Monday's alert asked New Yorkers to be on the lookout for suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami with little information. What can be done differently?

New Yorkers had a particularly rude awakening on Monday morning, when phones across the city blared with the earsplitting tone of an emergency phone alert, which until now have been reserved for extreme weather notifications and Amber Alerts. But this time, phones displayed the following banner message—the first of its kind—urging people to look out for the suspect behind the bombings in NYC and New Jersey:

The alert—delivered at around 8 a.m. EST—was criticized, deservedly so, for a few reasons, including the vague directive ("see media for pic") and the lack of a link or other identifying information beyond suspect Ahmad Khan Rahami's name. Since this was an unprecedented use of the emergency alert in NYC, its efficacy is hard to parse: Though Rahami was tracked down a few hours later, the agency responsible for sending out the alert could not say for sure if it helped authorities make the arrest.

"I still have not heard anything specific about what role the alert may have played in ultimately catching the suspect, but we think that sharing the information across all possible city platforms was helpful as the suspect was identified within hours of the public being notified through a variety of channels," NYC Emergency Management Department press secretary Nancy Silvestri told Fast Company. The NYPD, which put in the request for the alert, did not respond to requests for comment.

One thing, however, we can all agree on: Even if this type of alert delivers on getting the word out, the content needs work.

The mechanism behind the alerts in question is the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) system, which is regulated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and sends geo-targeted messages to mobile phones. That's why yesterday's alert did not include a link or photo of Rahami: FEMA has imposed strict limitations on the technology, which means the alerts are limited to 90 text-only characters.

"It's almost obvious to say, 'Gee, shouldn't the picture pop up with the alert message?' That's just what we've become accustomed to in our media-saturated, smartphone-carrying society," says Bob Iannucci, a Carnegie Mellon professor doing research on improving the WEA system. "The fact is, WEA was engineered based on assumptions about what the network was 15 years ago." When WEA was being developed, Iannucci says, it was "relatively straightforward to make WEA piggyback on the same sort of mechanisms that carry text messages." In the time it took to get wireless carriers and public TV stations on board, the system became more dated (WEA has only been delivering messages since 2012).

This helps explain why FEMA also prohibits the inclusion of links in WEA messages. "The idea was not to overload the network with all of a sudden a million people going to find stuff," notes Martin Griss, another CMU professor working on WEA research. "By not having a link, you're not encouraging them to go poking around." As Griss noted, this is a quaint notion when Google is now just one click away. People are going to search for more information regardless—so why not just provide it within the alert?

According to Motherboard, it's not just FEMA that is concerned about overtaxing networks; even companies like Apple expressed concerns about "congesting wireless networks" in a filing to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) earlier this year.

One update proposed by the FCC that is feasible in the short term is increasing the character count of the alerts form 90 characters to at least 280 characters, and possibly up to 360 characters. In studying the current state of the WEA system, the CMU team (which includes Iannucci, Griss, and their colleague Hakan Erdogmus) is advocating for a new interface that would better reflect how we consume information in this day—say, an app with a stamp of approval from Homeland Security ensuring the messages are authentic. "Once it is cast as an app, the possibilities of having it evolve more quickly and incorporate rich media and so on becomes something that's much more realizable," Iannucci said. WEA alerts could then be made to look more like what users are familiar with, like a web page.

The FCC will be re-evaluating current WEA rules—specifically, the character count and the exclusion of images and links—next week, on September 29, when it holds an open commission meeting.

Another improvement, Iannucci explained, would be to tweak the structure of alerts to easily update as a situation unfolds—a concept the researchers call situational awareness. During an earthquake, for example, there might be a slew of messages as the situation unfolds—maybe even some that conflict with previous messages. (In the case of yesterday's incident, the alert could have automatically updated once Rahami had been captured.)

"We studied a mechanism that would allow the phone to essentially digest this series of messages and only present the most current situational view," Iannucci said. "The scenario is: A family is getting ready to leave their house. One of the parents pulls a phone out, looks at it and says, 'Which way am I supposed to go?' And the answer is there. They don't have to sift through five, 10, 15 messages and, in a state of panic, try to figure out which is the most recent. Instead, the phone does that." When the researchers tested a prototype with human subjects, they found that this approach was far simpler to understand than the existing pop-up message format.

The issue, it seems, is not technological limitations so much as rules imposed by the powers that be at FEMA and wireless carriers, who might protest changes to WEA's current form. "The phone could do a lot, and the new app could do a lot," Erdogmus said. "We proved that this is actually quite feasible from a tech perspective. But how you make even those small changes in the end-to-end, complex workflow is a matter of negotiation and policy."

More women are investing in each other's success, writes Sallie Krawcheck, putting gender parity in closer reach than ever before.

The "queen bee" is dying. You've heard of her, right? She's that senior businesswoman at the top of her field who didn't help other women get ahead—or, worse yet, actively worked against them. Was she just a natural bitch? It's easy to see her that way. After all, this character is as much a crude stereotype of the modern workplace as a real pattern of behavior tracked by researchers.

But consider this: Perhaps she simply knew that there was only one seat—maybe two at best—for women at the executive table. Maybe she watched the women before her settle into middle-management purgatory, and she didn't know another way forward. It's even likely that over the course of her career she grasped how, as researchers now know, women who fight for other women are often penalized for it.

The business world is finally changing, though, and the queen bee's reign is ending. Women now have more opportunities and incentives to support one another than ever before—which makes gender equality in the American workplace a high likelihood sooner than you may think. Here's why.

1. The Business Case Is Harder Than Ever To Ignore

The numbers don't lie, and they're piling up. In one McKinsey study, gender-diverse companies were found to be 15% more likely to perform better than their competitors. In this joint Intel and Dalberg report, tech companies with even one female leader had a 13%–16% higher enterprise value (once you control for age, size, profitability, and revenue) than firms with all-male leadership. Or take this one from First Round Capital, which notes that their investments in companies with female founders performed 63% better than companies with all-male founding teams.

And that's not to mention research on gender diversity from Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Catalyst, and the World Economic Forum all showing similarly positive findings. As the evidence mounts, we're heading closer to a tipping point.

Business leaders who still believe (unconsciously or not) that having women in leadership positions doesn't add anything to the bottom line are going to have a harder time getting their boards, investors, shareholders, and even their employees to believe that they aren't leaving performance gains on the table. (Those recalcitrant execs may begin to even sound—dare I say it—emotional about their insistence to the contrary? Even irrational?)

2. Women Are Building Their Own Tables, Not Just Asking For Seats

Technology is bringing down the cost of starting businesses so much that more of us are finding entrepreneurialism within reach. It's not just the declining cost of technology, either—it's the declining costs of so many things, from short-term office leases and video conferencing that cuts down on business travel to the plethora of administrative functions you can now outsource cheaply.

According to a recent American Express report, the number of women-owned businesses in the U.S. has grown five times faster than the national average since 2007. Also awesome? Of the 3.5 million women-owned companies launched between 2007 and 2016, 78% are owned by women of color. And on balance, a BNP Paribas report finds, women's businesses are outperforming those run by men.

Freelancing is also becoming a more viable career option for many of us (53% of full-time freelancers are women). Women are more likely than men to freelance for extra income, schedule flexibility, and to escape office dynamics. So rather than trying to adapt to make an often unaccommodating structure work for us, we're going solo and working on our terms—successfully.

3. One Woman's Success Clears The Way For Others

Today, women are nearly four times more likely than men to believe we won't advance in our careers because of our gender. Yikes. It's the old "you can't be what you can't see" phenomenon.

Looking at this in reverse, though, you can be what you can see. So expect that statistic to go down. When I see someone like me who's successful it offers me a roadmap. Visible, successful female entrepreneurs encourage other women to become entrepreneurs: Go Jessica Herrin; go Alli Webb; go Julie Wainwright! Visible, successful senior managers encourage other women to become senior managers: Go Indra Nooyi; go Ginni Rometty; go Meg Whitman!

This is also important because so many people who hold the purse strings out there—venture capitalists and other funders—fall prey to "pattern recognition." It's just a fact of human psychology, but it causes them to back businesses that look sort of like the last business they funded, and to fund entrepreneurs who look sort of like the last entrepreneur they funded. Corporate executives do it too; again and again, I've seen them promote people similar to them. But as more successful women become ever more visible in the business world, it chips away at this self-reinforcing bias. Fortunately, that's already well underway.

4. More Women Are Recognizing Their Power To Change Things

Gloria Steinem has argued that women are the only demographic group that grows more politically and socially radical with age, and it's true. I can't tell you how often I'm with senior women who express disbelief that we haven't made more progress so far. A handful of factors are finally turning that frustration into real leverage. Women in the U.S. control $5 trillion in investable assets, direct over 80% of consumer spending, and make up just more than half the U.S. workforce.

At the same time, and perhaps because of this, the old economic systems that wrapped up our worth in a ring and husband are starting to crumble, as the journalist Rebecca Traister points out; at an unprecedented level, single women are now steering the conversation on issues like the minimum wage, paid family leave, affordable childcare, and college that doesn't bury students in debt.

Combine this with the increased transparency that technology brings, and now we can also choose to direct our substantial resources to work for companies that treat us well (for instance, by using Fairygodboss to compare companies' employee policies), buy from companies whose values align with ours (BuyUp Index), and/or invest in companies with more women in senior leadership (my own Pax Ellevate Global Women's Index Fund).

This may be just the beginning. More and more, women are putting serious money behind other women and initiatives. This summer, a group of Wall Street women funded the movie Equity (about women on Wall Street); and I've recently announced a new round of financing for my company, Ellevest (a digital investment platform for women), that includes both traditional institutional providers, as well as successful women like Venus Williams; Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments; and women investors at Broadway Angels and Astia Angels. These are just a few promising first steps to women consciously using their financial power to help other women advance.

As the "queen bee" paradigm ends, so does the learned helplessness with which she accepted corporate America as it was. Women are already investing in one another's success at a level unprecedented in human history. It's shaping up to be one of the most powerful and disruptive forces in business and society today. The dividends are adding up faster than you might think. And it's about damn time.

Sallie Krawcheck is the CEO of Ellevest, a digital investment platform for women. She is the Chair of Ellevate Network and the Pax Ellevate Global Women's Index Fund.

Leveraging everything from advanced hardware engineering to AI, this startup wants to give you control over your world's sounds.

I'm trying to listen as Doppler Labs cofounder and CEO Noah Kraft walks me through his company's new smart earbuds over the din of a crowded restaurant, but the cacophony of chattering diners and clanking silverware is overwhelming. I can't make out a word. Then, all of a sudden, the background noise disappears. Kraft's voice comes in loud and clear.

It feels a little magical—even though we're not actually at a restaurant. I've been getting a demonstration at Doppler's San Francisco headquarters, and all of that background noise was a simulation, pumped into my ears—and then muted—via a cobbled-together tangle of earphones, microphones, circuitry, and other components that are strapped to my head and draped around my neck. (Wearing the contraption, I look a little like Frankenstein, Kraft cheerfully informs me.)

In November, Doppler plans to take this trick out of the lab and ship a pair of sleek, wireless earbuds embedded with the same technology—designed to allow anyone, anywhere to neutralize the hubbub of a real restaurant. Paired with a smartphone, the $300 Here One buds will stream music and answer calls. They will also be capable of remixing your world's audio in a variety of subtle and sophisticated ways, muting specific sounds—a baby's cry, your talkative colleagues—and using cues such as your location to suggest appropriate filter settings. The buds will be able to add effects such as reverb to live music, making a neighborhood club sound more like a concert hall. If you are at a concert hall, they'll be able to overlay the music with streaming commentary, or even let you listen in on a performer's backstage conversations. You'll even be able to tune into a ballgame while you're on a run without blocking the sound of oncoming traffic.

What this all adds up to is a new form of augmented reality—Doppler likes to call it "layered listening"—that has a shot at being both practical and socially acceptable. Google Glass flopped, in part, because wearing a computer display in front of your eyes turned out to be an awkward, off-putting way to interact with the rest of society (a lesson for Magic Leap's upcoming headset and Microsoft's Hololens). But people already walk around with buds in their ears—why not exchange them for a pair that's designed to enhance the world, rather than simply tune it out?

Kraft and Doppler's cofounder and executive chairman, Fritz Lanman, are leading a 65-person team that's scrambling to launch Here One in time for the holidays. Their ambitions, however, are lofty enough to keep the company busy for years. "We want to be the future of computing," Kraft declares. "If Microsoft put a computer on every desk, and Apple put a computer in every pocket, at Doppler Labs, we want to put a computer, speaker, and microphone in everyone's ears."

Now Doppler just needs to integrate a complex array of hardware and software technologies into earbuds that are a mere 20.1 millimeters tall—less than the diameter of a nickel. Over the summer of 2016, as the company entered the home stretch of its race to ship Here One, I followed along during numerous visits to its headquarters.

Even if Here One is everything that Doppler wants it to be, it's not a given that consumers will buy it in droves. Research firm IDC thinks that the overall wearable-computing business will grow at a 20% annual clip over the next four years, but it expects that most of the action will happen on the wrist, in the form of smartwatches and fitness bands, such as the Apple Watch and Fitbit. Its forecast lumps earwear such as Here One and Bragi's Dash into a catch-all "other" category that it expects to account for a measly 3% of the market in 2020. That hasn't stopped Doppler from racking up $50 million in funding, from major venture-capital firms as well as music-industry bigwigs such as David Geffen, Quincy Jones, and "Uptown Funk" creator Mark Ronson.

For Doppler investor Kevin Efrusy, the company's technological aspirations were only part of what made it attractive. "What was more interesting, honestly, was how they defined the problem," says Efrusy, who, as a partner at Accel, led investments in Facebook and Groupon. "Noah and Fritz looked at the world through a different prism. It wasn't building a better headphone. If it was, I wouldn't be excited. They said, 'Let's not just think about music or headphones, let's think about your overall experience in the world around you, and how you make that a whole lot different and better.'"

You only have to spend a little time with the red-bearded, 29-year-old Kraft to understand why he's been successful at pitching the promise of his company and product. He's an infectiously enthusiastic salesman, the kind of person who grows only more animated when he's short on sleep—which, as the CEO of a startup working furiously to hit its product-launch timeline, he often is. "I lose my voice every day by about 5 p.m.," he says.

San Francisco doesn't exactly suffer from a shortage of hyper-energetic young tech CEOs, but Kraft, unlike most, is not a born geek. After studying international relations and history at Brown, he stumbled into the movie business. In 2012 and 2013, he was a producer on Bleed for This, a boxing drama executive-produced by Martin Scorsese that will finally hit theaters in November.

That delayed gratification "is one of the reasons I had to leave film," Kraft confesses. "We shot this film in 2012 and 2013, and then we handed it off to a studio that was like, 'We'll release it when it's ready.' I can't do that." One reminder of his Hollywood past is the ostentatiously decorated championship belt signed by Vinny Paz, the real-life boxer who inspired the film, that's framed in Kraft's office. Another is the fact that when he wanted to capture Doppler employees talking about their work for a promotional video, he directed the interviews himself and presented them in lush black and white.

More than Kraft's film career, it was his lifelong love of music that led him to tech. The founder of several rock bands over the years, Kraft took time during his film-producing stint to work on a friend's electronic-music tour, helping to pick clubs and promote shows. As the tour went from venue to venue—usually small rooms with subpar acoustics—he was struck that his friend's music sounded different in every space. "What if we could curate how we hear the world?" he recalls asking himself. "What if we could give ourselves more control?"

By 2013, Kraft had the glimmer of a smart-earware concept in mind, but knew that he couldn't make it a reality on his own. He floated it by a music executive friend, who put an acquaintance in the tech industry on speakerphone to bat it around.

That tech guy was Fritz Lanman, 35, a former Microsoft executive. Lanman had helped engineer Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook in 2007—a move that prompted plenty of skepticism at the time, but soon looked prescient.

After the Facebook experience, it dawned on Lanman that, rather than channeling Microsoft's money into promising companies, he might do a lot better investing his own. So he reinvented himself as an angel investor. In the years that followed, he became a walking encyclopedia of startup knowledge by working with more than 70 companies to date, including Pinterest and Square. He also cofounded Livestar, a recommendations engine acquired by Pinterest in 2013.

When Kraft and Lanman met, Lanman had just moved to New York and, along with his investing activities, was serving as executive chairman of two startups based there, ClassPass and Dwnld. A meeting over brunch turned into hours of discussion as the two riffed on Kraft's concept for a new kind of augmented reality. "Everybody at the time was focused on the eyes, because Google had launched Glass," Lanman says. "Noah was just so focused on the ears, because he's a musician."

As they explored the possibilities of a wearable for the ears, the new acquaintances "kind of mind melded," recalls Lanman, who, in contrast to Kraft's vibe of exuberant wonder, has more of a seen-it-all demeanor. He was struck less by Kraft's lack of tech-industry bona fides than his potential: "I've probably met 800 entrepreneurs. You get to pattern-match the ones who won't take no for an answer, and who will be able to withstand the brutal downtimes in startup lives that are inevitable." Kraft, meanwhile, saw Lanman as a partner whose technical chops and startup background could help make his brainstorm a reality: "I had no idea how to build anything, let alone a deeply technical hardware product."

Smitten though he was with Kraft and his concept, Lanman had limited time for another startup. "Originally I was trying to just give him some money as an angel investor," Lanman says. "He ended up talking me into cofounding the company with him." Retaining his executive chairmanships at ClassPass and Dwnld, Lanman took on the same title at Doppler. He describes the position as one "that gives me the freedom to be as involved or uninvolved as I need to be, or the company needs me to be."

As Doppler started to staff up, Lanman's credibility and connections helped recruit high-powered talent. And the more good people the company found, the easier it was to hire even more of them. Hardware product manager Andrew McIntyre, an early recruit, had worked on Amazon's Fire tablets. According to Kraft, when Doppler had only around a dozen employees, McIntyre walked into his and Lanman's office, and declared, "'My boss's boss's boss at Amazon [has been] running Nike Fuelband. He just left. We should hire him.'"

It took six months of badgering by Kraft until McIntyre's boss's boss's boss, a literal graybeard with decades of experience named Kennard Nielsen, agreed to became Doppler's VP of product. Once he did, he brought even more of his former Amazon colleagues on board and became, as Kraft describes him, "our Obi-Wan." The company has even printed cards with his five leadership principles—such as, "We live at the leading edge, and we innovate simple, brilliant technology"—for employees to carry in their wallets.

Gints Klimanis, director of audio and digital signal processing engineering, worked at Apple on multiple generations of iPods, iPhones, and iPads before leaving to join Nest Labs, where he toiled on its smart smoke detector. His efforts there involved "a huge amount of audio engineering heard only when something's really wrong at your house," he says. Then the Doppler opportunity arose. "When offered the chance to work on something sexy like reinventing hearing and making the world sound more beautiful, how could one resist?"

Other staffers were recruited from companies such as Dolby, Dropbox, Sony, Palantir, Qualcomm, and Sennheiser—a significant feat for a small startup without a particularly high profile. "It wasn't too hard," Lanman says. "The good news is our space is exciting and intriguing enough. In-ear computing is at the precipice of becoming a big thing."

One thing that was hard, originally, was figuring out where Doppler should be headquartered. The company started out in New York, where Kraft and Lanman lived, even though the majority of employees were in San Francisco, where engineers with audio backgrounds are far more plentiful. "It became clear in Q3 of last year that the distributed office was one of the biggest inhibitors for us moving fast," says Kraft. "Over drinks, I turned to Fritz and said, 'I think we need to double down on SF.'" Lanman agreed: "It's hard not to be in San Francisco for HQ if you're trying to build a transformational tech company, if you want to eventually hire thousands of people."

When the company decided to shutter the New York office, 14 of 20 staffers relocated to San Francisco, including Kraft, who, pre-Doppler, had spent only a handful of days in the city. Now the vast majority of the company's employees work in a pair of small, adjacent buildings on a side street in San Francisco's startup-heavy SOMA neighborhood, with Kraft zipping back and forth, up and down stairs, more or less continuously. He says that this proximity has been a boon: "There are people here who six months ago I barely knew who now are some of my closest confidantes as we move this company forward. You can't build those types of deep bonds without that face time."

Still, when I ask him whether he's fully acclimated himself to his new environs, Kraft doesn't put on a brave front. "SF is alien to me," he says. "I'm learning it little by little, but I'm definitely not part of it." He talks wistfully of Brooklyn music clubs and muses that if Doppler does as well as he hopes, it might need a New York office again in two or three years.

For all the value of Lanman's tech-industry experience in jumpstarting Doppler, it was Kraft who championed the company's thoughtful go-to-market strategy, which involved shipping progressively more advanced products and learning about design, manufacturing, and marketing along the way. Doppler's first offering, 2014's Dubs Acoustic Filters, weren't even a piece of consumer electronics: They were just $25 earplugs designed to look stylish and make music sound good, but quieter. Developing and selling them helped the fledgling company begin to think about the challenge of getting people excited about something you stick in your ears.

"Earplugs were always this strange, orange-foam thing," says Angus Brown, who's responsible for Doppler's brand partnerships. "And it was kind of dorky to be putting them on at a concert. We wanted to create something that was a little bit more cool and felt like a lifestyle and fashion statement."

A year later came the Here Active Listening earbuds, which introduced the first version of Doppler's audio technology and allowed users to perform tricks such as tweaking how live music sounds and minimizing the engine noise on an airplane. Rather than attempt a full-blown retail rollout, the company offered the earbuds to backers of its Kickstarter campaign, which raised $635,000. Then it partnered with Coachella to sell them to attendees at this year's music festival—in part to make clear that Doppler's goals go far beyond competing with Beats and Bose.

In a tent at the event, the Doppler team walked users through the earbuds' fancy sound filters, showing them how to block out the sound of the crowd—or the entire festival—with a swipe of a finger. "We had 4,000 people wearing a tech product in their ears," says Kraft. "If it had been a headphone, that wouldn't have happened."

Oddly enough, the biggest missing features in Here Active Listening are the ones you might assume even the most mundane earbuds would offer: the ability to make phone calls and stream music and other audio from a smartphone. They're coming in Here One, along with the next generation of Doppler's technologies for suppressing unwanted background noise and customizing the sounds you do want to hear. The company is also doing deals with content partners such as museums, sports teams, and music venues, to deliver audio commentary and other enhanced experiences. (It's keeping the specific providers under wraps until closer to Here One's release date.)

One day in mid-June, when I arrive at Doppler headquarters for a visit, Kraft greets me by saying that he has a breakthrough to show off. Hunched over a workbench, several staffers are streaming audio wirelessly from one earbud to the other for the first time, using an Office Depot ruler to position the buds 22 cm apart—the width, more or less, of a human head.

The feat matters in part because Doppler chose to accomplish it using near-field magnetic induction technology, a decision that caused more work for the company but provides better battery efficiency than Bluetooth and lowers the risk of latency issues that can leave audio out of sync with video. "Frankly, we always knew we could do [Bluetooth] as a super-backup," Kraft says. "But my mantra has been that we're not shipping that."

The fact that Doppler's first successful test of bud-to-bud streaming came only around five months before it plans to ship Here One reflects the breakneck pace of its product development. The company is building a complex hardware product that incorporates an array of custom technologies—and trying to move with the speed of an internet company.

In September 2015, key stakeholders spent two days drawing up a list of the features they wanted Here One to offer. "The engineers always want to do, technically, the best job that they can do," says director of product Matt Jaffe, who formerly worked at Dropbox and brought some of its product-development philosophies with him. "The product managers come in and say, 'Let's do what we can, in the time that we have.'"

In the case of Here One, the available time was defined by the need to get the buds into stores before the 2016 holidays. That imperative overrode the exact capabilities that they would ship with.

In fact, what exactly buds will do at launch is still in flux when I visit the Doppler offices in June. "We have a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C," director of software Nitin Khanna confides. "We have confidence that we'll have something to ship." Kraft interjects to put a more upbeat gloss on that plan: "What he's trying to say is, 'We have the utmost confidence we will ship a great product—on time.'"

As with most consumer electronics, a sizable chunk of the process of bringing Here One to market—from sourcing components to final manufacturing—is happening in Asia. Unlike most startups its size, however, Doppler has its own feet on the ground in China, in the form of eight employees based in a Shanghai office. The arrangement helps the company wring as much productivity as possible out of every 24-hour period. "Every day, overnight, we have this back and forth, where I'll work the day shift and they work the night shift," says Jaffe.

Early this year, Doppler made a big decision that, at first blush, sounds reckless given its timetable for shipping this year: It dumped the contract manufacturer it had been working with and started over with a different partner. The move was particularly momentous given that there weren't many companies in the world up to the job of cramming advanced components into devices as small as the Here One buds.

According to Nielsen, it would have been more risky to stick with the initial manufacturer. "The first one couldn't keep up with us," he says. "I saw things coming that would have prevented us from scaling, and very possibly from shipping this year. It was hard. It was gut-wrenching. Logically, it didn't make a lot of sense, but it's starting to pan out that it was a good decision."

Even Doppler's more intrepid manufacturing partner has to hustle to keep up with the project's tight schedule, so the startup is trying to teach some of the things it's learned about building hardware at an internet pace. "They just aren't moving fast enough, so we're helping them to move faster," Nielsen says.

For all the intricacies of engineering and manufacturing computers small enough to wear in your ears, Here One will be defined at least as much by software as hardware. Crucially, that software will be upgradable. "We are not designing a headset that you buy once, and it doesn't change after that," says Khanna. "Almost every aspect of this hardware should be customizable. It should allow us to add features which we hadn't even thought of when we selected the components."

To set itself apart from other noise-canceling earware, Doppler wants to get increasingly better at eliminating specific sounds, and if it's going to turn down the volume on distractions such as sirens and wailing infants, it needs to be able to identify them on the fly, in a multitude of variations. It's not just babies that have distinct voices; European sirens sound nothing like their U.S. counterparts. That's a formidable artificial-intelligence challenge that has not been the subject of much research, so a Doppler team is collecting vast quantities of real-world audio for analysis. "Where speech recognition has thousands of published papers, environmental audio classification has dozens," explains senior software engineer Jacob Meacham as I chat with him in a nook at Doppler's office dominated by a subwoofer so big it doubles as a couch. "On our second day, we were at the forefront."

Doppler is using the audio it has collected to train computers to identify particular classes of sounds. When I get a demo in early June, the company hasn't yet gotten the technology working within its smartphone app, but a PC-based version can identify babies and sirens as well as distinguish between male and female speakers. Some of the time, that is—it's still very much a work in progress.

Doppler may still be in the early days of its research, but the long-term implications of it go far beyond Kraft's initial yen to make live music sound better. Here One isn't a hearing aid; if it were, it would be subject to a torrent of medical-device regulations that the company is happy to avoid for now. "If you're in real need of a medical device, you need to go buy a hearing aid," says Lanman. "That's the fact of the situation, and it's a regulatory decision about who needs a medical device and who doesn't."

Still, for a startup that emphasizes that it isn't building a product to compete with hearing aids, Doppler spends a lot of time thinking about what its technology could do for people with hearing loss. Two key members of the team—Nielsen and Kristen "K.R." Liu, director of accessibility and advocacy—are hearing impaired and enthralled by the possibility that Doppler's technology could help others by amplifying conversations and suppressing background noise. "When I put hearing aids in, I hear," says Nielsen. "But the sound is so compressed that it's very flat and tinny. What happens when you put Here in is, we don't compress sound. We do real-time, full-speed audio processing. And so what I hear is very warm and rich."

"I'm 38 years old, I've worn a hearing aid my entire life, and all of a sudden [with Here One], I'm hearing things I've never heard before," marvels Liu, who, in addition to having 20 years of experience in the consumer electronics field, is an advocate for the hearing impaired and serves on the board of the Hearing Loss Association of America. If Doppler can make in-ear computing fashionable, she hopes it might reduce the stigma associated with admitting that you don't hear well. "Noah doesn't have issues hearing," she says. "I do. But we both have a passion to change that conversation. Let's change the stigma around what it may mean to have different levels of hearing, and make it a socially acceptable thing to put something in your ear."

On June 28, Doppler formally announced Here One and began taking preorders. Shortly afterwards, when I ask Kraft how the reveal went, he's even more ebullient than usual. "The launch went great! It was awesome!" he exults. "We got a lot of press, which is great. We got a lot of traffic, which is great. More importantly, though, people got the core foundational idea."

"Until this announcement, we were a Kickstarter company," he continues. "We can now actually talk about our vision, which we haven't been able to do outside of very closed doors for years. And the joy of it is, we just showed the tip of the iceberg."

I ask Kraft whether he's concerned that huge, resource-rich companies such as Amazon and Microsoft will be intrigued by the kind of in-ear computing that Doppler is pioneering and introduce competitive products. "The day after we announced, without exception," he says, "every single one of those guys wrote us a nice note saying, 'Hey, wow, you guys are really far along on this thing. You wanna come in and have a talk with us?' Which was really flattering. We have enough inside information to know that everyone at that level is working on something."

One shoe drops a little over two months after Doppler makes its announcement, when Apple unveils its much-rumored AirPods wireless earbuds at its iPhone 7 launch in San Francisco. Conceptually, the snow-white gizmos have some obvious similarities with Here One, but they've got stick-like appendages that jut out of your ears. (Doppler, by contrast, went to pains to incorporate all of its technology into buds that don't extrude any more than absolutely necessary.) Jokesters on Twitter quickly compare Apple's industrial design to everything from electric-toothbrush heads to hair dryers to Snoopy.

By removing the headphone jack on the new iPhone, Apple could help popularize both its own AirPods and devices such as Here One. (Doppler has even added a banner to the top of its website: "No headphone jack? No problem.") And for all the ways AirPods play in the same category as Here One, they are—for now—just wireless headphones, not a computing platform with the smart noise filtering and other software-based capabilities that Doppler is creating.

By late August, when I drop in at Doppler for another visit, the pieces of that computing platform are tangibly falling into place. Technologies that the company's engineers had working only in ginned-together demos back in June are running on near-final versions of the Here One buds. Using a feature called Smart Settings, Doppler's app can do things such as geolocate where you are—at work, for instance, or a restaurant—and automatically apply noise filters designed for that environment. The baby-and-siren-identifying AI that had required a PC now works on the phone, and its accuracy rate is much better. (As Kraft notes, "The magic only works if we're right most of the time.")

Even as Doppler puts the finishing touches on Here One, it's thinking about the long-term future for its platform and tinkering with features that won't be ready anytime soon. One such project is using the earbuds for real-time language translation. When I get to try an experimental version during one visit, I feel a tad silly once again: I have to don a backpack that contains a pint-size desktop PC and the largest battery you can legally carry on an airplane.

That's because Doppler wants to handle the translation on a device you can take with you, rather than shuttling it off to the cloud. "You go to an airport in Asia, your phone's not going to work great," explains VP of R&D Jeff Baker. "And if it does, it's going to cost you an arm and a leg. The [translation] engine should be local. Whether it's in your phone or on a separate piece of hardware, we're not sure yet."

I understand why the company is investing in the effort when a Doppler staffer says, "Buenos días, amigo. Cómo estás?" and I hear, "Good day, friend. How are you?" Because Doppler's technology can control both what you hear and when when you hear it, it's able to overlap the two halves of a conversation, removing some of the lag normally created by the translation process. "It becomes much more fluid, usable, and enjoyable, instead of being super-frustrating and a gimmick," says Baker.

As my English/Spanish chat continues, Kraft watches and beams. Afterward, he emphasizes that Doppler isn't sure how, when—or maybe even if—it will deploy translation to consumers. "We know we want to get there, but we're not going to compromise our ability to ship this first product," he says.

If Kraft sounds confident about where Doppler is going, it's in part because of all he's learned on the fly to get this far. "I now lead the product meeting," he tells me. "If you had told me two years ago I'd lead a full-on product meeting with every single team, I'd say, 'You're nuts. No chance I'd ever be able to do that.' But that's where we are. And Fritz just listens in sometimes."

When Here One ships, it will bear the imprint of both of Doppler's cofounders: the music-loving filmmaker and the technologist who has helped dozens of startups get going. On his own, Kraft says, "I would have come up with some gimmicky Beats derivative that probably wouldn't have worked that well and would have looked cool. And Fritz would have shipped Google Glass for your ears. When you combine those things, hopefully you have a product that is culturally relevant but also really sophisticated." If Here One pulls that off, it will have a shot at seducing consumers—and Doppler will be that much closer to fulfilling its improbable dream of putting a computer in every ear.

A little bit of San Francisco history becomes a setting to get people to think of AT&T as something more than a phone company.

There's absolutely nothing remarkable about the AT&T store near my office in San Francicso. Once you're inside, it could be any neighborhood AT&T shop, anywhere in the country.

On September 28, however, it's being replaced by a 24,000-square-foot West Coast flagship store that will be the largest AT&T retail establishment in the country—and, I imagine, the most spectacular. I recently got a sneak peek inside as the company raced to put the finishing touches on the place.

The new space at One Powell Street used to be a sprawling Forever 21 store, but more importantly, it's a historic 1921 building that was originally the headquarters of the Bank of Italy, which later became Bank of America. Designed by a noted San Francisco architecture firm, Bliss and Faville, who also did the iconic St. Francis Hotel, One Powell is strikingly evocative of its era and located right next to a cable-car turnaround generally teeming with tourists.

Inside, the building has an amazingly ornate ceiling, faux marble walls, and other touches that AT&T is showing off and restoring where necessary. But the company is also packing the place with technology, including a 48-foot-wide curved video screen that will show a rotating sequence of images intended to reinforce the idea that AT&T is an integrated provider of products and services designed to connect, entertain, and inspire.

The main floor will be devoted to phones and other gadgets, plus an assortment of accessories that will include some posher-than-usual items from brands such as Kate Spade. (Besides the splashy front entrance, there's a low-key back door that AT&T expects locals might use if they're doing something mundane like coming in to pay a bill.)

Take the escalator up to the mezzanine, and you'll find a series of experiences—they vaguely reminded me of Disney World's Epcot—such as a kitchen equipped with a smart refrigerator; a smart bike you can pedal while watching scenes of San Francisco; a living room-like area equipped with AT&T's TV service, DirecTV; and many screens showing promotional videos. The goal, obviously, is to get consumers thinking about the company as something bigger than a provider of wireless services for smartphones.

With the notable exception of the Apple Store's fanciest branches, the tech industry doesn't have a great track record of building over-the-top flagship stores that actually do well enough to stay around for the long haul. (Some of us remember the long-gone massive storefronts that Microsoft and Sony opened in 1999 at the Metreon, a few blocks from One Powell.) AT&T obviously built this new flagship to make a statement, not just move product. In the end, though, it will only flourish if the selection of items is appealing and the customer service is up to snuff. And even then, it seems like a pricey undertaking.

But if you happen to find yourself near the corners of Powell and Market Streets in San Francisco anytime soon, it's well worth stepping inside and taking it all in. Did I mention that the ceiling is incredible?

New research finds that your efforts are more likely to be successful if you get rid of your safety net.

Creating a Plan B (and maybe even a C, D, and E) sounds like practical, levelheaded advice. Life happens and success isn't guaranteed. Who wants to be in a situation without any options? Unfortunately, having a backup plan may backfire.

Research published in the July 2016 issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, however, found that having a backup plan actually hurts your chances of successfully achieving a goal.

Jihae Shin, assistant professor of management and human resources at Wisconsin School of Business, and Katherine L. Milkman, associate professor of operations, information, and decisions at The Wharton School, conducted a series of experiments in which two groups of participants were asked to unscramble sentences. Both groups were told that if they did well on the task, they'd be given a free snack or the chance to leave the study early, but one group was also instructed to brainstorm other ways they could get free food or save time later in the day in case they didn't perform well. The groups that had backup plans did less well on the task.

"When performance is effort-based, having a backup plan can cause you to put in less effort and demonstrate lower performance," says Shin.

But why? Shin and Milkman examined two scenarios: Does a backup plan reduce how much you want a goal, or is a backup plan a distraction in your mind?

"We found it was the former," says Shin. She explains:

A backup plan can make you want to achieve the goal less. It makes you prematurely think that whatever happens is okay. Failure is okay. Making those plans in your mind reduces your motivation, and you don't try as hard.

Do-Or-Die Attitude

If you set a goal that you are motivated to complete, the answer might be ditching Plan B. Corrie Shanahan, CEO of The Beara Group LLC, Washington, D.C.,-based leadership consultants, credits her success to getting rid of her safety net. "When I started my business as a solo consultant, a good friend kept asking me what my backup plan was. I said I didn't have any. She was horrified," she says. "My thinking was, 'I know this is what I want to do. I know I have the expertise. I know there's a market for it. Now I just have to get moving and make it work.'"

Shanahan says one of her biggest hindrances was a lump sum she received from a former employer that amounted to nine months of living expenses in the first year. "I would have been better off with just three months," she admits. "Sometimes you want to even reduce your safety net to keep you focused on the goal and get momentum going."

People who focus on contingency plans never realize the highest potential of what they otherwise would achieve, adds Tony Sarsam, CEO of Ready Pac Foods, manufacturer of convenience fresh foods. "Providing a backup plan would be similar to a sports team saying they can't bear the thought of losing so they'll plan for a tie," he says. "I believe that a company that opens itself up and takes risks will, in the long term, have better growth, be more successful, and will win," Sarsam explains. "This is what drove my approach three years ago in turning Ready Pac Foods around," he adds, "aligning the organization against goals to win, with no other option."

Not All Backup Plans Are Bad

But sometimes options are good, and a study from the University of Zurich found benefits to backup plans.

"A backup plan can later become a simultaneously implemented and complementary means to achieve a goal," writes study author Christopher Napolitano, a professor of psychology. The backup plan could be a two-pronged attempt to complete a goal, such as creating two streams of revenue in a business.

Napolitano writes:

Because a backup plan is developed but is not initially used, it can provide a ready safety net if one's first option proves insufficient. In addition, because backup plans are reserved for later use, they may divert fewer resources away from one's first-choice plan compared with concurrently used means. Finally, a person may resort to a backup plan when using more than one means is not possible or is too costly, thus not allowing concurrent use of multiple means.

Napolitano believes developing backup plans can be akin to having your cake and eating it too: "An attempt to reap the benefits of having multiple means available while also selectively investing one's finite resources."

Crisis Planning

Don't overlook crisis planning, adds Jayne Heggen, president of Heggen Group LLC, a strategy consulting firm with clients that include Microsoft Store and PayPal.

"Scenario planning provides alternative approaches to support or replace components of an original plan," she says. "On the other hand, backup plans focus on critical loss events that can cripple key operating components of a company if not the entire organization, such as natural disasters, system failures, security breaches, theft, etc.," says Heggen. "Ultimately both plan approaches replace the original plan but for incredibly different reasons," she says.

Focus On Effort

Shin stresses that their findings only examined goals where performance and success is highly dependent on effort. If the outcome doesn't depend on effort, making a backup plan might bring benefits that are more significant, such as reducing perceived uncertainty about the future.

While there are potential costs to making a backup plan, it does not mean that people should go through life without ever having them, Shin says. "Explore ways to mitigate these costs—such as being more strategic about when you make a backup plan," she says. "You might want to wait until you have done everything you can to achieve your primary goal first."

On the margins of technology and the law, companies and governments are hacking unmanned vehicles and putting up their drone shields.

Last week, the director of the Federal Aviation Administration reported that his department is receiving an average of 2,000 new registration requests for drones every day, and that it has registered up to some half a million drones since new rules went into effect in January. But as sales of drones have increased, so too have other more worrying numbers: the FAA also says it receives more than 100 reports per month of drones flying around airports and other forbidden places, where they could damage infrastructure or accidentally collide with the engine of a landing airplane.

Then there are the more deliberate misuses: It's thought that terrorists will inevitably use unmanned aircraft to deliver explosives, just as they've already been used to smuggle drugs across prison walls. Last year, the Secret Service reported at least two incidents where unmanned aircraft flew in restricted airspace around the White House, while in Japan, an antinuclear activist was charged with using a drone to deliver a tiny amount of radioactive sand to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's office.

Meanwhile, camera-equipped drones are already being used to surreptitiously invade people's privacy, and they can intercept data, too, says Gilad Beeri, a software engineer with experience in cybersecurity and radio communication.

"I can buy a $300 or $500 drone and just send a device that is a computer, cloud-connected, with HD camera," onto private property. "I can use it to hop your network, because it can come with all of those kinds of radio sensors close to your computer."

Beeri is cofounder and chief technology officer of Palo Alto-based ApolloShield, one of a number of startups and defense companies selling ways to take down drones behaving badly.

Unlike physical options for taking down a drone—which have included nets, guns, and birds of prey—ApolloShield's handheld device leaves drones intact and functional, sending them back to their pilots nearby, Beeri says.

"The drone never crashes, just goes back to the operator and lands safely near the original operator," he says.

Beeri, 30, and his friend and cofounder Nimo Shkedy, 33, who honed their cyber skills in Israel's elite cyber agency Unit 8200, first focused on the drone problem in 2014, according to a report on the blog of the incubator Y Combinator. While the pair were watching a soccer game between Albania and Serbia, a drone carrying an Albanian flag zipped into the stadium, causing havoc. A few weeks later, they were playing volleyball at the beach when a quadcopter with a professional camera began hovering ominously overhead. Beeri and Shkedy resolved to develop a solution.

ApolloShield, which resembles a wireless router and costs about $30,000 a year, is designed to detect nearby drones up to two miles high—well above the FAA-established ceiling for drones of 400 feet—and record their unique identifying numbers. It also gives its users the option of spoofing the drone's "go home" signal, ordering them to return to their operators and land.

The process involves buying commercially available drones and reverse engineering the ways they communicate, something that generally takes about two weeks per model, Beeri says. "We actually learn the language of the drone and the remote control, and we teach our system how to speak that language," he says.

As new drones come on the market, the company can push updates to its customers, who, he says, only include those in charge of protecting airports, stadiums, prisons, power plants, and other critical infrastructure.

So far, Beeri and Shkedy have raised $500,000 from Y Combinator and other angel investors. They declined to name any of the company's existing customers, but in an email Beeri wrote that "each customer is screened and vetted on a case-by-case basis, depending on vertical and geography. The purpose is to make sure only customers who should be able to have such a system get it. The process is still being formalized with time so I can't share any more details right now."

Unmanned But Not Unlawyered

There are no specific rules about who should use an anti-drone system or under what conditions, as there are about drones themselves. Under FAA rules that went into effect this summer, drone pilots are required to register aircraft weighing more than roughly half a pound with the agency, and commercial pilots are required to obtain a special certificate from the FAA. Anyone flying a drone within five miles of an airport is required to coordinate with air traffic controllers, and commercial pilots aren't allowed to fly over people or launch from a moving vehicle.

Additional restrictions apply to secured airspace around Washington, D.C., and various military installations, according to the FAA. Drones also aren't allowed near certain high-profile sporting events or firefighting operations, and some states place additional restrictions on where, when, and how drones can fly and take pictures.

Still, there aren't yet any standardized technical measures for keeping unmanned vehicles from going where they don't belong. Generally, federal law and FAA regulations make it illegal to damage or tamper with any aircraft, including drones, and Federal Communications Commission rules make it illegal to jam any kind of radio transmissions, according to Dallas attorney Jason Melvin, who's been called the "Texas Drone Lawyer." But, he says, courts have yet to specifically deal with the question of the legality of anti-drone systems.

"None of these issues have been litigated, and there aren't a lot of laws and regulations that address the situation yet," says Melvin. Even in cases where, say, federal law enforcement agencies are granted permission to take down drones, there are still likely to be questions of liability if a drone is unintentionally damaged, or even crashes into someone, when it's sent an overriding signal, he says. Moreover, a powerful signal from an anti-drone jammer could also disable other nearby communications technology, like cell phones and navigation systems.

ApolloShield says its customers are required to comply with local laws, wherever in the world they're based, and some customers have asked for restrictions to be applied to their devices to ensure compliance.

Research and development firm Battelle also offers an anti-drone device, a rifle-shaped anti-drone radio transmitter called the DroneDefender, but Federal Communications Commission regulations on radio transmissions mean the company can only test it under restricted circumstances and can't sell it to civilians. While Battelle is reluctant to disclose too much about which federally authorized customers are using the DroneDefender, Battelle researcher Jordan says it's sold about 100 of the devices to the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. In July, one was spotted on a military base in Iraq. The devices run in the five-figure range, he says, and well less than $100,000.

The rifle-shaped radio transmitter and external 10-pound battery pack wouldn't look out of place in the Ghostbusters arsenal. Because the DroneDefender is directional, it shouldn't interfere with drones—or perhaps other electronics—that aren't in its line of fire, according to Battelle researcher Alex Morrow.

While ApolloShield's device sends a drone back to its operator by impersonating a drone's operator and sending its own commands, the Battelle device effectively blocks the radio signals the operator is sending. It transmits a "proprietary waveform" that's designed to interfere with any commercial drone it's aimed at, without needing to understand the specifics of how the device communicates. (Most commercial drones are programmed to safely return to their pilots when they lose signal.)

"We really wanted to focus on not destroying the aircraft in the air," says Morrow. "Many of the incidents are just wrong place, wrong time—maybe a 14-year-old kid flying their aircraft too close to the airport and not knowing the rules involved."

Some drones can be self-programmed to avoid sensitive areas, like airports or private property, a feature that popular Hong Kong-based drone manufacturer DJI began to include on its newer drones, with a restriction on flights around Washington, D.C.

But government and military agencies aren't taking any risks. Last year, it was revealed the Secret Service was testing a drone shield around the White House, and the FAA and Department of Homeland Security began testing a drone detection system earlier this year intended to locate errant drones around airports and other secure locations and one that can both detect and block radio communications with misbehaving drones. To stop drones from interfering with firefighting aircraft during wildfires, the Interior Department announced in July that it was testing a "geofencing" system to send software warnings to nearby drone pilots, as part of a collaboration with the drone industry.

Meanwhile, NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's R&D arm, are developing and seeking proposals for building a system that could track all drones flying below a certain altitude across a city, perhaps using tracking systems mounted on additional drones.

Dan Stamm, who developed the DroneDefender with Morrow, says that no anti-drone system will work every time. "There are certainly drones that are out there, that will be resistant to our effects, for sure, but we like to say that we're effective against the vast majority of commercial [unmanned aircraft] that are out there."

Anti-drone vendors will struggle to stay one step ahead of drone makers in the quest for vulnerabilities. "Like any kind of security company, it's always a bit of an arms race," says Grant Jordan, CEO at anti-drone tech startup SkySafe. SkySafe provides a subscription service including hardware and software to identify, land, and potentially even take control of unauthorized drones. The company's currently focused on the public safety market as it builds out new capabilities, and is not currently selling to individual end users, says Jordan.

The security flaws used by anti-drone devices could also be used by people with less beneficent intentions to hijack legitimate drones. In March, an American researcher demonstrated he could hijack a heavy-duty quadcopter used by police and fire departments and in industrial uses from a mile way, with only a laptop and a cheap digital radio. Not only was the drone's Wi-Fi connection dependent upon "WEP" encryption, which is known to be weak, but the connection between the operator and the drone used an even less-secured radio protocol, leaving the drone open to a man-in-the-middle attack. Such vulnerabilities, he told the RSA security conference, may apply to a broad swathe of high-end drones.

Meanwhile, with rules around anti-drone equipment still unclear, it's not certain when consumers will be able to legally buy, build, or use tools to keep unwanted drone flights away their property, says Jordan. "For some of these things, we're just going to have to wait and see."

Most of Dirty Lemon's over 50,000 monthly SMS messages are answered by a bot—is this the future of commerce?

I recently started drinking a new brand of supplement-infused beverages called Dirty Lemon. One is caffeinated with green tea to give you a jolt of energy as you start the day, another contains magnesium and chamomile to help you go to sleep. But the most interesting thing about the company wasn't how the drinks tasted (a little tart and not too sweet), but how you reorder more once you've run out. You text the startup the way you might text your friend, "Yo, can you hook me up with more Dirty Lemon?" And you get a quick response, "Confirming for you now"

So far, Dirty Lemon is one of the very few companies that have developed an infrastructure to perform all customer interactions through SMS. Others that support text ordering, like Domino's Anyware, developed a platform recently that offers customers the option to order up their pizzas via text, as well as through Twitter, Amazon's Echo, and other channels. Still others, like subscription pet-product company Barkbox, allow customers to text orders, but they have to text the codes for each item.

Zak Normandin, who founded Dirty Lemon, thought that his product would be ideal for text ordering, so he baked that in from the beginning. The beverages are something you need to reorder on a regular basis, but you don't want to go through the hassle of logging onto the brand's website to place a new order. And Normandin, like many of us, does not like recurring subscriptions. "They make you feel locked into something," he says. "And you might need more bottles before or after your next subscription is due."

Since the text function was available when the company launched in September 2015, it's hard to say whether SMS reordering has given Dirty Lemon's sales an additional boost. The company claims revenue has grown 1400% since this time last year and receives over 50,000 text messages every month.

Building a platform for managing transactions online is a complicated business. Customers, unlike robots, don't speak in generic phrases when they want to place an order, so what happens if the automated system doesn't fully understand what an incoming text is all about?

Normandin worked with the communications platform Twilio to create the texting system, and payments are processed through Stripe. Early on, he discovered that it was important to make it easy for a human being to intervene if necessary. So when a customer says something complicated, it immediately triggers a customer service representative to get involved.

For instance, someone might text Dirty Lemon asking about which drink might work better for their lifestyle or explain a problem they had with their delivery. In cases like these, someone from the Dirty Lemon team will provide a more robust response. "It's meant to feel seamless, so the customer doesn't know when the texting bot ends and the customer service representative starts," Normandin explains.

There are also other safety nets in place. If the automated system wants to process a payment, it first asks the customer to confirm the order. Only after it has received a "Yes," will the order be authorized.

Many of these features came about through trial and error. At first, the system was much more rigid than it is now, without the ability for someone at the company to intervene if there appeared to be a problem. "As long as you followed the script perfectly, then your order would be processed," he says. "If you didn't, customers would receive a text asking them to email customer service," he says, pointing out that a lot of beta customers sent plenty of annoyed emails.

Normandin has been tweaking (and tweaking some more), and he now believes this approach to engage customers via text is pretty watertight. He's discovered that despite the advances in natural language processing technology, bots are still fairly limited in terms of how they can communicate. And in many cases, such as when a customer is upset, it's really important to make them feel like there is a real human on the other end, providing a personal touch.

Normandin started Dirty Lemon because he felt there was a need in the market for beverages that do more than taste good and provide hydration. The first drink he came out with is the first national beverage brand to use activated charcoal, which is known for absorbing toxins and impurities in the system. "We believe that ready-to-drink beverages offer a level of convenience that popping a bunch of supplement pills does not provide," he says. "Especially if these drinks are wrapped in a brand that consumers can relate to." But they aren't cheap. A six-pack costs $65, and shipping is free.

Along the way, he became fascinated with trying to create a satisfying, problem-free customer experience by text. Now, he says he receives daily emails from people asking how his platform works. He's planning to create a spinoff business that helps other businesses implement text transactions. "We know there's an opportunity here from a business standpoint," he says.

Of course, texting to order only works with a certain type of product. It needs to be something that you buy with a level of frequency. Amazon has tried to simplify ordering for some items with the Dash Buttons, but you need a separate button for each product, and you can only use them for a small number of brands. Their current value leans more in favor of Amazon's data gathering than consumer convenience.

Normandin's platform can be set up with relative ease for any item a customer might want to reorder regularly, like snack bars, toilet paper, and printer cartridges. "I believe this will be the future of commerce in some way," he says. "I'm not saying that every company will be using SMS to process transactions, but for a high-frequency item sold by brand looking for a more intimate relationship with their consumers, this is such a perfect solution."

For $199, farmers can understand their soil better—which is key to keeping their crops healthy.

For the founders of Trace Genomics, strawberries are the low-hanging fruit.

The company's cofounders, Diane Wu and Poornima Parameswaran, are borrowing 23andMe's model and applying it to agriculture. For $199, growers—and the suppliers that sell fertilizers and seeds to them—can collect a sample of soil from their crops' roots using a special kit and send it back to Trace's lab for analysis. The company will then share the results of its pathogen panel, which tests the sample for tiny organisms like bacteria, viruses, and fungi that are associated with plant blight. For now, the offering is limited to some 30 diseases affecting strawberries and lettuce.

I met with the pair in late July over lunch in Dogpatch, a part-industrial, part-residential neighborhood in San Francisco that is home to a growing number of biotech startups. We ordered salads before jumping into a discussion about the various microbial diseases that affect our fruit and vegetable supply.

"Think of soil as the immune system for crops," says Parameswaran, a molecular biologist by training, between bites of a pear and butter lettuce salad. "And yet we know so little about it."

Wu and Parameswaran are not the only ones pitching genomics tools to growers and suppliers, but they believe they have an edge. The pair, who met at the lab run by Nobel Prize-winning biologist Andrew Fire, say they have developed a novel way to clean up and extract information from dirty samples like soil. Their secret sauce isn't just their team's scientific knowledge, but their expertise in advanced computing disciplines like machine learning (Wu previously worked as a software developer on Palantir's machine learning team).

Their goal isn't just to deliver insights to farmers, but information they can act on. It's still early days, but Trace says it is helping its customers determine how best to treat the soil and mitigate disease, as well as the crops that are the best fit for the soil. Today, it is primarily used for chemical interventions, like finding the optimal combination of fertilizers.

Trace, which currently has more than $4 million in the bank, is a recent graduate of DNA-sequencing giant Illumina's accelerator, which works with startups that are developing all manner of genomics applications. Both Trace and Illumina see potential in an emerging field called Metagenomics, which involves using genetic material recovered directly from environmental samples.

A Billion-Dollar Opportunity

The timing is fortuitous for this crop of companies. Climate change is posing challenges to farmers and poses a threat to the control of pest and disease invasions, an estimated $220 billion a year problem in the U.S. alone. Agricultural genomics solutions are viewed by many as "key to the efficient development of crop varieties that are more climate-resilient and can be produced with a smaller environmental footprint," says Wayne Allen Parrott, a professor of crop sciences at the University of Georgia.

Moreover, growers are under pressure from regulators to prevent contamination rather than respond to it after the fact. Such legislation as the Food Safety Modernization Act gave U.S. Food and Drug Administration, new authorities to regulate the way foods are grown, harvested, and processed.

Trace Genomics' future depends on growers increasingly using its tool. If it can collect a large number of soil samples, in a manner similar to 23andMe, it can start to grow a database with longitundal information about soil, seeds and treatments depending on their location. "The more samples that Trace processes, the more powerful their database becomes, the more helpful their insights and actionable decisions become on a per-farm basis," says Zal Bilimoria, a investor with Refactor Capital, which participated in Trace's most recent funding round. One potential outcome might be for Trace to help growers determine the practices that are best for sustainability.

If Trace Genomics can prove that its science is robust and delivers actionable information, it has a shot at gaining wide adoption. Even in the more conservative beef industry, stakeholders are overcoming their reservations and adopting new technologies as they see their rivals do so, explains Jared Decker, an assistant professor of beef genetics and computational genomics. For that reason, he says, "I think we'll continue to see different applications of genomics technologies."

Librarian and lifelong insomniac Drew Ackerman found a creative outlet for his storytelling skills: bedtime stories for grownups.

Always-on technology and digital devices creeping into our bedrooms have turned all of us into insomniacs. It doesn't help that we live in a culture that celebrates the "secret to success" as getting by on as little sleep as possible.

Long before mobile screens illuminated our pillows, a young Drew Ackerman was suffering from insomnia. But unlike many who spend nights unable to fall asleep, Ackerman's insomnia took him through a decades-long creative process that resulted in the podcast Sleep with Me.

Currently, three episodes air weekly and draw around 70,000 listeners for each show. Users download episodes around 1.3 million times each month. In 2014, Sleep with Me appeared on iTunes' list of top 50 podcasts, alongside brands like NPR, Earwolf, and ESPN. Ackerman, who also works as a librarian in San Francisco, recently hired two freelance editors and attributes the show's success to his ability to tell a good boring story—which all started in the room he shared with his little brother.

Throughout their childhood, the two would tell each other boring stories to help them fall asleep. The adult Ackerman continued telling what he calls "long, boring, leisurely plodding-plot stories" to help lull loved ones, from significant others to his 9-year-old daughter, to sleep.

In 2013, when another project fell apart, Ackerman decided he would use the time he'd already put aside to start the bedtime-storytelling podcast he'd been dreaming of for years. "It was weird, I never have well-adjusted thoughts like this," Ackerman tells Fast Company, "but the project imploded and on that day, part of me was like, 'why don't you do that podcast with that time that you already set aside? I thought, I guess I will listen to whoever's voice this is."

So began Sleep with Me, where Ackerman's known as "Dearest Scooter." The original 20-minute segments, gave way to hour-long narratives when the 42-year-old decided short tales caused listeners too much anxiety as most weren't asleep yet by the end. On Sundays, Ackerman believes people need a little more time to slow their racing minds, so episodes then tend to go past the hour mark.

In a low vocal range, Ackerman tells tales of a magical pirate woman name Lady Witchbeard, gives a monologue about the Red Priestess Melisandre's famed choker (known to all Game of Thrones fans), and narrates what it's like to walk through a mall of the future.

In the intro to some of the shows, Ackerman refers to it as "the podcast the sheep listen to when they get tired of counting themselves." But it takes Ackerman about 50 hours each week to perfect the tone and pacing of the kooky plot lines that aim to drift today's overstimulated brains off to sleep. Here's how he does it.

FC: You call the podcast "boring." What does "boring" mean to you?

DA: By using the word "boring," I let the listener off the hook. There's no expectation on their end. If you say something is boring, then people don't have to listen or take any lesson from the story. It sets up a non-intimidating environment.

But, if the podcast is too boring, it wouldn't work. The podcast needs to be a fine line between uninteresting or mundane and somewhat engaging. I'm always shooting for somewhere in that middle place.

What kind of role has working at the library played in your love of stories?

Stories and reading have always been a part of my life. In the summer, my mom used to drop us off at the library, me, my brother, and sister. We were the oldest of six kids. We would go to the library and read and participate in the programs. I always loved hiding in my room and reading, so stories have always played a huge role in my life. That's the great part about my job. I get to do these things all the time.

How do you come up with your stories?

I let the idea come up, kind of think about it, play with it and give it space to come back more formed. For example, right now, I'm doing a science fiction series every Thursday where I'm on a spaceship with the nuns from my grammar school. They used to terrorize me. I knew I wanted to do a story about the nuns. I let that idea sit, then I had the idea of working with them on a team and finally, came up with the spaceship bit.

Then sometimes, there's more immediate stories. For instance—I think this one will come out next week—Helen Zaltzman who makes the Allusionist podcast, I follow her on Twitter and she recently posted this picture of a dollhouse. This dollhouse has no furnishing and was so dirty inside. There was something about the image of this vacant dollhouse with all this dirt that I couldn't get out of my mind.

I would forget about it sometimes but only for a day. Then I thought of the title "The Dirty Dollhouse" and I just really liked that. Then last weekend, I couldn't stop thinking about this dirty dollhouse and then I was thinking about Helen. So I looked on Twitter to see what's trending in the U.K. where Helen is from, and that led me to think about Brexit and Oxford University. And that's the story behind where the dirty dollhouse comes from.

What's your process for keeping a record of ideas for your stories?

I have pen and paper for the most part. I have a notebook in my pocket and I have a Steno pad in my backpack and a legal pad on my couch. I write down my ideas and if it's a picture, I'll write down the title or description.

How long does it take for you to come up with stories?

People say it's your imagination or your selective subconscious. I call it the "story swamp." I don't know if it's my brain or in the universe's brain. Some stories sit down there and sometimes I have stay down there and dig around.

Some have to sit in the percolator for six months but others, like the dollhouse one, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Nonetheless, I make sure to write every day for half an hour to an hour on my commute and the episodes take about a week to finish. On Thursdays, I write the outlines and the dialogues for episodes. The day after it's recorded, I listen to the episodes and see what changes I need to make.

How has the podcast affected your day job?

I have become more productive. The podcast has helped me to focus. I'm a very anxious person. I get so much general anxiety. I have to focus on something to tune that out. The podcast is so much work. It is very encompassing of my spare time. Any time I'm not at work and I don't have a family commitment, I have to be working on the podcast. Even if I'm at work, I ask myself, do I need to check my email again right now, or work on this other task that I need to do. It has helped me be more productive and I've learned that small tasks help me deal with my anxiety.

What do you do when you're running low on creativity?

I'll look on Twitter to see what's trending. Also, the power of the deadline helps me push through when I'm low on creativity. That's the secret of the podcast. Sometimes I have a couple of episodes in the bank but I have a day job, so I have to record something during the time I set aside because I don't have any other time. The episodes need to come out. If I'm not feeling it, I remind myself that this is a podcast to put people to sleep. I have to put my perfectionism aside. That's when the stories work. If I'm calm, the stories are more relaxed and more fun. They're more ridiculous and absurd.

Do you listen to stories to fall asleep?

Once I started thinking about the podcast, I would listen to audiobooks, but I was always more of a person-to-person storyteller. It made me think, why isn't there bedtime stories for grownups? I know adults want bedtime stories, why aren't there more people out there providing it?

So what do you do then before sleep?

If I get too worked up on the future of the podcast, it can affect my sleep. I try to put myself in the listener's shoes and say, 'OK I need to stop what I'm doing an hour before bed.' I try to maintain a consistent routine like sit quietly, meditate, write, or I just read, usually fiction, for 45 minutes to unwind and help myself drift off.

Rather than coax people into real-time communication, Vidii uses AI and pop-culture content to improve the kind you can wait around for.

You know how it sometimes takes a Mariah Carey GIF to really get your point across? You might soon enough.

Text-based communication is gradually becoming less about text, or at least not just about text. Emojis are now common enough in work correspondence to require etiquette guides. Here at Fast Company, GIFs and short YouTube videos regularly pepper our Slack channels, and chances are that you're seeing more multimedia in whatever group chat platform your company uses, too.

This might be a very good thing. Emails are notoriously prone to being misread. In a 2005 study, researchers found people picked up on sarcasm in email messages just 56% of the time, making the chances of a joke actually landing not much better than a coin toss.

It probably doesn't help that recruiters and hiring managers keep saying they need emotionally intelligent employees, but are having more trouble finding them. Some also report that younger workers tend to lack communication skills in particular, possibly thanks to the fact that so much communicating now happens behind screens.

Experts are still studying how digital technology affects the way we experience and convey emotion. But insofar as that interplay actually is causing communication breakdowns at work, can it also be a part of the solution?

Going Beyond The GIF

Enter Vidii, a chat app launching this week that not only lets you add high-def, full-audio videos to ordinary text messages but—if you chat within the platform—will also employ artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze your emotional responses to them.

So instead of just sending you a grainy GIF of Mariah Carey crooning mutely before a pack of sailors, I can now treat you to a "vidicon" (no relation to the hardware used in 1950s TVs) of that same dance sequence from the music video for "Honey," but this one's in HD and every gorgeous note is intact. Vidii even links out to the full-length video, so the uninitiated can find out exactly what sliver of sepia-toned, late '90s splendor they've just glimpsed.

To confirm that you enjoyed the multimedia offerings shared with you, Vidii uses your smartphone camera to scan your face, read your reaction, and drop the sender an "emoji receipt" like this , absolving you of the need to text back, "LOL loved it!!" As the AI gets the hang of what you like, it'll suggest new vidicons for you to reply with.

What's it all for? According to founder and CEO E.L. Mont, one of Vidii's main goals is to humanize digital communication. "When you look at text messaging," he tells Fast Company, "it's basically saying humans have to go back to figuring out how to interface with a computer in some way. It's speaking at their level." Typing limits how well we can express ourselves, says Mont. "That's why we prefer to have face-to-face and voice-to-voice [interactions]."

For many, those don't just convey emotion better, they're also more enjoyable. Vidii is supposed to be fun, not merely useful. The platform isn't meant as a workplace tool, but it isn't hard to see how it could become one—for eliminating communication misfires, propping up workers' emotional intelligence, or even boosting low "engagement" rates.

On the other hand, it's just as easy to imagine how some might find it distracting or overstimulating in any context. If I had to devise a system of communication perfectly crafted to exasperate my mother, for example, Vidii would be it (I texted her to confirm this, which she did). There may be just as many tech-savvy, emotionally intelligent professionals like her in the workforce as there are those who are jonesing for more Breaking Bad clips in their workflow.

Sensory Overload, Or Just Makes Sense?

There's already been something of a "Slacklash" among users of group messaging platforms who feel those tools are burying them beneath an avalanche of frivolous chatter. That's impacting work cultures, they say; group chat pretty much forces everyone to be, well, chatty.

Mont doesn't see multimedia's role in messaging quite the same way. For one thing, he says, "We're sharing personal experiences," even through vidicons. "When you send one of these things, people can relate—be it to that person's personality or your experience seeing that particular film or a callback to other days." We allude to pop culture in face-to-face conversations all the time, he points out—it's already how we relate to each other—and humans have been using images to communicate long before writing was invented. "It's part of our nature," he says.

As for the distraction question, Mont raises a point others have made in the debate over email's supposed demise at the hands of group messaging apps: It's hard to engage with any type of communication system in real-time. For all its alleged faults, Gmail product manager John Rae-Grant told Fast Company earlier this year, "Email is non-disruptive. It's asynchronous. If you want to just inform someone about something, you send them an email with the expectation that they'll get to it, just not necessarily right away."

That's why live video-chat—a synchronous format, by contrast—isn't exactly supplanting "I'll-just-get-to-that-later" ones. Mont and his team devised vidicons to be non-disruptive, too. Just like "snaps" sent to you on Snapchat, you can open them whenever you want to. Rather than coax people into real-time communication, Vidii and Google are both working on making the asynchronous type better, with the help of machine learning.

Gmail has introduced tools like Smart Reply that suggests phrases to reply with, and the design of Google's newer Inbox app shows the company is experimenting with other AI-powered features that can automate the more tedious parts of the process and personalize others.

Adding multimedia to the table doesn't necessarily flip it over, Mont believes. "It's not intended that every message you send is a vidicon—unless you're trying to one up each other!" Ultimately, he says, "It lightens the mood. It doesn't change the conversation, it's part of the conversation."

Only now, that conversation is between you and me and Mariah, too.

Why a fairy tale inspired a highly successful approach to leadership.

The average American read 12 books in 2015, according to findings from the Pew Research Center.

Reading for pleasure, according to Dr. Josie Billington, deputy director of the Centre for Research into Reading at the University of Liverpool, can also improve your health, preventing conditions such as stress, depression, and dementia. "Reading can offer richer, broader, and more complex models of experience, which enable people to view their own lives from a refreshed perspective and with renewed understanding," Billington told Fast Companyin a previous interview. The bonus is that with the understanding and perspective gained between the pages of a book, Billington says the reader is better equipped to cope with difficult situations because their "repertoires and sense of possible avenues of action or attitude" have expanded.

While many books can be good reads, few stick with us and actually change how we think. Four business leaders weighed in on the books that had the most impact on their management style, along with specifics about why they were so important. Here are their insights in their own words.

Appreciating Differences

Sabrina Wiewel, chief customer officer, Hallmark Cards

A staple on my bookshelf is Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type by Isabel Briggs Myers and Peter B. Myers. The book explains the personality types and their significance to how we approach work and life.

I first read the book years ago when it was given to me by one of my former leaders. At the time, I had recently taken the Myers Briggs Type Indicator assessment, so I was given the book to accompany my results. Since then, I've pulled the book out on numerous occasions throughout my career when I needed some perspective on leading and working with personality types different than my own.

Before reading Gifts Differing, I don't think I'd ever really considered how the different personality types perceive the world and approach their work and relationships in ways unique from my own. For example, I am a strong extrovert on the Myers Briggs scale. I need to process things out loud. This book offered really valuable insight into how I can effectively lead introverts, and address their need to process things more quietly and often in more time.

I recently had to lead my team, comprised of a variety of personality types, through a dialogue on a contentious topic. Knowing that some of my team members are introverts who require the extra time to process information, I gave them a heads up prior to the meeting so they could come into the conversation with a developed point of view.

Inspiring An Extreme Trust Makeover

Brian Spindel, president and cofounder, PostNet

The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey was a book that really resonated with me. To be a strong, effective business leader of a global franchise organization, you must have the ability to build and maintain strong relationships with people in all areas of your business—from your employees and franchisees to customers, strategic partners, and any others that in some way touch your business.

I was so impressed with a lot of the concepts in the book about how trust can enable an organization, and how lack of trust can constrain it, that I put together a leadership exercise. My leadership team read the book, and we had a half-day workshop where an internal moderator walked through and talked about areas of our business where there was a perceived or real lack of trust that was holding us back. We talked through those areas—our interpersonal communication, communication between departments, and our communication with others—and used the concepts of the book to increase the amount of trust and break down the barriers that lack of trust creates. Now, we communicate with greater transparency to our franchisees, customers, suppliers, and others.

While I already believed in these principles, the book did a great job of bringing it all together and made me more mindful than ever that trust in my organization starts and ends with me—through every interaction, meeting, phone call, and email. I must set the standard.

Becoming A Fairy Godmother

Barbara Corcoran, real estate entrepreneur and costar of ABC's Shark Tank

My grandmother first read Cinderella to me when I was about 4 and, like every little girl, I hoped I would one day be found by a real live prince.

I had a hard time learning to read in school so I read picture books to myself until I was about 11. Cinderella remained my favorite, but I got a whole different message out of it the older I got. I figured out I probably wouldn't get a lucky break someday to take me out of our overcrowded apartment—we had 10 kids and 1 bathroom—so I let go of the idea that I would be rescued and decided I'd better become the prince. I worked my ass off after school from age 12 on and got as many jobs as I could, figuring if I could work really hard I could be the one to make other people's dreams come true.

When I opened my real estate brokerage business at age 23 and hired my first employee, I decided I would become the fairy godmother to anyone who was willing to join me. I worked like crazy to make their dreams come true. I spent all my time doing whatever I could to help make them successful and have a good time doing it. My management style was 100% fairy godmother, granting their every wish, putting on big parties, and making them believe in their own magic.

When I sold the business 25 years later for a truckload of money it was the happy ending I had worked for, and I left behind more than 1,000 very happy and successful people, all with stories of their own.

Going To The Dogs

Chris Dorsey, CEO, Dorsey Pictures

My most impactful business read was Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard—who also happens to be a friend. It helped me to let go of some of my inherent need for control and to let others "own" the business. Sometimes they make mistakes, but what the hell, I make mistakes too, but the difference is that staff has no need to care if I make mistakes.

The book is also about the social responsibility of a business—a manifestation of the adage that it's one thing to make money, but quite another to make a difference. We like making money, but if we can make a difference at the same time—even in small ways—profit then has a broader definition.

It also showed me that happy people do better work, and it isn't always about the money. Before I read the book, I wouldn't have considered, for instance, allowing employees to bring their dogs to work. Now I think we have more dogs in the office than people, and the staff is absolutely happier around their pets. It creates a different relationship between staff members since they also get to know canine family members as well. We've actually had people apply for jobs at our company who couldn't accept the positions because they were allergic to dogs. But they could also see how happy people were with their dogs in the office, so they never complained about that requirement when turning down the offer.

ProtectWise says handling security analytics in the cloud lets it store more data and move faster than its competitors.

When football fans checked their email and uploaded photos from Super Bowl 50 this year, the Denver-based security software startup ProtectWise was monitoring traffic from Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, for potential threats.

"We were invited by Norwich University's computer security program to participate with the Santa Clara Police Department as part of their security architecture for the Super Bowl," says ProtectWise cofounder and CEO Scott Chasin.

Unlike other security companies, ProtectWise generally doesn't provide hardware devices to attach to a network, or cumbersome software that can slow down individual computers by scanning files and network traffic. Instead, it provides lightweight software "sensors" that simply upload compressed network traffic from customer machines to its private cloud for analysis and monitoring.

"We have a very lightweight software sensor that acts like a virtual camera," Chasin says. "Essentially, we take that recording, compress it, optimize it, and replay it in real time or near real time for our platform in the cloud."

That approach let ProtectWise get up and running "in minutes" at the Super Bowl, where the company's software monitored about nine terabytes of data transfer to about 17 million different websites, Chasin says. He can't reveal too much about what the software discovered at the Super Bowl, other than that it found about 19 potential threats amid all that network data.

But in other cases, ProtectWise's software has been able to spot malware infections and hacking attempts—and use archived traffic history data to trace them back to their origins and determine which machines were compromised when. If a machine is spotted communicating with a malware command-and-control server, for instance, ProtectWise can replay prior data to determine how and when the machine was first infected.

"Today's attacks are extremely complex, and they happen over a really long period of time," says Chasin.

A February report from security firm Mandiant found that in one set of security breaches, it took companies a median time of 146 days to realize they've been compromised. ProtectWise can store data for weeks, months, or longer, in order to replay for further analysis in the event of a security issue. Customers pay varying fees depending on how much data they wish to store and for how long, with ProtectWise's cloud-based approach meaning they don't need to allocate their own servers to store the data or worry about keeping it safe.

And as the company learns of new kinds of attacks from published reports or its own research, it can automatically scan for them in its customers' recorded internet traffic, notifying them if, for instance, it's discovered their employees have been sending data to a known phishing site.

"We have many examples of retrospection," Chasin says. "They run the gamut from what you would think would be more traditional malware whose existence wasn't known previously to zero-day vulnerabilities, where we only learned about them recently, but in fact they're used in breaches historically, to ransomware phishing attacks that weren't discovered until a retrospective scan had taken place."

And network data is generally enough to catch most attacks, even if they come in through other channels like compromised USB keys, since they'll ultimately involve someone trying to remotely control machines, extract data, or something else relying on the internet, he says.

"We like to say the network doesn't lie," he says. "It's our true north."

This is how the (unlikely) partnership actually works, as told by the people from both companies who manage it every day.

On a July day in 2014 some people from IBM and Apple got together in a room at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California to start work on their recently announced business app creation partnership. The fact that the two companies were working together at all sounded a little unlikely; IBM, after all, was once cast in Apple mythology as the big, slow, and safe antithesis of everything Steve Jobs wanted his company to be. At least in the consumer space, the two were bitter rivals.

Then Apple won personal computing. In the new millennium business was increasingly done on mobile devices—increasingly, personal devices brought into the workplace by employees—running apps served from the cloud. People began expecting work applications to possess the ease of use and design sense that they saw in their personal apps.

The IBM people brought with them to Cupertino that day a mobile app they'd been working on—a fuel calculation app for airline pilots—that they thought might serve as a starting point for the partnership. It was built by IBM people, who had also built some powerful data analytics into the background. The IBM people hoped the Apple people would see it and be impressed, and then the two companies would continue building the app together.

But that's not what happened. IBM's app—all 40 screens of it—was a bloated mess. One Apple UI expert in the meeting said simply "that's not going to work," a person who was there told me. Pilots, the expert said, would not go through 40 screens in an app, even if they were currently doing the same tasks on paper.

So began the Apple/IBM partnership, which is officially known as IBM MobileFirst for iOS. IBM's fuel app didn't end up launching the partnership, but the Apple UI expert's criticism of it summed up the design sense that would guide the creation of IBM MobileFirst apps going forward. It also said a lot about the what the dynamic of IBM and Apple's working relationship would be.

Unlikely Partners

The July 15, 2014 press release announcing IBM MobileFirst for iOS described a combination of Apple's expertise in mobile computing with IBM's deep understanding of specific industries and their analytics, workflows, and data needs. The two companies said they would build 100 apps in verticals like travel, health care, retail, and energy. By December 2015 the two had reached that goal, and they've continued developing apps—both custom apps and ones that could be used multiple clients.

"It's strategically very powerful for both companies, and we think it's a great fit," Apple VP of product marketing Susan Prescott told Fast Company.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, who early in his career spent 12 years working for IBM, told CNBC on the day the partnership was announced that he began chatting with current IBM CEO Ginni Rometty two years prior and found some commonalities in the challenges and opportunities their two companies face. They soon assigned teams from both companies to look into ways Apple and IBM might work together. The teams returned a number of ideas, and an app collaboration partnership was one of them, Cook said in the CNBC interview.

And, at least in theory, IBM MobileFirst for iOS could open up a big market for Apple. Big IBM clients that decide to use one of the co-developed apps will obviously need lots of Apple devices on which to run them. And the addressable market is pretty huge. A earlier this year said enterprises will pay about $1,840 per employee per year for mobile devices when carrier, IT, security, and services are factored in. About 21% of that is pure hardware costs. Multiply that by the thousands of people employed by corporations and you begin to see the opportunity.

Working Together

This is how the IBM general manager for the Apple partnership, Mahmoud Naghshineh, describes the two company's day to day working relationship: "Apple is the great designer who takes ownership of the app. The IBM person knows the client's business challenges and back-end systems."

No doubt that's accurate, although it's the IBM people who seem to do most of the work. They're the ones who bring in the clients, sell the apps, and plan what types of apps to build. IBM designers and coders around the world do most of the actual app building. "I don't want to say that [Apple] is not doing the the design, but they're not sitting down at the computers doing the design," says Sue Miller-Sylvia, VP of IBM's MobileFirst for iOS Solutions program.

For many clients, IBM even acts as an Apple hardware distributor. The company offers a number of ways for its clients to acquire large numbers of iDevices. Customers can buy outright, lease, or sign up for a buy-back program that lets them trade up for new devices every year or two. Customers can also access IBM cloud-based device management, security, and mobile integration services.

Still, Apple is bringing something to the partnership that no other company can. For many people, the company defined the look and feel of mobile computing. And in the Bring-Your-Own-Device era, someone might be using an enterprise app on a smartphone at 4:58 p.m. and using a personal app on the same device at 5:02. That leaves people directly comparing work and consumer tools, and less likely to tolerate ugly enterprise work apps—especially on the small screens of mobile devices.

That's the context in which the IBM/Apple partnership happened. "In a very basic sense, it's all about making the apps people use at work more congruous with the apps they use on their phone in their personal lives," Miller-Sylvia says.

Apple's role in the MobileFirst partnership involves mandating that the apps be simple, and pointing out the native features that they should be using. The company's designers hold weekly calls with the IBM people building the apps to make sure design principles are being respected. "They are the ones that look at it and say 'You know what, that's not going to work, somebody's not going to do five taps to get to that particular screen,' or 'you need to follow our Human Interface Guidelines.' It's always been advice and counsel, and making sure it was something they would put their stamp on as well," explains Miller-Sylvia.

The iPad Takes Flight

A few months ago, a woman on an Air Canada flight into London's Heathrow airport got upset because the flight was late and she thought she might miss her connecting flight. The passenger—who was in tears, according to a flight attendant—had lost her boarding pass when getting on the plane in Frankfurt. Now she was fretting about landing at a big, strange airport and not knowing her way to the connecting gate.

The information the flight crew needed to help the troubled woman wasn't on the passenger information list (PIL), the big sheaf of printer paper flight attendants normally use to manage the flight. But the good news was that Air Canada had just begun using the MobileFirst Passenger+ app, remembers Air Canada service director Suzanne Strong. Strong is one of about 1,300 Air Canada service managers for whom the airline leased iPads from IBM to run the app.

Strong said she approached the passenger with iPad and app in hand and addressed her by her name. "Someone with just the PIL wouldn't have been able to do that," Strong said. "We often have no idea who they are." After the woman got some information about her gate and how to get there, she calmed down and cheered up. Just being addressed by her first name and getting the personal attention seemed to help a lot, Strong says.

In Passenger+, a flight attendant can see which passengers are traveling with babies, require special meals, or are entitled to special perks. If a flight in progress is delayed, the app can provide information on its impact on passengers. Flight attendants can use the app to find solutions while still in the air, such as booking a new flight for a passenger who has no chance of making a connection. Managing such information at large international airports can be particularly cumbersome on paper, says Strong.

Air Canada is currently in phase 1 of a three-phase implementation of the app. Air Canada's Passenger+ app now contains all the information in the PIL, and the airline is in the process of adding additional additional data. Where the PIL contains only information about passengers who have special needs or requests, Strong told me, the Passenger+ app contains information about all passengers on the flight. The information is currently static, but the app will eventually be able to update it in real time during the flight.

In the second phase, Passenger+ will starts to look more like a CRM (customer relationship management) system, Air Canada senior director of operations, information systems, Steve Bogie told me. It's at this phase that flight crew will be able to identify VIP passengers and offer them personalized TLC. In the third phase, Passenger+ will incorporate mobile payments, allowing the airline to sell add-on products and services to passengers. This could mean anything from premium wines to noise-canceling headphones to first-class upgrades.

Apple, IBM, Designers, Devs, and Real People

When IBM gets an order for an app such as Passenger+ from one of its enterprise clients, it invites key members of the client's team in for a three-day workshop at Apple's Cupertino campus. At the beginning of Passenger+ development, Air Canada sent IT people, managers, and flight attendants to the workshop to hash out the basics.

At the workshop, some manager types like Naghshineh and Miller-Sylvia are in the room. Apple will have a few of its designers there, as will IBM.

In addition, Apple requires that end users from the client—such as flight attendants in the case of Passenger+—are there to provide their unique view of what they need from an app. The company believes that this step is essential for prompting an immediate "Oh I know how to use that" reaction from the people who will actually use an app, one app designer told me. It also cuts way down on the training time needed to initiate new users.

Miller-Sylvia told me that this insistence from Apple doesn't always play well. "You can't imagine how much push-back we get from the client, because the managers think they know," she says. But "all of the transformation comes from the end users being involved. There's so many things that they do, and the managers end up getting surprised in the sessions and saying, 'We had no idea.'"

During one workshop, one of the end users explained: "When I need to do that, I just write it on my hand," Sylvia-Miller recalls. "And the manager was like, 'you what?!'" It's exactly this kind of nitty-gritty day-to-day work reality that gets exposed during the three-day workshops—things a middle manager might never know about.

The first day of the workshop is spent mainly talking to end users about their workday and about how the app might best be integrated into the work. After that, the Apple and IBM designers begin to develop actual app screens that carefully reflect the users' workflows.

By the end of the three-day workshop, the participants will have created the first few screens of a new app. Naghshineh told me that after the workshop is completed, many of the apps are designed and coded by the iOS and Swift developers in IBM's "App Garage" in India. The Passenger+ app, however, was developed for the most part in an IBM development shop in Toronto. IBM also has development facilities in Atlanta and Chicago.

Apple Flavor

Even before the workshop in Cupertino is over, the designers begin to apply design elements that have a familiar iOS look to them.

The MobileFirst apps use design artifacts that users might recognize from within iOS or in an Apple app they run on their phone. For instance, the Passenger+ app uses "badging" (small red dots with a number within) over a seat to signify that the passenger sitting there has a number of special needs or requests that might require attention from the flight attendant.

In another app, the designers used a familiar toggle bar at the top of the screen to switch between two views. It was familiar because the same toggle bar is used at the top of the iPhone's Recent Calls screen to switch between "all" calls and "missed" calls. Miller-Sylvia calls that a perfect example of a design trick used to help people move seamlessly from their personal apps to their work apps.

IBM's app developers are required to know and use Apple's Human Interface Guidelines to guide the look, feel, and flow of the apps. "We do checks against that when we train our people," Miller-Sylvia said. "We say, 'This is your bible.'" IBM has also been been building a book of best practices during its work with Apple, with elements and design templates and artifacts that can be used and re-used in building apps.

Traditionally, IBM has immersed itself in the the business realities of many different industries, Miller-Sylvia explains. It has deep analytics experience and expertise. "Apple has really taught us to step outside of that for a minute and really look at the simplicity," Miller-Sylvia said.

For instance, Apple's guidelines dictate that it should take users just one or two taps to get to what they need at any given time. Users should also be able to get to everything they need to complete a specific task (like estimating pounds of fuel for a flight) from the app's opening screen.

To Apple, a big part of simplicity is scope. The company's designers want to completely understand what the end user will be doing at the moment they use the app. Building in functionality that addresses tasks beyond that moment may overburden the UX with too many tab bars and links to other tasks. Apple would rather make a series of smaller, purpose-built apps than one big one that tries to do everything.

This is often a very new concept for IBM's clients, who often come in with the idea that their app should be all things to all people at all times. Miller-Sylvia remembers one woman who came to the workshop in Cupertino carrying a 400-page binder with everything she hoped to wedge into an app.

"We said, 'Just trust us for a few days, just let it go'," Miller-Sylvia told me. The woman ended up throwing her binder away, and she left Cupertino happy after starting a new version of the app from scratch.

In the past, Apple has never been considered a go-to enterprise vendor in the way Microsoft and IBM are, a notion Cook acknowledged in the 2014 CNBC interview: ". . . the reality is, that the penetration of these businesses and in commercial in general for mobility is still low." When Apple devices show up in enterprise workplaces, more often than not it's because employees buy them for personal use then bring them to work. Apple's association with IBM may give its name a more credible sound in the ears of Fortune 500 CTOs.

As successful as Apple has been in the 2010s, iPad sales have been a sore spot. Five years ago, sales of the devices contributed 16% of Apple's revenue; today they contribute about 9%. It's difficult to gauge whether or not the MobileFirst for iOS initiative has begun helping reverse that trend, but then the initiative is only a bit over two years old. Getting whole industry segments turned on to doing their work with iPads and mobile apps doesn't happen all at once.

Talking to Apple and IBM people for this story, I got the honest impression that the initiative still has a lot of juice behind it—perhaps a bit more so on the IBM side. Apple is clearly invested in addressing the enterprise, as it's shown by forming partnerships with other big players like SAP and .

Perhaps most importantly, the Apple and IBM people seem to be pulling in the same direction. People I spoke with from the two companies were reluctant to talk about any disagreements or growing pains in the relationship, but they talk in very similar terms about the roles of the two partners, about the initiative's guiding principals, and about its near- and long-term goals. Miller-Sylvia told me that if you were to eavesdrop on one of the app workshops on Apple's campus (good luck with that) you wouldn't be able to tell the Apple and IBM people apart.

Yes, the world has changed a lot since that day back in the '80s when Steve Jobs was photographed standing in front of the IBM sign flipping it the bird.

Playing sports at an elite level requires commitment, humility, and perseverance—all necessary traits of great leaders.

Playing sports at an elite level requires commitment, humility, perseverance, and other attributes similar to those of great leaders. In fact, elite athletes can tell us a great deal about how to be better leaders, says Stan Beecham, author of Elite Minds: How Winners Think Differently to Create a Competitive Edge and Maximize Success.

"The obvious similarity is that they're both competitive arenas," Beecham says. In his coaching practice, which includes both executives and elite athletes, the training and mental toughness required is similar for both types of clients, he says. Business leaders can draw a number of lessons from those who play sports at an elite level.

Thrive In Chaos

When linebacker Bradie James retired from the Dallas Cowboys in 2014, he devoted himself full-time to his franchise businesses. James had some success with MOOYAH Burgers, Fries, and Shakes, but was looking for new challenges in the business world. After discussions with management, he joined the company's corporate team as director of brand engagement, working in marketing, operations, and sales.

James credits his time on the Cowboys with making this transition. "As an athlete, we thrive in chaotic situations. [On the field], there are so many different things that are going on—the crowd, the opponent—you have to do your job. What you have to do is just hone that ability," he says. He used the ability to quickly assess needs and actions that he developed on the football field to do the same for his new employer.

Tap The Right Training

One of the first things elite athletes learn is that they can't work in a vacuum, says elite performance coach Michelle Cleere, author of From Here to There: A Simple Blueprint for Women to Achieve Success in Sport and Business. You need the right training and coaches to help you succeed.

Developing relationships with the people who can help you get better is second nature to athletes, but perhaps less so to business leaders, who may try to achieve more on their own, she says. Look at yourself as an athlete, she suggests. If you need to get better in a particular area, think about where you can get the extra coaching or training you need to develop that skill set.

Don't Skip Practice

Where elite athletes practice far more than they actually compete, business leaders are often expected to compete relentlessly, often with little practice, Beecham says. That can leave them ill-prepared when the stakes are high. While there is an enormous focus on numbers and successes, less attention is paid on building a solid process that prepares people to achieve those goals.

That process includes training, mentoring, stretch assignments, and assessment of strengths and weaknesses before "game time," he says, whether that's a big sales presentation or taking on a big project. Beecham points to John Wooden, the famous UCLA basketball coach, who was well-known for not talking about winning or losing, but rather how he wanted the game played.

"What I'm saying is what a lot of business leaders fail to do and I would say that in the sport, they do better than this," Beecham explains. "Good coaches in sport really do talk about the process, the things that we need to do to focus on to do well. In business, they don't do that as well," he adds.

Get It Done

When Ryan Kwiatkowski was a professional volleyball player in Belgium, he learned quickly how to manage his time. Three or four practices per day, traveling to matches, and other demands made it important for him to be organized about what needed to get done and overcome procrastination, he says. Now, he is director of marketing for his family's financial services firm, Retirement Solutions, Inc. in Naperville, Illinois, which manages more than $100 million in assets.

"I take a look at the work day in chunks and focus on very specific targeted activities throughout the day," says Kwiatkowski, "similar to how it would be during practices."

Win Or Learn

Recently, Kwiatkowski's team didn't land a big business pitch. While the news was disappointing, the former volleyball pro drew on his athletic experience to rally his team. The options aren't "win or lose," he says. They're "win or learn." Review what happened and where improvements can be made to be a better competitor next time, he says.

Suck It Up And Shake It Off

When you're a linebacker in the National Football League taking a beating from the other team, overcoming adversity is part of your job. James says that one of the key lessons he learned playing pro ball was that you have to bounce back. You're going to get hit. You're going to have bad days, he says. But you've got to figure out a way to get yourself back in the game, renewing your resolve, determination, and enthusiasm to make another run, even when you might not feel like it.

"You don't fail by falling, you fail by staying on the ground. It's about getting yourself back up," he says. That kind of mental toughness is an essential part of long-term success.

Get Everyone To Play Together

As captain of the Cowboys, James says there were times when he had to be the liaison between players and coaches, resolving concerns. Today, he uses that same skill as he helps build the MOOYAH brand. His experience as a franchise owner allows him to bring a different perspective to the corporate team, and he speaks out regularly to make sure their voice is heard.

"Sometimes you say, 'You know what, the team is banking on this, so let's look at it from a different perspective. Let's try a different way. I'm all in no matter what we do, but let's make this one adjustment. What do you think?'" James believes that ability to get people to work together toward a common goal is a skill that will serve you in business and in life.

One company is tapping talent pipelines far outside Silicon Valley pretty much as soon as they're built, but can it do that fast enough?

Cybercrime damages cost the world $3 trillion last year alone, according to a recent report from Cybersecurity Ventures, and that figure is expected to double by 2021, putting it on par with the current sum of U.S. corporate debt. This catastrophe will probably worsen before it improves. As smart-home technology spreads through the Internet of Things (IoT), a Security of Things (IoT) infrastructure will need to come with it.

Unfortunately, there are too few people with the expertise to build it—or, for that matter, to meet the widening range of other cybersecurity challenges impacting everything from banking to statecraft. In other words, there isn't just one type of cybersecurity—there are manifold sectors with different hubs in different parts of the world, including places far afield from Silicon Valley, where top tech talent likes to cluster.

As cybersecurity issues and the skills gap compounding them get even more global, one company is aggressively building an internship program to tap into affordable talent all around the world. But will it be enough?

Looking Outside The Valley

BullGuard is a U.K.-based personal security company, but it's found a rich seam of talent in Romania, where it also has offices. The company recently gained a foothold in Israel, too, after acquiring the pioneering SoT company Dojo Labs last month.

For a company like BullGuard, which maintains four global offices altogether, hiring in multiple locations around the world isn't optional—it's just necessary. But CEO Paul Lipman says it's also unlocked a hidden advantage that firms based in tech hubs like the Bay Area may not grasp. "We've had great success with an intern program that we kicked off this summer in Bucharest, where there is a hub of cybersecurity talent," he explains.

Since cybersecurity is a relatively new field, professionals in the sector tend to pick up expertise on the job. It's only more recently that universities have started seriously ramping up programs. But BullGuard finds that's been happening internationally, not just in the U.S., so it's making moves to tap into those talent pipelines pretty much as soon as they're constructed.

With its new Romania-based internship program, Lipman explains, "We took computer science students with cyberexperience in their college studies, and put them into our more innovative projects over the summer. It's been a real win-win. We get access to new blood [and] fresh thinking, the interns get valuable real-world experience, and we build a relationship with the university."

Establishing this ability to "hire straight out of college," Lipman says, "is another way to overcome the cyberskills shortage in the wider marketplace," without having to compete for the most high-cost professionals in the priciest talent markets.

Next year, BullGuard plans to expand its intern program in Bucharest and elsewhere around the world, then bill that global presence as a key advantage to promising new hires. It's hoping that the chance for Romanians and Israelis to work for the company in London and California, for instance (and vice-versa), will prove a tempting carrot and lay the groundwork for a loyal workforce—at a time when cybersecurity companies like BullGuard need that most.

Why New Grads Might Not Cut It

Others are more circumspect that this will work. Gary Hayslip is one of the world's foremost experts on cybersecurity and San Diego's chief information security officer. San Diego is another center of cybersecurity know-how, not least because of its long historical connection with the city's huge naval base and the head office of Qualcomm. Hayslip believes much more needs to be done than recruit graduates.

In the U.S. alone, he says, "there are thousands of unfilled cyber positions, and there aren't enough schools to produce the people for these positions, but in the last three years I have seen a major growth in colleges and universities offering classes and degrees in cybersecurity." So have companies like BullGuard, which are moving to scoop them up.

"However," says Hayslip, "popping out a bunch of squeaky new graduated cyberanalysts doesn't fix the issue because cyber is a multifaceted discipline that goes beyond classwork; you need experience."

It'll take more than creative partnerships between companies and universities to close that gap, he believes. The public and nonprofit sectors both have roles to play "so our next generation of cybersecurity professionals have an organization to protect and learn their discipline. We as a community must get involved if we expect to solve the problem," he says.

If Hayslip is right, BullGuard's Romanian internship program would still appear to be ahead of the game. But to some extent, he feels, businesses like it are still swinging in the dark. "I don't think companies truly understand what they are trying to hire," he says. "I have seen numerous organizations trying to hire a 'unicorn'—basically a cybersecurity professional with skill-sets across multiple fields such as firewalls, forensics, cloud security, open source tools, compliance-regulations audit, and so on."

Those candidates don't come around that often and are often prohibitively expensive, Hayslip says. "Trying to hire that rock star is not the best way to go," he continues. "It's better to hire two or three junior- to mid-level security analysts, mentor them internally, and build that rock star team."

That's ultimately what BullGuard is trying to do, even if, as Hayslip argues, it may not be able to do it alone. The hope, though, is that making job-experience opportunities more accessible and attractive to a truly global talent pool (ideally with the support of nonprofits and government groups), the industry can bring down the high costs of staffing cybersecurity positions, and do it fast. Let's hope it can. More and more depends on it every day.

Monty Munford writes regularly for Forbes, BBC, the Economist, MIT Tech Review, and Wired U.K. as well as for his blog, Mob76 Outlook. Follow him on Twitter at @montymunford.

For the executives of growing companies, devoting the time to read for a few hours a week adds value in more ways than one.

Jessica Mah, the CEO of inDinero, a San Francisco-based accounting software startup, sees reading as so important to the growth of her company that she reads two books a week. Mah, one of Fast Company's Most Creative People, explains:

I love reading about how the most successful and creative business leaders built their businesses and how I can take that idea and run with it or modify their strategies for inDinero. My routine is to take advantage of and fill my weekends and after-hours and travel time with reading. I also suggest books to my executive team, some I have not read, so they can learn different things and bring the best ideas up for discussion. It's a team effort.

In the tradition of executives being avid exercisers and meditators—because it's both good for them personally and as business leaders—founders who have a reading habit find that it helps their cognition and, by extension, grows their companies.

The Productivity Booster

Manish Chandra is the founder and CEO of Poshmark, an interactive resale fashion marketplace for members to buy and sell their own clothes and accessories. He spends time reading before heading to the office: "Reading early allows me to process information much faster throughout the day," he contends, "and helps with both decision making and overall time spent on any task."

Alexandra Cavoulacos, cofounder and COO of The Muse, echoes that sentiment. "Reading books has definitely boosted my productivity," she says. Cavoulacos asserts that books offer both wisdom and a new perspective. "I've also found that reading is one of the rare times that my mind is focused 100% on one thing," she asserts, "a hard thing to find in a world of distraction and secondary screens." She believes reading has "strengthened her focusing muscle," which, in turn, improves her ability to lead and innovate.

The Growth Stimulator

When executive leaders take the time to read, they create an opportunity to expand their knowledge or sharpen their skills that allows them to contribute more significantly to the growth of their companies.

Under Cavoulacos's informed leadership, the company's revenue grew four times between 2014 and 2015. They had 25 people on staff in January 2015 and now have a team of approximately 120.

Manish Chandra has presided over Poshmark's expansion as well. Now, one in 50 American women are selling in its marketplace. "Reading is an engine for personal growth, and I truly believe that the business growth is in so many ways tied to the leader's personal growth," he says. "So the net-net is that my reading equals business growth. That's just simple math!"

A graduate of Y-Combinator's class of 2010, Mah initially had inDinero on a hypergrowth track. That soon turned into a collision course with the reality of generating revenue on a freemium model. Several years later, the company is on a more healthy, sustainable trajectory. In 2014, InDinero had a growth rate of 2,685.6% and a revenue of $2.9 million. The company doubled in size in 2015, and expects to do so again by the end of 2016.

"Honestly, I'm not sure how you could maximize your potential if you are not reading regularly and considering alternative ways of thinking and approaches to solving your company's problems," Mah maintains. "There's so many answers out there, you just need to read them and relate them to your goals as a business leader."

The Problem Solver

Says Cavoulacos: "Whatever is keeping you up at night from a business perspective, read one or two books that help tackle that issue. The external perspective can really help generate new ideas, pose questions differently, and drive to an answer."

Cavoulacos specifically recommends the book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. The book is a business book written as a fable.

Cavoulacos says, "Lencioni goes through the five areas in which a leadership team can be dysfunctional, and how to address them. Even for teams that work well together, Cavoulacos says, "It's a great foundation and gives you a lot to think about—we read it as a leadership team at The Muse, and incorporated it into our executive team offsite."

Mah has been public about how a previous iteration of her company struggled with a cash burn rate that resulted in mass layoffs. As she made plans to pivot the company's mission, Mah turned to books. "There's no doubt that reading for me was key to inDinero's comeback," she states. "I'm sincerely thankful for all these past business builders to draw from and learning from others' mistakes or successes."

Not to mention, reading is a proven method to reduce stress. According to a 2009 study by University of Sussex researchers, reading can reduce stress levels by up to 68%. The study found that reading was faster at reducing signs of stress than listening to music or taking a walk; the lead researcher of the study cited the engrossing nature of reading as the reason behind its stress-busting merits.

As Mah says, "Making [reading] a successful habit will show up next quarter and next year, that you can bank on."

Here's what it takes to strike the right balance between being polite and seeming overly deferential.

It's normal to err on the side of being respectful, especially if you're at the earlier stages of your career, meeting new colleagues, or wooing a prospective client or hiring manager. No one wants to look presumptuous or too informal for the situation.

But it's possible to go overboard and leave the wrong impression, too. Showing too much respect turns into deference, which can work against you for other reasons. You can end up flattening yourself off and hiding your personality in contexts when you really need it to shine, and you run the risk of being seen as lacking leadership presence.

The good news is you can strike a balance between being respectful and being overly deferential. Here's how.

1. Focus On Authenticity

When you show deference, you tend to hide your true self—you're too worried about making room for others. You're afraid to show your best, so you describe your ideas plainly or tentatively, with little sign of pride, satisfaction, or confidence. You answer questions carefully to avoid any possibility of offense. In short, you become a sheepish follower, afraid to put yourself out there. If you're asked about growth, for example, you might simply state, "We managed to grow revenues by 15%, in line with expectations."

You can still be respectful, though, while putting your best self out there for those in authority to see. You're proud of your ideas and accomplishments, and you're not afraid to say what you really think—tactfully and within reason, of course. All this takes is being open, forthright, and authentic, which isn't always easy to do in tricky business situations.

But the main the idea here is to respect others' leadership while showing that you have leadership potential as well. If you're asked about growth, you might instead say, "By launching a major promotion, we were able to deliver on our commitment of 15% revenue growth." Same information, totally different message.

2. Stay Confident In What You Have To Offer

When you show deference, you give the impression that you lack self-esteem. You might stand awkwardly, looking down or off to the side. You hesitate before answering questions out of fear you might say the wrong thing. You mentally rehearse your answer, choosing the right words and the right approach, often adding fillers that undercut your credibility, like "um" and "uh." You appear to lack confidence.

When you show respect, though, you choose your behaviors based on a positive feeling about who you are. You stand tall, making frequent eye contact and speaking with conviction. You welcome questions because you believe in your ideas and your ability to execute them. You answer immediately, without editing your words, trusting yourself to share your ideas and beliefs. This way you appear self-assured but not arrogant.

3. Speak With Feeling . . .

You'll know you're being too deferential when your voice is flat, your expression is slack, and you're holding your hands together. You're too emotionless and "buttoned-up."

Being respectful doesn't preclude you from projecting a feeling of warmth—it actually depends on it. Your voice should be resonant, not too nasally and not too gravelly. When you speak, sound should resonate in your mouth as opposed to in your nasal passages or throat. To see what this feels like, make an "mmm" sound with your lips, and say the word "me."

Another way to project a feeling of warmth is to gesture with movements that come from your whole body. This might feel too over-the-top depending on the situation, but the key is to show enthusiasm within reasonable limits. You don't want your hands to be flippers whirling crazily through the air; you want your arms to thrust forward with your body, in one fluid motion. If you're able to connect your messages with natural gestures, you'll communicate openness and authenticity without overdoing it or looking forced.

4. . . . And Feel Like A Winner

Finally, when you show deference it's often because you have a losing mind-set. You feel intimidated by somebody else's position, authority, and power. You get smaller. It's like playing against a tennis player who's way better than you—what chance do you have? You can try a little, but what's the point?

When you show respect, on the other hand, you aren't cowed. You have the mind-set of a winner. You feel challenged by their position, authority, and power—in a way that motivates you to show what you've got. You get bigger. It's like playing against a superior tennis player, but one who isn't so much better that they'll crush you no matter what. You up your game and go for it.

If you're presenting a proposal to senior leaders, don't be so cautious that you only talk about immediate impacts and hedge your statements with caveats. Confidently explain why your proposal has such a tremendous upside and could open doors for the company down the road. You can do that respectfully without going overboard, and erring on that side—showing enthusiasm and confidence—may actually be a safer bet than showing deference.

When This American Life signed a deal with Pandora, it amplified a raucous, behind-the-scenes debate over the future of public radio.

This spring, This American Life and its creator and host, Ira Glass, became the latest flashpoints in a long-simmering public radio civil war.

Glass had recently signed a deal to distribute the hour-long show through streaming audio service Pandora, a potentially lucrative partnership that promised to bring in millions of new listeners to what is already one of the most visible and well-loved audio programs in the English-speaking world.

Executives at struggling stations, however, were not exactly thrilled. After the news broke, Mike Savage, a member of NPR's 23-person board of directors and the station manager of WBAA, at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., wrote a short post on LinkedIn explaining why he planned to drop TAL from his station, and why he thought other stations should, too.

His message was measured and diplomatic, befitting the mannered world of public radio; its one concession to raw emotion was a single underlined sentence. At the same time, it was also full of vague allusions and public media dogwhistles hard to parse from the outside.

"The decision to do this was not taken lightly and was made for a variety of factors," he wrote, without mentioning any others. "But one really stood out—the recent decision by Ira Glass to distribute the program to paid subscription service Pandora."

The fact that the show is available over Pandora made Savage question the entire idea of offering it to his listeners, or whether it was even public media at all. "We must respect the mission," he wrote, implying that Glass's pursuit of a wide audience via a lucrative partnership was not the way things are done in the world of public media.

His post got dozens of "likes," and prompted a public debate among current and former NPR executives, including Ira Glass.

"One of the sacrifices I made is that I joined LinkedIn in order to respond," Glass said over the phone on a recent afternoon. "Then, as soon as the whole thing was over, I quit."

Why did a distribution deal make a public radio station want to drop one of its most beloved programs? If you're confused, so was Ira Glass.

"I just didn't understand what his issue was," he said over the phone on a recent afternoon. (Savage declined to comment for this story.) In his eventual reply, Glass stressed that any money generated by the show was being put back into the show. "Mike has asked, what do member stations get out of it, when a show like ours generates revenue from Pandora and from elsewhere outside the system? My answer is: better programming." Several other public radio luminaries chimed in to support Glass, and Savage deleted the exchange (it lives on in a Tumblr archive).

This was just a small skirmish in a much larger conflict centering on an increasingly urgent question: How should public radio engage with the rapidly expanding world of streaming and downloadable digital audio, and who exactly should profit? It also sheds light on a few nagging NPR questions about which public radio and podcast fans might wonder: Shouldn't the radio network that invented the bemused and curious storytelling style that dominates podcasting itself be the country's biggest podcast player? Why aren't its flagship shows, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, available as podcasts?

To figure out what's really going on here, you have to look at the structure and mission of public radio in the United States. NPR was created in 1967 when Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act into law, which also created PBS. NPR broadcast its first show, an episode of the evening newsmagazine All Things Considered, in May of 1971. Its very 1970s original mission to was to "serve the individual," "promote personal growth," "celebrate the human experience," and "encourage a sense of active constructive participation, rather than apathetic helplessness."

This first show led with correspondent Jeff Kamen reporting from a Washington, D.C. anti-war protest, saying, "Today, in the nation's capitol, it is a crime to be young and have long hair." The show went out to 90 stations.

In some ways, NPR is like a television network. It centrally produces shows and sends them to its local affiliates, now numbering more than 900. Those affiliates air NPR shows alongside other syndicated programs—shows like The Moth Radio Hour and The Tavis Smiley Show—which come from an alphabet soup of distributors including PRI, PRX, and APM. Confusingly, even programs produced by NPR affiliates like studio 360 and The Takeaway (both from WNYC) are often distributed by organizations other than NPR; This American Life is produced by Chicago's WBEZ and distributed by PRX.

Very much unlike a TV network, however, NPR's local affiliates are extremely influential in the decision-making of the national organ. This control is both explicit and implicit. Its 23-person board includes 10 station managers from around the country. There's also a monetary dimension. In 2015, payments from member stations to NPR added up to $77 million, a little less than 40% of its annual budget of $193 million. The rest comes from corporate sponsorships, grants, and an assortment of smaller sources.

Those member stations, in turn, get most of their money from donations and underwriting—public radio speak for advertising. Those two buckets make up just over 50% of an average member station's budget, according to estimates published by NPR (the rest comes largely from an assortment of public and private grants).

This arrangement has meant that in many ways the member stations chart NPR's course. Since they view a direct connection with their listeners as their most valuable asset, anything that circumvents them and connects NPR writ large or one of its programs directly with you, the listener, is viewed with suspicion if not outright hostility. This logic has diverse implications. Even though, again, This American Life is not distributed by NPR, the reaction to the Pandora deal illustrates a prevailing attitude.

"Ira Glass, during the intro to his show, will mention where you can find This American Life, through the podcast or where you can find it on other places—on Pandora," said Dan Bindert, a public radio station manager in Chicago. (Glass does not regularly advertise its Pandora stream on his radio show, but he points listeners to the show's website.) "If you're a station manager, maybe that's something that shouldn't have in the broadcast, maybe the individual stations should cut that out. If you're airing a program on television, you wouldn't advertise the fact that you can watch it on another station."

In essence, Bindert doesn't see why stations, struggling to maintain their budgets and attract donors, should help a program build its own audience elsewhere. (His station, WDCB, is an affiliate of Public Radio International and not an NPR member station.) "If Serial," Sarah Koenig's popular podcast, a This American Life spin-off, "is aired on This American Life and all these public stations that have built up the audience for This American Life aired the broadcast that include Serial, and then they say go elsewhere for Serial and none of the money is going to come to the station, all of the money… goes directly to Ira to produce," said Bindert.

"Now, it's great for Ira that he's able to expand his staff and do great work, there's no question, he does exceptional work, but at some point should the stations just say, 'Well hey, you're airing an episode of Serial and we're not getting the rest of the program. Is this an infomercial for a commercial product?' You've got people using the public broadcasting states to promote the things that will help the individual producer, but won't help the system. It doesn't help the station."

Some feel that this attitude—that the primary way NPR should serve its listeners is by supporting its member stations—keeps it from leading and innovating in the digital audio space. Shouldn't it be focusing instead on its audience, wherever works best?

"The most uncharitable way to read this is to call this a hostage situation," said Nick Quah, author of the popular digital audio industry publication Hot Pod. NPR, he said, "probably has the potential to be the most reliable network of journalists across the country that can serve listeners and readers directly. The tension I personally feel as a consumer is that the member stations are holding them back. NPR's original mission was to serve the member stations, understanding those stations as proxy of the American public."

This structure and this set of incentives have very negative consequences, Glass told me. "When it comes to innovation, they've always been terrible," he said. "They have a terrible track record. The Fox Network in any given year invents new and more kinds of shows than NPR does by far."

NPR denies that it is under-producing in the digital realm. Spokesperson Isabel Lara described "an incredible amount of innovation going on." She points out that the network leads one ranking, by Podtrac, of top publishers, with its 33 podcasts garnering a unique monthly audience of 8,506,000 in August, helped by popular new shows like "Code Switch" and the just-launched "How I Built This." NPR's chief digital officer, Tom Hjelm, agrees. Hjelm, who until recently held a similar job at New York's WNYC, says it's his role to figure out "how we can make the world a better place, how we can propel the values and the offerings of NPR and public radio into the digital era and beyond? That's a wonderful challenge."

Hjelm emphasizes that NPR's digital footprint is "not audio only, but we're audio first." He has focused on hosting breaking news as text on NPR.org, figuring out a productive way to engage with Facebook Live (like some other media outlets, Facebook is paying NPR to experiment here), and working with social platforms. But he is also thinking about new ways to create and distribute audio, and to capitalize on the company's ability to offer breaking insight and commentary online around major news events.

Game Of Microphones

The tensions extend beyond programming and into product development. In 2014, newly installed NPR CEO Jarl Mohn forced out chief content officer Kinsey Wilson. That move was widely seen as a rebuke to his vision of a digitally focused, national-first NPR.

One of Wilson's central innovations was NPR One, an app three years in the making that streams digital content directly to a listener's device, and uses an algorithm and editors to build playlists tailored to listeners' interests. In a concession to member stations, it also uses geolocation to connect a user to their local public radio station. In concept, it was NPR's big digital play.

The promotion of NPR One was unusually fraught, with member stations opposed to it. A widely circulated rumor in the public radio world says that NPR couldn't convince member stations to even utter the the app's name, and was reduced to purchasing air time on their own affiliates to get it mentioned. NPR denies this. An internal memo circulated to all NPR journalists from March of this year outlining on-air guidelines signaled a quiet defeat for the app (emphasis theirs), "No NPR One: For now, NPR One will not be promoted on the air." The same memo forbid "tell[ing] people to actively download a podcast or where to find them."

In our interview, Hjelm demurred when I asked him if NPR One was NPR's flagship digital product, pointing to its website and news app. He acknowledged the controversy it faced.

"On the face of it, there are questions about it" from NPR member stations. "I'm not going to say there's skepticism or antagonism toward NPR One, but part of my job is to work with the station and help them understand the value proposition that a product like NPR One brings, the value that it delivers to the system as a whole."

As of July, NPR says NPR One is growing its audience by about 10% every month. About 40% of its users are under 35 years old, and more than a quarter say the app has led them to listen to broadcast radio more often.

As things stand, NPR is far from being in a crisis. Its two flagship news programs, All Things Considered and Morning Edition, both have massive and enviable radio audiences. In the fall of 2015, ME had 12.6 million listeners, while ATC had 12.5 million. To give a sense of scale (and although the numbers aren't directly comparable) the top-rated network TV morning show, Good Morning America, had 4.2 million average daily viewers the week of August 1, and the top-rated evening news broadcast, NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt had about 10.4 million for the week of August 8.

Still, the public radio world feels it's in the early stages of a massive disruption, similar to what the movie, music, and newspaper industries have had to deal with. The questions of its eventual shape are very much up in the air.

Some are hopeful about the future of NPR and its relationship with its affiliate stations.

"I believe in the United States of public radio," Hjelm told me. "I believe that now and I actually believed it before when I was still on [the] station side of the aisle, when I was at WNYC. I think the power of the network is huge and there's tremendous value there."

Others are decidedly more gloomy. "I'm very much an evolutionist person," said Quah. "The member stations, some of them need to die. Some of them aren't economically as feasible and some of them are sort of not as adept or as aware of the stakes in the digital disruption. But at the same time, they are dictating NPR's conduct, and that's a very great danger for this network of information journalists."

An increasingly popular way for NPR talent to make creative new ventures is simply to leave NPR altogether. This week, for instance, Planet Money reporter Steve Henn announced that he's teamed up with Netflix veterans John Ciancutti and Steve McLendon, to make a shortform audio startup called Tiny Garage Labs. Their platform, 60dB, is a decidedly digital, NPR One-like effort, powered by the founders' years of experience with recommendation engines at Netflix. Indeed, becoming the "Netflix of podcasting" seems to be the dream of a range of platforms, including Gimlet, Howl, and Audible.

Insiders have seen the crisis for local radio looming for decades. During the debate on LinkedIn, Glass wrote that twenty years ago, his station WBEZ hired a consulting firm which told them that, "It was inevitable that soon enough, lots of people would be able to bypass local stations like WBEZ and get their public radio shows elsewhere." The consultants went on to predict that stations would divide into two classes: those that produced content, and those that simply repeated, or re-broadcast, those shows. "The repeaters would have trouble surviving," Glass wrote.

WBEZ responded by starting an experiment in producing original programming with a new show called Your Radio Playhouse which would later change its name to This American Life. In the long run, Glass and many others believe, the only route to a salvation for these stations is producing shows that their audience wants to hear.

Smaller stations look at the success of shows like TAL and feel it would be impossible to replicate given their budget and time constraints. This isn't an argument for which Glass has a lot of sympathy.

"WBEZ started This American Life with no money," he said. "Nobody has the money to start a national show. Everybody goes out and raises the money and that's just what you do.

"When it comes to the bigger point, if you're a little station, how do you make original programming that you can monetize on the internet? It's not easy. It's like starting a business. What we're talking about is you're starting a business within your business and that's really hard. It's hard to get the money to start. It's hard to figure out a plan. It's hard to figure out a product that people would want. Yeah. That's really hard. Okay, well, not to be harsh about it, but that's kind of their mission."

In the end, in any case, Mike Savage did not drop TAL from his station, WBAA. The reason? His listeners demanded it.

Correction September 23, 2016: updated to include a quotation from an NPR spokesperson regarding NPR's podcast audience. An earlier version of this article referred to Kinsey Wilson as "she" but he is in fact a "he." It also gave conflicting numbers for the membership of NPR's board. The actual number of members is 23.

Sources claim that when distributors won't sell to Jet.com, it sometimes buys out brick & mortar stock instead, to the ire of manufacturers.

Last fall, Barbara*, who works in the marketing department of a holistic pet supplement maker, was in the process of putting together a pricing policy for her company's products when her boss asked her to look into a site called Jet.com.

"They were all over the news at that time," she recalls. The coverage concerned a program called Jet Anywhere. Jet.com was offering "JetCash" to customers when they shopped at merchant sites belonging to Walmart, Amazon, Macy's, and others. To use this cashback program, consumers would have to go to the Jet Anywhere tab on Jet.com and click on a link to one of those merchants. Once they completed their purchase on the other site, they were directed to forward their purchase confirmation to anywhere@jet.com. Jet would then append "JetCash" to the customer's Jet account, which could be redeemed for money off their next purchase on Jet.com. Not all the merchants linked to on Jet Anywhere had agreed to participate; more than 100 retailers asked Jet.com to remove the discount links, prompting the news coverage.

Though Barbara's company was not among those linked to on Jet Anywhere, her boss wanted her to check out the site and see if their pet supplements were appearing there. Barbara discovered her company's supplements were being sold on Jet.com. "We don't allow our products to be on Jet.com, and if you Google us you'll see us on there," she says. After ordering her company's product through the website, she was able to determine which distributors had sold to Jet, and promptly issued letters asking them to stop. Roughly a year later, the company's supplements are still being sold on Jet.com, despite the manufacturer's best efforts to stop it.

Barbara's company isn't alone. It turns out a number of high-end pet food manufacturers like Champion Pet Foods, Diamond Pet Foods, Rawz, FROMM Family Foods, Weruva, Naturvet, and Wellness Pet Food all say they don't distribute through Jet.com, and yet their food appears on its site. Many of the manufacturers I spoke with said they had signed agreements with their distributors specifically stating that they would terminate their business relationship if those distributors sold the manufacturer's goods to Jet.com. But that didn't deter Jet.

"A representative of [Jet] approached me and said that if we didn't sell them our product, then they would go and buy it retail," says Ted*, the owner of a pet food manufacturer, who wished not to be named. In other words: When Jet couldn't negotiate deals with fancy pet food makers, Jet representatives went to small bespoke pet stores, bought food off shelves, and resold it online.

The Amazon competitor also looked into buying a physical pet store in order to foster a relationship with niche pet food distributors and manufacturers, one well-placed source claims. More often, Jet tried to get mom-and-pop pet shops to act as distributors for its big online marketplace, the source says. But using small stores as distributors isn't easy. Unusually large orders raise flags for manufacturers and their distributors, which could lead to a small store being cut off from a certain product or company.

The Problem For Pet Food Manufacturers

There are a few reasons why specialty pet food makers may not want to sell to Jet.com. The first is that some prefer to exclusively sell their products through brick-and-mortar shops, because they view that experience as being more white-glove than an online experience. The second reason is manufacturers see Jet as undervaluing their premium products through its discounts. Thirdly, these manufacturers may have signed deals with other online merchants promising not to sell on competing sites.

Pet food maker Rawz boasts high-protein, grain-free dog and cat food, claiming it's the next best thing to a completely raw diet. Raw diets, which can include a blend of bones, raw meat, fish, eggs, organs, and other animal parts, are supposedly healthier for cats and dogs than most manufactured foods. But they are difficult to prepare, have a high ick factor, and can be expensive. Rawz dehydrates a variety of poultry and fish and turns it into kibble. The grain-free food doesn't come cheap, but consumers know they're paying for a quality product. The company also donates 100% of its profits to charity.

A Jet representative approached Rawz founder and CEO Jim Scott, wanting to sell Rawz on its site, but Scott told them he only sells to brick-and-mortar stores. Scott feels pet specialty shops offer a more personal shopping experience than online stores. Amazon has tried to re-create this same intimacy through reviews, but Scott would argue it's not the same. Store clerks can wax poetic about the benefits of each product and make personal recommendations to pet owners. "It's a nutritional consultation, is really what it is, and you can't get that online," he says.

The second reason Scott said no to Jet.com is because of its discount pricing. "It creates the perception that the product is overpriced," he says. Jet.com doesn't consider itself a discount site, though it does offer consumers item price breaks when they buy products in bulk. On its website, Jet explains that it saves money when it can package goods together and in turn can pass savings back to consumers by adding discounts to their overall cart. Consumers can earn further discounts by paying with a debit card rather than a credit card. Here's the shopping cart scheme in Jet's own words:

The items you've added can be packed and shipped with other items in your cart. It costs us less to ship multiple items together, so when you add items with the tag to your cart, you pay less. Products whose manufacturers don't allow discounts won't drop in price, but don't worry—our prices are low from the start.

Jet says its doesn't offer price breaks on products that manufacturers don't want discounted, but if you put products from any of the brands mentioned above who aren't officially working with Jet in your cart, you'll see discounts applied. That doesn't sit well for brands that want to maintain the perception that their goods are worth a certain amount.

For Scott, there's also a concern that online stores with discounts like Jet.com are a threat to small brick and mortars, because people would rather buy a product they already know from a website with a cheaper price than from their local pet store.

Scrappy Tactics

This wouldn't be the first time that Jet founder Marc Lore packed a van full of store-bought goods to later sell on one of his sites. When he was starting up Diapers.com, he was unable to strike an agreement with diaper manufacturers, so he sent out his only employee to a local BJ's Wholesale Club to buy up diapers in order to fulfill orders being placed on the site, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek feature on the company's early days. Eventually Diapers.com was able to convince major manufacturers like Proctor & Gamble to work with them.

In the Businessweek article, the ploy comes off as a scrappy way to circumvent the big dogs, who refused to sell to Lore because his operations were initially too small to bother with. But the tactic is perhaps a little less admirable when used to dodge the wishes of niche manufacturers who want to limit the number and scope of retailers they work with. As a salesperson at one of the manufacturers put it, "They're like hackers. You cut off one source and they find another entry point."

Of course, this kind of behavior from a major e-commerce player isn't uncommon. Amazon's well-documented rub with the publishing industry illustrates the way online discounters can put the squeeze on companies that don't comply with its interests. When it comes to inventory, Amazon has the added advantage of its glut of third-party merchants.

Amazon's roughly 2 million third-party retailers, often small independent stores looking for larger distribution, are responsible for almost half of units shipped on Amazon's platform. That allows Amazon to have a diverse product offering without having to deal with manufacturers directly. While some of the pet food manufacturers I spoke with were equally unhappy with their products being on Amazon, they said it was easier to get in touch with an Amazon merchant and have their products pulled offline than it was to negotiate with Jet. These third-party merchants do make it hard for Jet to compete with Amazon in terms of breadth of merchandise. But is circumventing manufacturers who don't want to do business with them an appropriate workaround? Manufacturers would say no.

Is This Legal?

The strange tactic is probably legal, but it's definitely not standard business practice. In most circumstances, businesses are not selling a product for less than they acquired it for. Thanks to its oodles of venture capital, Jet.com has been in a unique position to lose money.

Pet manufacturers assert there's an issue of food quality at stake, too, because they can't guarantee the product that Jet.com is selling is being stored properly or sold within its shelf life. They're concerned that if Jet is negligent with sell-by dates, customers might get a stale representation of their food, or worse, someone's pet might get sick.

The practice of selling a product without the manufacturer's blessing could also cause contractual issues for food makers. Some pet food brands have exclusivity deals with Amazon and Chewy.com, a discount site that only sells pet accoutrements. So when Jet.com obtains products outside the usual channels, manufacturers say it may put them in breach of contract if they're obligated not to sell to a competing site.

Legalities aside, it's pretty obtuse for a company of Jet's size and valuation to ask the very small pet boutiques it plans on undercutting to be complicit in circumventing upscale food manufacturers that don't want to sell on its platform. And it would be difficult to argue that Jet might be putting small pet speciality retailers out of business through its competitive pricing. But if Jet is shown to be contributing to the demise of these shops by underpricing them, potentially limiting competition, the point is moot if some stores are actively helping Jet do so by selling product to Jet off the shelf.

Manufacturers, too, might have difficulty trying to win a suit against Jet—especially if they band together. If it appears that a group of pet food manufacturers are collectively deciding not to sell to the online retailer, an argument could be made that they're boycotting Jet, which is considered anti-competitive behavior.

In general, anyone can sell anything (unless they've stolen it) to anyone for any price they see fit. Once a product leaves a manufacturer, they typically don't care what happens to it. A shirt bought at Barney's can be resold repeatedly on eBay. The only time that isn't true is if that company or person is doing the above in a way that interferes with competition. Then it becomes an anti-trust issue. But for the reasons outlined above, it would be very hard to make the case that Jet is acting anti-competitively.

Though Jet.com's unconventional product acquisition maneuvers may not be explicitly illegal, they are definitely weird and have earned the wrath of manufacturers. Walmart, Jet's soon-to-be parent, has not said whether or not it will end this practice. When we reached out to the superstore, a representative said, "We are building a detailed integration plan based on our complementary capabilities and what makes the best sense to drive the business and provide the best experience for our customers."

*Sources have been given alternative names to preserve their anonymity.

From Sephora to Ulta to independent startups, the cosmetics industry is embracing what is clearly much more than a passing fad.

I showed up at a Korean beauty blogger panel discussion in Los Angeles this past July because I wanted to understand the appeal of snail mucus face masks. The panel was part of KCON, the world's biggest Korean culture convention.

I was turned away at the door. The hall at the L.A. Convention Center, which could hold hundreds of people, had become a fire hazard.

"We're filled to capacity with this one," a guard told me. I begged, and eventually he let me inside, where representatives from top Korean beauty blogs discussed such topics as oil production and acne scarring and something called "bubble peeling" to an audience so rapt you'd think they were in the presence of deities. It didn't matter that near-deafening drums next door threatened to drown out the speakers or that the room suffered a two-minute blackout. These people—men and women of all ages—were devoted.

Korean beauty encompasses a wide range of both skincare and makeup products and is known for a few key factors—most notably, creative innovation in packaging and product formulas that often rely on unusual natural ingredients, like bee venom or artichoke extract.

The category has been popular in the States for several years now, and demand is showing no signs of slowing down. According to the Korea Customs Service, the country's exports of cosmetics totaled $2.5 billion last year, up 53.1% from 2014. (In comparison, their cosmetic exports were at $1 billion in 2013.) Specifically within the U.S., exports hit $663 million last year, a 56% uptick from 2014. Last month, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Bain Capital Private Equity announced they will acquire a majority stake in the Korean cosmetic firm Carver Korea Co. Ltd., while the luxury giant LVMH bought a minority stake in South Korea's Clio Cosmetics for $50 million. Smaller upstart companies have jumped in as well—from Korean beauty incubators to e-tailers that double as content providers.

The hyper-competitive Korean makeup business pushes brands to innovate at a rapid rate, which accounts for the high number of products released each season—and the need for sites to review them. Many of these brands are trying to do more than just sell products: They're promoting a whole cosmetics culture, an attitude toward skincare that is all about indulging oneself and enjoying the ritual of doing so. And of course they hope to instill the idea that these practices should become a permanent part of the American beauty routine.

The fascination with Korean beauty brands can be traced to BB (beauty balm) creams, a makeup-skincare hybrid of foundation mixed with anti-aging properties. Sephora took notice of innovations coming out of Korea seven years ago, but it wasn't until they came in contact with BB creams as a category that they decided it would be a good business investment.

"These all-in-one color and treatment products were perfect for the fast-paced North American consumer who wanted more multitasking products," says Cindy Deily, senior director of Merchandising for Sephora.

BB creams were the ultimate gateway drug: easy, quick, and effective. For the average time-strapped American woman, convenience is crucial, and BB creams offered multiple benefits in one little package. While many aspects of Korean skin rituals involve multiple complex steps with various products, importers knew to cherry-pick simplicity for an audience in the States.

"I don't think U.S consumers are ever going to use 12 products—that's not realistic," says Margie Nanninga, beauty analyst at the market intelligence agency Mintel. "Skincare isn't a high enough priority for where we would adapt such thorough routines, so we're kind taking the bits and pieces from the Korean market."

With BB creams firmly perched on their bathroom shelves, American women became more curious about Korean beauty. It has an allure of something foreign and exciting, thanks to ingredients like salmon eggs or sake. As Deily says, it's the combination of "innovation, dedicated routines, efficacy, and playfulness."

"American consumers are very results-driven and they're recognizing that Korean women put a very strong emphasis into their skincare routine," Nanninga says. "They think there might be a secret that the Korean market has figured out that we're missing out on."

Today, Sephora sells hundreds of Korean products and even hosts a dedicated K-Beauty page on the company website. "We believe our early adoption of this trend at Sephora, along with the increase in social media and YouTube vloggers from around the world really helped to accelerate our clients' interest," Deily says. The company's top sellers include Dr. Jart+ sheet masks—serum-infused masks that you can use and toss—and Too Cool for School Egg Mousse Soap, a whipped egg white mousse cleanser infused with egg yolk extract to hydrate skin.

Ulta, another giant beauty retailer, has also ramped up its offerings, now selling eight different Korean brands and over 150 products. Masks are a hit. "They're an approachable, inexpensive way to treat yourself to an indulgence," says Julie Tomasi, SVP of Merchandising. Ulta consumers increasingly prefer non-chemical ingredients, which is a staple of Korean skincare. "The interest for natural ingredients continues to grow," Tomasi says.

Birchbox, meanwhile, launched a Korean beauty limited-edition box in September 2015 that sold out in less than a week. "We saw huge demand and engagement from our customers," says Eric Neher, VP of Merchandising at Birchbox. "Our customers prioritize treating their skin over concealing it, and the Korean focus on great skincare really resonates."

One of the leaders in this category is AmorePacific, a cosmetic company in South Korea that boasts more than 20 brands, including Sulwhasoo, Laneige, Mamonde, and Etude. They alone account for 40% of all Korean beauty market sales worldwide, and the company is growing more than 30% a year.

AmorePacific's products are sold at Sephora, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom. Its biggest hit is the innovative AmorePacific "cushion foundation," a portable compact application for coverage infused with Asian botanical ingredients and SPF. The compacts' soaked cushion applicators allow consumers to apply liquid makeup mess-free on the go. Some beauty bloggers have said it revolutionized the foundation sector.

"Everyone had a very specific view on what foundation should be and look like, and we disrupted that," AmorePacific president Brad Horowitz says.

Korean beauty is not just a mass-retailer game. Smaller independent retailers are now dedicated entirely to this sector. Glow Recipe was founded in 2014 by Sarah Lee and Christine Chang, two former L'Oréal employees. They wanted to educate consumers on the diversity of Korean brands, emphasizing items that would resonate with the American market.

"A lot of the Korean products were brought over to the U.S. as they were, and what we learned [from our L'Oréal experience] is that if you have products that work in a specific country, it doesn't mean it will translate the same way or be perceived the same way in the U.S.," Lee says. The duo localized the positioning of the products so American consumers could understand and easily use them, demystifying the perception that Korean beauty is complex and overwhelming.

For example, they created the term "rubber masks" for an existing Korean skin treatment that involves applying a thick layer of vitamin-enriched rubber that conforms to one's face. "We created a new category," Chang says.

In Nov. 2014, Glow Recipe made $3,000 a month, but within five months—with a boost from an appearance on ABC's Shark Tank—Glow Recipe raked in half a million. Now they not only boast a successful online business, they've begun consulting for more established retailers, Sephora among them, on which Korean brands to sell in stores. In addition to curating new and upcoming products, Glow Recipe provides Sephora with a range of content, including video tutorials that explain in detail some of the more complex processes. (I personally had to watch the video for "splash masks," mini-facials that demand specific product-to-water doses and repetitive splashing, four times.)

"Sephora was curating well, but we want to make sure to give them products that have great ingredient lists and can deliver well," Lee says. Glow Recipe also helps Sephora keep up to date with the influx of Korean brands that are constantly launching new products. "There are no breaks within innovation. It's why the world is looking at Korea for inspiration."

There are more niche American retailers, including Soko Glam, Cosmetic Love, and Via Seoul. The latter, previously known as Insider Beauty, sells a meticulously curated line of cult favorites from Korea, like temporary tattoos for eyebrows and a face mask infused with real 24K gold. It caters to women in their 30s and 40s with more mature skin needs. Via Seoul boasts a 70% growth in sales year-to-year, but according to CEO Angela Kim, would like to expand to a broader consumer base.

The online beauty destination Peach & Lily launched in 2012, when there were 1,200 beauty brands in Korea. "Today there are over 9,000," founder Alicia Yoon says. She explains that her American audience was originally drawn to the uniqueness of Korean products but became repeat customers after benefitting from what she says are real results.

"Korean beauty consumers are some of the most globally demanding beauty consumers, who push beauty brands in Korea to meet sky-high expectations," Yoon says via email. "The result is highly efficacious and gently formulated products with a delightful sensorial experience when it comes to texture, scent, and application. To boot, the products need to be retailed at a value-driven price point and the packaging and applicators all need to wow and stand out."

To that point, this is just the beginning. Currently, a good portion of Korean beauty is limited to higher-end, prestige brands like AmorePacific, but Mintel is betting that interest will trickle down into more mainstream players over the next few years.

"Skincare is a very competitive market, and brands are looking for ways to stand out," Mintel's Nanninga says. "And I think [incorporating Korean beauty culture] is going to be one of the strategies to stand out to consumers."

One idea that the more affordable cosmetics companies might want to master if they do decide to pursue Korean beauty is already old hat to the upscale niche retailers. "We've been using the term skin-tertainment,'" says Glow Recipe's Lee. "The idea that skincare is not a chore—it's just as fun as makeup."