Co.Labs

EY is scouring campuses and employee referrals to find a stadium's worth of new hires.

If recruiting, vetting, hiring, and onboarding even one qualified employee is a difficult task, then hiring more than 15,000 may seem beyond the realm of possibility. Yet EY will have to do just that over the next 12 months.

The multinational professional services firm, which just announced $29.6 billion in global revenues in its latest fiscal year, is currently on a blitz to fill 15,200 seats across their American offices during the next fiscal year, which began on July 1. To put that into perspective, the firm will be hiring 6,200 more people than the organizing committee of the London Olympic Games.

Hiring to Fill the Critical Skills Gap

Of the new hires, 9,200 will be taken fresh from university campuses, while the remaining 6,000 positions will go to experienced professionals.

Dan Black, EY's recruiting leader for the Americas, says the hiring blitz is a result of "strong demands for our services in today's shifting business and economic landscape." The bulk of the new hires will fall into the company's advisory and tax practices, which have experienced continuous growth over the past three years, much as they have in other companies.

"Some of the hotter areas include cybersecurity, data analytics, digital, health care consulting, and human capital consulting," he adds.

Using Tech to Make Human Connections

Black explains that EY's approach will require significant efforts on a variety of fronts, many of which will be aided by tech tools. "EY uses candidate-relationship management software that allows us to interact with candidates before they hit the 'apply' button, as well as stay connected to potential candidates when there isn't a position available," he says.

Once hired, the swarm of new employees will be trained and onboarded with the help of EYU, the company's digital learning platform, which "allows us to deliver consistent online and in-person professional development courses, so that our people succeed personally and professionally," says Black.

Still Counting On Referrals

Another of the key sources for new hires at the firm is through its employee referral program, which has seen dramatic growth in recent years. In the 2010 fiscal year the company ushered in 28% of its new hires using employee referrals, but in 2016 the program was responsible for more than half.

"Referral candidates perform better and stay longer," says Black. "In fact, external research has shown that referred workers are up to 30% less likely to quit and have substantially better performance on high-impact metrics." Other studies indicate that even so-called "weak" connections are likely to lead to placement and better job outcomes.

Black says that Ernst & Young paid out more than $8.1 million in referral bonuses during the 2016 fiscal year. Intel has also been tying referrals to compensation in effort to improve the number of diverse candidates in the hiring pool. Such referrals can also significantly boost the chances underrepresented minorities have to get a promotion.

Catching Them On Campus

Aside from referrals, the company is also planning on deploying a major campus recruiting effort to attract 9,200 new candidates, which will combine in-person and digital strategies. "Through our campus events, students can speak and network with EY professionals, get valuable training and leadership development, and learn about all the opportunities EY offers," says Black.

Writing for PBS Newshour, veteran tech recruiter Nick Corcodilos has lamented the fact that recruiters don't often do much of this in-person talent scouting on college campuses any more. He wrote:

"In a job seeker's market, new grads must subject themselves to machine interviews, invest their time filling out online applications, and wait like starving dogs to be fed. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs HR managers get paid to wait for someone else to do their hiring."

Corcodilos says that if there truly is a talent shortage, recruiters need to go out and sell to candidates, a process that "requires personal contact, persuasion and, yes, a soft touch."

Major organizations are taking bold steps to attract talent using social media, such as Cisco's recent takeover of Nasdaq's Snapchat for talent acquisition during National #TechiesDay (October 3). EY is pursuing a similar approach, using social media content, videos, and other digital strategies to leverage its brand and attract new hires.

Black explains that campus recruiting can also act as the ground zero for reaching the company's diversity hiring targets. "We know in order to achieve the best outcomes for our clients, we need to engage diverse students," he says, citing the firm's Women in Tech Consulting Conference as an example of their efforts to attract female hires at the university level. Black adds that the company hired 1,400 African-American and Hispanic students in 2016, up 40% from the previous fiscal year.

Paid Family Leave And The "New" 401(k)

Attracting 15,200 new hires will also require the company to really push its selling points. For EY that means touting the fact that it recently became the first among the big four accounting firms to expand its parental benefits, which now provides both mothers and fathers, as well as same-sex couples, up to 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave.

"For campus recruits, we offer solutions for repaying student loan debt," says Black. Only about 3% of private sector businesses currently offer this benefit, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. The company's "EY Student Loan program is available to all U.S. professionals and can be used for either undergraduate or graduate student loan debt." Nearly 1,200 EY employees are currently participating in the program.

EY is hoping these strategies will fill a stadium-sized cohort of new hires by next year.

The Snow-Capped Mountain

A majestic mountain sits not far northwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Like a low triangle, with long gentle slopes, Mount Taylor is clothed in rich forests that appear a velvety charcoal-blue from the distance. Its bald summit, more than 11,000 feet high, is often blanketed in snow—a reminder of the blessing of water, when seen from the blazing desert below.

The Zuni tribe lives about 40 miles west of Mount Taylor. In 2012, I worked with a team to interview 24 tribal members about the values they hold for Dewankwin K'yaba:chu Yalanne ("In the East Snow-Capped Mountain"), as Mount Taylor is called in the Zuni language. We were told that their most ancient ancestors began an epic migration in the Grand Canyon.

Over millennia they migrated across the Southwest, with important medicine societies and clans living around Mount Taylor. After settling in their current pueblo homes, Zunis returned to this sacred mountain to hunt animals such as deer and bear, harvest wild plants such as acorns and cattails, and gather minerals used in sacrosanct rituals that keep the universe in order. Across the generations, Dewankwin Kyaba:chu Yalanne has come to shape Zuni history, life, and identity no less than the Vatican has for Catholics.

But unlike holy places in the Western world, Zunis believe Mount Taylor is a living being. Zuni elders told me that the mountain was created within the earth's womb. As a mountain formed by volcanic activity, it has always grown and aged. The mountain can give life as people do. The mountain's snow melts in spring and nourishes plants and wildlife for miles. Water is the mountain's blood; buried minerals are the mountain's meat. Because it lives, deep below is its beating heart. Zunis consider Mount Taylor to be their kin.

There is a stereotype that Native American peoples have a singular connection to nature. And yet in my experience, they do see the world in a fundamentally different way from most people I know. Whether it is mountains, rivers, rocks, animals, plants, stars, or weather, they see the natural world as living and breathing, deeply relational, even at times all-knowing and transcendent.

In my work with Arizona's Hopi tribe, I have traveled with cultural leaders to study sacred places. They often stop to listen to the wind, or search the sky for an eagle, or smile when it begins to rain, which they believe is a blessing the ancestors bestow upon them.

During one project with the Hopi tribe, we came across a rattlesnake coiled near an ancient fallen pueblo. "Long ago, one of them ancestors lived here and turned into a rattlesnake," the elder Raleigh H. Puhuyaoma Sr. shared with me, pointing to the nearby archaeological site. "It's now protecting the place." The elders left an offering of cornmeal to the snake. An elder later told me that it soon rained on his cornfield, a result from this spiritual exchange.

Violent Disputes

Understanding these cultural worldviews matters greatly in discussions over protecting places in nature. The American West has a long history of battles over the control of land. We've seen this recently from the Bundy family's takeover of the federal wildlife refuge in Oregon to the current fight over turning Bears Ears—1.9 million acres of wilderness—into a national monument in Utah.

Yet often these battles are less about the struggle between private and public interests and more about basic questions of nature's purpose. Do wild places have intrinsic worth? Or is the land a mere tool for human uses?

A Hopi elder making an offering to a snake to protect a sacred space.[Photo: Chip Colwell]

Much of my research has involved documenting sacred places because they are being threatened by development projects on public land. The Zuni's sacred Mount Taylor, much of it managed by the U.S. National Forest Service, has been extensively mined for uranium, and is the cause of violent disputes over whether it should be developed or protected.

Even though the U.S. does not legally recognize natural places as people, some legal protections exist for sacred places. Under the National Historic Preservation Act, for example, the U.S. government must take into consideration the potential impacts of certain development projects on "traditional cultural properties."

This and other federal heritage laws, however, provide tribes a small voice in the process, little power, and rarely lead to preservation. More to the point, these laws reduce what tribes see as living places to "properties," obscuring their inherent spiritual value.

In New Zealand, the Te Urewera Act offers a higher level of protection, empowering a board to be the land's guardian. The Te Urewera Act, though, does not remove its connection to humans. With a permit, people can hunt, fish, farm, and more. The public still has access to the forest. One section of the law even allows Te Urewera to be mined.

Te Urewera teaches us that acknowledging cultural views of places as living does not mean ending the relationship between humans and nature, but reordering it—recognizing nature's intrinsic worth and respecting indigenous philosophies.

In the U.S. and elsewhere, I believe we can do better to align our legal system with the cultural expressions of the people it serves. For instance, the U.S. Congress could amend the NHPA or the American Indian Religious Freedom Act to acknowledge the deep cultural connection between tribes and natural places, and afford better protections for sacred landscapes like New Mexico's Mount Taylor.

Until then, it says much about us when companies are considered people before nature is.

"I Get Deeper Faster"

Matt Hall learned he had leukemia in 2006, at age 32. Fortunately, his form of cancer was treatable with Gleevec, a drug that keeps the disease manageable, meaning that Hall can expect to live a relatively normal life.

Still, that good news wasn't immediately obvious when he was diagnosed. He recalls being in his car afterward. His wife was driving. He looked out the window and saw other people in their cars, heads moving to the music. "Life goes on, but in my car it felt like life was at a standstill," he says. "I lived with a perspective of three feet in front of me. When something like this happens, you don't take the long view."

Eventually, once he transitioned from thinking he might die soon to learning he would live with a chronic disease, he realized he needed a longer-term view. The urgency does fade, he says, "but it never faded all the way back to what I would consider a normal, pre-cancer rhythm of life."

Hall says, "Now, I'm decisive, and have an urgency that is sometimes uncomfortable for other people." He cofounded a business (Hill Investment Group), and wrote a book (Odds On: The Making of an Evidence-Based Investor). When he wants to do something, he tends to do it. He recently went to Wimbledon because he loves tennis and wanted to see Roger Federer play. "I get deeper into conversations with people faster," he says.

This intense rhythm does have its complications. "It is in some ways exhausting," Hall admits. "You don't give yourself time to just coast or relax, ease into things," he says. "I would say that's something I have to work on."

"I Don't Beat Myself Up"

When Hall was diagnosed, he came across a series of articles in Glamour magazine by a young woman who had the same form of leukemia. Writer Erin Zammett Ruddy was diagnosed at age 23, and has been living with the disease for 15 years. Her perception of time changed in a somewhat different way than Hall's did.

As a 23-year-old go-getter, "I had to maximize every hour of the day," she says. "I never relaxed. I was always doing, and accomplishing, and obsessing about the future." The roller coaster of her diagnosis, and then her realization that she would be able to live a relatively normal life, "made me realize that I don't really care about that," Ruddy says. She finds herself thinking, "I'm healthy, and I'm feeling good, so I'm just going to chill."

That said, she's not a slacker. Pre-cancer, she wanted to travel, to be a writer, to have influence. The irony is that "what I thought was going to derail me, didn't quite derail me." Ruddy wrote a book (My So-Called Normal Life) about having cancer. She's traveled the world speaking about cancer. She realized that while she could accomplish a lot, "I didn't need to be that crazy about all of it," Ruddy says. "I guess I just stopped waking up every day feeling like I have to conquer the world today. If watching Below Deck on Bravo is something that makes me happy for an hour at night as opposed to a number of other things I could be doing, I don't beat myself up. I just do it."

Finding Peace

Layla Banihashemi, a neuroscientist and assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 32, a few months after getting married. She spent a year going through chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation.

Before her diagnosis, she says, "I was almost exclusively focused on my research and career." She hadn't traveled much. "There were definitely things in the back of my mind that I wanted to pursue, like yoga teacher training or learning to how to play the guitar and write songs. But they stayed in the back of my mind because there was always something seemingly more important going on, and there was always a later or an after this is over." Banihashemi and her husband even decided to delay their honeymoon because they were busy with work. "I also spent a lot of time worrying intensely about the future—what will happen if my grant doesn't get funded, what will I do with my life?— and not seeing any other possibilities."

The diagnosis changed that. Banihashemi learned "to act on the things I wish to do." After finishing most of her treatment, she wrote two songs with the help of a musician friend. She and her husband took their delayed honeymoon to Kauai. She took a singing class and two guitar classes. Currently, Banihashemi is taking a drawing class and learning to swim. She also began to address her spiritual side more.

"After my radiation treatments, I experienced some post-traumatic stress symptoms and began to seek out ways to heal on an emotional and spiritual level," Banihashemi says. "When these symptoms were at their worst, I decided to pursue the yoga teacher training I had wanted to do since college," she explains. "And although it would be time consuming, I couldn't think of a reason not to do it." She spent 10 hours in the studio on weekends, finding peace and healing. Banihashemi spent more time in nature. "One thing that I devote much less time to is worrying about the future," she says. "I have a greater sense that I'm on the right path, and that things will work out exactly as they're meant to."

Don't Sweat The Small Stuff

For all the different reactions, one theme emerges: Surviving tends to make people think that there is no point wasting time and energy on things that are neither meaningful nor enjoyable. "I don't fool around with small stuff," says Hall. "I outsource as much as I possibly can now. I used to have a lawnmower but now I don't." He also lives close to work to spend as little time as possible in the car.

Ruddy finds herself relaxed when things go wrong—a good trait to have while raising three small children. She can plan a great day, and then have the toddler throw up everywhere. "Next thing you know it's 2 p.m. and I haven't showered," she says. But "because I've had that experience, I know, thank God, there is going to be another day. It's not the end of the world."

We're actually told the truth more often than we realize, and liars' usual "tells" are red herrings.

Lies are hard to detect, and you're probably worse at catching them than you think. Psychologically speaking, lies are like needles in haystacks. Human communication relies on cooperation, so most of the things people tell you have to be true most of the time—probably more than you realize.

Your Brain Errs On The Side Of Ingenuousness

We're verbally inundated with more information than we pause to notice and instead take much of it at face value, which we're right to do more often than not. If that weren't the case, it would be hard even to get a simple conversation started, let alone accomplish any goals you want to achieve. That's one reason why con artists are so effective. The "con" stands for "confidence," after all; they succeed by telling lots of truths in order to get away with one big lie.

In other words, it's hard to be skeptical of liars all the time. If you had to constantly monitor everything people tell you on the off chance that something might be untrue, you'd waste a lot of time and would struggle to build relationships. So instead, most of us generally assume that the things people tell us are true.

What's more, in many cases, the stakes for being wrong about whether someone's lying aren't actually that dire. If someone says that they like your new outfit, and they really don't like it that much, there isn't much of a downside to believing them anyway. Of course, some cases are consequential. Bernie Madoff, the notorious former stockbroker jailed in 2009, lied to his investors for decades in order to defraud them of huge sums of money through a Ponzi scheme.

What Looks Like A Lie Often Isn't

So if you're in a high-stakes situation, it makes sense to try and be more vigilant about whether you're hearing the truth. But even then, many of us look for the wrong signals. In fact, researchers have found that when we consciously try to catch someone in a lie, we get much worse at it. Our unconscious lie-detection instincts are more reliable than our conscious ones.

Some of that may be because the common advice for catching someone in a lie simply isn't very good. You might've heard, for instance, that liars supposedly can't make eye contact when they're fibbing—or even that they make too much eye contact to compensate. Movies and cop shows on TV like to toy with the idea that liars have a "tell"; maybe someone looks up and to the left when they're lying, or scratches their eyebrow.

But while it may be true that trying to lie effectively increases the risk that we'll fall into nervous tics that give us away, most of these "cues" are simply related to stress. And we can feel stress for all kinds of reasons—not just because we know we're lying. Maybe the person you're talking to might be excited about a big deal being negotiated, or they might just find social interactions difficult.

Whatever the case, if someone feels uncomfortable while talking to you, they might have trouble making eye contact or overcompensate by holding your gaze. So while those supposed "tells" maybe accurate signs of discomfort, they're often red herrings for deception.

Plus, many lies don't come along with a stress response. You might be talking with a very well-practiced liar. They might have convinced themselves that the lie is important—and may even have started believing it themselves. Or they might just not think the lie is a big deal, even if you think it is.

The Better Way To Catch A Lie

So if you're really concerned that someone might be lying to you, the best thing you can do is to keep talking to people. Studies suggest that the best way to detect liars is to focus on knowledge rather than on signs of stress.

That is, if you're telling the truth about something you did, there's a lot of information you have about the situation that you probably haven't thought about. If you went to a particular conference talk, for instance, you probably know what floor of the hotel it was on, the size of the room, and how full it was. If you actually know a particular person, then you probably know whether she wears glasses, whether she favors dresses or slacks, and whether she's prone to use foul language in private conversations.

When you have concerns that someone might be lying to you in an important situation, the best thing you can do is engage them in a longer conversation. Ask lots of questions about factual information that you could go back and look into later. Liars often stumble on these questions because they didn't expect to be asked about that information. Even if they answer fluently, they're likely to make up an answer that isn't true. If the situation is important enough, you can verify what they said before deciding for certain whether the person is telling the truth.

Typically though, we don't think to probe this deep. Instead, we try and detect subtle behavioral signals when we're on guard against lies—and those lead us astray. That makes sense: We don't want to interrogate the people around us, which might make us look nosy or paranoid.

But more often than not, this fear is unfounded. People should expect you to ask a lot of questions about something you care about—that's how they'll know you care. Not only can that put liars on notice, it can also help you gather the information you'll need to actually sniff them out when it matters most.

A look inside innovative new programs that aim to shift the gender balance in tech.

The leadership team at Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) was well aware of data illustrating the gender gap in tech employment. According to their data, more than 5.1 million people worked in core technology jobs in the U.S. at the end of 2015, but just 25% of those jobs were held by women. But the heads of the nonprofit simply had to look around its industry events to see the anecdotal evidence, too. Most of the attendees were men.

"We wanted to take a closer look at what some of the reasons were for that," says Carolyn April, CompTIA's senior director of industry analysis. So, the organization commissioned research to look at why young girls are not choosing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and careers.

Why She Shies Away From STEM

The findings provided some insight into several critical factors behind why girls "opt out" of tech at between the ages of 10 and 17:

Exposure. Boys are more likely than girls to be introduced to technology at an earlier age. Eleven percent of boys began using devices at age 5 or younger, versus 5% of girls.

Awareness. Nearly half of boys have considered a technology career verses less than one-quarter of girls. Of girls who have not considered an IT career, 69% attribute this to not knowing what opportunities are available to them. More than half (53% ) say additional information about career options would encourage them to consider a job in IT.

Role models. In general, just 37% of girls who responded knew of someone with an IT job. But 60% of girls who considered an IT career knew a woman who worked in IT. Relying on more classes isn't enough—girls who have taken tech classes are only slightly more likely to consider an IT career.

These findings formed the basis for CompTIA's new awareness campaign, Make Tech Her Story, which features components such as a website and e-book that the organization hopes will "inspire tech industry leaders, educators, parents and, most importantly, girls to make the industry more gender inclusive."

While knowledge about why girls are choosing careers other than STEM can help pave the way for change, do we really need another awareness campaign about the gender gap?

School Days Solutions

It's not a bad idea, but efforts need to go beyond awareness, says Jeanne Meister, a partner at workplace consultancy Future Workplace and author of The Future Workplace Experience: 10 Rules for Mastering Disruption in Recruiting and Engaging Employees. And efforts to engage them in these paths need to start earlier.

"What's really shocking is that their consideration of an IT career decreases the older they get," Meister points out. "That says to me, that they have intellectual curiosity about technology, but it's beaten out of them between grammar school, and by time they get to high school," she says.

Change needs to start from young girls' early years through parental encouragement and even in their toys, Meister says. Relatively new market entrants like GoldieBlox and Project MC2 encourage interest in science and building things, and are targeted to appeal to girls as young as 4 or 5 years old. That gives girls an early awareness of the possibilities their future may hold, Meister says.

By providing a focused, intensive environment, the American Museum of Natural History's (AMNH) Brown Scholars program teaches young women about the intersection of computer science and science. Fast Companypreviously reported on the three-year, tuition-free program open to 9th and 10th grade girls, that's funded by the Helen Gurley Brown Trust. The program includes a paid internship and college and career exploration components. Field trips may take them from the computer science functions at Hearst Publishing or to those at a hot new startup.

But beyond introducing the young women to role models, which has been shown to be critically important, and showing them pathways to achieve their goals, there's another essential component: Community. Christina Wallace, the vice president at Bionic, an IT company focused on generating growth in large companies, founded BridgeUp: STEM, the educational initiative at the AMNH of which Brown Scholars is a part. Wallace is also a member of the TheLi.st, an online community of women in technology devoted to changing the ratio in the tech sector.

Wallace says that many girls come in to the program because of their interest—they may have heard of it or seen a relative or friend work in the field. But what keeps them around is having a community of other young women who are also interested in the same field, she says.

"Once they'd get there and they meet all of the other girls—that's what keeps them around and what really is that 'sticky' thing," she observes. "We've had 100% retention through the three years of the program. They now have a cohort of girls like them. They've got that community across all of these different schools in the city, and neighborhoods, and backgrounds, and interests," she says.

Snagging The Older Set

And some are focusing on recapturing potential STEM candidates at later stages of the game. Northeastern University is tackling the issue by creating the ALIGN program, which focuses on undergraduates and women who have completed their bachelor's degrees, but didn't study computer science. Piloted on the university's Seattle campus four years ago, the first small class of eight students graduated in 2016. Alumni landed jobs at Amazon, Facebook, Staples, and Porch.

In addition, the university is expanding its co-op program—undergraduate students do two to three co-ops while Masters-level computer science students do a six- to eight-month co-op—so that students in more majors get co-op experience in computer science. Northeastern is also expanding its dual majors and "meaningful minors" for computer science majors, which give more students the opportunity to study computer science along with other areas of interest, says Carla E. Brodley, professor and dean of Northeastern's College of Computer and Information Science. One of the reasons she's so excited about such opportunities is that it shows students, especially women and underrepresented groups, that there are many ways to use their interests in addition to computer science to follow varied career paths.

"[T]here's a lot of awareness that we need to get girls interested in STEM. But I think, 'What about all the people who graduated before? It's not too late for them, either,'" she says.

Of course, awareness campaigns can inspire change. As a large industry group. CompTIA has various programs that conduct outreach to and on behalf of the industry. April hopes that this research will influence the organization's membership and industry leaders to take action to encourage more young women to opt in to STEM education and careers.

Tumor Shortage?

Leading academic organizations, including the Association of American Universities and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, oppose the rule, saying too many restrictions and costs placed on tissue and DNA collection will slow down researchers and stifle medical advances. "We may not get enough samples" to study, said Dr. Alexander Lazar, a pathologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Lazar said he already has difficulty finding enough Desmoid tumors, rare fibrous masses that can strangle arteries and compress organs, to study. If the federal proposal goes forward, he worries that the community hospitals that supply him may not have the time or resources to solicit patients for consent, leaving him unable to retrieve tumors.

Yet, many patients say that researchers too often take their contributions for granted, taking their fluid and tissue samples for research and offering nothing in return. Not only should researchers be required to get permission to study their tissues, these patients say, they should give patients information from the research that may help them.

"If you study my DNA, just let me know what you find," said Stacey Tinianov, of California, who was diagnosed with breast cancer three years ago, six weeks after her 40th birthday. "I don't think that is too much to ask." Tinianov is one of more than 2,000 parties who have sent comments on the rules to the FDA.

With the price of some new biotech drugs rising into the six figures some patients whose genetic samples may lead to the next expensive breakthrough want something in return, much the way subjects are compensated for time and travel for participating in clinical trials.

"There is an economy around this data," said Sharon Terry, chief executive officer of the Genetic Alliance, a patient advocacy group based in Washington. "Why shouldn't the consumer be part of it?"

In fact, poll results show that people are far less charitable about helping researchers when they know the researchers' companies stand to make money from them.

About 68% of people are willing to give permission for their specimens to be used by a researcher for any purpose, according to a 2015 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. But support dropped to 55 percent if patients knew their sample would be used to "develop patents and earn profits for commercial companies."

Partners Healthcare Cambridge biobank has tens of thousands of samples of donated DNA samples, stored in freezers at -80 degrees Celsius.[Photo: Lauren Owens/The Eye]

Freezer Farms

Troves of biologically valuable human samples are known as biobanks in the medical industry. Researchers familiar with one cache in Cambridge, Massachusetts, simply call it the "freezer farm." It's a half-empty room where Partners Healthcare medical system stores specimens derived from blood of more than 47,000 people in 16 large gray freezers at minus-80 degrees Celsius.

To stock it, Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's hospitals send emails and deploy recruiters to waiting rooms asking patients to donate three small tubes of blood to advance medical research. The blood is processed, yielding DNA information, serum and plasma, and frozen in vials marked with a unique barcode linked to patients' de-identified medical records.

About 6,000 researchers affiliated with Partners can tap into the biobank for samples or data for about $20 a pop, to study how genes, environment and lifestyle affect people's health. If a researcher collected a sample on his own, it would cost $400 or more, according to Scott T. Weiss, scientific director of Partners Healthcare

Personalized Medicine

Although data are hard to come by, one 2013 study found more than 600 biobanks in the U.S. alone, built by hospitals, industry and others.

Though patients don't often share in the profits of biomedical research, they do sometimes get useful information, as in a partnership between New York-based Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Geisinger Health System, with treats four million people, mostly in Pennsylvania.

Willing Geisinger patients provide Regeneron with DNA samples, and in return, if genetic sequencing reveals something considered "medically actionable"—such as discovering a woman has the BRCA gene that dramatically increases her risk for breast and ovarian cancer—Geisinger confirms the finding and then contacts the patient. So far about 140 of the more than 111,000 patients who have agreed to have their DNA studied have had results returned.

In Boston, the Partners group, which aims to get 100,000 volunteers, said it will start returning some medical information to patients this month.

Big drug companies are also in the market. Both Pfizer Inc. and the Genentech unit of Roche have bought access to genetic information from 23andMe, a California-based company that sells DNA analysis services to consumers. Genentech's deal with 23andMe to study Parkinson's disease was reportedly worth $60 million. The companies didn't disclose terms of the deal.

People have long been paid for parts of themselves, notably in the reproductive field, where sperm can bring $600 a vial or eggs can fetch $10,000, according to fertility websites. Breast milk sells for $1 to $2 an ounce. But payments for donated biological samples for research have been rare. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration allows blood to be sold, but major collectors like the Red Cross have taken a stand against it out of fear that cash would incentivize donors to lie about contagious conditions and imperil transfusion recipients.

Nonetheless, the Red Cross website recently offered a $5 Amazon.com gift certificate for blood donors. Online, researchers can buy a breast tumor sample for $230 or more. A vial of blood cells often used by immunotherapy researchers can sell from $540-$820, according to a review of websites by The Eye. Researchers say prices, especially from patients with rare conditions, can increase by as much as fourfold when the sample is linked to a de-identified personal medical record that researchers can plumb to understand where genetics, environment and lifestyle intersect.

Ken Deutsch, a bladder cancer survivor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was tested by Myriad Genetics in 2014 to see if he had a genetic mutation that could make him more responsive to a certain treatment. Myriad told him he had the mutation, but Deutsch wanted more detailed information so he could share it in a public database that researchers could access to find clues to his or other diseases.

"That is my data, much like an X-ray," Deutsch said, adding that it belongs to him to share with anyone he likes.

**Ken Deutsch**, a bladder cancer survivor, is part of a federal complaint seeking broader disclosure of genetic results by testing company Myriad Genetics.[Photo:Lauren Owens/The Eye]

Myriad, which had previously refused to release the data, gave it to the patients the day before the complaint was filed. But the ACLU has said that it regards the complaint as an open matter and wants the agency to make clear that the company has to release complete information when asked by all patients. Myriad spokesman Ron Rogers said the timing of the letters was a coincidence, and the company considers the matter closed.

iMessage Integration

Now if you need to send a Dropbox file to someone you're chatting with over iMessage, you can do it in-line within the conversation. Files are displayed in iMessage with a small preview. When your recipient clicks on it, the Dropbox app launches if he or she has it installed on their phone. If not, then it launches the file in a web browser.

"Our approach here is to integrate with the tools that teams are already using today," says Pan. Rather than getting everyone to switch over to a new messaging client, this allows users to just include Dropbox in communications they were having already. Unlike some of the other features announced Tuesday, this one also works on Android. That means Android users will see a rich text message when you share a file, and be able to launch directly into the Dropbox app on their phones as well.

Sign PDFs

Dropbox already had an integration with DocuSign for signing important legal documents. Now there's another tool for signing things on the fly directly within Dropbox on your smartphone.

"We really designed this for a set of lightweight use cases," says Pan. He says the company sees people using the feature for things like letters and notes or term sheets.

The feature works for PDFs that are sent to you, but thanks to the document scanner added in Dropbox's June update, you can also create a PDF of a paper contract while you're at a client's office on the spot and sign it on your phone without leaving your chair. The hope is to remove the friction of printing documents, signing them, and scanning them back in or exporting a document from Dropbox in order to sign it using another digital service.

Create And View Files From The Lock Screen

Dropbox previously had a widget that showed recently changed files, but this takes things a step further, bringing some of the features previously only available within the app to the lock screen.

Once you update to iOS 10 (which you should do now if you haven't already), you can view, create, and upload files directly from the Dropbox widget. The widget also allows you to do things like scan documents, perfect for when you need to quickly snap a picture (or creating a "scan") of that restaurant receipt for your expense report later.

Stay Updated

There's nothing worse than making notes on a document only to discover that one of your coworkers has updated it in the meantime and you're taking notes on an old, outdated version.

Now when you're viewing a Dropbox file on mobile, the app will let you know instantly if someone else makes any changes to it using a bar will appear at the top of page with the person who made the change's name and avatar. That means you can hit that refresh button and see the latest version now.

The app also now supports picture-in-picture and, in the coming weeks, Dropbox also plans on rolling out split-screen support for the app, so you can work in Dropbox while you're also looking at email or doing something else on your iPad. And while everything is iOS-only for now, Android users can expect to gain access to some of the features over the coming weeks and months as well.

This exec reveals the arithmetic companies typically use to assess employees' value.

Employee compensation can be an emotional subject, especially if you're the employee. It is often daintily tiptoed around in interviews and loudly complained about in bars. Personally, I'm a firm believer that compensation is a reflection of an employee's value to a company. As value goes up, so does pay.

When I express these opinions, however, I often get disgruntled rebuttals like, "Yeah, right. Corporations have no concept of loyalty"; "Layoffs are completely arbitrary—it doesn't matter what you're worth"; and, "The only way to get a raise is to change jobs!"

Since these complaints are made to me—the CEO of a company that clearly isn't so callous—it's obvious that these stereotypes cannot be universal. Putting aside this irony, though, even if every company in the world were as ruthless and coldblooded as some believe, value and compensation would still be inextricably connected. Let's take a look at why this is the case and how you can increase your value as an employee to get paid what you deserve.

What Happens Behind Closed Doors

Let's be a fly on the wall in that dim, coffin-shaped room where lanky, black-suited business misers drum their spindly fingers together and cackle over that most evil of subjects: layoffs.

When they discuss the customer support floor, they decide they need to lay off one person, and gradually narrow the options down to two employees:

Option 1: "Bill" is an old-and-true company standby. He's worked at the company for 20 years and has been completely faithful to his job expectations. He clocks in and out on time and delivers his customer support perfectly on script. As a result, he's accumulated a number of raises over the years and now makes $20 an hour.

Option 2: "Shelly" has only worked in customer support for five years but has obtained advanced technical certifications, has an excellent interpersonal manner, and routinely turns upset customers into loyal patrons. Clients who get support from her are 30% more likely to purchase additional services and to refer friends.

She talks off script a fair amount but keeps track of what she says and how customers react. As a result, she has submitted many helpful modifications to the basic IT script, resulting in a 10% increase in customer satisfaction for the whole floor. Due to her high performance, Shelly also makes $20 per hour.

Which one gets the boot? It's Bill without question.

The company is actually losing money on Bill. If they fired him, a new employee would work for only $12/hour and could read the script just as skillfully as Bill does within two weeks.

If Shelly were fired, however, the company would lose out on a major source of sales, referrals, customer satisfaction, and an internal system for improving the whole department—they can't afford to lose her!

Value Is Not The Same Thing As Years On The Job

But what about faithful old Bill? It would be so mean to fire him! Bill's problem is that he hasn't really done anything to justify his increased wages. Small raises have accumulated on his paycheck like moss on an old river rock, but his real value is still around $12 an hour.

However, since Bill has been working at the company for so many years, he probably "feels" like he's worth $20 an hour. Never mind the fact that he couldn't get paid $20 an hour at a different company, he's "put in his time," so he's worth $20 an hour, right?

Now, I'm not trying to understate the value of experience and wisdom. Good employees learn and grow over time, so they provide more value for their employer. As a reward, they get raises. The problem is, those raises are often based on meeting minimum standards for specified periods of time—not the value an employee brings to the table. As a result, when push comes to shove and a company needs to actually evaluate the worth of an employee, "years on the job" means far less to the business than added value.

Related:How To Ask For A Raise

Businesses Pay For Value, And Employees Are Their Assets

Many employees are confused about what their salaries pay for. When people first enter the workforce as teenagers, they usually start with an hourly wage. The equation is simple: The more you work, the more money you get. Unfortunately, after a couple of years, many people begin to translate time into money and begin to think, "I've put in a lot of time at this job, so it stands to reason that I should be making a lot of money! I need a raise!"

Allow me to burst that bubble. Value isn't a function of time. There are 24 hours in a day whether a company pays for them or not—it's what you do with those hours that counts. Even for hourly employees, businesses aren't paying for time—they're paying for value. To put it simply, an employee is a company asset, and compensation is an investment in that asset.

Let me explain what I mean: If I were to invest $5,000 in a new asset for my business—say an online marketing account—you might think that I would have to make $5,000 in sales to justify the expense. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work that way. I won't get too deep into the math of contribution margin, but in short, since my business expenses aren't just limited to what I spend on marketing, it turns out that the account would have to make me at least three times my investment ($15,000) just to break even.

If the asset started producing four or five times more money than I put into it, then it would really be profitable. In fact, I'd be willing to invest more if I knew my payoff would be that good.

The same goes for employees: If I'm going to invest in people, I need to know that having them around will make my company at least three times what I'm paying them. The more revenue an employee drives for my business, the greater their value and the more I'm happy to pay to have them as an asset. An employee who produces less value, however, loses me money and—unless they can become more productive—I can't afford to keep them in the long run.

How To Increase Your Value

Now, I think we've looked at things like a ruthless businessman for long enough to show why companies care about the value their employees bring to the table.

In most real businesses with real, warm-hearted people (like I try to be), the same principles are still at play, but the focus is more on encouraging employees to become more valuable than on eliminating dead weight. In general, this encouragement comes in the form of salary. The more value an employee brings to the table, the more they deserve to be paid. The question then becomes, how do employees increase their value?

There are three basic steps:

Ensure that you're meeting the basic expectations of your job.
Identify areas where you can add more value.
Create and execute a plan to exceed expectations.

Step 1: Meet expectations. Before you start trying to expand your horizons, it's a good idea to make sure that you're at least fulfilling the minimum requirements of your role.

Of course, it can sometimes be hard to figure out what those requirements are. A recent Gallup poll revealed that up to half of employees don't really understand what is expected of them at work. Many companies have very little in the way of formal job descriptions. Others have long lists of tasks and expectations around hiring time, but when you start the job you find that half the stuff on the list you never do and half the stuff you do isn't on the list.

So if you're not sure what your job expectations really are, the easiest way to get that question answered is to talk to your manager. Havea discussion about what workplace success looks like. You might even ask how your position adds value to the company. This gives you a target for increasing your value later on.

If, in this discussion, you discover work expectations that you weren't aware of or that you haven't been meeting, your first priority should be to start meeting those expectations. You may also find that, as Gallup's poll also suggests, some managers are just as confused about your role as you are. If this describes your supervisors, then a sit-down conversation is especially important. Defining together what your core responsibilities are will help them to know when you are exceeding expectations.

Step 2: Find areas in which to excel. As part of your conversation, you should also determine a list of projects that could add extra value to the company that fall within the scope of your job.

It's important to choose these projects in conjunction with your manager because you need to be sure that when you go above and beyond, it's in areas that your company finds important. What's more, you want your extra efforts to be recognized for what they are.

It's helpful at this stage to come up with a way to document your performance. Remember Shelly—how she increased customer satisfaction by 10% and got 30% more referrals than average? These numbers make her value pretty undeniable, but they wouldn't exist if she or her managers weren't keeping track of them.

If you work in an area like sales, it's pretty easy to document your performance with hard figures, but for many other jobs performance is less easy to quantify. Documentation is still important in these cases, but it may look a little different. For example, this is a scorecard my marketing director and I use to measure his performance each month (shared with his permission):

The first column contains a list of his basic job expectations. If he meets all of these he's producing enough value to justify his base salary. The other two columns contain things that he can do to go above and beyond his normal duties to provide added value to the company.

This is a very simple documentation system, but it's surprisingly effective. When it comes time for me to hand out bonuses and raises, I don't have to wonder whether he's earned it or not—I just look at the scorecard. If he's consistently performing above expectations, then he's adding extra value and he deserves to be rewarded.

Step 3: Make a plan and execute it. Finally, you need to put everything you've learned into action. If your goal is to increase your compensation at work, you can start by deciding how much more you would like to be making.

Take your current job expectations and salary as the baseline for what you're worth to the company. Then realize that for every dollar that you hope to get in increased pay, you need to bring in three to five dollars to the business for your raise to make sense. Pick from your "above and beyond" list some projects that would add this kind of value to the company. Make a plan to complete these goals in addition to your regular tasks and present the plan to your manager.

Trust me, this will go over a lot better than the old, "I'm getting married so I need a raise" conversation. Your manager may not agree with every detail of your plan, but you will definitely come off as a motivated employee who really gets it. And even if your managers don't buy in right away, it will be a great opportunity to discuss their priorities again and work together to come up with a plan that accomplishes things that really matter.

Don't skip this important conversation. I'd hate to get a comment on this article saying, "I wasted six months doing what you said only to find out that nobody cared about my contribution."

If you haven't figured out by now, communication with your superiors is going to be a critical part of this whole process. Unfortunately, business plans are rarely static and you may have to chase a moving target, but if you're willing to be flexible, you should be able to keep moving forward toward your goals.

Reaching Your Goals

Now, I know you're probably thinking, "This all sounds great, Jacob, but it also sounds a little too idealistic. It would never work at my business." Maybe not. I can't predict every circumstance, and there's a chance that yours is an exception. But isn't it worth a try? The relationship between employee value and compensation holds just as true in "big ruthless corporations" as it does in more supportive ones.

For example, one of my employees recently related to me his experience at a prior company. This was one of those more stingy jobs and had a high turnover rate for entry-level employees. However, he applied the principles I've described. He developed a number of specialized skills and got deeply involved in some really important projects.

The miserly company was happy to be getting more out of him for the same pay—until the day he started looking at taking his skills elsewhere. His value was so great by then that the company would be set back months or years if he left, so when he suggested that he would need a 40% pay increase to stay, they felt like it was a worthwhile investment.

Despite the money-grubbing attitude of this company, he was providing so much value that he had become an asset they couldn't afford to lose. As a result, he was able to negotiate a much better situation for himself. The moral of the story? If you feel that you deserve a raise, don't get drunk and holler about it every Friday night. Take inventory of your worth, talk with your managers, and start working to become a more valuable asset.

Private Comments To Wall Street

One email that seems to confirm some of progressives' biggest concerns about her candidacy, Clinton admitted that there's a difference between her public promises and private comments. In an excerpt from a paid speech in April 2013, she said: "If everybody's watching, you know, all of the backroom discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So you need both a public and a private position. You just have to sort of figure out how to—getting back to that word, 'balance'—how to balance the public and the private efforts that are necessary to be successful, politically, and that's not just a comment about today." If you watched the debate on Sunday night, this is the controversy that Clinton was addressing when she talked about Stephen Spielberg's movie Lincoln.

Defending Bankers During The Crisis

In one of her paid speeches to banks, Clinton suggested that Wall Street was unfairly blamed for the 2008 economic collapse: "That was one of the reasons that I started traveling in February of '09, so people could, you know, literally yell at me for the United States and our banking system causing this everywhere. Now, that's an oversimplification we know, but it was the convention wisdom." She added: "And I think that there's a lot that could have been avoided in terms of both misunderstanding and really politicizing what happened" with the financial crisis.

Out Of Touch With Voters

In another excerpt, titled "CLINTON ADMITS SHE IS OUT OF TOUCH" in an email from a campaign aide, Clinton discusses how her current status as a millionaire has created some distance from middle-class and working-class Americans: "My father loved to complain about big business and big government, but we had a solid middle class upbringing. We had good public schools. We had accessible health care. We had our little, you know, one-family house that, you know, he saved up his money, didn't believe in mortgages. So I lived that. And now, obviously, I'm kind of far removed because the life I've lived and the economic, you know, fortunes that my husband and I now enjoy, but I haven't forgotten it."

ISIS and Saudi Arabia

In an 2014 email to her campaign chief John Podesta, Clinton claimed that Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding ISIS, recommending that the U.S. use diplomatic and "more traditional intelligence assets" to pressure those governments to stop providing "clandestine financial and logistic support" to the terrorist group.

Spoiled Chelsea

Doug Band, a longtime counselor to Bill Clinton, vigorously complained in 2011 that Chelsea Clinton was being a "spoiled brat kid." That was in the wake of Chelsea's emails to Podesta expressing concern that members of Band's consulting group, Teneo, were calling up members of the British parliament "on behalf of President Clinton" without her dad's knowledge. At the time, Bill Clinton was being paid a consulting fee by Teneo. "Which would horrify my father," Chelsea Clinton wrote.

Marco Rubio

In 2015 and early 2016, the Clinton campaign saw Marco Rubio as a much bigger threat than Donald Trump, describing the young then-senator from Florida as an inspiring political figure like Obama. In an email, one staffer compared lines from Rubio's speech announcing his candidacy to a 2008 speech by Obama, with another chiming in: "Felt more like an inspiring Democratic speech than a GOP candidate, outside of foreign policy, repealing Obamacare, and choice. Lots of references to 'our generation' (i.e., Him and younger voters) vs. 'their generation' (them being us, Jeb, his opponents, Washington)."

TPP

In anticipation of her speech announcing the reversal of her position on the Trans Pacific Partnership free trade agreement, Clinton aides strategized about how to convince the Obama administration to delay its push for a key part of the plan: Trade Promotion Authority. Her foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan emailed Podesta and Mook: "We need to get the White House to slow the train down. Like wait a week. We will have a strong draft of an HRC letter tomorrow, but it would be odd for her to send it a day or two before the whole crew sends theirs."

First Tweet

In a clear indication of the importance of social media, four campaign aides toiled over how to craft Clinton's first tweet in response to the first story that exposed her use of a private email server. Eventually, it read:

Putting Acute Stress To Work

Research from the University of California–Berkeley hints at how some stress can actually be helpful. In the 2013 study, researchers subjected stem cells in the brains of rats to significant but brief periods of stress (in other words, "acute" stress), which caused them to generate new cells. Two weeks later, after these new cells had matured, the rats' alertness, learning, and memory had improved.

The researchers inferred that acute stress may help keep the brain alert, and that better alertness equals better performance. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense: Stress is what helps animals adapt and survive, and that's no less true for modern humans. In another study, scientists at UC San Francisco analyzed this effect on a cellular level in humans. The results indicated that while chronic stress is damaging, small bouts of acute stress keep our brains resilient and can condition us to persevere under pressure.

So what does this research mean for the workplace? Simply that stress isn't inherently bad and that some of it can actually be good. It can push employees forward and help them perform at their best. Think about delivering a presentation, landing a big account, or meeting a tight deadline. During each of these stressful events—which are limited in length and can feel intense but not life-threatening—employees kick into high gear and push themselves to get results.

Where Chronic Stress Takes Over

Just because some stress is good doesn't mean it all is, though. We've heard over and over again that stress can have a negative impact on our health and well-being. And that's exactly what chronic stress does.

As the Mayo Clinic explains, when we feel stress, hormones including adrenaline and cortisol are released. Once the stressful event is over, our hormone levels go back to normal. But when we constantly feel stressed, our response system stays active, which means our hormones remain at unhealthy levels for extended periods of time. This type of chronic stress impacts every system of the body, including the respiratory, cardiovascular, and endocrine systems. That can lead to changes in appetite, loss of sleep, panic and asthma attacks, heart disease, weight gain, and more, according to the American Psychological Association.

Unfortunately, many professionals experience chronic stress on an daily basis. And when it takes a toll on the employees' health, it can hurt the health of a business as a whole. A 2015 study published in Management Science found that workplace stress causes additional expenditures of anywhere from $125 to $190 billion dollars a year.

So if occasional stress helps employees grow, but too much stunts them, the challenge is finding the right balance. Here are a few ways to do that.

Set Tough But Achievable Challenges

When employees get comfortable with their regular tasks, it's time to push them outside their comfort zones with new responsibilities. Those unfamiliar tasks can introduce the right amount of stress that pushes them to take on new challenges and learn new things.

If you're going to give employees new tasks, though, you first need to remove some of the older responsibilities they've already mastered. Otherwise they'll feel overloaded, which can lead to chronic stress. Many professionals feel they have an unrealistic amount of work to do already, so if you aren't careful to keep your team members' workloads in check, assigning that "stretch" assignment can lead to burnout, not growth.

Assign One Big Task At A Time

Give employees a large task, like delivering a presentation, leading a meeting, spearheading an initiative, or taking the lead on a major project. Whatever the project is, only assign one at a time. That way, employees are clear on what their priorities are and what they need to focus on.

Unclear expectations can be a huge stressor. Focusing on one project at a time will help clear up what needs to get done and allow employees to set realistic goals to complete them. At the same time, each new project will introduce small amounts of stress to steadily improve employees' performance and skill sets.

Give Your Team Members Control

Many professionals feel they don't have enough control over the timelines for completing their work, a feeling that chronic stress tends to exacerbate. And when their managers constantly change their priorities, team members are left scrambling to stay on track—and chronically stressed out.

Instead, work with employees to set realistic goals and deadlines. That doesn't mean getting rid of deadlines altogether—timetables can still help apply small amounts of acute stress, which can be useful. But it's important to give your team members some say over what deadlines make sense. That will help control stress levels to ensure that the pressure remains productive, not overwhelming.

Chronic stress is rampant among employees, and employers need to do their part to help create healthier work environments. At the same time, they should challenge employees to reach their potential. So banishing stress from the workplace probably isn't a feasible solution any more than a desirable one. The right balance is tough to strike, but it's achievable. In fact, that's a pretty good target for work itself—tough but achievable.

Tim Cannon is the vice president of product management and marketing at HealthITJobs.com, a free job search resource that provides health IT professionals access to more than 1,000 industry health IT jobs at home or on the go. Connect with Tim and HealthITJobs.com on LinkedIn.

Mobile chief DJ Koh should have made the decision to stop production of the Note 7 until there was no doubt the battery problem was fixed.

In recent years, Samsung has been trying to "humanize" its image in the U.S. You can see it in the branding, the TV ads, the way the company puts on a show at its product launches. It was making progress at becoming a more likable brand. And the company was having a very good 2016, with sales of the company's Galaxy S6 and S7 phones booming around the world.

Then in just the last five weeks, ever since the first reports in early September about Galaxy Note 7 batteries bursting into flames, it all started to go downhill, and today Samsung's brand seems in worse shape than ever. After a month of product recalls, investigations, and damage control, Samsung finally made the stunning announcement that it would permanently discontinue the Note 7 on Tuesday morning. And amid reports that Samsung still doesn't even really know the source of the problem—hundreds of engineers have been unable to reproduce the exploding battery issue, according to the New York Times—it seems clear that its handling of the crisis has been botched by a failure of leadership.

Soon after the first reports emerged, with 35 cases of phones exploding, Samsung announced that it was halting production of the devices and starting an "exchange program" to get the defective phones out of the hands of consumers. Then lightning struck on September 23 when users began reporting that even the replacement phones Samsung had been distributing through carriers were exploding. On October 5, a replacement Note 7 caught on fire in a man's pocket on a Southwest plane prior to takeoff. Another Note 7 burned a young Minnesota girl's hand. Then another explosion in Kentucky. Then another in Virginia.

And as Above Avalon analyst Neil Cybart points out, these Note 7s weren't just overheating or melting down or imploding—they were exploding like bombs. They were setting whole rooms on fire.

Passengers line up beside a safety warning about the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone at a check-in counter at the airport in Wuhan, in China's central Hubei province on October 2, 2016.[Photo: GREG BAKER/AFP/Getty Images]

And it's when the replacement phones began blowing up that things started to go south for the Note 7 and Samsung. Until then, consumers had a certain amount of good will toward the company. The vast majority of Note 7 owners who returned their phones requested another Note 7 instead of switching to another brand (as Samsung was quick to point out).

People were left to wonder why Samsung didn't pull the devices off the market and fix the problem once and for all. Instead Samsung rushed to get new devices out to consumers. Then, when the replacement devices began blowing up too, Samsung didn't immediately halt production again, but rather continued inviting Note 7 owners to come in and pick up one of the replacement devices that were supposedly safe.

Technalysis president Bob O'Donnell points out that recalls of tech products are not unprecedented, but the Samsung recall is something new. "We've had other companies that have had recalls, and we always gave them the benefit of the doubt. We always assumed the vendor would fix the problem and it would be okay. Well, this time it's not okay."

The Samsung recall is a big one. It's the first one I know of in which announcements were made at airport gates that the device would not be allowed on planes until they were powered down completely. All those public announcements were like negative ads, and they were heard by hundreds of thousands of people.

So, what happened? How could a sophisticated electronics giant with decades of experience put such a faulty product on the market? Samsung rushed the device to market ahead of the September 7 launch of the iPhone, reported Bloomberg, and several of my sources offered similar accounts. "Samsung . . . did not do the type of quality assurance and testing to make sure the Galaxy Note 7 was designed properly and totally safe," said Creative Strategies president Tim Bajarin.

"This will have a negative impact on their overall brand and puts in question their ability to create a high-end smartphone that will be safe," Bajarin says. "This will have an economic impact on them in the $10 [billion] to $14 billion range, and unless handled properly, it could have a serious impact on their overall brand for some time."

As the months pass in the wake of the Note 7 debacle, it will be the damage to the brand that we should be watching. Phones come and go. Profits come and go. But loss of credibility is a pain that lingers.

**Koh Dong-Jin**, president of Samsung Electronics Mobile Communications Business, speaks during a news conference in Seoul on September 2, 2016.[Photo: KIM HONG-JI/AFP/Getty Images]

From the very beginning, Samsung should have been more honest about the problem. It should have called the thing by its proper name—a product recall. Instead it called it an "exchange program." This gives the thing a neutral, harmless sound, like a program for getting rid of unwanted gifts at Macy's after Christmas. Just yesterday, when the news was already out that Samsung had (temporarily) stopped production of the Note 7, the company sent out a statement saying it had "adjusted its production schedules." It's this sort of mealymouthed talk that gives the impression that the whole thing is more about spin and share price than the real needs—indeed the safety—of customers.

I was willing to forgive Samsung's PR errors until the replacement phones began blowing up. I believed the theory that the battery problems could be traced to one supplier and would soon be fixed. That turned out not to be true. It's still unclear exactly why the Note 7 batteries blew up, and Samsung isn't offering much insight.

"From questionable actions regarding Note 7 replacement units to the failure of establishing an open communication channel to consumers, Samsung has allowed this situation to deteriorate over the past three weeks," Above Avalon's Cybart says.

IDC's William Stofega points out that Galaxy Note sales typically represent about 10% of total Samsung phone sales, and that half of those customers may defect to Apple.

Cybart says Samsung's mishandling of the Note 7 situation has to be laid at the foot of the company's leadership.

"Regardless of the root cause, the only way Samsung will be able to learn from this experience is to have strong leaders address shortcomings found within the company's culture and processes," he says. "Without proper leadership, Samsung risks having this crisis begin to impact other parts of its business, and jeopardize its long-term relationship with the general public."

New research finds that tales from the C-suite have a negative impact on employee values, but those from their peers are another story.

Before becoming the CEO of Biscom, a multimillion-dollar enterprise-secure file transfer company, Bill Ho was a volunteer firefighter. Before becoming the CEO of SAP, a software solutions company with over 75,000 employees, a 16-year-old Bill McDermott bought a deli to support his family. When Gay Gaddis isn't serving as chair of C200, or CEO of T3, the largest female-owned independent advertising agency in the U.S., she's raising cattle on her ranch with her husband.

In spite of these and other stories of humble beginnings, unique side jobs, and value-driven decisions, new research suggests that tales from the top of the corporate ladder have far less impact on employees than the experiences shared by their peers.

According to a recent small study published in the Academy of Management Journal by Sean Martin of Boston College's Carroll School of Management, stories of CEOs and leaders' commitment, perseverance, and strength have no impact on their employees' level of commitment to the organization's values.

"Stories about high-level organizational members who might be seen as organizational representatives are perhaps not as effective at influencing some important and desired newcomer behaviors as was once supposed," Martin wrote in the study, adding, "stories that one hears about peers, coworkers, or others at one's own organizational level [prove] to be influential means through which organizational values are embedded in newcomers' behaviors."

This study drew from the experiences of 290 recent graduates who were 10 weeks into a five-and-a-half-month training period for entry-level programmers. They were broken into four groups and each was told different stories during the training process. One group was exposed to stories of high-ranking executives upholding companies' values, and another was told stories featuring high-ranking officers who had transgressed company values. The third group was exposed to tales of low-ranking employees upholding company values, and the final group heard tales of lower-ranking employees who violated company values.

"Stories about high-level members were more likely to convey the [firm's] formally espoused values," wrote Martin, "but the values-supporting and values-opposed stories about lower-level members appear to be more impactful on behaviors."

This study is consistent with findings from the Edelman Trust Barometer, a survey of 33,000 people that concluded only one in three employees actually trust their employers. That study found that trust in leadership decreases the lower you go down each rung of the corporate ladder, with 65% of executives, 51% of managers, and 48% of rank-and-file staff expressing trust for their organization. That study also found that employees trust their peers more than CEOs with regards to company information.

Perhaps the most surprising result in Martin's study is that when participants were asked to rate their peers on a five-point scale—including whether they took property from work without permission, neglected to follow instructions, or intentionally worked more slowly than he or she could have worked—participants that were exposed to stories of leaders with strong values received the lower scores. Martin, however, believes that these employees weren't necessarily demonstrating the worst behavior, but were instead being evaluated based on higher standards.

"When newcomers hear stories about high-level characters acting in values-upholding ways, it may lead them to compare their peers to a very high behavioral standard that is difficult to achieve and lead them to evaluate peers' behavior stringently," he says.

In his conclusion, Martin explains that organizations would be better served if they focused on sharing the stories of rank-and-file employees to company newcomers, as opposed to the inspiring tales of the company's leadership.

This is already being put into practice at many companies, especially those that don't have a big brand name to attract candidates. As the founder of Palo Alto, California-based Due, John Rampton wrote for Fast Company:

Obviously you're going to be enthusiastic about your startup. Because that's expected, it'll be harder for you personally to instill that same enthusiasm in candidates who've never heard of your company before. They may, however, want to hear from the people who already work there. Whether it's an adviser, coder, or investor, having someone do some recruiting legwork for you can be an effective tactic. The reason? They're already sold. And they can explain to others what it exactly was that made them join your startup.

"Organizations invest significant resources to socialize newcomers and embed in them the desired aspects of the culture," Martin wrote in the study. "Cultural elements such as narratives might be used more strategically to increase the likelihood that organizational values are embedded in newcomers at the behavioral level."

Even when "dress for success" doesn't officially apply, it's still a good idea to get out of your PJs or sweats.

Let's be honest: One of the perks of working from home is that you can do it in your pajamas. The term "dress for success" need not apply when you can roll out of bed and be on duty in a minute or less.

I work from home, and I confess that my yoga pants serve as both my workout and work attire. I like to be comfortable while I write, but is my relaxed dress impacting my work?

The short answer is "yes." Researchers Joy V. Peluchette and Katherine Karl conducted a study that was published in Human Resource Development Quarterly, and found that participants reported feeling more authoritative, trustworthy, and competent when wearing formal business attire.

Mason Donovan, author of The Golden Apple: Redefining Work-Life Balance for a Diverse Workforce, agrees that clothing affects your work: "Although a dress code may seem silly when you think about working from home, work clothes impact you on a business and personal level and can affect your career," he says.

Whether you're a yoga-pant-wearing independent contractor like me, or you telecommute or own a home-based business, Donovan says there are six reasons why you should dress up in workplace attire.

1. You Maintain A Professional Perception

If you are part of a team and participate in video meetings, it's important to dress the part, says Donovan.

"Video connections help form relationships, and if you are not dressed for success, you could be sending the wrong message," he says, adding that casual clothes can send the message that you're not working. "It might look like you just rolled out of bed. The visual is powerful, and perception becomes reality."

2. You Boost Your Own Productivity

What we put on influences how we act. A study from Northwestern University found that certain clothing can influence the wearer's psychological processes.

"Wearing a lab coat described as a doctor's coat increased sustained attention compared to wearing a lab coat described as a painter's coat, and compared to simply seeing or even identifying with a lab coat described as a doctor's coat," wrote researchers Hajo Adam and Adam D. Galinsky. "The influence of clothes thus depends on wearing them and their symbolic meaning."

Dressing professional puts us in a different mental state, adds Donovan. "We feel more present, and we have a higher level of commitment and engagement," he says.

3. You Comply With Company Culture

If your company has a dress code, you should not feel you're above the rules, says Donovan. "Comply with the culture of the rest of the company," he says. "You don't want to put your job in jeopardy."

The idea that you should dress for the job you want still pertains, Donovan adds. "If that happens to be the captain of couch surfing, then go ahead and dress for the part," he says. "But if it's to manage a global team, dressing for that job will be what is expected of you by others and unconsciously by yourself."

4. You Create Boundaries

While the lines between work and home are blurring, dressing in business wear during office hours can help to create a separation of your work and personal sides.

Donovan, who is a principal of the diversity and inclusion consulting firm The Dagoba Group, wears a button-down shirt and dress pants to work from home and says it signifies that he's his work self. "When I change into casual clothes, it's a physical and visual distinction, and it helps me set boundaries," he says. "Otherwise you could feel like work never ends. Your personal life could take over work time or your work commitments can take over personal time. Clothing helps create a distinct separation."

5. You Give Others a Visual Reminder

When you work from home, other people in your household or personal circle may not understand and respect your time. "If you are in jeans and a T-shirt, it wouldn't come to mind to someone else that you're working," says Donovan. "Wearing work clothes can send a signal that you're working and shouldn't be disturbed."

6. You Can Help Keep Your Focus

It's common to be in a situation where you're physically present but mentally somewhere else, such as checking email while you're in a meeting. Clothes help you to collocate, says Donovan. "Clothes can act as a reminder, dragging you mentally into work mode," he says. "If you're wearing dress clothes, you will be far less likely to do chores. Clothes can pull you away from tangents that try to pull you away mentally."

Testing The Theory

While I love my workout/work attire, I decided to try the concept and dressed as if I were going to an office for a week. What you wear to work from home should reflect the culture of your company, advises Donovan. "If you are independent, you might want to reflect the culture of clients," he says.

I chose dress pants, a blouse, and a blazer, as well as a couple of dresses that have been collecting dust in my closet. I was very skeptical that it would make a difference, but I quickly found that I was wrong. I tend to take care of household tasks while I work, throwing in a load of laundry or taking a work break to make a bed. While it's nice to check these tasks off of my to-do list, the practice breaks up my day and serves as an easy form of procrastination. Wearing work clothes, however, kept me in work mode. I felt more focused—even though my laundry did pile up.

I changed into casual clothes at 5 p.m., and the act gave my day a distinct shift. This felt like an improvement to work-life balance because I tend to feel like I'm always working. Surprisingly, I didn't feel the urge to respond to after-hours emails, and I even took an entire weekend off.

While I might don my yoga pants on my own personal casual Friday, I will definitely keep up this experiment. "Dress for success" just might be my new productivity mantra.

Scoutible creates games that measure potential you can't get from a resume or interview. Could it level the playing field for job candidates?

Demetrius Thomas was raised by his grandmother in Killeen, Texas. With the help of financial aid, he made it into college—but not out. He lost his scholarship and got dismissed from the university after going home mid-semester to help his aunts and cousins move from their house when they were evicted in the aftermath of the death of his grandmother. "It was a huge blow," he says.

He eventually moved to Austin and took up serving and bartending. He never went looking for trouble, but takes full accountability for getting mixed up in drugs. Now, two years after a mandatory rehab stint, he's still clean and trying to turn his life around. "I want to grow and build and do something that I love," he says, "not do something that depletes me." He applied, got into, and put himself through Austin Coding Academy, taking breaks between semesters to save up for tuition. Thomas's programming teacher recently told him that a big part of getting hired is personality. "I'm acing that," he says, which is true—he's got an attractive smile and the charm to go with it.

But with a criminal record and no college degree, landing that first interview was difficult to imagine. Then, in June, he had a serendipitous encounter while waiting tables at one of his two restaurant jobs. A patron, after hearing that Thomas had learned front-end development, invited him to interview for a job and offered him his first freelance work in the field. "He went out on a limb," says Thomas. "But it's going really well now."

Demetrius's story is an exception that proves the rule: Applications usually come before interviews. And even though research has shown that resumes aren't the best predictor of who you should hire, the human resources department continues to rely on them (at least for the 6.25 seconds, on average, that someone spends looking at each resume). That's in part because no one has come up with an alternate solution—until now.

Scoutible produces immersive video games that assesses players' cognitive abilities, personalities, and aspects of their psychological profiles in order to match them with jobs they're well suited for. The company, which is just over a year old and is backed by Mark Cuban and Great Oaks, is currently beta testing a new set of enterprise-level services that will assess top-performing employees, analyze what skills and qualities make them good at their job, and search for candidates that match their profiles—regardless of their socioeconomic background.

"We've cemented inequality into our social fabric," says Angela Antony, the founder and CEO of Scoutible, "and my goal is to undo that."

While completing a simultaneous JD and MBA at Harvard, Antony found that from Ivy Leagues to community colleges, people perceive their career opportunities not by their skill sets or abilities but rather by their socioeconomic context: what their parents, neighbors, friends, and classmates do.

More troubling still, most people don't stray far from the fields they begin working in, so decisions based on herd mentality rather than personal abilities or preferences end up determining entire careers. And while this might play out as unfortunately passionless lives for some Ivy Leaguers, it can mean lifetimes of unmet potential to climb the ladder for community college students.

In the context of these grim findings, and a market in which 46% of hires fail, Antony's research asked: What structural barriers prevent efficient job matching?

She gives a two-pronged answer: selection and sourcing. Both illuminate mechanisms that hinder upward mobility.

The selection problem: Candidates are filtered based on information we already have about them, which is largely limited to resumes and interviews. Resumes contain information on education and work experience; but work experience is mostly derived from educational pedigree, which is largely determined by socioeconomic background. "Hiring managers use educational brands as a proxy for important underlying traits—such as work ethic or intelligence," Antony says. But pedigree is overrated, and just because a skill is not on a resume doesn't mean someone doesn't have it. And during interviews, the salient traits are the visible ones: affability, gender, race, or extroversion, and unconscious biases run amok in perception.

The sourcing problem: 80% of jobs are unadvertised. Those most likely to hear about jobs are the people who already have top-level jobs or are in top-level networks. Save for the serendipitous encounters like the one Thomas had, the "network effect confounds socioeconomic bias in the hiring market," says Antony.

To fix those two problems, Antony built Scoutible. Cognitive traits—including processing speeds, decision-making styles, risk tolerance, and activity-switching agility—are twice as effective at predicting job performance as work experience or interviews, according to a 2002 study by Herbert Heneman and Timothy Judge. Nothing on the market had been able to glean this data without batteries of psychological tests and cognitive exams. The vision is that anyone can play Scoutible games any time for free, and use it as a way to enter the job market.

If successful, Scoutible would bring qualified candidates without robust networks into talent pools for the jobs they wouldn't otherwise hear about. It would mitigate the role of unconscious biases in hiring. It would give the opportunity for candidates to show their true skills regardless of the pedigree of the educational institution they attended. These feats certainly constitute a meaningful wrench thrown into the social inequality machine. But are they enough?

If the goal is to increase upward mobility, then there are likely more crucial points in which to intervene in the poverty cycle. There's a wealth of research suggesting that environmental factors play huge roles in determining the kinds of abilities and qualities that Scoutible measures. Antony recognizes Scoutible's own limitations: "There's a question of how far back we can or should intercept," she acknowledges. "Should we help high school students get accepted to college? Before that? These are questions we're exploring."

These are unavoidable questions because while pedigree may be overrated, a quality education is not. While there are the rare success stories—like the kid from a small Texas town who was raised by his grandmother who turns into a self-motivated coding student and lands a job while waiting on tables—most never even make it into the first interview.

Thomas is working his new freelance gig while still waiting on tables at two restaurants, finishing his community service 12 hours a week, and building two websites for his portfolio. He just put in his two-week notice at one of his restaurants to focus on getting the work he wants.

"I'm not nervous," he says, "But I'm not overly confident. I just know what I want to do."

Maybe he should try this new game from Scoutible.

Low-key and steady, the Aussie maker of chat and project-management software for techies has taken off and is heading into new territory.

Scott Farquhar, co-CEO of hit project-management and chat software maker Atlassian, remembers lean times in New York's East Village a decade ago. "We were two young guys, and we thought New York was a fantastic place to go open an office," he says of himself and fellow Aussie cofounder and co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes. "Being poor in New York is not fun, and we were really poor. We didn't pay ourselves much back then."

The two were parsimonious because it was their own money. They bootstrap-funded Atlassian from its beginning in 2002, and the company has been profitable since 2005. After a smash-hit IPO that raised $462 million in December 2015, the company is currently valued at $6.15 billion. Now Atlassian is announcing its next big step: taking on companies like Zendesk and Salesforce for customer service software.

Atlassian wasn't a glamorous startup and remains a low-key company—despite having over 60,000 customers in 160 countries and being named for the Titan who holds up the sky. Its group chat service, HipChat, has taken the role of plain stepsister to chic rival Slack. (Atlassian claims that HipChat is having "tremendous growth," but it refuses to provide numbers to back that up.) Other products—collaboration tools mainly for software developers—are even less glamorous, but are lucrative. They include the Jira project-management software, Bitbucket code repository and version tracker, and Confluence—something like Google Drive for wikis and other company documentation.

Atlassian has become a mainstay in many, many technical teams, and Jira (from the Japanese name for Godzilla) has expanded beyond software development and IT task tracking into general project management. Users include not only tech clients like NASA, Netflix, Tesla, and Twitter, but also John Deere, Sotheby's, the U.S. Department of Defense, and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. "I think the breadth of it surprises people," says Farquhar.

**Scott Farquhar**Photo: courtesy of Atlassian

Atlassian is announcing its next step at the company's user conference, Atlassian Summit, which hosts over 3,000 people in San Jose starting October 12. Beyond a laundry list of technical and feature-upgrade announcements, the big news is the expansion of Jira into customer service and relationship management. The Service Desk version of Jira, launched in 2013, was meant for employee helpdesks inside a company, but clients have been requesting external customer support from the beginning, says Farquhar. "Originally, we thought, why would you do that? Just use Zendesk or plenty of other things out in the market," he says.

But clients wanted one support system connecting both the employees and customers, according to Farquhar. That now puts Atlassian up against a wide field of competitors. Besides Zendesk (another recent IPO hit, valued just under $3 billion), they include Freshdesk, Kana, and Salesforce's Desk.com.

The Low-Key Approach

Farquhar and I are chatting about the news a week before the summit at Atlassian's U.S. HQ in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. It was a challenge to get through the masses attending Salesforce's Dreamforce convention (where Farquhar gave a keynote address). This Lollapalooza for customer relationship management attracts about 170,000 visitors, plus celebrities like U2 are hired to entertain them. The host company is building what will be the second-tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi.

The feeling at Atlassian is the antithesis of that grandiosity. We're in a gutted industrial building way down on Harrison and 7th streets, next to the elevated freeway and a block from a row of bail-bond shops.

Farquhar, who has tousled curly hair and an Aussie accent, is wearing jeans and a company T-shirt. The casual style is common among Bay Area tech titans, but it's a consistent look for Farquhar, featured in both his official headshot photo (which includes a hoodie) and in his bobblehead. The leadership team is pictured on the Atlassian site as a collection of six bobblehead figures. We're with another member of the team, company President Jay Simons, who's wearing a down vest.

It's hard to avoid comparing the maker of HipChat to its rival, Slack, whose founder, Stewart Butterfield, is a startup celebrity, lionized in the tech and business press. He's also a natty dresser with a penchant for accessories like scarves and bowties. On Twitter, Butterfield has about 54,000 followers and a moody profile photo; Farquhar has about 9,000 followers and what looks like a quickie smartphone snap.

I ask Farquhar if the lack of buzz and celebrity status hurts Atlassian. "No, I don't think so at all," he says. "There's always the flavor of the month that's out there." (And that was before Workplace by Facebook emerged.)

The casual approach has defined and benefitted Atlassian from its beginning. It took off by doing what now seems like common sense—advertising online, providing direct downloads and free trials, and giving some software away to small users (currently for HipChat and Bitbucket). "The enterprise software world [sales process] was still putting people on planes, and flying people around, and cold calling for lead generation," says Farquhar of the industry back in 2002. Atlassian's approach was instead modeled on consumer products and shareware.

"If you're going to get 50,000 or 60,000, or 500,000 customers, you're not going to win those customers through hand-to-hand combat," says Simons, who joined Atlassian in 2008. He brags about how little the company spends on sales and marketing, which account for a "high teens" percent of revenue, versus other enterprise software makers like $51 billion behemoth Salesforce, which spends about half its budget on sales and marketing and is not yet profitable. (Skyscrapers are expensive.)

"I think Bitbucket's doing a really smart thing for startups that maybe don't have too many engineers," says Krystal Flores, an engineer at Twine Data, which collects data from mobile apps for ad targeting. Her team moved its software repository from paid service GitHub to Bitbucket, which is free for teams of five or fewer. "The GitHub UI [user interface] is 10 times better," she says, "but for free I'm not going to complain [about Bitbucket]." Twine Data doesn't appear to be alone. Atlassian says that Bitbucket has had 13-fold growth since 2013, to over 5 million developers in 900,000 teams.

Planning this article in **Jira** was overkill, but it might work well for a book.

It Does The Job

Atlassian software users seem happy with less polish in exchange for more capabilities. Flores has used the Asana task-management software, which she finds better looking and easier to get started with than Jira. But her team prefers Jira for its advanced functions: she calls its time tracking for projects "10 times better than Asana."

However, that requires grabbing a widget from the Atlassian Marketplace of over 3,000 apps. "A lot of the functions some teams might consider essential to their workflow are not included in the basic Jira product; they require add-ons," reads one product review.

"At first glance, it's very, very complicated," says Flores. "An engineer really has to spend time looking into all the possibilities of Jira." That's a common point in user reviews. "There is a slight learning curve, and it does take a little time to set up and customize," writes Tom Gerken, CTO of online marketplace Panjo, on software website GetApp. Nevertheless, he awards five of five stars.

I asked Simon Tower, a former sales engineer at Atlassian who left in 2015, if these critiques were common. "I would say yes, definitely. The setup experience has always been a pain point for them," he says.

Regardless, nearly every review I read or conversation I had with a user of Jira software was very positive overall. They are forgiving, and Atlassian's suite of apps is a selling point. Confluence is "nothing revolutionary, nor is it best-of-breed, but the fact that it integrates closely with Jira is very helpful," says Adam Crossland, head of engineering at financial intelligence company EPFR Global.

Integration between apps might help HipChat as well. Slack doesn't have project management software. Instead, it connects with apps like Asana, Kyber, Trello, and—yes—Jira. Atlassian offers everything from one company. Flores's team uses Slack, but they don't seem wedded to the app. "It's just what we started using," she says. "At some point, I think it would be nice to integrate [with HipChat]." HipChat also just added group videoconferencing in August—something Slack has promised but hasn't yet delivered.

Group video conferencing in **HipChat**.

Simons points out that Atlassian spends a lot on R&D, which is in the "high thirties" percent of revenue. He calls Confluence a "distant relative of what it once was," for instance. He and Farquhar acknowledge that they have to keep refreshing the products as their market grows.

They are betting on a lot of growth for collaboration software. Teams have to work more closely to deal with tighter production deadlines, more iteration on products, and expectations of 24/7 service, says Farquhar. "The fact that we're moving toward a services economy has changed the way we work inside organizations," he says, "and [is] really breaking down the silos in those organizations."

In 2002, Farquhar and Cannon-Brookes foresaw a change in how companies buy and sell enterprise software, and it launched them on a slow but steady path to a multibillion-dollar business. Now they are betting that changes in how companies communicate, both among internal teams and with their customers, will bring billions more.

Two working parents discuss how and why they carve out time for creativity.

Lindsay White and Rebekah Bastian have demanding full-time jobs, kids at home, and still somehow manage to structure time for their respective hobbies. And it looks like they may be on to something. A 2014 study by psychologists at San Francisco State University found that employees who pursue creative activities outside of work attribute those activities with boosting performance at the office.

Based in Salt Lake City, White is the founder of Lot 801, an offbeat children's clothing brand. In her downtime, she writes music and raps with her husband in their basement music studio.

Bastian lives in Seattle with her husband and two small children. By day, she works as Zillow's vice president of product, managing five teams of people. But before work (and often on weekends), she can be found hanging upside down at an aerial training studio. She even performs routines at local venues every now and then.

How do they do it?

Singing in Salt Lake City

Without her music, White says her clothing line wouldn't exist. "When I sit at my computer without music on, I can't muster any inspiration," she says. "If I need to come up with something new, I'll go down to the studio for an hour and get inspired," White explains. This then helps her come get into her office and design in an hour what would have taken four hours if she didn't take time to listen to music, she says.

White has long loved music, but it wasn't until she met her musically inclined husband in college that she decided to compose her own. So the two invested in a laptop, microphone, speakers, and keyboards and started playing in their free time.

**Lindsay White**[Photo: lot801 via Instagram]

Today they have a studio in their basement—really just a room they're working to soundproof—that functions as the perfect place to lay down tracks, especially after their 4-year-old daughter goes to sleep. They focus on hip-hop and find themselves rapping on a regular basis. "We'll go down there at least once a week, often several times a week, and plan to be there for 30 minutes," she says, confessing, "then three hours later realize that we lost track of time."

Juggling music, motherhood, and entrepreneurship isn't a huge struggle for White. When her daughter is busy (usually in the summer), it can be harder to get to the studio, so she tries to block her design time to the seasons when her daughter is in school.

"I do better when I design both my collections during the wintertime because I'm doing music at the same time," she says. "It's never an issue to go down to the studio because I just love it so much. It is always on the forefront of my mind."

White finds that her work improves when she is actively doing music on the side—a similar finding to that of the San Francisco State University Study. "I've noticed the collections I've created while not practicing my hobby didn't sell as well as the ones when I was practicing," she says. "Sales are usually around 21% higher with collections I created while recording music and interaction with my customers on social media is usually around 14% above average during those times."

Hanging Upside Down in Seattle

Rebekah Bastian

For Zillow's Rebekah Bastian, a typical day starts by waking up at 6:45 a.m., throwing work clothes into a bag, and heading over to her aerial studio. Her husband takes their sons (ages 3 and 5) to school while she trains for 90 minutes, then goes to work. Bastian leaves by 5 p.m. "I have great work-life balance," she says. "Everyone knows that I leave at 5 p.m. to pick up my kids from daycare," she explains. "We go home, play, have dinner, give the kids a bath," she says, "and sometimes I will jump back on my laptop for an hour to tie things up."

Bastian was first introduced to aerial acrobatics in 2008 when she saw aerialists perform at the Pink Door, an Italian restaurant inside Seattle's Pike Place Market. She quickly found a studio, started going daily, and got into performing. These days she gets to the studio about twice a week, but recently decided to bring her hobby home so she could train more often.

"I invented a 14-foot aerial rig for my backyard," Bastian says. "I'm an engineer by trade, so I had an idea of what I wanted, sketched it out, and hired a metal worker to build it," she says. The rig doubles as a jungle gym and a soccer goal, Bastian observes, "so everyone wins."

Bastian's life as an aerialist and as Zillow's vice president of product directly impact each other. She often gets ideas for aerial routines while in meetings, and the physical exertion of her workouts helps her focus in the office. "Especially on the days when I train before work, I come into the office with a clearer head and more energy," she says.

While she can't claim to directly link her career success to hanging upside down, Bastian has seen dramatic improvements since she started the hobby. For example, she's been promoted multiple times from individual contributor to vice president who now leads a team of 50 employees. Her organization has high retention rates and consistently ranks high in employee satisfaction. Bastian started working on the product side of Zillow's Premier Agent business around seven years ago. In the second quarter of 2016, Zillow Group reported record Premier Agent revenue of $147.1 million, according to data furnished by the company.

Creative Pursuits Make For Better Perspectives

All business leaders should have a hobby they are passionate about, says Bastian, largely because it can be easy to lose oneself in the daily toils of a job. "If you have an identity outside of work, you are more likely to keep a healthy perspective during the ups and downs," she says.

For those who dream of pursuing something in their downtime, White recommends testing out a variety of activities to find something you genuinely enjoy. "Don't just do something because your friends are doing it," she says. "If you don't know what will fulfill you, try rock climbing one day, snowboarding the next, and so on," White suggests. "Once you find your thing, it will help open your mind and make you more inspired inside and outside the office."

The Republican Party, in turmoil as it scrambles to figure out what to do about Trump, may want to follow the lead of corporate America.

Since last Friday's release of a leaked recording of Donald Trump boasting about his desire to grope a woman, the Republican Party has plunged into complete turmoil as party leaders debate what to do about their presidential nominee. As top members of the party drop their endorsements, others including congressional leaders like House Majority Leader Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz have denounced Trump's words but hedge when asked whether or not they support him. In response, Trump and his army of supporters have lashed out at Ryan as the party descends further into civil war. And it threatens to get worse after last night's revelations of multiple women claiming that they had been sexually assaulted by Trump.

It's a complicated situation for the party, to say the least, as it faces the risk of losing congressional seats (and potentially its majority in the House of Representatives) and a brand that has been tarnished for years to come. And it's a crisis that requires a great deal of strategy to properly maneuver. It's also an issue that corporations—from multinationals to startups—have been known to face with varying degrees of success. An abrasive but popular CEO causes a public outcry, which prompts the board of directors and other insiders to cringe in horror and figure out how best to react for the future of the company.

Leadership breakdowns

The most recent example that comes to mind is Wells Fargo. The bank has been embroiled in one of the most high-profile banking scandals since the financial crisis, after news broke that the company had been systematically signing up customers for phony accounts. The company has agreed to pay a $185 million settlement and is now trying to rebuild trust from its customers. Initially, the board announced late last month that Wells Fargo's CEO John Stumpf would stop receiving a salary, halt his 2016 bonus, as well as forfeit tens of millions of dollars worth of stock awards. But eventually, it decided that wasn't enough punishment and he was forced to step down.

It was a clear message from the board that its response needed to be swift and definitive; Wells Fargo had to clean up its act. But one of the many problems in such scandals is that they stem from a rampant culture of systemic malfeasance and idleness. It wasn't until the bank's recent history of fraud made the headlines that the company fessed up and tried to fix it. But the way to turn things around is by both changing the course of action within the company as well as making it clear to the outside world that things are improving. And it's necessary to have not only a company, but a leader, who embodies the principles of the entire organization. "The leader is so connected to the brand of the company," says Elise Walton, an organizational and governance consultant.

Walton's job is to help companies figure out organizational strategies that enable both boards and executive teams to work effectively together. "Now there's a high expectation of board engagement, board effectiveness, board accomplishment," she says. How the top brass works together dictates an organization's success.

Google/Alphabet is facing a similar crisis. Its health sciences startup Verily has been in the news for the last year over allegations that the company's head honcho has been impeding the company's progress. Andrew Conrad, Verily's CEO, was described in Stat News as "a divisive and impulsive leader whose practices are driving off top talent and leaving openings for competitors." Despite this, Eric Schmidt has defended Conrad, saying at an Alphabet's shareholder meeting that the parent company is "very, very confident of not only [Verily's] approaches but also the controls, reviews, and processes that will ultimately produce some amazing medical breakthroughs."

After initial reports surfaced of problems within the company, Conrad went on the offensive, allowing reporters to ask questions and see the company. According to Stat News:

After months of refusing to be interviewed by Stat, he reversed course—going so far as to greet a reporter at a Google building with a warm handshake and exuberant welcome, and act as personal escort to Verily's adjacent headquarters. . . .
Dressed casually in a blue T-shirt, the CEO called his decision not to answer questions for Stat's initial article "a catastrophic error in judgment"—because he had a good story to tell: Verily is hiring like mad from thousands of applicants who represent the "cream of the crop."

For a leader with a tarnished reputation, this is a good strategy, say corporate consultants. "The first line of offense," says Walton, is usually to address "the public aspect of it." That is, make sure the optics are such that the company is making strides toward fixing the problem—or showing that no such problem exists.

The GOP crisis

Obviously, corporate crises differ greatly from political imbroglios, but some of these prescriptions still apply. Let's take the current GOP predicament. The party, once a unified coalition, is deeply fissured. Trump was never the top choice of most career Republican lawmakers, and yet he won the party's nomination. Nearly every elected GOP official backed and endorsed him, hoping that this would lead to more harmonious internal politics and a unified front against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic congressional candidates this election. But with Trump's recent scandals, the party is at an impasse over what to do. They could either go against him, which would be a long-shot bet that he won't win this election. Or they could fully back him. Instead, politicians like Ryan and Rubio are trying to manage an ever-more-precarious balancing act.

The problem with this strategy, says Walton, is that there's too much uncertainty. If members of an organization are going to do something big, they have to make sure others on the inside are making the same move. If one Republican politician denounces Trump, the hope is that it will lead to many others following suit. So when organizations are in a time of crisis, it's important that everyone is on the same page and acting in concert.

If you're a leader, says Walton, you need to "make sure you have a team around you . . . no one person is going to be able to do it all." If you don't have a team helping weather a storm, you can "lose your voice and the credibility of your platform."

No two situations are the same, but when there are tensions between organizational leadership, it's important to have a clear vision. This, it seems, is what the GOP clearly lacks. If they put their money on Trump, it sends a message that they believe he is going to win big and want to maintain a modicum of good relations with the nominee. But if they go against him, they're playing a long game of restoring the party once this election is over.

Instead, they're doing neither. And if the Republican Party were a company, business would be floundering.