Both candidates have put forward family leave platforms. Here's how some tech companies are already leading the pack.
With less than five weeks away from Election Day, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are doubling down on their messages in the hope of gaining voters' support.
Over the last month, the two candidates have crystalized many issues in the attempt to woo middle-class voters with family- and personal finance-related proposals. Both Clinton and Trump presented a formal platform for mandated family leave.
Though the U.S. lags behind many developed countries for its nationally mandated family paid leave, the top tech companies have different and interesting programs that may help inform the problems both Trump and Clinton are trying to solve.
First, let's look briefly at what Clinton and Trump are calling for. Trump's plan calls for six weeks of paid maternity leave to protect mothers (and only mothers) whose employers would not provide this. The benefits would be paid through unemployment insurance. Clinton's plan allows any gender parent to take up to 12 weeks of family leave and receive at least two-thirds of their current wages during that leave.
The two plans are similar in theory—give parents paid time off whether or not employers provide it. Clinton's, however, is more inclusive because it includes not only fathers but also people who are taking care of ill family members. Trump's plan includes a Dependent Care savings account to provide care for elderly dependents.
In short, both candidates believe that (some) parents should be able to take time off to have a child and be compensated during that period. Ironically, companies have noticed that paid leave does bring in returns. So the conversation is now being shifted from whether or not these benefits should exist to how they should be implemented.
Facebook and Apple, for instance, once got press for offering employees access to egg freezing. At the time, the move was criticized as an implicit way of telling female employees to not have babies while climbing the corporate ladder. But it's become more standardized as a possibility for people in large companies who are considering starting a family.
Facebook offers a suite of perks for families trying to figure out how they can start a family. Egg freezing is just one, adoption support is another, as well as aid with surrogacy. Facebook gives four months of "paid baby leave" for all new parents, regardless of gender. Tudor Havriliuc, Facebook's vice president of human resources, describes the company's family benefits programs as a promise to "take good care of our people and support them." The company also offers a cash benefit for new children, new parenting classes, and private nursing rooms.
Similarly, LinkedIn tries to maximize paid time off for parents. The company gives mothers 100% of their salary for the actual maternity leave and then an additional six weeks of paid parental leave for all employees over the first year. Nina McQueen, LinkedIn's vice president of global benefits, says the company is trying to make its parental benefits "something that's meaningful to employees."
In fact, both Havriliuc and McQueen say that they wanted to make sure the programs they offered mirrored the needs of their employees. McQueen set up focus groups to learn more about staff needs. And Facebook's Havriliuc says, "We did our first survey to see how these benefits are received."
Both HR executives found that employees had similar expectations from their companies. They wanted paid leave for new family arrivals and also specific support networks to help them figure out work-life balance over the first year. What seems to be working is not only giving families space but also fostering a family-inclusive culture.
IBM also offers an expansive suite of benefits for new families. Beyond paid leave—mothers get 14 weeks, and fathers and adoptive parents get six weeks—the 105-year-old company believes that the real key is instilling a culture that signals to employees how important it is that they use these benefits. Lindsay-Rae McIntyre, IBM's vice president of human resources, says that having management who instill an inclusive culture is key to creating a space that is welcoming to new families. IBM has been offering paid time off since the '50s, and McIntyre says it has been working to make sure all employees take advantage of their benefits.
"When you have a management that is supported and trained on a suite of offerings that they can then use to customize a support solution at the employee level," she says, "then you have managers who can walk the talk." That is, it's not only companies' jobs to offer a baseline of family-oriented perks, it's also necessary for these places to have higher-ups who know what's available and make sure their employees use them.
Each of these companies, and many of their tech peers, like Netflix, offer paid family leave policies that at least match, if not exceed, those of the candidates' platforms. What they all say is most important, however, is that they made sure the policies reflected staffs' needs. "How do we allow [employees] to be successful as working parents?" McIntyre asks.
What Clinton and Trump offer may seem like a starting point, but companies and lawmakers need to work to instill a culture where people take full advantage of their benefits. McQueen, for instance, says that often fathers don't take off the full time they're allotted.
A 1,000-person company is not the same as a 50-person one, but even small businesses can make paid parental leave work. "No single program is the answer," says McIntyre. And ultimately, "it's a cultural point." Create an environment that both provides baseline services for its works and instills a philosophy that it's okay to use them.
The way to do that? Says McIntyre, "start with management."
Tracking the flow of top tech talent can be a good indicator of tomorrow's business successes.
Wherever the best engineers, programmers, and designers in the tech industry go, investment dollars, successful products, and revenues may often follow.
The flow of talent in the technology industry is complex, but it can also serve as a key indicator of potential future success. The technology firms that are identified as having the best talent in 2016 are also some of the highest performing tech companies in the world. Topping the list, according to a recent study by Paysa, is Uber, followed by Airbnb, Google, Pinterest, Facebook, Dropbox, Square, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Salesforce.
"Talent is often the canary in the coalmine," says Chris Bolte, cofounder and CEO of Paysa, a big-data platform providing market insight about compensation and retention.
Bolte points to Yahoo and Uber as prime examples of how talent flow can reveal future potential. When Uber launched in December 2009, its talent rank was 10,025, while Yahoo was firmly among the top 20. It wasn't until December 2013 when the two companies crossed paths at approximately 200th position. At the time, few expected the young startup to provide a better career opportunity than the established technology behemoth, but the flow of talent proved to be a predictor of things to come.
Quantifying and tracking the flow of tech talent is no small feat. Paysa has developed a complex algorithm that ranks individual employees across the tech industry and monitors their migration from one employer to the next. Paysa's machine-learning algorithm has aggregated and analyzed nearly 8 million points of data, including job postings, resumes, and social activity, across 200,000 companies over the past 10 years.
Individual candidates are analyzed according to 10,000 different components, each of which is assigned a value and used to create an overall score. Those scores are based on skills, experience, education, path to promotion, employer reviews, employer reputation, and much more. As a candidate moves to another employer, their score automatically migrates with them, revealing a picture of which companies the best of the industry are flocking to at a given moment.
Paysa's data, for example, reveals that when Twitter's rank fell from 8th in 2015 to 17th in 2016, its top employees migrated to companies like Google, Uber, Facebook, Lyft, AirBnB, and LinkedIn. The data also suggests that the biggest talent comeback stories of 2016 occurred inside of Starbucks, Hulu, Websense, Adobe, Capital One, Frontier Communications, Netflix, and Fidelity Investments, all of whom reached a high position in years past, fell down the rankings, and made a glorious return this year.
Paysa's algorithm is not only used by tech employers seeking to better understand the flow of talent and employees considering their next career opportunity, but also investors in the technology industry. "We see investment firms and VCs asking for a debrief on the data so they can understand where their opportunities are," Bolte says. "It's the same as an individual thinking about making a bet with their career."
By that rationale, the companies to watch in 2017 are:
Docker
Expedia
Twilio
Braintree
Twitch
Prosper Marketplace
Lending Club
Credit Karma
Veritas Technologies
Cox Automotive
Lyft
Stripe
Tesla Motors
Okta, Inc.
Zulily
Snapchat
These companies have experienced the most significant jump since the last Paysa study.
Bolte adds that it's a good time to be a data scientist, as the tech industry's most renowned employers have suddenly begun to pursue them aggressively. "Folks like the Googles or Airbnbs or Uber or Amazon, they're trying to keep them by cranking up salaries and trying to acquire as many talented ones as they can," he says.
While Bolte makes it very clear that Paysa is a data-driven company and that there is no clearly defined rationale behind the flow of talent, he does suggest a few theories based on historical trends.
"New leadership with clear mandates, new rounds of funding, or surges in business tend to drive that [increase]," he says.
"If you bring in a high-profile technical leader, that will help maintain and retain key talent as well as attract new talent. If you're solving a really interesting problem—and I think you can look at Tesla [No. 42] as an example, that's a major problem that is high profile—that attracts people."
Bolte says that the reverse is also true. Leadership problems, funding challenges, disconnected corporate strategies, stale technology and uninspiring mandates, as well as new competitors with better opportunities for employees can drive talent away. "The first people to leave are typically your best people," he says.
Forget about faking it 'til you make it, these tips will trick your brain into thinking you're all that.
Whether you are interviewing for a job that feels beyond your current abilities, demonstrating a skill that feels rusty, or working with someone who is difficult and challenging, there are dozens of everyday challenges that can shake your confidence.
Some people suggest that you "fake it 'til you make it," but that's bad advice, says Angie Morgan, cofounder of the leadership consulting firm Lead Star and coauthor of Spark: How to Lead Yourself and Others to Greater Success. "Confidence isn't a skill, it's an emotion," she says. "You can manage it. In fact, unpacking your confidence is a part of self-efficacy."
Tapping into your source of confidence is important because it connects you to the goals you want to pursue. "Confident teams ask for more money," says Morgan. "When you lack confidence, you put a lid on your potential."
Our brains are hardwired to defend ourselves, says Morgan, and we often scan for worst-case scenarios or danger instead of looking at something as an opportunity. Instead, put a positive talk track in your head to get in the game.
"Our words run through our brains reckless and unchecked," says Morgan. "Get rid of thoughts like, 'I'm lucky to be here' and 'I hope I do well.' Instead, say to yourself, '[Confidence] is a thing, and I can manage it.'"
Morgan recalls having a bout of insecurity before she was to take the stage and deliver a speech. "I went into a corner and had a Stuart Smalley moment, saying, 'I'm good enough. I'm smart enough.' It sounds cheesy, but it works."
Research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that self-affirmations do indeed boost confidence. In an experiment conducted at the University of Toronto, half of the participants were instructed to write about their most important negotiating skill, while the remaining half were told to write about their least important negotiating skill. All of the participants were then tested on their negotiating skills. Those who completed the self-affirmation performed significantly better in negotiating a lower sale price.
"Any time you have low expectations for your performance, you tend to sink down and meet those low expectations," writes lead researcher Sonia Kang, an assistant professor of organizational behavior and human resource management. "Self-affirmation is a way to neutralize that threat."
If you had a great presentation or won an account for your firm, take time to experience your success. "It's easy to get to a point where your achievements don't feel real, where you attribute your success to someone or something else," says Morgan.
The practice of looking to outside reasons for success is called "imposter syndrome," a term coined by Atlanta psychologist Pauline Clance in 1985. A study published in the International Journal of Behavioral Science found that 70% of people suffer from the syndrome, and it's especially prevalent in people who challenge themselves, because they're constantly in a stage of growth and discomfort.
"Identify and celebrate what you're doing well," says Morgan. "When you take time to acknowledge and experience your achievements, you build a strong foundation and have ready points of reference to use when you feel challenged."
We all encounter negative people or those who aren't supportive, but we can choose whose opinion we allow to influence us, says Morgan.
"Not everyone or anyone should have a say in how you feel about yourself," she says. "Be purposeful about who you choose to surround yourself with."
A study from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research found that confidence is linked to a person's number of social connections. "Having a large network of friends did not predict self-esteem, but belonging to multiple groups did," the authors write. "Groups provide benefits that interpersonal ties alone do not; namely, meaning, connection, support, and a sense of control over our lives."
It's natural to feel fear or worry when you're doing something you've never done before, says Morgan. "Courage isn't action in absence of fear; it's action in spite of fear," she says.
Instead of letting these emotions consume or even paralyze you, determine if the danger is real. "If it is real, decide how you would manage it," she says. "If you're manufacturing the danger, let it go."
One way to let go is to practice meditation. When negative thoughts come into your mind, recognize them as thoughts and release them. A study from Emory University found that 20 minutes of daily meditation is associated with activity and connectivity changes in the region of the brain that controls attention, allowing you to disengage from distraction.
Another way to boost your confidence is to pay attention to the way you hold your body. In her viral 2012 TED talk, Amy Cuddy shared the concept of "power poses": Making yourself bigger by stretching your body to take up more space. The practice, which takes just two minutes a day, increases your testosterone levels and decreases the amount of the stress hormone cortisol that is released into your brain, making you feel more powerful and confident throughout the day.
Although Cuddy's study wasn't successfully replicated in subsequent research, Richard Petty, professor of psychology at Ohio State University, has also researched the link between posture and confidence. In a 2009 study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Petty found that sitting up straight and pushing out your chest can boost positive beliefs in yourself as opposed to being in positions of slouching or looking down, which can lead to negative thoughts.
"The brain has an area that reflects confidence, but once that area is triggered, it doesn't matter exactly how it's triggered," Petty told Fast Company last year. "It can be difficult to distinguish real confidence from confidence that comes from just standing up straight . . . these things go both ways just like happiness leads to smiling, but also, smiling leads to happiness."
The Selma director's searing new Netflix documentary, available today, argues that slavery persists in our criminal justice system.
Our news cycle, sadly, has no shortage of stories detailing violence against African-Americans. Every week or two seems to bring another name, another Facebook Live video, another senseless killing of another black man, woman, or child in a police encounter gone horribly wrong. With these tragedies seeming hopelessly ubiquitous, and with outrage already running high, the average Netflix user may hesitate before clicking on Ava DuVernay's 13th, a documentary that just opened the New York Film Festival and premieres on the streaming platform tonight.
But we need 13th—desperately. If the daily news cycle reliably chronicles injustice at its extremes, it's less adept at contextualizing these extremes. What about injustices that don't result in blood? What if instead of being fatally shot, a man, woman, or entire community is slowly, insidiously suffocated? This less obviously dramatic, but much more far-reaching, violence against Americans of color is the true subject of 13th, which argues that slavery in the Unites States was not so much eliminated as transformed, and that its spirit persists in this country's swollen criminal justice system.
"Police violence, that isn't the problem in and of itself," says one of the film's interview subjects, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindnes, which DuVernay has cited as an influence. "[Police violence] is the reflection of a much larger, brutal system of racial and social control known as mass incarceration, which authorizes this kind of police violence."
The film's title comes from the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Widely considered a landmark in the narrative of black liberation in the U.S., the amendment's 1865 passage was the subject of the recent Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln. The amendment declared that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude...shall exist within the United States."
Michelle Alexander in 13th[Photo: courtesy of Netflix]
But what about that ellipsis? In 13th, DuVernay, who directed 2014's Academy Award nominee for Best Picture Selma, focuses on a clause in the middle of the amendment, which abolishes slavery "except as punishment for crime." This caveat, for DuVernay and for many of the people she interviews, is key to understanding how slavery—or at the very least, racial oppression—has continued under the guise of legality.
The statistics are well known but bear repeating. The United States accounts for only about 5% of the world's population—and 25% of the world's prisoners.
That fact in and of itself would be troubling, but it's doubly so when we consider the racial makeup of our prison population, which is disproportionately black and brown. While African-Americans and Hispanics make up about a third of the U.S. population, they comprise nearly two thirds of the incarcerated population. The rates are especially high for black men, one in three of whom can expect to go to prison at some point in their life.
DuVernay's film draws a seamless narrative line connecting forms of racial oppression from the slavery era right up to today. When the documentary moves into the past few decades, when this country's experiment in mass incarceration began, it slows its pace to carefully lay out the details. Some of the most shocking moments—in a film full of them—are simply numbers: the steadily mounting tally of the U.S. prison population through the decades. In 1970, our prison population was under 200,000. By the year 2000, in the wake of the 1994 crime bill that Bill Clinton would apologize for much later, the prison population swelled to almost 1.4 million. It stands at 2.3 million today.
Cory Greene in 13th[Photo: courtesy of Netflix]
In a conference room in a Manhattan hotel this weekend, DuVernay shared with a group of journalists the process of making 13th. To achieve the film's historical sweep, DuVernay and her editor, Spencer Averick, combed through over 1,000 hours of archival footage of racial violence. "I cried a lot making this film," she said. "Watching a thousand hours of violent racist footage takes its toll."
"I'm in a self-care moment right now," she added, "where I don't know when I'll do this again."
Ava Duvernay at The New York Film Festival premiere of 13th[Photo: courtesy of Netflix]
But she—or someone—may have to. After a year that began with hope, criminal justice reform has stalled. Both liberals and conservatives claim to want reform, and 13th features a new interview with Newt Gingrich, whose positions seem to more or less align, in 2016, with those of Angela Davis. But even bipartisan support for criminal justice reform has not been enough. A few naysayers were able to weaken, then scuttle, Congressional attempts this year. Last week, the editor of The Marshall Project, a website dedicated to criminal justice news, published an analysis he titled "Criminal Justice Reform: An Obituary."
13th, in the end, may be something like a tactician's map, a topography of systemic injustice that reformist generals may pore over with their lieutenants, studying for points of leverage. "Part of what I want 13th to do is overwhelm you," DuVernay said. "There's no one thing that's gonna fix this. There's no one thing that's gonna fix plea bargains, and the people making money in prisons, and cops and [their] over-militarization. There's no one solution that does that. The only way to fix it is if we all start to think differently."
Related Video: Ava DuVernay Speaks About Lack Of Diversity In Hollywood
Scientists at Google and elsewhere are turning to the 30-year-old digital music standard MIDI to teach neural networks how to write music
In May, Google research scientist Douglas Eck left his Silicon Valley office to spend a few days at Moogfest, a gathering for music, art, and technology enthusiasts deep in North Carolina's Smoky Mountains. Eck told the festival's music-savvy attendees about his team's new ideas about how to teach computers to help musicians write music—generate harmonies, create transitions in a song, and elaborate on a recurring theme. Someday, the machine could learn to write a song all on its own.
Eck hadn't come to the festival—which was inspired by the legendary creator of the Moog synthesizer and peopled with musicians and electronic music nerds—simply to introduce his team's challenging project. To "learn" how to create art and music, he and his colleagues need users to feed the machines tons of data, using MIDI, a format more often associated with dinky video game sounds than with complex machine learning.
An example of a composition in MIDI.
Researchers have been experimenting with AI-generated music for years. Scientists at Sony's Computer Science Laboratory in France recently released what some have called the first AI-generated pop songs, composed from their in-house AI algorithms (although they were arranged by a human musician, who also wrote their lyrics). Their AI platform, FlowMachines, has also composed jazz and classical scores in the past using MIDI. Eck's talk at Moogfest was a prelude to a Google research program called Magenta, which aims to write code that can learn how to generate art, starting with music.
A song cowritten by Sony's FlowMachines algorithm.
Listening to and making music is worth pursuing because, researchers say, both activities can help intelligent systems achieve the holy grail of intelligence: cognition. Just as computers are starting to evolve from simply reading text to understanding speech, computers might start to regularly interpret and generate their own music.
"You can learn an awful lot about language by studying text. MIDI gives us the musical equivalent. The more we understand about music creation and music perception, the more we'll understand general, important aspects of communication and cognition," says Eck, now a research scientist on Google's Magenta project.
As synthesizers gained popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, engineers started to experiment with ways to get their electronic instruments to communicate with each other. The result was the Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI, which the music industry adopted as a technical standard in 1983 after its creators, Dave Smith and Ikutaro Kakehashi, made it royalty-free, offering up the idea for the world to use.
"In hindsight, I think it was the right thing to do," Smith told Fortune in 2013. "We wanted to be sure we had 100% participation, so we decided not to charge any other companies that wanted to use it."
Personal computers soon evolved to read and store MIDI files, which reduce high-level, abstract pieces of music into machine-readable data in a very compact format (a song stored in a 4 MB MP3 file would be a mere few hundred kilobytes in MIDI). MIDI would become standard on electronic instruments, from keyboards and drum machines to MIDI guitar controllers and electronic drum kits. Music composed through MIDI has powered the rise of dance, techno, house, and drum and bass music, and its sound can be heard in most television and film scores.
MIDI is the symbolic representation of music, just like text is the symbolic representation of speech. "MIDI itself doesn't contain sound—it's just instructions," says Jonathan Lee, a musician who specializes in MIDI.
One MIDI link can carry up to 16 channels of data, indicating information about things like musical notation, pitch and velocity, volume, vibrato, audio panning, cues, and tempo. Instruments can also retrieve sounds from a set of prerecorded sounds, called SoundFonts, which are stored in a separate file. The format provides a wide latitude for musicians, allowing novices to compose sophisticated arrangements and more experienced talents to build complex orchestrations.
A MIDI composition.
Though digital instruments still use the 30-year-old, five-pin MIDI connection, every modern computer and even the Chrome browser has the ability to receive instructions from MIDI devices via a USB adapter. The format has come a long way since 1990s Geocities pages and games like Doom, thanks to better computing power, digital samplers, and recent movements like "Black MIDI," in which MIDI musicians like Lee saturate a digital musical score with so many notes, typically in the thousands or millions, that little white peers through.
The most popular song that Lee has ever released—1.6 million views on his YouTube channel, TheSuperMarioBros2—contains 7.6 million musical notes. Playing it on YouTube sounds like Philip Glass on acid; playing it through MIDI software like Piano From Above or Synthesia would likely crash your computer.
"Ninety percent of computers wouldn't be able to play it without giving up," says Lee.
An example of Black MIDI
Lee, a 17-year-old Houston native, said he burned through the RAM and CPUs of both of his parents' laptops by experimenting with these Black MIDIs. He eventually bought himself a gaming-grade computer that could withstand his experimentation.
Lee believes that Black MIDIs, with their densely complex set of computer instructions, could push engineers to create software that relies less on RAM and more on CPU power, for example. This could help prevent computers from crashing during periods of heavy processing.
As learning material, MIDI files are a computer scientist's dream, unlike audio recordings; They are small, available in troves on the internet, and royalty-free, providing a resource that can be used to virtually train AI machines without limit.
The state of the art in training computers is deep learning, artificial learning that uses neural networks, a method of storing information that loosely approximates the information processing of the brain and nervous system. In computer vision, where deep learning has become the standard machine learning technique, scientists know how a computer learns through a neural network when the computer knows what shapes to look for in an image. You can see this process in reverse in the Deep Dream algorithm. Google engineers Alexander Mordvintsev, Christopher Olah, and Mike Tyka used the company's image-recognition software to "hallucinate" images out of everyday scenes, based on the system's memory of other images it had found online.
The Deep Dream algorithm reverses the image recognition process, "seeing" images in the patterns of other images. Music algorithms, fed with MIDI music and other inputs, can write songs through an analogous process.
What perplexes scientists more is how and if computers can perceive something that is more subjective, like music genres, chords, and moods. Listening to music can help computers reach this higher-level cognitive step.
In July, a team of scientists from Queen Mary University of London reported they had trained a neural network to determine musical genres with 75% accuracy by feeding it with 6,600 songs in three genres: ballad, dance, and hip-hop. Then they tore apart the layers of the computer's neural network in order to see what the network learned at each layer when the scientists exposed it to songs from Bach and Eminem. The researchers saw that the computer started to detect basic patterns, like percussive instruments, at the neural network's lower levels, and more abstract concepts, like harmonic patterns, at the highest level.
Rather than using MIDI representations or other kinds of music notation, the researchers fed their learning algorithms 80,000 samples of raw audio signals extracted from the 8,000 songs. That decision may reflect the limitations of MIDI and other digital representations for teaching machines to learn the nuances of analog music.
In MIDI, the human voice is "that human intangible that ends up being a little bit absent, in the same way that you might have a Boston accent versus one from Texas or Minnesota."
"Something like MIDI has a lot of potential in terms of modeling classical elements of music such as harmony, or rhythm, or structure and form," says Eric Humphrey, a former doctoral researcher at the Music and Audio Research Laboratory at New York University, who is now a senior machine learning researcher at Spotify. "But what is really interesting is that MIDI isn't necessarily good at modeling timbre or production effects." Among other things, that means that "a lot of popular, modern music is not well-coded by MIDI."
"In terms of the expressivity and the nuance of the performance, that's that human intangible that ends up being a little bit absent, in the same way that you might have a Boston accent versus one from Texas or Minnesota," says Humphrey.
Rather than meditating on what might get lost in the art form, Google has already started to build new deep learning models to generate music. Over the summer, Project Magenta researcher Anna Huang designed a neural network to write in new voice sections in Bach chorales, whose original voice sections she had sporadically deleted. Huang and the team initially considered using the techniques of computer speech generation to finish the middle of a song if a musician had already written the beginning and the end.
But the researchers saw two problems with reusing the machine learning models used for speech generation. First, music is multifarious; several instruments and voices play out at once. In speech recognition, the computer essentially must only learn the pattern of one person talking. Second, musicians might not write scores in a linear fashion but, instead, opt to go back and fill in gaps as they compose. Spoken languages, on the other hand, build ideas in a logical sequence.
To address the first problem, the researchers took a cue from the field of image recognition. They found a machine learning model that taught computers to reconstruct the blanks in an image, a method called "inpainting." They thought that if computers could simultaneously recognize three RGB values in a picture, then they could think of each voice as a separate RGB value in their new model. To address the second problem, they decided to write an algorithm that let the computer generate melodies randomly, rather than sequentially.
The team trained its computers with several MIDI Bach chorales containing soprano, alto, mezzo-soprano, and baritone voice parts that they randomly cut out at different points in the pieces. At any given time during the modified sections, the computer would "hear" one to three voices. Then, the researchers tested what the computer learned by gradually taking out each voice part in a single Bach chorale until none were left. The team left the computer's 28-layer neural network to generate new voices from each previous voice it had generated.
Music generated by Google's Magenta.
In the end, Google researchers were pleased with the overall aesthetic of the computer's new work. Analyzing these Bach chorales taught Google that it could teach a computer to resolve musical dissonance, lean toward a preferred set of harmonies, and learn the musical key.
But their model only digitally approximated a few real-world musical style points. For one thing, their model did not account for the natural limits in pitch range that specialized vocalists, like a soprano or alto, would have. At certain points, the computer inflected the pitch in a voice line to stay in line with the musical key. The team is working on new ways to better code these human aspects into its machine learning model.
Music generated by Google's Magenta.
To do that, it will need more music to "teach" from. Besides producing new research useful for artificial intelligence more broadly, the Magenta engineers are also enthusiastic about growing their collaboration with the music community.
In August, the team issued an updated interface between musicians and TensorFlow, Google's open-source AI software. The new release allows musicians to connect Google's AI model to their own synthesizers and MIDI controllers to make AI-generated music in real time. Meanwhile software developers can also connect their own AI models in lieu of the one from Google, in the hopes that injecting non-Google ideas into the Magenta community will trigger more experimentation.
Lee, meanwhile, continues to make his own brand of Black MIDIs and publish them on YouTube. His MIDI compositions weave novel "note art," like swirls, letters, and even Morse code, into the visual effects of the musical score. Some are more mathematical in nature—one video, "Pi," contains exactly 3.141592 million musical notes and is 3:14 long, and another one, "Fractal Images," describes a set of mathematical equations called the Mandelbrot set.
Lee's MIDI-composed "Pi"
When told that Google was looking for people to contribute MIDI files to its new AI project, Lee was eager to contribute. He plans to canvas the entire Black MIDI community to upload their files to the project. If those super-dense MIDI files don't crash computers, perhaps they could teach them a few things about how to write their own Black MIDI songs. "We're going to flood them with good content," he says.
Pre-orders begin October 10. There will be 35 titles at launch.
This December, the Oculus Rift will elevate to the level of its biggest competition, HTC's Vive.
At Oculus Connect yesterday, the Facebook-owned virtual reality company's annual developers conference, it confirmed what had been rumored for weeks: Its Touch controllers, which bring users' hands into Rift experiences, will go on sale December 6 and will cost $199. Oculus will begin taking pre-orders for the Touch, which will come with an additional Rift sensor, on October 10.
When consumers get their hands on the controllers—more than a year after they were first announced—Rift will finally become a true high-end VR system, one that delivers immersive experiences and which incorporates users' hands into those experiences.
Think about what you can do with your hands: Hold things, swing things, throw things, make gestures, draw, paint, sculpt, and on and on. That's the promise of high-end VR, and until now, Rift owners have only been able to look forward to that, even as owners of the Vive have been able to take full advantage of it thanks to the two controllers that come standard with that system.
Oculus Medium is one of the most compelling titles for Touch.
At launch, Oculus said, there will be about 35 titles available, ranging from games to art to educational experiences, with more coming soon. Although Medium, its compelling VR sculpting tool, will be available when Touch launches, the company hasn't yet decided if it will be included with the controllers or be sold separately, Jason Rubin, Oculus' head of content said.
The Rift sells for $599. That means that a Rift, with Touch, will cost the same as Vive, which goes for $799. Oculus also said today that Rift will soon offer true "room-scale" VR, which means users can move around in a room-size space, but to access that, Rift owners will need to buy yet one more Rift sensor for $79.
Although there are some concerns that the cost of a fully fleshed out Rift system, with Touch, an extra sensor, and the new $49 earphones the company announced yesterday, will be too high, CEO Brendan Iribe didn't seem worried.
"The enthusiast community is ready to embrace all great VR, and a lot of people want more," Iribe told Fast Company. "For a certain population, the whole notion of Rift, no matter what price it is, and a new desktop PC, already makes it feel expensive for them. [But] that's why we see this new category of standalone [which Oculus showed the first prototype of yesterday], is very important to getting VR out to more people."
Boosting your own creativity is one thing; changing how a group thinks is another. But these psychological findings may hold the key.
Uber. Airbnb. Electric vehicles. Self-driving cars. Buses that can drive over traffic. Pretty much everything Steve Jobs created at Apple since the iPod. These are the inventions of our time that aren't just about innovation, but about leaps of imagination.
These are the kinds of things that make us ask: How did they get there? And, more importantly, how can I get my team there?
The end results may seem neat and tidy after the fact, but you can be sure they didn't seem that way at the start.
Collaboration is messy. Creativity happens in fits and with many false starts. There's no linear path from problem to solution, and there's no magic formula to innovation.
But there are ways that leaders can intentionally create an environment that fosters curiosity and a willingness to engage with new ideas to see where they might lead.
Here are three key strategies to foster more creative collaboration on your team.
In 1974, Toshio Okuno was promoted to plant manager at Higashimaru Shoyu Co., Ltd., a manufacturing plant that produced over 200 products, including several varieties of soy sauce. At the time, the company was struggling. A crowded market, rising costs, and stagnant prices had led to declines in profit year after year.
Okuno accepted his new post on one condition: that he be allowed the freedom to revitalize the corporation. One of the innovative methods he used was called "the Hangen game."
Hangen—meaning to reduce by half—was a game that consisted of removing half a team's members and challenging those left to try to complete the work of the whole team. Okuno says removing half the group, rather than just one or two people, "forces the group to reconsider every task it performs and ask whether each task was necessary."
Instead of finding small ways to marginally increase efficiency, the remaining team members identified fundamental ways to reevaluate their workflows. "I experienced the power of this approach personally as I listened to the workers review their jobs and come up with unique solutions that reduced their workload." Okuno says:
I called it a game because I wanted them to enjoy the creative process. We proved that people really do become more creative when they are placed in a tight corner. Just as importantly, we proved that it can be fun to be creative.
In the end, the team came up with a new system that kept the same line running smoothly with just 16 of the original 25 team members. Okuno was then able to reassign the extra nine team members to other areas of the company.
Ultimately, the pressure from removing half the team made it possible for employees to think more creatively about their jobs.
Why was the Hangen game so effective in fostering creative teamwork? A 2011 review of six separate studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology may shed light on the answer.
In one study, participants were asked to navigate a maze before solving a series of anagrams. Half the participants encountered an obstacle while navigating the maze, while the other half were allowed to complete the maze unhindered. The group that overcame the obstacle came up with significantly more creative answers to the anagram puzzles, even though the task was unrelated to navigating the maze.
The researchers hypothesized that encountering the obstacle caused people to take a mental step back, evaluate the "big picture," and consider a wider range of options than those who completed the maze with no obstacles, similar to the group dynamics Okuno observed in the Hangen game. This open mind-set then allowed them to think more creatively on the subsequent task.
In other words, obstacles have the power to put us in a more creative, problem-solving frame of mind. Artists often come up with creative work using very limited resources, and one study found that managers can foster more creative solutions in their teams by creating the perception of limited resources.
Sohrab Vossough, founder of design and innovation consultancy Ziba, says, in Harvard Business Review, "Scarcity forces focus." He continues:
Given enough time and money, any competent organization can emulate something that succeeded in the past. But when limited resources take the tried-and-true off the table, the only option is to come up with something new.
Vossough says we can see the principle of scarcity at work in creative teams. "All this may serve to explain a common characteristic of continually innovative organizations," he says, "that they operate with a scarcity mind-set, even in times of plenty."
As a team leader, it can be tempting to throw more resources at a problem—extending deadlines, adding more team members, allocating a larger budget—or scale back requirements. However, if creative solutions are the goal, you may be better off doing the exact opposite.
Set an ambitious deadline for a project. Define the problem as a challenge that tests current assumptions about what's possible. Limit resources by setting firm numbers for project budget, the number of team members involved, or the amount or kinds of materials used.
Find ways to present challenges to your team to broaden their mind-sets and consider a broader range of possible solutions to your business's problems. Teams often succeed because of the tension of working within challenging boundaries, not in spite of it.
In 1948, Alex Osborn was a partner in the advertising agency BBDO, "widely regarded as the most innovative firm on Madison Avenue." That year, Osborn published a book called Your Creative Power, which shared his best advice on creativity.
Forget quality; aim now to get a quantity of answers. When you're through, your sheet of paper may be so full of ridiculous nonsense that you'll be disgusted. Never mind. You're loosening up your unfettered imagination—making your mind deliver.
However, in 1958 a group of researchers at Yale University decided to test Osborn's assertion in a controlled experiment. They recruited a group of students and had them work on different types of creative puzzles. Half the students were put into groups and instructed to follow Osborn's guidelines, while the other half worked alone with no guidelines.
Counter to Osborn's brainstorming method, the study's solo students won out on measures of both quantity and quality. They were able to come up with more solutions to their creative puzzles than the students who were placed in groups. Furthermore, their solutions were judged as being more feasible and effective.
Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.
In 2003, psychology researcher Charlan Nemeth discovered that the secret to creative brainstorming might actually be the exact opposite of Osborn's advice. She gave groups of five students a single problem to solve: "How can traffic congestion be reduced in the San Francisco Bay Area?" The groups then had 20 minutes to come up with as many solutions as they could. Each group was assigned one of three conditions:
Brainstorming guidelines, including the "no criticism" rule
Debating guidelines, including suggestions to debate and even criticize each other's ideas
Control group with no extra guidelines
The brainstorming groups outperformed the control groups, though only slightly.
However, the group that actively debated ideas came in first.
The debate groups came up with almost 20% more ideas on average. Even more surprisingly, the effect continued even after the initial brainstorm. After the teams broke up, each individual was asked if they had any more ideas to share. The brainstormers and control group members offered three more ideas on average, while the debaters produced seven.
Nemeth said of the study:
While the instruction "Do not criticize" is often cited as the important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.
Nemeth suggests dissent helps us come up with new ideas because it encourages us to reassess our viewpoints by engaging more with the work of others. Although it's less positive to throw out the "no bad ideas" spiel, Nemeth says the compromise is worth it. "Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive," she said. "True creativity requires some trade-offs."
So throw out the old rules that prohibited criticism and encourage your team to set aside egos, ask questions, and engage with each other's ideas in a constructive way. Reframe debate as a positive, vital part of any problem-solving or creative process.
The strategies outlined above can easily backfire without a positive team culture to support them—teams can quickly become overwhelmed by the pressures of meeting seemingly impossible expectations, and debates can easily devolve into petty disagreements, resentment, and gridlock.
These strategies are most effective when supported by an underlying culture of trust and positivity that allows people to be vulnerable and candid with each other, and to accept criticism as a positive force and failure as part of the creative process.
Research shows that positive moods make us more open to learning new things and considering a broader set of options. They make us more receptive to both criticism and opposing points of view. In contrast, negative moods narrow our mind-set, focusing on problems rather than possibilities.
Teresa Amabile, an expert in the study of effect of emotional states on work, suggests that creativity and positive emotions may act as a feedback loop: Creative tasks can make you feel more positive, while feeling positive makes you more likely to be creative. In addition, positive emotions can help us develop psychological and social resources that outlast our temporary happiness. So we may be more creative in the future, thanks to a positive state of mind now.
Similarly, psychologist Barbara Fredrickson's research has shown the myriad benefits of positive emotions on individuals' work, creativity, and overall well-being. "They feel more effective at what they do," she said. "They're better able to savor the good things in life and can see more possible solutions to problems. And they sleep better."
Fredrickson teamed up with psychologist and business consultant Marcial Losada to see how the impact of positivity on individuals transferred to team dynamics. Losada studied 60 different teams while they conducted annual strategic planning meetings, a process that requires a great deal of collaborative creativity to be successful.
His team observed and recorded the meetings behind one-way glass and classified each statement made as being "positive," "negative," or "neutral." They also classified statements based on two other key criteria:
Was the speaker focused inward on the group itself, or was he or she outward, taking into account the larger context the surrounding the organization?
Was the speaker focused on advocating his or her own point of view, or was he or she asking questions and actively gathering new information?
The researchers then ranked each team's subsequent performance based on independent business metrics. High-performing teams had a positive-to-negative statement ratio of about six to one. In contrast, more than half of the statements made in low-performing teams were negative.
In addition, individuals on high-performing teams balanced their statements between asking questions and advocating their own point of view, and an internal focus on the group and an external focus on the larger context within which the company operated. Low-performing teams did the exact opposite; they tended to focus inward on the group, almost never asked questions, and advanced their own point of view almost exclusively.
"None of them were listening to each other," Fredrickson says. "They were all just waiting to talk."
That's not to say that the team must be positive at all times in order to be successful; negative emotions do have their place in the creative process. Some studies have shown that "neutral or mildly negative moods can be more effective for tasks such as systematic analysis," since they make us "less prone to errors in judgment, more accurate when recalling events, and better able to craft higher-quality, persuasive arguments."
Yet when negativity becomes the dominant mood, teams quickly fall into a downward spiral of negativity, narrow-mindedness, and self-advocacy. To uncover creative solutions, effective managers create positive team cultures that foster an openness to new ideas, encourage questions, and help employees think more broadly about about the challenge at hand.
When you unpack the stories behind creative teams, the winding path to innovation tends to be equal parts science, art, and luck. However, there are things you as a leader can do to create a culture of active engagement, debate, questioning, and open-mindedness that surfaces those elusive creative ideas that set companies apart.
While we need [constraints] to spur passion and insight, we also need a sense of hopefulness to keep us engaged and unwavering in our search for the right idea. Innovation is born from the interaction between constraint and vision.
This article originally appeared on Todoist and is reprinted with permission.
Clinton was said to have cleared her schedule the week before the debate. She surrounded herself with strategists and communication experts. She studied policy and rehearsed her talking points. According to CNN, she also spent time watching Trump's past debate performances and reading up on his policy proposals. Trump, meanwhile, continued to campaign, and one of his aides told the New York Times Trump had trouble focusing during practice sessions.
We'll have to see whether his new strategy pays off in Sunday's debate. To know what to watch out for, here's a look back at three key moments from the first debate that revealed how much both candidates may have brushed up. It's as a good a lesson as any that practicing a few important skills can help you nail even an unpredictable, unscripted speaking gig—whether you're addressing eight people or 80 million.
One of the reasons preparation is so important is because you get to practice your stories. We all have so many experiences in our lives that it can be difficult knowing which narratives to share for which occasions.
Clinton shared multiple stories, each with colorful imagery. The most memorable one she told was about her father. "He worked really hard," she recounted. "He printed drapery fabrics and went down with a silk screen and dumped the paint in and kept going." In the context of a presidential debate, it's easy to dismiss recollections like these as canned political set pieces—which they undoubtedly are.
But that doesn't make them any less effective rhetorically. Because Clinton's memory was real, her gestures were real, and as she told this story, her expressions were authentic. The image she painted of her father wasn't hard to visualize. And because she'd prepared ahead of time to paint it, Clinton had no trouble turning back to that narrative when the argument suited it. Later in the debate, she expressed relief that her father had never worked for Trump. That brought continuity to her remarks over the course of the debate, and gave viewers a memorable image to latch onto.
Trump didn't seem to have prepared any similarly colorful examples. He may have wanted to avoid coming off as rehearsed—something Clinton has been criticized for in the past—but that meant forgoing many opportunities to paint a vivid picture to engage viewers' imaginations. In fact, Trump mentioned his own father, too—but only to say that he gave him "a very small loan" to start his company (that loan has been estimated at $14 million, or $31 million in 2016 dollars). He could have told a brief story that better illustrated their relationship, or emphasized how grateful he was for the assistance, but Trump didn't seem to have this sort of narrative at hand.
When Saturday Night Live parodied the first debate, Kate McKinnon, playing Clinton, teased that the Democratic candidate's "Trumped-up trickle-down economics" line was a carefully planned catchphrase: "I don't know, I guess if I had to call it somethin' off the top of the ol' dome with no prep whatsoever, I don't know, I guess I'd call it, Trumped-up trickle-down economics!" When asked if she just came up with that on the spot, McKinnon adds cannily, "I did, right off the stiff red cuff!" and holds up the starched, scarlet sleeve of her pantsuit.
And of course the line was rehearsed. But just like planned stories, clever headlines like these are powerful weapons, even if they're easy to lampoon. Even though you could tell the "Trumped-up trickle-down" line was preplanned, it didn't matter—it was effective. If viewers remember a single line from Clinton's airtime in the last debate, it's probably this one, which distills her criticism of her opponent's economic philosophy into four words. That's exactly the type of provocative zinger that won't just come to you on the spot.
One of Trump's best lines was when he said he would release his tax returns just as soon as Clinton "releases her 33,000 emails." It was a powerful way to turn the tables and call his opponent a hypocrite on matters of transparency. Perhaps Trump did think of this right in the moment, but this was likely one of the retorts he worked on prior to the debate. Regardless, if you struggle to deliver zingers like these, you risk leaving your audience without something memorable to ponder afterward.
Finally, it's useful to practice connecting your talking points with the potential questions you will be asked. That's true whether you're joining a panel discussion, being interviewed by the press, or hosting a Q&A after your remarks—and it's true for a presidential debate, too. After all, preparing your points is just the beginning. The real challenge is how you can get to them in a format you may not have much control over.
When you're being asked a question, ignoring the question remains one option. But if the first debate was any indication, audiences are quick to note a dodge: You ask A, and I answer B. That looks even more rehearsed, mechanical, and sometimes downright deceitful than any preplanned story or clever headline you may have lined up. The latter two can often help you, but the former almost always hurts. The real art is to learn how to bridge from the question into your talking points by giving at least some sort of direct response, however brief. This way, you'll seem more in the moment and authentic.
Clinton did this pretty well when moderator Lester Holt asked her how she would heal the country's racial divide. She said, "Well, you're right. Race remains a significant challenge in our country." She then went into her talking points about criminal justice reform and gun control—but first, she connected with the question directly. Clinton was able to do this in some fashion for every question she was asked, likely because she was prepared.
Trump, on the other hand, struggled in this regard. By my count, Trump either refused outright to answer a question or answered only after first making an unrelated point for 12 of the 17 questions he was asked—over 70% of the time. When asked who he thought was behind recent spate of cyberattacks and what he would do to stop them, Trump's response was, "I do want to say that I was just endorsed and more are coming next week, it'll be over 200 admirals, many of them here, admirals and generals, endorsed me to lead this country." Those endorsements were worth mentioning, to be sure, but he should've brought that up after acknowledging the question first.
It's clear that Clinton's debate performance helped her, which suggests her preparation strategy paid off. A post-debate reaction poll by CNN/ORC showed 62% of viewers thought Clinton had won, compared with 27% who felt Trump had the upper hand. A week after the first debate, her edge in the polls has widened considerably. Trump's task this weekend couldn't be clearer, but to close the gap, he may need to prepare more than an opponent who's already proved how well-practiced she can be.
New InHerSight data show that high-quality mentorship programs for female professionals are in high demand and short supply.
Mentorship is widely touted as a means of supporting professional women, but a good mentorship program is hard to come by. Over 90,000 women have contributed to our database here at InHerSight, ranking their employers on 14 fixed metrics like management opportunities, salary satisfaction, and mentorship programs. And according to their feedback covering some 17,500 companies, it's pretty clear that many employers talk a bigger game on mentorship than they actually deliver. "Mentorship and sponsorship programs" is the lowest-rated factor of all 14 criteria that we capture, with an overall score of 2.2 out of five stars.
But here's the thing: According to our research, a company's mentorship program is highly correlated with women's overall satisfaction and happiness at her company. That means that, far from just scrapping badly rated mentorship programs and trying something else, your company probably needs to double down and work harder to get it right. If your female employees are unhappy with your mentorship program, they're more likely to be dissatisfied at work overall.
Some companies seem to have solved this puzzle better than others. Here's a look at two that have.
Enterprise software company NetSuite scores a 3.9 out of 5 for its mentorship program for female employees, which is still in its early days.
The program matches high-performing women at the company with mentors (regardless of gender) who work two levels above and in other departments. As JoAnne Taylor, NetSuite's global senior director for organizational effectiveness, learning, and development, explained, the goal is to give participants access to a broader network of coworkers within the company that they can learn from.
Mentorship at NetSuite isn't just about making those connections and stepping back, though. The program includes a number of structured events that allow for networking, many of which are part of the broader Women in NetSuite program. There's also regular email communication on topics for mentorship pairs to discuss.
NetSuite's mentorship program currently serves about 60 mentees, and Taylor says it's in high demand and growing fast. Not only do those participants get one-on-one career coaching inside the company, but they're also able to share their knowledge and experiences with their mentors, helping more senior workers stay current in the fast-changing technology space.
While PayPal has a number of different mentorship programs, its Unity Mentorship Program is especially noteworthy. Unity is an employee-led community whose mission is to help women thrive at PayPal, which scores a 4 out of 5 for its mentorship programs overall.
Like many corporate mentorship programs, this one is relatively small, serving 100 matched mentor-mentee pairs at any given time. Pairs can be in the same department or different departments and are of mixed gender as well.
At its core, the program tries to emphasize a human connection, Stefana Hunyady, who runs the initiative, explains. Although pairs are initially matched based on a short set of survey questions, the first meeting helps determine whether each participant has found a good fit. Those relationships tend to work best, says Hunyady, when "you have chemistry with, and are inspired by, your mentor or protégé."
Like NetSuite, PayPal is seeing more demand for its Unity program than there are spots available, so the company is expanding its offerings to include group and peer mentoring. The group mentoring effort, which is in development now, will have one senior leader paired with 20 mentees. The group will meet monthly over a six-month period to discuss specific topics.
Peer mentoring will serve a different role, giving PayPal employees cheerleader-like figures inside the organization. With an emphasis on personalization, the goal is to give participants the support they need in order to reach their own versions of success.
Mentorship programs are in high demand, particularly from people in the earlier stages of their careers. If done well, they can be a way to keep employees happy and loyal even when you can't afford to pay the highest salaries or offer the hottest benefits. Mentorship programs can also be a way to hang onto the "job-hopping generation" by providing them with the feedback and connection they crave.
But a good mentorship program requires thoughtful planning and a sustained commitment. If you're not willing to make mentorship a focused corporate effort, the data suggests that the better approach may be to scale your program back to a level your company can support. Many big mentorship efforts fail because they're too large to actually deliver the benefits they're designed to. Even big tech companies like PayPal seem to prefer a constellation of more focused mentorship programs to just one huge, companywide option.
One smaller-scale approach that's both manageable and effective might be a shadowing program that provides some of the benefits with less commitment. But if it's clear the resources or commitment just aren't there at the corporate level, it may be better to scrap your mentorship program until you can get leadership on board. The risks of a shoddy offering may be worse than no offering at all.
If you're looking for other companies getting above-average marks for their corporate mentorship programs, check out LinkedIn, which scores a 3.8/5; CDW, which scores a 3.7/5; and EY, CEB, and Facebook, all three of which score a 3.6/5. Here's a longer list of 20 companies getting high marks for their mentorship or sponsorship programs.
Finally, a good place to start is simply finding out how your own company's sponsorship or mentorship program stacks up. Your employees may already have weighed in on whether it's one of the rare success stories or a dud.
Kate Ward is head of partnerships for InHerSight, whose mission is to improve the workplace for women by measuring it. InHerSight brings women's insights together into a common framework to show what's working and what's not at companies, and to help more women find their ideal workplace.
Hopefully you'll never have to use it, but this long read may hold the only advice leaders need for handling painful cutbacks.
The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and U2 aren't the only ones who can fill up the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. If every person that Beth Steinberg has helped hire took a seat at the venue, about 500 people would be left standing. They'd hail from fashion retailer Nordstrom to gaming giant Electronic Arts, from solar provider Sunrun to social network Facebook.
Any talent leader knows how astoundingly hard hiring can be—until they execute a layoff, which Steinberg has had to do at least once at nearly every company she's worked. If you think hiring 10,000 people over a career sounds daunting, try laying off 2,000 of them.
Steinberg started her career with a decade in retail, in which layoffs are common given the seasonality of the sector. As she began working with more technology companies, she managed another type of expansion and contraction cycle, but this time mirroring the ebb and flow of capital and talent. In addition to some of the aforementioned names in technology, Steinberg has advised several organizations such as Ideo.org, Puppet Labs, and Hackbright Academy.
Permanent layoffs—or what are more accurately known as reductions in force (RIFs)—are terminations rooted in structural and market-based changes, versus the performance of specific individuals. Here, Steinberg addresses the four phases of a permanent layoff and outlines the people to convene and steps to take during each stage. Drawing from anonymized examples from her career, she brings tactics to one of the most difficult times a company faces and what to expect from a leader, terminated employees, and the team that remains.
When it comes to layoffs, Steinberg has worked with leaders who are incredibly empathetic with employees but lack experience, as well as those who can lead layoffs methodically, but without a keen awareness of their impact on their team. The key is to get those elements in equal proportion.
"Layoffs are first and foremost about your people: those who will be let go, those who remain with the company, and the leaders who guide the company through the process. So while it's a business decision, what's in motion are the people you've hired and have helped you build," says Steinberg.
Every company wants leaders who naturally understand and guide their company according to this principle. But even the most capable leaders can falter when emotion, inexperience, and pressure come into play. That's why you need a process that orients leaders and couples attentive management with a thoughtful plan.
Steinberg still remembers the experience that shaped her current philosophy toward layoffs because it caught the entire company off guard. "It was my first HR leadership position at a very early-stage startup. Over 18 months, we grew from about 50 to over 300 people. Headcount went unchecked as we went after a business model we thought worked," she says.
Turns out we didn't have the model to justify our team. We needed to get our burn rate down immediately. The layoff strategy was haphazard; some decisions were based on performance, team, popularity. Thinking back, it was entirely the wrong approach in every possible way.
The most disastrous part was the leadership at the top. "Our CEO had very little—if any—accountability and actually did not come to work the day of the layoffs. So the CFO, a few other managers, and I had to sit down and lay off about half the company," says Steinberg. "It was very painful experience because there was not a lot I could say that made me feel like we were doing the right thing. Years later, it still makes me sad and wonder what else I could have done."
When Steinberg works with leadership teams, she makes a note to double-check that headcount is justified whenever hiring plans are being discussed. "It's not to be a killjoy, but to add in a checkpoint. It's hard work to get funding or close a big customer, so when there's the opportunity to grow, the first reaction is often to hire more people. It's as if it sends a signal that the company is making it," says Steinberg.
I realize now that I had the strength to step in and lay off people. I just wish I'd had a stronger voice earlier on and asked, 'Why are we hiring all these people?' The truth is that there needs to be an awareness before there's a strategy. If your hiring plan is one side of the coin, your layoff plan is the other side.
Steinberg understands that the quick turns of company building make this type of methodical thoughtfulness around layoffs at the onset not easy—especially for startups. So she suggests taking incremental steps to usher in that philosophy:
Map out capabilities, not just headcount. "When managers grow teams, I often see them conflate people with skill sets. They need a sales director, so they immediately think of that profile existing in a separate person, often outside their company. If that happens with every team leader, all of a sudden the company is hiring left and right," says Steinberg. "By the time you define a profile, put lines out into the market, vet candidates, interview, hire, extend an offer, set a start date, onboard and get the hire spun up, you could be looking three to six months down the line. And that's probably conservative."
Instead, define the skill sets you want. Says Steinberg:
By extracting the skill sets you need from the person you think might have them, all of a sudden there are many other ways of obtaining the capabilities you need to grow. You may still need to hire, but maybe you'll realize that a freelancer or contractor can supply what you need. Or an employee you already have is able to grow into that skill set in the same amount of time it'd take to hire someone else—and would be current with institutional knowledge.
From a management point of view, these types of options keep your workforce flexible and lean. Also, employee development not only gives you more depth with your existing workforce, but it's a retention mechanism. They're not mutually exclusive, but instead of just immediately growing headcount, you're also developing talent.
Steinberg has helped not only heads of people develop these talent plans, but also entire leadership teams. "All group leaders should go through the exercises of mapping out the skill sets they need 12–18 months down the line. I know it's hard because they're stretched already to hit pressing goals, but it makes life much easier over the long run," she says.
"I'm working now with a leadership team that's never done talent planning. I told them that if their talent lead knew what they might need 12–18 months from now from a skill perspective, they can start seeding those relationships now. Some upfront work would make their lives—and the talent leader's life—much easier."
For leaders or startups that need to keep talent planning low-lift, Steinberg can boil down a conversation about critical positions into five key questions:
What is the position that's needed?
What are the key skills and competencies?
When will these skills be needed?
Why will they be needed/what is the work?
Who are potential internal candidates or external profiles who could fulfill this work?
This lightweight version is powerful when it rolls up to give a talent leader or founder a sense of the skill sets the entire company will need down the line. "The mind-shift from headcount to skill sets is one shift; a systematic way to track those needs is another," says Steinberg.
A budget is not just a number, but a signal. One of the immediate challenges facing leadership teams at growing companies—especially quickly scaling, dynamic startups—is deciding how and what information should flow throughout the company. Says Steinberg:
It's hard to know where to start, so here's what I recommend: All people leaders, from the C-suite to the frontline leaders, get exposure and access to view the annual budget. I've seen how this act has made founders nervous or fearful, but also how they relax when their people rise to the responsibility of what's been shared with them.
Here's what happens: The health of the company is no longer an abstract concept. They see in print how the biggest expenses are facilities and salaries and how increasing those fixed costs quickly make burn rate accelerate over time. It's the only way managers will learn and get better.
When this exposure happens long before any sign of a layoff, it is an act of trust and every part of the leadership is empowered. When it's done just before or after the layoff, it's an explanation more than an education. There's a power vacuum, and exposure at that stage of the game makes middle and frontline managers feel informed by—not in line with—their leadership.
"Create a view-only, shared document that, at minimum, outlines budget and projected headcount for each team. I encourage leaders to share the entire budget to avoid different versions throughout the organization," says Steinberg.
Then bring in the finance leader if there is one—or an external consultant, if not—to explain the budget and budgeting process for non-finance leaders. It sounds basic, but this act is as critical to the long-term health of a company as the budget itself. Thereafter, set a quarterly check-in to provide voiceovers to any changes. Then, when there's talk of needing to reel back to get to profitability or to raise more money, you'll be surprised how people rally around a goal driven by information they've been entrusted with.
Otherwise, there's a lot of ground to cover when something like a layoff hits. "Without that exposure to the business plan and budget, a freeze in headcount and impending layoff will catch the company off-guard," Steinberg says.
For leaders who hesitate with transparency or worry that their decisions will be called into judgment, I remind them: People can usually handle the truth, but they can't handle feeling as if they've been deceived or purposely left in the dark. That feeling seeps into the culture and dissolves the conditions that allow people to do their best work.
A layoff shouldn't be a surprise to leaders, nor to its people. It's not something that happens to a company. It's an act by its leadership when no other routes can be pursued. In other words, when a layoff is your way forward, you should implicitly be telling people that you've exhausted every other route. Here is what you should have already considered:
Delay hiring:
It's not uncommon for companies to move resources from one quarter to a later quarter. Leaders should ask their people managers to look at their goals and headcount asks, and then see what's realistic to move. I've never had leaders not work together to delay and reprioritize hires.
Cut salaries:
I've been at a company where every senior leader didn't take a bonus—which amounted to about 33% of our pay—in order not to have to lay anybody off. For many, the cut felt substantial. Not every senior team will like it, but driving accountability at the highest levels is paramount and can prevent a layoff.
Reset the senior/junior employee ratio:
If a layoff is about helping return a company to financial health, senior members should not be immune to a layoff, as they can account for a big chunk of expenses. It depends on the company, but a good rule of thumb is that senior leaders should make up less than 5% of the headcount. I've seen companies as high as 20%. Factoring in equity, there's a huge delta between the compensation of senior and junior staff.
Scale back perks as well as travel and expenses:
This isn't the first lever to pull to scale back costs, but it could be a significant budget line, especially in smaller companies. At one organization, they had 15 different types of chips. The very tools used to delight and retain employees might put the company at risk down the line.
Consult with your board:
Changes in customer buying behavior is the first signal many companies should get that market forces may be shifting. However, leaders familiar with—but who are external to—your company are especially helpful if they've operated or invested in similar organizations or funding cycles. Keep those channels open. Not only do they have a vantage point to help spot potential downturns or droughts of capital, but they'll have ideas on what has worked to weather these changes.
When alternatives are being explored, there is a core group that's involved in evaluating options. "In a startup, it may include the cofounders and the board. With larger companies, that may involve the CEO's executive team. In both cases, it's standard that in-house or external counsel is involved to ensure legal compliance and act as a sounding board," says Steinberg.
Each executive has a part to play—such as running numbers or preparing legal documents—in evaluating the alternatives to a layoff. There's a lot of detailed work and careful review that goes into this process. Don't cut corners. You need to always remember that you're talking about people and in the process of taking away their jobs.
How to convene this core group that's evaluating alternatives is also key. "I recommend that those weighing the options convene as conspicuously as possible—perhaps either very early or late during a work day. This is not for focus or to be excessively secretive, but to avoid worrying teams unnecessarily," says Steinberg.
If people see their leaders—who may not meet all together in this way regularly—locked in a meeting room, they'll think something bad is going on. Speculation not only starts the rumor mill, but halts productivity. Until it's been decided that layoffs are the only way forward, there's no reason to let people feel anxiety.
Inform and equip your senior leadership. Where many leaders understandably struggle is how, when, and with whom to share the news that a layoff is coming once people outside the most senior decision makers must know. News travels quickly, so laying the groundwork to manage internal communications is the first step to initiating a layoff. Here are a few tips from Steinberg on sharing the news internally:
Justify your confidentiality:
After the core team who evaluated the alternatives, the next group of people who should receive the news are the leaders of each team. If they were involved in the initial collective, then it's all people managers.
If possible, meet in-person with the most senior tier of management who wasn't involved in the initial evaluation. Share the problem you are trying to solve and run through the alternatives that you evaluated. Let them ask questions. Your thorough diligence and an open forum is a key way to gain their empathy and confidence.
Ask for your people managers' help:
The link between the senior management and next level of people managers is critical. As mentioned earlier, they should have context already around the budget and hiring plans, but they'll still need to digest the news and ask questions. Once they have, you must ask for their partnership to help roll out the news.
I've seen situations where managers and their people were told in the same conversation that their people were being laid off. That's demeaning to the manager. There's always a challenge when cascading news during layoffs, but it's more vital to trust that your managers will have discretion than to have them feel undermined.
Anchor to the definition of a layoff:
There will be a range of emotions. This is where getting wording right matters, especially to your senior leaders, who will field questions after the layoff is announced. A talent head or coach must train leaders and practice these conversations with them.
They must help them be crystal clear that a layoff is very different than terminating people for bad performance. This is not about something the employee has done wrong. Many people lump them together, but a layoff is defined as the elimination of job or function, not a specific person.
Steinberg has seen a range of viable layoff communications plans—and outlines a few of them below—but feels most strongly about how quickly a layoff should happen. "From announcement to exit conversations, the information should flow through your organization through established channels in hours if it's a small startup, or days, if it is a large company," says Steinberg. "If it draws out for multiple days or weeks, it generates anxiety for all: managers, their reports, and the leadership. Not only is it cruel, but it brings productivity to a trickle."
That's why laying the groundwork for a layoff is not only so important for leadership and culture, but for the speedy dissemination of information. Says Steinberg:
Managers who have access to a current budget and updates to headcount projections are not caught off guard when layoffs might happen. That transparency leads to increased trust in leadership, which brings credibility to the executive team when it says a layoff is necessary after considering all the options.
Only if that prework has been done will a leader be able to go from making a decision regarding a layoff to disseminating it through her senior management efficiently. If not, all efforts will be toward building relationships versus disseminating information—not ideal when there's urgent news to share.
There are two approaches to breaking the news internally. When the a layoff is about to be announced to the entire company, Steinberg has seen two main approaches work:
The company calls an All-Hands. The CEO makes the announcement. People return to their desks and direct managers start having team and one-on-one conversations.
Direct managers announce the news to their teams. The company calls an All-Hands. The CEO expounds on the news. People return to their desks to have one-on-one conversations.
Says Steinberg:
Which way to announce the layoff depends on the culture of the company. I've always pressed leaders to consider which option they think is better suited for their people, even if it's not easier for them. By and large, the more transparent the culture, the more frequently they start with the All-Hands.
In cases where there's not a periodic All-Hands or frequent interaction with the CEO, I've seen the second option work better. Either way, the people should convene to receive a message from their CEO and have the chance to ask questions in a small group. Regardless of order, they should both happen in immediate succession so information is contained as much as possible until everyone has spoken with their direct manager.
Regardless of order, when the CEO speaks, she should hit a few main points. "First, the CEO takes accountability. It's the leader's job to bring together the right advisers, intelligence on the market, and senior leadership to avoid needing to use this tool of last resort," says Steinberg. "Pretending that it's someone or something else's fault causes a lot damage. The CEO and leadership team are accountable for the health of the company. You admit what went wrong, commit to fixing it, outline your plan, and restate that you're taking accountability for it."
If a message about layoffs can ever crescendo, it should do so around the summary of the plan forward. Says Steinberg:
There needs to be conviction in the way ahead, not only to show that the layoff was not for nothing, but to reassure those who've believed in—and have worked hard for—the company. It's not easy, but, as much as possible, a leader needs to think of this as a structural change that will also allow people to keep their jobs and drive toward a vision.
The final point should be an assurance that all measures have been taken to ensure this happens once and without more rounds of layoffs in the near future. "You don't want your people to have a lingering fear that more people are going to be laid off. I was at a company that laid off five to six people every week for four months because the leadership thought it'd be better for optics," says Steinberg. "But it became a morbid joke where people would guess whose turn it was each week. As you'd expect, people lost their trust in the company and productivity and morale plummeted."
When it comes to leaks about a layoff, Steinberg admits that that's a curveball that can come at leaders. "There are ways to minimize the risk of leaked news of your company's layoff, but the moment the consideration is shared with anyone outside the CEO, it could happen. A layoff is as much a litmus test of leadership and culture as it is a milestone for a company," says Steinberg. "You may wonder if you can trust your senior leaders and direct managers with an important, confidential message. Now you'll find out. And that realization of the company you're running is more precious than a potential leak."
That said, there are measures that can help control the message outside of your company's walls. "Of course, you want to get ahead of any leak or review on Glassdoor. I've seen the most success when the Marketing or PR lead has a press release queued up and media contacts ready to receive it," says Steinberg. "The lead clicks send the moment the CEO announces the news at the All-Hands to the company. Many CEOs also work with teams to prep a more personal blog post. All these techniques are signals that a company isn't hiding from the news and it wants to address what's happening in its own words."
In order to execute a layoff expediently, direct managers should be the ones to deliver the message to each terminated individual. In addition to training with a HR or People team leader, Steinberg says that in-house or external counsel can be a resource for what absolutely shouldn't be said. Here are her tips on a few key issues:
Severance:
There's a big range. I've seen a company that laid off people after eight years and gave them two weeks. Another company overhired and, in wanting to own their error, gave a generous two months to everyone.
It's all dependent on the plan to getting back to financial health. Most people grant varying amounts of severance by tenure and seniority. It's different for public companies, but I'm not a fan of doing a severance policy up front, as situations are different and require flexibility.
Walking out:
Layoffs typically range from being effective immediately to two weeks out. Either way, have boxes preordered so that people have a way to carry out their belongings if they wish as soon as they hear the news.
I always recommend that direct managers give laid-off employees options. They can pack up and go home immediately after the announcement. Or they should offer to meet them over the weekend, if they prefer to pack up with fewer people around. Respect them by trusting that they know what they need. Be present and helpful.
Help finding new jobs:
At past companies, the talent team and I have worked with anyone who wanted help, by reviewing their resume or supplying intros to other companies. We assigned each recruiter a functional areas to support those in non-technical and engineering roles who were let go. Also, the CEO worked with the board and investors whose other portfolio companies had open jobs.
This puts action behind the reality that a layoff was a business decision, not about the people as people. Don't just let go and cut ties. Take it personally so those laid off don't.
Just as preparation for a layoff begins long before it might happen, so are there important steps to take after those laid off leave. "I recommend the same all-hands and small group session combination for employees who are still with the company. The CEO should readdress what this change means for the company and explain the organizational structure and plan going forward," says Steinberg. "The small group sessions focus on asking employees three questions that are more difficult to cover in one large session. They are: Is it clear why this happened? Do you have any questions about our new plan? Is there anything we could've done better?"
"Give people time to grieve because they lost friends and colleagues. But, after that, quickly orient the company to the future. There should be a celebration of the contributions of those who have left and those who remain. Don't pretend it never happened, but focus on what's next," says Steinberg. "After a layoff, I've seen companies host happy hours or lunches. These are routine acts that can help reinstate some sense of normalcy. When a layoff has gone as well as it can go, you'll eventually see former employees return to visit. The best companies host alumni events and online forums to encourage these relationships."
Ultimately, you want former employees to eventually acknowledge that it was a bad and difficult situation, but not at fault how it was handled. "I've personally tried to write handwritten notes to everyone who's been impacted by a layoff. I let them know that if they need anything to please let me know," says Steinberg. "Many people write back notes of appreciation or return to visit and thank me in person. It's about making an effort as a human being. It may take longer to write a note—it doesn't scale—but those gestures endure and define your company."
A layoff is difficult to discuss and even harder to execute. It's a tool of last resort that can revive the financial health of a company when nothing else will. To avoid using it, give your people leaders—down to the newly minted frontline manager—access to current, projected headcounts and budgets. This information should be coupled with financial education and quarterly updates.
By establishing this common knowledge and relationship, leaders will be able to more easily mobilize and count on their managers to help roll out a layoff efficiently if it's necessary. Layoffs should be done quickly, but with consideration of those leaving. Leaders must be able to articulate which alternatives were considered. Those staying will take note of how their colleagues are handled. The leadership and talent team should use their networks to help place former colleagues, while the CEO must guide the company to its next chapter.
"The memory of Silicon Valley—and other entrepreneurial hubs—is long. That's why it's so important to do what you can upfront to lay the groundwork should a layoff happen," says Steinberg.
Fortunately, these preparations are also in-step with smart company building, such as getting teams to be as productive as possible, monitoring and sharing the levers of financial health with managers, and building trust through transparency with your teams. But even if all these gears are turning, bad luck happens. When the situation intensifies, don't let yourself forget that those line items are people with lives and families interwoven with your company. You must act with empathy. That's the only way to get through a layoff.
This article originally appeared on First Round Review and is reprinted with permission.
Investors are more cautious than they used to be, but a higher bar for startup founders means more chances to prove your mettle.
Pandas were taken off the endangered species list earlier this year, but unicorns seem to have been added to it lately. VC-backed billion-dollar companies have exited more than new ones have been funded this year. This suggests investors are a lot more cautious about investing in startups than they used to be, preferring to get their older investments sold or sent public.
That means new startups courting investors may face even more scrutiny and skepticism than they would have even a year ago. These seven venture capitalists explain what their due-dilligence tests consist of right now, and what it takes to pass them.
"The number-one indication of the company being successful or not is its customers. That's where I start with due diligence," says Sonja Perkins, founder of the all-women angel/VC powerhouse group Broadway Angels. "I'll directly talk or meet with customers and ask them the following three questions: First, 'What is your problem?' Second, 'How are you solving this problem today?' and lastly, 'How would this new solution solve this problem for you?'" There better be a lot of customers to interview, she says, even potential ones.
Perkins continues, "I don't ask two or three customers, I interview several. My favorite company is the one that's doing well despite itself. Maybe the company's founder isn't too polished or the infrastructure is a bit weak, but if customers are dying to have the solution, I know I have a winning investment."
Laurent Grill, an investor at Luma Launch in Los Angeles, goes even further when companies are young. "Likely, early adopters of a product (e.g., Kickstarter) will skew into a smaller demographic than the eventual larger market," he points out. "We need to know an extended demographic that could adopt the company's product at scale." Grill continues:
Therefore, asking current customers of early companies about their experience can be misleading due to their intrinsic [knack] for risk-taking on companies or early products. Instead, I do a scalability risk analysis and reach out to the potential demographic for the company. This is an effective way to make educated assumptions on the ability for a company to bring their product to larger mass market.
Beyond adoring current or potential customers, a product's evolution is a key mark of how well founders can adapt. But Kevin Zhang, principal at Upfront Ventures, says most startups today don't have the robust financial models or expensive research reports he got used to seeing as a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. So as an investor, he's had to turn to other metrics.
"That's why I'm so focused on the product demo process," Zhang says. "In the absence of significant quantitative data, the early product evolution is a mirror for a founder's innate grasp of customers' needs, and how they will iterate to solve them." Before Upfront decided to fund entrepreneur Todd Hooper's live-streaming VR platform VREAL, Zhang recalls, "I saw multiple versions of the product over six months of meetings. Each time, features were refined and stability improved with careful, user-centric reasoning behind every change."
Getting a front seat to this process was crucial, Zhang says. "The product evolution was evidence of thoughtful debate and hard decisions around balancing user needs with revenue opportunities and measured resource allocation." Ultimately, Zhang says he felt confident that Hooper and his team "would manage the user experience and the business with careful consideration to every stakeholder" and decided to back VREAL.
Founders who can showcase great management skills as diverse interests multiply and business demands mount is critical for investors in the current startup environment, too. Ben Sun, Partner of New York City–based Primary VC, puts it bluntly: "About 80% of our investment decision is based on our belief in the entrepreneur."
Sun says he and his team evaluate entrepreneurs according to three key questions. "First, would you work for this person? A great company will only happen if the entrepreneur can build a great team. If a founder can't attract great people, we'll pass on the deal, no matter how great the idea is."
The second question, says Sun, is, "Can this person sell stock? Being able to raise money is a real skill. If the company's runway is really short, they can go out of business very quickly." Sun's last question surrounds the "cheetah vs. lamb" debate on the importance of emotional intelligence. Quite simply, Sun says, "We look for cheetahs."
Like Perkins, Allison Thoreson Bhusri is an investor with Broadway Angels, and she also has a protocol for investigating founders' characters. She does that "both directly and through back-channel references. Confidence and an almost irrational optimism are needed," says Bhusri, "but too much arrogance is a red flag." Bhusri says Kurt Workman and Jordan Monroe at Owlet and Meaghan Rose at RocksBox all had solid, consistent back-channel references. "I learn a ton from back-channel calls, and this homework makes me a better advisor to the company if I do end up investing."
"I learn a ton from back-channel calls, and this homework makes me a better advisor to the company if I do end up investing."
Chirag Chotalia, principal at DFJ, also talks with references in order to assess founders' "motivation and desires for the business." That's crucial for understanding "the team's ability to execute," Chotalia says, but that isn't always evaluated:
Unlike financial or market diligence, there's no scientific way to approach this. It's the result of many direct conversations with the team, speaking to people they've worked with in the past—both prior investors if they've raised capital prior—and direct reports and former managers."
Investors' goal in these discussions, says Chotalia, should be "gauging how the team has handled situations in prior contexts," then using that to predict its future performance.
Lastly, investors want plain honesty. "It's the nature of startups: we will inevitably go through tough times together," said Jennifer Carolan, a partner at Reach Capital. "As an institutional investor, I expect to be working closely with the founding team for years. It's critical that we can trust one another and that the founder can be open about the problems so we can tackle them together."
Eight years ago, Carolan led diligence on BetterLesson, founded by Alex Grodd. "He was very honest about himself, the early limitations of the product, and the tough market outlook," she recalls. "He did not overpromise. Fast-forward to today, I still sit on his board and can say that his veracity and character are key reasons why the company has grown into a market leader."
Perhaps the best way to save the thinning herd of VCs' unicorns? Companies of cheetahs with character, customers, and the ability to change. After all, investors' relative cautiousness doesn't have to mean fewer opportunities for entrepreneurs. That can even work in startup founders' favor—by giving them more chances to prove their mettle.
Beck Bamberger founded BAM Communications in 2008 and writes regularly for Forbes, Inc., and The Huffington Post about entrepreneurship, public relations, and culture.
This week's top stories may help your cover letter stand out (for the right reasons) and keep your impatience in check.
This week we learned which cover letters hiring managers weed out first, how to make better use of those idle moments spent on our smartphones, and what it takes to be patient for longer.
The days of the cover letter may ultimately be numbered, but they're still widely used to screen candidates. These are some of the most common immediate disqualifiers, according to one experienced hiring manager.
Sometimes 10 or 15 minutes is all the time you've got to think about the handful of tasks you won't be able to get to as you hop from one meeting to the next. So instead of using those short intervals to make a hurried, jumbled mental list—or just giving up and scrolling Instagram—try this.
Patience may be a virtue, but it's one we're hardwired to resist much of the time. That's thanks to two competing mental systems, one psychologist explained this week, that work in tandem to motivate you to pursue certain goals over others. Impatience is a byproduct of that dynamic, but there may be a few simple ways to hack it.
When this exec moved his company to an open office, he realized it wasn't just his team that had to adapt their work habits. His management approach needed to evolve, too. This week he shared some of the growing pains he hadn't expected, and what it took to get past them.
Our perception of the passage of time is anything but stable—sometimes it moves too fast for our liking, sometimes way too slowly. Here's a look at the latest research on two key variables that play the biggest roles in determining the speed at which the minutes, hours, and days seem to tick by.
You know how to write a to-do list. If you're like lots of people, you may already be in the habit of writing out a list of the day's tasks as soon as you get into the office each morning or even the night before.
The bigger challenge is figuring out how to prioritize it. No matter how productive you are, there will always be too many tasks for you to complete. You're always going to have to choose which ones to do first, which to do second, and which tasks to do not at all. It isn't always easy to remember that it's not the amount of time you put in, it's the value of the work and the things you achieve in that time that really counts. Your job is to focus on accomplishments rather than activities.
Allocating your time based on the value of the task starts with your to-do list, and this method can help.
The "ABCDE method" is deceptively simple: Before you start your workday, go through your list and write one of these five letters before each task or activity. Think about the likely consequences of completing or not completing each task. Something is only as important as its potential consequences. Likewise, an unimportant task is one that has low or no potential consequences. Consequences are everything.
Successful, highly productive people spend most of their time working on activities that have big potential consequences. Unsuccessful people often work harder and longer hours, but they spend too much of their time working on activities without much impact one way or the other. It doesn't really matter if they complete them or not.
Put the letters A, B, C, D, or E next to each task on your list. An A activity is something that you must do. It has serious potential consequence for completion or non-completion. If you don't do this task or get it done on time, there are going to be serious problems. These are the most important things that you do each day.
Put a B in front of activities that you should do, activities that have mild potential consequences if they are done or not done. You need to get to these tasks sooner or later, but they are not as important as your A tasks. The rule is that you never do a B task when there is an A task left undone.
A C task is something that would be nice to do, but it has no consequences at all, either for good or ill. Checking your personal email, phoning home, having coffee with a coworker, are all activities that are nice to do but it does not matter at all whether you do them or not. These items don't often make it onto our to-do lists but tend to creep into our workdays unplanned. Since you'll probably be checking Facebook anyway, it helps to include that—the key is to take an honest inventory of what you'll do at work each day before you can take action accordingly.
Unfortunately, the great majority of people spend most of their time doing B and C tasks, and they think that because they are doing them at their workplace they are actually working. But this isn't true. Just because you're at work does not mean that you're indeed working.
Put a D next to all tasks you can delegate to anyone else who can do them. Think about the value of the work you do in monetary terms: If you aspire to earn $25 per hour ($50,000 per year) or $50 an hour ($100,000 per year), don't spend your time doing tasks that someone else can do for $10 an hour.
An E task is something that you can eliminate and it won't make any difference at all. It may be a task that you have been doing for a while (or even just a bad work habit . . . sorry, Facebook), but it's no longer important. It may no longer be your task to do. Whatever the case, it can be eliminated safely and have no consequences at all for your career.
Now go back over your list and organize your A tasks by priority by writing A-1, A-2, A-3, and so on next to your most important tasks. Do the same for your B tasks. Finally, start on your A-1 task, your most important and valuable use of your time. Resolve to concentrate single-mindedly on that one task until it's 100% complete.
This simple formula—making a list, prioritizing it, and then starting and completing your most important tasks first, uninterrupted—can help you dramatically improve the quantity and quality of your output at work. It's the key to high results. And remember, results are everything.
This article is adapted from Master Your Time, Master Your Life by Brian Tracy, from TarcherPerigee, a division of Penguin Random House. Copyright 2016, Brian Tracy. It is reprinted with permission.
It's easier than ever to pump gobs of data and flashy multimedia into your presentation. Don't.
In early 2001, I was asked to prepare a presentation for senior executives at Microsoft. Our goal was to determine why our sales education programs were seeing such low adoption rates, explore options to remedy the situation, and ultimately expand our global relationship. The only thing was, I'd barely logged 60 days in my new role.
During my presentation, I announced that the company had achieved a low return on its seven-figure programs investment and said we were willing to help them improve. The leadership team got defensive. I endured a heated, loud banter among the top leaders, and then quietly returned to my seat.
Within 24 hours of that meeting, Microsoft asked my boss to remove me from the account.
I was disappointed that I wasn't able to persuade those execs to see things differently, but it was clear why I got the reaction I did in retrospect: They didn't even know me, let alone trust me.
Fifteen years later, high-stakes pitch meetings and presentations look a lot different than they typically did back then. But lately, as I travel the world and speak to conference audiences, I see many speakers' presentations falling flat for different reasons. Some of the most common approaches out there still miss the fundamentals I'd overlooked as a new hire trying to win over Microsoft.
It's easy to lose sight of the basics of persuasive delivery in an onslaught of snappy diagrams and loads of data. But audience impact usually gets lost with it. Based on the number of presentations and marketing plans I've critiqued over the past year or two, I'm seeing a rush to present facts and figures at the expense of rapport-building. When this happens, speakers can't earn hearts and minds of their audiences.
The most memorable presenters keep things simple. They tell stories about successful initiatives. They inspire others to be better and bolder. They avoid dumping heaps of data on listeners. Here are three tried and true, low-tech tips for winning over your audience—which still work no matter what other presentation styles may be in vogue.
No matter what transformation you're arguing for—whether it's a new CRM system, a cost-savings initiative, or a modern video strategy—don't forget that it's going to disrupt the status quo. There's a high likelihood that your listeners will resist that change. When presenters only share the good news, they hide their human, vulnerable side.
This discourages detractors and doubters from voicing their concerns—and from offering the sort of candid feedback you actually need in order to make a stronger case. Ignoring their reservations will put the brakes on what you're trying to accomplish with your presentation.
More willingness to anticipate and address this resistance might have rescued my Microsoft relationship. In hindsight, I could have woven this into my introductory remarks: "I know some of what I'm about to share will surprise you, and possibly upset you. Stop me when you have questions, and let's work through it together."
As I navigate the hectic fall conference season and annual budget-planning cycle, I'm turned off by software screenshots and performance dashboards, usually containing minuscule, 12-point fonts. Chances are I'm not alone. It's hard seeing the detail on the slides, let alone the point all that data is meant to drive home. Squinting to make sense of it all, your audience will get frustrated. Their minds will wander. They'll stop listening.
Effective presenters often win hearts and minds by showing just a single image or word on a screen while they tell a story. So skip the data dump. Instead, you might consider hiring a professional designer to create eye-succinct, eye-catching (rather than migraine-inducing) slides. Personally, I follow Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule. Or skip the slides altogether, and use (gasp!) a flip chart—yes, that can still be just as effective as any slide deck.
You're activating two-way conversations, not a one-way data dump. So make your presentation a conversation by pausing to ask the audience questions. Encourage self-reflection. You can even incorporate a few brief exercises that require your audience's active participation. Pause from time to time and ask them whether your points make sense. These are some of the basics that are easy to miss, and they don't require huge data sets or flashy multimedia.
You also need to select your words carefully, even as you open your presentation up to a more casual back-and-forth. A single gaffe can undermine your intentions. Last month, while attending the Digital Summit in Washington, D.C., I watched as an executive lost an audience with just a single word. The speaker was outlining how the company had successfully driven more visitors directly to its main website, versus through intermediaries. "Don't use intermediary websites" the presenter said. "They will not allow you to control your customers' experience."
The simple use of the term "control" caused the audience to flinch. Some even shook their heads in disbelief. The prevailing sense in the room was that companies needed to let digitally savvy, mobile customers control their own experience at any time, in any place, and on any device. The speaker may have agreed with that, too, but it wasn't the idea that came out.
So as you prepare for your next big presentation, keep the fundamentals in mind: Be authentic and vulnerable, and be impeccable with your written and verbal communication. These may sound like old-fashioned ideas—and they are. But they're still around for a reason. These speaking basics are arguably even more powerful than ever in today's digital world. Just ask my former Microsoft client.
Before you just say "no" to brain-picking, try one of these smart ways to respond without alienating anyone.
If you've achieved a measure of success in your career, you've probably gotten requests from others to "pick your brain." These may range from earnest invitations for coffee meet-ups or phone sessions, to ongoing appeals to pump you for your hard-won experience and contacts.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with professional generosity and mentoring. However, time is a valuable resource and you don't want to waste it on someone who isn't serious, or who is just going to ask for short cuts you don't want to give. But these savvy professionals have found smart ways to manage brain-picking requests—and even make money from them—without alienating prospective clients and contacts.
Anne-Marie Faiola is a serial entrepreneur whose companies, including soap-making supplier Bramble Berry Soap Making Supplies, gross more than $15 million annually. She's also a blogger and has her own YouTube channel, so "people feel like they know me and they're friends with me. I feel approachable to them," she says.
That's great for her persona, but can be problematic when it leads to lots of brain-picking requests. So, she programmed a number of email signatures that answer common questions so she can respond quickly and easily to everything from requests to sit on an organization's board to requests for business advice and technical assistance.
One such response is a brain dump of her experience in business, as well as her favorite resources, which can help most new business owners find their way. "One answer fits most," she says, but she also customizes each a bit for a personal touch. With just a few clicks, she can deliver a wealth of information and resources in just a few seconds of her time, saving her an estimated five to 10 hours each month.
Consultant Megan Constantino, founder of public relations and marketing firm Parachute Partners, was enjoying a nice influx of business from word-of-mouth. But as more people learned about her budding business, she was also getting her fair share of requests for free advice. As a self-described "people-pleaser," it was tough to say "no" to such requests or to tell friends and family that she'd be happy to help them for a fee. So, Constantino developed a menu of popular services and pricing that she now sends when she gets such requests.
"I gently let them know through my pricing sheet that these are the services I offer and roughly what I charge for them. It lets them see that this is a job for me," she says, "it's not a hobby."
Related Video: Everything You Think You Know About Finding A Mentor Is Wrong
Business coach Meredith Liepelt, founder of consultancy Rich Life Marketing, was getting many "could you just help me with this" requests. From gratis brainstorming to free advice, she was frustrated because she was giving away so much of her time. "I have a strong desire to help people," Leipelt admits, "but too much unpaid brain picking leads to a really dark closet and trouble paying your mortgage."
So, Liepelt developed an a la carte program for short information sessions. Now, when someone asks for advice, she recommends her "Adventures in Brainstorming" sessions, which cost $175 per hour, by phone. Those in need of help can pay by credit card and get a fixed amount of time during which Liepelt will help them with brainstorming and business advice. She typically books at least five hours of sessions per month. Several of these clients have hired her for bigger projects, turning her formerly free advice into a new revenue stream, she says.
After graphic designer Larissa Pickens, owner and creative director of Float.Design, had a request for advice turn into an ongoing, multi-hour free consulting arrangement, she had a realization. "I either needed to get less nice or find a better way to deal with them," she says.
So, when she got a request for advice from Casey Bunn, owner of Handsocks.com, to critique the website, Pickens asked her if she would be open to a new idea. Pickens would record her professional evaluation and use the video as a lesson for others interested in improving their design.
"A lot of times [people ask for] very similar advice," she says. Bunn was thrilled with the in-depth advice. Now, Pickens plans to create one video a month and create a library of these case studies to which she can refer others who have similar issues or questions.
Krystal Covington is both the customer service and public relations director of Natural Grocers, a regional chain of supermarkets, and the founder of Women of Denver, a professional women's organization. Because of her high profile in the community, she gets many requests for "coffee dates" from people who want to learn more about each organization, so she's developed some online referral sources to beat back the amount of time such requests take.
If someone is inquiring about working for Natural Grocers, Covington refers them to the website to apply online. Applicants who have questions are invited to email her a few specifics about what they need and she will send them a few suggestions about what the job entails and how to apply online.
She refers those inquiring about her professional group to her calendar on scheduling platform Frederick, which lets them schedule 15 minutes to discuss membership or 30 minutes to discuss possible sponsorships. Says Covington: "This sets expectations immediately, and helps keep the meetings and calls brief."
You may not realize you're still clinging to the corporate world's measures of success, but they can undermine your solo efforts.
When I decided to start my own business three years ago, I thought the hardest part would be making ends meet or finding clients—the tactical, business-building stuff. I knew it wouldn't be easy, but after a 10-year marketing career in the U.S. and U.K. at both big brands and a startup, I thought I was as prepared as I possibly could be.
But what surprised me the most was how emotionally intense it was to make that transition. In retrospect, the biggest hurdle wasn't the nuts and bolts of running a business; it was changing my own mind-set. It's hard to build a personal brand while you're battling your insecurities in unfamiliar terrain. I found that in order to make self-employment work for me, I had to first let go of these three, deeply ingrained beliefs I'd picked up in the corporate world.
For much of my corporate career, I noticed myself taking people who worked for well-known companies more seriously. Unsurprisingly, when I left that world behind, I couldn't help but feel less important.
My experiences early on after starting my own business didn't help. I went from being continually courted by people at networking events to barely being noticed. I went from living in London, a dynamic hub for knowledge workers, to a less expensive town in the English Midlands, surrounded by retired people, to alleviate some financial pressure as I got my business off the ground. I went from working in a shiny, corporate office to tapping away on my personal laptop at our dining room table at home, with our two Russian dwarf hamsters as my only work companions (they're nocturnal, by the way).
It may sound obvious, but I eventually realized I couldn't let my work environment dictate how I felt about my own professional self-worth. In practice, it's difficult to let go of the external validators you don't even know you depend upon—the subtle yet commonplace signals that you're a credible, knowledgable expert who's good at what you do.
Letting go of all that lets you invest your energies in honing your personal brand on your own terms, so you can clearly communicate the value you offer. After all, if you can't do that, you can't run your own business.
When I worked in the corporate world, I became accustomed to having a steady salary with access to benefits. Needless to say, those perks vanished when I became my own boss. Savvy job seekers get adept at figuring out their value on the market—it's how we know what kinds of raises to ask for and which salaries to negotiate.
But that can instill an attitude that comes back to bite you once you leave traditional employment behind. Soon after setting up my own business, I caught myself envying others whose startups just went public or who landed that big end-of-year bonus. I was still using those same, monetary metrics I'd internalized in my previous career in order to assess value.
This wasn't so easy to diagnose, though, because at the same time, I really was happy with my new life as an independent business owner. My new lifestyle gave me control, flexibility, and freedom. Having control of my time allowed me to start exercising regularly in the middle of every workday. The flexibility let me spend more time with my wife, friends, and family who lived overseas. And my newfound freedom allowed me to pursue any work project I wanted without having to first wade through layers of approval.
But those advantages didn't square with the mind-set I still had yet to shake. Ruminating over the material wealth I'd left behind was distracting me from the lifestyle wealth I'd gained by leaving. Getting into the best shape of my life, spending quality time with people I love, and doing work I found meaningful altered my outlook on what truly mattered to me. It took some time to fully embrace those upsides, but doing so opened my eyes to what I still find truly priceless.
When I worked at a large company, status, compensation, and reputation were often driven by where you sat on the corporate ladder. As a result, I couldn't help but feel my job title was a main indicator of my professional success.
Shortly after I started my own business, I crossed paths with someone visiting London in search of a guest speaker. He asked me, "Do you know of someone here who's really successful?" I asked him what he meant by "successful." He went on to rattle off a laundry list of fancy job titles, like CFO, CMO, partner, and so on. Silly as it may sound, I couldn't help but walk away from that meeting feeling a bit dejected because I was no longer on track to be any of those things.
It was only later that I realized how deeply I'd internalized the corporate world's career ladder as an index of my own success—and how much that threatened to hold me back. Evaluating yourself against traditional measures of achievement isn't just inappropriate once you've left behind traditional employment, it's actually counterproductive.
So instead of letting that frustrate me, I decided to put other metrics in place to measure my progress:
Can I do all the things I want to do?
Can I spend quality time with people I love?
Can I feel good about the person I'm becoming?
I still use these basic questions to size up my success today—on my own terms. They're just much more in line with the reasons people choose independent work in the first place. And while I may not have the fanciest job title any longer, I no longer rely on it to know how far I've come. As a result, I can honestly say I'm able to achieve each of these three things that now matter to me more.
If you started your career working for a traditional employer before going into business for yourself, making this change in mind-set may be harder than you'd expect. But sticking with your previous measures of success can undermine your solo efforts. It's like trying to stick to the rules of one sport when you're trying to learn how to play another. And that's a losing strategy.
Joseph Liu is a career change strategist and speaker. Hear inspiring stories of career reinvention on his Career Relaunch Podcast and follow him on Twitter at @JosephLiu_
You already know you need to line up some questions to ask your interviewer, but are you asking the right ones?
You're searching for a job, a new position, or a new client. Maybe you're a little desperate—you really need this new gig. The interview is coming up, and all you can think about is how nice a pay bump or lucrative project would be if it all comes together for you. Or maybe you're thinking about that awesome new office and the relief of a shorter commute.
It's natural and normal to fall into this mind-set. These are such positive, seductive feelings that you can't help but indulge in them. That's understandable—after all, they're what motivate most of us to look for new work in the first place. But this mind-set can also be dangerous. They're feelings that, if you don't shed them before you walk into the interview, will lose you the very opportunity you're so keen on landing.
You have to put aside what you want and replace it with what they need. Why? Because they need something and think you can provide it, or you wouldn't have gotten the interview. Now comes the opportunity to confirm their hunch.
This is a point that gets made pretty often in advice for jobseekers, but it isn't always easy to put into practice. You already know that your main objective is to convince them you can meet their needs better than anyone else. Got it.
But you'd be mistaken if you think you can do that just by positioning your skills and experience in line with the role as it's been described. Again, you should do that, but you also need to address the prospective employer's needs more head on.
A second piece of common career advice is that you should interview them while they interview you, and that's a sound suggestion as well. But the "you interview them" side of the equation isn't just about culture fit, or finding out whether you'd actually like working at the company. You'll also want to gear your questions toward uncovering what the interviewer wants the new hire to accomplish and what their own experience has been at the company.
To take each of these common approaches a step further during your next interview, you'll need to know not just the right questions to ask but the right stories to tell.
When I was presenting to Coca-Cola for a packaging assignment, I told a story about when the big boys in my neighborhood bought me a Coke at the corner store when I was six years old. Getting that Coke made me feel like I had just been accepted into their tribe. It forever cemented my connection to the Coca-Cola brand. From that simple story, the Coke team knew I understood the essence of their brand.
Short, tightly drawn stories like that build meaningful connections. And they can often result in your interviewer returning the favor, by telling a story or two of their own that shows their connection to the organization. That's the way it should be—all about them.
Yes, it's an interview, so you can expect lots of questions on both sides of the table. But you need to be ready with many questions of your own, and the standard few you may already know to keep up your sleeve may not get you as far as you'd hope. First, ask permission: "I'd like to ask you a few questions about the role [or project]. Would that be all right with you?""
This way you've taken the reins, rather than waited until the very end of an otherwise one-directional conversation for a desultory turn of the tables. Then you can dive in. When you do, ask big-picture, open-ended questions, not just those that can be answered strictly with information, like "How will you define success in this role?"
The key is to demonstrate that you want to understand the company and its goals in the broadest possible way so that your work will be in sync with their most fundamental objectives, not just those associated with the specific job. Here are a few things to inquire about, which lead to trading stories, not just information:
1. The current state of the company:
I understand the company was recently acquired and it's been announced that you'll be entering some new markets. Is that correct? If so, how do you see this position [or project] supporting such a major change?
2. How the role or project relates to the company's past and future:
What has your experience been with projects like this in the past?
What sorts of failures has the team this position is part of encountered before, and how would you describe those?
3. How the position or project you're interviewing for supports where they see themselves going:
What would be most valuable and helpful for you right now?
How are your needs evolving right now, and which key challenges do you expect to face right around the corner?
4. What the goals are and why those goals are important:
How would you describe success, and why is that your criteria?
Each question opens up a new avenue of questioning, and it shows you've done your homework. This line of inquiry can also get your interviewer to talk more concretely about their aspirations, in a spirit of mutuality.
The more they talk about the opportunity, the more you'll learn, so you can refine your follow-up questions on the spot and in your communications post-interview. Best of all, the more they talk, the better they'll feel about you and your ability to succeed for them.
Ted Leonhardt is a designer and illustrator, and former global creative director of FITCH Worldwide. His specialized approach to negotiation helps creative workers build on their strengths and own their value in the marketplace. Follow Ted on Twitter at @tedleonhardt.
E-commerce's common quandary is how to let consumers touch and try the goods. Here's how Argent is bridging the divide in an organic way.
When women's workwear brand Argent launched in June, its premise was simple: "Dressing for work doesn't have to be a mindf*ck." Unlike many brands on the market, Argent has a sassy, irreverent sensibility and is calibrated to speak to strong women who want outfits that will allow them to be taken seriously in the workplace. As such, it promised to make functional clothes for the professional woman, such as blazers with mesh cell phone pockets to peek at messages without actually taking out the device.
Argent started selling online first, but as it gets ready to make a bigger splash in the marketplace, founders Sali Christeson and Eleanor Turner wanted to think outside the traditional retail box. Rather than turning to department stores or boutique retailers, they decided to go somewhere unexpected: the coworking startup WeWork.
Selling their product at WeWork locations instinctively made sense to Christeson and Turner. It would allow them to reach women within the WeWork network who were freelancers, entrepreneurs, and startup employees, all of whom needed workwear in their closets and would likely get Argent's sensibility. Given that WeWork's coworking spaces foster relationships, it would be a good way to organically get the word out about Argent to the wider community.
Perhaps most importantly, WeWork had brand values that resonated with the founders and the brand they were cultivating at Argent. "It's about building community, encouraging doing work that you love, being a bit disruptive, and elevating female founders," Christeson says. "There's so much overlap from a brand perspective. It was almost too good to be true."
For eight months, Christeson and Turner discussed a strategy with WeWork about using a coworking location in San Francisco as a base for their operations, but also as a place to organize events and sell products. "We were really talking about the future of retail," Christeson says. "To us, it makes a ton of sense for our go-to-market strategy to leverage their footprint."
While the plan is experimental and open to constant tweaking, for the moment Argent will use the San Francisco WeWork as a retail venue, where customers can come to see or try on products. The brand will also use communal space to host networking parties and career coaching events that would target the WeWork community, but also the wider public. Christeson and Turner are committed to using the brand as a way to empower women in the workplace, but these gatherings are also a great way to introduce customers to products.
Besides being a smart marketing strategy, collaborating with WeWork also made good business sense. The founders felt that having a physical space for customers to see the garments and experience the brand's values was very important, but leasing a retail store, then investing money in building it up, is expensive. "There's so much risk inherent in brick and mortar retail, and we feel so strongly about having a physical presence," Christeson says. "We feel really strongly about building a community around our product and giving our customers a chance to connect with one another."
Many brands are in a similar quandary, which is why the pop-up model has been so popular. That's starting to shift as some realize a better strategy to showcase their wares may be not be in a strictly retail setting. Bed linen brand Parachute is opening a hotel, for example. The idea is to use the space for a variety of activities while giving potential customers the opportunity to see the goods used in a natural environment.
With WeWork, Argent is hoping to have a more long-term strategy, where it will pay a fixed month-to-month fee and have the option of moving to different locations around the country, perhaps even the world. (Christeson says WeWork was very flexible about negotiating a contract that best suited Argent's needs.) "Because we're new, we're able to be flexible and nimble, and we have a little bit of fluidity around which markets we go into," Christeson says. "But in an ideal world, we'll be in WeWork for the long haul."
The brand has just moved into a "showroom-office" in San Francisco that will serve as their hub. But they have also created little pop-ups at other Bay Area locations, like a recent one they did in San Franicso's SoMa neighborhood. These pop-ups will be at street-level WeWork locations or WeWork lobbies, to attract foot traffic.
This is just the start. Argent's founders are constantly brainstorming to find creative ways to make the most of their WeWork partnership. "There has to be a creative solution between brick-and-mortar and online only," says Christeson. "We're trying to figure out what that is."
Even if you don't live in a swing state, you know voters who do. This Pokemon Go-inspired game from MoveOn.org and Jane McGonigal will help you reach them.
If you're passionate about defeating Donald Trump next month—and you live in a state with a predetermined outcome like California or New York—you may feel disenfranchised by an election process in which only about 12 states actually have electoral votes that are up for grabs.
That's why the left-leaning political action nonprofit MoveOn.org and the well-known game designer Jane McGonigal have teamed up on Swing Voter Go, an election game launching today that's clearly inspired by Pokemon Go and meant to help people in uncontested states feel like they can still make a difference in the election's outcome.
In past elections, MoveOn has come up with numerous campaigns meant to empower people in safe states. This year, based on the burning desire of its membership to keep Trump out of the White House, the organization wanted to develop something that split the difference between traditional "clicktivism" and the hard ask of traveling to swing states, says Ilya Sheyman, MoveOn's executive director.
"How do you empower millions of MoveOn members who don't live in swing states" to impact the election? Sheyman asks. "One of our realizations is that in the social networks of all these people, there are all these swing-state voters that people know. If you ask them, 'Do you know someone who's considering voting for Trump, staying home [because they're] disenchanted, or considering voting 3rd party?' They say 'Yes, my cousin, or uncle, etc.'"
As scary as it sounds, studies have shown that 62% of Americans rely on social media for their news, a number that's even higher among millennials, Sheyman explains. At the same time, Facebook determined that if users see that someone in their feed they know personally is voting, they themselves are six times more likely to vote.
That led to the conclusion that social networks would be a great place for people in safe states to reach out to friends or family members in swing states and try to persuade them to vote—specifically, to cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton, who at this point is the only candidate with a legitimate chance to beat Trump.
The trick was coming up with a game that could help people figure out who in their social graph was in a swing state, and then determine how to help them start an "authentic" discussion with their friends or loved ones about voting for Clinton.
As Sheyman explains, if you make the process of canvassing something like a video game, or have similar elements, you can possibly increase the number of people who participate in the process.
One of McGonigal's key insights was that 155 million Americans play video games, more even than the number of people who vote. That made MoveOn feel like there was something to tap into.
McGonigal, a researcher at the Institute for the Future and the author of two best-selling books on the positive impact of games on society, told me that the key to the game is fact that most people in uncontested states have friends or family in swing states—and they may not even realize it.
That's why the first thing players see when they log in will be a map highlighting swing states. Tap on one of those states and the game opens a window listing all your Facebook friends who live there.
Swing Voter Go isn't the kind of social game people are used to, McGonigal says. There are no points, no leveling up, and no achievement badges, though players do report when they've successfully changed someone's mind.
"The game mechanic is to swing a vote," she says. "Something magical happens in your personal profile section [when they succeed]. Your score goes up, and we're keeping score."
Although she wouldn't be specific in advance, Swing Voter Go uses game metaphors and language that will be familiar to many people.
"There's a specific game that we are referencing," she said cryptically. "It will be very obvious when someone comes to the site what our references are."
Clearly, that game is Pokemon Go.
McGonigal is quick to note that MoveOn is being very careful about privacy—it's not importing any data about users' friends. Rather, Swing Voter Go simply gives players a way to search for their friends and family in swing states, and then set out on their mission.
That mission, of course, is to try to persuade their friend or loved one to vote for Hillary. To do so, McGonigal tells me, the game provides numerous non-confrontational suggestions on how to approach potential voters, suggestions that have been proven to effectively persuade without putting people off.
More to the point, the techniques include memes, talking points, and conversation-starters that have been shown to be most effective in getting people to vote for Clinton. And when it works, the game is built to help the community of players learn from each other's successes.
"We've got a repository of these techniques that you can try," she says. "Every time you try one, we ask you to report back, and if it works, we're collecting intelligence" on what works.
Although the game mainly is geared around connecting players to their friends and family on Facebook, it also provides tools for using other social networks, like Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn, to get the conversations started.
Over many elections, MoveOn has honed the techniques it provides its members for going door-to-door to canvas. But those are built around trying to persuade strangers, and when she was designing Swing Voter Go, McGonigal knew that players would be having different kinds of conversations about voting for Clinton since they would be talking to people with whom they already have relationships.
"The way you talk to a stranger is different than if you know someone and you know something about them," she says. "If it's somebody who has granddaughters, you can talk to them about what it might mean to have the first woman president. It's really designed for a more personal style of conversation, more connected to values, and helping people be heard. I think you can do that more effectively with people you know, because a deeper conversation is more likely."
MoveOn isn't trying to delude its members into thinking they can convince millions of people to change their votes. But knowing that, for example, George W. Bush won Florida—and thus, the presidency—by just 537 votes in 2000, the organization said even small changes can make a difference. It hopes that a minimum of 10,000 people will reach out to at least two friends or family members. Even that, Sheyman says, might generate enough new Clinton voters to help the former Secretary of State win one or more swing states that she might have otherwise lost.
"Is this going to win the election? I don't know," says Sheyman. "When elections are extraordinarily close, these kinds of conversations with voters in swing states" can make a difference.
Once someone signs up for Swing Voter Go, they will have access to what McGonigal calls a "secret headquarters" where people can discuss the techniques they tried, what worked, and what didn't.
And while the game's main goal is to defeat Trump, the secret headquarters will also be a place where players can learn about some of the down-ballot candidates and initiatives about which their friends and family members might care. That might prove to be helpful fodder in convincing people to go the polls who had been so frustrated by the presidential race that they've been on the fence about voting at all.
One element of the secret headquarters is a private, moderated Facebook group available to registered game players. Anyone will be able to access the game's map, McGonigal explains, but she's not worried that pro-Trump voters will infiltrate the game.
"I would not be surprised [if Trump supporters] use the tool, and that's okay," McGonigal says. "The most important thing is that so many of us live in states where we feel our vote doesn't matter, so the more people who are engaged and using these tools, that's okay."
Added McGonigal, the Facebook group was designed as a "space for people who are genuinely excited about defeating Trump," and while the Republican's supporters may well lurk in the group, no pro-Trump trolling will be tolerated there.
Ultimately, Swing Voter Go is all about boosting people's participation in this election.
"Truly, the most important thing is making sure people don't opt out," McGonigal says, "and making sure people aren't so overwhelmed by anxiety and anger that they fail to exercise [their power]. We're so connected across geography, we truly do have more than one vote in many ways, and there are many people whose opinions are uniquely held who don't give politics a lot of thought. You can change that."
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Here's how to stop writing emails that bury what you're asking for under a bunch of inessential information.
Inside each of us there's a little efficiency guru who views every single email within a larger matrix of all the stuff we could be focusing on: the big deadline that needs to be met, the presentation that needs to be prepared, the client conflict that needs to be resolved, the errands that need to be run. I call this the "busy bias," and it colors how much—or how little—attention we are willing to give any one interaction or piece of information.
When everyone is busy, a key part of getting people to pay attention is being respectful of their time. In the context of composing an email this means being clear, concise, and actionable. You can achieve this by sticking to a few simple strategies for structuring the information you need to communicate.
Without being abrupt or pushy, it's important to put your ask at the top of your email—within the first sentence or two if possible. The goal is to get the reader's attention and have them understand the action that's being requested immediately. If you put a lot of rigmarole before your ask, an impatient reader might never get to it. For example, let's say you're reaching out to the CEO of a startup you admire to invite her to speak at a conference. You could position the ask like so:
Hi Catherine—This is Mark Holland. I run the popular Firestarters conference, which draws over 5,000 entrepreneurs to the Staples Center in L.A. each year. I'm writing to extend an invitation for you to speak at our event on March 5, 2016.
Catherine may not know what the hell the Firestarters conference is yet, but she does know something important: What this email is about (a speaking invitation). She also now knows the date and location of the event and that it has fairly impressive attendance numbers. Now that the ask is clear and her interest is piqued, Mark can go on to give her some backstory on the event, share more impressive stats, and make his case even stronger.
In a short-attention span world, it's best to get right to the point immediately and do your explaining later. Think about what will appear in the two-line message preview the recipient will see as she scrolls through her inbox: Will it capture her attention?
Why should I care? is the tacit question hovering in most people's minds as they open an email, especially if it's from someone they don't know. This is why establishing your credibility early on in the message is crucial. Tell your reader why you are different, why you are accomplished, or why they should pay attention to you.
For instance, if you're cold-emailing a brand to request a sponsorship, you might establish your credibility by sharing data points about your audience and the awards you've won.
Hi Tom—I'm Tracy Black, the editor of Feed Daily, a Webby award–winning website with over 2 million visitors a month. I'm putting together a new article series that targets ambitious young creatives, and I wanted to see if you might be interested in sponsoring it?
Related Video: 2 Useless Phrases You Need To Eliminate From Your Emails
If you're emailing someone you do know—getting in touch with a coworker about an urgent task, for example—you might legitimize your request by indicating that you are under pressure from the boss (assuming that's true).
Hi Tom—I'm following up to see if you were able to implement the new email signup feature? The CEO wants to see this wrapped up by the end of the week.
But data points and brute authority aren't your only options, of course. You can also establish credibility by being a keen observer of the person you are contacting: You could tell them how long you've followed their work, what you enjoyed about the last blog post they wrote, or how their product might be improved—with tact of course! As long as it's not fawning, most people appreciate being noticed—and it makes them notice you back.
You're much more likely to get a response from someone if it's clear what the next step is. I frequently receive emails from people who are interested in some sort of knowledge exchange but never clarify how they would like for me to take action. Do they want to have a coffee? Do they want to do a phone call? It's unclear, which means that instead of saying, "Yes!" I have to respond by asking them what they're asking me for in the first place—or, more likely, not respond at all. By making the way forward clear, you make it easy for the recipient to say yes to your request.
Let's say you're reaching out to a film director you admire for advice. Don't just email them with:
I've been a fan of your work for years, and I'd love to pick your brain. What do you say?
Instead, propose something specific:
I'm a longtime admirer of your work and have the greatest respect for your filmmaking expertise. I would love to ask you a few questions about how you financed your first film. Would you be game for a 15–20 minute phone call next week? My schedule is wide open all day Thursday and Friday if you have availability then. I promise to keep it brief.
The second example clarifies the subject matter at hand and the fact that you just want to do a brief phone call. This means that the recipient knows the time commitment will be minimal and—because you've already proposed a calendar date—they know that the email thread can be closed quickly and efficiently. In other words, you've respected their time, and they now know that dealing with you won't be another headache they don't need.
