Collaboration has defined the world of work for decades. This former IDEO designer says these days, it's showing its limits.

Something's afoot in the future of work, but it's hush-hush. People don't like talking about it.

"I know it is ugly to say 'unicorn,' but yeah, you kinda do have to be the unicorn," Chris Noessel, head of design for IBM's transportation group, tells me. Before joining the tech giant, Mr. Noessel spent a decade at the design and strategy firm Cooper.

His former boss, Alan Cooper, who invented (and later sold to Microsoft) the core design for Visual Basic, is even more cautious around the subject. "I think we in the design profession do ourselves and our colleagues a disservice by even recognizing the argument that 'unicorns' exist."

Noessell and Cooper aren't talking about tech unicorns—startups valued at over $1 billion—they're talking about people. I asked them both about the type of person whose professional expertise is both deep and wide in multiple subject areas, and whether such a worker's already high value has risen in recent years. Cooper seems to reject the notion of such a person outright; Noessel doesn't but is uncomfortable with the notion of a "unicorn" worker in his field—somebody with vast experience in business, technology, and design. Yet both men are clearly more than a little polymathic themselves.

I've written before for Fast Company about the role of these "comprehensivists" in the knowledge economy, and how some are leaving corporate jobs to take on high-paid freelance work. Plenty of companies are more than happy to pay one such "unicorn" worker a lucrative rate to do the work of what would otherwise be a two- or three-person team.

But they may be less willing to talk about it. After all, the notion of a well-rounded comprehensivist working solo flies in the face of a work ethos that's been resolute about the need for collaboration for a generation or more.

A Short, Stalled-Out History Of Specialization

Knowledge workers with competencies in multiple disciplines threaten the culture of collaboration that's ruled the working world for decades. As the Economist recently put it, "In modern business, collaboration is next to godliness." So comprehensivists' tendency toward whole-brain thinking, straddling art and science, introversion and extroversion, the tactical and the strategic may strike some as a puzzling departure. It conflicts with the notion of company life imagined by our Industrial Age forebears of the 1890s as well as the collaboration gurus of the 1990s.

Indeed, fin-de-siècle factories and modern-day workplaces aren't too dissimilar. Both were designed explicitly for teams of specialists. The polymath had no place. In the world of work, an interest in (and/or aptitude for) self-reliance has been out of vogue for quite some time. As author Susan Cain once put it in the New York Times, "Collaboration is in."

That was in 2012, and what was "in" then may not exactly be "out," but it's showing signs of wear. A growing body of academic research and the popular press have begun to point toward collaboration's costs and limits. In one study last year, high-performing individuals were shown to carry their teams—managers actually got higher returns by investing in their top employees than by trying to motivate and support everyone equally.

Meanwhile, collaboration doesn't seem to have solved our intractable productivity needs, risks of burnout, and communication breakdowns. Even the technologies designed to make collaborating easier and more seamless are coming under fire by some users who claim they do nothing but add to the noise.

Has the progress that collaboration promised finally stalled?

An Equal But Opposite Reaction

In many ways, comprehensivism is a direct reaction to the ever-increasing burden and diminishing returns of collaborating. Gradually, and perhaps even unintentionally, individual workers amass whatever skills they need to accomplish their goals independently, at a pace and style satisfactory to them, with no sales pitching, arguing, pleading, cajoling, or meeting in sight. In this sense, comprehensivism is a necessary workaround in an overly collaborative environment.

As Noessel tells it, having a rich and varied quiver to draw from is priceless. "I knew this one guy in grad school who got terrible advice from a Stanford professor who told him, 'Don't worry about learning graphics software. Don't worry about technology. There will always be minions who can do that for you.' So this guy was always dependent on others who could realize his vision," Noessel recalls. "He became a manager by default. He had to be in a terrible feedback loop all the time."

This is a problem for organizations that have invested heavily in the idea of collaborative work for decades—everything from continuing-education programs and communication cultures right down to the physical design of spaces. Real dollars are involved in getting people to work together—even when they'd be more productive flying solo. Chalk it up to the "sunk-cost" fallacy, but it seems now as if there's no going back. By now, it's become important to the world of work (read: balance sheets) that collaboration continues to "work." Otherwise, what good are all those training modules, messaging platforms, and collaboration cabins?

How And What Collaboration Kills

But when it comes to collaborating, what if our proclivity to overdo it were the least of our problems? According to research by MIT's Mark Klein and colleagues, collaboration may be a creativity killer.

They've found that a collaborative design process—where a bunch of specialists put their heads together to try to come up with innovation solutions—generally "reduced creativity due to the tendency to incrementally modify known successful designs rather than explore radically different and potentially superior ones."

That's funny. Because collaboration has been billing itself as the font of workplace creativity for decades. What if the opposite were true? Incidentally, groupthink is also characterized by a loss of individual creativity. It may be that collaboration and groupthink are two sides of the same coin—kissing cousins at least—and we've collectively chosen (thank you, groupthink) to see only one side of that coin for years.

Comprehensivism Two Ways

While comprehensivists are likely a reaction to the creeping curse of collaboration, it doesn't mean they yearn for total solitude and self-reliance; certainly, asking everybody to be good at everything and do it by themselves is no solution. You can't just employ only multidisciplinary "unicorns" and fire the rest of your staff. The answer more likely lies somewhere in the middle—and it starts not only with knowing when not to collaborate but also when to resist the urge to go solo.

"I have for years been relying on myself for everything. I can deliver a one-man team on a lot of stuff," says Joe Brown, multidisciplinary designer at IDEO (where, in full disclosure, we once worked together). "The biggest challenge for my career has been to not do that."

Brown points out that at some point, projects become too large to manage without the use of teams. When he worked onsite in Berlin for a year with European e-commerce client Zalando, he directed a studio that had five teams running simultaneously. "That just means there is no way I can do everything."

As you begin to work more with creative teams, "the more you do, the less they learn and develop," says Brown. It becomes less about solo performances and more about helping others grow, which requires stepping back.

At Zalando, Brown says, instead of actually doing everything, he was able to assist with anything. There's a subtle shift there for the comprehensivist. Varied and valuable skills are present in either case, but their application changes completely. "Being able to jam with one team for a short, intense period of time is really great, because it fills whatever gap the team has at the moment, which may be more quantitative or may be more visual-oriented. That's been a real joy."

Creativity Amid Collaboration

For all of its drawbacks, collaborative work isn't going away anytime soon—and that's probably a good thing. To be sure, even the most dedicated comprehensivists don't aim to shortcut teamwork wholesale. They simply want to right-size it, as any sane person on the brink of burnout might.

In fact, all workers are likely on a trajectory toward some version of comprehensivism, perhaps even unwittingly. As Doreen Lorenzo, director of integrated design at the University of Texas at Austin recently wrote, "In the future, all designers will be hybrids." The same is likely true in a variety of industries.

Why can't the mid-career architect also also pinch-hit on acoustic and lighting design occasionally? Why can't the financial analyst also tackle accounting-journal entries from time to time? Why can't the supply-chain manager also oversee a production run or two? No reason per se. Small businesses and startups embrace hybrid workers out of sheer necessity. Medium- and large-sized businesses could take a cue.

"In anyone's career, anyone's growth, if you only exercise one set of skills, then you're only going to be a partial contributor to what you're doing," says Brown. "You may become incredibly good and gain expertise in your field, but you'll always have a hard time connecting to the people you work with. If the future of work is highly collaborative, then there will be value in being able to plug into others." We'll need to know how to do one another's jobs—or at least parts of them—in order to do that.

Then perhaps through this cycle of hybrid-skills acquisition, collaboration can dial itself down a little, letting workers everywhere regain the time and headspace to do their best, most creative work all on their own. Wouldn't that be a dream? Seems almost unreal—like, say, unicorns.

Lisa Baird is a former principal designer at IDEO. She recently earned her master of design at California College of the Arts and previously earned her MBA at University of California Berkeley. Follow her on Twitter at @bairdlisa

With spin-off investments Grail and Helix, and a new software-savvy CEO, Illumina is poised to make DNA an even bigger part of your life.

It would raise the stakes even higher, but that didn't stop Jay Flatley, Illumina's then chief executive, from sending in vials of his own saliva and blood to the company's newly opened lab. It was January 2009, and Illumina's scientists were about to embark on their first mission to sequence a whole human genome.

The project, internally dubbed "Jaynome," required a prescription from Flatley's doctor in case the scientists discovered something medically relevant. It took several weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars for the lab to deduce the sequence of the genome. "We felt the pressure, but we were doing a lot of firsts at that time," recalled Brad Sickler, the company's then recently hired bioinformatician. "Jay was in the first 10 people in the world sequenced at this depth."

The result of the Jaynome experiment hinted at the potential—and some of the challenges—of bringing gene sequencing into clinical care. Flatley learned he had a condition called malignant hypothermia, which can result in sudden death while under general anesthesia. "It's 100 percent preventable if you know about it," Flatley later told me. "Only few people do." He was also informed that he shouldn't have survived childhood. At that time, it was no easy feat to shift through a giant pool of 3.5 to 4 million variants, without having robust data to compare it to.

All told, the Jaynome project set Flatley on a path of wanting to democratize genetic information by making the tools exponentially cheaper and easier to use. And his company has played an instrumental role in doing just that.

If you've ever used 23andMe, Ancestry.com, or any other genetics-testing service, chances are that your genes were sequenced on machines made by the $25 billion biotech behemoth. Now the undisputed leader in the emerging field of DNA sequencing in the U.S., Illumina has outstripped its rivals by selling its sequencing hardware to medical researchers around the world.

It has been a key player in driving down the cost of genetic sequencing from $100 million in 2001 to $1,000 today. As Nature once put it, "That does not just outpace Moore's law—it makes the once-powerful predictor of unbridled progress look downright sedate." The process used to take weeks, but can now be finished in days—16 people's genomes can be sequenced in just three days using one of Illumina's sequencers, the HiSeq X Ten. That machine is capable of sequencing 18,000 human genomes each year.

The technology is quickly moving from the lab and into hospitals, clinics, and even homes with the advent of consumer genomics. And Illumina, founded in 1998, is looking for new ways to capitalize on the growing clinical and consumer markets with new applications, and become an essential part of every aspect of the DNA ecosystem.

The challenge for Illumina, as with any other large company, is to continue to innovate while maintaining a grip on its core business. The company recently took a page from Alphabet by announcing a series of "moonshot" ventures, called Helix and Grail, which will create an App Store model for DNA informatics and bring early cancer screening tests into every doctor's office. And veteran Apple executive Phil Schiller joined Illumina's board this summer, giving the biotech company an injection of consumer marketing know-how.

"We saw this cycle with computer tech. It used to be mainframes, then office equipment and now every phone, TV, car, and music player. They are all computers," says Schiller, who was a systems analyst at Massachusetts General Hospital long before he took charge of Apple's App Store. "I think that the whole category of gene sequencing is going through the potential of a similar evolution, where it moves from being in very few labs to natural business environments to medical institutions, hospitals, and eventually being the tech that we all use in our lives."

In another big change, Flatley also stepped down this summer after 17 years at the helm. His replacement, soft-spoken MIT-trained computer scientist Francis deSouza, was recruited from Symantec to expand the company's global footprint and build out software products to sit on top of the instruments and other services it sells. DeSouza is also spearheading some cultural changes, including offering employee benefits such as 16 hours of paid volunteer time and free access to a screening test for undiagnosed diseases.

But critics say it will be a challenge for lllumina to figure out how to expand into these same markets without encroaching on its customers' territory. Startups have already entered the clinical market with applications for everything from "liquid biopsy" tests to monitor late-stage cancers (an estimated $1 billion market by 2020, according to the business consulting firm Research and Markets), to non-invasive pregnancy screenings for genetic disorders like Down Syndrome ($2.4 billion by the end of 2022). The majority of companies in both the clinical and consumer arenas rely on Illumina's machines for their underlying analysis.

"I think entrepreneurs, investors, and companies are at times apprehensive about Illumina and worried about if, and when, they might choose to compete against them," says John Stuelpnagel, Illumina's cofounder and former chief operating officer. If it can walk that tightrope, many expect that Illumina will tap into a potential goldmine in the next five years.

"Less than 3% of the population knows anything about their genomic data," adds Jonathan Groberg, a biotech analyst at UBS. "This opportunity is where the internet was in the 1970s."

The Hardware In Its DNA

Illumina's San Diego headquarters bears some resemblance to the technology campuses of Silicon Valley. The hallways are filled with light, even on the foggy day I visited, with ample space for employees to collaborate, coffee shops, and an onsite cafeteria (but the meals aren't free, in part to demonstrate that resources are being spent wisely). The senior executives work in cubicles with everyone else, and there are no offices. In his first weeks as CEO, DeSouza reduced the size of the cubes on the executive floor even further to make it easier to collaborate. Those at the top have also blocked out time on their calendars for anyone to ask questions or suggest ideas.

Flatley, Illumina's former CEO, is credited by current and former employees I spoke to with maintaining a "culture of innovation," especially as the company grew to some 5,000 employees and annual revenues of more than $2 billion. But back in 2003, just five years after it was founded, the company was barely eking out a profit and facing off against some larger, tougher competition in the form of larger and better-funded companies.

After Flatley made the strategic decision to buy Solexa, a British biotech startup with a novel approach called "sequencing by synthesis," that all started to change. From 2007, Illumina's researchers improved on the core technology, and the company built a global distribution network. The executive team revised some of its processes to allow for rapid new product development at multiple geographic sites.

"We developed this incredible ability to innovate when our talent, processes, and product-development strategy came together," recalls Stuelpnagel. "It was a culture of innovation fueled in part by a healthy paranoia of others trying to outcompete us." Within five years, many onetime competitors like Roche (at one point, also a potential buyer) and Complete Genomics fell away or got acquired.

It was Flatley's idea, in 2009, to get an edge by setting up a federally certified lab on the premises to test new hardware, and showcase what could be possible with next-generation sequencing, and even assist in the occasional medical case.

To open up whole genome sequencing to others beyond himself, Flatley initiated a consumer genomics push with the Understanding Your Genome Project (UYG), which provides far deeper sequencing than a 23andMe or Ancestry (in this case, a doctor's note is required). For under $3,000, participants have learned they have a resistance to a certain drug, like Warfarin, or a gene mutation that indicates a likelihood of getting breast or ovarian cancer. Illumina's Erica Ramos, a full-time genetic counselor who works with UYG, told me they find out about a significant variation with about 2% of the population. "A lot of what we're trying to do is drive up awareness of genomics in practice," she says.

The lab, where DNA sequencing is performed internally, is filled with rows of humming computers of varying sizes. The HiSeq X Ten, which is as large as an office photocopier, sells as a set of instruments for more than $10 million. There are 35 customers globally that own one of these machines, including the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They're sometimes referred to as the "X Ten club."

Lower-end instruments for more targeted applications, which can be as small as a desktop computer, sell to molecular biologists, pathologists, and oncology researchers for around $50,000 each.

Illumina has captured more than 70% of the sequencing market with these machines that it sells to academics, pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, and more. During his tenure as CEO, Flatley built a reputation around tight product execution, culminating in Illumina being the first to announce the $1,000 genome in 2014.

"Nowadays, Illumina is like the 800-pound gorilla in genomics," said Joyce Tung, 23andMe's director of research, when asked about the company's impact.

"I have never encountered any other machines but Illuminas," adds Gabriel Otte, cofounder and CEO of Andreessen-Horowitz-backed genomics startup Freenome. "And my PhD is in genomics."

Some biotech experts suspect that the core technology will eventually be commoditized as the price plateaus, and perhaps comes down further, in the coming years. But Flatley is convinced that this is far from imminent. "It will be a long time before that happens."

These days, Illumina faces its stiffest competition from Thermo Fisher Scientific, the Waltham, Massachusetts, multinational that supplies biotech for everything from anti-doping analysis to genetically modified crop production. And Illumina may soon face off with European vendor QIAGEN as it moves into the clinical market. There are also some up-and-coming rivals in more niche areas, such as the makers of "long-read" sequencing technologies that are useful for things like looking at structural issues with chromosomes that lead to diseases like cancer, and testing for some hereditary diseases that are missed with short-read approaches.

One potential rival is U.K.-based startup Oxford Nanopore, which makes small, portable sequencers that it claims can deliver real-time reports and be used in the field, including at the International Space Station. Oxford Nanopore's technology reads long strands of DNA by measuring changes in electrical current as a nucleotide passes through a microscopic pore. Critics of this technology point to the lack of accuracy, although it shows promise in applications that involve rapid diagnoses of diseases like the Zika virus.

It's unlikely that Illumina will be knocked off its pedestal by Oxford Nanopore or any other startup in the near future, according to a half dozen experts I spoke to. That's in part because Illumina has invested big in R&D, and some biotech startups like 10X Genomics are building applications to enhance the information that can be gleaned via Illumina's sequencers. The other reason is that Illumina, like many of its former competitors, has shown that it is comfortable using litigation to remain competitive.

After investing over $18 million in Oxford Nanopore in 2009 and an undisclosed sum in 2010, Illumina divested and filed suit against the company earlier this year, claiming that the British startup's technology contained ideas stolen from its patent. Oxford Nanopore responded by sending a letter to the U.S. International Trade Commission claiming that the the suit was analogous to "restricting the trade on smartphones because mainframe and desktop computers are available," and that Illumina was seeking to "stifle emerging competition and enhance its monopoly." The company also told the commission that Flatley had previously participated as an adviser on its board. A few outside observers speculated that the real battle was about whether Oxford Nanopore technology would someday displace Illumina in the battle to provide hardware and services in the sequencing market. The lawsuit was settled in August.

Others say this kind of litigiousness is par for the course in the life sciences world. Illumina, for instance, was sued by many of its larger rivals in the years that it was the underdog. Large biotech companies are under pressure from stakeholders to expand their businesses and avoid competition from startups snapping on their heels.

In its current position, Illumina is either an ally or frenemy to virtually every genomics company that exists. Even those I spoke to that harbored some fears that Illumina would encroach on its territory were reluctant to speak publicly about it.

"As Illumina moves into the clinical markets, it's making for some tough conversations," says Groberg.

One of Illumina's mantras, which I heard repeatedly while reporting this story, is that it does not compete with its customers. But when the topic of its new ventures in reproductive health comes up, that concept seems to break down.

In 2013, Illumina bought a company called Verinata Health for $350 million. That sent shockwaves through the industry (one executive described the move as "puzzling"), as Verinata is a direct competitor to several of Illumina's customers in a space known as noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT). It's a technique for analyzing fetal DNA circulating in the mother's blood for signs of chromosomal conditions. The market is now valued at $1 billion, and almost a million of these tests are sold annually.

I asked Illumina's chief commercial officer Christian Henry whether the buy-up of Verinata was intended as an explicitly competitive move against other NIPT vendors, several of whom like Natera rank among Illumina's biggest customers. "It's a foundational question for us how much we compete with our customers," he responded, carefully.

Henry stressed that the company is trying to "walk the fine line" by avoiding selling directly to doctors. Instead, Illumina is choosing to sell to labs or other NIPT companies that want to use the equipment. Still, it's easy to see why other NIPT players would be threatened, especially given the fact that the field is already so crowded and litigious. "Illumina says it wants to democratize the ability for any lab to offer these NIPT tests, but you can follow the trail as well as anyone," adds Groberg.

The Holy Grail: Cradle To Grave Sequencing

"Today, where genomics is considered important and valuable and should be paid for is in the range of genetic and rare diseases," says Euan Ashley, an associate professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford University and a rare disease specialist. "I think you'd find very little argument inside or outside Illumina in relating to that as a consensus position."

Illumina is making an impact in these areas by selling sequencing tools to researchers, and occasionally clinicians who study and treat disease. But it's a little-known fact that scientists at Illumina do take on the occasional compelling rare disease case, and it's typically a child with a set of debilitating symptoms, where no diagnosis has been found through conventional methods.

Over coffee at the company's cafeteria, Illumina's senior director of scientific research, Ryan Taft, shared the story of a former patient who had a mysterious disorder of the central nervous system. As a toddler, a young Australian boy named Massimo lost the ability to eat and crawl. The boy's father called Illumina after surmising that the disease was likely genetic.

Massimo became the 45th person in the world to have his genome sequenced by Illumina's machines, followed by his parents. The rationale seemed simple enough: His parents were healthy and Massimo was not, which meant that some quirk in the DNA would be able to uncover the problem. But as Taft explained, he had to sequence the families' genomes 30 or 40 times to ensure there wasn't an error. That's about 120 billion letters each.

The hope is that DNA sequencing might find a potential clue by uncovering the right variant(s) among a massive pool of potential culprits. "That's like finding a needle in a big pile of needles," Ashley says.

Taft, who is also a computer scientist, whipped up some algorithms using existing open-source frameworks (these are the kinds of sample-to-answer informatics tools that Illumina is building for clinicians). He found a mutation in Massimo's genome that he thought might explain the symptoms. To test the theory, Taft set out to find other children that resembled Masimo and sequence them. By investigating MRI biobanks, Taft and Massimo's family were able to uncover nine other children in the U.S. and Europe with similar symptoms. They eventually diagnosed a new disease known as HBSL.

Taft now leads the company's internal efforts to support clinical trials and collaborate with rare disease researchers on the occasional case. "It's a small effort, but we want to engage and try to solve these medical cases," he says.

Because of genomics, Ashley and other rare disease specialists expect that the library of diseases with a genetic basis will drastically expand. "Different diseases will get different treatment based on their specific mutations; drugs will have more impact and trials will be more successful," says Ashley, who is the principal investigator of the National Institutes of Health's $7.2 million-funded Undiagnosed Diseases Network.

The hard part is making sense of all the data that will be coming off the sequencers and parsing out what's clinically meaningful in all the noise.

For Illumina, it's not an easy feat to jump up the technology stack from hardware to software and services. As Serge Saxonov, CEO of 10x Genomics and a cofounder of 23andMe explains, "Companies have DNA based on how they got started." And software requires different skill sets and a new way of thinking.

Nevertheless, computing hardware—whether it's your laptop or Illumina's sequencers—becomes far more valuable when it's sold as a package with software and tools that make it useful. Illumina will need to amp up its offerings to tap into the much-larger clinical and at-home market, and the company's new CEO is under pressure to do just that.

At a recent UBS Summit in Park City, Utah, deSouza spelled out his plan to incorporate software into the sequencing service, rather than to try to sell it separately. Over lunch, deSouza shared that he had been hired in part for his expertise in developing secure software products.

One such venture currently in development is called BaseSpace, a cloud-based offering with software tools for interpreting DNA data from the company's machines.

The company also invested in a $100 million-funded software spinout dubbed Helix, which is led by former MapMyFitness cofounder Robin Thurston. The idea behind Helix is to partner with well-known brands to incorporate genomics into targeted, personalized apps in a model that borrows from the Apple App Store. A customer might check how quickly they metabolize caffeine via an app developed by a nutrition company. Helix will sequence the customers' genomic data and store it centrally, but the nutrition company delivers the report back to the user.

"The brands will do the heavy lifting from a marketing standpoint," Flatley explains. For that reason, Helix's team expects that the number of people who have been sequenced will drastically increase. Thurston predicts that it will be 90% of people within 20 years.

Another distinguishing factor is that the genome data isn't delivered back to the customer all at once; instead, answers are delivered for specific questions as new apps are developed by Helix's brand partners.

The model depends on Helix building a very large number of partners, so customers will want to find out insights about their genome over and over again. Helix subsidizes the cost of sequencing the whole exome for the first time, expecting that customers will query it repeatedly throughout their lifetime. Another difference to consumer genomics apps like 23andMe is that Helix offers exome sequencing, which offers more information and is more expensive than traditional "genotyping" methods.

"This will be the first deep sequencing test broadly available on consumer market," says Thurston.

"We find the idea of Helix intriguing and are interested to see how companies use their platform," says a spokesman from 23andMe, when asked whether 23andMe views Helix as a competitor at this stage. "It also validates our confidence in the consumer genetics market that we've pioneered for a decade."

Helix is expected to launch with its first set of customers, which include Mayo Clinic, LabCorp, and Duke University later this year.

"I'm Confident This Is The Future"

In 2015, the White House unveiled its $215 million-funded "Precision Medicine Initiative," which is primarily focused on cancer.

The basic premise is that each tumor harbors a different set of mutations, and new therapies can be designed based on which mutations are present, with each patient receiving a personalized treatment plan by their physician. "The cancer world has fundamentally changed," says Maurie Markman, a physician, ovarian cancer researcher, and the president of medicine and science at Cancer Treatment Centers of America. "I've been doing this for over 30 years and I'm a very conservative person, but I'm confident that this is the future."

Illumina seems to agree: Its other $100 million spinout venture is developing the first FDA-approved screening test for cancer. Grail, a standalone company, will proactively test patients for the earliest signs of cancer, so they can be treated before the disease advances. The idea is to take a high-resolution snapshot of patients' genetic fragments from dying cells of tumors that circulate in the blood. Such tests already exist to monitor patients already known to have cancer, but not to diagnose it at a much earlier stage.

That premise helped Illumina recruit Jeff Huber from Google as CEO of Grail. Huber lost his wife to advanced colon cancer in November of last year. "It was effectively a death sentence," he says.

Flatley, who is helping to oversee the initiative while shifting into the executive chairman role at Illumina, is confident that the new company can overcome the myriad technical challenges—for one thing, the test needs to be highly accurate or clinicians risk misinforming patients. Flatley boasts that Illumina is the only company that has the technology to sequence to the required breadth and depth. "The market is a moonshot; the tech isn't," he says.

By 2017, Grail aims to kickstart "the largest clinical trial ever conceptualized," says Flatley, and for the screening product to be approved to hit the market by 2019 for a price point of less than $1,000. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions have both invested in the startup, and its potential market size has been touted as $20 billion to $40 billion.

If Grail and Helix are successful, a lot more people will have access to their DNA throughout their lives. It's no surprise that the final phase of Illumina's masterplan has been dubbed internally as "Genomics Everywhere." The vision is that it will be commonplace for a person's sequencing journey to begin before birth and continue throughout their entire life.

"I think many of us, myself included, have imagined a future where genomics touches every individual in the health system," Ashley, the Stanford geneticist, explains.

Several genomics companies are founded on this vision, particularly when it comes to leveraging technology to better treat the sickest patients with more targeted therapies. Many researchers believe that preventative care will also be more routine when patients understand (and can take steps to proactively reduce) their unique set of disease risks, or they get screened for cancer well before it spreads.

What comes next is writing DNA, and not just reading it. Gene-editing tools like CRISPR-Cas9 are making it cheaper and faster to move genes around, which has untold consequences for changing the environment and treating disease. Stuelpnagel believes that in the coming decade, Illumina may have more impact on health and agriculture than any other company. "DNA is the foundation of life, and Illumina is enabling us to learn about it and, coupled with DNA writing technologies, manipulate it."

As the technology advances, bioethicists, consumers, and policymakers will carry a huge burden in determining how and where to draw the line.

As genomics hits the mainstream, the company knows that it needs to become a voice. This year, it hired a government affairs team and held introductory meetings with policymakers to discuss the Precision Medicine Initiative and funding for scientific research. Flatley has also stepped up his presence in Washington, D.C., especially as the company explores opportunities in the regulated clinical market. Explaining adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymines to a broad audience without raising the ire of the FDA is no easy feat.

"I often joke that we need to do a Super Bowl ad," says Illumina's Henry. "Conceptually we know we need to get the message out."

[Photos: Noel Spirandelli for Fast Company]

The people in your office may not trust you as much as you think they do. Here's how to win them over.

Do the people in your office trust you? Maybe not as much as you think they do.

Consulting firm EY released its Global Generations 3.0 research which found that less than half of full-time workers between the ages of 19 and 68 place a "great deal of trust" in their employer, boss, or colleagues. Another recent survey from Globoforce's WorkHuman Research Institute found that 80% of employees trust their colleagues, but only 65% trust senior leaders in their companies.

That's a problem. EY's research also found that low levels of trust majorly influences employees to look for another job (42%), work the minimum number of hours required (30%), and be less engaged and productive (28%).

Earning the trust of your team has real bottom-line benefits, says Dennis Reina, cofounder of Reina, a trust-building consultancy and author of Rebuilding Trust in the Workplace: Seven Steps to Renew Confidence, Commitment and Energy. He points to one of his clients: an airline with a troubled operations team. Lack of trust, marked by infighting and poor communication, was making the team ineffective. In a year, Reina's team raised the level of trust in the department by 51 points, according to a post-test they did. The department saved $1 million in strategic planning costs because they were able to work well together and cut the planning time down to one-third of previous requirements, he says.

There are a number of simple, straightforward actions that build trust, Reina says. Here are six simple tactics that work.

Keep Your Agreements

Few actions ruin your trustworthiness faster than breaking your word, Reina says. Doing what you say you're going to do reinforces the perception of your character. If circumstances change and you're unable to do so, explain why with as much detail and context as possible so all parties understand the reason for the change. When you're consistent with your word, people know they can depend on you.

Give Context

Leaders are often counseled to give specific direction and communicate clearly, but context is also important, Reina says. When people understand why you're asking them to take on a difficult challenge or a task they'd rather not do, help them understand the importance of what you're asking. Seeing how their role fits into a bigger picture and is valued helps them understand and trust the organizational vision, which can help foster greater trust in both the company and its leaders. Plus, transparent cultures are good for business.

Be Present

When you're interacting with your team members, pay attention and focus on the conversations and dynamics, says Tara A. Goodfellow, managing director of Athena Educational Consultants, Inc. Listen to what matters to your employees and let them know that you are actually hearing and considering what they're saying. If you're distracted or unfocused, you risk making them feel like you're insincere, which will erode trust.

"If you don't get to know your employees and what motivates them, it's really hard to build that trust," she says.

Welcome Diversity

Leaders and organizations that welcome varied input and feedback are more trustworthy. The EY study found that 38% of respondents say that a diverse environment is a "very important" determinant of trust. In this context, diverse environment means that it "strives to recruit, retain, and promote diverse people with all differences including gender, country of origin, and thinking style," according to the survey results.

Be Human

You're going to make mistakes and there are going to be things you don't know, so ask questions, admit when you're wrong, and, when appropriate, make amends, says Timothy G. Wiedman, a former corporate manager and associate professor of management and human resources at Doane University. By showing a measure of vulnerability and willingness to admit when you're wrong or need help shows that you're human and helps people more easily relate to you, he says.

"A question that should have been asked—but wasn't—may have catastrophic consequences that will not soon be forgotten," he says. But when people know that you're willing to get the answers you need instead of faking it, they'll trust you more, he says.

Have Their Backs

Employees will trust you most when they feel you're looking out for them, Reina says. Encourage feedback—even when it's difficult to hear—and create an environment where they feel secure. When they are having challenges at work, provide the support, training, or resources they need to improve. And if they're facing an unfair or otherwise disruptive situation, go to bat for them to make it right.

"People are forgiving if they know that their leaders—particularly their senior leaders—are trying," he says. "If they know that their senior leaders are being straight with them and they have [the employees'] as well as the company's best interest in mind, they're more likely to trust."

Several new companies are building their businesses around the mainstreaming of androgynous clothing, no longer a passing fad.

Androgyny has been a steady part of pop culture for years: Remember David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust in the '70s, Grace Jones's flattop hair in the '80s, Kurt Cobain's queer grungy looks in the '90s, and Prince's endless array of glittery numbers throughout his career?

Subtler versions of these looks end up trickling into fashion: Yves Saint Laurent created boxy menswear-inspired suits for women, Calvin Klein had a series of black-and-white ads featuring women with shaved heads and men with luscious long hair side by side, and Marc Jacobs featured Andrej Pejic, a trans woman, as the face of his brand.

But in 2016, is fashion androgyny more than just a passing fad? Some startups are making the case that wearing gender-bending clothing is not particularly transgressive anymore. This is partly due to broader cultural changes that have made society more accepting of differences in people's gender and sexuality, thanks, in part, to the Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage and the current fight for transgender rights. While older generations might perceive these moments as big cultural turning points (which they are), many millennials and gen Z'ers see them as givens. Brands say these changes are tied to an increased demand for clothes that don't conform to traditional gender norms and reflect a person's sexuality, gender identity, or simply their taste.

Take Older Brother, a brand founded in 2013 by Bobby Bonaparte and Max Kingery. Their collection consists of unisex garments that are designed to hang loosely on one's frame, disguising male and female body parts. Lookbooks show models of both sexes wearing the same outfits: baggy trousers, oversized button-down shirts, shapeless T-shirts. But none of this is meant to be particularly transgressive. In fact, it is meant to conjure up the warm, fuzzy feelings of wearing your older brother's hand-me-down jeans and sweatshirts when you were small.

The founders believe that in the digital era, fashion trends don't come around in cycles anymore. People who are attracted to particular styles (such as androgyny) can seek out a brand (like Older Brother) and stick with it, which creates enough of a steady demand to sustain the company. "The internet has totally disrupted trends," Kingery says. "Now it's really about finding your niche. You can buy clothes that suit you whenever you want."

Bonaparte and Kingery launched their brand in Portland, Oregon, where they grew up, and they believe they are filling a particular need for genderless clothing in their community. "Coming from a place like Portland that celebrates weirdness, many people don't feel like they need to wear one type of clothing because society dictates it," Bonaparte says.

They've found that their brand also tends to do well in particular pockets around the world where people are not so focused on the social conventions of dressing. Older Brother has taken off in London, Korea, and Japan, which all have a long history of unisex fashion. "Take the kimono," he says. "It literally just means, 'a thing to wear.' It was not tailored, so it could really fit anybody of any shape, size, or gender. Gender-neutrality is organic in the way that they use garments."

In the U.S., the brand does well in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin—cities that for decades have been the country's most progressive, particularly when it comes to gender and LGBTQ activism. There is a higher demand for gender-defying clothing from men and women who describe themselves as queer or gender non-conforming.

Brooklyn-based couple Kelly and Laura Moffat saw a need among women for masculine shirts. They themselves had struggled to find staple oxfords that looked boxy but still fit the female form. Women's button-downs tend to be designed with darts and pin-tucks to be fitted, while men's shirts are often too rectangular and gape around the bust area. Last year, the Moffats launched Kirrin Finch, a company that makes dapper menswear-inspired shirts that don't leave women looking like they're wearing tents. "Our customers are women who might identify as tomboys, androgynous, or queer," Laura says. "People who don't fit the mold of what traditional retailers are creating for women."

But they've also found that gender-neutral fashion is appealing to a broader spectrum of women, even those who do not think of themselves as queer. Many women simply want to have more options in their closets. They might wear a frilly frock one day and shirt with a bowtie the next. "There are beautiful things about traditional men's and women's clothing," Laura says. "Think feminine floral patterns and masculine geometric shapes. When you start to experiment with not being just one or the other, you get to a place that is more interesting."

The founders of Older Brother point out that women are much more willing to adopt masculine fashion than the other way around. Although their collection tends to veer toward more masculine silhouettes, nearly 70% of their customers are women.

Women have a long history of adopting men's clothing. In the early 1800s, they started wearing trousers, which were, until then, an exclusively masculine garment. But we've yet to reach the point in mainstream culture where men are embracing dresses and skirts en masse. Bonaparte recalls the time when he was a 6-year-old and wore his friend's dress for a day, only to be shamed by the girl's father. "There's still a lot of stigma attached to a man wearing a skirt," he says.

There are places where this is beginning to change. In high fashion, designers like Rick Owens and Jil Sanders have created gender-defying pieces for men. And male celebrities tend to be more comfortable wearing feminine pieces. Rapper Big Sean was featured on the cover of XXL magazine wearing a Dior floral print bomber jacket, for instance.

Bonaparte and Kingery are trying to push the boundaries in their own way. In a recent collection, they introduced a cropped T-shirt and a shirtdress that were inspired by more traditional womenswear, but chose not to be too heavy-handed about it. "This is just playful experimentation," Bonaparte says. "We're being supportive of the concept without stuffing it down people's throats. But if we can make it easier for men to wear women's clothes, I think that would be an amazing position for us to be in."

In more subtle ways, androgyny is already cropping up in some of the everyday items that men are wearing. Bucketfeet, for instance, is a footwear company that collaborates with artists who create designs to decorate sneakers. The art is varied, from graffiti to screen-printing to photography, and could be classified as masculine, feminine, or gender-neutral, but the vast majority of the designs are sold to both men and women. "There's this idea in fashion that women will shop in men's stores, but not the other way around," says Raaja Nemani, who founded Bucketfeet in 2011 with Aaron Firestein. "But our products already stand out because of the art on them, and we've found that our customers are already willing to take risks with how they dress to break down some of those gender norms."

Nemani says he's found that it is impossible to predict which designs will appeal more to each gender. Some designs that might seem more feminine, including those with pastels or graphics of birds and flowers, have been a huge hit with men. "I'd rather not guess whether men or women will prefer a pattern," he says. "Art affects people in such unique and varied ways that transcend gender."

The underwear brand MeUndies has also found that its heavily millennial client base has grown tired of buying undrrwear that is overtly gendered. For a woman, shopping for underwear usually involves digging through piles of frilly lace in soft hues, girly patterns, and va-va-va-voom red; for men, everything tends to be gray and black with no patterns at all, regardless of whether you're into boxers or briefs. Much like Bucketfeet, MeUndies develops a wide array of fun, bold patterns which it then makes in both men and women's styles. This means there are occasionally bright pink men's boxers and camo-print women's bikinis. The brand has also tried to make the cut and shape of the underwear itself less gender-specific, although there are obviously physical considerations to ensure that the products fits comfortably. "Our women's boy short is essentially the men's boxer brief without the pouch, while our men's brief is essentially the women's bikini cut with a pouch," says Jonathan Shokrian, the brand's founder. "The design elements for each remain consistent across the board."

When Calvin Klein launched his unisex scent in 1994, it was meant to make a bold statement. Print ads for the fragrance showcased skinny, tattooed men and women, each in various stages of undress and dripping with ambiguous sexuality. At the time, these images stood out in perfume aisles adorned with photos of women in white dresses and frolicking in fields of flowers, or muscular men with smoldering expressions. But these days, this kind of marketing feels almost quaint.

Four months ago, a perfume company called Phlur entered the market with a suite of six unisex scents. Although gender-neutral fragrances are still not that common, the brand has does not emphasize its androgynous approach as a selling point. Instead, Phlur highlights how each combination of smells represents a particular state of mind or mood. "We were trying to depart from the tired messaging of the fragrance category for the past 70 years, which was entirely laced in sex, the objectification of both genders, and an almost carnal misogyny," says founder Eric Korman. "Traditional sexist messaging just does not resonate with younger consumers the way it has previously."

The company's ads feature images of men and women in a wide range of contexts. Female models wear masculine blazers and leather jackets, often with no makeup; those same women are also featured wearing sequined dresses. Male models wear tank tops and necklaces in some images and suits in others. Gender is treated with a light touch, as if the brand's not trying too hard to get the politics of gender right. "Androgyny is not a trend anymore," says founder Eric Korman. "It's a shift in behavior and expectation."

The camera maker wants to take on DJI, its former partner and now rival, but upending the consumer drones market won't be easy.

The chatter started two years ago: GoPro was getting into the drone business.

The rumor sent a message to DJI, the world's largest maker of consumer drones, that it shouldn't get too comfortable—not if GoPro, one of the best marketing companies in the world, had decided it was no longer content just to have its devices accessorizing other companies' flying machines. Not if the camera giant wanted to beat DJI, until then a friendly a partner, at its own game.

Today, San Diego-based GoPro is finally launching that drone, known as the Karma, with the promise that it delivers "Hollywood-Caliber stabilization in a backpack." But in the 22 months since the rumors began to fly, the industry's dynamics have changed dramatically. For one thing, DJI has grown to become as dominant in consumer drones as GoPro is in the action camera business. For another, after its stock soared to more than $86 a share in 2014, GoPro shares plummeted on worries about poor camera sales and other issues. The stock has never really recovered, closing at $14.96 on Friday.

And where observers had once floated the idea that GoPro could challenge DJI's dominance, the Chinese company's position in consumer drones is now seen as all but insurmountable on the strength of massive sales of its Phantom line, which it updates on a regular basis.

Still, one should never discount a company like GoPro if it commits to something, and with the Karma, it is showing that it still has eyes on upending the drone industry. The new device, which will sell for $799 when it's available October 23, is designed to shoot "amazingly smooth, stabilized video," be folded into a small backpack, and be flown easily with a game-style controller with a built-in touch display—no smartphone necessary.

The Karma features a removable stabilizer that can be held by hand and which is compatible with GoPro's Hero4 and Hero5 cameras. The company is selling packages that include the drone, the carrying backpack, and either a Hero5 Black—for $1,099—or a Hero5 Session, for $999.

The stakes in this game of drones are large. Analysts say the consumer drone market is already worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, a number that could grow to more than $4 billion in annual sales by 2025. DJI and GoPro obviously both want large pieces of that pie, as do other drone makers such as China's Yuneec, 3D Robotics, Parrot, and others.

In DJI's early years, many people mounted GoPro cameras on their Phantoms, and the two companies were known to have friendly relations. When DJI decided, with the Phantom 2, to begin selling models with built-in cameras, that may have soured that relationship and forced GoPro's hand, leading the company on the winding road that culminated in today's launch event, at Squaw Valley near California's glorious Lake Tahoe.

For some time, DJI has marketed the Phantom as a "flying camera," and it's clear GoPro sees the Karma the same way—except easier to use. A release about the launch referred to the drone's "painless out-of-the-box experience unlike any other drone in the market."

Until now, GoPro has revealed little about the Karma—including its place in the market, and whether it would be seen as taking on DJI's Phantom line directly or trying to carve out its own niche in the market. The answer seems to be more titled toward the latter, with GoPro aiming its drone at the same kind of adventurous types who are already heavy users of its Hero line of cameras.

Because Karma is light and foldable, it won't weigh users down when they're on ski slopes or hiking. That suggests GoPro doesn't yet want to compete with DJI's Phantoms, which range in price from $339 to $1,199 and offer an impressive out-of-the-box feature set, but come with a rigid frame that doesn't quite as easily lend itself to being carried around in action-oriented environments.

It remains to be seen whether consumers will flock to the Karma, but GoPro is clearly betting big-time on exactly that. Combined with the company's new cameras, its cloud-based subscription service, and other new tools, it is hoping that its full ecosystem will comprise what founder and CEO Nick Woodman called an "end-to-end storytelling solution that finally makes it easy to capture, edit, and share your life's best stories."

Females were slightly better represented in the preorders for the Series 2 than for the Series 1.

More women are buying the new Apple Watch Series 2 compared to the number of women who bought the previous version, according to new preorder data from Slice Intelligence, but men are still far more likely to buy the device. The research firm analyzes millions of online consumer transactions to get a look at who ordered what and when.

The data show that 74% of those who preordered an Apple Watch Series 2 between September 9 and 12 were men, while just 26% were women. Women were slightly better represented than in the preorders for the first Apple Watch in April 2015. Then, 20% of the preorders came from women and 80% came from men

It's true that more men buy smartwatches than women in general. Samsung executives pointed out in a recent briefing on a new smartwatch that the device was geared toward men because women are far less interested in the category.

But the gender gap may be closing. NPD Connected Intelligence says that as of May about 35% of adult smartwatch owners in the U.S. were female. That's up from just 29% in January, the firm says.

Slice also found that nearly one-third of those who pre-ordered an Apple Watch Series 2 had previously purchased an Apple Watch Series 1. That a full third of Watch owners would get in line early for the next edition of the device says something nice about the quality of the product and the loyalty of the customers.

Slice also points out that a slightly younger demographic is leading the preorders for the second Watch. Millennials placed the most preorders of any group (39%) during the opening four days, edging out the gen X crowd that led preorders for the first Watch.

Some other interesting nuggets from the data:

*The 42mm is the most sold size of Apple Watch, which mirrors the first Apple Watch launch.
*Black is the most popular watch band color for both woven nylon and sport bands.
*The Sport band is the most preferred option for Apple Watch 2 buyers and accounts for 70% of sales.

Some very busy people feel quite relaxed about time. Here's what they do that the rest of us don't.

K.J. Dell'Antonia has plenty going on in her life. As a columnist and contributing editor for the Well Family section at the New York Times, she manages other contributors and near constant content. She has four children who play competitive hockey. This involves copious weekend travel, time at ice rinks, and time in ice rink parking lots. "I've done more source interviews from rink parking lots than I can count," she says.

Yet Dell'Antonia refuses to answer queries about how life is going with the word "busy." She refuses to feel busy. "I'm just not going to let that be the way I see our life," she tells Fast Company. She likes to feel calm, and that where she is now is where she is supposed to be.

This is not a common mind-set among people like Dell'Antonia. Every year, Gallup asks Americans about time stress. Not surprisingly, people with jobs are more likely to say they lack the time for the things they want to do (61%) versus retirees and others who are not working (32%). Likewise, people with children at home feel more time stress (61%) than people without kids (42%).

Yet about four in 10 people who are working, or who do have kids, say they have enough time for the things they want to do. Here are their strategies for feeling like they have all the time in the world.

Be Clear On What Matters

Damon Brown launched two startups (and saw one, Cuddlr, acquired) the year that he was also the primary caregiver for his infant son. "The first step is to understand that everything that has to get done will absolutely get done," says Brown, who is the author of The Bite-Sized Entrepreneur book series. "We get into trouble when we make everything in life a priority."

Every day he asks himself what three things he wants to do to advance toward his goals. Winnowing down his priorities allows him to focus, which helps get those three priorities completed relatively quickly. "It also helps me calm down and look at everything done beyond that as icing on the cake," he says. "In fact, it usually calms me down enough to breeze through the bonus priorities, too."

Don't Fill Time

People sometimes invite time stress into their lives, says Jeff Kavanaugh, senior partner at Infosys Consulting, and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, whose career has involved advising many busy executives. "They treat their time as an open-ended invitation to commitments," he explains, "drawn in by their desire to please people or the fear of missing out, and downplay their capacity limit until the commitments—and the stress—stack up."

Learn to embrace a paradox: Time is precious and plentiful. To have as much time as you need for the things you want, you need to be ruthless about not filling time with things you don't care about.

Abbie Duenckel embraces this philosophy. She works two part-time jobs, and is the primary caregiver of her 2-year-old. Yet she feels relaxed about time in part because she savors the free time she has. Most nights, "between 9 p.m. and usually midnight, I do what I want to do." Many people fill this time with social media. Not Duenckel. "I would rather save my time for face-to-face relationships or phone chats," she says. She also takes long baths.

If you want to feel like you have all the time in the world, try not turning on the TV, phone, or computer some night. See how slowly the time passes if you just go outside to stare at the stars.

Don't Rush

Dell'Antonia says she used to be late frequently, which meant she was always rushing. She kicked the habit by learning to count backward from when she had to be somewhere, and accurately estimating how long each step would take. (Pro tip: Getting in the car with four kids takes longer than 15 seconds.)

She also learned "not to try to fit in that one last thing—the 'I'll just empty the dishwasher before we go' syndrome." The payoff has been incredible. "I love being on time—no, I love being early," she says. "I love knowing that we have time to stop for gas. I love looking at the car clock and not desperately calculating whether we can get there in six minutes and whether the clock is maybe a minute fast," Dell'Antonia enthuses. "It just gives you this big open feeling of calm."

Be Where You Are

Jeff Heath runs Matrix Applied Technologies, which manufactures and sells equipment that's installed on large oil and petrochemical storage tanks. This line of work has him traveling frequently from his Tulsa home to a manufacturing facility near Seoul and a regional office near Sydney. He spent 90 of the first 270 nights of this year on the road.

He maintains his productivity, and his marriage, with a simple strategy: "It sounds trite, but I really try to be present with whatever I'm doing," he says. "With my job, the work is like liquid and will expand to fill the available space if I let it. There is always more to do than can be done." And so, he says, "I've had to make a conscious choice 'not to work,' which is hard for a workaholic. But it's been an improvement in my life, to say the least."

Heath tracks his time hour by hour so he can be accountable for it. When he's on the road, his time logs show he can work 70 hours a week, but during weeks at home it might be 30 hours as he focuses on his wife and children.

Try To Enjoy It

We can choose how we think about our time. Talking about how crazed and busy we feel can reinforce the feeling that time is scarce, but to what end? Says Duenckel: "Everyone is stressed. Everyone is busy, and there is no point competing because that is silly, and we never really gain anything anyway."

Rather than complain about time spent driving to hockey games, Dell'Antonia not only takes the broad view (she is grateful for four active, healthy children), she chooses to appreciate small perks, too. "It comes with lots of joys," she explains. "Spending time with other parents whose views can expand mine, long in-the-car talks with kids, time to listen to podcasts, the chance to explore new small towns around us—and, of course, new parking lots. I choose to appreciate it."

Let It Go

Some days are just not going to be productive. And that is okay. A calm, effective life is built over the long haul. Brown gives himself "minimal viable days" when he's not feeling it. A play on the "minimal viable product" concept, this means he only does what absolutely has to happen. "After a minimal day, I am proverbially jumping out of my seat ready to get things done," he says.

Letting it go also means recognizing that much stuff that causes time stress doesn't matter. Duenckel has realized that with a 2-year-old, "there's no point in picking toys up over and over again all day long." Better to let them sit on the floor and enjoy the time with her daughter instead. More broadly, in life, she understands, "I cannot do it all. I am not expected to do it all, and the world does not depend on me to do it all."

Bottom line: If you don't take yourself too seriously, it's easy to feel like you have all the time in the world.

The announcement comes just months after Nest debuted its own $199 outside camera.

When Canary's cylindrical home security tower launched as an Indiegogo project in 2013, it received a rosy reception. Now the company is launching a new slickly designed wireless outdoor security camera called the Canary Flex.

The announcement comes months after Nest debuted its own $199 outside camera. While Canary's new product may look like a tagalong, founder Adam Sager says his company had been working on the Flex for years before he knew about the latest addition to the Nest family. Canary has been called a formidable competitor to Nest, but up until today there hasn't been much differentiating the two products in the eyes of many reviewers. To pull itself out of Nest's shadow, the company is focusing intently on security, rather than on being a more general-purpose internet-connected webcam.

Both Nest and Canary currently offer a similar amount of free access to video viewing. Their subscription services, which let customers rewind through stored video for a fee, are likewise also comparable. But Canary's new product and services scheme could give it the extra oomph it needs to stand up against the Nest Cam.

Canary's new $199 outdoor camera is a pill-shaped weather-proof device that attaches to a wall mount magnetically, though a more secure mount is available as well. Like the original Canary it features night vision. To operate, it must connect to Wi-Fi, which may limit how far outside a house it can be mounted, but it is cordless, unlike Nest's new outdoor camera. That means you don't need to run a power line outdoors in order to use it (though you do have the option to plug it in if you so choose). The battery lasts two months between charges and it takes about 2-3 hours to recharges.

Of course, as Sager says, Wi-Fi connectivity "is not perfect everywhere." To deal with dead zones, Canary lets customers know which areas of their house (or outdoor space) is best connected. The company has also devised a wireless mount that connects to 4G LTE through Verizon (of course this will come with a monthly fee paid directly to Verizon).

The wireless nature of the device has spurred Canary to build a variety of different kinds of fixtures like stake mounts so the camera can sit in an unassuming place like a garden. Though a garden camera seems crafty, robbers could get wise to the trend and start stealing them. And it's easier to avoid a camera's eye when there's room to come up behind it, as there would be in a garden. Of course, if a thief were caught on camera stealing the camera or perpetrating any other kind of activity, the victim would be notified instantly via Canary's service.

While the device itself is snazzy, the more eyebrow-raising offering from Canary is its new video pricing system. Starting in October, the company is rolling out a new membership system that will let customers access their last 30 days of video clips for $9.99 a month, or $99 a year. If you own two to three cameras, that subscription fee will be $14.99 per month, or $149 a year. Canary will also up its free offering, giving consumers without a plan access to the last 24 hours of video—an increase from 12.

Canary is also expanding its customer service program. The company has built out a team of agents to help people manage the aftermath of an incident, like a robbery. Not only will they retrieve the appropriate video, they'll also walk you through evaluating damages, and other processes for reporting lost or damaged property. The new Canary subscription package and device is designed with small businesses such as stores and restaurants in mind as well as consumers. Last year, Canary did a pilot with a range of small business including restaurants, offices, and stores to understand their product needs.

"Most of the security companies won't even sell to a small business," says Sager. He's referring to corporate security systems that often require longer-term contracts, like ADT.

By comparison, Nest's free plan enables only live streaming and the ability to view the last three hours of video captured. For $100 a year, you can access a 10-day video history at any time (additional cameras are another $5). If you pay the subscription fee, Nest will also notify you when it detects motion or sound or a human. For $300 a year, you can get a 30-day history, with extra cameras costing another $15 each. Much of the software between Nest and Canary has been historically comparable. So Sager is pushing for more services to assist customers after their home has been compromised—a place Nest may not be as keen to compete in.

"I think a lot of people in the industry have been distracted by home automation," says Sager. "We're not trying to turn your home appliances into robots." Certainly Nest with its Nest Cam, Nest thermostat, and Nest Protect has an interest in the future of the connected home. The company has been feverishly building out a network of products that Work With Nest. While Canary does connect to home hubs like the Amazon Echo and the Wink Home hub, Sager is more intent on expanding into the kind of over-the-phone assistance that big security companies like ADT provide.

Canary's approach might very well pay off. This has been a strange year for Nest. The company launched its outdoor product, but overall Nest Cam sales are said to be slowing. We don't know exactly how much the camera (originally known as Dropcam) is earning, but we know that it's contributing to Alphabet's non-Google business, which in 2015 earned the company $448 million, according to its fourth-quarter earnings. Analysts had expected that Nest alone would earn $627 million in revenue, according to Forbes. Then there was the infighting between Nest CEO Tony Fadell and Dropcam founder Greg Duffy, which resulted from a report on the unhappy work culture at Nest. Months later Fadell left Nest to explore other opportunities.

Canary has only been on the market for 16 months and the company is mum about sales. What we do know is that the company pre-sold 15,000 cameras, which at $199 a pop probably landed the company $3 million, including its Indiegogo campaign which pulled in nearly $2 million in funding through pre-orders. Canary is currently being sold in 10,000 retail locations as well as on Amazon and customers in 115 countries have hooked up a Canary. The company is also processing about 600 million videos per day.

The overall home security market is expected to be worth $47.5 billion by 2020, according to MarketsandMarkets. Meanwhile the install-it-yourself home security market like Nest Cam, Canary, or SimpliSafe is thought to be about $1.5 billion, according to NextMarket. To effectively compete here, Canary will need to address some of the problems it's seen early on: alerts. Users can be overwhelmed by notifications. Even though the company has made adjustments to notification settings, allowing customers to limit them, they're still a bit overwhelming. Nest Cam suffers from this too, and it's an issue that could prevent these sorts of simple home security companies from truly playing against more robust home security systems that tend not to bother homeowners and renters in their day-to-day life.

This gets down to the bigger question: Is Canary enough? With this new product, the company will need to prove that its cameras aren't just capable of competing with Nest Cam, but that they're sturdy enough to hold up against home security titans.

Weekend hobbies can help improve workplace performance, but only if they're chosen based on what you did during the week.

If you find Mondays particularly difficult, it may be due in part to how you spent your weekend. Lingering hangovers and lack of sleep aside, new research suggests that the hobbies we engage in over the weekend can impact our productivity during the workweek.

"Our main motive was to find out if people would find more benefit in certain activities based on their career," says the study's lead author, Kevin Eschleman, an assistant psychology professor at San Francisco State University. The study, which surveyed 350 U.S. workers in different locations and industries who work Monday to Friday, was presented at the 2015 Academy of Management Annual Meeting.

Eschleman adds that he was also attempting to "better understand how people can use their free time to allow them to come back and feel energized and hopefully get more out of their work."

Previous studies conducted by Eschleman already suggest a link between workplace productivity and hobbies outside of work. This particular study, however, sought to understand how people could better use their weekends in order to improve their workplace performance.

"Our most interesting finding is that these creative activities that seem to be somewhat important become very important for people who are doing a job currently that doesn't provide a creative outlet," says Eschleman.

He explains that those who work in fields that demand a significant degree of structure and regulation should seek a creative outlet during their spare time, while those who work in industries that promote creativity should seek a more regimented weekend hobby.

"Whatever activity you're doing in your free time should not be taxing you or demanding you in the same way as your job," says Eschleman. "If you've been working on a creative project all week, it's probably not in your benefit to do another creative project in your free time."

Creative hobbies, Eschleman explains, can include artistic pursuits such as arts and crafts, music, creative writing, and even playing video games, while non-creative hobbies might include volunteering, playing team and individual sports, or simply completing chores and housework.

Furthermore, Eschleman observes that not every workweek provides the same level of creativity, no matter the industry. Eschleman, for one, considers his research position to be a creative outlet, but the weeks he spends grading papers are the ones he seeks out more creative hobbies on the weekends.

"A lot of people don't realize how much variability there really is in their job," he says. As a result, he suggests having variability in the types of ways you recover and the types of hobbies you have. "If you're having an experience where you haven't been as creative in your job, you should seek those out in your free time," he says. "That's likely to improve how you feel about your job, and how you feel in your job," Eschelman explains."Our past research shows it might even improve your performance."

The recharging effect that hobbies can have, however, is only temporary, notes Eschleman, who suggests that weekend activities will only really impact the early portion of the workweek.

"It's usually about two to three days later that these effects fade out, which is why people need to engage in some kind of activity in the middle of the week," he says. "It's very similar to physical exercise: You need to continuously work at these things in order to experience the mental health benefits. It's short-lived."

With technology tightly entwined with business, transportation, and government, lawmakers need to work closely with the tech community.

During my 35 years of covering the technology industry, I have seen firsthand how companies have tried to keep an arm's-length relationship with the government. With some rare exceptions—the Pentagon's cooperation and collaboration with industry brought us the internet—Silicon Valley has generally tried to avoid federal and state bureaucrats. After all, the less the government knew about what tech companies were doing, the fewer legal and legislative issues the industry would have to deal with.

This dynamic no longer works.

In the mid 1990s, a group of technology heavyweights led by Cisco's then-CEO, John Chambers, and Kleiner Perkins venture capital firm partner John Doerr, along with various other tech leaders, began to realize the Valley would need the partnership of government and politicians for their vision of the future to be realized to the fullest.

Chambers and Doerr et al also foresaw the dramatic impact that the internet and mobile technologies would have on the U.S. and the world. Already back then, Chambers was percolating his ideas of connected cities and the Internet of Things (IoT).

These executives began evangelizing these concepts within the Clinton administration and at the federal agency level. They made an effort to educate elected officials on how technology would impact every level of government, and how it would transform our cities, businesses, and system of education.

To their credit, Clinton and Vice President Al Gore understood what Chambers and Doerr were saying. Clinton and Gore opened lots of doors for the tech leaders in Washington, giving them a chance to share their vision of the future.

At the end of the Clinton era, when Al Gore battled George W. Bush for the presidency, Chambers, Doerr, and other Silicon Valley leaders wisely kept up their efforts to influence both candidates. It became clear that whoever became president would follow President Clinton's lead and allow Silicon Valley leaders to continue pushing the tech agenda.

When Bush became president he created (at the urging of Chambers, Doerr, and Michael Dell) a special nonpartisan tech counsel to advise him. I was invited to join that council and weigh in on the role of tech in the future. The council was a large one and included tech leaders and tech educators from around the U.S.

Our first meeting with President Bush at the White House was very promising. He seemed to understand how important technology would be for the future of the U.S. I know he had spent many hours with tech leaders before the election to help him grasp their vision of the role that tech would play in our country.

But just six months after our first tech council meeting at the White House, 9/11 happened, and fighting terrorism became the main focus of the Bush presidency. So the tech council (and probably other special councils created to advise the administration) were put on the back burner. The tech council, in fact, was never revived.

While key tech leaders tried to get their message heard in a broader way in Washington, any efforts to significantly expand the tech agenda met with minimal success.

When President Obama entered the White House, many of these same tech executives, and some new and younger leaders, began pushing the administration to put more focus on the role of tech.

Obama has become more friendly to Silicon Valley, and has been proactive in understanding things like the Maker Movement, IoT, and mobile tech. During his presidency, we have seen the internet and the cloud become core assets within government, business, education, and consumer programs.

We're now approaching another presidential transition, and given recent technological advancements, whoever is elected needs to be more tech-savvy than ever.

During the keynote at Intel's Developer Forum a few weeks ago, Intel CEO Brian Krazanich invited Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE, up on stage to talk about GE's work to make cities more intelligent. BMW executives shared their vision for autonomous driving. Krazanich said BMW believes they will have a totally robotic vehicle on the road by 2021.

For smart cities and smart cars to succeed, a legal framework needs to exist to undergird the technology. Cities around the U.S. will be forced to create new forms of legislation in order to make it possible for autonomous cars to drive safely. In some cases, city governments will have to approve the placement of new sensors and smart cameras on streets and light poles, and at intersections to enable accident-avoidance systems.

Officials will have to understand how the new technology will impact every corner of their state. States will have to create new rules of the road for autonomous and self-driving vehicles on all streets and highways.

And federal officials at all government agencies will deal with unprecedented levels of tech integration in their areas of governance. They will need to understand next-generation technology and its ramifications as they're asked to regulate a world where technology must be applied equally and fairly within their purview.

Unless our elected officials become more tech-savvy, they will only slow down the role technology will play in their cities, states, and the broader U.S. We will need our legislators at all levels to grasp how technology will impact their constituents so that they can make laws that work for everyone.

Disgruntled customer or attacker? Here's how to tell and what to do.

Despite social media maturing as a platform, online services—mostly Twitter—are plagued more than ever by trolls looking to cause emotional distress in individuals. Yet while we think of trolling as a problem for individuals, brands are increasingly being targeted by trolls, too.

Some forms of brand trolling can be harmless and humorous, but there are also more malicious attacks, which if not dealt with properly, can potentially harm a brand.

"Your brand might not have 'feelings', but it does have a reputation," says Josephine Hardy, director of content and marketing at Acorn, The Influence Company. Hardy maintains:

Trolls attack the integrity of your brand, and thrive on the chaos they create. The worst thing that could happen to a brand from trolling is to have their reputation destroyed. It takes time and money to establish a positive brand image. As little as one comment can plant the seed of doubt in the minds of customers.

From protecting a brand to protecting its users, Fast Company asked social media experts to weigh in on best practices to fend off troll attacks.

1. Distinguish Trolls From Dissatisfied Customers

Trolls aren't always easy to spot. Sometimes they are purposely vague when they begin trolling in order to start a conversation on social media with a brand. Once the conversation gets going, their trolling really begins. Trolls shouldn't be fed (see more on this in the next tip), but "because it can be nearly impossible for a brand to be able to tell whether a poster is a genuine dissatisfied customer or a troll, we would advise that they should always respond assuming the poster is genuine," says Clare Groombridge, founder and director of boutique social media agency South Coast Social. "If the post is regarding a complaint, provide an email address for them to contact you or invite them to DM privately," she explains. "This should then indicate if the poster is genuinely dissatisfied."

One giveaway is that they generally won't always identify a specific problem in their comments, says Josephine Hardy. "An online troll is someone who will publish inflammatory remarks in a public forum with the intention of provoking an argument," she says. "It's true that dissatisfied customers might also try to provoke an argument, but usually they just want their problem to be heard and resolved."

2. Don't Feed The Trolls

Once you know you have a genuine troll on your hands, the most important rule to remember is to avoid getting into an argument with them. Trolls are generally impervious to logic and reason, which makes dealing with them rationally a virtual impossibility.

"Social media is a public forum, and anything your brand says is a reflection of the business," says Hardy. "Heated exchanges will not resolve the problem. Flag their comments as inappropriate and monitor comments from other individuals who respond to the troll."

But above all, says Hardy, "Avoid an emotional response at all costs."

3. Never Ignore Abuse Directed At One Of Your Followers—Or Critics

While you should try not to engage a troll, it's never okay to ignore the abuse a troll directs at one of your followers, even if they're an upset customer. A recent example of this unfolded on Facebook when H&M Sweden failed to take timely action against trolls who were threatening to rape and murder an H&M customer who was critical of the company.

"The social media team left [the] comments that were threatening to rape [the commenter] for over a month, even though they promised to remove them," Sofie Sandell, social media speaker and author of Digital Leadership, told Fast Company in a previous interview. "H&M should have removed the online assault immediately." Both H&M and Facebook were condemned for the attacks.

"A brand should always step in if they see any instance of a customer or follower being trolled on the social media feed of that business," says Groombridge. She notes that procedures for dealing with any instances of trolling should form part of a brand's social media policy–-and any abuse against another commenter should be acknowledged immediately.

"We generally advise that brands should allow negative comments against the business, providing no defamatory language is used, to provide an opportunity for the business to respond in a positive manner," says Groombridge. "However, in the instance of a follower being singled out and targeted in a personal, derogatory manner, we would advise it would be appropriate to issue a comment that such behavior will not be tolerated and similar comments will be deleted—otherwise [the brand] could be accused of complacency."

Groombridge says it's also useful to post a guide to online etiquette on a brand's social media channels so followers understand how any instances of trolling will be dealt with.

4. Approach Brand-On-Brand Trolling With Caution

Brands have figured out how to turn trolling into a positive–-by trolling each other. Brand-on-brand trolling is often good natured and agreed on by both parties in advance. The result is often humorous social media posts that are widely shared.

Still, brands should take caution, says Groombridge. "It's important to remember that in the vast majority of cases they are large, international brands such as Amazon, Mercedes, Jaguar, and Nokia, each with a dedicated, qualified social media team who will have spent time evaluating the impact and potential ramifications of their posts," she says.

Smaller brands without the resources and time to evaluate the tone and wording of off-the-cuff responses should avoid a spur-of-the-moment battle. A post that's clever and witty to one person could be tone deaf and offensive to the next. "There's always the potential for a trolling campaign to backfire," says Groombridge. "Our advice is, if you're not sure, don't post."

5. Actively Monitor Your Social Media Community

The final tip social media experts recommend is also one that, if followed, could help you prevent trolling problems in the first place. Experts recommend that brands constantly monitor their social media feeds to ensure instances of trolling are dealt with swiftly. This means taking time to read all the comments left on each post, says Groombridge.

While bigger brands will have the manpower and resources to have dedicated people available to constantly monitor all their social media profiles across Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and more, smaller brands can achieve the same level of monitoring thanks to specialized software applications available. Or, if they prefer a human touch, a professional social media agency can be retained to look out for trolls.

Nikon says image quality will be the killer feature in its rugged, $500 KeyMission 360 virtual reality camera.

When you think of major camera makers, names like 360fly, LG, and Ricoh may not spring to mind. Such newcomers have staked out early spots in the emerging 360-degree virtual reality video market. That changes today as Nikon launches its KeyMission 360 virtual reality camera.

Nikon teased the device way back in January at CES, but it's finally released all the specs, the price (about $500), and availability (October). It also launched a pair of traditional action cameras today. Aside from a famous name, what else does Nikon have to offer against over a dozen competing models?

"They're all about imaging, no question about it," says Steve Heiner, a senior technical manager at Nikon. "That's why we make the lenses in the cameras...We're into very high-quality imagery." It will be a few weeks before anyone knows if Nikon has met that goal, although it has put out some slick video samples.

The KeyMission 360 already has some tough competitors. Tech reviewers have been gushing about the image quality of the 360fly 4K (about $500) and the Kodak Pixpro SP360 4K (about $450), for instance. All three cameras offer 4K/Ultra HD resolution, although only the Nikon captures the full spherical view with no blacked-out sections (which often appear at the bottom of the video). That's because the KeyMission 360 actually contains two 20-megapixel cameras, one on each side under roughly 190-degree wide-angle lenses. (You can, however, connect two of Kodak's cameras to get seamless video, for twice the price.) Heiner brags that Nikon's in-camera image stitching, which combines the two hemispheres of video, is cleaner than that of other multi-cam models, which also remains to be seen.

The KeyMission 360 is a heck of a lot more durable than competitors: able to plunge 100 feet underwater for up to an hour, survive a 6.6-foot drop (onto plywood), keep out dust, and get chilled down to 14 degrees Fahrenheit. Of the VR action cameras that are waterproof, around 30 feet is usually the deepest any go.

Video from the KeyMission 360 can be transferred over Wi-Fi to phones, where Nikon's new Android and iOS app can handle basic video trimming and posting videos to YouTube, one of the few online sites that host 360-degree videos. Nikon also throws in a Google Cardboard-style headset that turns a smartphone into makeshift 3D goggles.

Despite the consumer-grade price, Nikon says it may end up selling a bunch of KeyMission 360 cameras to corporate and industrial customers. Since Nikon first teased the camera, several companies have contacted it with interest in using the camera for tasks like equipment inspections and shooting 360-degree training videos. "It took us by surprise," says Heiner. "In fact, we're working with a very large airplane manufacturer." Like everyone else, however, none of these companies have yet had a chance to actually try out the camera.

A product manager explains how trying to oversell his technical chops to Google helped him switch gears while interviewing at Etsy.

Last summer I was interviewing for product-manager jobs in New York City. My last job had left me feeling cornered into a specialist role at an enterprise marketing-software firm, and there wasn't a path for me to grow into or room to move up. So I started putting out feelers. I spoke to startups, big companies, and a few in the middle. The two companies I was most excited to interview at were Google and Etsy.

From An Ideal Product Manager . . .

I'd heard from friends at Google that the company really looked for product managers with strong technical backgrounds. I already knew my way around basic web development: HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but threw myself into leveling up my skills. I watched videos and took copious notes on how web servers, DNS, and web traffic load-balancing worked, and how databases store and retrieve information. The stuff was pretty dry for me, but I pushed through it, believing it would make me a stronger candidate.

I was so focused on giving the "right answer" that when I dialed into the actual phone screens with Google, I was no longer my relaxed, enthusiastic self. Instead, after every product question, I carefully asked for time to "jot down some thoughts." Then, with an interviewer waiting patiently at the end of the line, I quickly attempted to screen out any crazy ideas that came to mind and offered only reasonable ones—which sounded bland and tired the moment they escaped my lips.

Over two 45-minute phone interviews, I wasn't asked any questions that actually related to the technical information I'd studied. And worst of all, when I later asked my contact inside Google (who'd referred me for the role) why they'd passed on me, the feedback she said she'd heard was "lack of product insight and depth of answer." Ouch.

. . . To An Ideal Me

I was frustrated, but I knew I couldn't give up. I realized that if Google needed a super-technical product manager, that was never going to be me, and trying so hard to fit into what I thought they wanted from me was foolish. As a result, I never even got to show my strong side, which is building rapport with people and coming up with ideas spontaneously.

So when I went on to interview at Etsy, I knew I had to wow them, but also be my authentic self. I'm a big reader, so I studied the company, read its S-1 filings prior to its IPO, and looked through press clippings from the past few years. Then created what I like to call a "10x application," building a website called PoweredBySellers.com that conveyed my excitement for Etsy, my analytical abilities, and my technical prowess.

At the actual onsite interview, I didn't think too hard about my answers but just went with the flow. During a whiteboarding exercise where we analyzed a conversion funnel (something I'd never done before), I just grabbed the marker and started thinking out loud and having a conversation with my interviewer. While I may have thrown out some crazy ideas, I was also able to read cues from my interviewer and expand on the ideas he seemed most interested in.

I had a blast during the interview process at Etsy, and after I got an offer and accepted it, I found out that one of the biggest reasons why they picked me for the role was that I was clearly enthusiastic and would bring a lot of energy to the team. I'm so glad it worked out—it's been really great working as a product manager here at Etsy.

Three Less-Technical Lessons For Tech Interviews

All in all, this experience taught me a few things:

Play to your strengths. Your temperament, interests, skills, and knowledge make you uniquely qualified for certain roles and poorly qualified for others. Don't fight this. Embrace it. Lead the things you're good at, rather than spending all your time covering weaknesses.

Don't get too fixated on yourself. Leading with your strengths doesn't mean you don't carefully research the companies where you're interviewing in order to really get inside their world. Spending time reviewing the industry, product area, geography, and culture of potential employers will go a long way to making them feel like you "get them."

Keep your chin up. Job hunting while holding down a full-time job is grueling work, but remember that it's temporary and that it's still your job to convey a positive attitude when you're actually interviewing—even if you had the worst day ever. If you simply can't project positivity, be honest with yourself about that. You can either change the time of the interview or suck it up go in with a smile anyway.

Just remember: Interviewing can often be a stressful, highly scripted experience no matter how you cut it. So being as authentic as possible isn't always easy, but it's key to standing out for the right reasons. I was fortunate enough to learn that the hard way—and still wind up happy with the outcome.

Jason Shen is a product manager at Etsy and a partner at Ship Your Side Project, a six-week online bootcamp for tech professionals. He tweets as @jasonshen and blogs at The Art of Ass-Kicking. (This article represents Jason's views and not his employer's.)

Needing a change of scenery (or several) is as much about basic psychology as any kind of "trend."

For better or worse, so-called "job hopping" is commonplace these days. Workers are moving from one role to the next more rapidly than in the past, by one measure at a rate of roughly every two to three years. Some see that (probably groundlessly) as a quintessentially millennial habit.

Others chalk it up to the influence of the gig economy on the overall workforce, or to a mind-set that may have sunk in after the 2008 financial crisis, where navigating career instability became the new normal. And plenty of experts say job hopping still holds more risks than advantages.

But what if changing jobs continuously is at least as much about human psychology as it is about the zeitgeist or state of the workforce? To what extent do people just need some variety—and the single-company-career model of past decades was more an exception, psychologically speaking, than a rule?

Many Motivations

Before trying to answer that question, it's worth recognizing that there always are (and have always been) lots of individual differences in people's motivations to change jobs.

First, work by the researcher Tory Higgins and his colleagues has shown that people differ in their tendency to focus on the potential positives or negatives in life. Those who generally focus on the good stuff that can happen (optimists) will see the opportunities in new careers and embrace the challenge of going after them. People who generally focus on the problems that can arise in life tend to seek safety and security—they're more likely to stay put and settle into the jobs they have.

Second, one of the core personality traits psychologists have identified is "openness to experiences"—simply put, how people react to new things. If you're very open to new experiences, you'll often enjoy change. If you don't, you won't—change will stress you out.

This range of temperaments—between optimists and pessimists, and those who embrace change and those who resist it—is pretty constant. It isn't much impacted by vagaries in the economy or any other factor, and yet it still drives people's career decisions just as much as the material pressures of the moment might. But it's something that's easy to lose sight of amid talk of the "trend" of job hopping.

Addicted To The Learning Curve

Most people enjoy learning new things. When you first start learning, you get better quickly. When I was in my mid-30s, I took up the saxophone. In the first three months, I went from not being able to get a sound out of the instrument to playing recognizable songs with a sound that was recognizably a sax. After 15 years of playing, it's harder to gauge my improvement now.

The idea that you learn quickly at the beginning and your progress slows later on is what we call the learning curve, and it's real. It's also motivating at first; it feels great to know that your skills are growing so fast that you can see a difference from week to week. It can be much more frustrating to be stuck in a rut later on, feeling like you're making incremental gains at best.

One thing that job switching provides is lots of opportunities to pull yourself up the steep part of the learning curve. It can actually be addicting to continually place yourself in situations that force you to rise to new challenges. You might like that experience so much that you find yourself job hopping over and over again as a result.

Performance Versus Mastery

Education researchers have found that some students focus on performance, while others focus on mastery. A "performance orientation" reflects the desire to achieve some outcome. A "mastery orientation" refers to the motivation to learn and understand something. One is about results; the other, knowledge.

These two types of motivation follow us into the workplace. People who are performance-oriented enjoy making specific contributions. They create "bucket lists" of things they'd like to accomplish. Switching jobs provides lots of opportunities to tick items off the bucket list.

People with more of a mastery orientation tend to change jobs for different reasons—and may be less liable to job hop as a result. It can take years working in a particular area to become an expert, and this type of person really values that; career changes can be a big distraction.

Even if you stay in the same field or build upon your previous role, changing jobs unavoidably shifts your focus away from your domain of expertise, even if just for a while. You have to get used to a new corporate culture. You have to build relationships with new colleagues. That takes time. And while you're integrating yourself into a new organization, you aren't as focused on continuing to deepen your knowledge. So you're less likely to put yourself into situations that lead you to do that.

Finding A Calling

There's a third motivation for job hopping that speaks to basic psychological needs, too. It's hard for people to stay in a job just for the sake of advancing an organization's success. Many people in the workforce have seen their parents and older colleagues reach the end of their careers only to wonder what the sustained effort added up to. So they make career changes to stay engaged, clear space for the personal lives, and pursue side projects and passions outside of work.

Nor is this just a millennial thing, though it's often framed that way. Studies of happiness in the workplace suggest that people are most engaged by their work when they see what they're doing as a calling—connected to some greater purpose that's bigger than a paycheck.

Finding this sense of purpose in your work doesn't depend on the types of tasks it asks you to do. It relates to the contribution you see those tasks making to a larger set of goals. When you can see that connection at work, you're more likely to stay put—because the job change won't necessarily help you sustain the underlying mission that motivates your career.

But for many people in today's workplace, the job is just a job—so they leave it. And that's only human.

When you work at Microsoft, everything looks like software—even cancer and other threats to human life.

Microsoft's researchers don't talk about "curing" cancer. Instead, they are aiming to "solve" it.

The technology behemoth is best known for its operating systems and business software, and since 2014, under CEO Satya Nadella, it's focused much of its energy on plotting a future for mainstay products such as Windows and Office. But the company has also quietly built up a presence in medical research. In Cambridge, U.K., it has 150 scientists and software developers working on a wide variety of projects at its little-known "biological computation" unit, which includes a newly installed wet lab. The company says its eventual goal is to make cells into living computers that could someday be programmed—and even reprogrammed—to treat diseases like cancer. In the near term, it is building computer-modeling tools to assist pharma companies in drug discovery and development.

The lab is positioning itself at the intersection of machine learning, computer-aided design, mathematics, and biology. For decades, these disciplines were relatively disparate, but that's beginning to change with the advent of such fields as bioinformatics. Microsoft's team specializes in biological modeling, a still-nascent branch of systems biology that involves using advanced computation to map the complex interactions at work inside a cell.

"The field of biology and the field of computation might seem like chalk and cheese," says Chris Bishop, head of Microsoft Research's Cambridge-based lab, using a Britishism to convey their obvious differences. "But the complex processes that happen in cells have some similarity to those that happen in a standard desktop computer."

The emerging field of biological modeling caught the attention of the scientific community in 2012 when researchers at Stanford University developed the first complete computer model of an organism, the tiny parasite Mycoplasma genitalium. That research brought to light a problem that still plagues biologists: There is no shortage of cellular data drawn from experiments, but this data can't be properly understood until it can be brought in one place. Microsoft's senior researcher Jasmin Fisher describes this process as "connecting the puzzle pieces."

Proponents of the field see potential for a variety of medical uses. In response to the Stanford development, National Institutes of Health director James M. Anderson described these kind of computational models of cells as having the "potential to advance our understanding of cellular function and, ultimately, to inform new approaches for the diagnosis and treatment of disease."

Reprogramming Cancer

In exclusive interviews with Fast Company, Microsoft's scientists provided an inside look at two ambitious projects of their own that are currently under way that treat cancer as an information system that can be programmed. The company says these efforts are not connected to Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen's $100 million-funded Allen Institute for Cell Science, which is based in Seattle.

The first is an effort to model the computational processes that happen within the cell. The second, which is headed up by Fisher, is the development of a tool for scientists and researchers to create their own computer models of biological systems. Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca is partnering with Fisher's team on the latter project, dubbed Bio Model Analyzer, an effort to better understand drug interactions and resistance in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia.

Fisher, a neuroimmunologist and computer scientist by training, says she joined Microsoft Research in 2007 to focus on the deep, fundamental questions like: "Why do cells behave as they do?" and "Why do they decide to die, migrate, or divide?" Her team's work isn't data analysis, she stresses, but it requires thinking about biological mechanisms as programs. From there, researchers use computer programming languages to compare the biological processes of a healthy cell with the abnormal processes that occur when disease strikes.

For AstraZeneca's Jonathan Dry, the Bio Model Analyzer is shaping up to be useful in better understanding which patients will form a resistance to a drug therapy. If the company can better predict these outcomes, he explains, it could suggest a step-in drug of sorts that could be used to overcome the resistance. It is also potentially useful in determining which potential therapies are worth pursuing. "I'm hoping this is the beginning of changing the way we do drug discovery," he says. "We could ... test all our ideas in a system like this, and determine the experiments that will have the best chance of success."

Another project, led by the head of Microsoft Research's Bio Computation Group, Andrew Phillips, is an effort to understand how cells make decisions, including those that trigger cancer. The goal is to develop a programming language to model the relationships between the biological components, and potentially control how cells behave. If that's possible, Phillips says, a response could be triggered within a cell to fight the disease before it spreads.

Experts say this kind of a moonshot is plausible, but hurdles abound. "The dream is to model everything, no experiments required," says Gabriel Otte, a computational biologist and biotech entrepreneur. But he stresses that it's still very early, and these tools are most useful today to create high-level models of drug responses. Bringing this type of system to scale will require that researchers prove that it is both accurate and robust—and that will take time.

According to Phillips, another major challenge for his team is that computers were developed by humans; cells and the diseases that control them are the result of many, many years of evolution. That requires a computational model that can deal with an extreme level of complexity. 'You can think of computing of being a sequence of instructions like a recipe," he says. "In a biological setting you have a chemical soup."

Remember that movie where De Niro plays an intern? Paul Critchlow decided to try it.

Paul Critchlow had earned his retirement. It was May of 2015, and he'd worked very hard over a long life, and as a young man, he had even fought in Vietnam. He went on to report for the Philadelphia Inquirer and served as spokesman for Pennsylvania's governor. Finally, he'd spent the last 30 years at Merrill Lynch, half of those as its head of communications. Now that he was turning 69, it seemed like time for a rest.

The first feeling was euphoria. Paul went to Cuba with his eldest son. He walked Sag Harbor's beaches with his wife, the novelist Patricia McCormick. A decade younger than Paul, Patty's career remained quite active, and Paul began accompanying her around the world as she addressed audiences about her work.

But before long, Paul's euphoria had worn off. In its place was a feeling of irrelevance.

Paul attempted work on a memoir he had begun some years earlier, but he wasn't confident that his life story was worth telling at all. He had expected a few consulting gigs to materialize, but each fell through, for one reason or another. A friend told Paul he had to be more entrepreneurial, to create his own opportunities. But Paul didn't feel like an entrepreneur. He'd spent his life as a company man.

One day, Paul complained to Patty that the internet wasn't working, since he wasn't getting any emails. She replied that her own email seemed to be working fine.

Sometimes, when Patty was out traveling or writing at a coworking space, Paul was left alone. He had no grandkids yet, and his children were less available than he might have liked. His daughter, in her 30s, lived across the country. His younger son was in his 20s and lived nearby in Brooklyn, but seemed busy. Their responses to Paul's emails tended to be clipped, when they responded at all. Sometimes Patty gleaned intelligence on them from Facebook. But the social network seemed daunting to Paul, which he felt he was too old to join.

Months passed. Paul took to picking up litter each day along the side of the road in Sag Harbor. Neighbors saw him as they drove by, the gray-haired man in an orange safety vest, stooping to clutch another beer can in the pincers of a trash grabber.

One day last February, a friend invited Paul out for lunch. He had met Sally Susman some years before at a political fundraiser in Sag Harbor, and they'd hit it off. Sally, who in her mid-50s brought a mixture of toughness and warmth to her role heading up communications at the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, occasionally asked Paul to lunches like these, picking his brain for advice.

They met at Café Cluny in the West Village. Sally had a list of questions for Paul, which she diligently worked her way through. She was lobbying for a library renovation in Sag Harbor, which would require some political maneuvering. She picked Paul's brain about some of the struggles to Pfizer's image in the wake of adverse coverage of the high price of certain medicines.

Whether Paul noticed it or not, Sally was intensely nervous, because she was avoiding the real reason she had asked for a lunch with Paul. Finally she came out with it: "There's something I'd like you to think about, and it won't offend me if you say no." She swallowed.

"Would you consider being my summer intern?"

In Sally's recollection, Paul paused, as though to check his hearing aid. Sally quickly explained that she'd seen the Robert De Niro movie The Intern on a recent airplane flight, had been greatly moved by its portrait of a senior citizen intern working for an e-commerce startup, and wondered about making its concept a reality at Pfizer that summer. She had already cleared the idea with Pfizer's human resources chief (he had also seen the movie on a flight).

Paul had only seen the trailer for The Intern, but the idea had charmed him as a movie premise. And now, he confessed to himself, even more so as the premise for his summer. What would it mean to have a gray-haired man moving about amid a sea of youngsters? Who stood to learn more from whom? Why shouldn't the experiment be tried in real life?

"I just fell for it right away," he later recalled.

That night, he went home and watched the movie, which reinforced his excitement. Soon, he told his wife, his kids, and several friends.

"Don't call me to complain about being stuck in an office when I'm out on the beach," Patty warned him. A friend was less diplomatic: "Are you out of your mind?"

As the internship approached, Sally asked Paul what he expected in compensation.

"What do the other interns make?" he asked.

"$18.25 an hour."

Paul considered.

"That'll be fine," he said. His decades with Merrill Lynch left him without financial urgency. More to the point, he felt it was in the spirit of the thing to join the interns at their level.

To a certain extent. Wanting to impress his fellow interns and bosses, Paul went to Ralph Lauren and spent his entire projected summer earnings on suits.

Every summer, hundreds of college-aged students arrive at Pfizer for their first tentative steps into professional life—a scene echoed at countless other offices around the world. But the idea of a retired-age intern was unprecedented at any major corporation. Older people of course remain in the workforce in various ways, from the executive who just won't step down, to the Walmart greeter who simply needs the money. In 2013, a 71-year-old advertising professor tried an internship at a branding firm called the Richards Group, in an effort to hone his teaching acumen. But experiments like the one in The Intern seem to be without high-profile precedent.

Pfizer's corporate affairs division admits about 25 interns each summer, whose start dates are staggered. Most of them work in a windowless bullpen off a hallway on the 11th floor of Pfizer's corporate headquarters in midtown Manhattan. But it was decided that Paul, when he arrived, would sit in a less cramped, adjacent room, sharing a table with three other interns.

The first of those three to begin his internship was Connor Sink, a cherub-faced rising senior at Ball State University in Indiana. On his first day, a supervisor told him that he'd be joined in a few weeks by a senior citizen intern, like in the Robert De Niro movie. "That's really cool," said Connor, though he was a little puzzled.

Soon, Connor was joined at the table by the second intern, Sarah Rekenthaler, a gregarious rising senior at USC. Sarah had also heard about the experiment. "Are you worried?" Sarah asked. "I'm kinda worried," admitted Connor.

The following week, the third intern arrived: Sophie Spallas, a dry-witted rising junior also at USC. Together, the three went into full Google-stalking mode.

But "Paul Critchlow" wasn't turning up on social media, with the exception of a sparsely populated LinkedIn profile. Connor became fixated on Paul's service in Vietnam, for which he'd received a Purple Heart. Sophie was daunted by Paul's profile photo, in which she thought he looked like a dictator. This guy is so terrifying, she thought.

Sophie marched down the hall and barged into the intern bullpen, which by now had filled with about 15 people. "Who watched the movie The Intern?" she asked. A few raised their hands.

One of them was Shalini Sinha, a petite and energetic graduate student studying at Georgetown. At 24, Shalini was a bit older than the other interns. She was also from across the world, having grown up outside Calcutta, India. She had spent the first week of her internship feeling out of place, not getting the other interns' references to old American TV commercials (though she had seen The Intern a few months before). Exceptionally driven to succeed, Shalini mostly kept her head down, working in a far corner of the room, and frequently asking for more work from her supervisor.

Shalini listened to what Sophie had to say—the premise of the movie was about to be real, but at Pfizer!—but the rumor didn't interest Shalini at the time. "I just didn't register it," she'd say much later, laughing.

Paul stepped into Pfizer's lobby on Monday, June 6, wearing shoes he had shined the night before. After some agonizing over whether he might appear too formal, he had also opted to wear a tie and carry a briefcase. Paul had passed the drug test and completed the online modules required of all interns. But he was nervous. "I feel like the new kid in school," he said.

Sally and Paul—both seasoned communications professionals—insisted that publicity was never the central reason for the internship experiment, but, they said, it smelled like a good story. Shortly before Paul's internship began, they invited a reporter from Fast Company to shadow him through the summer.

In Pfizer's lobby, Paul approached the check-in desk for visitors and announced himself to one of the guards. "I'm here . . . as an intern," he said with a devilish grin.

The man checking Paul in did a double take. "Oh, an intern!"

Soon Paul made his way up to the 11th floor, where a supervisor showed him to the desk he'd be sharing with Connor, Sarah, and Sophie. The latter two were present.

"Nice to meet you, Paul," said Sarah.

"I want that spot," said Paul coolly. He was pointing at Sarah's chair.

Red-faced, Sarah stood immediately.

"I was kidding!" said Paul.

A look of relief washed over Sarah. "Oh, I didn't get it." She laughed nervously.

"But that's very nice. I'll remember that," said Paul. Then pointed at Sophie. "Actually, I want her seat."

The rest of Paul's day was a flurry of activity. An email from Sally to all the interns cast Paul as a mini-celebrity, and at a small reception at noon, he was swarmed by the other interns, as well as a few full employees. (Shalini got the briefest of handshakes, before Paul moved on to another group.)

Later, Paul took a small group of interns to a sushi lunch, where he shared a few war stories, metaphorical and literal. When he was about these interns' age, Paul was recovering from shrapnel wounds from an rocket-propelled grenade attack in Vietnam, he told them. "Wow, you've had an interesting life," said Sarah. "It kind of makes my Netflix after work seem pretty dry."

A meeting with Sally clarified the projects Paul would be working on through the internship. In many respects, much of Paul's summer would more closely resemble a consulting gig befitting someone of his stature. Paul would advise Sally herself periodically, and Paul would write a few pieces for a Pfizer website called Get Old, which attempts to portray aging in a more favorable light.

But as with any internship, the hope was that Paul would get as much as he gave—that he'd be learning something. Sally asked that Paul prepare to give a few presentations about his career to the other interns. That way, Paul would get a chance to hone his communication skills for an audience decades his junior. It was also decided that Paul's fellow interns would help him learn social media, a prospect that still daunted Paul.

Near the end of the day, Paul set a last tentative goal. An intern explained to him what a "man bun" was. "Maybe I'll try to grow one this summer," Paul deadpanned.

Shalini Sinha is not tall, and usually makes an effort to be at the front of group photos.

But on the second day of Paul's internship, when a supervisor herded a number of interns together for a photo, the group happened to coalesce with Shalini in the back, right next to Paul. They all stood still for a moment, smiling for the photo, Shalini craning her neck slightly to be seen. Then, once the photo was taken and the group's ranks began to break, Shalini steeled herself and turned to face Paul.

"Hi Paul, I'm Shalini," she said. "You probably don't remember me. Would you be my mentor?"

("All in one breath," she'd recall later. "I don't know what got into me.")

Paul was taken aback by Shalini's directness, but also charmed. How could he say no?

A few hours later, the two met for coffee in Pfizer's cafeteria on the second floor. Paul apologized in advance: He would have to run to a haircut scheduled in an hour.

Shalini explained that she'd had another mentor who had recently retired and grown unresponsive. She told Paul about an inner conflict: Shalini had fallen for New York ever since first setting eyes on (and Instagramming) the Empire State Building. She wanted to make her career here, but she worried about offending her father, who hoped she'd return to India.

Paul immediately sensed Shalini's strong drive to succeed. Paul shared his own stories about how moving to New York had also been a challenge, but had unlocked his own ambition. "You want to be the best at what you do, and there's no place where that can happen more meaningfully than New York."

Engrossed in their conversation, Paul missed his haircut.

Ambition had recognized itself. Asked later about what surprised her about her relationship with Paul, Shalini said, "how similar we are." Then she laughed, because she knew they couldn't be more different—in gender, in nationality, and, of course, in age. "We have literally nothing in common . . . but we're so similar."

"We're all interns. No one needs to be nervous," said Paul, sitting near the head of a table in a packed conference room.

It was a Tuesday in late June, a few weeks into his internship, and Paul was the one who had reason to be nervous. Today was the day of his first "lunch-and-learn" presentation. The group of 25 communications interns had filed into the room a few minutes before, having been promised free pizza.

Related Video: Pfizer's Senior Intern Program Is Retiring Old Age Bias

Though Paul had by now gotten to know a handful of interns fairly well, most remained strangers. All were about five decades younger, making this his first real test of whether he could engage a room full of millennials.

Paul started out by explaining that he and several interns had nicknames for each other. Connor was "Sink" and Sarah "Shrek," after their last names, while Sophie was "Soap."

"And I'm Critch," he said. "You can call me Critch." There were a few uncomfortable titters.

Paul pressed on: "My, uh, my old boss was a man named—he was the governor of Pennsylvania—Dick Thornberg. And he once said the 'threshold requirement' for success of any elected official is the ability to manage a crisis, and manage it well. And I think the same thing is true of corporations," Paul said.

Off to a rickety beginning, Paul's presentation soon picked up. Paul, it turned out, had been the governor's press secretary during the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident, a scene of frenzied panic. Paul and the governor had managed to keep cool heads and avoid a premature evacuation that might have harmed many people.

It was a riveting story. But soon the presentation lost its focus. Paul digressed into a lengthy discussion of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster and the ensuing public relations effects. (He had had nothing to do with that.) His PowerPoint slides, with their default color schemes and fonts, were somewhat dull. And since Paul had chosen to sit tucked away at one corner of the table, he was difficult for many in the room to see—just a gravelly voice to tune in to or out of while they munched free pizza.

Then he started to talk about 9/11. At the time, he had been the communications chief for Merrill Lynch, whose office stood not far from the Twin Towers. He was in a meeting that morning when he heard a loud boom. Turning in his chair, he saw a gaping, flaming hole in North Tower, knowing immediately he was witnessing a hostile act.

"I think my experience as a combat veteran helped guide me that day," he said. "I found myself detaching from my emotions, and concentrating on what needed to be done." Paul said that a crisis "separates the men from the boys, and the women from the girls."

Merrill Lynch's executive team ordered an evacuation of the building, and soon Paul and the other executives were making their way north to a contingency office space. As they moved through the streets, they heard a rumbling sound, and saw the spire of the second tower begin to sink. "The cloud was just about to engulf me and the others, when a huge wind came up from the river—in my mind, like the hand of God—and stopped the cloud about 100 feet from us," Paul said.

At the contingency space, there were reports of a gas leak. So Paul improvised, inviting his group of 25 or so colleagues into his West Village townhouse.

"Patty was so happy to see me; she took it all in stride," said Paul. Their son had stayed home sick from work that day, and their 18-year-old daughter had been slated to fly that very afternoon to begin college. But there was no time for a big family reunion, and soon Paul and his colleagues began running Merrill Lynch to the best of their abilities off of Paul's five landlines.

Here Paul's story became curious. A 60 Minutes reporter wandering the neighborhood that morning showed up at Paul's home, and Paul stepped out to give a comment. "Instinctively, I made a point to say two things, to try to sound confident."

Paul pressed a button, bringing up a new slide in his presentation, filled entirely with the following quote in large font, which he read aloud:

"Our priorities: first, to account for all of our employees. Second, to get the business up and running for the clients . . ."

Paul seemed to present this moment as something like heroic, but an awkward silence seemed to settle over the room. To some, Paul's focus on business in the midst of a national tragedy—amid big new questions about what mattered and what didn't—clearly seemed a bit tone-deaf.

Paul opened the floor to questions. He'd previously told Sophie, Connor, and Sarah that he expected to field a few light questions about how the crises he'd faced might differ in the age of social media. Instead, a tall, serious intern named Zack raised his hand, asking about Paul's comment to the 60 Minutes reporter.

"I understand the necessity of getting back to business," asked Zack, "but also Merrill Lynch is a company made up of human beings and, like everyone else in the nation, was grieving. So how did you toe the line between being bullish in the business sense while also being compassionate and realizing people needed to recoil from 9/11?"

Paul seemed taken aback by the question. "Those were the two handrails all along the way," he said, sputtering a few examples of how Merrill Lynch balanced its business with compassion, by offering group therapy sessions for employees, for instance. He continued for a minute, concluding, "It's a great question, but other than by giving some examples, I can't tell you . . ."

The room was quiet a moment. There was more to the story of Paul's 9/11 experience, a more personal story that, he told me later, he would have liked to have shared with the group, if he'd felt more comfortable.

But as it was, Paul's first lunch-and-learn had taken a slightly somber and strange turn, and no one seemed to know what to ask next.

Finally Sophie raised her hand.

"Yes, Soap!" said Paul.

"I was thinking," offered Sophie, "about how much different Three Mile Island would be today with social media."

Paul looked relieved. "Wow, that's what I wanted to ask you," he said.

As the summer progressed, Paul intensified his study of millennials, the way they thought, spoke, and behaved. His first subjects were Connor, Sarah, and Sophie, whom he took out to an Italian restaurant in the West Village. All three would remember that evening as the turning point in their relationship when they began bonding with Paul more as friends than colleagues.

At the office one day, the group got into a spirited discussion of memes and other millennial forms of expression. They taught Paul that to say "bye, Felicia" in a certain tone amounted to a curt and denigrating dismissal (though none were quite aware that the phrase had a source other than the internet). They taught him the phrase "on fleek," explaining that it expressed a certain overall goodness of a thing; for instance, one might utter it in praise of a woman's eyebrows.

One Thursday in early July, Paul was walking down the street, when he excitedly spotted a poster advertising the ride-share service Gett.

"$10 to go anywhere in Manhattan," read the ad. "That's tight AF. Right, on-fleek millennials?"

He snapped a photo on his iPhone and sent it proudly to the group, which responded encouragingly at the find.

Then Paul texted a follow-up: "What's tight AF?" (They told him.)

A few days later, Paul made good on his plan to confront his fear of Facebook. He sat down with Shalini in the cafeteria, while they pulled up his profile, which a colleague helped him create a few weeks before.

"You're so popular! You have like nine friend requests!" said Shalini.

"Well, it's just 'cause I'm new," said Paul.

The two began scrolling through Paul's news feed. Shalini taught Paul how to like a picture of his niece. "Your first like!" said Shalini.

But soon they encountered a post that caused Paul some anxiety. "This is the son of a friend," he explained, pointing to the post. Paul explained he'd been on Facebook earlier and had seen this young man, who does standup comedy, make a joke about a recent mass shooting.

"I don't want that on my Facebook," said Paul. "I don't want somebody to see that I accepted or allowed that. So I unfriend?"

"Social media doesn't work like real life," explained Shalini. "In real life, if you're sitting at a table with someone who's being mean and nasty, if people see you keeping company with that person, they'll judge you . . . On social media it's different. Just because you're friends with someone and he says something, it doesn't reflect poorly on you."

"But if I have agreed to friend somebody, and they enter my account, don't they see all this . . . trail of people talking?"

It became clear that Paul had conflated his news feed with his profile. He thought that everything he saw in his feed, his friends would see, too, and associate with him. The idea daunted him.

"No," Shalini said. She explained that his Facebook friends didn't see his feed. And no one would judge him for the behavior of his digital associates.

"Ohhhh," said Paul. "So it's not as frightening as I thought." He let out a relieved laugh.

Paul kept scrolling. "Fuck . . . Jerry?" he inquired of a humorous photo reposted by a niece. Shalini just laughed.

Paul scrolled further and further down his news feed, persisting even though he seemed to be growing fatigued. "I just want to see when it comes to an end," he said. He scrolled down once more, but the feed kept repopulating with fresh material, again and again and again. Paul's eyes widened. "Oh my God, it keeps bouncing up! How long does it go?"

Shalini explained there wasn't really an end to the news feed. It stretched back as far as the posting histories of his friends. "I love the kind of questions you ask," laughed Shalini. "They're so new to me. I never thought, when I keep scrolling, at some point it should end."

"How can it never end?"

"You start ignoring things, only looking at the things that matter to you."

"It felt manageable," said Paul. "I had a notion . . . that it was not infinite." He stared at the glowing laptop screen for a moment, looking daunted again. "But the rabbit hole never stops."

"It doesn't," said Shalini.

Paul thought a moment. Then the worry seemed to lift from his face.

"Now I've learned that . . . I can impose my own stop orders on things," he said.

Shalini smiled. "You can."

One evening, Paul stayed late at the office, when he saw Shalini alone in the intern bullpen, absorbed in extra work she had solicited from her supervisor. He muttered a few words to Shalini about the importance of striking a balance between life and work, encouraged her to think about imposing her own stop order. But Paul's words didn't seem to register. The two said goodnight, and Paul went on his way.

"Spokespeople come in all shapes and sizes," said Paul. It was a Thursday in mid-July, one of the last weeks of his internship, and this was Paul's second lunch-and-learn, a second chance to engage an audience of millennials with his story. Already, his presentation had a different vibe: Paul was standing at a lectern near the screen, not sitting in the corner.

"Here are some examples," Paul began, clicking through images of various spokespeople: the Geico gecko, the Aflac duck . . . and an unrecognizable young man with a giant, bushy mustache. "Yes, that's me," he said.

Paul had consulted with Connor, Sophie, Sarah, and Shalini on this presentation, and the results were apparent from the first slides. His PowerPoint game was strong, with stylish design and adept comic timing.

"Rule number one: Never lie," said Paul, launching into the next slide. "Here's a quiz. Say you learn that during clinical trials a prominent new drug is showing some serious side effects for its users. The trials are not completed yet. A reporter has been tipped and calls you for comment . . . What should you say to the reporter? One: 'It's none of your business.' Two: 'No, the tests are going fine.' Three: 'We're having some issues, but it's early.' Four: 'I'm not in a position to comment right now. I'll get back to you as soon as possible.'"

"Four," the interns all chimed in. The room was already on board.

As Paul's talk progressed, the audience only became more engaged. Paul shared further rules—about maintaining credibility, about the need to understand your company's culture, and about the art of keeping journalists at arm's length ("David, I apologize," he said)—with quizzes to illustrate each rule.

If Paul's first lunch-and-learn belonged in the Wall Street Journal, this second one would feel right at home on BuzzFeed.

The fourth quiz presented a scenario where a reporter calls you, the spokesperson of an imaginary company, claiming knowledge that the CEO is in trouble with the board of directors. The possible responses were "Let me get back to you," "No comment," "I never comment on rumors," and "That's baloney, the CEO's tight AF with the board."

The room full of interns erupted in laughter. Sally Susman, sitting along the wall, leaned over to a colleague. "What's tight AF?" she asked. The colleague blushed, then whispered a sanitized explanation.

When the presentation ended, it was met with strong applause, followed by an energetic question-and-answer session. And when it was all over, the tall, serious intern named Zack approached.

Zack made his right hand into a fist, then held it outstretched toward Paul. Paul looked at it for a moment, made a fist, and bumped it back.

On August 11, the last day of Paul's internship, I found him sitting alone at the desk he had once shared with Connor, Sophie, and Sarah. Just as their internship start dates had been staggered, so had their end dates, and Paul's was last. Paul had bid goodbye to each of them the week prior, just after they threw him a surprise 70th birthday celebration.

Among the few interns who now remained was Shalini, and she and Paul convened again in the cafeteria for a last meeting. Shalini had a hope that she might see Paul again later that summer, but Paul explained he'd be in Sag Harbor through Labor Day. "But I learned how to FaceTime," he said.

The discussion turned again to Shalini's striving. Though Paul had begun the summer a happy cheerleader for her ambition, he'd begun to have second thoughts after seeing her working late nights.

"We had a discussion," began Paul, "and Shalini openly stated, 'Work will be my priority. And my boyfriend knows it.' And I said, what's important is that you make a conscious decision, and not just drift into workaholism, which is what I did."

"Maybe by my thirties, I'll strike the right work/life balance," she said. "And also be CEO," she added.

"It's just being mindful," said Paul. "By the way, this is the pot calling other kettles black. I was not mindful."

And here Paul shared with Shalini for the first time the fuller story of why 9/11 was in so many respects a watershed day for him. It was true that he had witnessed horror that day, true that he had projected bullish confidence for Merrill Lynch, and true that Patty had been happy to see him at the moment he filed into their townhouse with 25 colleagues. But there was more to the story.

"We operated out of my town house for six or seven hours," he said, resuming the story from where he'd left off during his lunch-and-learn. "Then we went to another facility Merrill Lynch had, stayed there till three or four in the morning. I came home, and my wife said, 'Can we take a walk?' I said, 'No. I'm too tired, and I have to get up early and get back to work.' That was wrenching for her, because it was me saying to her that my job was more important than my family."

September 11, 2001, also happened to be Paul and Patty's 19th wedding anniversary. But Paul's choices that day opened a rift in their marriage. Soon, Patty packed up and left. They remained separated for almost two years. They were only able to heal once Paul chose to step down from the chief communications post at Merrill Lynch into a less demanding job. It had taken him almost his whole life to figure out how to balance his work and his personal life, and had nearly cost him his most important relationship. This summer, while scratching his itch to work again at Pfizer, he had still taken care to set boundaries, declining to log in remotely and carefully monitoring his hours.

Of 9/11 and its aftermath, Paul summed up: "That could have been the end for our marriage."

A few moments passed.

"Paul," asked Shalini. "Do you think I'm gonna become that?" Her own relationship with her boyfriend, she said, had at times been strained this summer by her work.

"Please don't," Paul said.

"Will you remind me when I become like that, not to be that person? Please remind me."

Soon it was time for Paul to pack up and head to Sag Harbor.

"I wish I could chill at the beach," said Shalini.

"You will when you're 70," said Paul.

"No, my goal is to become a senior intern when I'm 70."

En route to Sag Harbor, Paul stopped off with Sally at an event for Pfizer retirees. Together, they shared with the retirees the story of Paul's summer internship. For once in this upside-down summer, Paul found himself surrounded by a sea of gray-haired people like him.

Finishing his presentation, Paul opened the floor for questions from the retirees.

He called on the first raised hand he saw. The man of about 80 asked, "How can I apply for your position?"

Paul smiled and shrugged and turned to his supervisor.

Sally hasn't decided just yet whether Pfizer's senior internship will resume next summer. Several of Paul's features—his easy demeanor, his comfortable financial status, his pre-existing friendship with Sally—raise questions about how easily his success this past summer could be replicated. "We had a couple of unique conditions that were very favorable to a positive result," concedes Paul.

But as the number of restless retirees like Paul rises—the population of seniors in the U.S. is forecast to nearly double over the next three decades, growing from 48 million to 88 million by 2050—both Sally and Paul say that they hope his story can serve as a template for others. They argue there are real advantages to a senior internship over intergenerational mentorship programs that companies might already be attempting. There's just something about a "one-time, unique, neutral source of career advice," says Paul.

For his part, Paul says the internship invigorated him. Inspired by the response to his later lunch-and-learns (of which he delivered several more in his internship's final weeks), Paul says he has a new confidence that his life is worth writing about. He plans to throw himself back into his stalled memoir. He signed up for a Sag Harbor writers' group, which he plans to begin attending after he returns from a family vacation.

Paul says he also gained confidence about pitching himself for communications consulting gigs. "I think I got a sense that I can be entrepreneurial," he says.

I related Paul's story to the writer and director of The Intern, Nancy Meyers. It's "the kind I love," she said, "one with a happy ending."

Paul might contest that wording, because he feels like his story is far from over. "I now am closer to knowing where I'm going. And I'm ready to get started."

The scientists can remotely read emotions by scanning heart and breathing rates, but what does it mean for privacy?

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they've developed the first known system able to read people's emotions by bouncing wireless signals off a person's body.

Potential applications include more adaptive user interfaces as discussed in Co.Design. And while the team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab is taking measures to make it difficult to scan people's emotions without their consent, the experiment still raises questions about privacy that some experts say current legal frameworks may be ill-equipped to handle.

"The whole thing started by trying to understand how we can extract information about people's emotions and health in general using something that's completely passive—does not require people to wear anything on their body or have to express things themselves actively," says Prof. Dina Katabi, who conducted the research along with graduate students Mingmin Zhao and Fadel Adib.

The system, called EQ-Radio, works by generating a low-power wireless signal and measuring the time it takes the signal to reflect from various signals in its vicinity. Since the reflection time from people's bodies vary as they inhale and exhale, and as their hearts beat, it can distinguish humans from other objects that generate static reflections, according to a paper the team plans to present next month at the Association for Computing Machinery's International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking.

Then, the system learns to distinguish heartbeats, which cause faster but smaller changes in reflections, from breathing, which leads to slower but larger differences. It's roughly as accurate at measuring heartbeat time as a traditional electrocardiogram, say the MIT scientists, who are also working with researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital to study potential medical applications.

"We are able to extract breathing and heart rate in a very passive way without asking the user to do anything except for what he does naturally," says Katabi, who in 2013 was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" for her work on wireless networks.

Both sets of measurements are then fed into a machine-learning process that observes people in emotional states including anger, joy, and sadness, along with their heart and breathing rates. Once it's trained, EQ-Radio is about 87% accurate in recognizing emotions in people it observed during training and more than 70% accurate in others, the researchers say.

And while they emphasize that commercializing the system won't happen overnight, they do envision some potential applications. Similar systems might be able to help diagnose mental health conditions like depression or bipolar disorder, they say. Or, they could also be able to help movie studios and advertisers track people's emotional reactions to their work. Katabi says the technology is likely to find its way into tools made by Emerald, a company she founded that's also developing wireless tools to sound an alert if elderly people fall within their homes.

EQ-Radio is far from the first attempt to scientifically determine people's emotions: the medieval Persian physician Avicenna wrote around the year 1000 of diagnosing melancholia, similar to what would now be called depression, by measuring a patient's pulse, wrote Manuel Garcia-Garcia, a senior vice president for Research and Innovation at the Advertising Research Foundation, in an email to Fast Company.

And more recently, companies ranging from fledgling startups to giants like Microsoft and IBM have offered software to infer emotional state from facial expressions, spoken words, and written language. And while these tools can be useful to companies looking to understand their customers' emotional states or even to consumers looking to track their own feelings over time, there's also plenty of potential for abuse, especially if people's emotions, or simply their heart rate and breathing, are tracked without their consent or even knowledge.

"I think that any kind of nonconsensual monitoring of people's metabolism is a pretty serious invasion of privacy," says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. "I wouldn't be surprised if we see security applications for that, maybe even commercial applications, where people aren't even aware that they're being monitored, let alone having given permission for it."

Security officials could treat elevated heart rates as evidence of lying or suspicious behavior, or employers might shy away from hiring job candidates whose vital signs suggest potential health issues, he suggests.

The MIT researchers say their current prototypes are designed so they can only be used consensually: The existing version of the device prompts users to make certain distinctive motions that it can wirelessly detect, in order to effectively authorize it to begin tracking, says Katabi. And, she says, they've already developed ways that people can block such a system system from taking measurements where it's known to be in use, essentially by transmitting interference at similar frequencies.

"You want to block the information this wireless signal has by countering it with another wireless signal," she says.

But in some cases, like in employer-employee relationships, people might still find themselves coerced into allowing such technology to be used, potentially with little recourse under current laws, says Stanley.

"If an employer informed its employees that it was doing it, and was very up front about it and made it a condition of employment, I'm not sure whether it would be illegal," he says. "Even so, it's an extremely intrusive thing to do to your workers."

Looking out for your team members is great, but not when you're so overworked that you stop looking out for yourself.

It's pretty much a given that as a manager, you're going to have more high-level responsibilities than the employees you oversee. But feeling chronically overworked and stressed is not something you should just live with as a condition of your job.

"Stress is a normal reaction that helps us cope with challenges and threats in the environment, but we're only meant to experience it in short bursts," says David Ballard, assistant executive director for organizational excellence with the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C.

If you recognize these seven signs about yourself and your job, it might be time to seek out a change.

1. You're Snippy

Being a good manager means you make yourself "mentally and emotionally available to those you work with," says Jason Lauritsen, director of client success at Quantum Workplace, an employee-engagement software company in Omaha, Nebraska. But when you're overworked, you've got less to give; you're worn thin, increasing the likelihood of friction between you and others. Here's another way of looking at it: "It's like trying to download an app on your phone when the memory is full," says Lauritsen. "The only way to fix it is to uninstall something from your day-to-day grind to make some room."

2. You Forget Things

With so much on your mind, you're going to forget things from time to time. But unless your job eases its grip, your memory is likely only going to get worse. That's because when you're under stress, it's hard to think clearly and form new memories, says Julie Anderson, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Oregon. When you're overworked and experiencing burnout, you may have trouble concentrating and can become quite forgetful, she says.

3. You're Constantly Late

As a manager, you're in demand much of the workday. Poor time management can cause undue stress on you and your team. "If you're constantly running behind and on tight deadlines, the pressure never lets up, and it can feel like you don't even have a minute to breathe," Ballard says. "Sometimes this comes from an excessive workload, but other times it's just that you need to learn to manage your time more effectively."

4. You Live For The Future

Are you constantly telling yourself that things will get better after tax time, performance reviews, the merger, or the next big thing that's happening? "This is a form of denial," Lauritsen says. "When we feel overworked, it can be hard to muster the energy to really consider the circumstances and take intentional action to do something about it. So, instead, we try to make ourselves feel better by convincing ourselves that if we wait long enough, things will get better on their own."

5. You're Tired All The Time

Managing a team can be exhausting, but it can also be incredibly exhilarating when everyone is performing at their best. That being said, it's one thing to work hard, but it's something else entirely when you're completely depleted 24/7. If you're bowled over at work, you may experience sleep disturbances, Anderson says, which includes having difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep. "Some people become so tired and unmotivated that they sleep all day and don't feel rested," she says.

6. You Get Sick More Often Than Usual

Looking out for other people on your team is great, but not when you're so overworked that you stop looking out for yourself. "People with burnout tend to get sick easier and feel tired, nauseous or generally unwell more often," Anderson says. Increased stress hormones in your body, produced in response to feelings of overwork and being overwhelmed, can suppress immunity and make it harder to fight infections. Often the cycle is compounded when you neglect self-care tasks like exercising and eating healthfully, she says.

7. You No Longer Enjoy Your Job

Sad but true. "Turns out, there can be too much of a good thing," Lauritsen says. "Even when we love what we do, if we can't ever seem to catch up or get ahead, the joy quickly fades. The problem is that when we lose our passion for our work, it impacts our performance."

If your head is underwater and nobody is offering you a hand, it's time to start looking for a new job. The right employer will put your skills and leadership abilities to good use without taking advantage of you.

This article originally appeared on Monster and is reprinted with permission.

Bureaucrats haven't always done a great job of regulating tech, but new DoT guidelines set a clear path for driverless vehicles.

For the last few months, Tesla, GM, Ford, Uber, and every other company seeking to play a part in the future of autonomous transportation has been anxiously awaiting the Next Big Thing, which would either stimulate or slow the budding industry. Well, it arrived on Monday, and while it's not exactly a sexy product, it was exactly what the companies had been hoping for: A set of federal guidelines that offer a road map for manufacturers, without getting in the way of the rapid development of self-driving cars.

The guidelines released by the Department of Transportation lay out what the government expects from manufacturers as they build and deploy autonomous cars. Eleven of the guidelines offer broad suggestions for how companies should address concerns such as privacy, cybersecurity, certification of new features, and how drivers are educated about their autonomous vehicles. Importantly, four of the guidelines offer requirements that carmakers must consider when designing the autonomous technology itself.

Regulation of technology is a tricky thing—again and again, the U.S. government has found itself desperately trying to catch up to tech developments. Recent examples of this include bitcoin, high-bandwidth internet access, apartment sharing (a la Airbnb) and ride hailing (a la Uber). This DoT document, however, suggests the federal government is not going to get caught unawares by the autonomous ambitious of car and tech companies. As government documents go, it's a pretty piece of penmanship, covering the most critical consequences of the move from cars that are driven by humans to cars that drive themselves. It does so clearly, managing to simultaneously guide and encourage. And it makes clear that one thing matters more than anything else to the federal government: that autonomous vehicles are safe.

Detroit's traditional automakers welcome that emphasis. This summer I had the opportunity to spend some time with GM president Dan Amman and strategy chief Mike Ableson, the execs overseeing the company's forays into ride sharing and autonomous vehicles. Amman, who closed the deals to invest $500 million in Lyft and acquire Cruise Automation for $581 million, told me, "Proving safety will be a key to the development of autonomous."

Ableson, meanwhile, explained that GM has spent lots of time discussing safety issues with the National Transportation Highway Safety Administration, a DoT division. "NTHSA has been working very constructively," he said. "They've talked to us and other companies. They're getting lots of input from the states as well as outside experts."

I asked Ableson if he felt that the death of a Tesla driver in May would slow down the timetable for the mass-market introduction of autonomous cars. "Not inside General Motors," he said. "Safety is always our highest priority." I heard this refrain again and again at GM. "We want to be known as industry leaders in safety," CEO Mary Barra told me. "When we put a vehicle out on the road, we've done everything to validate it using our 100 years of experience."

Of course, this from the same company that installed a faulty ignition switch in Chevy Cobalts and other cars, leading to well over 100 fatalities. And that's why the real beneficiaries of the new DoT regulations are people—the actual human beings who will be shuttled here and there by self-driving vehicles.

Autonomous cars promise an enormous societal benefit: namely, a significant reduction in the number of automotive fatalities. As President Obama noted in his Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed on Monday, auto accidents claimed the lives of 35,200 people in the U.S. last year. The DoT regulations lay out a clear path for carmakers to follow if they want the government to certify the safety of the autonomous cars they hope to deploy. Whoever wants to lead the way to autonomous—Detroit manufacturers, Silicon Valley upstarts, or some combination of the two—will have to hew to the rules of the DoT road.

Unicorns' mergers, acquisitions, and initial public offerings are trending up, but remain well behind last year's exit activity.

For the first time since 2014, there were more VC-backed billion-dollar company exits than there were new private VC-backed companies valued at over $1 billion entering the market. In other words, more of those $1 billion-plus unicorns exited than entered the tech industry during the first half of the year.

This may be in part due to unicorn activity in 2015, which saw far more companies reaching billion-dollar valuations than it witnessed successful exits at that value.

According to CB Insights' Global Tech Exits Report for the first half of 2016, there were 1,590 tech company exits between January and June, including mergers, acquisitions, and initial public offerings (IPOs), representing a 17% drop compared with the first half of 2015. Although the percentage of decrease is small, these startup and early-stage companies impact the global economy by driving employment, wage growth, and productivity.

Exits for tech companies grew in the second quarter of 2016, but still lag far behind the surge of exits that took place the previous year. This finding is consistent with an earlier study conducted by CB Insights in partnership with KPMG International, which suggested a slowdown in VC funding.

After a sharp decline in the second half of 2015, however, the number of tech company exits are again trending upward, but still pale in comparison to the 2015 peak.

Furthermore, of those exits with disclosed valuations, 53% of exiting companies were valued at $50 million or less, and another 26% were valued between $50 million and $200 million. Only 4% of 2016's exiting companies were considered unicorns, or valued over a billion dollars.

"It's a challenging time for VC investors," Brian Hughes, a partner for KPMG in the U.S., told Fast Company when the previous study was published in July. "Many investors are holding back to see how these uncertainties shake out, while others are focusing on companies they see as having a solid foundation and growth plan—like Uber, Snapchat, and Didi Chuxing," he said.

Who's Buying Up Tech Startups?

IBM and Microsoft emerged as the most active tech company acquirers in the first half of the year, including IBM's $100 million acquisition of Resilient Systems, and Microsoft's $500 million acquisition of Xamarin.

During the same period Intel Capital led all corporate venture capital arms in exit activity, including Nexmo, iControl Networks, and Rocketick. Trailing close behind in exit activity was Google Ventures, whose CEO stepped down recently, followed by Salesforce.

The flurry of acquisitions from major tech giants is in part due to a recent surge in interest into the artificial intelligence sector, which, according to CB insights, has become a hot commodity for organizations like Google, SalesForce, and IBM. In fact, M&A activity in the sector is up sevenfold since 2011.

Locating The Exits

The United States still leads the world in tech company exits, followed by the U.K., India, Canada, and Germany. Internet-focused tech companies dominated this year's exits in the U.S. so far, accounting for 59% of all exits, followed by mobile technology with 15%, non-internet software, computer and hardware services with 11%, and non-internet/mobile software with 10%.

In fact, all of the top five countries in the tech exit rankings by CB Insights have seen its exit activity dominated by the internet sector, with the mobile sector accounting for more than 22% of Canada's and India's tech exits in the first half of the year. However, mobile exits have been trending downward internationally, reaching a five-quarter low in the second half of 2016.

This may be due in part to the fact that app downloads are in decline, dropping 11% between February 2015 and February 2016. The typical smartphone user now spends about 88% of their app time using just five applications, according to marketing technology company Fiksu.

Unsurprisingly, California led the way as the state with the most tech industry exits in the first half of 2016, following by New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Florida.

A majority of venture-backed exits in the first half of the year were seed-stage startups, comprising 52% of all VC backed tech exits. This represents a significant increase for early-stage exits, which only made up 25% of VC-backed exits in 2015. In fact, 61% of companies that exited in the first half of the year had raised less than $10 million, and only 5% raised more than $100 million.