Avoid these three common mistakes and you'll strike a balance between resting up and not getting too far behind.
I'll be honest. For someone who's such a big advocate of taking time off when you need to, I did a pretty bad job of it recently. In fact, when I came down with a cold, I tried to go to work (and made a lot of my colleagues pretty upset in the process).
Sure, it makes sense that you'd want to be productive when you have "nothing more than a little cough," but it's important to take a sick day—and if you need to redefine what a sick day means to you to make yourself actually take one, do that!
So before you try to power through another (contagious) cold in the office, make sure you're not making these three mistakes:
If it were up to my mother, I'd shut off the internet connection from my apartment whenever I was sick so that nobody could get a hold of me until I got better. "Sick days are for being sick," she'd probably say. "You can't be sick and work at the same time." However, you and I both know the reality is that even when we're home sick, we're awake for a good portion of the day.
You might not leave your bed much (or at all), but it's natural to start feeling restless after a while. Not to mention stressed from getting behind. For those of you who've been in bed for a few days and just can't take it anymore, I bet you want nothing more than to suck it up and head into work the next day.
What to do instead of going into work sick. Depending on your boss, it might be as easy as being honest: "I'm not well enough to come in, but I can do most of my work from home today." Or, if your boss won't go for that (or your company has strict policies), go ahead and take the official sick days and then do as much work as you feel up to from bed. Emphasis is on feel up to—which might mean just monitoring your inbox to avoid getting restless.
Yes, it sucks to "waste" a sick day working, but it also sucks to return to the office after not feeling well and then get stuck spending a few really long days in the office catching up. And if you're the kind of person who can't bear the thought of getting behind, try compromising with yourself.
I took this to a bit of an extreme recently by talking myself into going for a jog. That was borderline idiotic and I would not recommend it. However, even if you're not as dumb about this as I am, think about all those times when you've had a little cold and thought, "Hey, I'll stay home from work today—and run all my errands instead!"
I get that it's tough to stay isolated for an extended period, but just as much as you'd want to keep your teammates from getting sick, you should also spare your neighbors from the same fate. Plus, you and I both know that you're not helping your health by moving around.
What to do instead of going out. If you're feeling up to it and have outdoor space, feel free to take your laptop outside and check in on things. Of course, use your discretion (and do not go for a run like I did). But if you've been home for a few days and are getting better, then treat yourself to some fresh air. However, if you're barely able to get out of bed, spare yourself the trouble and stay indoors. The only person who's putting on this pressure to get up and moving is you (assuming you don't have an evil boss).
You'll notice that the first two ways you're messing up your sick days include a few tips on how to stay productive when you're feeling antsy. But here's the thing—when you're taking a sick day, you are sick. It's important not to lose sight of the fact that while it's totally understandable not to want to fall completely behind on work, you do need a little time to sit around and take care of yourself.
What to do instead of taking meetings from bed. I'm not here to tell you to do absolutely nothing during a sick day, especially if you know you have a tight deadline coming up. But instead of working a typical day from home, make yourself a list of things that have to get done ASAP. Find some time to do those things, and once they're out of the way, allow yourself to do something you need in order to get better. That includes, but is not limited to, watching mindless TV, scrolling through social media, and taking midday naps.
There's nothing worse than having to stay home from work because of a cold, when all you want to do is go to work and get some stuff done. However, you shouldn't always put pressure on yourself to loaf around while you're feeling less than stellar just because you're taking a "sick day." Don't be afraid to redefine what it means to you so that you can return to work feeling better.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Muse and is reprinted with permission.
From data analysis to innovative wearables, new companies are working on solutions for Americans' sleep problems.
A whole panoply of new sleep apps, sites, and devices are waking up the digital health industry—and they go far beyond the tracker market.
The digital health sector experienced record highs for funding in the last two years, with 2015 reaching $4.5 billion. According to a recent study, the market for devices that help diagnose and treat the 40 million Americans suffering from sleep disorders is estimated to reach $125.8 million in 2017.
Given this boom, it's not surprising that investors are taking this industry more seriously. And enterprising consumers are too: A quick search on Kickstarter reveals dozens of inventive, forward-thinking (and downright kooky) sleep products, like complicated-looking travel pillows.
"Consumers are interested in becoming more active in their health care," says Mitchell Mom, venture lead at Rock Health, a fund dedicated to digital health. Mom predicts that high-deductible health plans will nudge consumers into new habits, who will be spending more money on their health care than before.
"I think devices will help keep consumers engaged and aware of their own health care," he says. Hopefully, that means a shift from a reactive process (I'm sick, thus I should go to a clinician) to a more proactive one (my inflammation levels are high, I should probably take it easy).
While there's reportedly been a bit of wearable fatigue, Mom sees more companies focused on what to do with all the information gathered about people's sleep patterns. "There is a push to do a lot with this data," he says. "That's what consumers want."
Doctors have noticed this trend as well. Michael Breus, sleep specialist and author of Good Night: The Sleep Doctor's 4-Week Program to Better Sleep and Better Health, has seen a sharp uptick in patients coming to him with their trackers. He's suspicious of the accuracy of many monitoring models, but he appreciates that it forces people to make a habit of looking at their sleep patterns. Just like Mom, however, he wants to know: What do you do with all the data?
"The more people can present real data and talk about sleep, the better because the public is absolutely yearning for it," Breus says. In fact, the National Sleep Foundation recently requested that monitoring companies create a set of standards so that consumers can—at the very least—decipher what's being collected.
That's what companies like Beddit are trying to do. The company makes a thin mattress sensor that tracks one's movements, snoring, and environment, then analyzes it and offers a report as well as guidance on how to improve the snooze. Breus, who tests as many devices as possible ("I've tried them all," he says with a laugh) recommends it, along with the S+ sleep sensor (which creates daily charts based on sleep patterns) and the Oura ring (which measures pulse waveforms, heart rates, and body temperature).
"We have finally come to the age where people are interested in their health, more so than any other time in history," Breus says. "It used to be all about exercise and diet, but sleep deprivation is entering the public vernacular."
So what else is on the market? Plenty, especially so-called "active" devices that intervene with sleep cycles. There's the Cereve Sleep System to cool the forehead and soothe "a racing mind," the Sleep Shepherd, which delivers brainwave sensors and beats to your ears, and Sleepion, a 3-in-1 gadget that emits sounds, lights, and sleep-inducing aromas.
These new startups are using advanced technology, focusing on products that proactively analyze, diagnose, or treat sleep disorders versus merely collecting data. Take, for example, Rythm's Dreem, a sensor-clad headband that influences brain waves with soft sound stimulations. Founded in 2014, Rythm raised of total of $11 million in funding and now boasts a staff of more than 60.
Rythm's Dreem[Photo: David Hugonot Petit, courtesy of Rythm]
"Sleep is a very complex topic," says Dreem cofounder and CEO Hugo Mercier, who envisions the neurological wearable as a personalized device. "You are not sleeping like I am sleeping; your brain is not mine. This product is for everybody."
Rythm is currently focused on France and the U.S., two top countries that, according to Mercier, suffer from sleep deprivation.
If you're looking for something a little less intrusive, there's the wildly popular Sleep Genius. The auditory sleep-aid was originally developed to help lull astronauts to sleep. Now, it's the No. 1 health and fitness app in the Apple store.
"Our sleep really sets the barometer for other functions: If we're not sleeping well, it has an impact on our attention, on our mood, on our performance, on our choices, on our relationships, on our communications," says Sleep Genius cofounder Alex Doman, who studied neurotechnology for 25 years.
As he sees it, without sleep, you can't tackle any other brain issue. "It was an issue over the course of my career that kept coming up," he says. "We couldn't make the kind of progress we needed to [for patients] unless we helped them first resolve the sleep problems. Sleep is really ground zero for our brain performance. "
Doman has been especially surprised by the increase of consumer interest in sleep in the last two years. He's noticing it grow across media channels, with awareness at an all-time high.
"The sleep industry has been experiencing exponential growth," he says. People are recognizing that it's not one thing: It's not just surface changes; they need to adopt healthy sleep hygiene practices. While the default surface solution used to be popping an Ambien, today, Doman says, "people want to show that they're proactive" in their health.
For the home-tech market, Lighting Science specializes in lightbulbs designed to mimic the effect of natural light. The company's new Genesis Lamp, marketed as the "first 24-hour lightbulb" monitors your sleep schedule, then alters the light according to your circadian needs. It comes with quite the stamp of approval: It's used by both NASA astronauts and soldiers in Afghanistan.
Genesis Lamp by Lighting Science
"It's like standing under the sun and moon," says Alex Polier, the company's director of communications, likening the bulb to going back to caveman times. "It's putting your body back on a natural-lighting cycle, with no artificial light spectrum to keep you up."
The product, which has been selling well despite only being on the market for a month, speaks to the momentum around the health and wellness trend.
"A lot of companies are investing in home technology," Polier says. "Everyone's trying to encourage better sleep in this high-tech age when everyone's awake all the time. We're all workaholics, and people are finally tired."
Exhaustion is what inspired Anna Richardson to create SleeperHero, a battery-powered doll with accompanying storybook. Like a more useful Teddy Ruxpin, the PJ-clad superhero helps children overcome their sleep anxiety. Equipped with two lights—red and green—the transportable plush doll signals when it's time for young ones to hit the hay.
"It came out of desperation," says Richardson, who found herself tormented by two restless young children who were "horrible sleepers."
The company is doing so well with young families that it plans to expand its collection: more books, more dolls, and some gender-specific editions. "Families are so busy and doing so much that sleep is the one thing that gets pushed aside," Richardson says. "We help get families on a routine."
And then there's the ever-growing thirst for more knowledge on the topic.
As the public searches for more answers to sleep-deprivation dilemmas, one company decided to act as media publisher in addition to home supplier. Casper, now practically synonymous with the modern mattress, launched its own publication in June 2015. Named Van Winkle's, after the sleepiest folktale hero in American literature, the website is dedicated to all things sleep—product reviews, interviews, culture news, and everything in between.
While Van Winkle's is an independent media property, it serves as an extension of the company's grand vision. Casper's cofounder and chief creative officer, Luke Sherwin, sees Van Winkle's as a long-term bet, one that will help create a unified lifestyle category. "Our vision is to do for sleep what Nike did for fitness," Sherwin said of the company's portfolio approach.
So far, the response from readers has exceeded expectations, garnering over half a million monthly uniques—with a staff of just four. "There's a legitimate increase in curiosity [about sleep] and about the ways that that subject insects other ones," he says.
As Doman puts it, "Sleep awareness is in the global consciousness," and there's no turning back. Today's consumers now look to maintain a proper sleep balance, perhaps with an iPhone by their bedside.
"We now understand that sleep has a real impact on our health, and not just our short-term performance, but our longevity," he says. "And people are looking for solutions."
Your perceptions can lead you astray. Here's how to see if the response you're picking up on is right.
Maybe you're pitching new business to a client or giving a presentation to your own team. If you're smart and even reasonably creative, your brain will be working overtime on how the meeting is progressing and how people are reacting.
In other words, you're "reading the room": Did that guy just look at his watch for the second time? The woman on the left, is she doodling? And you'll adjust according to your perceptions of what's going on around you, perhaps by skipping a couple of slides to shave off some time, or suddenly raising your voice to grab everyone's attention.
Most of us learned these basic room-reading skills in Business 101 or else just picked them up the hard way, trial and error. And for most of us, it stops there—our observational techniques and our responses are mostly intuitive. But that can be limiting, or even risky. The key is to make sure what you're observing is as close to what's really going on as possible, and then adjust your approach if it's missing the mark with your audience. In other words, you can't just read the room—you've got to inhabit it. Here's how.
Your perceptions of what's going on around you are important, but they're not the full story—and can even hold you back from grasping it. While you're busy checking out what everybody else is doing, you project your own experiences (replete with all your personal and cultural biases) onto your perceptions, which could be dead wrong.
Sure, when someone looks at her watch during your presentation, she might be drowning in boredom. But what if she's loving your talk and can't wait for Q&A time? I've just never been convinced that anyone can agree on what crossing arms or any other physical motions mean for everyone across the board.
So instead of thinking you have it all figured out, try not to just register your own perceptions, but to then take those and check them against the people around you. You might pause in your speaking and change your position: sit if you've been standing, step from behind a podium, or move to their side of the table.
Then candidly speak to what you've been perceiving. Use "I" statements and ask open-ended questions. And even if you're peeved at (what you perceive as) inattentive behavior, speak without blaming, shaming, or complaining. Someone could have quarreled with their partner the morning before coming to your presentation and may still be mentally miles away; they might be worried about a sick kid.
If you've noticed watch-checkers, you might say, "I see we're halfway through our scheduled time and I'm concerned I might not be addressing our topics usefully. What can I cover in the remaining minutes that would be most helpful?"
If you're getting the sense that you might have bypassed an important point, own your possible mistake by saying, "I've been assuming ______. Is that correct, or is there something I'm missing?" Or verbally shift the attention to your audience: "I've been so focused on what I wanted to tell you that I didn't ask about your experience." You can even address the room more generally by saying, "I'd like to take a pause and check in with how everyone's doing."
Changing the course of a meeting and inviting others to add their input can be frightening. It might feel like your objectives will get diluted or derailed. It can feel like you're throwing away your carefully prepared presentation and the hours you practiced it.
And you might be right—but the risk is usually worth it. In meetings when I've interjected a sudden halt and checked in with my audience, I've uncovered previously unspoken needs and established a new level of trust with those in the room.
Sometimes it's hard getting your bearings back after reading a room and having to adjust course. It can be nerve-wracking. So to stay present, you've got to keep yourself calm. Here are a few quick physical tweaks you can try making:
Breathe with your belly. If possible, breathe from your diaphragm so your belly inflates, not just your chest. This is only a slight difference—no one observing you will notice, but it does help calm you down. You can practice this technique alone by lying on the floor with your hands on your midsection and feeling it rise and fall with your breath.
Smile with your eyes. Yes, smiling with your eyes is a thing. Forcing only your mouth to smile can give you a death-mask look—that's no good. Instead, feel how the area around your eyes pulls in when you smile genuinely. That's what a "radiant smile" feels like.
Focus on others. Unless you're really good at managing your emotions, just noticing that you're anxious can make you more anxious. It's a vicious circle. When you feel your heart rate going up and your palms getting sweaty, try turning your attention toward others. Go back to your original perceptions on reading the room and use them to get your mind off yourself. That can calm you down and get you ready to make a more relaxed—and meaningful—connection with your audience.
Preparation and practice are also good calmers, but you can't necessarily draw on them in the moment. But what you can do is bring along plenty of artifacts like storyboards or product samples in case you need to change gears in the direction of doing something. By the same token, though, be ready to set everything aside and pay deep attention. The goal is to think less, do less, and experience more. Will it work every time? No. Will it work over time? Eventually, yes.
Ted Leonhardt is a designer and illustrator, and former global creative director of FITCH Worldwide. His specialized approach to negotiation helps creative workers build on their strengths and own their value in the marketplace. Follow Ted on Twitter at @tedleonhardt.
Despite its rocky history, it could one day be Apple's most important device.
It's fair to say that the Apple TV is the device that's had the hardest time finding a place as a "must-have" in Apple's ecosystem. It's always seemed to be more of an accessory to Apple's more popular Macs, iPhones, iPads, and iPods than a standalone gadget that was designed—as the others were, for computers, phones, tablets, and music players, respectively—with a clear vision to show consumers and competitors what the gold standard for a digital media player should be. And you can mostly blame Steve Jobs for that.
Back in September 2006, when Jobs first showed off the then named "iTV," he called the device a "hobby"—that is, something you do on the side, but don't necessarily have the desire to turn it into something bigger. Clarifying his remarks about the device the following year at the D2007 conference, Jobs said:
We're in two businesses today. We'll be very shortly in three businesses and a hobby. One is our Mac business, second is our music business, third business is the phone business—handsets. And the hobby is the Apple TV. The reason I call it a hobby is a lot of people have tried and failed to make it a business. It's a business that's hundreds of thousands of units per year but it hasn't crested to be millions of units per year, but I think if we improve things we can crack that.
In other words, the original Apple TV is probably the only device Apple ever released where Steve Jobs didn't have a clear, grand vision for what it was supposed to be. For years after its original January 2007 retail launch, the Apple TV languished when it came to the regular feature improvements and hardware updates that Apple's other devices saw on an annual basis. Between its unveiling in 2006 and the launch of the newest, fourth-generation Apple TV in October 2015, the Apple TV only saw one dramatic hardware change (over nine years!), from the first- to second-generation Apple TV, and just one major software change, with the advent of the fourth-generation Apple TV and its tvOS operating system.
Granted, Apple was a bit busy during that time changing the technology sector as we knew it—from revolutionizing the industrial design of PCs to defining what a smartphone should be to releasing the first tablet that caught the public's imagination. However, because of that lack of attention to its "hobby," the Apple TV got left in the dust by other competitors that were doing innovative work in the digital media player and home entertainment space, precisely because Apple was not.
Those innovators included Netflix, which was one of the first to see that the iTunes model of à la carte renting and purchasing of individual properties was not the future of home entertainment. Streaming was, and Netflix made sure its services were included on as many connected home entertainment devices as possible. Roku was the first to realize users wanted to customize their home entertainment experience and launched its app store, allowing users to select and install from thousands of channels on their Roku devices, including games and apps. Later, Amazon designed the first digital media player remote with built-in voice search.
And that brings us to the fourth-generation Apple TV. It's a device that borrows heavily from its competitors' improvements. Its brand-new operating system, tvOS, is designed to be a new platform for which developers can make channels, apps, and games. Its Siri Remote is a beefed-up version of the Fire TV remote. But perhaps the biggest change comes from Apple itself. With the advent of the fourth-generation Apple TV, the company has stripped away the "hobby" label and promoted it to a full-fledged device; it now even has a permanent, prominent spot at the top of Apple's website.
The thing is, the Apple TV still isn't a product that many people feel they need to own. It's true that during the company's most recent financial earnings press call, it revealed its "best ever" quarter for Apple TV sales. But since Apple doesn't break out individual Apple TV sales figures and lumps the device into its "other" financial category (which also includes mice, keyboards, and Apple Watch bands), it's unknown how many have actually been sold. One would think that if the numbers were mind-blowing, Apple would want to brag about them.
What that suggests is while the Apple TV sales may be on the upswing, simply adding an app store and Siri-based remote isn't going to make it the next must-have gadget. So what will it take for the Apple TV to become the digital media player of choice? It's got a steep hill to climb: Currently, the Apple TV sits in fourth place behind Roku, Google's Chromecast, and Amazon's Fire TV.
Here are four things Apple could do to make its TV device the next gadget we treasure as much as our iPhones. Any one of the following probably wouldn't be enough on its own, but taken together, these improvements could turn Apple TV into the industry-defining device it's never been.
The latest Apple TV software includes Siri integration throughout. TV show pictured: Mr. Robot.
To many, especially millennials, the thought of having a traditional cable television subscription is right up there with having a landline. You have it out of habit, but would ditch it in a heartbeat for something better. Apple knows this, which is why it's been trying for years to negotiate with cable providers and content producers to ink the multiple deals it would need from various parties to turn the Apple TV into a live-television service.
There are rumors that Apple is hoping to offer a live-television subscription service to cord cutters for $30 to $40 a month, perhaps allowing them to choose channels à la carte instead of paying for more expensive traditional cable-TV packages with hundreds of channels they'll never watch. However, Apple's streaming television service vision has come to a halt. The primary barrier is Apple itself, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper cites Apple's "assertive" and "hard-nosed" negation tactics, with the company's iTunes chief Eddy Cue refusing to budge on his company's demands.
Many have questioned why Apple doesn't have a Netflix-style streaming service yet.
If Apple can't use the Apple TV to upend the cable TV industry—and win over millions of new users in the process—it could reach critical mass by giving Netflix a run for its money. Given that Apple has been negotiating content rights for over a decade for movies and television shows to buy and rent through its iTunes store, this seems like a no-brainer. In the past, Apple wasn't perceived as a subscription-services company, but that's all changed. Now it offers two subscription services: Apple Music and iCloud storage.
If Apple combined its new skills with subscription services and its experience with acquiring content rights from film and television studios, and launched an on-demand streaming service through the Apple TV, the device could become a must-have for the 71% of adults who say they use a streaming service. As for original content to compete with Netflix and Amazon Instant Video's (Emmy-winning) offerings, Apple is already acquiring TV shows to distribute.
If Apple did go down the on-demand streaming route, it's conceivable they could also offer tiered packages like traditional cable companies, yet instead of packages with different levels of content, Apple could offer its streaming service as a stand-alone monthly option or group it with its Apple Music and iCloud storage services to get people to buy into all three.
The gaming capabilities of the fourth-generation Apple TV have been criticized by developers.
If consumers can buy one device that does it all, they generally won't buy a second device that just repeats some of the features of the primary device. Right now, this is a problem for the Apple TV, since most of the media features it offers are already available on games consoles like the Xbox One and Playstation 4: Netflix, apps, music streaming, you name it. Games consoles do almost everything the Apple TV can—plus they play the most advanced games on the market.
With the release of the fourth-generation Apple TV, the company has turned the digital media player into a casual games console. However, many games developers have criticized everything from the box's lack of graphics power to the rules on requiring games to be compatible with the Siri Remote (though this is changing with the next version of tvOS)—which, when compared to the controllers of Xbox and Playstation, is like using an Atari joystick to play modern games.
That means all those who own a Playstation or Xbox still have no good reason to buy an Apple TV, even the fourth generation. If Apple could improve the Apple TV's gaming capability and graphics, they could make inroads into the whopping 48% of homes in the U.S. that own a games console.
Could the Apple TV become the center of your digital life?
Perhaps the most dramatic move Apple could make to transform the Apple TV into a killer device coveted by the company's hundreds of millions of users would be to turn it into a dual-purpose platform that serves as the central hub of your home and life.
In the next decade, our homes will become as smart as our devices, and the company that can make a product that enables a "smart home" is guaranteed to sell tens of millions of that product. Amazon and Google have already announced that they are working on this. The Amazon Echo and its Alexa software are designed to be your always-on personal assistant at home, as is Google's newly announced device, Google Home, which uses Google's AI-based Google Now software.
Yet these two products are ignoring a major factor in people's buying decisions: We generally want one device that does it all instead of having to buy multiple components. This was the cornerstone of Steve Jobs's maxim when unveiling the original iPhone in 2007:
Today, we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device. So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone . . . are you getting it? These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.
That merging of devices is something Apple could do again with the Apple TV. An entertainment center/set-top box and a games console and the central brain of your smart home. Not only would this evolve the Apple TV—let's call it Apple Home—and take the best features of your living room's current devices, it would also add in a smart Siri AI assistant that could serve as the JARVIS of your home, communicating wirelessly with speakers throughout your house to allow you to control every aspect of where you live—from smart lights to calling up a movie on any screen in any room—with just your voice.
The Apple TV, unlike Apple's more mature devices, has yet to lead a revolution.
Apple Home would be the Apple TV evolved, just like the iPhone is the iPod evolved. And more than just being a central command hub for your home, Apple Home could be the platform of your life, securely storing all your personal photos, documents, and information on a secure enclave chip—much like how your Apple Pay credit card info is stored in your iPhone—and dishing out that digital data only to your approved devices at your command. This secure element could even be the game-changing feature of the ultimate smart device, ensuring that all of your most valuable data is stored locally, not in the anonymous cloud, where it is vulnerable to hackers around the world.
A device that does this—that allows you to access and control every aspect of your digital life, from entertainment to communications to security to your home—could very well be the most important device Apple ever produces.
Of course, all of this is mere conjecture. No one knows what Apple has planned for future Apple TVs. Maybe it will go beyond the possibilities mentioned here. Or maybe it will slowly die out, just as other promising Apple devices, like the iPod Hi-Fi, have. But one thing is certain. If the Apple TV is going to become a device that goes from selling a few million units a year to hundreds of millions, it's going to need to undergo a rapid evolution to thrive.
Automation targets tasks first, people second. That's mostly good news for those willing to adapt.
"The problem with new tech is it's really easy to imagine the jobs it will destroy," Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon recently told Product Hunt, "but really hard to imagine the jobs it will create." But it isn't quite that black and white.
Many of the first "new" jobs automation will create will actually be similar to the ones it does away with. That's because, rather than destroying entire roles, it's much more likely to chip away at certain work-related tasks. Many (though not all) positions will remain, but certain aspects of those positions will change, requiring workers to adapt to different, often higher-level activities in order to stay competitive.
That can be nerve-wracking, but it doesn't exactly spell doom for your career. Here's a look at three different positions and how they'll likely evolve (quite possibly with you still in them) as automation progresses.
After analyzing over 2,000 different activities within 800 occupations, McKinsey researcher Michael Chui concluded that the jobs at greatest risk of automation involve routine manual work or predictable data collection and processing. So at least for the foreseeable future, positions that require managing or developing people, applying expertise to decision making, and using emotional intelligence in interactions with the public all appear relatively safe.
Since HR managers, librarians, and retail salespeople's jobs involve one or more of those activities, I decided to check on their expected "risk of computerization" by using this interactive feature developed by the BBC. The HR position looked to be pretty secure (32% likelihood of automation), the role of the librarian could go either way (52%), and someone in retail sales appeared to be at greatest risk (95%).
Yet according to McKinsey, technology—at least for now—will automate less than half of the more than job-related 2,000 activities that the researchers studied.
It's also worth remembering that decisions about replacing humans with robots or computer code don't just hinge on technological feasibility. Wide-scale automation simply might not make financial sense in some businesses. There could be regulatory issues to contend with, for instance, and social acceptance to overcome—and it just might not be worth fighting those barriers.
Just because a robot someday could replace a nurse doesn't mean patients will warm to them. On the other hand, it's doubtful the public will worry quite as much about robot librarians, especially now that machines can find misplaced books with 99% accuracy.
And yet, in a report on the future of libraries from Arup Foresight, the consulting firm's researchers found more librarians morphing into "research mentors." This isn't just a matter of slapping an old profession with a flashy new name and praying for continued relevance. As the Association for Library Service to Children's white paper on "media mentorship" points out, librarians not only help children develop digital literacy skills, they show them how to use the apps, ebooks, and streaming media kids are now growing up with since birth in ways that actually help them in school.
Making this leap from entertainment applications to educational uses takes training that libraries are best positioned to offer. San Francisco's Central Library has even drawn attention for collaborating with social services to help homeless patrons "find access to information about their rights and necessary legal resources, guided by professionally trained staff," Arup notes.
Viewed in this light, what started out as librarians' roughly 50:50 survival odds doesn't look quite as cut-and-dried—at least not for those willing to reinvent themselves by building on the skills they already use.
The same holds true in retail sales. Arup Foresight's report on retail points to how consumer goods stores like Apple and Nike are moving away from being purely transactional places to offering multisensory experiences that engage consumers physically and emotionally. It's no longer just going in to buy a pair of sneakers and walking out—it's an immersive marketing event. This requires floor staff to become "even more knowledgeable about the products and services they sell," the researchers write. That includes helping customers complete purchases online, for instance, if necessary.
Will there come a time when robots routinely offer an opinion on whether or not that outfit flatters you? Or recommend foods that are delicious and won't trigger off your various allergies and intolerances? Maybe—these might well prove technological breakthroughs. But since a robot is (so far) about as emotionally authentic as a psychopath—and doesn't eat—would we necessarily want its advice over a human's? Or, put differently, will companies want to invest in acclimating us to that? The point is that those two activities—performed today by a retail associate and a nutritionist, respectively—are more likely to stay in human hands, even if some of those professionals' other tasks don't.
On the other end of the spectrum, human resources professionals may have to evolve more than they might imagine. Not only may they have to contend with automation even in the C-suite but, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report, there's a real risk to the HR field in being so widely "perceived by many as a passive, service-oriented function" that's purely transactional. PricewaterhouseCoopers points to three future scenarios outlining "evolving priorities" for HR roles, including applying emerging technologies like advanced analytics to ensure the right talent for globally distributed teams is in the right place at the right time.
In short, guessing whole professions' relative likelihood of automation is a mug's game, largely because it misunderstands how automation works. There's a greater likelihood your job will change than be suddenly automated out of existence. As technology evolves, so will the tasks required of your role—and so will you. Your future depends mainly on having the agility and willingness to adopt new skills and competencies, and that includes working successfully alongside machines, respectively doing what you do best.
The ad agency Walton Isaacson takes a page from Civil Rights leader Bayard Rustin in order to keep teams innovating.
We all know the story of the 1963 March on Washington because it culminated in one of the most iconic moments of the Civil Rights Movement, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., declaring, "I have a dream." What many of us don't know, though, is that the march might not have happened—and the fight for civil rights might have been a lot bloodier—if not for a rather troublesome character named Bayard Rustin.
Rustin was trouble for several reasons. He was a contrarian and outspoken. He was a radical follower of Gandhi, and what Fox News today might call "extremely liberal." He was also openly gay, which made him a political lightning rod in those days. And yet King fought to keep Rustin around at every turn. That's because Rustin was a master agitator, exactly what the movement needed.
At Rustin's urging, the fledgling Civil Rights Movement eschewed direct conflict in favor of being really annoying to the powers that were. He understood that in order to make progress, he and his fellow activists didn't need to talk and fight the way persecuted people always had. They needed to show—kindly—how it was flawed.
Bayard Rustin[Photo: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, U.S. News & World Report Magazine Collection, LC-DIG-ppmsc-01272 via Wikimedia Commons]
As Rustin famously put it, they needed to be "a group of angelic troublemakers."
Instead of throwing rocks, Rustin encouraged civil rights protesters to sit down in the streets. Instead of tipping over buses, he encouraged supporters to boycott them. Instead of taking up arms, he encouraged people to link arms and get in the way.
Angelic troublemaking—or going against the grain in a benevolent fashion—is a powerful philosophy for business as well as social movements. It's not just about being difficult; it's about forcing people to see situations differently. It's about making a mess, with good intentions, so things can change.
In 2013, a group of Belgian researchers made a surprising discovery supporting Rustin's philosophy. They were looking at the way teams come up with new ideas through brainstorming. A common problem with brainstorming groups, the researchers wrote, is that they "have a hard time thinking beyond the familiar." And they found that this happens for two reasons.
First, brainstorming groups tend to consist of people who are close associates and have similar perspectives. Studies show that the more diverse a brainstorming group's members' background, the more ideas the group will come up with. The second, trickier problem is that our brain's subconscious desire to be accepted by its tribe leads people to prioritize group stability over rustling feathers—something that presenting foreign or outlandish ideas tends to do. And so when we brainstorm together, we stick to variations of conventional solutions: Want to grow the product line? Change the color of the packaging. Want to win rights? Get guns and dig trenches.
Shane Snow is cofounder of Contently and author of Smartcuts.
So the standard thinking went. The Belgian professors found, however, that one simple addition to a brainstorming session dramatically increases the odds of coming up with truly innovative ideas: Throw in a "wild card."
When groups were asked in experiments to brainstorm ideas for a mobile telephone company, they generally came up with pretty straightforward solutions. But when an "extreme" or polarizing person with really weird ideas was introduced to the groups, the groups came up with both more ideas and better ones.
More dramatic still, when the researchers kicked off a brainstorming session with an extreme idea right out of the gates—even something so crazy it would never work—it still led participants to come up with even better ideas together. Throwing a wrench into a brainstorm session, the study concluded, shows "the promise of broadening the space of possibilities and, as such, helping stakeholders think beyond the familiar."
Recently, one man has taken Rustin's philosophy and applied it to running a business—with terrific success. Aaron Walton, cofounder of Walton Isaacson, runs one of the most innovative companies I've visited of late. They're a full-service ad agency with clients from Knob Creek to the L.A. Dodgers and a mission to be "the most interesting agency on the planet."
Their job is to come up with creative ideas all the time, and Walton sees his role as an orchestrator of angelic troublemaking. He recruits people from all sorts of backgrounds—every race and gender and education and geography—so that the company can brainstorm from many different perspectives. Walton guides creative sessions so that there's never just a bunch of heads nodding "yes."
"Real innovation comes from tension," Walton says. "'Angelic troublemakers' is a respectful way to do that."
At Walton Isaacson, people from totally different departments are sent to meetings they have no business being in. Recently, its events team was working on ways to get more people to live events for Lexus. Walton added someone from the digital ads department—someone with a very different perspective, who might throw a wrench in conventional events thinking—to the planning meeting. Together, the team came up with the idea to turn the live events into a television show about poetry and spoken-word performance. The show, Verses and Flow, is now a full-fledged series in its sixth season.
Aaron Walton[Photo: via Walton Isaacson]
"You may not always agree with it, but you want that kind of tension, pushing you to think about things differently," Walton says. The key to creating an innovative organization, he says, "is creating an environment where that can be done" with respect. They key to angelic troublemaking, in other words, is the angelic part.
Earlier this year, Walton Isaacson created a video for the campaign #TurnIgnoranceAround, which features Latino and Latina professionals from various fields saying things that presidential candidate Donald J. Trump has said about Mexicans, then turning those quotations into positive things. "I'm a dealer," says one man. "I'm a dealer of flavor. I'm a chef!"
The video has been viewed on various channels over 12 million times, according to Walton. It was thought up as an act of defiance by an Argentinian employee at Walton Isaacson—an example of the kind of simultaneously rebellious and positive thinking that the company encourages.
Crucially, though, says Walton, you need "cooperators" in order to actually get work done. We can't all be troublemakers all the time. But when you're trying to figure out what work to do, he adds, "You are most likely going to find the best solution [when you] challenge."
During the Civil Rights Movement, leaders like NAACP chairman Roy Wilkins didn't want Bayard Rustin around. He didn't always tell people—even his allies in the cause—what they wanted to hear. He was a wild card and seen by some as a political hazard. And he wasn't put in charge of everything. But as a key member, Rustin still forced the movement to consider new ways of doing things. In 2013, President Obama posthumously awarded Rustin the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work, calling him "one of [our] greatest architects for social change."
We should all put troublemakers like Rustin on our teams. Because sometimes the architect we need to make things better is the one who's willing to break them a little bit first.
Update: A previous version of this article referred to Walton Isaacson as a "digital agency" instead of an "ad agency" and recorded Verses and Flow as being in its fifth season, when it is in its sixth. Both errors have been corrected.
This week's top leadership stories may help you become more trustworthy, boost your creativity, and protect your brand from Twitter trolls.
This week we learned a few tactics for brands to take on social-media haters, what it takes to command your team members' trust, and some surprising insights from the science of creativity.
Hitting upon great ideas in the shower might not just be a cliché. In their book Wired to Create, authors Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire write that that's happened to a whopping 72% of us. This week we got a closer look at why and examined several other quirks tied to the science of creativity.
A former designer at IDEO, Lisa Baird claims that some of the fields best known for their creative teams harbor an inconvenient secret: They collaborate less than you'd think. Sometimes, Baird writes, just one person with a broad skill set is more creative and productive than a team of people with narrower ones. Here's her take on how we went overboard with collaboration.
According to recent research, people tend to trust their own colleagues more than their companies' execs, a gap that may contribute to employee turnover. This week we explored what leaders can do to narrow it.
Already have one foot out the door of a job where you feel overworked? Drawing on some key psychological principles of the workplace, LearnVest's Rachel Grumman Bender suggests some research-backed changes that may help restore some work-life balance.
Many consumers are ditching customer-service hotlines for Twitter rants, and sometimes it gets pretty ugly. These are a few steps companies can take to address their customers' needs while protecting the integrity of their brands.
Buffer explains why it's experimenting with letting team members reinvent their roles to play up their personal strengths.
What combination of strengths help a team thrive? It's a question we've been asking ourselves lately.
We've written before about the "bias toward action" mind-set that we believe creates a great fit on the Buffer team, and we're always experimenting, evolving, and fine-tuning the ways we work together. Recently, we've turned toward a new model we're calling "Editor/Operator." At its core, it's about harnessing the complementary strengths of two different work styles—one focused on vision, details, and editing, and the other on execution, performance, and operations. In sum, the operator gets us going fast, and the editor keeps us on the right road.
In the past, many of us at Buffer have tried to work on our own weaknesses and cover both of these mind-sets individually. For this experiment, we instead lean heavily into our own strengths and supplement our weaknesses to help us keep creating a unique company.
In the last year, Buffer cofounders Joel and Leo have both been doing it all—being editors (focusing on vision, the "why," and details) and operators (focusing on setting goals, creating results, and moving fast). But after lots of discussions, they realized they have very different strengths.
Joel makes his biggest contributions through his creativity, vision, ideas, and problem-solving capabilities. He's incredibly detail-oriented and has a super high-quality bar for himself and for Buffer. He cares deeply about the experience we provide—for customers, ourselves, and future team members. At the same time, he's less excited about executing processes and creating those results. Being a manager or operator of day-to-day processes isn't his strength.
Leo, on the other hand, thrives on the opposite end of the spectrum. His strengths are in the execution of projects and getting results. Leo feels less called to focus on the specific details of a project, though he appreciates Joel's insight on big-picture vision to come up with the best direction forward.
Here's a diagram that describes how they were working before we adopted the new model:
They both noticed that something really cool happened when they worked together on projects that benefitted from the combination of their approaches: they made great progress, twice as fast.
"That's when we find ourselves having outcomes we both feel excited to celebrate," Joel says.
What if we could find a way to tap into both of their core areas of strength and maximize them? The editor/operator model is our current solution to this challenge, and we've reorganized Buffer a bit to help those who identify strongly as an editor or an operator to lean into those specialties—starting with our founders.
While Leo leans further into his "operator" nature, Joel has moved toward his CEO role resembling much more of a company-wide "editor" than a manager. "It is quite common for a CEO to act in this way," Joel says, "such as Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, or Jack Dorsey. And for this to really work, I've read several times that it relies on working with a strong set of operational managers."
Of course, not everyone is on an extreme of this spectrum. But we were surprised at how much this model resonated with so many of us. It made so much sense to the team that we've adapted it in other areas of Buffer as well.
On the engineering side, Sunil feels called to the editor side, and Niel is taking on the operator role as director of product engineering. On the happiness team, Carolyn has moved into an editor role while Åsa focuses on more of an operator role. Carolyn even put together this chart to explain the differences between the two roles even further:
So what changes on the day-to-day level need to happen when you're working with both editors and operators? We're still figuring it out, but there are a few things we've noticed so far.
A key change has been that the operator takes on most of the regular one-on-one mentoring to help us create continuity and accountability across all areas. With this change, editors are less tied to any one project and instead are available to edit and provide advice on many projects and ideas.
With our cofounders as an editor/operator duo, Leo makes it a goal to maximize bringing Joel's reflections, detail, and care to Buffer. And Joel now has the ability to both focus on the details and go big-picture by setting vision and direction for the company.
Here are a few examples of what some of Joel's work as an editor can look like:
Discuss big-picture OKRs (objectives and key results) at the start of a quarter to set a direction.
Set down and articulate our vision and mission for Buffer.
Give feedback on the angle we're planning for a blog post or press announcement.
Help product and engineering teams find the best minimal feature-set for an MVP.
Dig into the smallest details of an interface to give users an incredible experience.
Brainstorm a vision for how we can do some truly unique things in the customer-service space.
Get into the details with a small team on the next iteration of our salary formula, to include better support for a wider range of experience levels and multiple career paths.
Review a feature before we roll it out to 50% of users.
Dig into the toughest questions around inclusivity with the Inclusivity Guild.
Helping solve a tricky customer situation that needs extra love and care.
The ideal outcome? A high bar for everything we do, while at the same time picking up our pace significantly.
Of course, a binary structure like this has its limitations. Another framework we've been exploring recently is the Adizes Methodology of "producers," "administrators," "entrepreneurs," and "integrators." It's fascinating to explore all the different ways we can reflect on our strengths and work better together. Editor/operator is an early experiment that's still in progress, and we're keen to keep learning more and see if this can help us achieve more, faster.
This article originally appeared on Buffer and is reprinted with permission.
That point where everyone runs out of ideas and gets stuck is when the really creative ideas start to happen, says one expert.
There are lots of problems with brainstorms, but the main one is they don't go on for long enough. They usually stop when people have run out of ideas and you get those embarrassing silences. But those embarrassing silences are when your unconscious starts engaging on the problem and is a vital part to coming up with great ideas.
The way brainstorms are practiced in most companies today is still almost exactly the same way that was recommended by their inventor, advertising executive Alex Osborn, over 60 years ago. Business and our understanding of how the brain works have both moved on so much in that time, and yet we're still hanging onto this old technique for so many of our idea-gathering sessions.
Here's how to rethink your brainstorm so it goes for longer than you're used to, but proves much more productive once it's over.
The fact is, brainstorms do have a useful part to play in solving problems. They can be very useful at the start and the end of the process. The trouble is that a lot of the time they're used as the only part of the process.
Here are some of the problems with the standard brainstorm:
The more extroverted characters often dominate the session.
Early ideas tend to disproportionately influence the direction the session takes.
You listen and focus on other people's ideas and don't spend time thinking about your own. When we hear someone else's solution, it's like a magnet and it pulls our focus towards it.
After the idea generation process, the decision makers tend to choose the moderately creative over the highly creative ideas.
In his 1953 book Applied Imagination, Osborn introduced the concept of the brainstorm because he claimed it was more effective in generating ideas than individuals working alone.
But around the same time Bill Bernbach, of the advertising agency DDB, also introduced the idea of a team of people working together to solve ideas. It's just that his idea of the "creative team" involved only two people. And they wouldn't just try to come up with ideas in one-hour times slots, but day in, day out. In most companies these days, Bernbach's approach is still pretty rare.
Instead, the Osborn-inspired brainstorm has become the dominant model for problem solving in business, because it's easy and quick. You get everyone together for an hour, throw ideas around, and then the boss picks the "best" one. You know at the end of the hour you'll have some solutions to your problem, and you can all move on.
But it's unlikely that the brainstorm has created the best solution. If you genuinely want good ideas, borrow the model from creative teams whose job it is to come up with ideas on a daily basis.
So here's the model I would suggest trying instead of the standard brainstorm. Think of it as a "brain marathon."
1. Make sure the signpost is pointing in the right direction. Really understanding the problem you're trying to solve is vital to finding a good solution. This is where a typical, quick brainstorm can be useful. It can feed in as much background information as possible.
2. Think, think, and keep thinking. Get people into small teams of two, three, or four and then allocate a decent block of time for them to work on the problem. The very minimum should be a whole morning or afternoon.
If you can get out of the office, that's even better. "Lots of the best ideas occur when camaraderie and chemistry have built up between employees, and breaks from the office together—even for just a day—can make all the difference," Richard Branson has said.
After an initial outpouring of ideas you'll find yourself drying up. That's normal. This is the stage when brainstorms usually stop. But don't think it's any reflection of your thinking abilities—it happens to all creative thinkers.
That point when you get stuck and feel like you're not getting anywhere, that's when you're hacking your brain and getting your unconscious—and its huge processing power—involved. It's important to stay together and not drift back to your desks to check emails.
3. Narrow down and decide. Once you've spent the morning working on a problem, take a break from it and then get back together for an hour at the end of the day to review your ideas.
This is when you need to narrow down your ideas and pick your favorites. Instead of your boss picking from a long list in a brainstorm, you should to narrow down the choice to a short list first. This way you get to argue out among yourselves the benefit of one idea over another and, in doing, so create a solid argument for each idea.
Brainstorms might come in convenient half-hour and hour time slots, but ideas don't. So if you're really serious about finding a solution to a problem, give the brain marathon a try.
This is an edited excerpt published with permission of the publisher, Capstone, a Wiley brand, from Brainhack: Tips and Tricks to Unleash Your Brain's Full Potential by Neil Pavitt. Copyright (c) 2016 by Neil Pavitt. All rights reserved. This book is available at all booksellers.
Relationships can suffer when one partner's working life is more demanding than the other's—but they don't have to.
"So I take it you won't be home for dinner again tonight?"
"Didn't you have to go into the office last weekend, too?"
"Gotta say I don't feel like I'm much of a priority lately."
Balancing a demanding job with your personal relationship—whether it's with a significant other, spouse, partner, children, or some combination of the above—is something millions of people do every day, some more successfully than others.
Much of the time, when one partner sees the other as working too much, there's no ill will intended but it can still create a lot of hurt. The hurt leads to anger, making conflict just about inevitable.
And while every relationship is different, and sometimes work is more of a proxy for other issues than a source of discord in itself, there's no doubt that work-life imbalances can put a strain on couples and families. Here are a few steps to help you set things right when your ballooning work hours are hurting your partner, or vice versa.
If you're the one who works more, step one is to step back and think about what matters most to you. No-brainer, right?
Not exactly. Whatever we think our values are, our calendars tend to tell an unvarnished story. For some, the honest answer is that work is the top priority, and you fit in whatever else you can around it. Others place a higher premium on their families, their health, and their life outside the office.
If you fall into the latter category, think through how your priorities are expressed in your time investment. If you genuinely care about spending time with your loved ones, it's important for you to own that yourself, and make it a goal to work toward—not just something your spouse or partner is pressuring you to do. If it isn't your personal priority, though, you'll never stick with it, so you need to be honest with yourself above all.
Your next step is to take some time to talk about it—try not to ignore these issues or just let them bubble up out of frustration. When you hash things out, validate your partner's feelings, even if you disagree with them. If you're the one who wants your significant other to work less, make sure you look at the broader picture before concluding he or she just doesn't care as much about your relationship.
In my work as a time management coach, I've found that overwork sometimes has unselfish motives; sometimes a busy spouse worries that if they don't perform well in a high-pressure job, they won't be able to provide for their families as well as they'd like—or worse. To some, not being able to support somebody means not being able to love them well. Most people are just trying their best, but they may not have the job environment or the time management skills to pull it off.
Conflicts often occur because of clashing expectations. If one partner is quite happy with the balance, she may be completely unaware that there's an issue. You might have a big blind spot; don't just assume that your husband or wife is fine with things because you are. And if your work responsibilities change, make sure to ask on a regular basis to make sure everything's working—even every couple of weeks.
If there's a gap in your expectations, it's often due to one of two things. Either your partner has a higher need for quality time than you do in order to feel cared for, or else there are practical issues sucking up your time together. If it's the former issue, maybe you can commit to a 30-minute one-on-one conversation each evening, call during your commute home, plan a weekend getaway, or do a weekly date night.
If it's a practical matter like getting laundry done, running errands, or shuttling your kids from one activity to the next, think about what you can outsource. If your budget allows, it's often better to pay someone to ease these routine burdens than to argue about them. The only time this might not work is if your partner finds some "acts of service" meaningful. If he or she finds it thoughtful—not merely useful—of you to unload the dishwasher, since that's a chore he or she hates, do it.
On the other hand, some couples get by just fine when one has a more grueling professional life than the other. The fact that your partner travels almost every week or isn't home for dinner most nights isn't a universal sign of a broken relationship. Those who thrive in these situations are good at accepting the constraints of their partners' jobs and can find things they like doing on their own—whether that's exercising or just hanging out with their own friends.
Of course, the proportion of solo time that works for a given partner in a relationship varies from person to person. And it's okay to want your spouse or significant other to be around more—that's why you're with them. But does it have to make you miserable when they're not? Not necessarily. If you can pin down your own needs and expectations and your partner can do the same, you'll have two baselines to compare.
Plenty of couples worry that falling into routines is a sign their relationship has flatlined, become boring, or lost its spontaneity. And for some, it is.
But the fact is that when one partner loses control of their work schedule, it often starts to violate the sense of trust the relationship is founded on—no matter how unscheduled and freewheeling your lifestyles are already. Every relationship needs some consistency, and every partner deserves some reliability. Without it, you may begin to feel you can't count on the person you're supposed to be able to count on most.
These may seem like "small" things when you're dealing with a work crisis that seems like a really big deal. But relationships aren't built or broken in a fell swoop; they develop or erode over time. Each time you make a commitment and then break it—no matter how small—you're chiseling away at that underlying trust. Each time you make and keep a commitment, you're doing the opposite.
So consider setting some routines that work for both of you. Maybe it's that you eat breakfast together before you both head into the office, or you avoid your work computer or smartphones on Sundays, or you always call and chat for 30 minutes when one of you is traveling. The exact routines you decide on aren't as important as the fact that they're deliberate, consistent, and meaningful to both of you. Sure, it may seem silly to be so ritualistic about routines you set voluntarily, compared with mandatory directives from your boss, but you need to take them just as seriously.
Keep in mind, too, that there's no such thing as a perfect score. (In fact, don't keep score—that's how things get petty.) If she makes it home earlier three nights a week, celebrate that and let go of the other two. If he's doing better overall but let you down once, explain how you felt disappointed, forgive him, stop talking about it, and move on. This can be tough when there's a history of disappointment to contend with, but it can teach you vulnerability where you both need it most. Be honest, but be encouraging.
Finally, at their core, these work-life issues are never one-sided. If your partner is concerned you're working insane hours, that's not just their problem—there may be something in yourself that's worth examining, too.
For those who do have demanding jobs (including those who don't mind that—or even like it), it's good to remember that your worth is still intrinsic. It isn't something you earn through your performance on the job. The fact that you are more than your paycheck or your performance review is alarmingly easy to lose sight of during the daily grind.
And for those who date, marry, or are involved in any other type of long-term personal relationship with somebody who works too much, it's often the case that you're cared for more than you may realize. That doesn't mean accepting less attention than you need or deserve, of course. But it helps to remind yourself, too, that your worth is also intrinsic. You might feel hurt because your partner hasn't made it home for dinner, and that's worth talking about. But you aren't less worthy of love because of it.
You don't impress baby boomers with tacos and pizza, but organizers of next month's mega-concert have a secret weapon: tons of gourmet food.
When Desert Trip was announced in May, its lineup of septuagenarian rock artists quickly earned it the nickname "Oldchella," or "Coachella for old people." Conversely, the mega-event featuring such luminaries as Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, and Roger Waters was also called the "concert of the century," but it has an uphill climb if it wants to satisfy discerning baby-boomer foodies, who aren't going to be impressed with the typical subpar catering fare once associated with concerts.
Fortunately, organizers have a plan to make Desert Trip more delicious: Goldenvoice, the concert promotor running the show, says more than 100 food vendors will be on hand, offering everything from vegan hamburgers to Thai street food.
"Food has become part of our shows," explained Nic Adler, who curates the Food and Beverage Program for Goldenvoice events, which includes Coachella. "[Festivals] are such a great place to introduce food. You have that social interaction, people are having fun. I think for a long time we were just leaving it on the table and thinking that pizza and tacos [would suffice] ... Now people know to come hungry."
Great food at festivals isn't necessarily new, but with Desert Trip, organizers hope to push the menu to new limits. Their chef billing reads like a who's who of top dining establishments: Marcus Samuelsson (Red Rooster); Scott Conant (Scarpetta); Alexandra Guarnaschelli (Butter); Daniel Humm (Eleven Madison Park); Marcel Vigneron (Wolf), and more household names. There are even trendy desserts from the likes of Mallow Mallow (they serve bourbon bacon s'mores); McConnell's Fine Ice Creams (they produce flavors like Boysenberry Rosé Milk Jam); and Dominique Ansel (beloved inventor of the Cronut).
Desert Trip, which will be held over two October weekends in Indio, California, sold out within hours in May, and over 75,000 attendees are expected. The ticket rush left some empty-handed baby boomers tweeting the Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." The mega-event ($199 a day / $399 for the weekend) is slated to bring together a large demographic of rock lovers, but it's safe to presume the audience will differ in age range than more younger-skewing music festivals.
Unlike at Coachella, a more sophisticated curation of restaurants—like the iconic Venice Beach restaurant the Rose Cafe and the Southern Italian hotspot Sotto—has been tapped to reflect ticket buyers' tastes. There will also be a craft beer barn serving microbrews and specialty cocktails as well as a curated wine program, which will include tastings, by sommelier Rajat Parr.
Parr will serve modern American wines from small, artisanal producers, a menu he described as "like a wine list for a new hip restaurant." There will be Barbera in addition to Cabernets, but erring on the lighter variety; as Parr noted, the challenge is to serve wine that won't put people to sleep before the night's festivities. "I want them to feel alive when they go to the show," he said.
The festival's promoters put together a mix of trendy restaurants, making sure to include both higher- and lower-priced options. In fact, the site's FAQ section pinpoints one jarring expected concern: "What if I just want a hot dog?" Don't worry, they'll have them. They might just be topped with rosemary-infused sriracha and topped with cilantro.
The all-inclusive "culinary experience" ($179 per day / $499 a weekend) allows attendees to spend the afternoon eating and drinking up until the evening. For those who want something a bit more distinct, there's a $225 four-course prix fixe seated outdoor dinner produced by Outstanding in the Field, known for its picturesque events. The open-air feast generally resembles something out of a wedding reception, with a long table feted with flowers and candles and wire-hanging twinkle lights. While it might seem unorthodox, it's all part of Goldenvoice's vision to redefine the music festival experience—and its dining counterpart.
What else differentiates Desert Trip from its younger, more skin-baring cousin Coachella? To start, the fact that there are only two acts per night on one stage—versus dozens on several stages—demonstrates the slower, more thoughtful pace. This allows attendees to focus on the food during daylight hours and prepare for the evening's main event. As for comfort level, Desert Trip will accommodate its more mature audience with shaded dining and air-conditioned lounges spread throughout the few hundred-acres site. Even the bathrooms are upgraded, with permanent bathrooms built on-site. "You will not see a Porta-Potty anywhere," promised Adler.
Goldenvoice implemented its food program after it witnessed attendees were more than just music lovers, they were foodies as well. These hungry concertgoers care about the top restaurants, craft beer, and celebrity chefs. Organizers began more seriously tending to food and beverage activation, but in a way that would appeal to today's connected culture.
"I talk to all the chefs and I say, let's make beautiful food, because people are going to take pictures of it," explained Adler. "It's like sharing a piece of art or your favorite band: sharing a shot of an ice cream donut sandwich is the perfect way to say, 'Hey, I'm having the time of my life.'"
It's why "bowl culture" has taken off at festivals—because nothing takes a better picture than food in a bowl. At last year's Coachella, Sweetfin Poké became the weekend's bestseller and social media superstar, thanks to its photogenic properties. Food has become as viral as the coolest bands, with certain edible items, like say EggSlut's juicy egg breakfast sandwich, clogging the event's hashtags on Instagram.
Festival-goers, however, need time to adapt to culinary changes. In 2014, Goldenvoice launched its first food program at Coachella by inviting noted chefs to outfit the festival with deluxe sandwich stands and sushi bars—a stark difference from the pizzas and hot dogs of previous generations. The first year Goldenvoice experimented with these upscale food vendors, it wasn't an immediate hit: Attendees were confused by kale salad at a rock festival. Whereas today, says Adler, "If we did a kale salad at Coachella, it could be the No. 1 selling item."
In the following years, once the public knew what to expect, Goldenvoice went after restaurants many people had heard of—on Eater, for instance—but hadn't necessarily tried yet. This year's audience got a taste of KazuNori sushi or Night + Market's crispy rice salad. Participants change yearly, with Goldenvoice opting for only a few returning vendors, like Sage Vegan Bistro, which sells items like quinoa corn cakes.
Zach Brooks, 40, is a festival-goer and host of the podcast Food Is The New Rock. He's seen the progression of music festival dining, noting that today's food options are as big a draw as the music. In a way, it's basically become two festivals—food and music—combined in one.
"It's been amazing how great a job [Goldenvoice organizers] have done is such a short amount of time," he said, adding that food at Coachella 2016 "was the best food at any music festival that exists."
Brooks witnessed how certain concepts, such as mini-restaurants in the Coachella VIP lounge, took time to resonate with fans; they'd be sparsely attended in their first year, then packed the next time around. He's confident that the more elegant ideas intended for Desert Trip, such as the four course-meal in the field, will better land with the expected fans. "That audience is way more suited for fancy meals than the Coachella crowd."
Vendors, meanwhile, are equally excited to reach a specific audience as well as receive a certain type of exposure. Top Chef winner Michael Voltaggio, who plans on selling his cutting-edge New American fare, like nitrogen ice cream, views it as a unique marketing opportunity.
"The fact that I got to read my name in the same article as the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young was unbelievable," he said. "That in it of itself is enough to do it—to be part of history."
With no band playing during the day, thousands of attendees will have time to buy their favorite foods and take it easy. As organizers noted, they're coming as much to see The Rolling Stones as they are to enjoy a relaxing vacation. And what's a vacation without good food?
"From a culinary perspective we wanted to deliver something that was familiar to the crowd that was coming," he said. That, coupled with iconic rock stars, is the secret sauce for Desert Trip. "All of us as we get older, we don't get to sit down in the grass with a glass of wine under some umbrella and just talk about life and then get up and see our favorite band of all time."
A little tension can be a good thing as long as you know what to do with it.
There's no such thing as a conflict-free office, and sometimes a little tension isn't such a bad thing anyway. Workplaces without any conflicts are often filled with employees who've stopped feeling connected to their jobs, or who bury their resentments beneath the surface. But as long as people are still engaging with one another—even in ways that sometimes seem negative—there's always the possibility of a positive outcome on the other end, as long as you handle the friction wisely.
That's just one more way emotional intelligence comes into play in the modern workplace. You need people with strong interpersonal skills not so much to avoid conflicts but to defuse them before they escalate, then channel the source of disagreement into mutual understanding and meaningful connections between people. That isn't easy to do, but these are some of the skills it takes to pull it off.
Emotionally intelligent people's awareness of their own emotional state helps them avoid reacting to negativity. If a situation has you feeling angry, wait until you've cooled off and can respond rationally. This is where the "take a deep breath and count to 10" advice still holds true. Most conflicts don't arise from urgent crises, even though high-pressure situations tend to escalate them. In other words, fighting about it won't help you make that tight deadline.
The key is to prevent the situation from worsening before trying to resolve it. You probably have more time than you might think in order to let everyone's emotions cool—including your own—before you can start working through the disagreement together.
Anger and other strong emotions are often ignited by something that reminds people of past experiences. That means that what somebody appears to be angry about may not really be the true cause—it's just triggered something else.
These don't need to be deep-seated psychological patterns that only a psychiatrist could root out, either. For example, someone who had a fight with their partner at home could inadvertently snap at a coworker that same morning. Emotionally intelligent people aren't shrinks—they're just aware of the most common triggers that tend to irritate themselves and others, and they can often tell when the reason somebody's angry has nothing to do with them personally, even if it may feel on the surface like it does.
When you're angry—or dealing with somebody else who is—it's common to want to make your side heard. But instead of reacting to negative emotions, try to find out more about the situation causing them. Resist the urge to get defensive and instead ask questions that clear some ground for the other party to express themselves. Emotionally intelligent people don't just tune in to their own feelings, they also help others become more aware of how they're acting and feeling. By allowing the other person to simply feel heard, you can head off a nasty fight and open up a conversation.
Many people are uncomfortable with conflict and run at the slightest hint of it; they pretend it doesn't exist or minimize it. That's not a good idea. The goal is to help everyone come away from the confrontation feeling better about themselves, not worse. A cooling-off period can be helpful, but it isn't a solution in itself—just a first step toward reaching one. Conflict rarely just blows over all on its own.
These first four steps may not be the toughest. If you've got a good share of emotional intelligence, keeping level-headed and giving others room to express themselves is often doable, even if it isn't easy. Genuinely empathizing with someone—especially someone who's upset with you and letting you know it—can be harder.
But the truth is that everyone's privately fighting a battle nobody else is fully aware of (that's just the human condition for you), and emotionally intelligent people are aware that others may be having problems they themselves have no way to gain access to. This recognition is itself a first step toward empathizing, though. It helps you be supportive of somebody who's treating you in ways others might find offensive.
Try to find out what's really going on, and know that you'll probably only ever get a partial picture. Then see if there's anything you can do to help. As you do, it's okay to set boundaries. While they're open to others, highly emotionally intelligent people understand their own needs and limits, too. They aren't pushovers and aren't easily taken advantage of. Sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to lend one hand but not both.
One key to defusing office conflicts is to understand their underlying causes, which often follow patterns. When you sense someone going through emotional turmoil, don't wait to act. With experience, you'll get a feeling for what's likely to set one person off or stress out the next. So pick up on these cues before they do much damage.
Approach the person you're concerned is feeling upset, tell them what you've noticed, and show your intention to help out if it's in your power to do so. You'll earn appreciation, respect, and trust from your colleagues and fend off ugly fights before they start—by channeling their sources into conversations that actually get you somewhere, together.
From escape rooms to DIY, these unique training methods help employees expand their skills while having fun.
Workplace training often feels like something to check off a to-do list. Companies spend about $130 billion each year on corporate education, according to a study by Bersin by Deloitte, yet research has found that the average adult forgets 40% of what they've learned after just 20 minutes, and 64% by the next day.
Four companies have adopted some unusual ways to train employees on everything from technology to culture to get a better return on the investment. From comedy to DIY, these unique methods get employees to expand their skillsets while having fun.
Asurion, a Nashville-based mobile technology company, has created a unique training program for its new tech recruits using the popular Escape Room style. The company set up a space that includes a living room and kitchen that holds a series of connected digital devices that are all locked. To unlock and escape the room, the employees have to troubleshoot and reconfigure the devices so that they work properly. And they have 45 minutes to complete the task.
"This training gives hands-on experience with the most popular connected devices with the goal of being able to provide knowledge- and experience-based tech support," says Vincent Phamvan, senior director of innovation. "It also instills a sense of patience, empathy, and a team mentality, which is equally important to providing tech support to consumers," says Phamvan. "Most of all,' he adds, "this training is fun."
Using the art of improvisation, The Second City has launched dozens of comic careers. The nimble form of communication is helping employees at Bluecore, a New York City-based email marketing platform, become more successful, too.
CEO Fayez Mohamood took an improv class for fun and was surprised how the experience helped his professional life. "It was one of the best things I've done; it's on par with the professional education I took in engineering," he says.
He decided to make improv lessons an employment requirement, and each quarter an instructor comes to their office to work with employees. "Improv teaches you how to communicate and articulate well," says Mohamood. "It's your goal to share your agenda to another person in room, and it's common to see an engineer, for example, ramble on."
Improv also helps people get comfortable dealing with ambiguity. "When you get on stage not knowing what story is and having new things thrown your way you have to be creative and come up with solutions on the fly," he says.
Improv also gets people working as a team. "You have to collaborate and make eye contact, he says. "It's saying 'Yes and …' instead of creating objections."
Employees of the Seattle-based startup OfferUp, a mobile marketplace for local buying and selling, start their first day by assembling their own desk and chair. From entry to C-level, employees unpack the box, gather tools, and build their workstation.
"It maps back to the company's 'all hands on deck' work culture," says CEO and cofounder Nick Huzar, who adds that the exercise started out of necessity. "As a small startup, I was tired of building all of the desks and chairs," he says.
In addition to getting a hands-on lesson on employee culture, the task has some side benefits. "Usually what happens is that the rest of the team comes over, says 'hi' and offers to help. But it's really about setting the tone that everyone's expected to roll up their sleeves and get dirty."
Google is known for its education programs, as well as the now-defunct initiative that allowed staff to use 20% of their work time to pursue projects and learning opportunities that are important to them. To boost creative problem-solving skills, the company started CSI:Lab in 2010.
CSI stands for "Creative Skills for Innovation" and is held through its "Googlers-to-Googlers" program, in which Google employees teach other Google employees about topics that interest them.
"CSI:Lab is all about reaching an end goal through brainstorming, getting your hands dirty and an 'ensemble' performance," writes Frederik G. Pferdt, Google's global program manager for innovation and creativity, on the company blog.
Pferdt started CSI:Lab to show coworkers how to "experience innovation." "I wanted to get a diverse group of people together in one room to solve challenging problems by learning from each other's experiences, and by developing their own inner strengths. The goal was to enable Googlers to experience an approach to innovation where one learns by doing, rather than by listening," he writes.
[Photo: Google]
During each class, groups are tasked to answer a challenge, such as: "How would you change the commuting to work experience?" The process involves taking surveys, posting ideas to a white board and ultimately choosing one idea for expansion. Employees are then provided with an array of building materials that include Play-Doh, pipe cleaners, LEGO blocks, and feathers, and are asked to create a physical prototype.
The learning method helps employees understand where inspiration comes from so you can replicate it, writes Pferdt. It also encourages employees to think like a child, questioning the things around you, dive into something new, share your knowledge and perspective, seek out unusual materials when developing an idea, and invest in your physical space.
"Having a supportive environment can make a big difference, so learn what types of space inspire creativity," he writes.
The success of CSI:Lab led Google to offer the program to employees worldwide. "One Googler told me that after the Lab, he used his experience to develop a prototype for a solution to one of his team's issues," writes Pferdt. "He described how good it felt to take a risk to reach a solution, and ultimately he convinced a team of other Googlers to work with him to refine and implement his idea. Ultimately, seeing these ideas absorbed by participants and put to use within the company is what CSI:Lab is all about."
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Many "gamification" efforts are cumbersome, distracting, or even a little juvenile. But they don't have to be.
Imagine web developers finishing a backlog of mundane ticketed tasks with a zeal usually reserved for playing Pokémon Go or watching a sports championship. The goal of "gamifying" work tasks is to turn otherwise tedious, long-term projects into fun, competitive experiences that get people excited.
In practice, it doesn't always work that way. Gamification can be a powerful tool to boost workplace productivity and increase engagement, but it needs to be done right. Without clear rules and end goals, it often just leads to tensions and frustration. According to Gallup, only just one in three American workers get some kind of recognition over the course of a normal workweek, and gamification aims to change that, building well-earned praise into the ordinary work experience. At my company, we've figured out a few ways to do that successfully, motivating our tech teams to take on big projects, and even saving thousands of dollars along the way. These are the two components that, in our experience, are essential to making gamification actually work.
A generic strategy that fails to incorporate team members' skills and interests rarely succeeds. Gartner estimates that 80% of workplace gamification efforts fall flat due to a lack of creativity and meaning. If employees aren't happy and don't want to participate, the game could be worse than pointless—it could be counterproductive. Employees who are determined to win may cheat or sabotage their coworkers, while others may tune out and lose motivation.
Overusing competition can also lead to underperformance. Omnicare learned that tough lesson when the pharmacy-IT company tried to gamify customer service procedures, CIO.com reported in 2013. In an effort to decrease helpdesk wait times, Omnicare rolled out an employee leaderboard and offered cash incentives to the fastest players. The strategy backfired. Omnicare's highly skilled employees felt like they were being overly monitored, which caused longer wait times and even wound up increasing employee turnover.
Lindsay Estrada, our company's vice president of project management, is careful to choose themes our employees are drawn to as the basis for any project or process we try to gamify. When our tech team recently had a long list of backlogged tasks that were getting overlooked, Lindsay developed a unique solution.
When the 2016 Major League Baseball All-Star Game was happening in San Diego, just 500 yards from our office, our staff was hyped up on baseball to begin with. Each member of the tech team was given nine "innings" (days) to get through the mountain of tech tickets—an otherwise unpleasant task. Each ticket had three days to be completed, and we considered them a "loaded base" when they were awaiting deployment. For every closed ticket, an employee scored a "run." After just nine days, the team had 19 homeruns with another nine bases loaded and waiting for deployment.
Incorporating a major event happening just down the street into tasks everyone had been putting off created a boost of motivation without making anyone feeling forced into participating.
Gamification won't work if it's just about having fun; it needs to improve employees' productivity. That means keeping the desired outcome in mind first, then working backwards by building a measurable program to reach it. With complex tasks like coding or developing software, it can be hard to clearly see which team members are being truly productive.
So the key isn't to set benchmarks for individual employees but instead to identify what's truly valuable to the organization. By defining productivity at department and company level, you help your employees prioritize, rather than dictating precisely which tasks to do how and when in order to reach the overall goal.
The same holds true for gamification. By defining the rules both for the organizers and the participants, you can accurately measure whether a given initiative encourages employees to be productive in ways that provide real value. If it takes too much effort to tally results, for instance, that's a sign your scheme is a waste of time.
Our tech team knew exactly what the rules were for our All-Star challenge, and which tasks were considered productive, thanks to the clear rules the project management team had set out. The organizers of the project also sent daily emails with quantifiable stats on homeruns, bases loaded, and outs remaining. The scoring template was easily filled out at the end of each day, which helped keep everybody's eyes on the prize—not bogged down in the mechanics of playing the game at the expense of the work it was meant to help them accomplish.
Employee productivity is what keeps the wheels of a business turning. It might seem complicated to develop these programs regularly, but making work enjoyable and recognizing employees for their effort pays off. In fact, companies with recognition programs that genuinely reflect their values are 32% more productive. Play the game right, and everybody wins.
Jason Kulpa is the CEO of Underground Elephant, a customer-acquisition solution company.
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Nobody likes to earn less money—ever. But the experience of taking a pay cut can prove a career asset in the long run.
Sometimes it's an economic cycle that forces your hand. Other times it's an opportunity where the career upsides outweigh the compensation package. Or maybe you've just had to move. No matter your reason, accepting a lower salary than the one you've earned previously isn't any fun. But there are actually some upsides to making less, and they can change your perspective on your career and even yourself in ways you might not expect.
Over the years, I've had to take pay cuts, go without a paycheck altogether, and still manage my life accordingly. Though it's really sucked each time that's happened, those were periods when I've learned a few lessons that later proved hugely valuable.
When you take a pay cut, money is no longer the be-all-end-all of your work. You've got to budget more carefully, and that means worldly goods can't be as high priority as they might have been before. You realize money isn't the root of your happiness.
Instead, you can change your perspective and refocus on the other aspects of your life that don't require money—like your health, family, and personal relationships. When I took my first pay cut, I really started to find out what was important in my life. It's amazing how perspective changes.
Most of us are always trying to see how we can earn more money. Once we do, then it becomes how to make even more than that. But when you have to go the other way on the scale, money isn't the driving force any longer. It finds its place as something necessary to live but not essential for thriving.
For me, taking a lower salary also helped me evaluate my skills and pin down what amount of money I'm truly worth. It caused me to focus on building up a more valuable skill set that people would be willing to pay more for. I was being paid $14.50 an hour at the time. Now, my hourly rate is in the $100s. Had I not taken a cut, I would have never realized what I could become professionally.
A lower salary may mean a job that no longer requires a commute or one that entails fewer responsibilities. It could even involve flextime so you don't have to be at a physical job site as often. In return, you earn back the gift of time so you can rebalance your career and personal life.
Suddenly, you have time to socialize, stay in shape, and even return to hobbies (some of which might even earn you some side dough to top up that savings account). You may even find that you can do things that give back, like volunteering in the community, for another enriching experience.
When forced to do more with less, many people rise to the occasion. "Resource scarcity" has been linked with creativity, and it makes sense—when you have to stretch every dollar, you're forced to come up with novel ways to do that. You'll find new ways of actually using what you've got. That won't just make you more efficient, it will make you more resourceful.
In fact, the last recession may even have popularized a "less is more" mind-set that may never have taken root otherwise—stimulating the sharing economy, inspiring the likes of Uber and Airbnb, as well as sparking wider interest in trading, recycled and homemade goods, and sustainability issues.
Making less money can also incentivize you to take risks and seize opportunities you wouldn't in different circumstances. You may strike out as an entrepreneur and see if you have what it takes. Or maybe you've always dreamed of running your own business but were afraid to do it because the money was always there with your traditional job. Once that salary starts to decrease, it may push you to finally take the leap. Nothing increases ambition like discovering you'll need to make less.
Taking a pay cut taught me I could live on less than I'd thought—a lot less, in fact. This helped me save up to the point where I had over two years' runway, even though I had less income overall to put away. I eventually used that runway to launch my first startup, which I ended up selling years later at a great profit. Despite successes since, I still live on a pretty similar budget to the one I got used to back then (even with a kid), which helps me keep looking for new opportunities and knocking on new doors. It's also allowed me to bootstrap my invoicing startup to profitability.
If you're considering taking a pay cut, the first step is to assess its impact on your overall budget—especially if your income helps support a family—and weigh your options in terms of what expenses you can reduce. But don't lose sight of what you might gain. Sometimes it's the experience of dealing with less that helps you do more.
John Rampton is an entrepreneur, investor, online marketing guru, and startup enthusiast. He is the founder of the online payments company Due. Follow John on Twitter at @johnrampton.
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Voters are tired of the antiquated debate format. What would an ideal debate look like? (Hint: It's not just about more fact-checking.)
When the first presidential debate of the 2016 general election airs on Monday, we'll see Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump hew to a tried-and-true method of political discourse: prepared statements, timed responses, and scripted zingers at the ready—all under the strict guidance of experienced moderators. It's a familiar format, but some say it's also antiquated and obsolete, and doesn't really give voters any useful insight into the candidates or their policies. Others say the events of this election present such unprecedented issues that doing things the old way simply won't cut it anymore.
Lately there have been more calls for a complete reformation of the presidential debate format, but what would that even look like? What changes could the Debate Commission implement that would make the process more interesting, useful, and informative?
David Birdsell, the dean of the School of International Affairs at Baruch College, helped me contextualize the issue. He's spent decades researching and analyzing political discourse and presidential debates, and says the most bellowed issue thrown at debates is the problem of fact-checking. "[Viewers] always want to hold debaters accountable for the veracity of their statements," Birdsell says.
The question is, how does one do that?
Before we go any further, it's important to debunk a few key myths. First, the idea of fact-checking the candidates isn't new. The question "has existed since the very first debate," Birdsell says. The other myth is that on-the-spot fact-checking would somehow tighten the effectiveness of a debate. The idea is that if a third party were able to yell from the crowd, "That is not true!" something would change. But the judgment required to know which claims should be called into question would be no easy task. Birdsell pointed to post-debate articles that, line by line, annotate what a politician said. He said this is useful and enlightens the public, but some comments are less valuable to fact-check during the debate than others—especially when occurring during a live taping.
And in the end, it's not really the moderator's job or network's job to ensure all things said are truthful. Historically, says Birdsell, "The person responsible for holding the other party accountable is the candidate."
Birdsell did offer one potential reform to make things a little cleaner and more interesting—and it might also alleviate some of the fact-checking tensions. "I think it would be great to give the candidates the ability to interrupt the other one or two times during the debate," he says. It's like when baseball managers demand replays of close calls. This way, if something truly out of bounds is said and not questioned, the other debater is given the chance to go back and re-analyze it. But this shouldn't become something oft-utilized. Instead, "It's a scarce good."
Beyond candidates questioning each other, perhaps there ought to be better ways for citizens to insert themselves into the conversation. The age-old debate formula is a single commentator or group of commentators asking a series of questions. Before 1992, it used to be a group of media members, all with prepared questions. Then it changed to a single-moderator format, making it less likely for "gotcha" questions to be asked. While the idea behind these formats is that the moderators are unbiased and neutral, more often than not, they don't have solid methods with which to incorporate citizen sentiment.
A recent paper funded by Civic Hall and the Democracy Fund looked into tools debates around the world were utilizing to facilitate more useful discourse. The research looked at models used in Australia, Taiwan, France, Japan, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S. to highlight format changes that have proven either successful or interesting. Constituents from different geographies have different debate presumptions: What a voter in the U.S. may want out of an event is likely different from someone in another country.
At the same time, voters across the world may have similar expectations of these political events, at least at a higher level. A 2010 study from the University of Leeds looked into the "entitlements" voters want from debates; for example, they want to be more a part of the process. Voters, explained Christine Cupaiuolo, a co-author of the new Civic Hall paper, "felt empowered to be part of the democratic process." Thus her project looked into ways to better make that happen.
Two of the most prominent ideas put forth in the paper were ways to better involve active engagement with the event. One was an idea implemented by PBS Newshour, which created private Facebook groups for undecided voters to talk about issues before a debate. Then the concerns brought to light in those conversations were used as question fodder for a February Democratic primary debate. This was one example, said Cupaiuolo, that let the public decide the questions. Additionally, such groups can help people digest what the candidates say. Birdsell explained that the Baruch community opens up conference rooms to watch the events together. Then they "turn off the talking heads and talk about it among ourselves." These groups that engage and reflect on what was seen and heard allow citizens to discuss politics in a polite and civically-engaged way.
Another example of audience engagement was a U.K. debate held in 2015 that utilized a panel of over 100 participants who gave instant feedback about the questions being asked. Each participant had an iPad and rated their sentiments about the topics at hand, which helped the CNN editorial team guide the conversation:
Audience members had eight seconds each time a question came up to select "yes," "no," or "no opinion"; a sea of smiling, frowning, and neutral faces would start to appear on the circular wall, reflecting the responses. Drawing on the results, [Christiane] Amanpour would guide the conversation with the panelists and occasionally ask for audience reaction to a point that was made. For these on-the-fly questions, audience members voted thumbs up or thumbs down using their iPads.
There are other ways to approach this idea of instant sentimental feedback. Designers at the innovation and design firm IDEO, for instance, have been working with the Sundance Institute on a panel format. Creative Tensions, as the program is called, requires everyone in a room to stand on their feet. Nearby are two speakers and a moderator. On the wall a "spectrum" is presented, which is bookended by polar opposing opinions of a subject. "The entire room—speakers and audience—move in the space along that spectrum," explained IDEO's Creative Tensions manager Anna Silverstein, while presenters discuss their opinions. The idea is to get in-the-moment movement that echoes sentiment. For example, if I were in the audience and a speaker said something I disagreed with, I would move away from him or her. So too would everyone else in the room, depending on how they felt. "It forms an interesting conversation that is less political and more nuanced," says Silverstein.
Creative Tensions was originally devised as a way to make panel discussions more participatory, but its methods have distinct political applications. For instance, a town hall meeting could be facilitated under these parameters by asking participants and candidates to physically move based on how they feel about a subject in the moment. This, explained Hailey Brewer, who leads much of IDEO's work in the public sector, allows people to explore the nuances of their own views. Where a dry debate feels scripted and reinforces the deadlock of differing opinions, the movement allows people to see if there are moments of agreement. It allows people to "have a real authentic conversation," says Brewer.
Of course, a conversation is really what people want from these debates. These rare events are a way to see a more genuine version of who the candidates are. I asked Birdsell if he saw them as more of a spectacle and less of a debate-and-engage format. "These are much more than spectacles," he says. Evidence points to viewers watching the events and learning. "Seeing how people respond in these moments teaches you a lot about who they are," he says.
He added that the gripes being brought up now, while valuable, are not new. People have been complaining about the lack of debate-like flavor since the first one aired in 1960. The only thing different about this election is Donald Trump. He is, says Birdsell, "a candidate who has looked like no other candidate . . . who has a well-earned reputation for making things up. I'm not sure that the remedy for that is to change the debates."
The answer, then, isn't to look at the problem created by candidates' flaws, but figure out a way to bridge the community into the process. "We really need to consider," says Cupaiuolo, "how we involve people in a way that respects their intelligence and takes seriously their concerns."
Following that, it's important to remember why debates exist: For people to see the candidates in a more nuanced and less scripted light. Voters get a chance to watch the politicians think and respond. This serves a function that few other events can. But debates are definitely not perfect—nearly everyone I talked to had some ideas for good and constructive reforms.
All the same, says Birdsell, "they are very valuable."
Eschewing a fancy remote control, ornate voice interface, or complex apps, Roku's biggest product launch emphasizes straight-up TV watching.
Roku, which made the first successful streaming TV box back in 2008, has its biggest product launch ever today. Its five new models include TVs ranging from tube sets to high dynamic range, 4K/UHD screens. Along with the revamp of its Streaming Stick in April, Roku has had a complete product turnover in just the last six months.
The $30 Roku Express, looking like an old Roku 1 model sliced in half, is its cheapest player yet, supporting video up to 1080P HD. For $40, the Express+ includes the analog ports from the old Roku 1, which used to cost $50. Priced at $80, $100, and $130, the Premier, Premier+, and Ultra models all offer 4K streaming, without the noisy cooling fan of the previous 4K model.
Yet Roku's remote controls for the new models have the same bulky, almost-child's-toy design from 2011. That simplicity is deliberate, and a reflection of Roku's overall no-frills approach to the streaming TV business. "In a combination of form and function, we tend to lean a lot more towards the function," says Lloyd Clarke, Roku's director of product management. The big buttons and deeply contoured purple directional pad are easy to find just by feel, says Clarke. "I see other companies move away from simplicity, trying to get to some overly sleek design," he says. Clarke might be referring to the Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV product lines—two of Roku's biggest rivals.
Streaming TV devices (including smart TVs), are now in 50 million U.S. homes, according to market research firm NPD Group. "This is no longer an early-adopter market, we're talking mass-market offering," says analyst John Buffone, who's been tracking sales and surveying owners of connected devices, as NPD calls them, since 2012. Roku seems to be focusing on what the mass market is looking for by following market trends rather than the early adopter buzz common among its neighbors in Silicon Valley.
Consider a comparison to Apple TVs, priced at $149 and $199, which stream up to 1080p HD resolution. (Sorry for the oncoming storm of specs; but it's how people shop.)
Apple's cheapest model costs more than Roku's new flagship player, the $130 Ultra, which streams 4K/UHD TV in high dynamic range (HDR) at 60 frames per second. That's the top quality offered by Netflix, the top streaming service, which Roku spun out from in 2007 and with which it still shares an office complex. Apple's pricing is based on the amount of storage (32GB and 64GB) because, as the company says incessantly, the future of TV is apps.
Perhaps, but the present most certainly is not. "Consumers don't use connected TVs or attached content devices for much other than watching TV. This trend has not changed in years," says Buffone. Roku offers about 160 basic games controlled awkwardly via its unglamorous remote. Amazon Fire TV and Apple TV offer well over 1,000 games, and each company sells a $50 Xbox-style wireless game controller.
But few people are looking for games on their streaming box. Just 9% of people who own internet-connected TVs reported playing video games in NPD's latest survey in the second quarter of 2016. But 67% of those people watched streaming services.
"Primarily, people watching TV are looking for the best picture," says Buffone. "The attributes that we're seeing in the marketplace as most salient [are] 4K and 4K HDR." That's where Roku goes big. Along with the Ultra, Roku's Premiere and Premiere+ support 4K/UHD at 60FPS. (The Premier+ also handles HDR.) Amazon's $100 Fire TV supports 4K but only up to 30FPS, and without HDR (although an upgrade may be be coming).
Roku Express
Roku doesn't skip the low end, though, with analog jacks on the Express+ for tube sets. These aren't the future of TV, but they're still part of the present. U.S. homes with connected TVs have an average of three sets, but only two that are online. "Those 50 million homes represent another 50 million TVs that could be connected, and a lot of them are old-school tube TVs," says Buffone. Neither Apple TV nor Fire TV, nor Google Chromecast have analog ports.
Although the streaming-box industry is booming, it won't last forever. Most new sets are smart TVs that don't need a smart box. In 2014, Roku started licensing its software to smart-TV makers. Roku's OS will be in "nearly 100" TV models this fall, says Matthew Anderson, Roku's CMO. They tend to be from budget manufacturers like Haier, Hisense, TCL, and Best Buy's Insignia brand. Sharp uses the OS in some budget models, and Hitachi will soon join in. They're not the most glamorous smart TVs, but they currently include the first, third, and eighth best-selling models on Amazon, as well as the second and tenth most popular on Best Buy's website.
Along with quality, which shoppers tend to measure in specs, consumers are looking for the most content, says Buffone. Roku wins here, with more than 3,500 streaming channels, including ad-supported ones that bring in extra revenue for Roku. In June comScore reported that Roku accounted for 49% of the set-top boxes people used for streaming in the U.S.—followed in order by Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV, and Apple TV.
Roku's search covers over 100 of the top online channels like Netflix and HBO Now. Roku does promote the movies and TV shows that it offers in a revenue-sharing deal with Fandango—on its home screen, not in search results. But the house brand doesn't overwhelm Roku's interface as much as it does the Amazon Fire TV's. Nor does Roku lock out popular channels, as Apple TV does with Amazon Prime Video.
Roku hasn't upgraded its voice search, which sticks to the basics, responding to the names of a movie, TV show, actor, or director. Amazon and Apple have powerful in-house voice recognition and AI engines, Alexa and Siri, to draw on. They can do extra things like tell you the weather forecast (Fire TV) or handle complex queries like "find comedies from the '80s." (Apple TV). But most people are looking for the basics, and voice isn't near the top of the list for most people shopping for video streamers, says Buffone.
Roku does win acclaim for its visual interface. That it's essentially unchanged in this new product revamp is a testament to the work done back in 2013 under Ali Vassigh, who left Microsoft's Xbox team to become Roku's director of user experience. The new look his team built is based on a two-column layout; large, gorgeous icons; and relentlessly consistent navigation. "You're going to scroll up and down for the choice you want, and when you pick it, you're going to move to the right to get closer to accomplishing your goal," says Vassigh.
However far down you dig, hitting the Home button on the remote makes the entire interface appear to slide from left to right, physically retracing the path back to the home screen. That took a lot of coding, says Vassigh, but he insisted on showing movement through the levels of the interface. "I want you to feel like this is real, like these are real places that exist," he says.
At Microsoft, Vassigh led the team developing 3D air gestures and voice interactions for Kinect, but he had no interest in bringing those techniques to Roku because the accuracy isn't bulletproof. Gestures are great in games, he says, because people see mistakes as a challenge to improve their technique, say in a tennis swing. "When you're using a UI, and you try to go like this to scroll a menu," he says, waving his hand, "and it doesn't work, your first thought isn't, 'Oh my gosh, this is exciting, I'm going to master this.'"
Instead Roku users mainly thumb around with a big purple button on a chunky remote control. And more people seem to be using Roku's simple controls to navigate its vast, straightforward video offerings than are using any of its rival streaming boxes.
Yes, "sleeping on it" actually works. Here's how to make it work even better.
"Have you not noticed that, often, what was dark and perplexing to you the night before," the inventor Alexander Graham Bell once asked, "is found to be perfectly solved the next morning?"
Probably, you have. If "sleeping on it" works, it's partly because when you sleep, your prefrontal cortex—the center of what makes you, you—powers down. That means your personality, your decisions, your social controls go to sleep with you. The night is when your unconscious really does have free rein. It can do its work without interference. Here's how that process works and what you can do to leverage it when you've got tough decisions waiting on you in the morning.
While our conscious mind rests, our unconscious is busy making sense of the day's events and filing them away in long-term memory. And if there are any problems on your mind, your unconscious will work on those, too. And it's true, as Graham Bell pointed out, that a problem can seem insurmountable when you go to bed, but then when you wake up, it doesn't seem so daunting. Here's the part of his quote that precedes the one above:
I am a believer in unconscious cerebration. The brain is working all the time, though we do not know it. At night, it follows up what we think in the daytime. When I have worked a long time on one thing, I make it a point to bring all the facts regarding it together before I retire; and I have often been surprised at the results.
If your unconscious is aware that your conscious mind has been working hard on a problem, come nighttime, it will put its full processing power behind it. But the outcome of that process depends on a couple of things: first, your conscious mind needs to have been working hard on the problem, and second, you need to passionately require an answer in order to get your unconscious to work on it. It's like the classic children's fairytale "The Elves and the Shoemaker," where the penniless shoemaker lays out his last piece of cloth, and the elves come in the night and turn it into a beautiful pair of shoes.
Sometimes the solution to a problem, or at least the direction you need to take, will be revealed to you in the morning; sometimes even in your dreams. (Either way, make a note of any thoughts you have as soon as you wake up, otherwise they may fade away.) If you can remember your dreams, then you can see the unconscious at work already. And our dreams, even though we have no control over them, are very good at solving our problems.
This is because when we're dreaming, our minds are in the REM state, which has been found to be highly conducive to fluid reasoning and flexible thought. In a 2002 study, researchers tested participants' ability to solve anagram puzzles when they were awoken from a deep REM (dream) sleep, compared with when they were roused from a normal, lighter doze. Those woken up from REM sleep proved 32% better at solving anagrams.
There is a way to help your unconscious work for you: Set it a challenge. Say, for instance, you're unhappy in your job and don't know whether to leave or not. When you think about it in the daytime, your conscious mind is beset with different opinions and emotions on the subject. It's like sitting around a table with 20 friends debating the subject. They all genuinely want to help, but their different opinions just make it all a bit overwhelming.
If you set the problem for your unconscious to work on, though, it has access to all the facts and relevant information and can work through it more calmly. Try these five steps:
1. Before you go to bed, spend 30 minutes thinking in a relaxed way about the problem or issue.
2. Then, when you get into bed, actually write down the problem and ask the question out loud to yourself. Also give it a deadline. Too much pressure creates stress; you don't want to be lying awake thinking about the problem—that will just send it round and round in your conscious mind and won't be helpful at all. But a little bit of gentle pressure can help, so set a time that you want to nail down the answer. You might say out loud and write down, "I am unhappy in my job and want to know what I should do. I would like an answer by 7:00 in the morning when I wake up."
3. When you wake up, write down any immediate thoughts or insightful dreams you can remember. But don't worry if the answer doesn't seem obvious. It isn't like ordering room service and expecting exactly what you requested to arrive, exactly when you asked it to—be patient. Take a shower, which can be a very productive place for unconscious ideas to bubble up.
4. Next, make yourself a tea or coffee and sit down in a comfortable chair with a pen and a pad of paper. For half an hour, just write. Don't think too much about what you're writing or if it makes any sense. Just get your thoughts down on paper.
5. After you've read back what you've written, let the council of your conscious mind debate it.
You may not have a tidy solution staring you in the face, but you may be surprised how much clearer things are after a good night's sleep. At the very least, chances are you'll be a lot closer to a decision you're comfortable with than you were when you went to bed.
This is an edited excerpt published with permission of the publisher, Capstone, a Wiley brand, from Brainhack: Tips and Tricks to Unleash Your Brain's Full Potential by Neil Pavitt. Copyright (c) 2016 by Neil Pavitt. All rights reserved. This book is available at all booksellers.
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Creators making physical stuff still need to package it up and ship it out. These companies remove most of the hassle at a fair price.
The designers of the Exploding Kittens card game originally thought they might need to print about 500 decks, and could handle fulfillment with help at a launch party. Instead, the game became a surprise Kickstarter hit during its 2015 campaign, raising nearly $9 million from over 200,000 backers. With multiple orders and the campaign's stretch goals accounted for, the game's creators had to produce and distribute around a million decks of cards.
Exploding Kittens breezed past the usual problems that stand in the way of success. Designing a compelling game is often difficult, and they came up with a catchy hook that plays well by all reports. Fundraising is tedious, but the two inventors brought in The Oatmeal's Matthew Inman, who has a massive fanbase for his cartoons and other projects, and it quickly caught fire. To print and package the game, the team went to Ad Magic, which handles Cards Against Humanity (CAH) and many others.
For creative efforts such as this one, the hard stuff of e-commerce often winds up being moving pesky atoms around to get in the hands of people who pledged and paid. That's where a division of Cards Against Humanity called Blackbox stepped in. Newly announced to the world, Blackbox is soon to split off into a freestanding entity. Exploding Kittens wound up being the largest project it's shipped so far, after the best-selling Cards Against Humanity games themselves.
CAH doesn't disclose its game's unit volumes or other figures, but sales are estimated in the hundreds of thousands yearly. In the five years since its debut, most copies of CAH have been moved by Amazon's Fulfillment by Amazon arm. That's changing. Blackbox has a live ticker on its site showing "boxes shipped worldwide," currently pegged at nearly 1.6 million.
Exploding Kittens
The goal is to work closely with creators to offer a "buy" button for their website, backend e-commerce services, warehousing, and branded packaging (with no mention of Blackbox), all for a fixed price of about $5 per shipment plus 5% of the product's retail cost—about $6 for a product with a street price of $20. For many physical goods, that's a cost that's hard to beat, due to the advantages in volume that Blackbox has and by the way it handles products: It never touches them.
Blackbox is not a distributor. Nor is it precisely a "3PL" (third-party logistics) firm—a category of company that comes in a large number of sizes and capabilities, and wings stuff around the world through shippers and freight handlers.
Blackbox's operation, as depicted on its own homepage.
More accurately, Blackbox is a front end to a number of warehouses around the country. It contracts with them to handle Cards Against Humanity, and now products made by other firms. The name is a giveaway: Blackbox serves as a black-box interface to fulfillment. CAH cofounder and Blackbox head honcho Max Temkin says he wants to build the fulfillment world's equivalent of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a set of on-demand, cloud-hosted services that abstract the hardware away from the functionality.
"We contracted commercial warehouses that know how to do this," Temkin says. "Wherever there's a U.S. Postal Service smarthub where they intake the mail for the whole region, there are these other businesses that pop up around there. We built software that coordinates all these warehouses together." He says the difference between Blackbox and managing one's own inventory and shipping is like the difference between running your own hardware server and outsourcing the effort to Amazon Web Services.
Blackbox has plenty of direct and tangential competitors. Some are traditional shipping houses, where a maker sends items and a list of addresses, and off they go. Others handle some combination of warehousing, order taking, packaging, and shipping. Still others offer soup-to-nuts coverage, like the appropriately named Make That Thing! division of web comics shop and fulfillment house TopatoCo. Make That Thing! can provide advice and management for creators ranging from conceiving a crowdfunding campaign through to sending out rewards and post-campaign sales.
Some of the products available through TopatoCo.
David Malki, the cartoonist behind Wondermark and the head of book design and special products at TopatoCo, says that many artists and other creators want to produce a book or other products that complement their online work, but just because "not everybody has those skill sets doesn't mean they shouldn't be able to make that thing."
For most creators, the amount of merchandise they have made for a crowdfunding campaign to bring to shows or sell online outstrips their ability to store that stuff, much less pack and fulfill it. "If you want to run an enterprise that involves manufacturing more things than you can fit in your Brooklyn apartment, you have to partner with somebody," says Malki.
The firm Lumi has carved out a different slice of this market, providing a dashboard front end that's similar to Blackbox, but designed to let customers create custom packaging material. The company's cofounders, Jesse Genet and Stephan Ango, pivoted their firm from selling a unique light-sensitive fabric ink to leveraging the expertise they gained in building a distribution network.
Now the company works as a buffer for others, including T-shirt companies Threadless and Cotton Bureau, to manage sourcing, printing, and delivering the array of branded boxes, shipping envelopes, packing tape, rubber stamps, and other items that help firms provide a consistent identity from online ordering through delivery.
Lumi founders Stephan Ango and Jesse Genet[Photo: courtesy of Lumi]
Genet says that while companies can source material on their own, packaging supplies wind up being a horrible mess for firms that are above a small scale and below an enormous one. Those that ship tens of thousands of high-value items a year fall below the thresholds to work directly with big packaging companies, and often get foisted off to brokers, who add a markup and use outdated methods. "You need to order a box, and all of a sudden you're faxing someone in New Jersey," she says.
For clients who have their own shipping operations or contract with warehouses, these packaging materials wind up being a surprisingly weak link, and they're expensive. Cotton Bureau, which prints carefully curated T-shirt designs after they've reached a certain preorder threshold, saved over 25% over its previous packaging bought through Alibaba, Genet says.
Like Malki and Temkin, Genet says Lumi is building a service and an approach for people like themselves. "We know what they're going through; we know what they're like," she says.
These smaller firms all contend at some level against Fulfillment by Amazon (FbA), a division of the online retailer, which can handle both shipping on behalf of its customers and listing inventory sold directly through Amazon.com. FbA's advantage is scale and relatively low cost, and the fact that it lets creators sell products on Amazon's own site, where they show up alongside Amazon's own inventory.
But mastering FbA's rules and pricing, which change regularly, can be overwhelming. Over two years ago, I managed to ship about 900 hardcover books through FbA, but it required tens of hours to learn the terminology and manage inventory via a seemingly late '90s-era interface, working (via email) with an Amazon representative, and, at one point, dealing with a pallet stuck in a queue for unpacking at a Pennsylvania Amazon outpost for 10 days.
Still, FbA was affordable. The price? About the same as the Blackbox estimate. But the books were shipped in an Amazon-branded box and with a sticky Amazon barcode label adhered to each book.
Temkin knows firsthand one of the other problems: counterfeiting. Cards Against Humanity has battled since its rise on the charts to Amazon's best-selling card game with ersatz products. "The counterfeiting, frankly, really became an issue," he says. Amazon effectively treats all products with the same identity (a unique stock-keeping unit or SKU) as interchangeable widgets.
For years, unaffiliated firms would cheaply bootleg print copies of CAH and ship them to Amazon, and when CAH ran out of stock—a routine problem in years past—other inventory would take its place. "My customers go on Amazon and buy the thing I made; it says it's for sale by CAH, they get it, and it's in the wrong font, and it falls apart, and it's poorly made," Temkin says. He notes, "They don't care who sells Cards; they care who is selling it at the best price." (A request to Amazon to discuss its counterfeiting policy didn't get a reply.)
More recently, Temkin says Amazon has given CAH higher status, and made it more difficult for other firms to offer CAH for sale in the same way. CAH has also improved its supply chain so it doesn't run out of product, and it now puts holograms on its boxes. (CAH gives the game away as downloadable PDFs to print, but doesn't authorize third-party sales.) But Temkin thinks of Blackbox as a way to provide guaranteed product to buyers.
The counterfeiting problem was part of a threefold set of concerns that prompted Cards Against Humanity's creators to start Blackbox. The other two were the challenges of shipping small, odd, and non-standard products, and having a dependency on Amazon as its sole fulfillment partner. "We really needed an 'in case of emergency break glass' option," Temkin says.
"If we wanted to do products that were really small or really large, we couldn't afford to do it with FbA," he adds. In late 2012 and for three years following, CAH experimented with using the USPS to send small expansion packs, letters, a tabloid-sized newspaper-style cartoon supplement, and other goods in holiday promotions. This helped them stage and manage their shift to shipping more of their own product and bringing Blackbox to life.
Temkin says that Blackbox's intent isn't to challenge FbA, but stake out a "lifestyle" territory that returns a modest profit instead of the maximum theoretical profit. This is in contrast to conventional distributors of books, games, and electronics who charge a much higher fee, but also place products into retail channels. It's tough to calculate how big its opportunity is, but the 3PL business is huge. Armstrong & Associates pegs revenue alone in the U.S. at over $70 billion in 2015; Global Market Insights suggests it could reach over a trillion dollars globally by 2022.
(Temkin, at one point during an interview at a cafe, leaned close to a reporter's digital recorder, saying, "My personal plea to Jeff Bezos: Please do not destroy us. We mean you no harm. I think we built something that's sustainable independent of Amazon . . . Please spare our families." He was unaware that the cafe teemed with Amazon employees who work in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood.)
For comparison, Kickstarter has collected over $2.2 billion on behalf of crowdfunding campaigns run on its site since 2009. This includes an enormous variety of projects, many of them producing an effectively digital end result, like a downloadable album or a digitally distributed film.
Every crowdfunding campaign won't fulfill via Blackbox, although projects (like CAH and Exploding Kittens) that start strong with crowdfunding often go on to ship vastly more units in the years that follow. And there are plenty of small-time creators whose eyes may roll back in their head when they look at text found on a typical 3PL site (like, "make sure you understand the difference between Prepackaged and Ready-to-Ship and Not Prepackaged and Ready-to-Ship"). They may be eager to remove fulfillment from their list of things to learn how to do.
TopatoCo's Malki, a friend of Temkin's who has exhibited at shows with CAH, says he doesn't view Blackbox as a competitor, because the companies typically slice off different parts of the idea-to-reality process. But they do share an ideology. Malki notes that TopatoCo's founder, Jeffrey Rowland, is dedicated to maximizing value for the artists with whom the company works. "The margins in a business with that core philosophy," he says, "are not as high as they would be otherwise."
Given the ongoing debate over fairness on social media, how will Twitter make sure that its curated timeline strikes the right balance?
Nasty put-downs, fact-challenged assertions, and lots of bluster. They won't just be evident up on stage at Hofstra University during tonight's presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. They'll also be ubiquitous on Twitter, which is live-streaming the event for its millions of opinionated users around the world (it's also available via the Wall Street Journal app and Facebook Live, among others).
Twitter's live stream sets itself apart in a few ways. For starters, Twitter won't require anyone to sign up for the service, or even download the app, to watch online—you'll just have to punch debate.twitter.com into your URL bar. The official debate hashtags: #debates and #debates2016 will each auto-populate an emoji. And whether you're watching on your smartphone or via Apple TV or another device, the live stream will feature a curated Twitter timeline and the platform will allow users to tweet direct from the live stream page (or from the Moments tab in the mobile app). Through a partnership with the Commission on Presidential Debates, moderator Lester Holt may even end up asking the candidates questions curated from users live on air.
But given the ongoing debate over fairness on social media, how will Twitter make sure that its curated timeline strikes the right balance between opposing political viewpoints, doesn't veer too liberal or conservative, and plays a fact-checking role? After all, during the primaries opinions tended to overwhelm thoughtful commentary and factual assertions, as they almost always do, on the platform. And in the previous election cycle Twitter was widely considered to be favoring Barack Obama over Mitt Romney: More users considered themselves liberal than conservative in 2012 and the political opinions expressed on the platform varied greatly from reality. After Obama's disappointing performance in his first debate against Romney, 59% of Twitter users thought he did a better job than Romney, though offline only 20% of people felt that way.
This time around, conservatives have claimed that Twitter has unfairly banned conservatives and Trump supporters, including Azealia Banks and controversial Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as removed anti-Clinton hashtags. And some liberals have argued that the platform has been slow to remove offensive tweets by white supremacists and racists.
And there will be more eyes than ever watching this debate. Ten million tweets were sent during the first presidential debate on that Wednesday night in 2012; since then, the number of active users on Twitter has doubled to more than 313 million.
So how honest and educated will Twitter's algorithm-curated tweet stream be during the debate, with so many partisans slinging mud on both sides?
Twitter insists that the stream will be solely curated by algorithm. In its early iterations—during the Republican and Democratic conventions, for example—the algorithm sourced only those tweets containing the appropriate event hashtag. But tonight, no hashtags will be required; instead, the algorithm trawls an ocean of timely tweets in search of key terms, relevant commentary, and more. This seems to lend itself to even more likely chaos and bickering. (Twitter declined to comment when asked whether human editors are set to intervene to prevent offensive tweets from appearing in live-stream timelines.)
During an NFL game, it's simple enough to catch and serve up player news, scores, highlights, and fan support from both sides. But populating a stream of tweets during a presidential debate has more import than it does during any given football game. Impartial fans tuning in to an NFL game won't likely be jumping aboard the winning team's bandwagon. And while some will, the only fans that really matter on game day are those who choose to squeeze into a pro football stadium with limited seating (and overpriced concessions).
Since it's the first face-to-face encounter between Clinton and Trump, and they're in statistical tie, the stakes are astronomically high. This debate—and those to come—will influence the millions of voters who are currently on the fence.
One of the most contentious issues is how the candidates' statements should be fact-checked. "Fact-checking is a crucial responsibility of debate moderators—and commentators covering the debates—who will give voters one of the last chances to judge the candidates on the substance and breadth of their policy proposals," says Olivia Kittel for Media Matters.
Fact-checking isn't about swaying a voter in any given direction, but about ensuring that the American public is as informed as they can be when they make their presidential decision on November 8. During this tight presidential race, intriguing throughout, the media has repeatedly failed to call out campaign lies as they happen—and even call out "lies" after the fact.
One test of Twitter's usefulness will be whether it can surface tweets with smart analysis and fact-based insights out of the ocean of blather and vitriol. Not all tweets are created equal, though American voters may be, and the algorithm needs to reflect that reality in real time. As we move ever closer to a frightening "post-fact world," Twitter must share a responsibility in setting the record straight. Especially if the company is serious about becoming a trusted newsmaker.
