing, making it easier to see places we've never seen before, like surface of a comet, for instance. Scientists are still sorting out how best to act on the new data that's coming in all the time.
SETI's rules are a set of defensive actions: if x happens, then y next. That makes them similar to the way measures are created in the cybersecurity sector; SETI's rules exist to protect those involved but are usually carried out during exceptional circumstances. Security professionals generally have plans in place about what to do during an emergency, yet the reality never plays out the same as it did when conceptualized.
Perhaps the most glaring example of this was the 2013 Target data breach, which exposed personal and payment information of some 40 million customers. The company had numerous security protocols in place—which, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, may have even detected the hack while it was happening. But when theoretical security planning was pushed into active procedure, several things went awry.
While Target was alerted by federal law enforcement about two weeks after the hack, data breaches take an average of 146 days to be discovered, according to a report from Mandiant. The potential receipt of an alien signal likewise needs to be vetted, which can also chew up a considerable amount of time.
Franck Marchis, a principal investigator at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute, explained that it's a way to ensure findings are real. Astronomers must "use the scientific method," he said. "Before making an announcement, you contact your colleagues," he explained. "You ask them to confirm that they also see the signal."
Researchers are working around the globe scanning the skies for any sort of abnormality they can detect. Every so often, they find something that defies explanation. The reason SETI has prescribed rules in place is to give a semblance of order to the process of figuring out these unknowns. The scientists I spoke to described the protocol as a safeguard to make sure every signal is properly vetted.
But as Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute who was part of the committee that crafted the document, told me, the protocol is just a prescription. "It's recommended behavior," he said. "There's no force of law." After years of meetings and reviews, the protocol has become widely accepted in the astronomy community. And according to Shostak, it's a "valuable document."
Both he and Marchis pointed to a signal SETI detected in 1997 that ended up being a false alarm. Though it looked promising, after colleagues weighed in, it became clear that the blip was in fact terrestrial.
Still, it's not always a smooth experience. If a promising signal is detected, it creates excitement. A scientist emailing a few friends about the discovery could also notify the press. "It spreads very quickly," Shostak explained. Often a finding that has yet to be completely vetted by the entire astronomy community gets leaked.
That is also reassuring, according to Shostak. He said that findings can get overlooked by the entities that matter—namely the government and the military. But the press has a way of garnering widespread interest that can then get the community involved in a healthy, global debate. The downside: "What's actually going to happen is a very messy media story," Shostak said, "with conflicting reports."
Yet methodological fissures still remain in the astronomy world. Earlier this year Fast Company reported on the widening difference of opinions when it comes to studying potentially alien lifeforms. While organizations like SETI focus on passively scanning the open skies for any external sign of life, other organizations like METI—Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence—believe it may be more useful to take a more proactive searching approach. Meanwhile, the protocol itself states: "No response to a signal or other evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence should be sent until appropriate international consultations have taken place."
Despite this, the scientists I talked with maintained that nearly every expert in the field is at least aware of the protocol and should know how follow it. But in this case, the team that discovered this faraway blip waited for over a year before making any sort of noise.
While this may seem odd, there's at least one possible explanation for the announcement's timing. Claudio Maccone, the Italian researcher (who is also the chair of the International Academy of Astronautics Permanent SETI Committee) who first saw the signal, is scheduled to show his findings at the 67th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara later this month. Still, this doesn't quite explain why the Russian astronomers already issued a statement saying it was most likely no extraterrestrial.
Shostak told me that he asked Maccone why the team didn't alert others about the finding last year. "He said they were shy," Shostak explained. "I don't know what that means."
Though the protocol has been updated again somewhat recently, it's clear that even the most high-tech scientists can be hampered by rudimentary organizational breakdowns. Do these perceived hiccups actually help push the science forward? Shostak sees the messiness as inevitable; Marchis points to just how important it is that others follow the protocol to truly corroborate findings.
A panel of 26 expert judges pored through more than 1,700 entries and selected the best products, services, and ideas of 2016.
Year by year, the Innovation by Design Awards have grown. This year's entries represented an astonishingly strong survey of innovation around the globe—more than 1,700 designs. In the eyes of our esteemed judges, the projects you'll find below (and in the slide show above) were the best of the best. There were only 15 winners anointed in the entire competition; we also crowned 231 finalists. Each of those projects represents what's best about design today: big ideas, meticulously thought-out details, and a clear viewpoint about how we live now—and how it could be better. We hope that you'll dig in and be inspired.
Digital artists have embraced the screen-as-canvas, but the next medium to master is a touch more esoteric: virtual reality. The immersive experience is becoming more accessible to the masses, and Tilt Brush is Google's tool to give everyone—VR pros and n00bs alike—the chance to create in 3D. Using room-scale tech, which tracks movement throughout a confined area, the app lets users paint in space with materials like fire, snowflakes, and a near-infinite palette of brushes and colors. When a work is complete, users can actually walk through their masterpiece, or welcome others into the brand-new world they created.
Adobe Experience Design CC (XD) is an all-in-one digital platform that provides the basic tools to both prototype and perfect UX projects. Rather than build this toolset on top of existing Adobe software, the company established an entirely new product development process, and thousands of independent designers were looped in to test early builds and provide feedback on pre-release programs—a uniquely nimble and transparent approach from an industry behemoth. The ever-evolving XD experience currently encompasses wire-framing, visual design, interaction design, prototyping, previewing, and sharing, and with the help of the creative community will become an even more robust destination for realizing websites and apps.
Since 2011, budding engineers have been developing their tinkering skills with littleBits kits; these inventions-in-a-box provide all the necessary gear to make tech- and code-based contraptions, but were only ever available via mail order. In 2015, the company debuted its first ever pop-up shop, a hands-on hub in the heart of SoHo that introduced visitors to the magical world of making. For six months, the brick-and-mortar workshop was open for business, welcoming creative kids (and curious adults) to interact with the products on-site, engaging with the full inventory of littleBits component parts while discovering and developing the little hackers that exist within us all.
BioLogic: Nattō is an ancient, aggressively pungent Japanese dish made from fermented soybeans. Nearly 1,000 years after its accidental discovery by a traveling samurai, the bacteria required to produce this slimy cuisine is being manipulated by the mad scientists at the MIT Media Lab and turned into something entirely different: A synthetic bio-skin. Rather than manufacturing actuators, which convert energy into motion, and sensors, which are affected by physical stimuli, the team is actually growing them; those animate cells are then harvested and transformed into a responsive material that reacts to body heat and sweat. And this next-level material will have a second life out of the lab—New Balance is experimenting with turning the textile into sportswear.
Death is inevitable, but the circumstances of any person's pivotal moment of passing on are largely uncertain. When and How You Will Die is a macabre digital experiment that aggregates different demographic variables like gender, age, and average life expectancy. It combines that data with stats on the most common ways to perish (think cancer or congenital disorders), then generates an interactive visualization that predicts the potential cause and timeline for your own personal adios. It's heavy stuff anchored in data, stats, and simulations that may or may not make you feel better about your impending mortality.
Providing—or receiving—essential health services should not be a political act, but Planned Parenthood's stalwart role as a nonprofit resource for sexual and reproductive education and services has put it on the front lines during a contentious time for women's rights. In order to ensure that the experience inside their clinics is welcoming, calm, and comfortable, Planned Parenthood enlisted Ideo to develop a new look and feel for waiting and recovery rooms. From the inviting, informational greeting zone, to the pre-procedure areas (more social, or solitary and reflective, depending on your mood), to the soothing after experience, everything was designed with empathy for patients in mind.
Wheelchairs are essential mobility devices for millions of Americans. GO hopes to transform the somewhat staid industry with a tech-driven approach to production, allowing users to create and customize their rides using personal biometric data on an easy-to-navigate app. Thoughtful advances like high-grip GO gloves and textured push rims will help reduce muscle strain and energy output, while the streamlined design just looks cool. LayerLAB teamed up with designer Benjamin Hubert and 3D-printed software titans Materialise to cut down turnaround time to three weeks—less than half than the standard two months—thanks to a set of standard components and two made-to-measure, locally 3D printed elements.
Every few thousand miles when car owners get their oil changed, the corresponding filter—often a paper-pulp contraption that clogs easily—is tossed in the trash, to the tune of about 400 million per year in the states, creating a lot of waste. The ultra-durable Hubb Lifetime Oil Filter is composed of two internal filter sets made from stainless steel mesh; the material is sized to capture debris while letting liquid flow through, while doubling the total surface area greatly increases efficiency and longevity. But perhaps best of all, it's reusable. Rather than junk it during a service, the device can be cleaned on the spot and fit back into the vehicle, over and over again for 50 years.
Kids can be crazy bundles of energy, but many younguns still aren't getting enough physical activity in their day-to-day lives. The forward-thinking folks at Technology Will Save Us created The Mover Kit to make exercise feel like play, with the added educational bonus of programming basics. The pack includes a plastic watch-like wearable that snaps into place on wrists, arms, legs, and more; little users can hop online to customize their accessory on TWSU's proprietary Make platform, coding it to track motion and direction, or to light up with rainbow LEDs.
Planned obsolescence is a major problem in tech. Increasingly complex products are designed to degrade after a certain period of time; consumers keep buying new versions without considering how to fix their current model; and, as a result, the Earth is getting overrun with unnecessary e-waste. Fairphone 2 offers an alternative to that vicious cycle, with a durable, modular smartphone designed for ease of use (and re-use). Thanks to a streamlined hardware design with minimal component parts, users have the power to troubleshoot repairs with household tools, and in the process form a new relationship with their gadget. A broken screen takes less than a minute to replace, no tools required, and the camera, headphone jack, and micro USB connector can be fixed using a screwdriver.
Prefab systems have long been touted, in some form, as the future of architecture; the promise of cheaper, faster, and more efficient construction methods makes the processes seem ideal, but scaling up from small single-family homes—the most common option on the market—has been slightly slow to catch on. In Manhattan, where real estate is precious and space is at a premium, Carmel Place offers an innovative take on urban development. Former mayor Michael Bloomberg tasked Brooklyn-based firm nArchitects to design a micro-units development, and issued a special mayoral override that allowed them to get around zoning codes dictating an apartment must have a minimum area of 400 square feet. Of the skyscraper's 65 individual modules, 55 units are under 440 square feet; these are diplomatically dubbed residential micro-units, and the structure represents the first micro-unit apartment building in NYC. Each of these individual modules were produced off-site, then transported and stacked in place. Shared amenities like a gym and public roof terrace make smart use of communal space, while luxuriously decorated interiors and 10-foot ceilings prevent these homes from feeling too cramped.
Set over a former dead-end street on a once contaminated shoreline surrounded by an industrial zone, the community-minded park and pier at Hunts Point Landing proves that urban revitalization is not only possible, but can truly transform what is considered by many to be irredeemable blight. Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects designed the 100-foot wide, 1.5 acre public space as part of the South Bronx Greenway Master Plan, and navigated the city's numerous agencies and labyrinthine approval processes to ensure proper access and utility systems. The result is an outdoor retreat for locals that will only continue to grow into an integral part of the neighborhood.
The Internet of Things has made communication between inanimate objects a reality. Em-Sense, developed by students at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, links people even closer into those instant connections through the power of physical touch. Everyday items like toothbrushes and doorknobs naturally produce electromagnetic noise (EM); when you make contact, those electrical signals circulate through your body (yes, you are conductive!). Imagine a maps app showing a shortcut on your smartwatch simply because you straddled a motorcycle. Em-Sense enables touch identification, authentication, and all kinds of custom DIY experiences.
Navigating the world with a disability can be a physical and emotional challenge for kids. The IKO Creative Prosthetic System turns artificial body parts into Inspector Gadget-style imagination machines that transcend traditional uses with all kinds of attachments. Hand? Sure! Space ship? Why not! Blender? Yeah! This playful approach empowers little creatives to embrace the relationship between their bodies and the tools that help them live comfortably and confidently. By combining robotics, programming, and prototyping with Lego Mindstorms, IKO provides a learning experience for the young user, and allows them to share that knowledge with their peers.
Kinduct is a responsive software system developed to optimize athletes' performances. By aggregating data from external sources like electronic medical records, and combining it with proprietary assessment trackers, the platform's visualizations and analysis can help determine the most effective training and treatment strategies for individual players, rather than a more traditional team-wide approach. The Golden State Warriors were one of the first NBA organizations to adopt the tool, and their consistent performance through the 2015 and 2016 seasons shows Kinduct's vast potential.
Not all regrets are created equal. Here's a breakdown of the types of decisions you're most likely to rue.
So much of life is vague and uncertain, but regrets are pretty distinct. When you look back and feel like things haven't gone as you'd hoped, regret sets in—but it often attaches to something specific. Many of the situations you regret relate to explicit choices you made. More often than not, those decisions fall into one of three categories, and understanding what those are can help you avoid making choices that'll leave you feeling regretful in the first place.
One of the most frequent kinds of decision regret involves situations where you got carried away in the moment.
Many of our choices relate to "active goals" we have. And an active goal is simply one that's been energized by your motivational system. That basically means that it starts driving your decisions—you begin making choices in order to get it. Research from my lab suggests that when a goal gets energized, it makes things related to achieving that goal seem more valuable than they were when the goal wasn't active. And on the flip side, it likewise makes things unrelated to achieving that goal seem less valuable than before.
So what does this mean in practice? Well, when you're sitting behind the wheel of that beautiful new car, the car takes on new importance for you. And at the same time, other goals—like paying for your kids' college education—are suddenly less important.
The thing is, as soon as you achieve the goal (in this case by buying the car), the goal decreases in its "arousal"—in other words, it ceases to be motivating, so your decision-making engine needs to find a new fuel source. As a result, all of your other competing goals get a new boost of energy from your motivational system. And now you realize how important some of those other things were to you. Suddenly that new car starts to seem like a bad idea. You're hit with buyer's remorse.
Not all buyer's remorse happens in the context of purchases, of course, but it's also a decent bet that not everybody who gets married on a whim in an all-night Vegas chapel is pleased with their choice in the long run. If you think you might be in a situation where you're liable to get carried away, you need to reduce the energy behind the goal you're trying to achieve—and do it before making a decision based on it. Get some distance from the situation. Sleep on it. See if you still think the option you're considering is as important from a distance as it was at close range.
Not every regret involves what psychologists call an "act of commission"—someone actually doing something. In fact, research suggests that the older you get, the more you regret the paths not taken. For every person who routinely experiences buyer's remorse, there's somebody who's so concerned about the risk of failure that they hold back from trying things that could've turned out great.
It's important to take a look at your own pattern of decision making; most of us tend to fall into one. How often do you err on the side of caution? It's always important to look before you leap, but if you're the type of person who typically opts out of opportunities, you may have the reverse problem—and need to leap more often.
If that's you, there are a few things you can do. First, ask yourself what the worst-case scenario really is. Some people jump right into imagining the worst possible outcome as the likeliest one, which it often isn't. And sometimes even the worst-case scenario isn't actually as bad as we may fear.
This isn't to advocate taking unnecessary risks. But there are plenty of times when the downsides of failure appear much worse than they are. Many people give up on the chance to give a talk in public, for instance, even though there's little real risk in bungling it. Even a bad talk isn't usually devastating to anyone's life or career. And the benefits of giving a good one can be enormous.
One of my kids had a great high school teacher who used to take his students to Hawaii every summer. He knew all the safe places where kids could jump off high cliffs into the water. After watching the kids stare down at the water for a few minutes, he would ask them, "Are you going to jump or spend the rest of your life wishing you did?" They'd all jump.
Finally, there are many regrets that result from bad outcomes but not necessarily bad decisions. You did the due diligence. You picked the option that seemed like the right one. And things still didn't work out.
It's easy to focus on outcomes, but you have to resist that. Just as your negligence in the decision process isn't absolved by a positive outcome, your hard work isn't wasted just because a decision turned out badly.
Rather than regretting bad outcomes, treat them as an opportunity to learn for the future. What went wrong? Could you have tweaked your execution in order to tip the balance in the other direction? Was there a piece of information you didn't realize was important at the time but that would've helped? Or were you just unlucky?
But in these types of cases, you already are lucky, in one sense: Situations where you made a good choice that went badly are the ones that are easiest to learn from. And—over time—good decisions are more likely to be rewarded than bad ones.
Once aspirational, companies like Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger have lost their luster, while innovative new brands are shining bright.
Fifteen years ago, when I was in high school, I remember flipping through the pages of Teen Vogue and marveling at glossy Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and Calvin Klein spreads. These brands each still represented distinct styles: Ralph Lauren portrayed fresh-faced girls with bouncy ponytails wearing tennis skirts and polo shirts, while Calvin Klein was edgier, with black-and-white photos of skinny models wearing nothing more than jeans and a tank top (if that). Depending on whether I was in an optimistic or angst-ridden phase, I'd gravitate toward one aesthetic or the other.
I remember thinking that one day, when I grew up and had my own money to spend, I would fill my closets with designer bags and dresses. But here I am today, at the age of 33, and none of these brands interest me anymore. In my mind, they conjure up images of outlet malls. Go to any T.J. Maxx or Marshall's and you'll find Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger shirts piled up in untidy closeout bins. At Macy's and JC Penney, Coach bags are stacked on crowded shelves, priced at enormous discounts.
I'm not the only one who feels that these iconic American brands have lost their luster. Many are on a downward spiral, hit by sluggish sales. Ralph Lauren is facing plunging profits resulting in the shuttering of retail stores. Coach is in a similar boat, having lost significant market share. Michael Kors recently devised a strategy of cutting back on discounts, since markdowns appear to have killed the company's cachet. Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, which are owned by the same parent company, have seen decreasing sales in the U.S. market, though they are still doing well overseas. (Fast Company reached out to each of these brands, but they either declined to comment or did not respond to interview requests.)
What went wrong? How did premium American companies lose their way? And is there a new generation of labels that will fill the void?
Charles Lawry, a professor at Pace University's business school who specializes in studying the luxury market, points to how high-end American brands have been creating cheaper products for decades now. "Ralph Lauren was one of the first American luxury brands to reach across many different categories, and that is really what made it successful," Lawry explains, pointing out that the company has at least 25 different lines, including the lower-end Polo and Chaps. "It is possible to purchase products from $25 to $3,000."
For a time, this strategy was extremely lucrative; soon, other brands followed suit, including MK by Michael Kors and Donna Karan's DKNY. By the early 2000s, Donna Karan,Ralph Lauren, and Coach had gone public. By 2010, the public company Phillips Van Heusen Corp. owned both Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. In their new incarnations, these companies all faced new shareholder pressures to keep business booming. "Growth became more important than brand," says Stephanie Sarka, who held various leadership positions at Coach throughout the 1990s and had a front-row seat to this wave of IPOs and mergers. "This meant everything from lowering the cost of manufacturing to making the brand accessible to new a wider spectrum of consumers."
Eric Korman, Ralph Lauren's president of digital and e-commerce between 2010 and 2014, concurs. "There was an over-expansion and distribution into places like factory stores, which presented a tremendous economic opportunity," he says. "But it came at the expense of the brand. If you start training the consumer to believe that the brand is widely distributed in factory outlets, people who were once your core customer will start doing that, or lose interest in the brand altogether."
To lower costs, many of these corporations shipped production to China and Vietnam, where labor was cheap. As a result, products suffered: People who weren't trained to work with premium leather or master expert tailoring could not be expected to create high-end merchandise on a massive scale. "With globalization and an effort to cut cost by going overseas, these megabrands that were once known for high quality started to see their quality deplete and decay," says Shauna Mei, founder of AHAlife, an e-commerce site that curates handcrafted goods.
It was also hard to predict consumer demand when outsourced orders had to be placed many months before they hit stores. This lead to bloated inventories. Karla Gallardo discovered this firsthand when she studied the luxury brand supply chain before cofounding her own brand, Cuyana, three years ago. "These businesses had to liquidate their inventories at low prices," she says. "When this happens once, twice, and three times, the customer gets used to buying on sale. This is a problem that gets compounded over time."
In 2008, American prestige fashion hit new lows. "During the recession and post-recession periods, these brands went further by having a lot of these products trickle down to discount retailers," Lawry says. "If you go to a T.J. Maxx, it's not uncommon to see brands like Coach or Michael Kors. That is a death knell for flagship luxury brands in America." There was a time when buying a Coach bag meant walking into an elegant shop, where you'd speak with a knowledgable sales associate and feel like you were treating yourself to an exclusive experience. But there's nothing remotely glamorous about picking up that same Coach bag in a messy, overcrowded department store with harsh lighting and thousands upon thousands of mass-produced articles. In short, bargain prices robbed luxury brands of their mystique.
The current state of American luxury brands would have been unimaginable to people in the industry just a few decades ago. "When I was at Coach, the focus on the brand's integrity was everything," says Sarka. "I still have memories of Lew Frankfort, Coach's CEO at the time, at our company meetings talking about making products in America, charging the same price across all channels, and certainly not discounting. The brand was defined by craftsmanship and quality."
At first, many consumers did not fully grasp how the quality of these products had plummeted. On the surface, the clothes and bags looked the same. But as the shoddy workmanship became evident in fraying hems and tattered seams that were glued, rather than sewed together, the illusion shattered.
A younger generation of companies saw the decline of legacy American brands as an opportunity to redefine premium fashion and educate customers about how high-end goods are made. The first out of the gate was Everlane, which launched in 2010 with a radical concept: Next to each item sold on the website, there was an explanation of manufacturing costs, broken down into the price of raw materials, labor, and import duties. The information was meant to show that Everlane's prices were reasonable compared to its competitors because there was no retail markup. It also underscored the higher level of craftsmanship that goes into Everlane's products.
"Digital-first retail brands, like Everlane or Warby Parker, successfully seized upon the fact that the internet did not just make it easier to buy products online, but that expectations of brands had fundamentally shifted," says Eric Korman, the former Ralph Lauren executive. "They architected brands that had a belief system built into them—about things like quality and social good—and a conversational tone built into its messaging that transparently exposed [those values]." Korman has since launched Phlur, a direct-to-consumer perfume brand that uses ethically sourced essential oils, but at the reasonable cost of $85 a bottle.
Over the last six years, many other direct-to-consumer upstarts have entered the market with a similar ethos. Take DSTLD, a two-year-old L.A.-based denim brand that offers high-quality jeans at decent prices. "There aren't many markets where the price of your products can drop by 60% in a matter of weeks the way it does with so-called luxury brands," says cofounder Corey Epstein. "It doesn't equate in the consumers' minds how they can do that and still maintain quality."
DSTLD discloses its fabrication process, explaining that products are made in factories in Los Angeles and overseas that have a long history of denim production. Next to each item, it presents the DSTLD price next to the inflated figure that a designer brand might charge. "The emphasis of our entire collection is to create staples that are not just passing trends, but that will stand the test of time," Epstein says. This is not a new idea, of course—and it's a common refrain among these next-generation brands. Gallardo's company, Cuyana, for instance, has the motto, "Fewer, Better Things." It has focused on creating women's clothing and accessories made by experienced craftsmen using quality materials so that consumers can enjoy their products for a long time—and perhaps even pass them on to their children.
Another important distinction between these fashion startups and older apparel companies is that they are much less flashy. "The notion of luxury is changing drastically," says Charles Lawry, the Pace University professor. "Millennials are not as interested in logos as previous generations who gravitated toward things like the enormous Gucci Gs. Those garish logos would scare today's consumer away." Everlane, DSTLD, and Cuyana don't have ostentatious branding on their products, which puts them a world apart from Ralph Lauren, with its enormous polo player emblem, or Calvin Klein, whose labels on jeans can be seen from yards away.
Karla Gallardo and Shilpa Shah, cofounders of Cuyana
Today, many people see high-end products as one-of-a-kind items—the antithesis of mass-produced commodities whose attention-grabbing logos turn consumers into advertisements. And a new wave of savvy entrepreneurs have built businesses on the idea of offering customers something that feels unique. Shauna Mei, for instance, launched AHAlife in 2009 with the goal of bridging the gap between master craftspeople from around the world with consumers who are interested in getting small-batch, well-made products. Stephaie Sarka, the Coach veteran, recently started a company called 1Atelier that allows shoppers to customize every aspect of a handbag on the website. Bags are then handmade in New York using top-grade leathers, then shipped 21 days after the order is placed.
"The internet has democratized brands," Mei says. "People are willing to pay for something special and they want to know how their products are made and, these days, it is possible to find exactly what they are looking for online."
While many of the legacy American fashion houses have floundered over the last few decades, there have been a few success stories. Vineyard Vines, for instance, was founded by the brothers Shep and Ian Murray in 1998, right when Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger were in their prime. Vineyard's aesthetic takes a page from the classic preppy look that made those other brands so quintessentially American: polos, chinos, crisp Oxford shirts; colorful ties for men and sundresses for women. The price point was comparable as well, ranging between $100 and $300. "Certainly Ralph Lauren paved the way for a lot of people," says Shep Murray. "We have incredible respect for him."
The house that Ralph built is fighting to regain its footing, and last month, it did just dress Team USA for its fifth consecutive Olympics. But the company also recently announced that it is closing 50 stores and laying off 8% of its 15,000 employees. Vineyard Vines, on the other hand, is in expansion mode. This year, it will add 650 new people to its existing staff of 2,600, and open 40 new stores for a total of 100 nationwide. In May, Goldman Sachs valued the company for as much as $1 billion.
Shep and Ian, cofounders of Vineyard Vines
The brothers attribute their success to several factors. First, they've stayed closely involved with the company, ensuring that their values penetrate every aspect of the business, from creating a positive work environment for employees to marketing campaigns centered on the optimistic tagline, "Every day should feel this good." Second, they have deliberately eschewed the the notion of exclusivity. Vineyard Vines, they say, is much more interested in projecting the image of a warm, inclusive brand. The Murrays believe that this is much more in line with the modern consumer's sensibility. "We like to feature real people rather than models in our ads," Shep says. "We don't want to lose focus on ensuring that customers feel good about our brand."
According to Korman, this is very different from Ralph Lauren's approach, at least when it first came into the market, when its strategy was to create a rich and famous mystique. He thinks that brands now strive for a much more democratic identity. "It's about changing your tone so that you're letting the customer in on the fact that you know that nobody really lives the life you're projecting," Korman says. "It's about doing things with a bit of a wink and a nod."
With that in mind, the big question is whether the once great American brands can right their ships and regain the consumer's trust by improving their quality standards, cutting back on their distribution channels, and speaking to the world in a more relatable voice. "Can a brand regain customer trust after they compromised the quality of their products?" Sarka asks. "That's still very much an open question."
Korman is more optimistic. "I think there's a way to do it, especially for brands that have a long history in the marketplace," he says. "But it's going to be a long voyage. Brands have a way of finding a second life."
Mark Cross is proof of that. One of the oldest American leather good companies, it was founded by a saddlemaker in Boston in 1845. But after Cross himself passed away, the business was taken over by the fashionable Murphy family, who rubbed shoulders with Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, and the Fitzgeralds. They transformed Mark Cross into a luxury accessory company that sold suitcases, cigarette cases, and evening bags. Hollywood took notice: In Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, Grace Kelly is seen packing her clothes in a Mark Cross overnight bag.
But for all its storied history, Mark Cross fell on hard times in the 1950s, when the American market became flooded with new brands. The Murphy family sold the company in 1961, and it passed from owner to owner until it was shut down altogether in 1997. That might have been the end if it hadn't been for Neal Fox, a fashion-industry veteran who remembered what the Mark Cross brand stood for. In 2003, he decided to buy the company and attempt to revive it. He sought out the Italian factories that used to manufacture Mark Cross bags, and he hired a team of designers to create a new collection that paid tribute to designs from the brand's archive.
Fox is committed to ensuring the new Mark Cross thrives without stumbling into the pitfalls that have tripped up other American fashion companies. "It's exceedingly difficult to balance building the business while maintaining exclusivity," he says. "I understand what can happen when demand for your product explodes: The easiest way to respond to that on a knee-jerk basis is to aggressively pursue growth. But I think if you want to maintain status as a luxury brand, you have to temper this desire." A little self-control can go a long way, even in fashion.
Related Video: Inside The T.J.Maxx-ification Of Major American Luxury Brands
Can the company's move to stream major events right inside its app, including Thursday night NFL games, woo the masses?
Once upon a time, there was an ocean that surged with a billion and one stories. Every one was different, and they combined in unexpected ways to create new stories. Fishing one out of the torrent took patience, but could be enormously rewarding.
The ocean in question is the subject of Salman Rushdie's 1990 fantasy novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a book unfamiliar to me until Jack Dorsey spontaneously urged me to read it as we chatted in the Aviary, a secluded spot at Twitter's expansive San Francisco headquarters. "I think you'd really like it," said the company's cofounder and CEO, smiling intriguingly. "It reminds me of Twitter."
Once you read Rushdie's fable about "a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity," as I rushed to do, it's obvious why Dorsey sees parallels between it and the service he helped launch in 2006. (Told of Dorsey's affinity for his novel, Rushdie, who tweets prolifically about everything from politics to baseball for an audience of 1.2 million followers, says he's "tickled" and is "happy to have been 16 years ahead of the game.") In the book, the sea of stories is being poisoned by a bad guy who prefers silence to speech, and an intrepid lad must try to restore its splendor.
Dorsey's task? He must rekindle the promise of Twitter's first several years, when the company aspired to be the first billion-user internet service. Dorsey was famously fired as CEO in 2008, returned as executive chairman in 2011, and succeeded Dick Costolo as CEO last year. (He also launched the financial services company Square and is still its CEO.) Now his role is widely, and uncharitably, seen as a rescue mission for an endangered institution.
The company's challenges are manifold. Since Twitter's 2013 IPO, its stock price has halved. While Snapchat and Instagram have exploded in reach, Twitter has been unable to fix its intimidating learning curve that discourages new users. In its most recent quarter, it reported 313 million monthly active users, an uptick of only 3 million from the previous quarter. (Facebook, despite having more than five times as many users, added 60 million in the same period.) "Twitter is in this position where they're going to continue to be compared to Facebook and they're going to be unable to catch up," says Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Marketing Land.
Revenue for the quarter and Twitter's estimate for the next one fell short of analysts' expectations. And the platform has been dogged by charges that it is a haven for hatemongers and other miscreants. That's led some well-known users to flee and commentators to publish think pieces with apocalyptic titles like "The End of Twitter."
Yet for all the eagerness to write Twitter's obituary, it remains a central piece of our cultural infrastructure. It's where Donald Trump drives the election news cycle, Shonda Rhimes takes TV viewers behind the scenes of her many series, and Bill Gates shares infographics about progress in tackling the planet's most important problems. Even seemingly mundane tweets are fodder for news stories ("Ellie Goulding Writes Mysterious Tweet After Getting Back in the Studio") in a way that happens far less often elsewhere, Facebook included.
Dorsey is pushing his company to turn that cultural relevance—a place where news is both conveyed and made on a moment-by-moment basis—into a growth engine. In late April, Twitter reclassified its iOS app on the App Store, moving it from social networking to the news category. This had the practical effect of vaulting the service out of Facebook's shadow into a No. 1–in-its-group spot. But the move also signifies how Twitter is working to redefine itself.
What Dorsey wants is to reset the game—or, more precisely, to stake out an entirely new one. Comparisons with Facebook have followed Twitter from its earliest days, rarely to its advantage. The results of this new framing could leave Twitter looking less like a social network that can never match Facebook's scale than like a new kind of media company.
Emphasizing news and commentary over networking, Twitter believes, dramatically broadens its appeal. In surveys, nonusers told the company that they "felt that in order to really use Twitter, they had to be tweeting every day," says chief marketing officer Leslie Berland, whom Dorsey recruited from American Express earlier this year. While devotees saw Twitter as an essential way to stay up on the news, those who weren't active thought it was primarily another way to share stuff with friends and family. "Many of them said to us, 'You know, I don't have anything to say,'" Berland explains. "They come in thinking we're a social network."
"This is not a pivot," says CMO Leslie Berland of Twitter's focus on live events. "This is who we've always been."
To fuel a shift in perception—among consumers, marketers, and investors—Dorsey, Berland, and COO Adam Bain are betting big on live video, exemplified by a high-profile investment in live-streaming NFL programming.
Dorsey likens choosing this focus—and de-emphasizing efforts that don't contribute to it—to his own habits at the gym, where he prefers to pick one exercise and stick to it. "It's been really emboldening, because now you can actually see it—it's here, and now it's here, and now it's here, and now it's here," using his hand to mark off recent accomplishments on the edge of the table we're sitting at. "And it's getting better and better every single day." Dressed in a white T-shirt and black jeans, the bearded 39-year-old is preternaturally calm and thoughtful. That's his normal demeanor, but it's particularly striking given that our discussion of Twitter's strategy is taking place less than an hour before he hosts an analyst call to discuss the company's disappointing results.
Inside Twitter, nobody is doing any victory dances just yet. Still, "I think a lot of us walk around knowing that we know a lot of the world doesn't know about what's coming," says VP of global brand and creative strategy Joel Lunenfeld, as we grab lunch in a cafeteria/community space known as the Commons, underneath a just-installed art piece made out of sweeping strands of colorful fibers that remind me, at least, of both Twitter and Rushdie's description of his sea of stories. "That gives us a lot of excitement."
"Happy endings are much rarer in stories, and also in life, than most people think," Rushdie cautions in his novel. "You could almost say they are the exceptions, not the rule." It's not surprising to reveal that the young protagonist in his story ultimately triumphs. Dorsey is writing Twitter's next chapter right now—a kaleidoscopic quest featuring looming adversaries, bedeviling trolls, and artificial intelligence. And it all kicks off with football.
On April 5, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell announced, via his first tweet in 19 months, that Twitter had won the rights to stream 10 Thursday Night Football games for the upcoming season. The news shocked the sports-media world. Speculation about likely partners centered around Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Verizon. If Twitter wanted to make a bold statement about its streaming-video aspirations, it couldn't have picked a better way to do it. "In traditional media, it's a widely held view that the NFL created Fox Sports," says John Ourand, media reporter for Sports Business Journal, citing how the then-fledgling Fox network used football rights to build a media empire. It's also, Ourand adds, "a widely held view that the NFL created ESPN, [which] charges cable companies a ton more than any other channel. The fact it has [Monday Night Football] is a big reason."
The NFL deal marks a new evolution in Twitter's impulse toward live events, which goes back to its earliest days. Back then, the service was, as one 2007 article snarked, "full of news flashes about which variety of latte a friend just ordered at Starbucks." But some members were already using it to follow and discuss current events, and even hear from newsmakers such as then–Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, one of the first Twitter celebs. That same year, MTV used Twitter to enhance its Movie Awards and Video Music Awards shows by enlisting stars to tweet during the events.
As smartphones improved, Twitter looked beyond 140-character chunks of text, acquiring Vine, a not-yet-launched, Instagram-esque way to capture and share videos in 2012. Even though Vine videos were (until recently) only six seconds long, they've been widely used to share compelling imagery of newsy events such as the 2013 suicide attack on the U.S. Embassy in Turkey.
Periscope, a video-streaming platform that Twitter purchased in early 2015 (also shortly before it launched) is even more news-friendly, enabling users to broadcast high-quality live videos of any length from a smartphone in real time. It's been increasingly integrated into the Twitter app, where live Periscope videos play inside tweets.
Twitter's move toward live streaming actually predates Dorsey's return. In late 2014, then-CEO Costolo asked Bain and CFO Anthony Noto to formulate a plan for investing in content. When the National Football League announced an auction for the right to stream a single 2015 game between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars, Twitter was reportedly among the bidders.
The auction was won by Yahoo, which paid $17 million and then delivered a resounding flop: Although Yahoo claimed 33.6 million views, analysts calculated that only 2.36 million actually watched, making it the least-seen game in NFL history.
To those inside Twitter, the NFL's one-game experiment confirmed the distinctive opportunity that they had. It was "the epiphany of 'we can really own this,'" says Twitter's Noto, who had been a star linebacker at West Point and the NFL's finance chief from 2008 to 2010. "People are already talking about these games on Twitter," he says. "They clearly are engaged in conversations with each other while they're watching the game. How do we create an experience that leverages the great content conversations happening on Twitter with the actual content that they're talking about?"
Dorsey says that Twitter can give partners such as the NFL something other tech companies can't. "We're doing the thing that people have been doing for close to 10 years, which is: They watch a screen, and they tweet about it," he says, motioning toward an imaginary HDTV and then cradling a phantom smartphone in his hands. "We're bringing that into the same screen, and, most important, we're making that mobile, so you can watch it anywhere."
"We really ended up with Twitter because we thought it gave us a great opportunity for incremental audience reach and mobile reach," says Brian Rolapp, executive VP of media for the NFL, which awarded these games to Twitter even though it wasn't the highest bidder. "We have data that says 7 of 10 of our fans have a second screen open [while watching games]. They're texting, they're playing fantasy, they're on Twitter." If superfans aren't at home to watch a broadcast, the league would much prefer that they watch and cheer in the Twitter app than do something other than think about football.
That's the Twitter deal's short-term benefit to the league. But Ourand points out that it's also thinking ahead to 2022, when its current big broadcast agreements are up for renewal. With more consumers cutting the cable cord and ESPN and Fox's subscriber bases contracting as a result, the league is "trying to give these digital companies a taste of the power of NFL programming," he says. "They're hoping they'll become addicted to it and come back."
Twitter won't confirm what it paid for its NFL rights, but it reportedly ended up plunking down between $10 million and $15 million to stream 10 Thursday night games during the 2016 season. That's less than what Yahoo paid for a single game and a pittance compared to the $45 million per game that CBS and NBC are paying to air the same slate of Thursday night games. Twitter isn't the exclusive outlet for the content, but the exclusive experience it's offering has found some quick traction. Long before its first live stream—Jets versus Bills on September 15—top-tier marketers including Anheuser-Busch, Ford, Nestlé, Sony Pictures, and Verizon had signed on as sponsors.
Twitter warmed up for the NFL season this past summer by streaming events such as Wimbledon and the Republican and Democratic conventions. In early August, I caught its coverage of the red-carpet premiere of Warner Brothers' Suicide Squad, hosted by a couple of bespectacled BuzzFeed reporters hyperventilating with anticipation over the comic-book supervillain team-up and its stars. Below the video window, a feed of tweets from everyday Twitter users alternately shared the BuzzFeed guys' excitement and mocked their exuberant nerdiness. Twitter used real estate in users' feeds to deliver an audience to the stream, and a tweet from Jared Leto (who plays the Joker in the film) helped the premiere become a top trending topic on the entire service. The whole thing was a goofy, good-natured dry run for more meaningful streams to come, and it showcases Twitter's unique power to turn an event into a conversation.
Twitter's streaming experience can be enjoyed without having to learn any of the platform's typical arcana. You don't need to figure out whom to follow, how to use hashtags, or what to tweet about. You can even partake if you're not logged in or don't have an account at all. In short, it's Twitter on training wheels—perfect for potential users who are intimidated by the classic Twitter timeline.
If everything goes according to plan, Twitter's live video streams could solve multiple problems for the company—by giving users, advertisers, and content partners reason to look at the service in a fresh way. "If you think about the 313 million people who use Twitter, there's at least another 313 million like-minded people who just happen to not use Twitter because they either tried it and didn't get it, or they tried it with the wrong intentions," says Lunenfeld, who spent years helping brands market themselves on Twitter before shifting his focus to helping Twitter market itself.
To reintroduce Twitter to nonusers—and those who have given the service a try in the past but lost interest—CMO Berland launched a new branding campaign in late July. One digital ad shows an amalgam of imagery: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton; Game of Thrones' Peter Dinklage; a Black Lives Matter march; Hamilton's Lin-Manuel Miranda; the Cleveland Cavaliers; and an obsessive Pokémon Go player trampling over the hoods of several cars. It ends with a new, newsy tagline—"It's What's Happening"—and a flurry of bright colors meant to better evoke the service's personality than its official shade of blue, Pantone 2382 C.
The ads do an uncommonly coherent job of explaining why the uninitiated would want to try Twitter, a feat that has often eluded the company in the past. "The goal of that campaign, and this is just a start, is to clearly define Twitter," says Dorsey. "You may have come in here assuming you're going to see baby pictures from your friends. What you're going to see is what's happening in sports and politics and the world around you."
Other sports leagues took note of Twitter's NFL deal and began envisioning their own contests streaming live on Twitter. Twitter suddenly had a roster of premium events to set itself apart from rivals, attract new users, and engage current ones. In a rapid-fire series of announcements in June and July, the company unveiled agreements to broadcast MLB and NHL games in their entirety, plus live highlights of English Premier League soccer and original programming produced by the NBA. It will also carry news programming from Bloomberg. For now, Noto says, the company is focusing on DVR-resistant live events rather than scripted programming such as sitcoms.
Twitter is hardly the only digital company targeting premium streaming video. Unlike Facebook and Snapchat, though, Twitter has a now decade-long track record working with traditional media companies, sports leagues, and brands. "We're bidding against people with deeper pockets, but we're still winning the deals," says Ross Hoffman, VP of global media partners. "There are many instances where we're the right partner."
"Twitter has a unique ability to bridge digital media and TV," says analyst Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research. The company "can legitimately compete for TV budgets. Not [digital] video budgets, but budgets that would go to premium television."
The NFL-on-Twitter ad experience will be familiar in many respects, with commercial breaks right where they'd be on a network broadcast. That appeals to marketers who now expect their digital advertising to be seen by prospective customers and are no longer smitten with the novelty of retweets. "The idea of putting something out there and praying it goes viral is really past us," says Greg Hahn, chief creative officer at advertising giant BBDO. "You have to be strategic. If [Twitter is] live-streaming Thursday Night Football, that guarantees you some eyeballs. If you can guarantee a specific audience at certain times, then that becomes the new prime time."
Video has been integral to how Twitter makes money since 2013, when the company introduced an ad product called Amplify that lets marketers sponsor brief video clips. (The NFL, to cite one example, has been a significant Amplify client.) Today, the majority of Twitter's revenue comes from video ads rather than text-oriented ones. "The response rate is higher for those video ads, and [users'] feeling for Twitter goes up as well," says COO Bain, who was a leading candidate to become Twitter's CEO before Dorsey made his comeback.
Unlike traditional network TV, Twitter can target users based on cues from their tweets. "If somebody is talking about being in the market for a car, we can help bring relevance there" by showing an automobile ad, says Bain. "If people are tweeting about going to the gym, there's a whole set of athletic brands that want to be relevant in that moment."
Twitter's live video initiative, as significant as it may be, won't displace the core experience of perusing tweets in a timeline anytime soon. And for many beginners, the service remains stubbornly impenetrable. Newcomers enticed by Twitter's ad campaign could well lose interest before they understand what Twitter is trying to do for them.
Dorsey himself can sound like a critic carping from the sidelines when he assesses the current state of Twitter. "Right now, you have to do a lot of work up front to build a great timeline," he says. "And then you have to do a lot of work to dig through it, to find the most meaningful stuff."
Which doesn't mean progress hasn't been made. The effort to create a compelling live experience has refocused the company's product-development efforts. As its streaming plans took shape, the service itself has become more intuitive and welcoming. In February, Twitter announced plans to finally start using algorithms to push the most relevant tweets to the top of users' reverse-chronological timelines. (Change-phobic Twitter devotees flooded the service with the hashtag #RIPTwitter, though in the first couple of months, only 2% of users chose to switch the function off once it was implemented.) For the Rio Olympics, the company upgraded Moments—the Twitter-powered news section that debuted last October—by letting users follow a particular country, sport, or event, and have relevant tweets automatically pushed into their timelines.
Another major undertaking involves deploying artificial intelligence to help make sense of the hundreds of millions of tweets that get posted each day, along with photos and videos. For most of its history, Twitter was not exactly a hotbed of AI talent, but in mid-2014, the company acquired Madbits, a startup that built technologies to help sift through giant repositories of images. Its staff became the foundation of Cortex, the team of AI specialists inside Twitter whose goal is to smarten up every aspect of Twitter's services.
Today, Cortex is being used to weave pieces of content together in brand-new ways. "In the case of a sporting event, there's some expert commentary that you're probably interested in, but you don't want it to be only that," says VP of engineering Jeremy Rishel. "If 100 people cheer, you want to know that, but you don't want to read a hundred [versions] of the same tweet."
One of the early beneficiaries of Cortex's work can be seen in Periscope. Engineers created a feature called Highlights that automatically stitches together mini-trailers for every video. "They were born from a very simple realization that [our] average broadcast is seven minutes," says Periscope cofounder and CEO Kayvon Beykpour. "If I have 20 broadcasts in my feed, am I really going to watch 140 minutes of video to catch up on what happened? Probably not."
In June, Twitter paid a reported $150 million to acquire Magic Pony Technology, an excellently named London-based startup, and folded it into Cortex. Its algorithms, which Twitter plans to adopt for both Periscope and major-event video streams, analyze imagery to improve how a video looks, filling in detail that might otherwise get lost. "While you're traveling home on the train, where you might have a spotty network, you can still see something with a look and feel that's HD-like," promises Dorsey.
Strategic use of AI could also play a role in helping Twitter address its most notorious, seemingly intractable problem: users who engage, often anonymously, in misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate speech. It's not that the company has done nothing to foil them; it's just that the trolls often seem to be a step ahead.
Recently, Dorsey says, "We've seen a trend—not just on Twitter, but on the internet more broadly, and in the world—of really targeted harassment and abuse." In July, when Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones was the subject of such a campaign and announced she'd be leaving Twitter, Dorsey personally stepped in and, in a tweet, asked Jones to contact him. The ringleader, conservative blogger Milo Yiannopoulos, ended up being permanently banned from the service, and Jones returned.
As an open network that doesn't enforce the use of real identities, Twitter can't eliminate harassment altogether. Truthfully, Dorsey seems more interested in helping users shield themselves from abuse than wiping all offensive content off the platform. "We want to make sure that people feel safe to express themselves freely, and for us that means that we're providing really crisp and clear tools so that people can report, and people can mute, and people can block," he says. "But at the same time, if people want to, they can see everything." In this spirit, the company recently introduced options that let users hide notifications for people they don't follow as well as "lower quality" tweets.
"Twitter has made some progress with regards to safety, but has a long way to go," says DeRay McKesson, the civil rights activist who has used Twitter to chronicle and organize protests seeking justice for unarmed African-Americans killed by police. McKesson, who befriended Dorsey when they both marched in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, has 536,000 followers but has manually blocked 19,000 other users. Ultimately, he says, Twitter's value outweighs the hassle. "There are some days that are easier than others," he allows, "and there are no easy answers."
One day in mid-August, a bizarre rumor takes off on Twitter: The service itself is going to shut down in 2017. The company is compelled to issue a denial, and worried fans tag 100,000 mournful tweets #SaveTwitter. It's hardly the first Twitter-borne death hoax. (Just ask Robert Redford, Paul McCartney, or Cher.) Still, the fact that it surfaced at all is evidence that many people perceive the company's condition as fragile.
Even in a worst-case scenario, the threats to Twitter's well-being are not remotely existential. The company has $3.6 billion in cash (and equivalents). It makes about $24 per U.S. user annually, and in its second quarter, it generated $175 million in earnings before interest, taxes, and depreciation, up 45% from a year earlier. That said, unless the company proves it can grow, its universe is destined to shrink. "I'm still bullish that there's a need for a product that, when you pop it open, tells you what's going on in your world," says Josh Elman, who was an executive at Twitter from 2009 to 2011, and is now a venture capitalist. That service, he believes, is "a billion-user product. Will Twitter the company get its exact product to do that? That's a good question. It's harder to reignite momentum than it is to keep fanning the flames."
Each time Twitter's stock price drops, the notion resurfaces that some tech or media giant might snap it up at a lowball price. Google and Facebook, both of which once coveted the company, have probably long since moved on, but perhaps an old-school player such as AT&T could make a run at it. Another theory has the company going private: In early August, speculation centered on a rumor that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who together reportedly control close to 10% of Twitter stock, might team up to buy it outright.
In late August, Twitter's stock got a bump when cofounder and board member Ev Williams said the company had to consider "the right options" about its future. And when the company held a board meeting on September 8, the items on the agenda reportedly included broaching the possibility of a sale, though no offers are on the table. But Twitter would still prefer to create a future for itself that inspires confidence on Wall Street, thereby driving its stock higher, warding off bargain hunters, and preserving its independence. That, ultimately, is what its new focus on news and live video is all about.
As Dorsey and I wrap up one of our conversations, I lob him a question about his long-range vision—the sort that most tech CEOs are only too happy to tackle. Maybe I shouldn't be shocked when he throws it back in my face.
"I think the present is so much more interesting," he says, politely but insistently. And for Twitter, it is. This company has so much at stake right now that the future isn't some far-off destination. It's what's happening.
Women are more likely to take command in collaborative work environments—including those that are predominantly male.
In spite of a significant imbalance between male and female leaders in business, new research from the University at Buffalo's School of Management suggests that in collaborative work environments where women are outnumbered, they often emerge as the natural group leader.
The findings fly in the face of the reality of the U.S. workforce, where many fail to recognize the extent of the female leadership gap. Women represent just 3% of new CEOs in the U.S., 5.1% of Fortune 1000 CEOs, and 4% of Standard and Poor's 500 CEOs. A recent survey by the Rockefeller Foundation also found that nine in 10 respondents thought there were more female business leaders than there really are, and further research by the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University found that those women are more likely to be targeted by shareholder activism.
"We tend to see the man as more leader-like than the woman," says lead author Jim Lemoine, in a video interview by UB School of Management. "What we were interested in in this research were exceptions to the rule."
In the study, researchers assigned nearly 1,000 participants to small groups and asked them to complete a series of tasks, later polling them on who emerged as the natural leader of their group. The study was replicated with participants of varying ages over both long and short-term periods.
When the groups communicated a lot, or were more "extroverted" in Lemoine's words, women were more likely to emerge as leaders. They were also more likely to emerge as leaders when the groups were predominantly male.
"When a group is composed of lots of extroverted people, they talk more," he says. "They're actually getting to understand each other's strengths and weaknesses and who may be the better leader beyond this diversity demographics stuff."
This getting-to-know-each-other phase is key to gender leadership balance, says Lemoine. "It makes the environment less masculine, more balanced, and gives everyone a chance to play on equal footing," he says.
Lemoine adds that when he advises companies, he often encourages them to ignore strategy talk at first and instead spend some time getting to know the other people in the room.
"When we think of men, we think independent, aggressive, competitive risk takers, which is for a lot of people a stereotypical view of a leader," he says. "When we think of women, we tend to think—true or not—more helpful, more cooperative, more caring."
Lemoine explains that in spite of centuries of gender imbalance, he finally sees the tide beginning to turn in favor of female leaders. That is because when people are asked what kind of leader they want to work for today, the typical answer has evolved to describe stereotypically female characteristics. As he puts it:
People tend to answer this more now, 'I would like to work for someone who is ethical,' 'I would like to work for someone who really cares about me, who understands me, who trains me, who puts me first, who's very authentic. As our ideas of what a leader is changes, so do our ideas change of who a leader can be, so really the future is looking bright for more gender equality for who becomes a leader.
In other words, one of the key strategies for breaking the gender leadership gap in the workplace could be simple conversation between team members, in a setting that gives every member of the team a level playing field.
We can't stop watching the super-cool oculus roof of Mercedes-Benz Stadium open and close.
Stadiums with retractable roofs are commonplace, but there's never been anything like the new home of the Atlanta Falcons, which is set to open for the 2017 season. Instead of a flat panel that slides back, Mercedes-Benz Stadium has an innovative oculus design that recalls a camera lens. It's one of many forward-looking elements of the $1.5 billion, 71,000-seat stadium. The project's lead architect, Bill Johnson, explains.
The oculus's eight segments each retract in a straight line, but an optical illusion makes it look like everything is rotating—a spectacular effect on such a large scale. "One goal was for people to come from all over the world not just for a football game, but to see the structure," Johnson says. And while most retractable roofs take more than 15 minutes to open, the oculus's clever mechanism and light materials let it accomplish that task in as little as six.
Just under the oculus will sit a unique, 360-degree "halo" HD screen that, at five stories tall and 1,100 feet long, will be more than triple the size of any other NFL video setup. IBM, the project's technology partner, will wire the facility with 4,000 miles of fiber-optic cable, build advanced security systems, and help create future interactive experiences. "The idea," says Johnson, "is to provide a game-day spectacle that can't be experienced at home or in a bar."
One of the most striking features is the 163- foot-high entrance, which is far more inviting and dramatic than a typical stadium design. Massive glass triangles let in natural light and connect the stadium to Atlanta's skyline.
To increase home-field advantage, end-zone seating is steeper than usual, creating "a wall of fans that forces the opposing team to play into an intimidating environment," Johnson says.
The Falcons' new home will likely be the first-ever LEED Platinum–certified stadium. Solar PV panels in the parking area will power electric vehicle charging stations, and the property is connected to the Atlanta Bike Trail Network. On-site vendors will prepare some dishes with vegetables grown in the stadium's urban garden, which will exclusively use rainwater harvested on-site.
New study suggests tech founders are aware of the benefits that come with a more diverse workforce, but many still fail to foster diversity.
The tech industry has historically struggled with diversity and inclusion, and while many founders acknowledge its importance, few have taken proactive steps to reduce bias and improve diversity in the workplace.
According to their own diversity reports, 70% of Google's staff are male, as well as 84% of Facebook's tech team, while Twitter's leadership is 72% white and 28% Asian.
In a new study conducted by Lawless Research on behalf of Techstars and Chase for Business, 72% of tech founders believe building a diverse workforce is very important, and 81% acknowledge that a diverse workforce enhances creativity and innovation. The same study, however, found that only 12% employ five or more employees from diverse or underrepresented backgrounds. The study also notes that while 92% of founders are at least familiar with the term "unconscious bias," only 45% have taken steps to combat it.
The study gathered responses from 680 tech founders and executives from companies established within the past seven years. While some major companies like Intel, Google, and Pinterest are taking proactive steps to improve the diversity of their workforce, the study concludes that early stage companies, particularly those founded in the past two years, are most likely to have no women or minorities in tech positions.
Those who champion diverse workforce initiatives, however, have a proven advantage. A 2015 study by McKinsey and Company found that companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to outperform their competitors, while those in the top quartile for ethnic diversity were 35% more likely to see financial performances above the national industry median.
Other studies have found that companies run by women achieve 35% higher returns on investment, and a recent report by Intel found that a diverse workforce increases 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," Danielle Brown, Intel's chief diversity and inclusion officer, told Fast Company.
In spite of the mountain of evidence to the contrary, however, only 23% of respondents of this survey believe diversity improves financial performance.
While hiring practices are a significant area of improvement for many founders, it is only one part of the equation, the study explains. Training and development programs, employee benefits, and management practices must be considered in order to retain a more diverse workforce.
In fact, the study's authors specifically recommend a seven-point plan for improving diversity and inclusiveness, especially for early-stage companies. Those steps are:
Companies with higher numbers of diverse technical employees are more likely to standardize their interview process, ensuring that all candidates are asked identical questions.
Advertising and recruiting in nontraditional venues helps startups find qualified technical professionals who are women and minorities.
Startups classified as diversity leaders are more likely to provide their employees with technical professional development, leadership training, and mentoring programs.
Offering parental leave and leave of absence can help startups increase tech diversity.
Startups can increase the diversity of their technical staff by examining bias in their management practices, such as auditing jobs for pay equity.
Ensure that measurable steps for promotion are clearly articulated.
Examine task assignment processes as well as performance evaluation tools and criteria for bias.
These are similar strategies to the ones laid out by researchers from Harvard and Tel Aviv universities who have studied why traditional diversity and inclusion initiatives like training often fail. "Companies are basically doubling down on the same approaches they've used since the 1960s—which often make things worse, not better," they wrote. They additionally advise businesses to encourage contact between groups, social accountability, and appoint diversity managers.
Startups have an advantage established companies don't. They can build diversity into their organizations from the beginning. Of course inclusion can be a challenge, even to those most committed to seeing it through, but it's proven itself worth the extra effort. At the startup recruiting platform Jopwell, the first four employees were former schoolmates or work associates. As cofounder Porter Braswell told Fast Company in a previous interview: "I think it is okay to hire people you trust and know, but you can't build a product that is going to change the way people interact and change the world without diversity in your organization."
How Kayvon Beykpour's live-streaming app Periscope fits into Twitter while also being its own thing.
If you're not paying careful attention, you might think that Periscope is a live-broadcasting capability within Twitter, akin to Facebook's Live Video, an offering that is said to occupy an outsize percentage of Mark Zuckerberg's attention these days. Periscope videos, after all, appear seamlessly inside tweets. And each time you compose a tweet, there's a "Live" button tempting you to broadcast rather than type.
But Periscope is no mere feature. Like Facebook's Instagram, it's also an app unto itself, with its own community.
That duality also exists behind the scenes, where Periscope is run by cofounder and CEO Kayvon Beykpour, who has a 54-person team and the freedom to shape the service's destiny while piggybacking on Twitter resources such as the Cortex artificial-intelligence group. He's also a member of Twitter's executive team, giving him influence over the company's overall direction.
By investing both in high-end, must-see programming such as NFL games and Periscope's democratized approach to streaming, Twitter is covering the whole spectrum of live events. "They're really part of the same mission," Beykpour explains. "You can experience something live with other people and have a conversation around it in a way that makes the content more compelling."
On Periscope as on Twitter, those conversations can be ruined by abusive users. "If you're broadcasting and someone says something negative, it's almost too late, because you've experienced it already," says Beykpour. Periscope recently fought back against the trolls with a new feature that creates mini-juries of users and lets them vote, on the fly, on whether a comment is offensive. The tactic has helped—and its deeply Periscopey feel makes it unexpectedly engaging.
So far, Periscope seems to be flourishing. In the first year after its March 2015 debut, Periscope racked up 200 million total broadcasts and reached an average of 110 years' worth of video watched per day. Like tweets before them, Periscopes are becoming part of the culture—even showing up on television newscasts, where anchors have been known to be flummoxed by the hearts that bobble up as viewers like a video.
Periscope's personable nature, even when combating miscreants, helps explain why it has caught on in a way that earlier live-streaming apps did not. "It's scary to be live," says Beykpour. "It's our responsibility to make it feel as frictionless and as not-scary as possible."
Eight strategies for being more approachable and fine-tuning your communication skills.
When it comes to being a great leader, you've likely heard the basic tenets: listen, communicate, motivate. But there's a precursor to all of those elements that many people overlook—putting people at ease so they can interact with you effectively.
While some people are comfortable around others in more powerful positions, many are not, Wilson says. That "power distance" can have a negative impact on everything from communication to morale, making the ability to put people at ease very important. In other cases, people are just generally shy or intimidated.
Whatever the reason employees and colleagues find as barriers to approachability, overall it's an obstacle to creating a better, more productive environment, he says. To lower or eliminate those barriers, try one (or all) of these eight strategies.
When you sense that someone is trying to approach you, direct your attention to them to let them know you're interested, says Jim Bolton, who heads communications and organizational performance consultancy Ridge Training. Close your laptop screen or put down your phone to signal that the individual is more important than other distractions, he says. Body language, such as turning toward the person, can also signal that their presence and words matter to you.
For example, if you're a fast-paced extrovert and expect someone who works more slowly or is more introverted to keep up with you, you may make them uncomfortable. If you're very detail-oriented and you're working with someone who needs "just the facts," you might want to pare down your response to a few data points. As you get to know your team better, you can adapt your style to maintain the best relationship and interaction.
If you sense that the person is nervous or hesitant, use empathy to defuse the tension. Saying something like, "It's always tough to come to the boss with a problem, isn't it?" can let the employee know that you understand their feelings and that you've been in similar situations.
Alternatively, humor can also lighten the mood. If an employee is hesitant to enter your office, you might joke about how it's safe to cross the threshold, for example. Either way, you're calling out the obvious tension in a non-threatening way and signaling that you're open to the conversation, Bolton says.
It's a simple technique, but integrating someone's name into a conversation lets them know that you're aware of who they are, Fine says. If you're bad with names, work on some simple techniques to get better, use a cheat sheet to review before you go into a meeting. If that's not possible or if you've simply forgotten, excuse yourself and ask for the name again.
"Say to them, 'There are so many people at this event, and I'm terrible with names. Would you remind me of yours, please?'" she suggests. Then use their name in the conversation. If you don't, they'll know it, and you'll burn a bridge, she says.
"How's it going?" has become a casual way of saying "hello." But for leaders, it's the most important coaching question you can ask, Bolton says. If you ask it and don't really listen for clues in the answer, you're missing out on an important opportunity to put those around you at ease.
"Sometimes, we ask that question and we don't really listen to the answer," Bolton says. If you hear something in someone's voice that indicates there's something wrong, ask a follow-up question to let people know you care, he says. Sometimes, you'll give people the opportunity to share something that has been on their mind or get an important piece of feedback, Bolton says.
Asking good questions can help strengthen relationships. Instead of the same old conversational questions, try a "digging-deeper" question, Fine says. For example, asking how someone's summer went is broad and leads to superficial answers. Instead, try or follow up with a digging-deeper question that lets the other person know you are truly interested. Those may include asking what the employee did with their family over the summer or if they did anything interesting over the summer. Being slightly more specific opens the door and gives a framework within which the employee can respond comfortably, she says.
However, there's a caveat here: Don't ask a digging-deeper question if you don't have time for the answer, Fine warns. The only thing worse than being superficial is to ask a question then have to move on before you've heard the answer.
Fine also suggests disclosing something about yourself that can create a point of connection. Don't make it too personal, but disclosing that you, too, have a child who plays soccer, or that you have an interest in a particular book can give the other person a conversational lifeline—something about which to ask questions or continue the discussion.
"You disclosed something that you're willing to talk about and you're giving someone some detail to talk about with you," she says. It also displays a measure of trust in that you care about the person enough to share something personal.
It's easy to cross the line from casual conversation and interest to sounding like a reporter, peppering the individual with questions. That's counterproductive, Fine says. Don't jump around from topic to topic or fire off too many questions in a row. If you leave your employee or colleague feeling like they're in a deposition, you've done the opposite of what you've intended.
Making people feel at ease boils down to a combination of intention, curiosity, and empathy. Take a healthy interest in creating connections with your team on an everyday basis, Bolton says, and they'll feel more comfortable coming to you when the stakes are higher.
Related Video: The Case For Mindfulness And Meditation At Work.
There's another reason why this launch is classic Goop: the business model.
Yesterday, Gwyneth Paltrow debuted the first item in her new Goop-label clothing line, and as happens whenever Goop releases something high-profile, her efforts were greeted with excitement by some, mockery by others.
Gwyneth Paltrow
The first outfit in the collection is pretty standard Gwyneth, a conservative classic with a twist: a chambray button-down shirt and a white tote, and a gray tweed suit with a tie-belt and culotte-cut pants. The outfit costs about $1,500.00 altogether, so of course some critics howled at that, though it's not exactly unusual for Goop (or similar companies) to sell outfits at that price point on its site (they've been collaborating on clothes with designers for years; this is the first Goop private-label release).
The items in her new clothing line will all be inspired by items in her own closet, which immediately made me wonder how Goop will avoid design plagiarism claims (I also wondered this when Kate Moss helped create a collection for Topshop inspired by her own closet).
But the Goop-iest part of all this is actually the way the brand is rolling out the items—just a few at a time. She isn't releasing a whole collection. When GP launched her site back in 2008, she didn't do what every one else was doing and start a blog: She started a weekly newsletter, instead. The website was basically a newsletter archive. Newsletter-first editorial projects are super common these days, but back when GP did it, it was pretty new. I remember thinking it was perhaps a little old-school and unsavvy at the time—newsletters were definitely in a downswing then. I was wrong.
Each week, she only posted a little bit of content. A few years later, once she had built up a big email list, she ventured into product, selling only one design collaboration at a time. The first physical product she sold was not, philosophically, much different than the first Goop private-label pieces that came out yesterday—that first item she sold in 2012 was a basic white T-shirt embellished with some piping on the sleeves. The price? $90. And its small run sold out. Goop continued to come out with just a few or even one product collaboration at a time for the next eight years. It also came out with a small skincare line earlier this year.
Coming out with her new private-label collection this slowly and carefully, in small batches, every few weeks (a few new pieces will be released on a monthly basis), presumably in part to test the waters (though they probably have a lot of data about what sells and what doesn't by now), is very Goop. What will October bring? Hunter Boots in GP's favorite shade of "Goop Gray"? A white cable-knit sweater with a daring bespoke button on it? A straight-jacket made modern with herringbone wool? Anything is possible. You never quite know when GP is being serious or when she's expertly playing us like violins.
Related Video: How Gwyneth Paltrow Created A "Real Brand" With Goop
Models take the stage during Kanye West's Yeezy Season 3 show at Madison Square Garden last February.[Photo: JP Yim/Getty Images]
For most of the past decade, the Grammy-winning rapper struggled to prove himself as a clothing designer, promising a debut line, Pastelle, that never materialized, and getting critically eviscerated for one that did: 2011's womenswear collection DW Kanye West. It wasn't until his 2013 deal with Adidas (worth a reported $10 million) that the man who often compares himself to God finally elbowed his way into fashion's promised land, via his Yeezy label. The collaboration has yielded the hugely successful Yeezy Boost sneakers and boots, which launched in 2015 and have consistently sold out within minutes (and often turn up on eBay for thousands of dollars). Despite receiving frosty reviews, the first two Yeezy ready-to-wear clothing lines have boasted high sell-through rates at Barneys and other premium retailers. But West's real ingenuity is being able to rattle the system from within. Last February, he unveiled Yeezy Season 3 with a presentation at Madison Square Garden that doubled as a preview of his latest album, The Life of Pablo. It was live-streamed into 700 movie theaters globally and later viewed by 20 million people on Jay Z's Tidal platform. There were jumbotrons and merchandise booths, and for the first time in New York Fashion Week history, the general public could purchase tickets to a show. In its outsize Kanye-ness, its ambition and unabashed commercialism, the event upended the elitist nature of 70 years of runway shows. And still, the industry's gatekeepers attended, as if tacitly acknowledging that this may be where fashion is headed. Vogue editor Anna Wintour indicated her approval by sitting not with her colleagues but with West's wife, Kim Kardashian.
British model and TV host Alexa Chung has been a global trendsetter for a decade, her unique look—clean lines, layers, feminine riffs on menswear—setting off such recent crazes as Peter Pan collars and brogue shoes. Her style savvy has attracted 2.4 million Instagram followers, and last year she helped relaunch the networking and shopping app Villoid. So, when Chung announced in July that she was starting her own high-end ready-to-wear brand called Alexachung (backed by an anonymous British entity), the industry took note, and probably groaned with envy. After all, fashion companies worldwide assign entire divisions to cultivating the kind of passionate social media followings Chung has built organically—and can mobilize instantly. The $1,000 Alexa handbag that she inspired Mulberry to create in 2009, for example, was so in-demand that the company reported an earnings surge of 79%. The following year, her collaboration with the J.Crew spin-off Madewell sold out in just days; she returned for an encore. Two 2015 denim forays with AG Jeans were equally successful, as was a vintage-themed womenswear line for Marks & Spencer. If her fans respond to the debut of Alexachung next May with even half their traditional enthusiasm, it will cement Chung's status as a leading force in millennial-driven fashion.
Even for Tom Ford, the move was bold. In February, less than two weeks before he was scheduled to unveil his fall men's and women's collections at New York Fashion Week, he canceled. The designer and CEO of a privately held luxury empire with $1 billion in sales announced that he was breaking with the tradition of showing new lines five months before they go on sale. Instead, he would adopt a "see now/buy now" model and present those fall collections in September, as the garments hit stores. The news came just hours after Burberry declared similar plans and soon other influential labels, including Vetements followed, sending shock waves through the fashion world. With this customer-first approach, Ford capitalizes on today's social-media-driven reality, where influential consumers can Snapchat their hot new Tom Ford stilettos and directly boost sales. It's the latest move in a forward-thinking career: In the '90s he transformed a fusty, nearly bankrupt Gucci into a vital brand now valued at $12 billion, and last fall he debuted his new collection not with a runway show but a music video starring Lady Gaga. "I can do what I want," he said recently. Including test the boundaries of an entire industry.
Demna and Guram Gvasalia, Head designer, CEO, Vetements
A hoodie featured in Vetements' Paris show last spring bears a quote from a 1994 episode of Beverly Hills, 90210.[Photo: Kevin Tachman/Trunk Archive]
In January, the Paris-based design collective Vetements, known for its cheeky, luxe streetwear, made viral tidal waves with a hot-selling $330 yellow T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the courier company DHL. Warholian stunt? Inspired antifashion commentary? Even critics weren't sure. What was certain was that Georgia-born head designer Demna Gvasalia and his CEO brother, Guram, had become trendsetters even within the trendsetting business. (Demna, a Louis Vuitton vet, is also the creative director at Balenciaga.) During couture week last June, Vetements, which simply means "clothing" in French, debuted its spring 2017 collection—an audacious collaboration with 18 different brands, from workwear staple Carhartt to Comme des Garçons—that exploded the very notion of a difference between high and low fashion. On the retail side, the brothers recently joined the incipient movement to make collections available for sale within days of a runway show, hoping not only to reach more customers more quickly, but to put a dent in fast-fashion knockoffs.
Doha-based fashion blogger Husnaa Malik, aka @eatsleepbefancy, in a photo from her popular Instagram feed.[Photo: Issa Al Sulaiti]
Women from the oil-rich Gulf states buy more haute couture than anyone in the world—a reality that the fashion industry is taking seriously to ensure its next phase of growth, particularly as questions arise about the possible softening of the luxury market in China. Last January, Dolce & Gabbana debuted a year-round line of hijabs and abayas, and Vogue Arabia is launching this fall. Amid this boom, Doha—the capital of the monarchical country of Qatar, which is the world's richest nation per capita—has emerged as the region's fashion epicenter. It is home to deep pocketed companies like Mayhoola for Investments, which bought Valentino in 2012 and Balmain last June, for a reported $548 million. Mayhoola is linked to the Qatari royal family, whose chic matriarch, Sheikha Moza bint Nasser al-Missned, chairs the Qatar Luxury Group, which is dedicated to fostering homegrown designers who might prove to be the next Christian Dior or Miuccia Prada. Meanwhile, local trendsetters are already making their mark: Buzzy Instagram feeds from Anum Bashir, Eileen, as well as Husnaa Malik have turned them into style stars around the world.
A dress from van Herpen's "Lucid" collection, shown in March, evokes a bubblelike exoskeleton.[Photo: Victor Boyko/Getty Images]
Since her student days, Dutch designer Iris van Herpen has embraced cutting-edge technology to invent bold new materials that blow past existing notions of "fabric." She pioneered the use of 3-D printing in fashion, and, in 2015, employed it to create a ready-to-wear collection made from materials including metal powder, rubber, and magnets. At her Paris show this past July, she debuted an ethereal dress made of thousands of hand blown glass balls. Drawing inspiration from art, philosophy, and science, van Herpen operates at the height of high concept (that 2015 line was influenced by the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland), which keeps the industry enthralled. Clients include Lady Gaga, Tilda Swinton, and kindred spirit Björk, for whom van Herpen fashioned a "snake dress" made from shiny acrylic tubes. As the fashion world tries to figure out the future, van Herpen is already there: She can't wait to get her hands on a material being developed by the U.S. military that uses mirrors to simulate invisibility.
Related Video: Rebecca Minkoff's Store Of The Future Will Blow Your Mind
How the same online voter targeting strategies used in U.S. elections are being deployed to build support for the refugee cause.
The rainbow-themed ads began popping up on Facebook in early 2016. "Homosexuality Is a Crime in 77 Countries," read one with a rainbow-colored globe. "All Over the World LGBTI People Are Facing Prosecution," said another with a rainbow border above two men kissing as an angry mob approached. Another showed a rainbow being blocked from setting over the Kremlin and talked about the "ideological wall" of Russian politics. Yet another had one large rainbow-colored fist, raised in defiance. All featured the hash tag #RainbowRefugees.
In total, eight different #RainbowRefugees messages went out to gay-rights supporters on Facebook who were living in zip codes with high voter turnout during the last presidential election. They were created by the Hive, a special projects group inside the U.S. branch of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, whose mission is to provide refugee advocacy, aid, and assist with asylum.
That's where #RainbowRefugees comes in. More than 65 million refugees have fled their homelands in fear of violence or persecution, in part because of sexual orientation. Share that with politically active gay people, Hive reasoned, and they might become passionate about the cause. As people clicked, the group honed on which message did best. ("More Than 10 Lesbians Are Attacked in 'Corrective Rapes' Every Week in South Africa," read the top tagline.) As they pledged their support, donated, or added a rainbow-colored fist alongside their profile pictures, they traded contact information so the group could keep in touch.
Hive wasn't after money exactly—not up-front anyway. In the view of cofounder Brian Reich, the "disaster porn" or "hope-and-horror storytelling bullshit" that many charities use to raise funds has led to an impulsive, emotionally driven style of giving.
Numerous studies show that people don't give rationally—they can be cued by sympathy, which overrides considerations about what investments will be most effective. In Reich's view, most of these "cry-and-buy" style pitches are trying to one-up each other. Donors aren't necessarily loyal to one cause, and solicitors aren't thinking beyond how to elicit the next tear-jerk reaction.
In a way, UNHCR can't play that game because they are already too far behind. Its approximately $5 billion annual budget is mostly funded by voluntary governmental donations, which as regional conflicts and natural disasters have ramped up, has contributed to an unprecedented shortfall. By the third quarter of 2015, just 42% the group's appeals were paid for, meaning they had to cut food rations and health care operations in some places. "Never before has UNHCR had to manage its programmed operations with such a high funding gap between approved budgetary requirements and funds received," notes a recent report. Encouraging private donors like foundations, corporations, and people to give more could help—that group generally provides just 6% of what UNHCR annually receives—but obviously won't totally solve the issue.
So Hive is trying a new tactic altogether. Since launching in late 2014, the group has been running targeted campaigns on Facebook and Instagram toward people who maybe never thought of themselves as refugee sympathizers before. It's not just a creative fundraising push, although building a bigger donor list would be a happy by-product. Their goal is to engage a half million new people within two years to generate the kind of mainstream conversations and advocacy that can influence governments, policy makers, and entrepreneurs to try bolder interventions. Reich says, only half jokingly: "This is like, could we create that thing on Star Trek where you could beam people out of refugee zones so they didn't have to go though the trauma of crossing 10 borders?"
To do that, Hive enlisted Civis Analytics, a data science company, and Timshel, an online platform builder, to create their own sentiment-changing skunkworks. They want to predict what kind of people might be open to joining their cause, how best to appeal to them, and design campaigns that can be A/B tested in real time to better make that happen
#RainbowRefugees is one of more than 20 tests the group has done to woo two camps of would-be allies. The first are dubbed "lookalikes"—those who resemble current supporters. The second are "persuadables" like the LGBTQ population—people don't realize it yet, but might just have good reason to join the fray. But how do you convince people who've never really thought about a cause to join it?
Civis and Timshel both emerged from ideas that were prototyped, tested, and refined as tools for President Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns. On a basic level, Civis combines regional surveys with consumer information and voter registration data to figure out how a message might resonate so it can be tweaked or rebroadcasted to the right set of people. Timshel's software lets groups easily build out ways to share those lessons, promote what's working, and track on a granular level how users are interacting.
Hive cofounder Ari Wallach, who runs a consultancy called Synthesis Corp (and has ties toFast Company), worked in varying capacities during both of Obama's presidential runs. He'd since tapped Civis and Timshel for other ventures, so he asked them to collaborate with UNHCR. Some nonprofits may be using similar tools but most are still focused on how to drive immediate donations. UNHCR is trying to secure cause-loyalty first, then see what the financial and collaborative ripple effect might be.
That makes actual payoff difficult to count. For elections, it's been pretty simple. You're only trying to predict and spur two things: donations and voter turnout. Success is measurable because your candidate either wins or loses. But cause marketing has more variables and a less fixed outcome.
For example, Civis's early sampling found that while nearly two thirds of Americans agree with UNHCR's mission, three quarters hadn't heard of the group at all. By combining regional surveys with indexes of national consumer behavior and voter registration data, they learned that lookalikes and persuadables are pretty different. In general, lookalikes are older urbanites, mostly white and female. Persuadables would be mainly adults age 40 and under, and tend to live in cities with strong Hispanic populations. (The Hispanic population in general seems supportive of refugees.)
Some UNHCR messaging was also being received differently than expected. For example, telegraphing that refugees undergo stringent security checks before entering the country generally decreased people's affinity for the cause. Among Democrats, messages that rang with too much patriotic exceptionalism also decreased their interest. Messages about how refugees are more likely than nonrefugees to graduate college and secure jobs also caused Democratic favor to decline.
On the flip side, messages about how nearly half of all refugees are children encouraged Republican support. Citations about successful refugees like Albert Einstein also resonated positively.
Because UNHCR itself lacks brand awareness, they're pushing the cause over the Commission's recognition. "Our job is to elevate 'brand refugee,' if you will, to close the empathy gap," Wallach says. They've realized they can't please every faction at once, so they use Timshel's software to design niche campaigns targeted toward different audiences.
That's led to unbranded "Jesus Was a Refugee" stickers to coincide with the Pope's visit, which played well with the Catholic faith contingent. Before COP21, the international conference on climate change, the group rolled out more messages about how "climate-driven conflict" displaces people from their homes to attract more climate activists and eco-friendly consumers. "In many ways, we're meeting people where they are," Wallach says. "Instead of saying, 'There is a global refugee crisis,' we're saying, 'This is the way it impacts you and what you care about."
In July, the group wrapped up two large pilot studies comparing what types of pitches might work best on a bigger scale. How valuable each engagement ends up being, though, depends on how long people stay passionate and what actions they ultimately take. On the back end, Timshel catalogues those actions, showing Hive who is taking pledges, sharing socially, turning up at events, or donating (perhaps repeatedly) so the group can hopefully add in more nudges to increase commitment.
The Hive is on pace to hit their 500,000-recruit target by January 2017. To be counted, each person must not only click an ad and leave contact info, but take virtual action—sign a petition, take a survey, re-share content on their own feeds. The direct impact of such clicktivism has proven hard to measure, but, in the short term, knowing your audience is at least a decent marketing tool; Hive recently published their own manifesto about why what they're learning should matter to major brands. That could boost awareness and proceeds toward the cause.
At South by Southwest this year they debuted a crowdsourced brainstorming game to imagine what that might look like. The concept is no longer theoretical anymore. USA for UNHCR, Hive's parent group, has been facilitating similar work for the White House through the Partnership for Refugees, a collaboration between the State Department and businesses to think up new ways to boost education, employment, and enablement among those displaced. So far, the organization has gained early commitments from 15 major companies, including Accenture, Airbnb, and Google. Hive may have provided part of the inspiration. "Our fingerprints are all over that kind of stuff," Reich says.
In anticipation of a public-acceptance tipping point, Hive has created its own blueprint of solutions, an in-house playbook called "The Big Book of Ideas," which suggests things like a survival migration phone or refugee camp-based fabrication labs to help displaced people immediately learn new skill sets. More future-looking ideas include a predictive intelligence engine that can spot the warning signs of mass exoduses. There's even a "smart flight" Refugee Prevention Plan that might allow data scientists and policy makers to identify, uproot, and carefully transplant entire cities years ahead of destabilizing changes, keeping people's families, communities, and jobs intact.
When the time comes, they hope their new ideological bloc encourages these kinds of radical ideas. Until then, they'll settle for donations.
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.
Hypocrisy or evolution? A company that zaps annoying digital ads now wants to make money by brokering the sale of less annoying ads.
The number one company that makes money from blocking online ads is now looking to make money by brokering ad sales. Whether that's hypocritical or evolved may depend on your feelings about internet advertising and your appetite for nuance. Germany's Adblock Plus (ABP), by far the most popular ad-zapping software maker, said today it is joining with ComboTag, an Israeli ad-tech startup, to broker the sale of certain advertisements that target Adblock Plus users.
What makes this a service rather than a betrayal, say the companies, is that they will sell only "acceptable" ads that don't bug people with things like pop-ups, animation, or covering over the web page content. In the process, publishers will have a chance to see some of that ad revenue they otherwise would not have seen, goes the sales pitch. "What it does is it opens up just strictly the ad-blocking market," to online advertisers, says Ben Williams, a spokesman for Adblock Plus.
More than 90% of Adblock's 100 million users already see commercial messages, says the company, but only those that meet its acceptable ad guidelines and have been placed on a whitelist that allows them through the software filter. (The default setting is to allow acceptable ads, but Adblock can be configured to block all ads.) Both advertisers and publishers pay to get ads reviewed and whitelisted. Adblock takes 30% of the extra revenue enabled by ads getting through the filter, only if more than 10 million new impressions get through per month. As a result, only the biggest websites pay the fees, says Adblock.
By forming an ad-brokering service with ComboTag, Adblock is streamlining the whitelisting process, says Williams. Launched in September 2015, ComboTag is a "supply side" service that lets web publishers sell space to advertisers. It had been more or less following the acceptable ad guidelines related to the style and position of ads. "We were without even being aware of it," says ComboTag founder and CEO Guy Tytunovich. "We established guidelines for a proper advertising mix that would not annoy users."
Tytunovich says he was a fan of Adblock Plus software, but didn't know about its acceptable ad guidelines until early 2016, when he sent an email to its founder and CEO, Till Faida. "When we started talking to them, it was like, I don't want to say preaching to the choir," says Adblock's Williams. "It was more like two different preachers preaching to each other about the same thing."
With the deal, Adblock won't have to work out parameters for acceptable ads, such as placements, through consultations with individual sites: ComboTag's software enforces all those rules automatically on sites that sign up. And ComboTag doesn't have to worry about ads getting blocked by Adblock. It will broker sales of ads that ABP has already whitelisted. Working through ad-placement services like AdNexus and Google's DoubleClick, Adblock will get just over a 6% commission on all the ads sold. "We can now work within the known architecture of advertising," says Williams, "rather than in this very, very ... time-consuming old way of whitelisting."
Tytunovich says he's briefed clients on the upcoming deal and gotten a positive response. "So we're talking to tier 1 [ad] agency trading desks and ... we're talking to digital publishers," he says. "And I haven't heard a negative response yet. Everybody seems to get it." The biggest client he names is Trinity Mirror, publisher of 260 titles in the U.K., mostly regional papers but also national titles including the Daily Mirror/The Sunday Mirror and the Daily Record/Sunday Mail. (The publisher is also known for eavesdropping on celebrities' phones and paying out large legal settlements.) Tytunovich also claims to have 500 publisher clients in the U.S., which he is not authorized to name.
Tytunovich says that the company is brokering about 5 billion ad "impressions" (a single display of an ad) per month and expects to earn $40 million for the year, calling the company significantly profitable. "We've got the track record that shows that this is possible, that publishers can indeed make more money with less disruptive ads," he says.
This is Adblock's second new revenue-generating strategy of the year. In May, it announced a deal with Flattr, a kind of digital tipping service for websites cofounded by Peter Sunde, who also cofounded the Pirate Bay (and served a brief prison term for aiding piracy). The upcoming Flattr Plus service, expected to launch in beta before the end of the year, will integrate with Adblock's browser plugin. Ad-hating users can elect an amount of money to put into their digital wallets, and Flattr Plus will automatically divvy up the money based on how much the person uses various websites or apps. Adblock and Flatter would split a commission of around 10%.
Looked at cynically, Adblock Plus is running a shakedown or protection racket: disrupting business deals between advertisers and web publishers and charging a toll. "When people call it a shakedown, I think they mischaracterize it," says Williams. "I would even go so far as to say this mischaracterization has been hatched inside some PR labs, perhaps of member organizations that will remain nameless." He may be taking about the company's archnemesis, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, whose president, Randall Rothenberg, famously called ABP "an unethical, immoral, mendacious coven of techie wannabes" back in January.
There's also been an issue of trust. ABP and its parent company, Eyeo, have taken heat for some of the whitelisting deals, such as with Taboola. The company places those "Around The Web" paid-content links to ads that masquerade as articles, like "25 Stars Who Are Literally Unrecognizable Without Makeup." Engadget security and privacy columnist Violet Blue labeled this an example of "pay-for-play" in a February piece called "RIP: Adblock Plus."
Williams says that this deal covered just some Taboola ads: Each had to be approved individually. The deal still took a lot of heat in ABP's user forums, and steps were taken to more clearly label them as advertorial, the company said in response to users. "This is actually a great example of how the Acceptable Ads initiative is an evolving, two-way process between advertisers and users," writes Williams in a follow-up email to me. "We're not going to get it right every time, of course, but the policy evolves with time and with user feedback."
Last year, ABP announced plans to avoid conflict-of-interest concerns by moving the decision-making about whitelisting outside the company to an independent Acceptable Ads Board. Williams says that the organization's bylaws are "99.9%" complete, that members are being recruited, and that the committee will first convene in early 2017. "I think that will quash a lot of that criticism, because we are creating in essence a firewall between our monetization ... and what is considered acceptable and not," says Williams.
When it launched in 2007, YouTube's copyright control system was far from perfect. But Content ID has grown smarter and more lucrative.
When Google bought the world's biggest user-generated video site in 2006, the company knew it could also be be acquiring the world's biggest legal headache. So a year after YouTube became a Google subsidiary, it launched a copyright management tool that only a company with Google's scale and knack for innovative problem solving could muster: Content ID.
Content ID gave rights holders an automated way of finding unauthorized copies of videos and songs uploaded to the site. They could then decide whether to block the content or run ads against it and start to rake in money. Predictably, the system was far from perfect: Leaving machines to make decisions about something as nuanced as copyright can easily lead to misfires and frustration for video uploaders and rights holders alike. Meanwhile, the most dedicated infringers can always find creative ways to sneak past the robotic copyright cops on the beat, primarily by distorting audio and video to avoid detection.
Nearly a decade in, Content ID has come a long way. The system—which the company says has generated $2 billion in revenue for rights holders—has grown smarter at matching video and audio and more nuanced in its approach to dealing with copyright disputes. While there's always plenty of room for improvement—and the system's successes don't address the bigger, looming questions about YouTube's paltry payouts to labels and artists or its broader role in the music industry—Content ID is a rare example of how a technology giant can take a proactive stab at a complex problem and learn from its mistakes along the way.
One of the most notable things about Content ID, flaws and criticisms aside, is that YouTube had no legal obligation to build it. Since the mid-1990s, websites that allow users to upload content have been shielded from legal liability by the so-called "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), as long as these sites provide a way for alleged infringement to be reported and infringing content to be taken down. While endlessly controversial (and the subject of debate as Congress reconsiders how to approach copyright in the 21st century), the DMCA is what we've got, and it's the reason that sites like YouTube and SoundCloud have been able to exist at all.
For YouTube, which was massively popular in 2006 and has only exploded since, leaving everything up to the DMCA and the "notice and take down" system it prescribes would not only be a logistical, unscalable nightmare, but also one that's bound to open up the company to legal troubles like Viacom's failed $1 billion lawsuit against the site in 2007.
Enter Content ID. The system, which now handles 98% of copyright management on YouTube, scans new video uploads and compares them against a huge library of 50 million reference files provided by copyright holders like film studios and record labels. That library, which now contains the viewing-time equivalent of 600 years' worth of material provided by rights holders, contains things like Michael Jackson's discography and blockbuster films in their entirety. This reference content comes mostly from thousands of hand-selected partners, an arrangement that naturally leaves some blind spots when it comes to independent musicians and other rights holders.
Content ID uses audio and video fingerprinting technology to detect matches between videos people upload and the reference files waiting in the system's copyright library. In the case of video, for instance, the clip is sliced into thousands of frames, and each one is automatically checked against the fingerprinted files in the reference library. Using similar, less sophisticated fingerprinting technology, the system can also recognize raw audio, much like Shazam is able to identify hot new jams in a crowded bar. More recently, YouTube updated Content ID with the ability to detect actual melodies, which helps songwriters track down unauthorized covers (to the inevitable chagrin of those who take the time to learn Prince classics on the ukulele).
If it finds a match (or thinks it found a match), the system will flag the video and let the purported rights holder decide what to do. They can block the video, ask to have the offending audio or video footage removed (in cases where only a portion of the video contains copyrighted material), or let the video stay up and decide to run ads against it, effectively monetizing what otherwise would have been considered pure piracy by funneling ad revenue to the rights holder (rather than the uploader, who would normally have the option to grab that ad revenue).
As you might imagine, this part is where much of the controversy around Content ID stems from. "There are going to be mistakes," says Harris Cohen, senior product manager of Content ID at YouTube. "There's inaccurate data sometimes. The first line of defense against that type of stuff is always the dispute process."
Some cases are more clear cut than others. If I upload Jurassic Park to my personal YouTube account, perhaps distorting the video somewhat to evade Content ID, that's an obvious violation. But in other cases—where a video clip is used in a context that legally counts as "fair use" under copyright law, or if I write a parody version of a popular song and record my own version—an algorithm is bound to screw up from time to time, incorrectly flagging a video as a copyright violation. If that happens, the process that Cohen describes would let one file a dispute and suspend the copyright claim for up to 30 days, during which the person claiming ownership can respond. (If they don't, the claim expires and my video stays put.) If they do respond, they need to clarify their case for upholding the video claim (or taking down the video), which I can then appeal. Fun times.
It used to be that a Content ID claim would automatically divert ad revenue away from the uploader, which invited accusations of YouTube giving preferential treatment to copyright claimants. This apparent bias triggered controversy among the gaming community in particular, whose video game walkthroughs and related material were frequently affected by YouTube's automated copyright crackdown.
Earlier this year, YouTube updated the dispute process to be more forgiving to uploaders. Now, when a copyright claim is filed, YouTube holds the video's ad revenue in limbo until the dispute is resolved, at which point that money goes to whoever prevails.
A Content ID "heat map" that visualizes potential piracy: The line represents a series of exact matches in the frames of a video, as compared to the reference content in YouTube's massive fingerprinting database.
To minimize frustrations for both uploaders and copyright holders, YouTube has also improved the way its content-matching technology works. This includes a general refinement of how precise the machines' artificial "vision" is. Two different soccer games, for example, can contain many scenes and images that are nearly identical, easily tripping up an algorithm. On the backend, YouTube has developed a system of abstract-looking "heat map" graphics to help visualize how similar two video frames are by analyzing things like the distance between objects in the frame. Whenever a reference file closely resembles an uploaded clip, this visualization draws out a line of bright colors in a pattern that signifies a match—that is, a possible infringement.
As the breadth of both YouTube's uploaded videos and its under-the-hood copyright reference library continue to grow, this process naturally rubs up against the constraints of computing power. To help keep Content ID both discerning and speedy, YouTube's engineers have plugged it into Google Brain's deep learning system. By using the neural network developed by the Brain team, Content ID can more quickly ingest new imagery into its fingerprinting system and find matches.
Google Brain also helps with one of Content ID's biggest weaknesses: Figuring out when people have modified videos and audio in order to upload infringing content. To evade Content ID, many uploaders have taken to visual tricks like horizontally flipping videos, changing their aspect ratio, warping the audio or adding a bright "halo" effect to the center of the clip. As pirates get more clever, Content ID's engineers must continually sharpen their claws for the inevitable cat-and-mouse chase that ensues. That means training the fingerprinting system to spot these types of distortions, and leaning on Google Brain's machine learning mechanisms to perpetuate and speed up that knowledge.
"In the past, we may have seen some patterns of abuse out there, and it would take quite a long time to revamp and relaunch the fingerprint technology in order to address that," says Harris. "We can be much faster now in terms of teaching the system to recognize new patterns and ignore extraneous images and that kind of thing."
Of course, these improvements don't mean that YouTube has succeeded in steamrolling distorted videos and eliminating this sneaky means of piracy. This episode of Vice's Party Legends—its frame shrunken down and embedded within a blurred, full-sized version of itself—has been live for one month. This slowed-down, visually altered version of Martin Scorsese's 2011 documentary about George Harrison, Living in the Material World, has been up for six months. It's possible that Content ID flagged these videos and that the copyright owners chose to keep them up, although that seems unlikely, given their unflatteringly lower quality.
Harris says YouTube remains focused on refining its matching technology, as well as the dispute and appeals processes. That's a good thing because YouTube's role in the music industry is a critical, often controversial one. As streaming music explodes toward mainstream dominance, the company finds itself in the unique position of streaming more music than services like Spotify and Apple Music, yet contributing a comparatively small slice of the growing revenue pie that labels see from streaming overall. Frustration over this so-called "value grab"—in addition to longstanding concerns about piracy on YouTube—comes at a pivotal moment: YouTube's major label licensing deals are up for renegotiation, pressure is growing for Congress to reexamine the DMCA, and competition in the music streaming space is heating up.
As the pieces of the new music economy puzzle continue to shift around, YouTube is eager to portray its own role as a positive one. And while an inherently controversial, copyright-focused tool like Content ID isn't likely to please everyone—especially the music industry—don't expect YouTube's engineers to stop trying anytime soon.
