Here's how to think like a casting director, not a hiring manager.
I spent 25 years in experimental theater. I wrote, directed, produced, taught, and performed shows ranging from a 12-hour performance piece to a highly narrative homage to the golden age of television. I even dabbled in circus acrobatics. In the process, I learned a lot about building a cast and crew that fits the project at hand.
Here's how my time in the theater shaped my approach to hiring, staffing, and leading teams of designers, web developers, and producers at a brand engagement agency today.
In theater, you audition performers to find the right fit for the role. To make the right choice, you need to put them in a context that lets them show off what they can do: an improvisation, a scene, a monologue. This way you get the chance not only to validate their technical skills but also to see how they take direction and collaborate.
In the business world, though, we often interview people mainly based on their resumes: a rehash of what the person has already done, plus some discussion geared to judging "cultural fit." After nearly three decades of evaluating potential on stage and in business, I treat interviews like auditions; what's on someone's resume is far less important than the potential they demonstrate.
So while you learn a lot by asking about prior work—it can show you a candidate's passions and thought process—it doesn't show the person in action. I recently interviewed a candidate for a UX role. After a good initial conversation, I asked him to respond to a brief for now-completed work. The goal of the assignment I set was to see if he understood the emotional context of the brand, not just the functional needs that were inherent in the task. I didn't need to verify if he could make a wireframe; it was about whether he could think conceptually. He could—and passed the audition.
Sometimes, though, the work misses the mark. For years I have worked with people who are honing their craft, which requires them to show some of the vulnerability that accompanies creative expression. As a result, I've come to feel strongly about offering feedback. Putting something out there warrants the respect of explaining what went wrong.
Each project demands a specific cast, and I do my best to assemble the right mix of talents. To assess team members' personalities, skills, and working styles, I tend to draw on the theatrical archetypes casting directors use to find the right balance of characters for a strong performance—both onstage and off:
Strategists are the directors, understanding the greater story and guiding the team toward a cohesive performance.
UX experts, designers, and developers express the story visually and through code, becoming the storytellers who bring the work to life.
Business analysts and quality-assurance specialists are the set and lighting technicians, making sure all of the pieces come together in the right way.
And of course the producers are, well, the producers—keeping the show moving and everyone happy.
It's the harried nature of client-based business to see staff as resources that can be readily moved around to plug holes. But my experience in theater has proven a good antidote to that mind-set.
In theater, you cast people due to a combination of practicality ("I know how to trapeze, so auditioning for another circus performance makes sense") and passion ("I'm accomplished in absurdist theater but would like to try my hand at a solo show"). I like to offer my teams the opportunity to think beyond their established talents and to try something new—to take the next logical step, whatever that might be for them.
While my current role stretches across strategy, creative work, and producing, in theater terms I'm probably most similar to an executive producer, making sure we're delivering on the purpose. But like most leaders, I play multiple roles. Some days, I'm the casting director, spending more time on building the team. Other days, I'm the director, shepherding everyone along to bring the playwright's vision to life. And sometimes I'm a stagehand, mopping up before the show.
Every day, though, I'm also the understudy: In every project, the proverbial show must go on—which means leaders need to know where everything stands, what's needed to get the work done right, and how to do that if someone leaves abruptly.
What I learned in theater has a profound impact on my approach to more than just hiring and staffing, though. It informs how I view the very nature of our work. I've spent years figuring out how to get the best out of people with different agendas, skills, and backgrounds in the high-stakes world of performance. Today, that experience pushes me to try and understand others' points of view, and even to translate what one team member is saying in a way that someone else will understand.
In the best theater, like in business, the ensemble is what really matters, not the star. And it's a leader's job to get the whole cast and crew pulling in the same direction, one show after the next.
Peter Petralia is managing director of digital strategy for brand engagement firm Sullivan, where he leads all digital efforts for the firm. An agency veteran, Peter has worked across industries on global initiatives for some of the world's most admired brands. He also used to be in the circus.
When it rolled out its own "Stories" feature last month, did Instagram actually do Snapchat a favor?
When it comes to theft, one social network's rap sheet is a mile long. There's the cloudy origin story, involving who allegedly stole what from those charming Winklevoss twins. Then there's the fact that the network's Like button was featured earlier on a site called FriendFeed. Later, when one-on-one messaging apps started taking off, Facebook conveniently rolled out Messenger as a smartphone app. And just as YouTube video exploded, the the company ramped up its own native video platform, which now gets well over 8 billion views a day. Facebook's latest heist, if you choose to see it that way, is its property Instagram's imitation of Snapchat's Stories, which lets users share photos and short videos that expire after 24 hours.
Underhanded? Unethical? Reprehensible? Nope. If you ask me, it's brilliant—even innovative. Here's why.
Like countless innovators before it, Facebook has repeatedly swallowed up competitors' features and made them bigger, better, and more accessible to a larger audience. And in the end, it's more than just Facebook that benefits. Often (though not always), it's ordinary users and even the business that got ripped off in the first place that win out. When done right, imitation represents a powerful, yet widely misunderstood business stratagem.
The history of human expression—from art and music to literature and dance—is built on the creative adaptation of what came before, and the internet follows this pattern; it's nothing if not the result of distributed innovation and development. The open-source golden age may now be behind us, but a key reason technology has sped ahead so quickly is because of that web-based culture of imitation that once thrived out in the open.
From the perspective of the company doing the copying, the reduced development costs are one enticement. But equally important is the assurance of product-market fit. Facebook knows, for instance, that Instagram Stories is a viable product because Snapchat has already gone to the enormous trouble of proving an appetite exists for day-long, disappearing photo collages.
This isn't unique to Facebook; the business case for "cheap and low-risk" pretty much makes itself. In our early days here at Hootsuite, we looked at the traction URL shorteners like bit.ly were getting and decided to put a variation of them into our product. It helped us get users at a critical time and it was a surefire bet.
But in the process of jumping on a bandwagon—or running away with it—the best imitators invariably put their own twist on the original idea. And something as simple as broadening a concept's reach can prove innovative all by itself. Take the Stories concept: Snapchat has around 100 million daily users and counting, a user base that tilts demographically young. Instagram, by contrast, has 300 million daily users from a much broader cross-section of the population.
But through subtle design tweaks, as one Co.Design contributor pointed out, Facebook has democratized the Stories technology, making it far more intuitive and easy to use than Snapchat's interface. Gone are the mysterious swipes, replaced with clearly labeled buttons. And unlike on Snapchat, you can instantly tap into a network of people to share with. In "ripping off" Snapchat, Facebook has made the format better and more useful to more people.
When more users gain access to more features, refinement, and value at a lower price, that's innovation in action. Having a monopoly on technology might benefit the company that holds the strings, but distributed access makes a lot more sense for the rest of us—the people all those companies are competing to serve.
But who loses out? Obviously, the company that did all the hard work of coming up with an original idea and bringing it to market isn't such a clear winner. Having been on the receiving end of this, I'll admit that it hurts. Hootsuite was the among the first to develop scheduling technology for social media, enabling posts to be drafted in advance and published days or weeks ahead. Almost immediately, that feature was copied by our competitors.
So in the immediate term, months of engineering work meant to give us an edge was swiftly wiped out. But in arguably more important ways, our copycats helped us—for one thing, by creating a larger pool of potential customers—and it's a fair bet Instagram teaching hundreds of millions more people to "snap" may wind up helping Snapchat, too.
That's because, especially in nascent sectors where technology is new and there's not a ready audience yet, the act of copying can be critical to building a category. In effect, your imitators are helping build awareness and creating an industry. You'll still need to compete with them, of course, but generating a new market from scratch may not be something you can pull off all by yourself.
There's another upside for victims, too: Urgency. The reality that your best ideas will soon be copied by competitors makes it impossible to rest on your laurels. Instead of getting complacent about your position, you're forced to get better—again and again. Goaded on by the copycats, a good business has the potential to become a great one, to innovate further and faster than ever anticipated.
To be sure, there are limits and drawbacks to all this imitation. Legally speaking, some lines should clearly never be crossed, so it's always crucial to consult with your lawyer or in-house staff if there's ever any question about legalities. Imitation is one thing, but violating patent laws and existing regulations is a real risk to avoid at all costs. If your company is uncertain, then the first step is getting an expert opinion.
It's also true that taken too far, ruthless copying can disincentivize creativity. Why pour money and energy into a new product that your competitor is going to steal the moment you unveil it? Companies that get hooked on stealing can inadvertently sap their own ability to come up with new ideas.
In the end, though, the only real hedge against all innovative thievery is the one thing that can't be copied: raw, relentless creativity. Or, as Rudyard Kipling put it best:
They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind.
Before and even after your top candidate accepts an offer, you need to stay vigilant against tempting counteroffers.
You've found the perfect candidate and they've accepted. Congratulations! Having held all the cards throughout the hiring process, this can be an uncomfortable time for managers. When days tick by and there's still no sign of a signed contract or confirmed start date, even the most trusting of hiring managers will grow suspicious. Until your new hire walks through the door on the first day, there's no ironclad guarantee they'll join.
So in the period between making an offer and having it officially accepted, hiring managers may need to fend off the risk of a counteroffer by the candidate's employer. Here are a few ways of doing that.
Initial qualifying conversations—even during those early phone screenings—are a great time to get candidates to open up. If you already ask candidates their salary expectations, you may as well also ask what they think their present company might do if they were to resign.
Ask outright if the company, to their knowledge, has a policy or track record of counteroffering. It's useful to know of a probable eventuality. You may catch a candidate off guard, but if they're aware of such a practice, they're likely to have an opinion about it.
Next, ask them what they might do if faced with a counteroffer. It's easier to gauge sincerity face-to-face; presented the right way, people can be very candid. But don't phrase this in a way that puts somebody on the defensive. Focus your question on the key priorities and criteria they're focusing on in order to make the next big decision of their career. Conveying a genuine interest in their situation and goals can encourage more openness.
Admitting that they'd potentially consider a counteroffer isn't necessarily a reason to exclude a prospective hire from a shortlist. Just be aware of any other opportunities they may be looking at, the likely salary level of those roles, and the timeframe of these processes.
Needless to say, it's always possible that a candidate could be less than truthful and declare they'd never take a counteroffer even if they would. What's more, it's generally difficult for any hiring manager to get a full sense of the other opportunities a candidate might be weighing up. But these perils are all the more reason why regular communication is so critical throughout the hiring process. Don't just grill a candidate mercilessly—that's a big turnoff for talent you're trying to woo—but use each interaction to subtly test their interest. A person's level of flexibility, communication, and availability through the interview stages are usually good indicators.
However, if you do get a sense that the candidate is likely to stay put for the right reasons, it's time to cut them loose. If anything, their candor has helped you. It's always better to take action as soon as this becomes clear—ideally before you make an offer. If a candidate begins to worry that you're considering other contenders, they'll either make a more impassioned case for themselves or else fall off the radar, confirming your suspicions.
Understanding a candidate's motivations for a career move is key to fending off the threat of a potential counteroffer. Use your interview process to get a better grasp of the things a candidate is most looking for, then build a case for the new role that's based on fulfilling them.
Everyone involved in the interview process should tap into an individual's motivations—not just the lead hiring manager. Anyone on your team who's involved with interview debriefs and feedback calls should ask questions about what appeals most about the role, then regroup to compare notes and see if the candidates' answers are consistent.
One motivation that should raise significant concern, of course, is money. If someone is thinking of leaving their current company for money, they're quite likely to stay for it, too.
If you indicate the salary range before making an offer, listen carefully for the candidate's response. Anything less than resounding enthusiasm should signal that you need to explore their reservations. To be sure, a savvy candidate will keep their cards close to their chest while negotiating—and that's fine. But it doesn't prevent you from being clear about the company's expectations on the offer and resignation process, or from making the turnaround of paperwork a priority.
If possible, make the offer face-to-face, give the candidate the contract in person, and request a next-day return. Then schedule a call immediately after their resignation to show support for what may have been a difficult conversation, and keep reiterating how delighted the whole team is that they're joining. Start penciling in "meet-the-team" meetings immediately: Putting a date in the calendar increases commitment and adds focus during a long notice period.
But your job isn't done yet. Post-resignation, it's vitally important to maintain regular contact with the candidate until they're through the door on day one. Arrange a lunch with their new boss or colleagues, and encourage everyone to keep up a regular dialogue. Get the candidate's input on upcoming projects, share updates on company developments, and send links to articles or a recently published annual report. Make them feel part of their new business right away, even before their start date. This helps keep your new hire focused on the role they've just accepted, and it cuts the temptation to follow up with additional recruiters or go on any remaining interviews.
You can also seek their help. Ask them for referrals for other vacancies or recommendations for the company's talent watch. The referrals themselves are less important than their display of loyalty to the new business. After all, that's the prize you've just worked so hard to win.
Jenny Hargrave is the founder of CV writing and Interview coaching service InterviewFit in London, as well as an executive search firm, ExecutiveFit.
The number of female CEOs among S&P 500 companies has increased at a rate of 1.1 over the last eight years.
Progress is being made in closing the gender gap for the top jobs in the S&P 500, albeit very slowly.
There are now 27 female CEOs in the index, according to the latest S&P Capital IQ. That's up from 21 in 2015. The S&P 500 can now profess a 5.4% share of female CEOs, up from 4.2% last year.
The annual report analyzed leadership among S&P 500 companies every year starting in 2006. When multiple CEOs lead a company, the longest serving one is counted. Where there is no acting CEO, researchers use the highest-ranking board member as a proxy. The study provides a longitudinal view of CEO trends by analyzing the 500 companies that represent approximately 80% of available market capitalization when combined.
There's a business case for having more women in the C-suite. Studies have shown that companies with more women in management deliver 34% greater returns to shareholders. Although female CEOs led only 5% of Fortune 1000 companies, they generated 7% of the group's total revenue and outperform the S&P 500 index during the course of their respective tenures.
Unfortunately, however, those tenures tend to be much shorter than those of their male counterparts, according to the S&P Capital IQ. While men serve an average of over six years, female CEOs average only four.
"While four to six years is not largely significant," writes Pavle Sabic, the director of market development of the S&P Capital IQ and author of the study, "in the context of a lifelong career, it may translate to a significant economic opportunity cost to women."
The discrepancy in tenure length may be in part due to the fact that once in the top, job female CEOs are more likely to be targeted by shareholder activism.
There are a number of sectors that lead the way in female representation, and they're not necessarily the ones traditionally associated with gender equality. Those with the most female CEOs included information technology, utilities, and consumer discretionary, with five in each sector, followed by financials and consumer staples, with four.
"In a surprising and positive development since our previous report in March 2016, we are seeing increased momentum in closing the gender gap at blue chip companies across multiple sectors," wrote Sabic.
In spite of the progress that is being made, however, the number of S&P 500 companies with female CEOs only grew by an average rate of 1.1 each year since 2009, according to S&P Capital IQ.
The materials and telecoms sectors remain without a single female representative among its S&P 500 CEOs. At this rate, the Institute for Women's Policy Research predicts it will take until 2056 to reach gender parity.
"During a time when companies are under increasing pressure to diversify the demographics of their employee base, especially to increase the number of females at the helm, we have not seen the statistics change dramatically," wrote Sabic, adding, "however, progress is being made."
The cost of raw materials for clothing fluctuates like any commodity—and Everlane believes retail prices should reflect that.
Michael Preysman founded Everlane with the goal of exploding the fundamental building blocks of the fashion industry. He didn't sell his products through retailers or department stores. He didn't invest much in advertising. And perhaps most importantly, he told the customer exactly how much it cost to make each product.
When the e-commerce site launched in 2011, there was a chart next to each item that laid out the cost of materials, labor, and import duties. "We wanted to help the customer understand where we were coming from," Preysman says. "People hadn't really seen anything like it before."
But the thing is, the price of materials is constantly changing. Raw materials like cotton and cashmere are traded in the international commodity market. Based on each year's harvest and global demand, costs fluctuate wildly. Cashmere, for instance, has been dropping in price for years now.
So starting today, Everlane is changing the price of its cashmere products based on how much it is paying for the raw fibers. It first started selling cashmere sweaters in November 2012 for $125. Now the company is charging $100 for the same product.
Of course, the price of raw cashmere also depends on its quality, which is why you can buy an $80 cashmere sweater from Uniqlo, a $950 one from Brunello Cucinelli, or at the very top of the chain, a $4,000 sweater from Loro Piana. "Not all cashmere is created equal," Preysman says. "Especially compared to other products: You're going to see a very big difference between the high end and the low end."
Part of it has to do with the quality of the fibers. Since cashmere comes from goats that are bred all over the world, from Mongolia to China to Pakistan, there is a great deal of variability depending on how the animal is raised and from which part of the body the wool is shorn. Grade A cashmere is made with fibers that are long and under 15 microns thin. Thicker fibers get categorized into Grade B and C. "Long, thin cashmere creates yarn that is stronger and that does not pill as easily," Preysman explains. "A single goat will have many grades on it. It all depends on where you get it on the goat."
After the yarn is made, it is then washed to make it softer. Cashmere that has been washed too much might feel buttery soft upon the first touch, but over time, it pills easily because the fibers have been weakened. So contrary to popular belief, you don't want to buy cashmere that feels too soft: It has probably been overwashed. "Really soft cashmere does well out of the gate because people touch it and fall in love with it," he says. "But then a few weeks later, it all falls apart."
Finally, the quality of the production matters a great deal. Since cashmere is so delicate, factories that have a long history of working with the material tend to produce higher-quality garments. Italy and Scotland are known for their cashmere manufacturing, but a lot of cashmere products in the U.S. today—including Everlane's—are made in China, where labor costs are cheaper. A single sweater travels great distances before it can be purchased. "Our fibers and yarns are from Mongolia, spun up in Ningbo in China, and the sweaters are finally produced in Dongguan in southern China," Preysman says.
Everlane, with its commitment to selling the best quality product at the lowest prices, only uses Grade A cashmere. Its new cashmere crew sweater is lightweight and feels silky to the touch, but is not as fluffy as some other brands on the market. The yarn is tightly knit, and when you tug at it, it springs back to its previous shape, which means that wear is less likely to result in holes.
Over the past three years, cashmere prices have been declining. In the last year alone, they have dropped 22% to $64 per kilo, according to data from the textile and clothing trade database EmergingTextiles.com. In April 2014, the price was over $100 a kilo. Analysts say that luxury-good sales have been going down, including a cutback on cashmere consumption. There has been an excess in cashmere supply, and since it is a commodity traded on the stock market much like gold or silver, prices have been driven down.
Preysman makes the point that most brands never adjust the price of their products when raw materials get cheaper. Consumers tend to be in the dark about the global cashmere trade, so many companies don't see the need to lower their product prices when the market dips. "Cashmere prices vary quite a lot, much more than cotton," he says. "Sometimes it goes up, and when it does, retailers raise their prices. Sometimes it goes down. But when that happens, retailers almost never lower their prices; they just keep the extra profit."
Today, Everlane is releasing its new line of lower-priced cashmere sweaters. But Preysman says that this is part of a larger strategy to adjust the pricing of all products based on what is happening in the market, a reflection of the company's commitment to being transparent with their customers and educating them about the apparel supply chain. "For what it's worth, when the price goes up, we will raise our pricing too," he says.
Many companies would stay away from a strategy like Everlane's because they don't want to disappoint their customers by dropping their prices only to raise them later. But Everlane has always tried to have a different relationship with its customers, one based on openness and honesty. The charts on its website also reveal how much of a profit the company makes on each item it sells, information most brands keep secret. Preysman believes that his customers are smart enough to understand that vacillations in commodity markets affects the supply chain—and they just want companies to be honest with them.
Related Video: Your Cotton Bedsheets Harbor A Nightmarish Secret
Preventing hackers from spying through digital webcams and microphones often involves surprisingly analog solutions.
Although they presumably have access to cutting-edge security tools and first-rate professional advice, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey still use a surprisingly low-tech piece of security equipment.
Both reportedly place a piece of sticky tape over their computers' webcams to make sure that even if hackers get access to the machines, they still can't spy through their cameras.
Years of reports have said that hackers, including some employed by the FBI, can sometimes activate webcams without turning on the indicator light, and research released last year by a team at the University of California, Berkeley, suggested that distracted users may not even notice the lights when they do turn on unexpectedly.
All of this has made physical security precautions to block out webcams and other recording devices—Zuckerberg reportedly also covers his computer's microphone—more mainstream than ever. A recent survey from virtual private network provider Hide My Ass! reported that 82% of computer users polled were concerned about webcam spying, and that 35% had already taken steps to cover their cameras.
Hide My Ass! even released a promotional webcam cover, designed to allow would-be intruders to see nothing but a static image of a cat. "Instead of just blacking out a computer's webcam with a piece of tape or a shutter, we wanted to give the public a way to protect their everyday privacy and simultaneously send a personalized message to intruders," said Cian Mckenna-Charley, the company's marketing director, in a statement.
While there's no sign that Zuckerberg and Comey themselves have ever had their webcams tampered with, the problem is more than just a theoretical worry. In 2014, a California man pleaded guilty to charges related to allegedly hacking into multiple women's computers, surreptitiously taking nude photos and attempting to blackmail his victims. Pranksters have reportedly also taken control of networked baby monitors, frightening parents and children. Computer stores have been accused of installing spying software on the devices they sell, and a Pennsylvania school district agreed in 2010 to pay more than $600,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging district employees spied on students through cameras installed on school-issued laptops.
In some cases, malware used to remotely activate webcams and spy on users has been used for international espionage, says Kevin Haley, director of security response at Norton by Symantec, the security vendor.
"We see these used by nation-states to spy on others," he says. "They're done by criminals when they get inside an organization and they want to steal something."
Hackers can even hijack webcams in offices to observe people typing in passwords, he says. The sheer size and complexity of video files means that it's generally not possible to fully automate webcam snooping—a human typically has to be on the other end actually spying to make use of the hacked device. But there are still enough hackers more than willing to actively watch webcam feeds to make such attacks a threat, he says.
And since any software tools used to disable webcams, microphones, and other input tools can generally be overridden by hackers with sufficient control over a computer, physically obscuring the devices generally does make sense, he says.
"You could turn off the driver if you knew what you were doing on the machine, but of course, if somebody's on your machine, they could turn it back on," he says, referring to the low-level software that controls the camera. "Blocking your webcam is kind of your last line of defense."
Makers of computers, phones, and other connected devices historically don't provide built-in ways to physically disable potential spy gear. It could be that they are reluctant to provide built-in ways to block cameras and microphones since it would add to the complexity of the devices—and make potential customers think of hacking risk, which is hardly a great marketing point, he suggests.
"The last thing they want to do is make you think about somebody being able to spy on you when you're trying to decide on a new computer," says Haley.
It also runs against a decades-old culture in the computing industry that emphasizes software control, rather than physical switches, in digital electronics, says Gunter Ollmann, the chief security officer at San Jose-based security firm Vectra Networks.
The risk isn't just limited to traditional webcams, says Ollmann, whose company reported on vulnerabilities in one inexpensive networked camera earlier this year. He adds that internet-enabled household tools like home security cameras and networked TVs with cameras and microphones can also be hacked. So can videoconferencing tools often installed in offices, which can sometimes be used as a gateway into other office machines.
"Those webcams themselves are compromised as if they were a computer and used for additional nefarious harm into the network it's connected to," Ollmann says. "The current generations of these technologies are still highly vulnerable to network exploitation and compromise."
In addition to taking physical steps to block or disable webcams and microphones—connecting an external microphone cord with nothing attached will often disable a laptop's internal microphone—computer users can take traditional steps like keeping firewalls and security software up to date and monitoring device makers' websites for security patches, he says. But many devices, especially those geared toward home users, simply don't deliver security updates, even if newer versions are safer, he warns.
"There's not an awful lot of product support for year-old technology in the consumer sphere," he says. "They're just not patched or updated. Security is a cost to these companies."
Ultimately, that may mean that as such devices, not to mention smartphones, and wearable recording devices like Google Glass and Snapchat Spectacles become ever more ubiquitous, people may simply learn to guard themselves around any electronics and seek deliberately private spaces for private activities, he says.
"It's not just our home to which we're deploying these technologies," says Ollmann. "They're now in our workspace and public and private areas, so we'll constantly be monitoring against these things."
When it comes to motivation, your brain is a little like a traffic light. Here's how to rewire it.
Are you a patient person? Are you sure?
Most of think we're pretty good at waiting for the things we want. But in reality, you're probably more impatient than you'd like to admit. It's hard not to get what you want right now—that's just how humans are built.
The good news is that there are a few things you can do to improve your patience. The bad news is that before you can implement them, you first need to understand where your impatience comes from. Here's how.
Your brain has two distinct systems that work in tandem to help you achieve your goals.
You can think of one as the "go system," which involves structures deep in the brain. It engages your goals, gives them energy, and directs you to focus on information related to achieving them. This system is extraordinarily efficient. On occasion, though, it engages goals you no longer want to pursue—or least don't want to pursue at that moment.
When this happens, the second system in your brain kicks in. It involves your brain's frontal lobes inhibits actions the "go system" is suggesting. You can think of this one as the "stop system," and it's generally much less effective by comparison. It's impaired by stress, drugs and alcohol, and even overuse.
So when you're impatient to get something done, it means that your "go system" has you strongly fired up to do it right now, and your "stop system" is having a hard time holding you back. The problem is that even if you successfully keep that urge at bay, you're still going to feel the discomfort of impatience—unless you find a way to disengage the go system from its dogged pursuit of the goal.
Got it? Great! Now it's time to look at a few ways of doing that . . . thanks for your patience!
The go system focuses on goals that can be achieved in the world as your brain perceives it to be. The more distant a goal is from you, the less that it motivates you. So if you can create distance between yourself and the goal, you can decrease the energy your brain's go system puts behind it.
And luckily, there are lots of ways to create distance. Obviously, physical distance can help; the adage "out of sight, out of mind" really does work. Mental distance can help move yourself out of the direct path of temptation, too. It's no secret that humans enjoy savoring the experience of being tempted, and that can put a lot of pressure on our capacity for patience. You think about all of the juicy details, which increases your desire, making you impatient.
But you don't need to become an ascetic who tries to eliminate temptation altogether. Instead, think about those temptations more abstractly. If you're lusting after a new car that you can't quite afford right now, don't obsess over its wood trim and efficient engine. It's okay to keep thinking about it, but think about it only as a vehicle or mode of transportation. Your go system will soon start to latch on to something else.
In order to help you with goal achievement, your go system also tends to focus you on just one goal at a time. That's why you get impatient. Everything else gets less important when your go system engages a particular goal strongly. That means that if you can compel your brain to fixate on a different goal, the temptation you're fighting will get less strong.
So find something else you also enjoy and immerse yourself in it. While you're pursuing that other goal, you won't feel the strong pull of impatience as badly as you did before.
It can be hard to disengage the go system all by yourself. Your natural cycle of thoughts will often bring you back to the desirable aspects of whatever you're struggling to stay patient about. Your mind creates its own vicious cycle that strengthens the go system's grip on the goal, making it harder and harder for you to avoid acting on it.
When this happens, you quite literally need help—from someone else. Humans are a social species. We're wired to give our attention to the people around us and to share their goals. When you find another person (a friend, family member, or colleague) who doesn't share your obsession, your interactions with them will lead your go system to pick up on what they want, which creates an opening for your brain's stop system to pump the brakes.
While you're with that person, you won't be the same impatient soul you were when you were alone. In this sense, anyway, training your brain to be more patient may have an unexpected side effect: it can bring people together.
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Even perennially unpopular industries can attract top talent if they know what strategies to use.
Everyone wants to work someplace interesting and exciting, but not everyone would describe every single industry that way. For better or worse, some businesses simply fail to connect with young job seekers' ambitions, dreams, and desires as well as others do. After all, few kids grow up wanting to work in insurance, but many do—and end up liking it.
Certain industries' popularity rise and fall with the times. Many of the kids who grew up during the Space Age rushed into engineering programs and wound up building Silicon Valley. On the flip side, the financial sector's hiring bonanza in the early aughts has cooled off a bit in the era of Bernie Sanders. Other industries just seem to be perennially unpopular.
But all of them still have the opportunity to make smart, passionate hires—if only they know how to seize it.
A measly 4% of millennials surveyed by The Hartford said they were interested in a career in insurance. What little the survey participants knew about the industry sounded boring. As one put it, "My idea of working in the insurance industry is kind of like older men making a lot of money, and there isn't a lot of room for creativity."
This may have no bearing on the reality, of course, but it still represents a genuine recruiting problem—so much so that insurers are collaborating in order to tackle it. The Insure My Path organization, a trade group, is working to educate new graduates about the industry and persuade them to consider working in it. While these efforts may move the needle some, it's far from the only approach that might work.
That's where "employer branding" comes in. The idea is simple: Create advertising that educates your target candidate demographic and attracts them to your job openings. To do that, you need to get your marketing and recruiting teams to play in the same sandbox. Recruiters have the stories, and marketers have the skills to bring them to life. Creating visual content that can be distributed on your social media channels helps job seekers get a better sense of what it's like to work for you. Not only does it help you get your image out there, it gives candidates a reason to trust you're a good employer.
This is crucial in less-than-popular industries. GE's "What's the matter with Owen?" campaign last year was geared to luring innovation-minded millennials to look beyond Silicon Valley's startup scene. It was a series of funny videos that were made to be shared on social. Of course, not every company has the ability to launch a national ad campaign, but the good news is that nonfiction storytelling may work just as well and cost a fraction of the resources.
Millennials abhor falsehoods (not that any generation craves them, but millennials are especially angsty about marketing wolves in sheeps' clothing). And as millennials become the dominant buying cohort for more and more companies, storytelling will become grounded in unvarnished truth.
To be sure, Baer is referring to millennials as consumers, not job seekers, and there's reason to raise an eyebrow or two at the research claiming to uncover traits and characteristics supposedly held by an entire generation. But you don't have to hold out until the definitive, longitudinal data comes in to recognize that job seekers today—no matter their age—are more likely and better equipped to "shop" for an employer than ever before.
Candidates now know they can look up your employees' profiles on LinkedIn; review ratings about your CEO and interview process on Glassdoor; and check out your company's reputation with customers on Yelp. In fact, many savvy job seekers—the ones you most want to hire—feel compelled to do so as a matter of course; it's just part of the job-search process now.
They'll follow your company's Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn feeds to see if you're a good company to work for. That gives employers a chance to get in front of job seekers in ways they couldn't before, as GE did. But it also comes with a risk: as Baer points out, the type of content you put on those channels needs to pass candidates' bullshit meters, which may be getting more sensitive. Any employer branding effort that sounds inauthentic is likely to be dismissed out of hand.
So here's a solution: Hand over your Snapchat account to current employees. This may be news for those over age 30, but "Snapchat takeovers"—where you give an ordinary employee the username and password for the day and let them document their workday—are the rage for good reason. Cisco recently gave it a try. "Snapchat allows for us to have that social conversation in a very unfiltered (pun intended), authentic, and fun way," the IT company's HR director Macy Andrews tells me, and unlike traditional marketing campaigns, it's clear that that authentic conversation cuts both ways—it's engaging for employees and prospective hires alike. After piloting the program with just a few employees, Cisco now has a waitlist of staff eager to participate.
Candidates are consumers, and vice versa. The same way that companies pay attention to customer service, it's worth thinking about the hiring process in terms of user experience (this is something Virgin Media clued into recently). So don't lose sight of that feedback loop; when you implement a recruiting strategy that attracts and impresses a large audience, you also create an opportunity to sell more of your products and services to them.
You'll know it's working when it starts generating real conversation—some of which won't be especially positive. And that's okay. Respond to your haters. Savvy job candidates don't expect you to be perfect; in fact, they'll trust you less if they can't find any potential downsides to working for you. Many companies ignore negative reviews on sites like Glassdoor, when in reality they should be jumping to respond to them. Thoughtful, balanced answers show you're listening and willing to take criticism.
It also gives you a chance to explain your side of the story, helping give candidates a wider window onto your workplace. That could hardly be more crucial for employers and industries where job seekers aren't necessarily storming the gates. In fact, one recent Glassdoor survey revealed 62% of job seekers have a more favorable view of an employer after reading their response to an employee's review on the platform.
Ultimately, the best antidote to unpopularity in the job market is simply becoming more present in it. Not only can your current employees help you do that on the cheap, they can keep you honest in the process. Since one of the biggest reasons top talent shirks certain fields is simple ignorance, anything you can do to fill in the gaps in their knowledge—and do it authentically—means winning the hiring battle even if you're losing the popularity contest.
If you want to influence others' decisions, you've got to understand the mental shortcuts they use to make them.
Your brain takes mental shortcuts all the time in order to make decisions efficiently. Because that takes place unconsciously, we can never fully control these "cognitive biases" that help us deal with the outside world—and, ultimately, survive in it. As practical as they may be, though, some of these biases can be problematic.
But the first step toward gaining a little more leverage over how your brain—and others' brains—make judgments is simply to understand the rules it follows to do so. Getting better acquainted with these three may help you become more influential with others.
Who is the brain more likely to trust: someone who has a proven track record but doesn't communicate confidently or someone with a weak history but who confidently shares their ideas? The answer may not surprise you. Carnegie Mellon researchers recently found that people are far more likely to trust someone who projects confidence, even if they don't have much of a track record to show for themselves.
Though it's alarming that we may not be as adept at judging leadership qualities as we might hope, the reason why is understandable: In order to make decisions efficiently, our brains look for signs of certainty and tend to assign our trust to those who project confidence. In effect, confidence becomes a shorthand for trustworthiness.
So the more confident you are (or even just seem) when you're presenting an idea, the more likely others are to assume it's a reliable course of action; deciding to following it will feel less risky.
This is pretty intuitive, after all. We all know that how we communicate is important, but it's easy to forget just how much it can sway perception. Often the idea that gets chosen isn't necessarily the best, it's the one that's presented most confidently.
Does the tone of voice doctors use with patients predict how likely they are to be sued for malpractice? One groundbreaking study found that surgeons who sounded glib and unconcerned were far more likely to have litigation brought against them than were those who used an empathetic tone.
Someone's tone of voice shapes our perception of what they're saying in other ways, too. In fact, my research analyzing the science behind the process of selling has found that one of the key predictors in how compelling potential customers find a sales presentation is the salesperson's voice inflections.
One of the reasons why tone of voice matters so much is because it influences how we feel, not just what we think—something researchers call "mood contagion." For instance, behavioral scientists Roland Neumann and Fritz Strack found that when listening to a speech, subjects felt more optimistic if the presenter spoke in an upbeat tone compared to a somber one.
So if you're looking to influence and persuade, it may be more effective to sound positive than to speak in a tone that suggests you're warning, criticizing, or cajoling.
There's now a wealth of scientific data suggesting that people make decisions contextually, which means that influencing others' decisions means framing their choices properly. And one of the best ways to do that is simply to prepare them to actually make a choice.
To prime the brain to make a decision, you need to focus someone's attention on the concepts you'd like them to base their decision on. For instance, a salesperson can ask potential customers, "Does it make sense why so many companies, similar to yours, choose to do business with us because of our customer satisfaction ratings?" After thinking through that question first—and reflecting on a prospective partner's satisfaction rankings—a client is now ready to make a commitment that's consistent with the value they've just affirmed.
Most of the research on how our brains make choices points to a pattern that would-be influencers need to bear in mind: The way something is presented shapes how it will be perceived and whether or not it will be acted on. If you can square your behaviors with the mental shortcuts that impact perception, your influence is likely to grow.
How the popular Stanford Designing Your Life course, now a book, is affecting mid-career professionals.
Brigid* started reading romance novels in her early teens. "It has always been my first love," she says. She embraced every fantastical sub-genre, from historical drama to paranormal. "I wanted to be swept away."
For Brigid, that love led to career success as a publicist for romance novel authors. She crisscrosses the country, promoting their books and meeting readers. When she's back home in New York, she spends time with nearby family and unwinds at home in her apartment—by reading fiction. "Which is funny, because I have to read for a living," she says. Now in her 30s, she finds herself gravitating toward contemporary romances. "You want to believe that your true love could be right round the corner, or on the subway, or looking very sexy on the beach."
Lately, she started to wonder if she should be finding more time for her life outside of work. "I always say I'm too busy," she says. Had her focus on her career come at the expense of her own relationships and interests?
Related Video: How Design Thinking Can Help You Solve Life's Wicked Problems.
That's around the time Brigid first heard about Designing Your Life, a workshop for professionals being hosted by Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. "I can't say that I'm overly concerned with the meaning of why we're here," says Brigid, "but I am concerned with what is of greatest importance to me, and how I can let the things go that are less important."
The workshop promised to give participants a new and practical perspective on how to build a joyful life, using design thinking tools and techniques. Brigid was sold. She marked the day on her calendar and started on the prework.
Last year, Fast Company was the first major publication to write about Designing Your Life, then geared toward Stanford students. Rumor had it that the course had become one of the university's most popular offerings, and its top elective. Conversations with students showed us why.
Designing Your Life, or DYL on campus, offered participants a values-based compass of their own design, and tools to navigate life's toughest decisions. In our secular age, where morality has largely disappeared from the classroom, Burnett and Evans had created space for students to articulate their beliefs and explore the implications. Their course was reinserting the idea of "vocation" into campus conversations, and colleges around the country were starting to take note.
At the time when the article appeared, Burnett and Evans were already at work on a book that would package the course into a form appropriate for "life designers" of all ages and types. Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life hit shelves last month. It's now No. 1 among the success/self-help books on Amazon—which happens to be a category that the authors disdain. "We're not going to give you some amazing epiphany. You're not going to walk away knowing the secret," says Burnett, who is also executive director of the Stanford Design Program. "Life is sort of messy."
The premise of the book is to approach your life as a designer would approach a design challenge, and go forward with a clear set of values and beliefs as your foundation. Designing Your Life is agnostic in regards to the nature of those beliefs (Burnett is atheist; Evans, Christian), but it does insist that you articulate them. As for what it means to "build" a life, Burnett and Evans contrast that idea with more familiar frameworks from business, where you "optimize" your way forward, and engineering or science, where you "solve" your way forward.
"When you are designing your life, you don't have a lot of data available, especially reliable data about your future," they write. "Traditional cause-and-effect thinking won't work."
Their solution is to encourage prototyping, the process central to design thinking. "There's somebody already doing the thing you want to do, they're in your future," Burnett says. He and Evans encourage readers to find that somebody, and interview or shadow them.
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In conjunction with the launch of their book, Burnett and Evans have been leading workshops at companies large and small. Mid-career professionals, as it turns out, are as eager as young college students to find their vocation and derive a sense of purpose and satisfaction from their work. The difference, post-college, is that many of us feel stuck. As new responsibilities pile on—car, kids, mortgage, retirement—our dreams seem to drift out of reach.
Kyle Williams, who served as a teaching assistant for the Designing Your Life course while he was a Stanford d.school graduate student, might have started to feel stuck in that way if it hadn't been for the lessons he learned from the course. Now married with a 20-month-old daughter, he is working as a stay-at-home parent while his wife completes a one-year postdoctoral fellowship.
"This is what I do now. I get breakfast for my daughter, we go to the park, she plays on the swings." In the afternoon, after Elsie's two-hour nap, they might visit the library ("they have these tubs with amazing toys") or go for an afternoon jog. Then it's dinner, bathtime, and bed. "It's different metrics," he says of the type of satisfaction he feels at the end of the day.
He and his wife agreed on the arrangement because they know that they'll be on the move again in a matter of months. For the last two years they lived in Athens, Georgia—near family, but far from his professional network. "I think a lot of people think of Designing Your Life as the thing that helps them find the dream job," Williams says.
The reality is more complicated and more rewarding. "There are lot of different lives for me," he says. "I don't feel pressure to get the perfect design job at the perfect design agency." In Athens, he landed a job at a local nonprofit and discovered he loved the work. Going forward, he feels confident that following a similar search process, focused on "being in the conversation somehow and telling your story well," will lead to similar outcomes. "I don't have any idea where I'll end up," says Williams, "but I know it will be really good."
For those arriving at Designing Your Life later in life, the book paves the way for defining success in new ways.
"I'm not a person who meditates. I'm not a person who subscribes to life coaches—I kind of roll my eyes," says Susan*, a sales manager at a large technology company. "I'm very logical, very data-driven. New age stuff doesn't really speak to me."
Yet she was willing to give Designing Your Life a chance when it showed up in workshop form at her employer—in part because she was encouraged by the career success that Evans, a cofounder of Electronic Arts, and Bennett had enjoyed. "They're very accomplished professionals, their resumes have all the checkmarks," she says, "but they also excel equally on the other stuff."
Parts of the workshop, like the idea of prototyping, came naturally to Susan. "Doing things quickly and on the cheap is in my genes, that really stuck with me." But for others, she needed a bit of coaching from Evans, who stays in regular touch with dozens of his students. He encouraged her to pay more attention to her instincts, particularly when feeling stuck or indecisive. "When I have a decision, don't ignore the gut. Listen to those good feelings." With his prompting, she and her husband are now thinking long-term about finding a way to live in Santa Fe, a town that they both love.
At a workshop in New York last month, several dozen mid-career professionals converged on a Friday morning over coffee and donuts for the half-day version of Designing Your Life. Each had completed a deceptively simple two-part assignment: write your life view and your work view. Participants arranged themselves in groups of three to discuss what they had written, coworkers turned sudden confidantes. Among their comments:
"I had a really hard time making the life view personal to me."
"Me too! I felt so inauthentic."
"Once you start writing stuff down it starts to sound trite, like a pageant speech."
"I don't think I reflect very often."
By the end of the morning, they were helping one another prototype ways to start a pie shop or become a fitness instructor.
Burnett closed the workshop by reminding the group that they would ultimately need to make choices about how to build their lives—and then let go and move on. "What you choose makes you happy," he advised. Chasing after "having it all," the impossible dream, will only serve to poison the good things.
For Brigid, who also completed a half-day workshop with her colleagues, the course brought her true goals into focus. Yes, there are personal projects she'd like to pursue, like mapping her family tree and maybe at some point setting aside time for dating. But she also realized that devoting herself to work she enjoys is nothing to be ashamed of, regardless of what others might say or think.
"The work stuff I feel even more confident in, I should take that seriously and authentically," she says. "I'm incredibly ambitious, I love being the boss." She also gained insight into how her peers think about their goals. "I feel that so strongly I tend to assume that others want the same thing," she admits. "That's just not true."
The workshop also alleviated the pressure she has sometimes felt to back away from work and from her beloved romance novels to find a match of her own. "Someone to share my life with—it's okay if that's not my priority this year. I can take the plunge with a little more confidence when the other areas of my life are balanced out."
In the span of a morning, she has a new mantra. "There are many possible yous. I can always make different choices in the future, but whichever one I choose now is perfectly alright."
*Note: Names have been changed throughout this article to protect workshop participants' privacy.
Here's how to nail the "living" part of "living the dream."
When many people are asked what their "dream job" might be, the answer often involves becoming their own boss. It often doesn't matter in what field—the main allure is no longer having any superiors to answer to. In fact, according to one recent study, 29 million Americans are considering going independent in the near future. But it's a pretty fair bet that not all of them will.
That's understandable. There's no one formula that makes being independent work for everybody who tries it. But one of the trickiest hurdles is to translate your "dream job" notion of self-employment into a sustainable—and still personally satisfying—reality. Here's what that takes.
Perhaps the hardest lesson most independent workers learn is also one of the first that they face: That your "dream job," whatever it consists of, takes hard work to realize and usually isn't what you thought it would be once you've finally realized it.
You'll have to overcome decision fatigue as you make choice after choice, often without much experience or information to go by. You'll learn how to set priorities, and value and price your work. Plus—and perhaps most arresting of all—instead of one boss (yourself), you'll actually have several, in the form of clients, each with their own requests. Paradoxically enough, having control over everything in your professional life can be thrilling and paralyzing at once. And after the initial euphoria of self-employment wears off, you may worry that you made a mistake.
The knowledge you acquired in order to become an expert in your field isn't the same as the skills required of a business owner. Learning a whole new skill set is likely to make you feel incompetent. That can lead to self-doubt, which can tank your entire effort if you aren't careful. Bear in mind that this anxiety is normal and temporary.
Getting past it, though, takes recognizing that once you have settled into independent work, you probably won't describe it as your dream job—but you'll still enjoy it. Most independents find that after mastering the practical realities of working for themselves, they wouldn't trade it for anything.
Building a sustainable business doing exactly the kind of work you want to do takes time. Your first clients and projects may not be ideal. Give yourself plenty of financial runway. While reducing your debt is critical, having cash on hand is actually more important for independents. This might sound counterintuitive. Obviously, having no debt is ideal but isn't always practical. Money in the bank makes you feel less desperate so you don't have to take just any prospect that comes your way.
Soon after going solo, you may also find that you need to pay off debts at a slower rate than you'd like while building a solid financial base. Having cash reserves helps here, too. That helps you ride out the natural fluctuations you'll inevitably meet with in the early stages of business. This way you won't find yourself white-knuckling it with a carton of ice cream in one hand and the other furiously tapping your keyboard as you search the internet for a job.
Most aspiring solopreneurs' daydreams don't feature the fact that everything—including bringing in revenue—rests squarely on our own shoulders. Selling is a new skill for most independents. It's easy to rely on your existing contacts for those initial clients, but when the friend well runs dry, you may not know whether to go to events, adopt a content marketing strategy, start a blog, or all of the above.
Trying out an array of business-building methods for the first time can drain you. While there are some general recipes for business success, the specific strategies that work vary tremendously from person to person. So take time to think about what you naturally enjoy so you can apply those skills to the type of promotion you'll need to adopt.
This goes for other parts of your business, too. Know your strengths and put them to use—including in functions for which you may not have applied them yet. Then automate or outsource tasks you hate or just aren't good at, as well as scheduling, building a website, or writing copy as the case may be. Just because your business's success or failure is all on you doesn't mean that every single task needs to be done by your own two hands.
One of the biggest surprises for independents is finding ourselves sitting at home, unsure how to proceed.
Untethered for the first time, and having to create all the rules from scratch, can be disorienting. You may begin to realize how much of your career and work style has actually been dictated by someone else. Many of the norms of 9-to-5 work are vestiges of the Industrial Revolution, and reflect the exigencies of factory management more than those of 21st-century knowledge work. The work habits you've fallen into may not serve you so well when you've dramatically changed the context in which you're applying them.
To adjust to being taken off autopilot for the first time, keep asking yourself these four questions. It's okay if the answers change over time—the key is to gradually get reacquainted with the new, self-employed you:
Are you best in tiny bursts throughout the day or long stretches that begin at a certain time of day?
Do you work best in total silence or amid the hum in a coffee shop?
Do you need to go into an office, or are you disciplined enough to avoid distractions at home?
What depletes your energy?
Finally, don't be disillusioned if working for yourself doesn't look exactly as you expected. We tend to build up our "dream jobs" to such a degree that some measure of disappointment may be inevitable. But it doesn't have to do you in.
Once you understand your main assets and how to get the best out of yourself, your work will come pretty darn close to the stuff of your dreams—and way better than wishing for a different life.
Parachute's "hotel" will be a cozy space for community dinners, workshops, speaker series, and also, a place to spend the night if you want.
Today's shoppers have made it clear they prefer to buy products online, rather than schlepping to a store. Experts are even predicting that a third of all malls will be shuttered in the next few years.
Yet many brands that first started online made the deliberate decision to open physical spaces. Everlane has launched "Shoe Parks," which the company describes as urban retreats where you can kick off your shoes and try on the brand's selection. Luggage brand Away opened a concept store with curated products, live performances, and speaker series related to traveling. And Warby Parker, a brand famously built for the internet, is quickly expanding its retail locations across the country.
Bedsheet brand Parachute wanted to come up with its own twist on the brick-and-mortar concept. In May, when Parachute opened its first store, founder and CEO Ariel Kaye noticed how guests would bond was by playing around with the bedding and towels together. "Young couples would come in together and spend an hour asking lots of questions and mixing and matching different prints in a way that they would not feel comfortable doing online," she says.
Some guests would buy sheets on the spot, while others would do so later, online. The actual purchasing experience though, seemed almost secondary. Guests were much more interested in spending a fun afternoon together, learning about bedding, and relaxing in a cozy place. Kaye was excited that she had created a place where people really seemed to enjoy spending time, and wanted to find other ways to do this.
When the loft above Parachute's offices in Venice, California became available, Kaye came up with the idea of turning it into a small boutique hotel. It was so small, in fact, that it would only have one room. "We're using the term "hotel" very loosely," Kaye says.
A number of lifestyle brands have recently announced that they are launching hotel chains. said it was starting its own chain. Before that, Restoration Hardware, Equinox, and Shinola all announced they were getting into the hotel business. (They are each partnering with hotel management companies who will actually run the hotels' daily operations.)
Parachute's new concept is going to be quite different from these others, which have much more in common with traditional hospitality companies like Hilton or Marriott. At the 2,200-square-foot Parachute Hotel, guests will be able to reserve the space for overnight stays, at a cost of $600 a night, and receive tailored itineraries for their stay in Venice. Since the room will be outfitted with Parachute sheets and towels, it will give these guests an opportunity to experience the product range and live in the brand's world. If all goes well, these guests could become powerful influencers and advocates for Parachute.
But Kaye envisions the space as being much more than a hotel. She wants it to be a real home in the middle of the Venice neighborhood that will also serve as a community center. "We're trying to create a narrative about our relationship with this community that is about more than just transaction," she says.
As such, the hotel will serve as a gathering place for dinners, workshops, and speaker series that will be open to the local community. Some of these events will be ticketed, which will provide another revenue stream for the brand. But all of these activities will be connected to what the brand stands for: home, comfort, high quality, and a particular design aesthetic. This might mean a flower arranging workshop or a wine tasting event. Or the space might transform into an art gallery featuring the work of a local artist.
Kaye says such collaborations with artists and designers are very important. The hotel will be outfitted with furniture and art from other independent designers that share Parachute's modern, gender-neutral aesthetic. "We're really excited to showcase brands that wouldn't otherwise be able to present their designs or furniture in L.A. because they don't have a store or a showroom," she says.
For Kaye, the business value of this space is that it allows her team to get to know her customer in a more intimate way, which will help as they develop new products. It will also help them shape and express the brand's point of view, then allow other people to physically step into it.
She believes the space will translate into revenue, both by holding paid events there and because visitors will want to buy a piece of a Parachute lifestyle. There will also be other intangible benefits that are harder to quantify. The Parachute Hotel is one way to move the brick-and-more store into the future, which is really not like a "store" at all. "We see it as a place to creatively express who we are as a brand," says Kaye. "We are a home brand, so creating a one-bedroom home allows people to experience Parachute's values."
If a court rules that photographer Carol Highsmith must pay to publish her own work, it sets a scary precedent for public-domain art.
Could a copyright lawsuit involving a renowned photographer of American iconography enable a new kind of scam in which ne'er-do-wells send out threatening letters demanding licensing fees for public-domain works—and that those actions are both legal and unstoppable? It could, in the form of an unintentional side effect that has cropped up at the edges of copyright law.
The case involves photographer Carol Highsmith, whose work you'd recognize even if you've never heard the name. Sometimes called "America's photographer," she's taken iconic photos of scenes from the White House to the saguaros in the Sonoran Desert to oversized roadside attractions. She was surprised to receive a letter in December 2015 from a company called License Compliance Services on behalf of the photo-licensing agency Alamy demanding that she pay a licensing fee for the use, on her foundation's website, of one of her own works.
The surprise was twofold: Not just that it was her photograph, but also that, since she'd turned over her photographs for free use by the public years before, to her mind, nobody could charge for them, much less insist on a license. Highsmith had dedicated her work to the public starting in 1988, which was formalized through an agreement signed in 1991 with the Library of Congress (LOC). In the intervening years, she has supplemented the initial offer with additional gifts.
Her shock wore off after she spoke with a representative of the firm attempting to collect payment—and it turned into ire. So she called her attorneys and filed suit on July 25 of this year, demanding statutory copyright damages from several companies that list her work for resale or issue demand letters for rights payments. This includes a claim against Getty Images that could go well over a billion dollars, since the agency offers 18,755 of her photos for licensing. Highsmith's suit seeks substantial but far lower sums against Alamy and the licensing contractors. (An amended filing from August 17 throws in more: Allegations of "false advertising and unfair competition" under federal and New York state law, which involve additional potential damages, though not on the scale of the alleged copyright violations.)
But can Highsmith sue for copyright damages if she donated her work to the LOC? The suit largely hinges on the ineffability of the public domain.
And should Highsmith be unable to sue effectively, it might open the door to much broader, more illicit attempts to demand fees—not by Getty Images and other legitimate stock-photo firms, but by those who know they have no right to collect them.
In her 1991 LOC agreement, Highsmith wrote: "I hereby dedicate to the public all rights, including copyrights throughout the world, that I possess in this collection."
Jennifer Jenkins, the director of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at the Duke University School of Law, says that there's no specific statutory language that lets a copyright holder define something as free of copyright. The general convention, she says, is that there has to be "an intent to abandon copyright and an overt act of intent to abandon copyright." Jenkins says that the initial portion of Highsmith's contract clearly encompass both.
If so, it's impossible for her to prove infringement, because "there can only be infringement if there's copyright," Jenkins notes. The Library of Congress even notes on a rights and restrictions page for the Highsmith collection that "Carol M. Highsmith's photographs are in the public domain," which would back that interpretation.
"It sounds to me like she successfully dedicated her copyright to the public, in which case she has nothing left as leverage," says Robert Brauneis, a copyright and constitutional expert and professor at George Washington University Law School, whose 2010 research into the ownership of "Happy Birthday to You" contributed significantly to that song finally being deemed effectively in the public domain. (Brauneis is currently consulting on suits filed by the "Happy Birthday" plaintiffs' attorneys to have two other classic songs declared free of copyright.)
In a motion to dismiss filed September 6, Getty Images noted, "Plaintiffs' four claims against Getty Images . . . are all an attempt to regain some measure of legal protection for the Highsmith Photos that Plaintiff Highsmith relinquished years ago." (When asked to comment, Highsmith referred Fast Company to her attorney, who didn't respond to questions about the suit. Getty declined to comment due to active litigation.)
Jenkins says, "It seems like Getty did something wrong. They took photos that are not theirs and put their watermark on them and charged people for them . . . [but] it's not illegal to charge people for public domain works." Getty cited a number of examples, including public-domain books sold on Amazon.com.
However, the public domain is a slippery place. It's more readily defined by an absence: work that no longer has copyright protection. Work that has fallen into the public domain includes all published items in the U.S. up to 1922, and an increasingly smaller amount of work over the next 64 years. Almost nothing since has entered the public domain without intent. Everything else requires research.
The U.S. Copyright Office, a division of the LOC, won't provide any guidance to those asking whether a given book, photograph, movie, or other work remains under copyright, be it donated or lapsed. It doesn't register donated works, either, so there's no central registry for work like Highsmith's. The Library of Congress specifically declined to comment about Highsmith's copyright, citing pending litigation.
It might seem that this situation is crystal clear, since Highsmith signed an agreement that she appended to her lawsuit. But after the seemingly unambiguous statement that she signed in 1991 to donate rights to her photos, things get murky in that document. Jenkins notes that the public domain dedication "could plausibly be contradicted by other parts of instrument of gift that placed restrictions that indicate she still is retaining other rights."
And that's what Highsmith's amended lawsuit argues: She never intended to abandon her copyright at all, because following the dedication noted in her 1991 contract, she also required attribution:
The Library will request, through its standard procedures, that when material in the Archive is reproduced by those who have obtained reproductions credit be given as follows: The Library of Congress, Carol M. Highsmith Archive.
Highsmith added in her amended suit in August that she didn't have the benefit of counsel while writing her 1991 agreement, implying that it's not legally precise enough to constitute a dedication. Jenkin says, "There's going to be a lot of room for interesting arguments."
Assuming that the judge in the case doesn't agree with Getty Images that the Highsmith suit should be dismissed, the court will ostensibly decide whether she retains any rights before this even reaches a jury stage. If so, the case proceeds in a fairly straightforward way. For the billion-dollar-and-change alleged misuse of copyright that Highsmith levies, she has to prove that the photo agencies not only falsified the copyright notice for her images (by labeling some of them as oddly as "Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Buyenlarge/Getty Images" or omitting her name altogether), but also that they did so with the intent to infringe on her rights, rather than by lack of attention to detail. In the other non-copyright allegations that have lower damages attached, there's less need to prove intent.
But here's where things once again get tricky. A court decision could spawn a new email and snail-mail scam that would be tacitly legal and impossible to fight.
If a court finds Highsmith did dedicate the work into the public domain and that because she has no ownership of the work, she has no grounds to pursue action for "false advertising and unfair competition," "deceptive acts or practices," and so on, as alleged in the suit, then anyone can send out demand letters for licensing fees for any public-domain work without any basis in reality. For instance, a publishing house could receive a licensing-fee demand for printing an edition of Shakespeare's Macbeth or, more insidiously plausible, one of the 46 Sherlock Holmes short stories that have lapsed into the public domain in the United States.
Someone receiving such a letter would have no way to know whether or not it could be safely ignored. And if the recipient researched the copyright and hired an attorney, there might be no way to have a lawsuit heard, should the Highsmith case set a precedent.
Brauneis says that if a court finds copyright law is paramount, and that without a violation under a section of the Copyright Act, "there's no other cause of action that can be brought, that essentially declares anybody can go into the business of selling the Brooklyn Bridge to people."
A victim of such seeming fraud would have no recourse because without an owner to pursue action under copyright law, there wouldn't be any other basis. Brauneis finds this potential "morally abhorrent," but sees it as an unfortunate possible outcome. He notes, "All those emails that come from Nigeria about cash someone had discovered, would all be about: You need to license from me."
This case received a lot of attention at its initial filing because of Highsmith's reputation and her stirring photos of U.S. symbols. Both Jenkins and Brauneis agree that it's not the cold legal facts that have provoked so much public discussion and outrage. "It makes a case emotionally," Jenkins says. Furthering that idea, Brauneis notes, "It generates sympathy to say, 'I was trying to give this to the public, and you greedy people reprofitized.'"
Highsmith certainly didn't intend this potential outcome, and a savvy judge should be able to avoid creating a path for enabling scams. But it reveals the amorphous borders of the public domain: An inexhaustible commons that could have fraudulent toll booths erected all around it.
AI systems are beginning to acquire emotions. But whether that means they deserve human-type rights is the subject of a thorny debate.
When writing the screenplay for 1968's 2001, Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were confident that something resembling the sentient, humanlike HAL 9000 computer would be possible by the film's namesake year. That's because the leading AI experts of the time were equally confident.
Clarke and Kubrick took the scientific community's predictions to their logical conclusion, that an AI could have not only human charm but human frailty as well: HAL goes mad and starts offing the crew. But HAL was put in an impossible situation, forced to hide critical information from its (his?) coworkers and ordered to complete the mission to Jupiter no matter what. "I'm afraid, Dave," says the robot as it's being dismantled by the surviving astronaut.
If humans had more respect for the emotions that they themselves gave to HAL, would things have turned out better? And will that very question ever be more than an experiment in thought?
The year 2001 came and went, with an AI even remotely resembling HAL looking no more realistic than that Jovian space mission (although Elon Musk is stoking hopes). The disappointment that followed 1960's optimism led to the "AI Winter"—decades in which artificial intelligence researchers received more derision than funding. Yet the fascination with humanlike AI is as strong as ever in popular consciousness, manifest in the disembodied voice of Samantha in the movie Her, the partial humanoid Eva in Ex Machina, and the whole town full of robot people in HBO's new reboot of the 1973 sci-fi Western Westworld.
Today, the term "artificial intelligence" is ferociously en vogue again, freed from winter and enjoying the blazing heat of an endless summer. AI now typically refers to such specialized tools as machine-learning systems that scarf data and barf analysis. These technologies are extremely useful—even transformative—for the economy and scientific endeavors like genetic research, but they bear virtually no resemblance to HAL, Samantha, Eva, or Dolores from Westworld.
Yet despite the mainstream focus on narrow applications of artificial intelligence—machine learning (à la IBM's Watson) and computer vision (as in Apple's new smart Photos app in iOS 10)—there is a quiet revolution happening in what's called artificial general intelligence. AGI does a little bit of everything and has some personality and even emotions that allow it to interact naturally with humans and develop motivations to solve problems in creative ways.
"It's not about having the fastest planner or the system that can process the most data and do learning from it," says Paul Rosenbloom, professor of computer science at the University of Southern California. "But it is trying to understand what is a good enough version of each of those capabilities that are compatible with each other and can work together well in order to yield this overall intelligence."
Instead of focusing efforts on one or a few superhuman tasks, such as rapid image analysis, AGI puts humanlike common sense and problem-solving where it is sorely lacking today. AGI may power virtual robots like Samantha and HAL or physical robots—though the latter will probably look more like a supersmart Mars rover than Alicia Vikander, the actress who plays Ex Machina's alluring, deadly Eva. As AGI grows more sophisticated, so will the questions of how we should treat it.
"At some point you have to recognize that you have a system that has its own being in the sense of—well, not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of the ability to take on responsibilities and have rights," says Rosenbloom. "At that point it's no longer a tool, and if you treat it as a tool, it's a slave."
We're still a long way from that. Rosenbloom's AI platform, called Sigma, is just beginning to replicate parts of a human mind. At the university's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), he shows me a demonstration in which a thief tries to figure out how to rob a convenience store and a security guard tries to figure out how to catch the thief. But the two characters were just primitive shapes darting around a sparse 3D environment—looking like the world's dullest video game.
Robots aren't people, but the discussion has begun about whether they could be persons, in the legal sense. In May, a European Union committee report called for creating an agency and rules around the legal and ethical uses of robots. The headline grabber was a suggestion that companies pay payroll taxes on their robotic employees, to support the humans who lose their jobs. But the report goes a lot deeper, mostly setting rules to protect humans from robots—like crashing cars or drones, or just invading privacy.
The proposal goes sci-fi when it looks at the consequences of robots becoming ever more autonomous, able to learn in ways not foreseen by their creators and make their own decisions. It reads, "Robots' autonomy raises the question of their nature in the light of the existing legal categories—of whether they should be regarded as natural persons, legal persons, animals, or objects—or whether a new category should be created, with its own specific features and implications as regards the attribution of rights and duties, including liability for damage."
Adding emotions isn't just a fun experiment: It could make virtual and physical robots that communicate more naturally, replacing the awkwardness of pressing buttons and speaking in measured phrases with free-flowing dialog and subtle signals like facial expressions. Emotions can also make a computer more clever by producing that humanlike motivation to stick with solving a problem and find unconventional ways to approach it.
Rosenbloom is beginning to apply Sigma to the ICT's Virtual Humans program, which creates interactive, AI-driven 3D avatars. A virtual tutor with emotion, for instance, could show genuine enthusiasm when a student does well and unhappiness if a student is slacking off. "If you have a virtual human that doesn't exhibit emotions, it's creepy. It's called uncanny valley, and it won't have the impact it's supposed to have," Rosenbloom says.
Robots can also stand in for humans in role playing. ICT, which is largely funded by the U.S. military, has developed a training tool for the Navy called INOTS (Immersive Naval Officer Training System). It uses a virtual human avatar in the form of a sailor, Gunner's Mate Second Class (GM2) Jacob Cabrillo, in need of counseling. Junior officers speak with Cabrillo, who is based on 3D scans of a real person, in order to practice how they would counsel people under their command. About 12,000 sailors have trained in the program since it started in 2012. INOTS draws from a deep reserve of canned replies, but the troubled sailor already presents a pretty convincing facsimile of real emotion.
Virtual sailor GM2 Cabrillo uses speech recognition, basic AI, and a huge library of responses to conduct what appears to be a free-flowing dialog.
In other cases, a robot provides the therapy. Ross Mead, founder and CEO of startup Semio, is building a kind of socially astute operating system (yet to be named) for physical robots. Increasingly, robots will serve people with special needs, such as caring for stroke victims or children with autism. They will need empathy to be effective in cases like assisting someone with partial paralysis. According to Mead, "The robot would try and monitor which arm they're using and say, 'Hey, I know it's tough, let me give you some feedback. What if you try this one? I know it's going to take a little while, but it's going to be okay.'"
Robots can show emotions without actually having emotions, though. "Robots are now designed to exhibit emotion," says Patrick Lin, director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University. "When we say robots have emotion, we don't mean they feel happy or sad or have mental states. This is shorthand for, they seem to exhibit behavior that we humans interpret as such and such."
A good example is the Japanese store robot Pepper, the first robot designed to recognize and respond to human emotions, but it's pretty basic. By analyzing video and audio, the adorable bot can recognize four human emotions: happiness, joy, sadness, and anger. Pepper tailors its responses in accordance, making chitchat, telling jokes, and encouraging customers to buy. More than 10,000 of the robots are at work in Japan and Europe, and there are plans to bring them to the U.S. as well.
There are arguments for giving robots real emotions—and not only to create a more relatable user experience. Emotions can power a smarter bot by providing motivation to solve problems. Los Angeles-based programmer Michael Miller is building yet another AI architecture, called Piagetian Modeler. It's inspired by the work of psychologist Jean Piaget, who studied early childhood development and how disruption of the environment leads to surprise and the need to investigate. "When you're in harmony with it, when you're at one with your environment, you're not learning anything," says Miller. "It's when you have troubles or problems, when contradictions arise, when you expect one thing, and you're surprised, that's when you begin to learn."
This ability could make more capable autonomous robots that can think for themselves when unforeseen obstacles arise far from home, like on Earth's sea floor, on the surface of Mars, or in the ocean under the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa (where scientists believe life may exist). HAL may yet get to Jupiter, and before the humans.
We're a long way from HAL of 2001, but there is already concern that autonomous robots could go rogue.
"Part of the whole emotional system are what are called appraisals," says Rosenbloom. "They're: How do you assess what's going on in various ways so you can determine the kind of surprise and the level of surprise and the level of danger?" Those appraisals then lead to more emotions in a process of reacting to the environment that's more flexible and creative than hard, cold logic. "[Emotion is] there to force you to work in certain ways which you don't realize the wisdom of, but over the development of your species or whatever, you determine it's important for your survival or success," he says.
That sounds like a stretch to Bernie Meyerson, IBM's chief innovation officer, when I ask him about these ideas. "What you just described is work prioritization," he says. "If you couch it as, it's got feelings, it feels an urgency—no, it just prioritized my job over yours."
"This is the thing about artificial consciousness," says Jonathan Nolan, co-creator of HBO's Westworld. "It's that the programmers themselves don't want to talk about it because it's not helpful. I get the feeling they consider it a bit of a sideshow."
While some tech and scientific luminaries like Elon Musk and Steven Hawking worry about computers taking over, many people have more prosaic worries, like that Siri or Alexa won't understand their accent. There's still a wide gap between a chatbot and Samantha from Her. It's unclear when, if ever, the gap could be crossed. "Nobody knows when artificial general intelligence is going to happen," says Miller. "It's going to happen gradually and then suddenly." Technical polymath and ardent futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that the Singularity, machines that outstrip all human abilities, will arrive by the 2020s. Rosenbloom is less sanguine. "We never know what hard problems we haven't run into yet," he says. "I'm pretty confident we'll do it within a hundred years. Within 20 years? I don't have much confidence at all."
Others say a conscious AGI will never happen. "It's a pretty high bar to say something actually has a right," says Patrick Lin, director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University. "Today, we would think that in order to have a right, you would have to be a person." Lin cites the work of philosopher Mary Anne Warren, who listed five demanding criteria for personhood: consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, capacity to communicate, the presence of self-concepts, and self-awareness.
Warrren's criteria are tricky, though. She used them to make the moral case in favor of abortion, saying that a fetus exhibited none of these abilities. Clearly, many people disagree with her definition of personhood. Also, Warren said that at least some, but not necessarily all, of these criteria are required. An AI with emotional drivers could reason, be self motivated, and communicate. Having consciousness and self-awareness are the intellectual and philosophical stumbling blocks.
In Westworld, the robots aren't just scary. Sometimes they are scared.
"No robot in the near or foreseeable future that I'm aware of has any degree of consciousness or mental state," says Patrick Lin. "Even if they did, it's almost improvable." Lin cites the philosophical problem of other minds: I can satisfy myself that I am conscious and exist. As Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." But I can't know for certain that anyone else has a consciousness and inner life. "If we can't even prove other humans have consciousness, there's no chance we're going to prove a machine, with a different makeup, composition has any degree of consciousness."
Lisa Joy, who co-created Westworld with Nolan (her husband), agrees that we have a poor understanding of consciousness or sentience. "One of the most consistent defining qualities of sentience is that we define it as human, as the thing that we possess that others do not," she says with a chuckle.
Miller isn't sure if future robots will reach the level of adult humans. Neither is Rosenbloom. "What you need, in my view, is actually a theory of not only intelligence, but of what kinds of rights and responsibilities to associate with different forms of intelligence," says Rosenbloom. "So already we know that children have different rights and responsibilities than adults and animals likewise."
Lin, holding to the point that only persons have rights, nonetheless recognizes certain responsibilities toward other creatures. "Just because you have a duty does not imply a right," he says. "I can talk about a duty not to kick my cat without claiming that my cat has rights." This could carry over to a robotic cat or dog as well. Even if it isn't alive, in the traditional sense, there's a duty not to abuse it. Or is there?
"You realize that people are coded differently on this sort of empathy scale," says Joy. "Even among friends that we asked, they were all over the spectrum when they thought it was transgressive to do something [cruel] to a robot."
Unlike other wearable cameras, these sunglasses don't try to do too much—and that could help them take off where others have failed.
For years, Snapchat has offered effects that allow a range of silly augmentations to its users' on-screen faces. But soon, its facial accessories will extend to real life.
At an expected price of about $130, Spectacles will cost a fraction of what that last celebrated piece of geeky headwear, Google Glass, went for. A key reason for the price difference is that the Spectacles lack the augmented reality electronics that Glass had. But it was Glass's ability to capture photos and videos that freaked people out, even though such capabilities have positive applications. Capturing snapshots and short videos is at the heart of Spectacles, which help tip off people that you're recording by showing a light.
Beyond their consumer-friendly price tag, Spectacles are far better poised for success than Google Glass, for a few reasons. These include their more traditional, even playful look. (That said, they are not stylish or practical enough to be a constant option for spontaneous video capture without a smartphone.) Unlike Glass or even the smartwatches drawing most of the attention these days, Snap, Inc.—the company formerly known as Snapchat—isn't trying to be a platform for other companies' apps. No reliance on third-party developers can make it easier for a product to get out of the gate, even if it can prove a liability in the long run. Regardless of whether you want it, you know what it does.
Despite being a wearable camera, the Spectacles are not intended for record-your-whole-life life-logging, a task that led to the undoing of hardware startups Autographer and Narrative, even as another such device recently cleared the crowdfunding rite of passage. The use case for Spectacles is more similar to that of Looxcie, another conspicuous wearable camera that struggled in the consumer market after several major design revisions. But Looxcie never hit the Spectacles' price point or had at its disposal an audience of more than 100 million consumers already using its companion app. Spectacles also arrives as Snapchat and its rivals are embracing live personal broadcasting.
That makes the Spectacles more of a cousin to GoPro's action cameras, intended to be used in particular situations, as opposed to the cyborg-evoking Glass that, at one point at least, was intended to be an all-day user interface to the real world. The gadget still needs to carve out a position between GoPro's enthusiast market and the ultimate mass market of the ever-present, ever-improving cameras built into smartphones. If it fails to do so, it wouldn't be the first time a hot social network stumbled in hardware or incited ridicule. And unless it avoids such missteps, Spectacles may prove as ephemeral as Snapchat's photos.
An experienced hiring manager explains what makes her eyes glaze over and what grabs her attention.
I've read a lot of cover letters throughout my career. When I was a fellowship program manager, I reviewed them in consideration for more than 60 open positions each year. So I saw it all—the good, the bad, and the standout examples that I can still remember.
As a result, I've become the go-to friend when people need feedback on their job applications. Based on my own experience putting people in the "yes" (and "no") pile, I'm able to give these cover letters a quick scan and immediately identify what'll turn a hiring manager off.
While I can't give you insight into every person's head who'll be reading your materials, I can share with you the feedback that I give my own loved ones.
First things first, I skim the document for anything that could be disqualifying. That includes typos, a "Dear Sir or Madam" or "To Whom It May Concern" salutation, or a vibe so non-specific that it reeks of find-replace. I know it seems harsh, but when a hiring manager sees any one of these things, she reads it as, "I didn't take my time with this, and I don't really care about working here." So she's likely to pass.
Another thing I look for in this initial read-through is tone. Even if you're applying to your dream company, you don't want to come off like you think someone entertaining your candidacy is the same as him offering you water at the end of a lengthy hike. You don't need to thank the hiring manager so incredibly much for reading your application—that's his job. If you align considering your application with the biggest favor ever, you'll make the other person think it's because you're desperate.
So, skip effusive thanks and demonstrate genuine interest by writing a cover letter that connects the dots between your experience and the requirements of the position. Telling the reader what you've accomplished and how it directly translates to meeting the company's needs is always a better use of space than gushing.
If your first line reads: "I am writing to apply for [job] at [company]," I will delete it and suggest a swap every time. (Yes, every single time.) When a hiring manager sees that, she won't think, "How thoughtful of the applicant to remind me what I'm reading!" Her reaction will be much closer to, "boring," "meh," or even "next!"
Compare it to one of these statements:
I've wanted to work in education ever since my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Dorchester, helped me discover a love of reading.
My approach to management is simple: I strive to be the kind of leader I'd want to work for.
In my three years at [prior company], I increased our average quarterly sales by [percentage].
See how these examples make you want to keep reading? That's half the battle right there. Additionally, it makes you memorable, which'll help when you're competing against a sea of applicants.
To try it out for yourself, pick a jumping-off point. It could be something about you or an aspect of the job description that you're really drawn to. Then, open a blank document and just free-write (translation: write whatever comes to mind) for 10 minutes. Some of the sentences you come up with will sound embarrassing or lame: That's fine—no one has to see those! Look for the sentence that's most engaging and see how it reads as the opening line for your cover letter.
Most often, people send me just their cover letter and resume, so I don't have the benefit of reviewing the position description. And yet, whenever a letter follows the format of "I am skilled at [skill], [skill], [skill], as evidenced by my time at [place]." Or "You're looking for [skill], and I am a talented [skill], " I could pretty much re-create it. Surprise: that's actually not a good thing.
Again, the goal isn't just to show you're qualified: It's to make the case that you're more qualified than all the other applicants. You want to make clear what distinguishes you, so the hiring manager can see why you're worth following up with to learn more. And—again—you want to be memorable.
If you write a laundry list, it'll blend into every other submission formatted the same way. So, just like you went with a unique opener, do the same with your examples. Sure, you might still include lists of skills, but break those up with anecdotes or splashes of personality.
Here's a real, two-line excerpt from a cover letter I've written before:
If I'm in a conference room and the video isn't working, I'm not the sort to simply call IT and wait. I'll also (gracefully) crawl under the table, and check that everything is properly plugged in.
A couple lines like this will not only lighten up your letter, but also highlight your soft skills. I got the point across that I'm a take-charge problem solver, without saying, "I'm a take-charge problem solver." Plus the "(gracefully)" shows that I don't take myself too seriously—even in a job application. If your submission follows the same list-type format all the way through, see if you can't pepper in an example or anecdote that'll add some personality.
You want your cover letter to stand out for all the right reasons. So, before you click submit, take a few minutes to make sure you're putting your best (and most memorable) foot forward.
The tech giant's OS, apps, and hardware divisions joined forces on the ambitious project that Google hopes will dominate virtual reality.
Clay Bavor is really prone to motion sickness.
That wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that as head of all of Google's virtual reality efforts, he spends a lot of time immersed in a technology that has been known to make some people feel nauseated.
Then again, he joked, sitting in a conference room in one of Google's many indistinguishable buildings near its Mountain View, California, campus, his affliction—if you could call it that—might actually be a benefit as the tech giant prepares for the November launch of its new mobile VR platform, Daydream, along with an all-new VR headset and accompanying wireless controller, plus built-from-scratch VR versions of YouTube, Street View, Play Movies, and Google Photos.
"You've got to solve the motion sickness problem [in VR] or you can't be comfortable for people," Bavor told me during an interview late last month, wearing the Silicon Valley uniform of jeans, a black hoodie, gray T-shirt, and black-frame glasses. "And so it's actually useful that I can be one of many litmus tests we have for: Have we done this properly? Is this comfortable?"
Google isn't a newcomer to VR. Consumers have already purchased millions of its low-cost Cardboard headsets, which turn just about any smartphone into a virtual reality device.
But with some analysts expecting VR to become a $30 billion business by 2020, and with companies like HTC, Facebook-owned Oculus, Sony, and Samsung having made important strides in releasing higher-quality consumer systems over the last year, Google clearly wants a major say in the evolution of consumer VR—and it's adopted an all-hands-on-deck approach to achieving that goal.
The best way to do that? Start from scratch with a new VR-friendly mobile operating system, known as Android N, as well as the first phone, the Pixel, to incorporate that OS and the $79 Daydream View, the first headset—and controller—that supports it.
"We saw the value in turning the smartphone you already have into a VR device with Cardboard," Bavor said. "And so, the natural next place to turn was: What if you designed [the phone] from the outset to be deliberately for VR?"
With Daydream, Google is betting not only that it has developed a platform that enables rich VR experiences, but that with reference designs for both Android N phones and Daydream headsets and controllers, it can also put that system in millions of users' hands with the help of numerous manufacturing partners.
"Our goal with both the Daydream software and hardware and reference design is to solve a lot of the hard problems in VR so that every one of our partners doesn't need to reinvent the wheel," Bavor said.
That may well work out, since Google says companies like LG, Samsung, HTC, ZTE, Alcatel, Asus, Huawei, and Xiaomi are developing Daydream hardware.
Given that Daydream only works with top-end Android devices, Google doesn't expect the platform's impact to be immediate. But within a year or so, the company hopes that handset makers will be also be incorporating Android N into mid-range devices that could be bought by millions of people around the world. With high-end tethered VR systems likely continuing to be too expensive for most people for the foreseeable future, Daydream could soon become the most utilized mid-quality virtual reality platform.
Daydream "won't compete with the Vive," said Anthony Batt, the cofounder and executive vice president of leading VR content producer Wevr. "But it will continue to become a better and better product as it's adopted by [more developers]. I think the outcome will be wildly, wildly cool. And I think that's good for VR as an industry."
One of Google's major aims with the Daydream platform has been to make it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. That meant making it simple to use. Pop a Daydream-ready phone into the headset and it pairs wirelessly in seconds.
"Anyone, whether they've used a VR headset or not, they look at this and they know exactly what to do," Bavor told me as he demonstrated it. "I'm not clipping the phone in here. I don't have to position it exactly."
That could be taken as a gentle poke at Samsung's Gear VR, the Korean tech giant's $99, Oculus-powered mobile VR headset, which requires users to snap their phone in precisely the right way or the VR system doesn't boot up. The Gear VR also works only with Samsung phones, while Daydream was designed to support any manufacturer's Android N phone and any company's compatible headset and controller.
With Daydream, the idea is that it doesn't matter if the phone goes in exactly the right way. Thanks to a system of sensors, the headset recognizes the phone automatically and auto-aligns what you see.
"There's nothing you need to learn to do," said Andrew Nartker, Daydream's lead product manager. "How could somebody who's not really fluent in these new technologies just jump right in and know what to do?"
While Bavor's team spearheaded Daydream, the project couldn't have come to fruition without participation from all across Google—from building Daydream support into Android N to developing the headset and controller, as well as incubating brand-new native apps for many of Google's most popular services.
"What's so exciting for me about—call it Version 1 of Daydream," Bavor said, "is that when you deliberately design the smartphone knowing that it's going to be a device for VR, and you design the headset, you design the controller, and you design the apps all together, you get this amazing experience….You have these passionate leaders and experts—in Photos, in Play, in YouTube, in real-world imagery with Street View—really leading the charge on these."
Although it would be tempting to conclude that the cross-company cooperation on Daydream was planned from the beginning, that's not exactly how it went down.
Google has been building up its virtual reality portfolio for some time now, first with Cardboard and later with apps for Android and iOS including Cardboard Camera, Tiltbrush for the Vive, and the company's ambitious high-end VR camera, the Jump. At the center of all that was Bavor's nascent team, kickstarting the diverse efforts percolating across the organization.
Yet there was no "singular decision" to get everyone in lockstep around Daydream. Instead, the development of the end-to-end platform took place organically, Bavor explained.
"I think one of the things that's pretty special about Google is that a person can go to basically any other person in the company and say, 'Hey, I'm working on this thing and I'm excited about it. I might need some help. Can I talk to you about it?' And the answer's yes... There's this assumption that at the end, everyone will figure out, OK, what is the right thing [to do for] Google here? And do that."
Although Google has had various VR projects in the works for several years, its formal virtual reality team is fairly new, launching officially just last year. In their past lives at Google, a number of team members worked on Android, and that "natural cross-pollination" helped foster a solid relationship between Bavor's group and the mobile OS team, he said. Incorporating VR support deep inside the Android group was the "obvious" place to start.
"There was a set of conversations between me and the senior folks in Android about, 'Hey, let's make this a thing,'" Bavor said, adding that those talks became "technical lead to technical lead, product manager to product manager—discussions about, 'Hey, how do we make this thing work?'"
The technical challenges were daunting. For one, phones had to be perfectly aligned to do the kind of high-performance rendering that a quality VR system requires. Graphics took the highest priority, yet the phones had to know not to let an incoming call disrupt the rendering. You couldn't do auto-alignment between the phone and the headset if you didn't understand how to engage the Near field communication system that establishes the handshake between phone and headset. If an important problem wasn't addressed, the VR experience could seem broken.
"It required 10 teams to get into a room and actually discuss how does [all] this work," Nartker said. "It's something no one team can solve. There's not a lot of companies that can get those 10 teams into a room."
At launch, the Daydream platform will feature a variety of third-party apps from the likes of Hulu, Netflix, HBO, The New York Times, Major League Baseball, the NBA, and of course, several games.
But in order to be sure the platform got the strongest possible start, Google knew it had to put its own application might behind the project. That led to the creation of all-new VR versions of Street View, YouTube, Google Photos, and Play Movies, all of which offer users nearly endless amounts of content—a valuable factor when you consider that many industry observers think the single biggest hurdle to people's ongoing use of VR systems is a lack of quality content.
Google doesn't think it has that problem.
"We've often said we've accidentally been building one of the ultimate VR applications for the last 10 years with Street View and with Earth," Bavor said. "What I love about the arc from Street View and Earth to VR is putting others in other places, connecting them with other places, connecting them with place information, experiential information, what it's like to be there. We've been doing that for awhile."
Still, while Street View for the Web and mobile give users something like a 360-degree environment to play in, that's nothing compared to what is possible in virtual reality—and that's why the Street View team built an all-new version for Daydream.
Starting out with numerous "tours" shot with Jump cameras—though all pre-existing content will also be accessible—Street View for Daydream drops users into the middle of places like the Taj Mahal and allows them to bounce around by aiming their controller at teleportation points throughout the famous landmark in Agra, India. It's a far more immersive and smooth experience than what's been possible with Street View in the past. Something that, while not exactly "reality," per se, offers the potential of meaningful virtual tourism.
One time during a Street View for VR product review meeting, Andrey Doronichev, the group product manager for Google VR apps and games, found himself distracted by what he was looking at.
"I was supposed to be paying attention to UI details, and I did honestly try for the first 40 seconds," Doronichev recalled. "Then I found myself in Prague, and I used to live in Prague, and I just started following this street to the Charles Bridge, where I used to walk all the time. Then, five minutes later, I hear, 'Andrey, Andrey.' I just lost myself in this city, it felt so real."
Doronichev is obviously biased, but if you talk to him for any length of time, you're going to hear about multiple cases where he lost himself in the experience.
Talking about the Daydream version of YouTube, which places users in an environment where they can control the size, placement, and even shape of the screen on which they're watching videos, Doronichev explained what it can be like to go down the rabbit hole that YouTube offers.
"Thirty minutes in," he said of a typical viewing session at home, "I find myself in all different poses on my sofa, laying down...positioning my screen right there at the top, or laying on my side. That's something really hard to do with a TV."
He said the goal with YouTube was to create "the best screen in your house" by rethinking one of Google's most used apps for a VR environment.
One of the first things to consider was the environment in which people watch videos—or films or TV shows, in the case of Google Play Movies.
"With YouTube and Play Movies, you'll see that the environment where you're watching the movie and the positioning of the screen actually matters a lot," Doronichev said. In VR, "it's an environment you're in, and that's a very different perception. So you have to be comfortable. You have to like it."
Doronichev's team found there's no simple answer to what kind of screen people would prefer for VR videos. Some people liked a curved screen up close to them that immerses them much like an IMAX does. Others wanted something smaller or at an angle. They concluded that users should have their choice of the screen's position and size and the ability to move it to suit their needs.
"We managed to get all the best Google teams involved in this effort, contributing code and building this stuff," Doronichev said. "You will see that across these applications—Play Movies, YouTube, Street View, and Photos—the way they converge in terms of consistency of user experience is really interesting because every team is exploring their own bit."
And while each app team focused on different goals, there had to be consistency across the greater project. That's why, Doronichev said, "We're constantly talking together so we have a regular sync-up point where we share our learnings and those great ideas that one team discovers. They essentially propagate to all the other products."
For example, the various teams needed to figure out how to visualize the Daydream controller into their apps. Some wondered whether showing it all was a good idea.
"When you visualize it, how exactly does it float," Doronichev said. "Is it far away? Is it close to you? Where are you positioning it? Do you light up buttons when you touch it or not? Turns out, all those things matter. Those little things are what makes your product special and make it feel polished."
The Street View team had come up with what they called a "fishing rod" visualization, where the controller is shown as the arced line that you aim at teleportation points. They had discovered that pointing a laser didn't feel right, whereas the fishing rod approach encourages you to bend your elbow. Other teams decided to follow suit.
When users strap on their Daydream headset, one of the first things many of them will do is try to watch their favorite movie on Google Play Movies. There won't necessarily be VR movies but rather a more immersive experience of watching films thanks to the nature of the screen. Doronichev adds that there is also a sense that you're in a warm, inviting place, like a "cozy" outdoor cinema.
Users will be able to watch any title in the Google Play library, while developers will be able to build new apps or repurpose existing ones for Daydream.
"On day one, when a Daydream developer submits an app, people in 190 countries can install it," said Brahim Elbouchikhi, Play's senior product manager for Google VR. "People in 132 countries can buy that app and spend money on the app, meaning [developers] can earn a living on Daydream" immediately.
Prior to joining Bavor's group, Elbouchikhi worked on the Android team and was one of Google Play's original product managers, one of the primary architects of the Play Store.
Having spent so much time on the creation of that marketplace, Elbouchikhi had an innate understanding of what it takes to build a successful app ecosystem. Still, in order to bring the Play Store's success to VR, he leaned on his colleagues. A lot.
"We worked with people in London, Mountain View, and Tokyo to do this and it really was an awesome effort," he said. "The relationships were essential here. I could not have done it without all the people on Play. I withdrew a lot from my social bank account."
Virtual reality, at least in its consumer form, is a young technology, and despite immense amounts of press covering its rise, it's going to take time before it goes mainstream. VR's cousin technology, augmented reality, may well turn out to be a much bigger industry.
But if VR is going to become the massive business some believe it can be, it's going to take successful platforms that millions of people use every day. It's too early to say whether Daydream will become that platform, but having teams across Google devoted to it makes the prospect more likely. Daydream's success, if it happens, will owe a lot to the company-wide collaboration.
"This is one of the incredible benefits of working at Google," Doronichev said. "You have all these smart people focusing on different goals, but once you have something like a new platform coming out, all those teams work together to make it successful, each one contributing in their own way….Every time we roll out a new update, we're making the whole platform, the whole user experience for the physical product better."
With its new Android N-compatible headset, Google is betting that smartphones will be at the center of consumer-grade virtual reality.
Google just went all-in on virtual reality.
The tech giant today shared the most information yet about its new mobile VR platform, Daydream, the ambitious follow-up to its popular low-cost Cardboard system. The company-wide effort, which will launch in early November, includes a headset, handheld controller, several major first-party apps, and the first phone that will support the system, via a new version of Android.
It's the strongest signal yet that Google sees the smartphone as being at the center of consumer-grade virtual reality. While companies like HTC and the Facebook-owned Oculus have released high-end tethered VR systems that require expensive PCs, Google has clearly placed its bet on VR that works on phones. It's also betting on an open system: Other companies will be able to take advantage of a Daydream reference design by making Daydream-compatible headsets and controllers, as well as Daydream-ready phones.
Google's idea is to enable a broad Daydream ecosystem that pairs its new mobile OS—Android N, which was built from the ground up with Daydream support—with a variety of manufacturers' light, customizable, easy-to-use VR headsets. The first of those headsets, though, is Google's own $79 Daydream View.
Unlike Samsung's Gear VR, which only works with the company's own high-end phones, Daydream View was designed to connect wirelessly to a range of phones that includes Google's all-new Pixel, which will start at $649 and go on sale on October 20, as well as forthcoming devices from HTC, ZTE, Huawei, Xiaomi, Alcatel, Asus, LG, and even Samsung.
In order to ensure that users have a lot to do with their new Daydream headset from day one, Google has built all-new VR versions of YouTube, Play Movies, Google Photos, and Street View. There will also be a number of third-party apps, including Hulu, HBO, and Netflix, as well as the New York Times, and many others across genres like travel, games, and sports. All told, there will be more than 50 Daydream apps this year, with hundreds more coming down the pike.
Google is hoping it and its partners can capture big slices of what analysts expect will be a $30 billion market for consumer virtual reality hardware and software by 2020.
As is the case with almost every major VR platform—the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, Gear VR, and Sony's soon-to-be-released PlayStation VR—Apple users are locked out of the equation.
Google's Daydream View headset, which comes standard with a controller, is 30% lighter than devices like the $99 Gear VR. At launch, it will be available in slate, and before year's end will also come in snow and crimson. It features an auto-alignment system meant to allow users to spend just seconds inserting their phones, without worrying whether it's lined up exactly right.
While other companies will be able to make their own Daydream-ready headsets, they will all feature the same wireless auto-alignment system, as well as a controller that works exactly the same as the one included with the Daydream View. All such controllers will include precision orientation sensors that recognize a user's motion, allowing her to point, slice, swing, and aim.
He was speaking at a 2007 event for the Learning Annex in San Francisco when a young woman named Juliet asked him a question from the floor: "How many jets do you have, and how might I apply to be a flight attendant?" In the video, the now Republican presidential candidate doesn't skip a beat. He invites her onstage, throws an arm around her, and says, "You're hired."
Sure, the moment was a hammy bid for applause as opposed to an actual job interview, but it squares with how Trump has made other employment decisions involving women over the years, including by his own admission.
He's hardly alone in that, to be fair. For years, behavioral economists have argued (in a niche field called "pulchronomics") that people considered highly attractive earn more professional rewards than those who aren't. The researcher Daniel Hamermesh has famously estimated that an especially good-looking professional—regardless of gender—could earn an average of $230,000 more, over the course of a career, than a person whose appearance is more ordinary.
Typically, this preferential treatment is the product of unconscious bias. With Donald Trump, the pattern is a bit more explicit.
At the Learning Annex event, with Juliet still pressed to his side, Trump recalls for the crowd how he once wanted to hire an inexperienced teenaged waitress because she was "so beautiful." That idea didn't sit well with Trump's staff, he says, but "I interviewed her anyway because she was so pretty. And I said, 'Let me ask you, do you have any experience?' She goes, 'No, sir.' I say, 'When can you start?'"
At this point in the video, Trump turns and plants a kiss on Juliet's cheek.
The day after Mother Jones dug up this footage, the Los Angeles Times's Matt Pearce reported that Trump sought to fire women from his golf course in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, whom he deemed unattractive.
According to court papers filed in a 2012 labor lawsuit, the club's catering director claims to have heard Trump "tell managers many times while he was visiting the club that restaurant hostesses were 'not pretty enough' and that they should be fired and replaced with more attractive women."
Fellow employees echoed these charges. (Pearce reports that the suit was largely settled by 2013, with no admission of wrongdoing.) In one incident, a staff member was allegedly told to fire an employee because "Mr. Trump doesn't like fat people." In another, a restaurant server recounted finding a coworker crying. She'd just been denied a promotion because of her acne, he claimed. "According to her, she was qualified for the job and wanted it, but couldn't get it solely because of her acne."
In a statement the Trump campaign provided to Fast Company, the Trump Organization's vice president and assistant general counsel Jill Martin called these claims "meritless. Rather than looking to old statements from a handful of employees with an ax to grind," Martin argues, "the media should focus on the thousands of happy employees, of all races, gender, size, and shape, whose lives upon which Mr. Trump has made an incredibly positive impact."
It's possible to see Barbara Res in this light, up to a point. She worked for Trump for 12 years, eventually becoming an executive in his construction business at a time when women at high levels of that industry were rare. In a New York Daily News op-ed, she recalls how her boss "would hire and promote many people with questionable qualifications" but, at the same time, "had several extremely strong women working for him."
A New York Times report in May, for which Res was interviewed, reflected this same contradiction, of a business leader just as eager to objectify women as to give some female employees responsibilities on par with men. Res told the Times she feels grateful for the career opportunities Trump offered her. But that didn't stop him from ridiculing her appearance, Res claims, toward the end of her tenure at the company. "You like your candy," she remembers him commenting.
As Res puts it in her editorial, "Does he discriminate against women? I never thought that Trump would hire a man over an equally qualified woman." But what counted as "qualifications" differed substantially for women, she concedes. "The receptionists and his assistants looked like models," Res wrote. "He certainly hired not-so-attractive females, he just hid them when people were around. Trump was, again, only giving the people what they want. Being gorgeous was just a BFOQ (bona fide occupational qualification) for working the front office."
This habit doesn't seem limited to the front office, though, and doesn't appear to be something everybody wants. After Hillary Clinton reiterated some of her opponent's more nakedly misogynistic remarks in the first presidential debate, Trump spent the tail end of last week's news cycle using Bill Clinton's affairs to impugn her. Yet one of the latest post-debate polls showed Trump's already weaker standing with women was diminishing further, particularly among independents.
In a press conference last March in Washington, D.C., Trump pulled a stunt that eerily echoed his performance in San Francisco nearly a decade earlier. As the New York Post reported, Trump was fielding questions from the audience when Alicia Watkins, a 38-year-old Air Force veteran and freelance blogger, asked him whether he was making efforts to hire veterans to staff a Trump hotel going up in the city.
So the candidate, who would accept the GOP nomination for president eight weeks later, invited Watkins to join him onstage. "She looks so smart, good," Trump said. "We need good people, so what's your experience, in front of the world?"
Watkins listed her writing experience and military credentials, which include serving in Iraq and Afghanistan until 2012, but Trump sounded more interested in something else: "She looks like she's got a great look," he told the crowd. "If we can make a good deal on the salary, she's probably going to have a job."
Now it's up to U.S. voters—including women like Res, Watkins, and the many others Trump has hired, fired, or passed over, for any reason or none at all—to decide whether Trump himself is going to have a new job.
Google, Microsoft, and others have shown that touch apps and traditional interfaces can mix. But developers need to come along for the ride.
Blending traditional and touch computer user input methods to create a satisfying experience and commercial success has proven elusive for the three big consumer operating system vendors. Apple, in fact, has mostly avoided the challenge by keeping the Mac and ther iPad distinct, with Tim Cook likening attempts to meld laptop and tablet interfaces to combining a refrigerator with a toaster.
Microsoft, on the other hand, was all too eager to take a welding torch to those metaphorical appliances. Fearful of the iPad, it made touch Windows 8's gairaigo—a foreign concept accommodated via a layer that existed largely in its own environment separate from an otherwise nearly untouched desktop interface. Windows 10 does a much better job of blending touch and traditional environments in Windows 10, and inventive hybrids such as Microsoft's own Surface devices have grown in terms of overall market revenue share. But these devices still tend to be used pretty much like conventional laptops due to the dearth of tablet-optimized Windows apps.
Then there's been Google, which has hemmed and hawed and hedged when it has come to melding desktop and touch user interfaces. Like Apple, company has historically had a keyboard/mouse-focused platform (Chrome OS) and a touch-focused (Android) one. However, it's been more willing to mix and match input techniques: It's long supported cursors in Android and has offered touchscreen input in Chromebooks since 2013's Pixel.
Following Apple and its own hardware partners, such as Samsung, Google itself has finally embraced multiple apps sharing screen real estate in Android 7.0 Nougat. And it has made good on a promise to allow Android apps to run on certain Chromebooks such as the screen-rotating Acer Chromebook R11. Unlike Windows, Android has millions of touch-centric apps. But few are optimized for a larger screen. And many of the ones that were—such as Google's own office suite—were already available as Chrome-ready websites.
If putting Android apps on Chrome OS has failed to excite, how about imbuing Android with elements of Chrome OS? That seems to be the idea behind Andromeda, a rumored forthcoming Google OS that would presumably aim to incorporate the best of both worlds. One model for how it may look and work comes from Remix OS, a tweaking of Android that debuted on a Surface-like device and has since become far more broadly available. It borrows desktop user interface elements from Windows even more aggressively than Chrome does.
Five years ago, I wrote that Chrome OS was heading toward a niche—ultimately the education market—versus Android. Now, with Andromeda, the security and simplicity that makes Chrome OS great and the windowing user interface that makes it usable on laptops could become key ingredients in finally allowing Android to have an impact on larger-screen computing devices.
Being able to run Android apps in a window, though, is simply not compelling enough to Android developers that are not excited by the shrinking PC market. In a time when Google is giving Android more mobile-focused smarts than ever, it might be a challenge to convince Android developers to optimize their apps for the PC's larger, less mobile screen and smaller use base. For that to take root, mobile developers may need to see phones that can somehow provide a larger screen experience through projection or other means.
