With a potential price tag of $30 billion, the companies kicking Twitter's tires need to reap big rewards.

Rumors are flying that a Twitter sale may be imminent and could fetch big bucks—as much $30 billion, according to Recode.

Despite its beloved status with many journalists, the social feed has struggled with lackluster revenue growth and a stagnant user base.

Although Twitter is having difficulty expanding, the platform still has much to offer a well-resourced company. For one, Twitter has lots of consumer data. It's also proven itself as a real-time source for news with roughly 300 million people using it to see what's going on in the world. Plus, the platform is moving beyond the feed by becoming a venue for live-streamed events, like NFL games.

Of course, different buyers have different interests. A number of big-name tech companies are on the roster of potential bidders. Here's why Twitter might appeal to Microsoft, Salesforce, Disney, and Google, all of which are supposedly sizing it up.

Google

The search giant has long beenrumored to be a strong contender to acquire Twitter. That's due, in part, to Google's attempt to create its own social platform, which never quite captured the public's attention. Despite having more than a billion people using its email product, Google hasn't been able convince them to engage on its accompanying platform Google Plus.

Google has had success with YouTube, its video network. YouTube has already forged ahead into live video and features live commenting. A partnership with Twitter could perhaps help those live streams attract more viewers. YouTube could use Twitter as its live commenting function to draw in a broadcasters followers, for example.

Twitter already functions as a live comment feed during major events. Partnering these two platforms could enhance them both. Twitter's increased focus on live streaming could also be a boon for Google, since YouTube is similarly geared toward doing more live content. Alternatively, YouTube could stream premiere live events over Twitter—again reaching a different audience.

The question is whether Twitter provides enough value for Google to want to acquire it. Not only does Twitter have problems acquiring new users, abuse is still a big problem on its platform. Both celebrities and average users have drawn attention to Twitter's inability to stem harassment on its platform. While Google may be the right institution to help Twitter develop better algorithms to prevent bullying, it may not want to inherit this well-documented problem.

Secondly, as Recode founder Kara Swisher points out, there's also potential for an antitrust dispute. The marriage of Google, a giant internet search company, and Twitter, an influential social platform, may not sit well with regulators.

Microsoft

Fresh off its purchase of LinkedIn, Microsoft may also be looking at Twitter, says CNBC. While a professional social networking platform like LinkedIn makes sense for Microsoft's enterprise software business, Twitter might not seem like an obvious choice. But as Microsoft digs deeper into artificial intelligence, having a social platform where people are known to be especially outspoken might be of particular interest.

Earlier this year, Microsoft attempted to train a bot named Tay on Twitter. Within 24 hours Twitter's most bigoted trolls trained Tay to repeat anti-Semitic phrases. The endeavor made Microsoft look foolish and the company pulled the bot offline. But with more direct access to Twitter's data, Microsoft might be able to teach its AI how to be social without a public blow-up. The question will be how much is that data worth to Microsoft?

Disney

The home of Mickey Mouse may also have its eye on Twitter, say Bloomberg's sources. Disney could be looking for ways to fortify a place on the second screen as people spend more of their day on their mobile phone and movie theaters and televisions become less relevant.

Twitter, with its recent NFL deal to stream games on Thursday nights and its reputation as a place for live event commentary, could be a great fit. It would give Disney access to online ad dollars, direct contact with consumers, and potentially, an additional channel for airing new or live content. The media titan is also probably keen to get hold of Twitter's consumer data.

More importantly, a company Disney's size is likely to have the money to support a Twitter purchase, though its execs will want to negotiate that price down. The company's last large acquisition was in 1995 when it joined forces with ABC for $19 billion.

Salesforce

This is perhaps the most perplexing suitor. Salesforce is an enterprise cloud computing platform that assists companies in managing sales, marketing, and analytics, among other features. Twitter and Salesforce are not an obvious bedmates. However, Salesforce chief digital officer Vala Afshar looks at it this way:

Your job may be routine and monotonous, but what goes on inside your head doesn't have to be.

You may not think of your curiosity as a job skill, but it is. There's evidence, for starters, linking curiosity to employability, and as a predictor of your ability to gain and maintain a desired job over time. Second, curiosity is crucial for building relationships. Curious people are more willing and able to connect with others, which equips them to collaborate, whether in person or virtually. Third, curiosity may even be an antidote to job automation: If you don't want your skills to get outdated or outsourced to a robot, you'd better keep learning!

What's more, how curious we are can often hinge on our circumstances. While it's a personality trait, curiosity can also be influenced by experience. Genetic studies suggest that curiosity is around 40% heritable, which means that environmental influences play a big role in determining individual differences in curiosity.

But sadly, even when organizations say they value curiosity, many managers tend to inhibit it since they'd rather have employees focus on short-term performance than on long-term learning. So if your boss or job is quashing your curiosity, the good news is that you still have some options at your disposal for giving it a boost. Here are six of them, backed by psychological research.

1. Know What You Don't Know

By definition, curiosity arises when you experience a gap between what you know and what you want to know. So it's no surprise that being aware of your knowledge gaps should incentivize you to learn. Many of us tend to double down on what we're already good at and shy away from the unfamiliar, so it can take an effort of will to find a new topic that interests you and spend some time exploring it—through books, blogs, or documentaries, podcasts, or what have you.

Sure, this is less of a curiosity hack than the old-fashioned approach to pursuing your ideas and interests, but it's worth remembering how easy this is to do when your job is getting you down. Even after a short investment, it should help you understand how far you have to go in order to become an expert in a field. It also helps to get feedback from someone who can be brutally honest about your breadth of knowledge or expertise.

2. Stop Focusing On Your Strengths

It's easier and more enjoyable to play to your strengths, but it's ultimately lazier. Think of somebody who just goes to the gym and always exercises the same muscles—they'll wind end up with an imbalanced physique. Likewise, you won't be able to develop your curiosity if you only keep doing what you're good at.

Besides, overused strengths often become weaknesses, and there's no scientific evidence for the idea that ignoring your weaknesses helps you develop your strengths. If anything, your curiosity will just plummet further and you may even wind up compounding your existing biases in the process.

3. Cut Out The Distractions

Philosophers from David Hume to William James have long argued that curiosity has two different sides, a "bright" side and a "dark" side. The bright side is all about acquiring new knowledge and developing expertise; the dark side concerns killing boredom, snooping around for superficial or trivial information, and finding quick answers to simple problems.

There's something to this theory, psychologists have found. And what's more, these two aspects of curiosity are typically in conflict: The more energy you devote to one, the less you devote to the other. In an age of information overload, it's especially easy to kill time by consuming trivial content—that is, with simple distraction. In a way, it's junk food for your curiosity. The better way to feed your hungry mind is to read a book or dive deep into a subject. Your friends' Facebook updates won't make you smarter or help you advance your career.

4. Start Hanging Out With New People

The best way to adopt new thinking patterns—in any context, work or play—is to change your experiences. Consider that even prejudiced people tend to overcome their biases when they interact with the people they dislike. Most of us tend to hang out with the same people most of the time, and the more time we spend with them, the more alike we all become. This gradually makes us narrow-minded, so our curiosity shrinks.

Be prepared to challenge your own convictions by going against your own rules now and then. After all, most of the rules you follow are made up to stop you from thinking—your brain prefers to minimize the conscious decisions it needs to make moment by moment, and a curiosity-killing job will exacerbate that tendency. So shake it up a little. Fewer rules = more thinking.

5. Volunteer And Say Yes More Often

One of the easiest ways to tank your curiosity is simply to avoid doing new things, and it's absolutely normal to do this. Indeed, inhibition is a fundamental element of human motivation. The problem is that it undermines learning.

In fact, it will generally make us unlearn things. Just like a person with social phobia will become more phobic by avoiding contact with others, opting out of the things you don't do well will only increase your incompetence. On the other hand, putting yourself out there and going outside your comfort zone can help you develop more skills and knowledge you couldn't gain access to otherwise.

6. Embrace Psychological Diversity

Most people think of diversity in terms of demographic characteristics. But the essence of diversity is actually psychological: People differ most substantially in their thinking styles, and these differences are the product of culture as well as personality. Goethe, the German polymath, once noted that "what we don't understand, we don't possess." A good way to develop your curiosity is to spend time observing and interacting with people who are least like you.

Try to work out how they think, why they do what they do, and what makes them tick. It will make you more open-minded, and openness is one of the key ingredients of curiosity. Best of all? Just spending time with those who think differently is something you can do on the job or off of it—no matter how curiosity-crushing your boss or daily work duties might be.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an international authority in psychological profiling, people analytics, and talent management. He is the CEO of Hogan Assessments and Professor of Business Psychology at University College London and Columbia University.

Mara Swan is ManpowerGroup's executive vice president, Global Strategy and Talent. A recognized expert in human resources, she is vice chair of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Gender Parity and a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources.

Google speeds up a difficult machine translation technology, allowing it to tackle even the notoriously hard Chinese-to-English task.

If you are translating text or speech, it seems obvious that you should read a whole sentence before figuring out what it means. But this hasn't been so easy for computers—in part because the work sucks up so many resources. So Google Translate has had to get by with looking at pieces of sentences, words, and phrases, and translating them individually. On Tuesday, Google announced a new system called Google Neural Machine Translation (GNMT) that works on whole sentences and improves accuracy about 60% on average over the old phrase-based machine translation (PBMT), including on notoriously difficult Chinese-to-English translations. This is the first translation to roll out to the Google Translate mobile and web apps, available now.

The science behind Google's news gets pretty complicated pretty quickly in the search giant's full research paper. But the gist is: Google's new GNMT system speeds things up by getting a tad sloppy with the math and running the work in parallel over the many cores in computer graphics chips (GPUs). Neural networks roughly mimic how the brain works by refining data through successive layers of processing unites (neurons). With the efficiency improvements, GMNT can stack up eight layers to work on decoding each sentence in one language and eight layers to compose a new sentence in the other language. It provides a limited amount of leniency for error in each neural layer in order to support more layers and ultimately get better results.

No matter how well you train artificial intelligence translation on a language, it won't learn every esoteric word of understand all names. In the past, Google just copied the word over to the translation, in the hope that it would be the same in each language. But now it breaks words it doesn't know into pieces that it might be able to figure out, which Google says makes it less likely to flub difficult words.

That said, Google admits that it still makes plenty of mistakes, like dropping words from the original language. Also, reading whole sentences is an improvement, but Google still isn't that good at seeing how sentences relate to each other, so whole translated paragraphs might read pretty clunky.

Key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida are experiencing steady job growth, in spite of what Donald Trump tells you.

If you've been listening to the candidates speak about jobs during the run up to the 2016 presidential election, you might be convinced that the sky is falling.

Donald Trump has assured voters that all of their jobs have moved to China, Mexico, and elsewhere. During last night's debate, he declared that "thousands" of jobs would be lost when Ford moved operations to Mexico. Ford insists that's not true. For her part, Hillary Clinton has made revitalizing the employment market a top priority for her first 100 days in office, should she be elected.

But in the swing states that may decide the outcome of this election, the hiring landscape isn't nearly as bad as they'd have you believe. In the battleground states of Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, which represent a combined 67 electoral votes, the doom and gloom espoused by the candidates about declining jobs figures is not entirely consistent with reality.

According to a recent study by iCIMS' chief economist, Josh Wright, Florida is experiencing job growth that outpaces the rest of the country, Ohio is returning to national averages after experiencing a slowdown in late 2015 and early 2016, and Pennsylvania has seen its unemployment rate level off in recent months.

In fact, three of Ohio's cities and one of Pennsylvania's ranked among the top 25 for jobs in 2016 according a study conducted by Glassdoor in May. The study found that there were more than 35,000 available positions each in Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati in industries ranging from health care to technology, finance, sales, and marketing. During that same month, the study found that Pittsburgh had more than 50,000 open jobs, most of which were for mechanical engineers, nurse practitioners, and product managers.

Florida, meanwhile, was becoming a startup state, boasting the country's second-highest rate of new business production in 2014.

"Unfortunately, the divergence between the headline statistics and what people are actually experiencing has too often bred confusion and cynicism about labor data, rather than inspired greater curiosity and critical thinking about the changes in the economy," says Wright.

Wright explains that historically speaking, a negative perception of the economy typically benefits the incumbent party. Pollsters remain unsure of just how much of an impact job figures can have. Political scientists have argued that job creation impacts the outcome of the election by a factor of somewhere between 40% and 90%, according to Wright. "Whatever the magic number is, jobs are a big deal," he adds.

In his study, Wright zeroed in on a few key counties that could determine the results of the presidential election, including Hillsborough County (Tampa) and Orange County (Orlando) in Florida; Franklin County (Columbus), Hamilton County (Cincinnati), and Wood County in Ohio; and Montgomery and Delaware Counties (straddling Philadelphia) in Pennsylvania.

"In the last three presidential elections, these counties in Florida and Ohio have voted for the successful candidate, regardless of his party affiliation," says Wright. "In Pennsylvania, the two counties have previously voted for the Democratic nominee, but their size and tendency to vote Republicans into local office have attracted speculation that they could turn Republican, taking the state's Electoral College votes with them," he adds.

Florida's swing counties have seen strong hiring trends, according to Wright, but only in the past few months. Ohio has lagged behind national job trends as a whole, but Hamilton and Wood counties have outpaced the state and are experiencing job growth consistent with the rest of the country.

Pennsylvania's swing counties, however, have underperformed, even when compared to the slow growth of the state as a whole. "In Montgomery County, the proportion of full-time positions is elevated and in Delaware County it has risen, but remains below average," he observes.

Wright maintains that most of these swing counties in Florida and Ohio continue to see strong hiring trends overall. "This contrasts with widespread reports of nationwide dissatisfaction with the direction the country is headed," he points out, "and concerns about income inequality and the nature of the new jobs being created." Still he says, "In some ways, Pennsylvania's figures look more consistent with the fears of malaise."

Economic data has been a strong indicator of election outcomes in the past, however, Wright admits that the race to the Oval Office between the two least popular candidates in decades may be without historical precedent. In other words, in the 2016 election, all bets are off.

Even in industries known for insane hours, you can have a personal life if you're smart about your time.

Work-life balance sounds great, but it's getting tougher to achieve. Managers and staff often don't see eye to eye on time spent between the two. Several studies also indicate that the traditional workweek is getting longer. In certain industries such as accounting, law, consulting, or at startups in general, that balance is assumed to be impossible. The "80-hour workweeks" people complain about mean there's no time for everything else.

Yet after studying time logs kept by people in many of these industries, I've noticed something. Weeks described as epic often feature work-hour totals in the mid- to high 60s. More normal weeks often feature work-hour totals in the mid-50s to the lower 60s. Even though workers perceive that they're logging insane hours, one 2011 study comparing estimated workweeks with time diaries found people claiming 75-plus-hour weeks were off by about 25 hours.

In other words, working 56 hours a week, averaged over the long term, is a reasonable goal in many demanding jobs. This is an important number, because there are 168 hours in a week. If you work 56 hours, and sleep 56 hours (8 per night) that leaves 56 hours for other things. This 56-56-56 split is balance in its own way—and is more achievable than any other version.

With that in mind, there are several ways to have work hours in the long-but-reasonable category, yet make the most of the rest of your time.

1. Know Where The Time Goes

Even if you track your work hours to bill clients, learning where your other 56 hours go can be eye opening. "It's amazing how much you learn about the way you spend your time when you actually track it," says Paula Pant, who runs the Afford Anything blog and podcast.

She had already cut the obvious time wasters (e.g., TV) out of her life, but when she tracked her time, she realized she spent 17.75 hours on things she didn't care about. Now, when she needs a break during work, she realizes, "I could either click on BuzzFeed articles, or get up and do a quick 10-15 minutes of yoga." One gives her more energy, and feels like a better use of precious nonwork time.

Work time itself can also be made more efficient. A survey by Post-It Brand found that on average, office workers say they attend three unnecessary meetings a week, and 24% say they attend five or more. Look at your calendar for the next week on Friday, and see what can be canceled, shortened, or delegated.

2. Think 168 Hours, Not 24

Vanessa Chan, the founder and chief designer at re.design studios and the inventor of loopit headphones, spent many years at the consulting firm McKinsey, becoming a partner before she left. She also has two daughters. "Usually I think in one-week chunks," she says. During her consulting career, she would figure out her priorities for the week, and then map these out for individual days. She'd ask, "How do I make sure I'm taking care of those? What am I putting off and when can I do that?" By looking at a whole week, she could see that long work hours and travel Monday through Wednesday might be balanced by much shorter days, and visits to her daughters' school, later in the week.

3. Manage Others' Expectations

Having a personal life in client-facing industries will always be challenging but not impossible. First, know that flexibility is a team sport. Clients can learn that someone will be available 24/7, but people will cover that availability in shifts.

Second, the good news is that in order to have a client call at 10 p.m. on Friday, the client has to want to be on the phone at 10 p.m. Friday, and this is not always the case. Anne Donovan, the People Innovation Leader at accounting firm PwC, has been at the firm for 33 years. Increasingly, she says, clients are facing their own staff demands for flexibility. Consequently, "It's easier to be honest with our clients" about personal needs. "Five years ago we wouldn't bring that up to a client," she says, but now, more often than not, "as long as we deliver, they don't care."

4. Make Work Fun

The best way to keep your 56 working hours from feeling like 80 is to seek out projects you enjoy. Invest in your relationships with colleagues. "Your personal life is very often enhanced by your satisfaction with your professional life," says Thomas Gaynor, the office managing partner of law firm Nixon Peabody's San Francisco office. "I love what I do and have been lucky to be able to work with terrific clients for a long time, so when I come home and I'm excited and invigorated by something that happened at the office or by a win for a client, I share that with my partner, and that, too, is part of life."

5. Protect Your Non-Negotiables

Intense jobs will take any time you give them, so you have to consciously speak up to demand time back for anything else that is important to you. Donovan coached softball for five years when her children were younger. People knew practice was coming and could plan for it. A commitment like that is often easier to protect than more nebulous activities, but Donovan stresses that whatever your non-negotiable, you can lobby for it. "If yoga is your thing, if you absolutely have to have yoga to feel like a whole person, it's totally on you to protect it."

For Chan, her girls' bedtime was sacred. "That's when you do the reading, that's when you get the quiet moments and find out what they're doing at school," she says. She and her husband, Mark, a corporate executive who also travels, would toggle back and forth on who would do bedtime and made it work. "There were only two to three days in my entire career at McKinsey when one of us didn't put them to bed," she says.

6. Plan Weekend Adventures

Some people with intense jobs get to the weekend and think they want to do "nothing," but that's a recipe for feeling like life is nothing but work. If you work long hours, leisure time is too precious to be leisurely about it. Make at least a loose plan of activities you'd genuinely enjoy, and that dose of anticipation can help you power through a long Thursday and Friday.

7. Outsource Or Simplify

You don't want to spend your entire nonworking 56 hours on chores and errands. Many people use the extra cash that often comes with an intense job to get these tasks off their plates, but that's not the only option.

Chan's family only recently moved out of a house where they all shared a bathroom. Small spaces mean less time spent cleaning. As for cooking, "All our meals are home-cooked, but they're 15-minute meals," she says. Salmon and steamed veggies, or pasta, or a dinner salad, or an omelet are all easy options.

8. Be Good To Yourself

You work hard. Choose pleasure when you can. "Do something to reward yourself for choosing a tough but great career," suggests Gaynor. Maybe it's paying for a trainer, or regular massages, or great vacations, but self-care can go a long way toward making the 56-56-56 lifestyle work.

9. Take The Long View

"Will associates have to make some compromises in their personal life early in their career? Absolutely," says Gaynor. "Will they get more control the further they advance in their careers? Absolutely."

Even within any given year, it helps to know that busy phases come and go. A 65-hour week during accounting's busy season might be tempered by a 45-hour week in June. "It does balance out," says Donovan. It is possible to keep the hours under control. Looking at her colleagues, she says, "If they're working 3,000 hours a year"—that is, averaging north of 60 per week—"it's because they've dived into some things they want to be part of."

Not if the 100-year history of autopilot for airplanes is any indication. Planes can fly themselves—but only with two people in the cockpit.

At a competition for the "most practicable safety device" in 1914, Brooklyn pilot Lawrence Sperry awed spectators in Bezons, France, when he stood up in the cockpit with both hands in the air mid-flight and asked his mechanic to crawl onto the wing. "The man did so, yet he had no more desire to die than you or I have," read commentary from the New York Times. "Nothing happened."

This was the first demonstration of autopilot. More than 100 years later, commercial pilots say they manually fly planes for just minutes of every flight, and the majority of military aircraft are drones.

But the FAA requires that two people be in the flight deck of a plane at all times, and commercial flights still have not just one, but two pilots. In a rare case of a person not becoming obsolete as a result of technology, humans who fly planes are in high demand these days. One study estimated that in 10 years, airlines will actually need 15,000 more pilots than they can hire.

The 100-year history of automated flight is worth keeping in mind as transportation executives make predictions about how the world—and their businesses—will be transformed by autonomous automobiles.

The first automated car feature debuted 43 years after Sherry's demonstration of aviation autopilot. When Chrysler introduced cruise control in 1957, the New York Times called it "another step in the trend toward automation in the American automobile." Chrysler initially referred to cruise control—the ability to set a speed and rely on the car to deliver gas to the engine without a human foot on the accelerator—as "autopilot," which is also the name of Tesla's self-driving car feature.

Toyota, Nissan, General Motors, and Google have estimated that automated cars will be on the road by 2020. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has promised complete autonomy within two years. And in a lengthy blog post that Lyft president and cofounder John Zimmer published last weekend, he became the latest transportation executive to predict that the era of self-driving cars is just around the corner, estimating it was a matter of "five years."

Autonomous cars still don't work well in the rain or snow, are susceptible to hackers, and have perception problems both on highways and in cities. But even with these shortcomings, they appear to be on the cusp of viability. Last week, when Uber began testing its first automated cars in Pittsburgh, reporters who went on a demo ride were nearly unanimous in commenting on how safe and normal the experience seemed—even boring.

Technology, though, is only one obstacle to the prospect of a driverless future.

Safely removing the driver from an automated car is a major piece of the puzzle. Tesla's "master plan" (that is actually what Musk calls it) involves summoning your car to wherever you happen to need a pickup and the option to add it to the Tesla shared fleet (from which strangers can hail rides) to generate income for the owner when the vehicle is not in use. Lyft imagines that by 2020, half of its rides will be automated, which will reduce the price of taking any Lyft ride and increase demand. But hiring a safety engineer, like the one that accompanies Uber's pilot vehicles on their test drives, is more expensive than an independent contractor driver, not less.

Autonomous car companies are already hard at work lobbying the government to approve these vehicles, but they face a different regulatory environment than airlines. In a paper for the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, Bryant Walker Smith, an assistant law professor at the University of South Carolina concluded that "automated vehicles are probably legal in the United States" (that's also the title of the paper).

He did not, however, say that human-less cars were probably legal.

Smith points out that state vehicle codes "probably" prohibit automated driving, but "assume the presence of licensed human drivers who are able to exercise human judgment, and particular rules may functionally require that presence." Missy Cummings, director of Duke University's Humans and Autonomy Lab, says she is not aware of any state that has passed a law that says cars can be truly driverless. Musk has conceded these laws might impede his master plan: "Even once the software is highly refined and far better than the average human driver, there will still be a significant time gap, varying widely by jurisdiction, before true self-driving is approved by regulators," he wrote in a blog post last summer.

Like automated airplanes, automated cars are likely to make fewer mistakes than human drivers. "Automated vehicles have the potential to save tens of thousands of lives each year," President Obama wrote in an op-ed that coincided with new guidelines for the industry released this week. Cummings has argued that the two accidents that have killed Tesla drivers while they had "autopilot" engaged were partly caused by an over-reliance on the feature, which is not intended to be a replacement for driver awareness, even though the company markets it as fully automatic.

But like automated airplanes, the statistical risk reduction automated cars may provide will not automatically calm people's fears. Another reason airplanes still have pilots is, quite simply, that current cultural norms don't necessarily accommodate pilot-less flying. "Would a member of the public be comfortable getting into an airplane without a pilot? The short answer is no," says George Perry, who runs the Air Safety Institute at the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA).

Whether this fear is justified has been debatable. Pilot associations like AOPA unsurprisingly tend to argue that while automation has made flight safer (last year, there were fewer aviation fatalities than ever before), it is still quite necessary to have capable human pilots on board. "When something is made by humans, it breaks," Perry says. "And you have to have the ability to think on your feet." He points to the plane that made an emergency landing on the Hudson River in 2009 after geese interfered with its engines. The FAA has identified weakening manual skills among pilots who rely on autopilot as a hazard.

Others have pointed to cases like one copilot's decision last year to intentionally fly a plane into the French Alps, killing 150 people, as an argument that we would be better off in the hands of machines.

The FAA recently created regulations for commercial drones that weigh less than 55 pounds and don't leave the sight of a human operator (this pretty much rules out deliveries). While executives at logistics companies such as FedEx have said they see fully automated cargo planes on the horizon, Cummings is doubtful that commercial passenger planes will operate without pilots. "In a very short period of time, the cargo airlines will become predominantly drones," she says. "I think we will always have someone who is called a pilot in a passenger plane. The pilot in the future will be there to keep social order [more so than to fly the plane]."

Much like Uber did recently, back in 1957, Chrysler offered cruise control demos to reporters, one of whom commented that he "approached the device with fear as well as inexperience" and concluded "there was a strong sense of remoteness from the automobile, as if someone else were driving it and I was only steering."

Cruise control is now so standard that it barely makes a new model's feature list. We might look at cars without drivers the same way one day, but the calculus about how to get there involves more than just technical ability.

This GE exec shares how she learned to change her working methods as she's taken on bigger leadership roles.

I accepted my first management role early in my career, heading up a 15-person team at GE Global Research's semiconductor laboratory. It was a big step at the time, but today I manage 28 labs of over 500 people, in addition to our research headquarters with around 2,000 people on site. Making that first shift from contributor to leader wasn't easy, but it set me up for the other big changes I'd go on to make in my career.

When a new role or opportunity forces you to change your work habits, it's rarely clear just how to do it or whether the adjustment will pay off. And it isn't just your role that pushes you to shift gears. Having a family has also forced my work habits to evolve, including in ways I never expected. Still, there are some common themes. In my experience, there are four key ways you'll need to change your approach to work as your career progresses.

1. Become Less Dependent On Your Boss

Early in your career, the best ways to understand your boss's priorities and keep your performance up is simply to communicate. You ask questions. You put in a lot of face-time. You meet frequently. This is good for you—it helps you highlight your skills and achievements and keeps your boss updated on your progress. This is how you built trust and, ultimately, get promoted.

At some point, though, expectations shift, and I made the mistake of not recognizing this. I kept my boss in the loop on projects and decisions where his guidance was no longer needed, and only after he asked, "What are you looking for me to approve?" did I realize the error. My project had grown, and so had I; despite having picked up the leadership skills to handle it, I clung to my old habit of checking in with my boss—which now projected insecurity, not conscientiousness. So I quickly shifted tactics and began to only check in when we hit key milestones or needed to make high-level decisions.

As you advance your career, time with the boss is better spent talking strategy (not execution) and receiving coaching, which means you may no longer need to meet once a week. Use the increased distance to build a different kind of trust—the sort that shows you can manage your team on your own. If you want more autonomy, give yourself room to be more autonomous.

2. Manage Your Tasks Over Longer Timelines

Entry- and associate-level jobs often require that you spend a lot of time working on things others need to review. Your own work output is managed closely, and you take direction on a very regular basis. That sets a certain pace for how you manage your workload. But as you move into higher-level roles, you need to lengthen the timeline that dictates your work.

Start managing your tasks according to weekly, biweekly, and even monthly or quarterly timelines—it's no longer as much about daily execution. Pacing yourself and your team is crucial both to avoiding burnout and performing well.

When I first started my career at GE, the way I managed my time was very different than the way I do today. I'll often pick the top three things that need my attention every month, then divide my time across those priorities each day. By the end of the month, I can measure how effective I was, and without that longer-range vision, my time would easily get swallowed up by daily distractions.

3. Start To Lead Like A Coach

There will be times when you need to give thorough, exhaustive feedback, no matter your position. But the higher-level the role, the more managers need to shift from oversight to coaching.

The difference can be easy to miss. For new managers, engaging with direct reports often means giving them time to talk through their commitments and establishing specific roles on your team. But as your management role grows, you need to spend more time discussing their approach to tasks and managing their responsibilities, and less time reviewing their actual output. Eventually, effective leaders become something like chiropractors, adjusting how those under their care might operate, but with less formal yet more regular check-ins than the annual visit to a general practitioner.

Or, to pick a different analogy, leaders need to coach team members to become coaches themselves. To do any of this well, you need to move from one-on-one engagement to team management as a whole. The more a team operates as a single organic entity with shared values and purpose, the more likely its members can hold each other accountable and drive collective results.

4. Build A Thoughtful Presence Outside Your Company

A final work habit you need to adopt as your career develops involves life beyond where you actually work: You need to develop a professional profile outside your business, from an active social media presence to representing your business or industry at conferences or in publications. This range of representation grows as you move to larger management roles, and with that, so do the sensitivities of speaking for a larger entity.

This may mean moving from casual, personal engagement to a more planned, thoughtful approach, partnering with your company's external affairs team in the process. Social media can be a great tool to connect with potential recruits, partners, and even your own employees. But there's also a risk that you may offend others or obscure your own points, so it's worth considering keeping personal accounts separate from professional ones as your career advances alongside your public profile.

One key habit doesn't change as your career evolves, though. Each time I feel my role change or evolve, I try to do the same thing: Take a step back to examine my priorities, refresh my focus, and keep my eye on the bigger picture. No matter what else changes, I've found that continuing to make an impact and feel fulfilled at work depends on getting that right, time and again.

Danielle Merfeld is vice president of the Niskayuna Technology Center and technology director at GE Global Research, where she leads a global team of over 500 scientists and engineers to develop electrical technologies for all of GE's industrial businesses.

Last summer, eight startups went to camp to make bots more productive and rewarding for consumers and businesses.

Declare your lifelong love for Poncho—a weather service personified by a tabby cat in a yellow raincoat that happens to be one of the most successful bots in Facebook Messenger—and it responds with an awww, shucks-like "Hiiiiii~." But unleash a stream of profanity, as some users do, and Poncho puts your relationship on hold.

When it comes to bots and humans, it's safe to say we still have a lot to learn about each other. Sometimes we want to flirt; sometimes we just want tomorrow's forecast. While consumer bots have been working to tackle that challenge, a new wave of all-business bots has emerged. They don't want to be your friend, but they do want to help you make your professional life more productive and rewarding. Digital workers and enterprise bots might just be a match made in heaven's cloud servers—if the bots can prove that they deliver meaningful value, optional.

Bots, depending on whom you ask, are either the biggest thing since apps or a distant dream better served by Stanley Kubrick than Silicon Valley. Already the technology has gone through not one but two hype cycles in less than a year, the first for Slack and the second for Facebook Messenger. Pity the entrepreneurs entering this fickle market with a bot—or, in a bid to better understand bots' future, support them with the promise of a $200,000 seed investment. That's what the New York-based startup studio Betaworks decided to do this past spring.

"We've had keyboards, we've had touch screens, we have cameras, and now we're actually figuring out how to speak to computers the way that we speak to people," says John Borthwick, founder and CEO of Betaworks. "This is the beginning of that new form of interaction, and that's a big deal."

Borthwick's investment team devised the idea for a bot-focused startup accelerator in March, after realizing that their degree of enthusiasm for bots matched their questions and concerns. Would consumers bounce, frustrated by the gap between Hollywood expectations and AI capabilities? Would a small set of master bots, controlled by Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook, subsume all others? Would bot-first companies ever become billion-dollar businesses? The team dubbed their accelerator "Botcamp" ("Kum ba yah" optional) and got to work sifting through applications from nearly 350 founding teams.

Peter Rojas, who oversees seed investments at Betaworks, says he had few strong opinions going into the selection process—except for an aversion to "concierge" bots, which are in vogue with over-scheduled Silicon Valley types but have yet to go mainstream. "Are you just stitching together a bunch of APIs? It's hard to get excited about that," he says. "We'd rather that you either go really deep into an area or try to focus on being demonstrably useful and different."

Botcamp: Are We Out Of The Woods?

The eight selected startups arrived in New York in July for a three-month marathon of product development, mentor feedback, and user testing. Rojas and his colleagues expected most Botcampers to be focused on consumer applications, but to their surprise, enterprise-bots companies were the most popular type of applicant and became the majority of the participants. Depending on how you define "enterprise," as many as six of the eight Botcamp startups fit the label, in the sense that they serve business customers or address work-related problems. Some, like data analytics solution Statsbot, are straightforward enterprise plays. Others, like Warren and Olabot, live at the bleeding edge of consumer and enterprise by solving problems for individuals related to their career or personal brand. Four of the eight companies have built the first versions of their products for Slack, the dominant player in workplace chat and a Botcamp partner. (Slack also operates an $80 million fund devoted to early-stage investments in Slack-bots.)

In mid-September, with one week to go before demo day, all eight teams gathered in the windowless café at Betaworks' offices, located in the Meatpacking District. Founders took the small stage one by one while their campmates looked on, offering questions and words encouragement. Pitches needed to be sharp: Many investors remain skeptical that bots are ready for prime time, given the current state of AI and uncertainty surrounding the major platforms, which continue to evolve their developer guidelines and user discovery tools. Plus, the industry has yet to reach consensus on key bot metrics and milestones, creating an additional challenge for companies looking to demonstrate meaningful traction.

"We could be wrong. It could be too early, we could have picked the wrong companies," Rojas told me before demo day.

When the big day finally came, Joe's Pub, an intimate downtown New York concert space, served as the setting for the presentations. Investors and advisors took their seats after a lunch break, their rows of faces aglow with laptop-light. The coffee was weak; the Wi-Fi even weaker.

Hugging Face, an entertainment bot with a sense of humor and pop culture-savvy ("Brad or Angelina?" "Brad FTW," the bot replies) presented first. Bites followed, with a bot that pairs rich media and group chat. Before long, the pitches shifted to address the challenges of digital-era work and career. Warren, a Messenger bot for creative freelancers, offers help with contracts and invoices. Olabot operates a personal bot on the user's behalf, billing itself as an end to "boring 'about me' sites or static resumes."

"Soon everyone can have a personal bot," said Olabot founder Esther Crawford, an early YouTube star. She has positioned Olabot as a particularly useful tool for celebrities and influencers to manage communications with thousands or even millions of fans. She announced that Olabot is looking to raise $1.5 million: "The future is in conversational profiles."

The four companies that closed out the day, all of which launched in Slack, embody the ways in which the email-killing messaging platform both improves and complicates work. Statsbot pulls data from Google Analytics and other sources into Slack conversations as needed, or at scheduled times. Zoom.ai manages scheduling and introductions in ways that could be particularly useful for employees in sales roles. Both offer straightforward productivity value for overstretched professionals.

Coach Otto and CareerLark, in contrast, are treading on shifting ground. Each one is designed to help employees better manage the kind of conversations they might otherwise bungle or avoid—an enormous challenge when Slack itself is rapidly changing cultural and linguistic norms. Coach Otto, for example, uses role-play scenarios to help employees prepare for difficult conversations. But the in-person versions of those scenarios, where there's no room to hide body language or emotion, could play out in very different ways. Similarly, CareerLark has launched with a bot designed to facilitate feedback. The bot prompts managers to offer employees targeted pointers, but a critique could be interpreted as harsh or discouraging if a manager doesn't supply the right GIF to soften the blow. In short, both bots' fate depends on their ability to develop an AI that understands the nuances and vagaries of language, in a chat context.

Even bot makers and enthusiasts concede that computers' ability to parse natural language remains primitive at best. "We aren't there yet," says Daniel Ilkovich, founder and CEO of Dexter, a Betaworks incubated bot-making platform. "There are a lot of intricacies in what a human is trying to say." He recommends that developers design pre-programmed responses, using buttons, and elegant ways of getting out of misunderstandings.

Bot discovery also remains a concern, but perhaps a premature one. If a bot can't sustain a conversation and isn't worth finding, no App Store equivalent is going to save it from oblivion.

Yet for all the questions bots raise, they do provide clear advantages over many existing tools. Investors have started defining bots in terms of "conversational interfaces" and "conversational commerce," but that kind of tech jargon doesn't really do justice to the shift in user expectations that bots represent. Twitter, for example, is a conversational interface. But on Twitter, there is not the same expectation of response. I can hope for a reply from a brand when I tweet a complaint about its customer service, but to some extent I am simply venting. Twitter's unhappy marriage of broadcast and conversation is at the heart of its limitations as a platform.

Bots, in contrast, are predicated on the idea of a timely, personalized response. They are, in essence, more personalized versions of the Google search bar, reborn in chat. In time, they will very likely anticipate your question before you ask even ask it—the bot equivalent of Google autocomplete.

"The real power of bots is when you have multiple people having a conversation among themselves with a bot providing functionality in-line to that conversation," predicts Phil Libin, the former CEO of Evernote and now a bot investor at General Catalyst. He expects to see the first bot IPO within two to three years.

For now, the companies that completed Botcamp would probably settle for a seed round. And those of us who live our days on Slack will continue hoping for the day when we can program a personal bot to reply to the boss, celebrate team victories ()—and give us cover to actually do our jobs.

The Facebook CEO's images offer a peek at the advanced technology it is using at its massive center in the forests of Northern Sweden.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg started sharing some rare photos of its data center in the forests of Northern Sweden, where Facebook is taking advantage of the low temperature and nearby rivers to increase efficiency and save power. The massive Luleå data center, which is the size of six football fields, uses enormous fans to "pull in the outside air to naturally cool the thousands of warm servers that line the center's broad hallways," writes Zuckerberg in a post on his Facebook page. He adds:

"You probably don't think about Luleå when you share with friends on Facebook, but it's an example of the incredibly complex technology infrastructure that keeps the world connected. I'm looking forward to sharing photos of more of our advanced technology soon."

Its leases in that city include a profit-sharing component, making it easier for WeWork to react if real estate prices fall.

The two locations that WeWork plans to open in Detroit early next year will look similar to the almost 100 locations that it already operates. Like offices in New York or San Francisco, the Detroit spaces will have glass walls separating tiny offices that tenants can rent on a month-to-month basis, communal coffee, and WeWork's "Do What You Love" branding—but the business side will be structured differently.

WeWork typically signs traditional leases for its real estate, which it then subleases to its tenants. In Detroit, the company's real estate partner, Bedrock, has instead structured WeWork's lease to include a profit-sharing component. "It's almost a percentage rent deal," says Bedrock CEO Jim Ketai, "so the better they do, the better we do." WeWork recently made a similar deal in India, but this is the first time it has made such an agreement in the United States.

The deal structure addresses one of the biggest criticisms of WeWork's business model: the company signs five- or ten-year leases, which means that if real estate prices fall, it will be locked into relatively expensive leases while its tenants, who pay by the month, expect lower prices.

Miguel McKelvey, WeWork's cofounder, says that under the new agreement in Detroit, "we would have a little more flexibility when it comes to pricing, whereas in a normal lease agreement you'd have a specific floor in how you could respond to the needs to change pricing." Bedrock and WeWork will share the cost of remodeling the space.

WeWork projected in 2014 funding documents that it would create 376 locations serving 260,000 members by 2018. In the same document, it outlined an "asset light" model in which landlords provide about 75% of the capital to remodel a space and WeWork signs a longer-than-usual lease, making up for the upfront remodeling expenses with a profit-sharing agreement. WeWork said the deal structure in Detroit is an evolution of this "asset light" model.

In April, the company reduced its profit forecast by 78%, citing delayed building openings and landlords who covered less of its construction costs than expected. In June, WeWork cut about 7% of its staff.

"What WeWork creates is the ability for all different sized tenants to enter the market and get into downtown Detroit, where the tech scene is booming right now," says Bedrock's Ketai. He partnered with WeWork rather than running a similar business himself, he says, because he believed young companies would benefit from WeWork's network of entrepreneurs in other cities and that WeWork's scale would help it run the space more efficiently. "They know how to service tenants better than I do," he said.

McKelvey says that the agreement in Detroit may serve as a model for deals elsewhere in the United States. "Obviously getting the first couple done opens the door to a few more," he says.

"Unlimited vacation" sounds great, but not if you don't know how or when to use it. So Buffer is testing a minimum vacation policy.

It's one of those mythical and vaunted startup perks, and one of the Buffer perks that tends to entice folks the most: unlimited vacation time. When someone new joins the team, they're immediately granted as much time away from work as they'd like, no questions asked. Under this non-policy policy, teammates have had some great vacations, including cruises around the world and even a month of sailing the Atlantic.

But is it really that simple? Well, yes and no. Buffer's unlimited vacation policy is incredibly generous. But as we've grown and evolved, we've also gotten some great signals that it can be a bit confusing to know when and how to take time off. When we surveyed our team to get their anonymous thoughts, we began to see a theme emerging. Here's a sample of comments:

It'd be really cool if we could make clearer taking vacation off and how to approach expensing things.

I think some sort of recommended range of time off can be really helpful.

I'm still struggling to figure out how to plan time off and if I should be asking for permission/advice before making plans.

A bit nervous, with a feeling of guilt and uncertainty about how taking the time off would make the team feel.

Taking time off and recharging is critical to doing your best work, so we knew we wanted to help everyone on the team feel great about planning and taking restorative time away.

Solving The "Unlimited" Challenge

Looking out at the landscape of like-minded tech companies, there are some cool and innovative ways to begin to solve this challenge.

• At Kik, it's mandatory for employees to take at least one week off every four months. Its offices also close for two weeks around the holidays.
• FullContact pays a whopping bonus of $7,500 to employees who take a vacation.
• HubSpot makes all employees take at least two weeks of vacation every year.
• Evernote offers a vacation bonus of $1,000, which we also tried at Buffer in 2015. We'll likely bring it back once we fully emerge from our cash-flow crisis!

Until that time, we needed a way to help teammates feel guilt-free about taking time off and to reduce the cognitive load of figuring out how and when to take time away. We started by getting a baseline. Julian on our data team was kind enough to export our shared Google calendar where teammates log vacation days and holidays (yes, it can get a bit crowded there!) so we could take a look.

We found that the vast majority of our teammates were taking in the range of five to 10 days per year (not quite enough, in our opinion), followed closely by the 10–15 day range (getting closer!).

Buffer is a global company, bringing together teammates from many different countries, cultures, and norms when it comes to time off. So we needed to take into account quite a few perspectives. Our team survey asked a variety of questions around the topic of vacation time. Here's a look:

Results showed that there was a wide spectrum in terms of the amount of days off teammates felt comfortable taking—everything from zero days to about four weeks. The mean from a sample size of 55 responses was 9.1 days, which is fairly in line with what the Google calendar data showed us.

What's The Right Amount Of Time Off?

So, is that enough? Across the world, paid vacation time varies quite a bit but generally is in the 20-day range.

And although the U.S. is the only developed country with no minimum protected vacation time, we learned that the average private-sector U.S. worker receives 16 paid vacation days and holidays. The average number of paid vacation days offered by U.S. private employers is generally:

• 10 days after one year of service
• 14 days after five years
• 17 days after 10 years
• 20 days after 20 years

Using these data points, we determined that we'd love to see folks take a minimum of three weeks' vacation time, in addition to extra time off for the holidays teammates choose to celebrate.

How could we gently guide more teammates into the 15–20-day range while still keeping the freedom of our no-policy policy?

Introducing Minimum Vacation Recommendations

Here's what we came up with: An experiment with minimum-vacation recommendations!

• We encourage team members to take a minimum of three weeks (15 work days) of vacation time throughout the year, in addition to the holidays (bank, religious, or otherwise) they choose to observe.
• There is no maximum vacation recommendation, though there may be more and longer conversations for unique situations in which a teammate might want to take, say, six to eight weeks off.
• Buffer is privileged to be a global team; we ask teammates to take time off that's in line with their country's standards, even if it's generally a bit more than our recommendation.
• It's generally great to begin to take time off after you've been at Buffer for about three months.
• This time is separate from holidays teammates choose to celebrate, and outside of sick/personal days, bereavement/compassionate leave, and family leave.

Combining Vacation And Holiday Time

Each teammate is free to combine vacation time and holiday time for their custom choice of time off. So in a year at Buffer, here are some theoretical totals:

• A teammate in Australia might take 17 days of vacation and seven holidays.
• A teammate in the U.S. might take 15 days of vacation and eight holidays.
• A teammate in France might take 25 days of vacation and five holidays.
• A teammates in Canada might take 20 days of vacation and seven holidays.

When we compare our time off to paid leave across the world, it might look something like this (the totals highlighted in yellow on the right are hypothetical examples only!)

When And How We Share Vacation Plans

Beyond sharing recommendations, we also have tried to get much more explicit in terms of describing the best way to share and record time off. We have asked teammates to share plans in advance with their team leads using the following general guidelines:

• For a half day or less, three days in advance.
• For one to three days off, two weeks in advance.
• For longer time off, a month or more in advance is great.

And we've added to our list of tools an app called Timetastic that we hope will make it easier to ask for and receive vacation time, track time taken to make sure we're all getting enough recharging time, and allow all of us to see who's out of the office at a glance.

Timetastic even allows us to see all team vacations in a super convenient Slack channel:

Buffer's "People team" (which I am a part of) will keep track of time off on a high level, solely for the purpose of nudging people who haven't taken the time to disconnect in a while.

Like many things we do at Buffer, this is a new experiment and we don't have all the answers. We're keen to keep a pulse on how these recommendations work and whether we begin to see vacation time inching up. We're planning check-ins at three months and six months and we'll keep you posted here.

In future iterations of these recommendations, we're hopeful to explore ideas like sabbaticals/longer-term unpaid leave outside of family leave and increased recommended vacation time for teammates that have been with Buffer for a longer time. We'll also be working on more guidance for team leads on encouraging more time away.

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

The bank allegedly set unrealistic expectations and rewarded bad behavior.

The operating ploy that led Wells Fargo employees to open up millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts to meet cross-selling targets was categorized by Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren as "gutless" and a "scam."

And one workplace expert contends that the bank, which allegedly fired those who reported unethical behavior, demonstrated "a classic case of systemic bullying."

Andrew Faas, the founder of the Faas Foundation, an organization that seeks to create psychologically safe workplaces, defines systemic bullying this way: "Setting unreasonable expectations to get rid of employees who do not deliver and causing others to resort to questionable practices to meet the expectations."

Faas and his foundation, which supports such organizations as Mental Health American, Doctors Without Borders, and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, claims to have no ties to any competing financial institutions. In his forthcoming book on workplace bullying, From Bully to Bull's-Eye: Move Your Organization Out of the Line of Fire, Faas includes a chapter titled, "Is your culture a ticking time bomb?" and he believes "a bomb went off at Wells Fargo."

The key ingredients that foster a hostile work environment, according to Faas, are unreasonable expectations put on employees, an acceptance of questionable practices, and reluctance to complain out of fear of retaliation. "If what we hear in the media about the treatment of whistleblowers is true, Wells Fargo has a much bigger issue than the fraudulent accounts—they have a culture of fear," he says. "If this is validated, it puts to question the credibility of their leadership's response."

The bank has since been ordered to pay a fine of $185 million. Approximately 5,300 employees and managers were terminated over a five year period for their involvement with the unauthorized accounts. The company's chairman and CEO, John Stumpf, has forfeited $41 million in unvested equity awards, forfeited his 2016 bonus and will not take a salary during the upcoming independent board investigation, but will not necessarily find himself out of a job, according to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal.

"Employees learn from what kind of behavior the firm celebrates," says Shiva Rajgopal, a professor at Columbia Business School.

When asked for comment, a spokesperson for the bank reiterated Wells Fargo's non-retaliation policy, which "includes limiting information as part of the investigation to only those who have a legitimate business need to know":

Our Nonretaliation Policy, which is available to all team members in our Team Member Handbook and reiterated in the Code of Ethics, makes it clear that no team member may be retaliated against for providing information about suspected unethical or illegal activities, including fraud, securities law, or regulatory violations, or possible violations of any Wells Fargo policies. Team members who believe that they or someone else has been retaliated against for reporting an issue are instructed to report it as soon as possible to the HR Adviser team, Corporate Employee Relations, or their manager to ensure that a prompt review and where appropriate, corrective action is taken.

When the spokesperson was asked why there had been a number of employees reporting that they'd been fired after calling the EthicsLine, they replied: "We do not tolerate retaliation against team members who report their concerns." Reports are confidential and anonymous as the call center is staffed by third-party interview specialists "who listen, ask clarifying questions if necessary, and then write a summary report of the call," they told Fast Company.

Wells Fargo has claimed that the 5,300 employees acted alone in opening up 1.5 million false bank accounts and 565,000 fraudulent credit cards on behalf of its customers.

"If these truly were 'rogue employees,' as Wells Fargo alleges, then it's all the more reason for there to be an objective assessment of the situation," says Faas. "If these people were the scapegoats, it is a tragedy of immense proportions."

If the bank's non-retaliation policy was violated in order to terminate employees who came forward, as alleged by almost a half-dozen former employees, then the whistleblower hotlines and policies merely exist for the purpose of plausible deniability, suggests Faas.

Wells Fargo's spokesperson said:

Everything submitted to the EthicsLine is investigated. Our team members' proactive participation in calling the EthicsLine and raising concerns enable us to investigate and appropriately address concerns. Also, at Wells Fargo we have a termination review process where team members who are terminated involuntarily can request to have the decision reviewed.

"These systems are largely fluff to help the company deflect when the news of shady business practices hits the airwaves, like in the case of Wells Fargo," Faas says. "These employees who were retaliated against fell into the trap of what these so-called reporting systems are truly meant for—to set up the employee who tries to play by the rules."

"When whistleblowers are considered traitors, it solidifies a culture of fear," says Faas. "To every organizational leader out there—what should keep you awake at night is what you don't know because employees are afraid to tell you."

Alto's Dashboard makes it easy to access useful items from emails, like boarding passes and reservations.

Three years ago, AOL released a Pinterest-like platform for desktop email called Alto, which Co.Design hailed as "email's next UI paradigm." Alto has kept a low profile since then, as its developers refined the desktop product with a small group of early users.

On Thursday, AOL officially launches Alto for iOS and Android after nearly a year of beta testing. The app's design is based on the idea that email has shifted from a communication tool to more of a transactional system—today's inboxes are filled with receipts, order confirmations, and reservations, rather than personal messages. To combat this flood of data, Alto automatically sorts email into stacks, such as "travel," "photos," "files," "shopping," and "personal."

But Alto's most interesting feature is the Dashboard, which creates easy-to-view cards for things like upcoming events, shipments, flights, and hotel bookings. The cards pull only the relevant items from emails (such as a reservation confirmation number) and rise to the top as they are needed—a boarding pass will appear prominently on the morning of your flight, and will be automatically replaced by a car or hotel reservation once you land at your destination.

The Alto Dashboard seems most useful for business travelers, who need to juggle multiple reservations, meetings, and events. The cards make it easy to get directions or summon a Lyft or Uber ride without leaving the app.

Alto works with any email account (no @aol.com address required) and is available for iOS and Android starting Thursday.

For its new smartwatch series, the company has turned to smarter sensors that require less screen time.

Before Apple revealed its first wearable device, some observers wondered if it would even have a screen.

Analyst Tim Bajarin, for instance, speculated that the device would be more like Disney World's MagicBands, packed with sensors to measure fitness, make payments, and trigger home automation. Business Insider's Steve Kovach wagered that Apple's smartwatch would be much simpler and more fitness-focused than existing Android Wear watches. Developer and writer Craig Hockenberry wondered if Apple's first wearable device might actually be a smart ring.

The eventual product proved them wrong, as the first-generation Apple Watch tried to handle all kinds of apps and communication features that were better suited for a smartphone. But with the launch of Apple Watch Series 2 and WatchOS 3, those early predictions don't seem entirely off base. Apple is now approaching wearables from a different direction than it did at first, emphasizing smarter sensors and limited interactions with the screen. The idea is that you'll get more out of the Watch even if you're spending less time actively using it.

More Info, Less Action

Although Apple originally touted the Watch's full-blown apps and communication features, it turns out users weren't that interested. Bajarin says his surveys found that 60% of Apple Watch owners cited fitness tracking—something that requires little or no screen time—as their main reason for purchase. When users do interact with apps, they mainly do so through notifications and quick glances.

"I think [Apple] probably overestimated the impact of apps on the Watch because of the small screen, and over time have emphasized the role of the sensors and the health benefits," Bajarin says.

As such, Apple has been de-emphasizing complex interactions with WatchOS 3, which debuted this month. Time Travel, a WatchOS 2 feature that lets you scroll the Digital Crown back and forth to see past and future events on the home screen, is now disabled by default, and requires the companion iPhone app to reactivate. The Watch's side button no longer leads to a contact list, but rather a dock for glancing at a handful of favorite apps. The existing Glances menu has been replaced by a set of quick settings toggles when you swipe upward.

Apple also seems to be nudging developers away from the kind of deep interaction that you'd expect from a smartphone app. The upcoming Pokémon Go app is the perfect example: The app will alert users to nearby Pokémon and can display pertinent data such as experience points and distance to hatch eggs, but you'll still need a smartphone to catch the actual creatures. The app exists primarily to collect and display data, not to take action.

One might even argue that the Digital Crown, which Apple initially touted as a defining Watch feature, is on its way out. Many apps only use the button as a substitute for swiping, rather than a controller for on-screen dials and knobs. Even Apple's new app dock doesn't need the Digital Crown, since you can quickly scroll by swiping along the bottom of the screen. Overall, the Digital Crown will become less useful as watch interaction decreases, and it's not hard to imagine it disappearing in future Apple Watches to make room for thinner designs.

That's not to say the Apple Watch doesn't need a screen, but its primary purpose has shifted from getting things done to staying informed.

The Apple Connection

Of course, it's tough to market a smartwatch on the notion that it does less than it did before, albeit more efficiently. So with the Apple Watch Series 2, the company is emphasizing fitness features such as a waterproof design (for swimming) and built-in GPS (for tracking exercise routes without a smartphone). Much like notifications and glances, fitness tracking is a passive use that doesn't require constant interaction with a screen.

But basic fitness tracking is likely just the beginning of Apple's efforts to bring smart sensors and data collection to the Apple Watch. Angela McIntyre, a wearables analyst with Gartner, says that Apple could make its wearable a more integral part of new health initiatives like ResearchKit and CareKit, which allow doctors to collect vital data about their patients. Some experiments on this front are already underway with health providers, including Ochsner Health System in Louisiana.

"It's a wider initiative, and certainly the Watch can be complimentary to that," McIntyre says.

In the future, the Apple Watch's ability to sense what's around it could come into play in other areas, like HomeKit, Apple's burgeoning smart-home framework. While you can already use the Apple's Watch's Home app or Siri to trigger certain smart-home scenarios, Bajarin imagines removing that step in the future through proximity sensors.

"I would love to have the Watch be the center of the action that automates a lot of functions when I walk in the door," he says.

Beyond simple proximity sensing, the Apple Watch could also help prove your identity, serving as the keys to your car, or as an NFC-enabled boarding pass that doesn't require scanning barcodes. Bajarin notes that this would be a much larger undertaking, requiring car doors and ticket counters to support NFC or other proximity-sensing radios. But it would bring the Apple Watch closer to the MagicBand-like concept he once had in mind. WatchOS 3 already takes a step in that direction by allowing you to log into your Mac without a password when the Watch is nearby.

If the fitness angle is any indication, Apple has realized that the Watch's biggest selling point isn't that it's another screen to poke at. Instead, the sensors inside will help feed all kinds of ambitious new Apple services, from HealthKit and ResearchKit to HomeKit and Apple Pay—the kind that are defining Tim Cook's Apple. Once those services are in place, perhaps the notion of a screenless Apple wearable won't seem so implausible.

With its new "Snap It" feature, the Lose It app automatically identifies the food you're eating.

One of America's most popular diet apps is trying something new—computer vision—in its quest to help you keep off the pounds. Lose It, a freemium weight loss app with over 3 million active monthly members, is rolling out "Snap It," a new beta feature this week that automatically identifies the foods that users eat. The idea is that, eventually, customers can photograph their meal instead of manually entering it. It's the latest innovation in a cutthroat marketplace, and one that even outflanks much larger rivals like Google.

Computer Vision And Weight Loss

I tried out a beta version of the functionality last week. You choose a meal inside Lose It's app, and take a picture. The app then analyzes a photo of the meal, and compares it against models from external databases as well as Lose It's internal database. The app then provides what the company calls "food suggestions based on what it sees." For instance, a photograph of sushi brings up sushi listings, and the user tweaks the entry to explain just what type of sushi it was. For Lose It, the idea is to let users enter meals into the app more quickly.

Lose It's image recognition feature, which CEO Charles Teague told me in an interview is designed to "semi-automate tracking," is a less sophisticated version of the holy grail of diet apps—a feature that estimates the calories in a meal when you point a phone at it. Teague repeatedly brought up the metaphor of Tesla Autopilot in our interview, and emphasized how data would be used to improve the product over time.

Last year, Google began work on Im2Calories, an experimental app that estimates the calories in a user's meal based on a photograph of it. Another tech-forward think tank, SRI International, is working on a similar project called Ceres, which uses images of meals to provide nutritional information and portion estimates.

By comparison, Lose It's feature identifies only the food itself, rather than nutritional information. The challenge is that computer vision is a young field, and is hard to implement in commercial settings without the massive research budgets available to tech giants like Google and Microsoft. That difficulty became clear when I started taking pictures of my food.

Despite the fact that Lose It puts out a great product—with pretty much the best user interface of any calorie-tracking app—this is, well, an obstacle.

An Omelette Is Not An Almond

In order to take the image recognition for a test drive, I tried a highly unscientific breakfast test for the app. I would photograph an easy target (a banana), a slightly more challenging target (coffee in a mug), and a difficult challenge (breakfast from the Whole Foods buffet counter), and see how the app would perform.

Lose It identified the banana almost as soon as I snapped it. However, the coffee and the full breakfast presented challenges.

Coffee in a mug was misidentified right away as a soup or a milkshake. An admittedly complicated plate with an egg-white omelette, vegetable hash, bacon, ham, and sautéed vegetables registered as either almonds, a salad, or a Caprese salad.

This is one of the biggest problems with computer vision: It works great in controlled environments, using easily identifiable items. In the real world, things get messier.

"Those complicated cases are hard," Teague told Fast Company. "The biggest thing for us to emphasize, and why I use the Autopilot analogy, is that they need cars out there obtaining functioning data, and getting the info that helps you drive the car. That's what we need as well. We're actually beginning gathering those millions and millions of photos of correlated foods. I hope users don't have an experience like what we described, but if they do, that's what we think of as a beta."

And the reason why Lose It is rolling out a new, experimental technology has a lot to do with the crowded market it's competing in.

Diet Apps Are Big Business

The weight loss app market is insanely crowded… and very profitable. A 2015 study by research firm Marketdata estimates the size of the U.S. weight loss market at $64 billion in 2014. Apps and software are a big part of that mix.

MyFitnessPal, an app that has much of the same functionality as Lose It, was acquired by Under Armour for $475 million last year. Weight Watchers, meanwhile, has been doing more than those iconic Oprah Winfrey "I love bread!" advertisements; they've also pivoted their business strategy to emphasize their app and online community groups alongside in-person meetings.

The challenge for Lose It is that customers have a short attention span. Their app already has a barcode scanning feature. Keeping users hooked (and more importantly, converted into paying subscribers) depends on making the app so easy to use that it becomes a part of daily life.

The next step for Lose It and their competitors is refining this computer-vision product, and creating something that works equally well with your lunchtime grilled chicken salad or an elaborate multi-course restaurant meal. Your phone might not recognize your dinner now, but it will very, very soon.

Amazon, Facebook, Google DeepMind, IBM, and Microsoft announced the Partnership on AI, which will research ways to use the tech responsibly.

The Terminator isn't arriving anytime soon, but concern is growing that artificial intelligence is already so pervasive in society—and getting more so all the time—that there needs to be more focus on how it's being used and potentially misused (even if by accident). Aside from futuristic killer robots, there are already real dangers ranging from faulty autonomous cars to algorithms used in hiring or recruiting that have an inadvertent bias against women or ethnic groups. The giants of artificial intelligence, especially as it affects consumers and businesses, have just joined together to form a nonprofit called the Partnership on AI, with founding members Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft.

It's the latest effort to keep a collective eye on how AI is developed and used. OpenAI, founded in December 2015, has a similar goal of conducing research and conferences to promote responsible use of AI. It's co-chaired by and Elon Musk and Y Combinator founder Sam Altman, with support from a long list of tech luminaries. Across the pond, in May, a European Union committee report promoted creating an agency and rules for the legal and ethical uses of robots.

"This partnership will provide consumer and industrial users of cognitive systems a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century," reads part of a statement from IBM's AI ethics researcher, Francesca Rossi.

The Partnership on AI announcement lays out an ambitious agenda for research to be conducted or funded by members, in partnership with academics, user group advocates, and industry experts. Topics on the research agenda include ethics, fairness, inclusivity, transparency, privacy, and interoperability. A recent white paper from IBM called "Learning to Trust Artificial Intelligence Systems" provides some hints as to what the Partnership on AI might be tracking. Authored by Guruduth Banavar, IBM's chief science officer for cognitive computing, it basically expands the concept of garbage-in/garbage-out to now include garbage in-between.

Teaching a system with bad training data—be it inaccurate or biased—will lead to garbage. A small but notable example was Microsoft's millennial-personality chatbot Tay. It learned from conversations it had with the public, and trolls quickly taught it to spout racist comments. (Microsoft quickly took Tay offline.) Subtler but more serious examples could include a hiring system that makes decisions based on the attributes of the most successful current employees and, lo and behold, recommends hiring only white men.

But there's a garbage-in-the-middle concern, a neologism from Banavar called "algorithmic responsibility." Even good data can become garbage depending on how algorithms learn from and process it. Banavar recommends clear explanations of what's going on inside the black box so that people, even non-data-scientists, can audit the process.

Aside from a full robot uprising, there's growing concern that AI will take over simply by stealing our jobs—whether it's on a factory floor, by driving taxis, or doing paperwork in place of humans. Already law bots, for example, are taking over the duties of paralegals in doing the preliminary research of poring through documents for cases.

The Partnership on AI is set to grow quickly, recruiting a board with en equal split between corporate and non-corporate members—possibly academics or advocates. The announcement also says it will work with other organizations such as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), as well as non-profit research groups including the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. More announcements will come "in the near future," it says.

The locations let IBM teach both startups and big companies how to harness its cloud services.

At one time, a tech industry truism held that "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." The company was practically synonymous with computing in many industries, whether it was offering mainframes or early PCs. But when it comes to new technologies like cloud computing, younger programmers at startups today are less likely to instinctively reach for offerings from Big Blue, the company readily acknowledges.

"This new kind of emerging, new-style programmer doesn't think positively, they don't think negatively, IBM's just kind of invisible to them," says Steve Robinson, general manager for client engagement.

That's part of why IBM started its Bluemix Garages. They're locations that are typically embedded within incubator or coworking spaces popular with startups, where developers can get assistance from the company in exploring its Bluemix cloud platform, he says.

The first Bluemix Garage opened in 2014 at the San Francisco branch of Galvanize, a company offering workspace and tech training at locations across the country. It hosts about 220 startups at that workspace alone. Since then, IBM has opened additional Garages in cities including Toronto, New York, London, and Nice, France, with more planned for Melbourne, Tokyo, and Singapore.

"We set them up where there are these larger groups of startups," Robinson says. "We are a citizen of their community, and we bring the Bluemix and the IBM story there as well."

The facilities offer collaborative sessions where IBM staffers help companies brainstorm potential ideas and spec out ways to reach particular types of users, or even work together over a period of weeks building out working apps harnessing IBM technology.

"They go home with not just a prototype, but a live, active application running on the cloud," Robinson says.

IBM isn't the only cloud vendor to offer walk-in locations for developers to ask questions. Amazon Web Services, which according to data from industry analyst Synergy Research Group still dominates the cloud market, operates what it calls AWS Pop-Up Lofts in New York and San Francisco. The Lofts feature training sessions, walk-in office hours and workspace for developers, and, of course, plenty of other vendors regularly demonstrate their offerings at meetups and conferences.

But Robinson says the emphasis on design thinking and serious collaboration—IBM encourages companies using the Garage to bring developers, designers, and business staff and to meet with counterparts from within the company—set it apart from the competition and help IBM learn what its cloud clients really need.

"It's given a chance to have our IBM groups be much closer to the pulse of startups," he says. "They, in turn, get to see IBM in a newer light."

And, it turns out, the sessions don't just attract startups: They also bring in more established companies looking to learn modern design and development practices while turning out new products for the cloud, he says.

Visiting developers typically pair program with IBM engineers sitting at computers equipped with two keyboards and developing a fledgling application together using various IBM APIs, from the Watson artificial intelligence and machine learning suite to weather data feeds. In the New York Garage, in an area of SoHo not too far from Wall Street or the financial industries' Jersey City data centers, many companies are interested in exploring IBM's blockchain tools, Robinson says.

"We've done everything—we had one company looking to work with the Watson APIs where they wanted to take a look at their executive speeches and see whether they were online with the marketing messages they wanted to put out," he says. "We had another bank in who wanted to open up some APIs to their extended business partner community."

For PLM Industries, a startup working on digital trackers for freight shipments, the staff of the San Francisco Bluemix Garage helped bring together engineers expert in IBM's Internet of Things platform (which the company relies upon as a backend), designers, and even IBM employees who had previously worked in the logistics industry and could understand the company's goals, says PLM President Tim Parker.

IBM helped the startup focus on what was necessary for a basic version it could quickly test with potential customers, says Vernice London, vice president at PLM.

"We came in with tons and tons of ideas and functionality we wanted to put into the system," he says. "They allowed us to focus in on the end user and get that minimal viable product and showed us the way to quickly get to market and what they call land and expand."

Just 20 minutes before a vote to "unlock" set-top boxes, the head of the FCC backed down—at least for now.

It seemed like such a no-brainer: a government proposal that would have forced cable and satellite TV companies to make set-top boxes optional and give subscribers more choice. Who wouldn't support a plan that lets consumers save an estimated $231 a year on box rental fees?

Alas, nothing is that simple in Washington—or Hollywood. That helps explain the dramatic move today when FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler pulled his "Unlock the Box" proposal just minutes before it came up for vote in a public open meeting. He insists he's not abandoning the plan, but says now that it needs more work. The sudden move is a big political blow for Wheeler, who was appointed by President Obama and presides over a majority-Democrat commission, which he can usually count on to support his proposals.

Nevertheless, he was facing strong opposition from some pretty powerful foes, in particular cable giants like Comcast and companies like Verizon and AT&T, all of which have a big stake in the pay-TV business. And despite the inclination many Americans have to hate their cable companies, those companies made some arguments against the set-top box proposal that proved persuasive.

Past Mistakes

The previous government policy to provide an alternative to set-top boxes, a decoder called CableCARD, was disastrous. That's in part because cable companies dragged their feet, but also because it cost them a lot of money. The cards were meant to plug directly into TVs or boxes from third parties, but the policy required cable providers to install the cards even in their own set-top boxes, at extra cost.

This time around, cable companies have been fighting for several reasons. One is that they invested a lot in new cable boxes—some of which, especially Comcast's new Xfinity X1, finally work well, with intuitive interfaces in the spirit of popular streaming boxes like Roku. The other issue is one of control: The FCC originally wanted them to make all their data streams—like scheduling and copy-protection requirements—available to any app or device maker. They especially bristled because Google and other Silicon Valley giants were backing this FCC proposal.

That also freaked out Hollywood. The big players got worried that the iron chains of copy protection would be loosened by this open access to data streams, making theft easier—despite vigorous assurances by Wheeler that it wouldn't. Meanwhile, small broadcasters were afraid that channel placement, which they pay for like any other piece of real estate, would go out the window if anyone could build whatever app and interface they desired. The head of a small Spanish language broadcaster, Vme Media, told me that he really needed to be next to giants like Univision and Telemundo so that channel surfers would be more likely to stumble across him.

Then things really got weird: Cable boxes became a civil rights and minority rights issue. Members of Congress, especially in the congressional Black Caucus, joined forces with cable companies, also with the concern that scrambled channel placement would make it harder to find those minority-owned channels. But others in the African-American and Latino community leadership, like BET founder Robert L. Johnson, came out in favor of busting the cable set-top boxes—to save their viewers money and give them more options for watching.

Compromise, But Not Enough?

After getting earfuls on its draft proposal for most of 2016, Wheeler's team proposed a pretty big compromise: TV subscribers would have the option to use an app instead of a cable box, but only cable or satellite TV suppliers would be allowed to build the apps. This isn't so different from what's happening anyway. Cable companies like Time Warner Cable are already providing apps that run on devices like smart TVs, Roku, and Xbox, as well as non-TV gadgets like tablets. But only customers who shelled out monthly for an unneeded cable box can use the apps. Getting TV service still requires getting a box, and the apps need to be unlocked with a valid subscriber number.

The latest plan, unveiled September 8, would just dump the box requirement. It even keeps in place the requirement that subscribers can (for the most part) only use the apps when they are at home. TV rights agreements are tied to geography, a complication leftover from the days when the only way to watch was broadcast TV. Still, big cable, Hollywood, and minority advocates said no. Conservative members of Congress, and the two (out of five) conservative members on the FCC, are also reliable opponents of most regulations.

One of the sticking points was the proposal to create a content-licensing commission, overseen by the FCC, to ensure that devices like streaming boxes can get access to show the content. Again, there's the issue of losing control that rankled Hollywood. Powerhouses including the Motion Picture Association of America and SAG-AFTRA called Wheeler's proposal an "unworkable de facto compulsory licensing regime that requires creators to allow their work to be shared across multiple platforms without compensation."

All that opposition might not have mattered if Wheeler could count on, as he usually does, the support of his two liberal commissioners: Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel. But Rosenworcel is also worried about the licensing board—she told a Senate committee that it might be outside the FCC's powers to create such an entity. It seems she still has concerns, even after a pledge by Wheeler two weeks ago to work with her on it.

"We have made tremendous progress—and we share the goal of creating a more innovative and inexpensive market for these consumer devices," said Wheeler in a statement released this morning. "We are still working to resolve the remaining technical and legal issues, and we are committed to unlocking the set-top box for consumers across this country."

Managing a hellacious client means foregoing more rewarding work for someone else.

Whether you're a business owner, self-employed, or just like to pick up some freelance work on the side, chances are you've worked with great clients and not-so-great clients. There's nothing like connecting with motivated, inspired clients who are committed to your working relationship.

There's also nothing quite like the clients who aren't. The ones that don't pay their invoices. The ones whose demands go well beyond a project's agreed-upon scope. The ones that expect you to bend over backward without being compensated for it.

This isn't to say that bad client relationships can't be turned around. Often, a direct conversation clarifies expectations and sets better ground rules so the engagement can eventually become a success. Other times, there's simply nothing to be done but cut ties, but it can be tough to know where the line falls between a client relationship that's worth the effort trying to improve and one that isn't.

Here are a few of the most common signals—in clients' own words—that it's time to fire a problem client.

1. "That's Not How We Do Things"

This is something I've seen several times working with marketing clients. They seek out an agency to help them change their approach, only to feel threatened when the agency proposes actually changing their approach.

At first, you're naturally excited about landing the new business. You work yourself up about all the great things you could do for them, and about all the changes you'd like to make. Then the client comes back and shoots down all your ideas—not just once but every single time you propose something new. As a consultant or freelancer or company hired to help a business do something differently, this can quickly get frustrating.

Unfortunately, I've found that it's rare for these situations to turn themselves around. Clients aren't going to magically wake up one morning and be receptive to your suggestions. In these cases, terminating the arrangement early saves you time, energy, and heartache over trying to force through changes that your client just isn't receptive to.

2. "I'll Send That Over First Thing Tomorrow."

In business as in life, things get delayed. It's only an issue when promises like these are said over and over again—and tomorrow never comes.

Throughout my career, I've encountered plenty of clients who fail to understand that hiring a marketing agency isn't a "hands off" thing. To do my job, I need access to your analytics. I need information about the approaches you've tried, what the results have been, and what you'd like them to be in the future. I need to know who your target customers are and how you feel your brand connects with them. I can't do any of that if you won't make the time to help me make our engagement successful.

No matter your role, field, or the type of client relationship you may be working under, there's no way you can do your job without the proper information or input—delivered on time, most of the time. After all, your time is money, too. Clients who waste your time with their unresponsiveness create needless stress and prevent you from taking on other projects with more potential.

Fire them, and move on.

3. "If You Could Just Handle That, Too . . ."

Scope creep. Freelancers, consultants, and agency owners know this one all too well—the client who's paid for one thing, and then asks for seven other things on top.

In my experience, the only way to handle scope creep is to state, from the very first incident, that the work they're requesting goes above and beyond the terms of your agreement, and will be billed accordingly. This helps set expectations from the get-go, and reasonable clients will respect these boundaries; habitual scope-creepers will not. End those relationships. Clients who continually demand something for nothing are never going to change their tune.

4. "I Don't Know What Happened—Accounting Said The Invoice Had Been Paid."

This is a classic stalling technique. Hear it once, and there's a legitimate chance that payment for your most recent invoice really did fall through the cracks. It's fine to give a client the benefit of the doubt. But hear this over and over again, and you've got a problem client on your hands.

Without payment, there's simply no client-consultant relationship. Even regular delays that are ultimately reconciled can seriously diminish the trust you have in your client, causing you to resent future work done on their behalf.

5. "Sorry I Missed Our Call Today"

Here, too, the context matters. One or even a few instances may be forgivable, but clients that routinely miss meetings and make themselves hard to communicate with usually aren't keepers. They may not do it deliberately, but insulting you or behaving rudely can poison your relationship to the point where it's unsalvageable. In order to work effectively on their behalf, a client needs to respect your time and keep their commitments.

So go with your gut: Does it feel like the client's rudeness is completely unintentional? Perhaps the client is too busy for pleasantries or facing a language barrier that prevents niceties? If so, that's one thing. If the rudeness seems conscious, careless, or even deliberate, that's another thing altogether.

A client that doesn't respect you is never going to be happy with the work you do. Look elsewhere for work—you'll be glad you did.

Aaron Agius is an experienced search, content and social marketer. He has worked with some of the world's largest brands, including Salesforce, Coca-Cola, Target and others, to build their online presence. See more from Aaron at Louder Online, his blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Bustle, a three-year old website for millennial women, now has 50 million monthly readers. Here's why they completely redesigned it.

At Bustle's Chelsea office in Manhattan, the two women at the heart of the website's overhaul—creative director Isla Murray and senior engineer Zahra Jabini—are sitting together in the design room. Around them, the walls are covered in inspiration boards filled with images from recent photo shoots for the online publication. Women wearing colorfully patterned dresses seem to float in a sea of bright pinks, teals, oranges, and yellows. Such scenes of warmth, optimism, and fun have been channeled into Bustle's brand-new look, which is being revealed today.

The site was first developed three and a half years ago and had a functional aesthetic much like Medium or Tumblr that allowed you to scroll through blocks of clickable images that would take you to an article. The background was white and minimalistic. "There wasn't that much personality," Murray says. "As we've grown, developing our editorial voice and our social voice, and really come into our own, we've been screaming for a way to visually express that."

Bustle was founded in 2013 by Bryan Goldberg, who had previously cofounded the Bleacher Report. The lucrative site churned out hundreds of articles a day written by sports fans, rather than professional journalists. Goldberg and his cofounders sold it in 2012 to Turner Broadcasting for more than $200 million.

The next year, Goldberg's plan was to build a media site along the same lines, but about women's issues, targeting millennial women. The site got off to a rocky start with many people accusing Goldberg of being offensive and tone-deaf in his early efforts to describe the kind of site that would appeal to women. "Yes, we believe that a partner-track attorney can be passionate about world affairs and celebrity gossip," Goldberg wrote in Pando Daily. "On the same day. During the same coffee break. And there is nothing wrong with that. Welcome to the year 2013."

Three years later, the site has become a magnet for 18- to 35-year-old women. Every month, the site draws a whopping 50 million unique visitors globally, 36 million of whom are in the U.S. It is on track to profitability. In March, Goldberg raised a series D round of $11.5 million, bringing the total amount of capital raised to $38.5 million, a portion of which has been used for this redesign. "We're trying to reach a mass audience," says Lindsey Green, Bustle's VP of corporate communications.

To do this, Bustle now has over 70 full-time editors and 250 contract contributors who pen more than 200 articles a day about topics they are interested in, from their favorite celebrities or TV shows, to makeup and fashion tips, and relationship advice. There is also a sprinkling of hard news in the mix. "We want to create content that we know our readers will like," Green explains.

Instead of bringing in external designers, engineers, and consultants, which is what often happens at media companies, Goldberg hired its own team and built everything in-house, to have as much control over the process as possible and to perfectly tailor the new site to Bustle's audience. It was also no coincidence that he picked women in their twenties—Murray and Jabini—to head up this overhaul. "Bustle is a publication focused on millennial women, so it makes sense that millennial women would take a lead role in bringing this new engineering vision to fruition," Jabini says.

All Together Now

Earlier this year, the design team moved from their Brooklyn offices to the editorial headquarters in Manhattan, which she says was an important breakthrough moment. Overnight, engineers and designers were able to better understand what writers were thinking and how they were engaging with readers every day. "There's a whole different kind of collaboration that comes when you're face-to-face with someone every day and you're not a train ride away," she says.

And while early on, the site did not have a discernible point of view, it has now carved out a distinct place for itself in the media landscape. While glossy magazines like Vogue seem exclusive and elitist, and feminist sites like Jezebel have a snarky tone, Bustle wants to sound like your best friend. "It's fun, it's inquisitive, it's inclusive, and authentic," says Green. (It's not entirely unique, though, as sites like Refinery29 have a similar tone and audience. Full disclosure: I wrote for Refinery29 before joining the staff of Fast Company.)

Murray's goal has been to translate all of this into how the site looks. "The most important goal of the redesign is for the site to appear approachable and friendly," Murray says. "We don't want it to feel too cool or unattainable. We want to be something that you can relate to."

The Second Look

A good place to start is Bustle's new logo, an evolution of its former logo, that was in a simple all-caps sans serif font. This version is designed with softer edges to feel warmer and friendlier. It is at an angle to represent movement and energy. The word is underlined, as if to say that it is getting right to the point. As Murray and Jabini explain, these are the kinds of decisions they made throughout the redesign process. "We're trying to express the voice that Bustle has grown into," Murray says.

On first glance, the website itself also looks lighter and airier. They achieved this by having a subtle but vibrant pattern in the background, rather than the stark white from the previous site. White, minimalistic backgrounds are the norm on many media websites, from the New York Times to (ahem) Fast Company, so this element makes Bustle distinctive. Bits of color and design show up in unexpected places, mostly a blue-green panel that is on a gradient, so the experience is unpredictable. "It's supposed to feel like a friendly wink," Murray says.

A Never-Ending Stream Of Content

The new site was designed to be mobile-first, and it does look a lot like a feed. Given that their readers tend to be tech-forward women in their twenties, the redesign team wanted to create an experience they would find intuitive based on how they use other platforms. "This is how we're seeing our users engage with content, whether it's on Facebook, Instagram, or just another website," Murray says. "We're taking these models as inspiration here."

But rather than having a predictable stream of stories, Bustle will constantly play around with what the user will see. Editors will be able to curate what readers see first, such as breaking news or a new exclusive story they want to promote. It will most likely start with the top stories of the day, but as you scroll down, you might find an interactive flow chart you can engage with. Or there might be a game tucked into the feed that you can pause to play. There is also room to include tweets or Instagram posts on the feed, GIFs, and photographs with captions.

At the end of a story, you will be thrown back into another feed. Editors will have picked out related stories that you might be interested in reading next. "The philosophy is to give you everything you need about a subject in one go," Murray says. "Not just articles, but also Instagram posts or whatever."

Memes Everywhere

Bustle already has a group of illustrators in-house who create humorous drawings that will show up in Instagram feeds, much like the comics that the New Yorker publishes. Recently, there was a picture of a woman floating on top of an enormous coffee cup to channel everybody's mood on Monday. Another showed the feeling of taking off your bra at the end of the day (think: so awesome it's akin to riding on a unicorn). These are meant to make the reader feel like they are in on an inside joke. "Everything is supposed to reflect what it is like to be a woman in today's world," Green says.

These images will also start to appear on the main Bustle website in the feed. But the redesign team has also been creating other products in the same style. For instance, they have created a sticker pack that will be launched in iOS 10, so that people can drop cheeky images into text messages and emails. Users will be able to give one another silly trophies and awards for things like waking up in the morning or putting on their pants.

Under The Hood

One of the most valuable parts of this new platform is that it is very flexible, which means that if the editors want to play around with what is shown on the homepage, they can do so without having to go back to square one. Jabini explains that the site was designed with movable blocks that can be reorganized at will. So you might want to move where a story appears on the website, insert a game here, or a new image there.

They can also design new products at any time and plug them in quickly. This is very different from a system that is based on a Wordpress template, for example, which is far more rigid. This modular design concept is a growing trend. "We rebuilt the site from the ground up because we wanted to make it easier for designers to come up with their wildest ideas and for us to be able to quickly make it for them," Jabini says. "They're just like Legos that can be moved around."

This also means that the new website can be changed over time as users interact with it. Bustle might discover that some new features—such as the games or flowcharts—didn't take off in the way they anticipated, so they can tweak parts of it without having to reinvent the whole platform. "We're always evolving as human beings," Jabini says. "One of our values here at Bustle is that we're not perfect, and that's why our readers love us. We're saying we're just like them, and we're open to continually experimenting until we get things right."

Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly stated that Bustle is already profitable. It is actually on track to profitability. We apologize for the error.