Confidently telling a coherent narrative about your job experience means accepting the lamest parts of it.
Everyone's resume has a dud or two. Glaring gaps after getting fired. That new boss who reorganized your team—and maybe didn't like you that much—and gave you a title demotion you're still embarrassed about. And let's not forget your short-lived stint as VP of operations at a hypergrowth startup, where your chief responsibility was packing boxes til midnight on Fridays until your partner cried foul.
I feel uncomfortable about parts of my career history, too. I went headfirst into marketing after college before realizing it was an Excel job and I expected a Powerpoint one. I started a restaurant that flopped. I made lateral moves, playing hot potato with my career for about a decade without ever cracking the ranks of leadership.
But what if duds like these aren't duds? What if they're simply the points on the zigzagging line that leads to the presently crystallized version of you? Someone with experience, know-how, and the crucial leadership traits of humility and empathy gleaned from working in the battlefields and the trenches—not just commanding the fleets?
Or hey, maybe not. Even so, the ability to take command of your resume—whatever it looks like—and tell a compelling narrative about your career couldn't be more critical. Selling your experience is a vital skill, whether you're on a job interview or wooing clients for your solo business. But to do that well, you first need to come to grips with the parts of your job history that you're least interested in talking about. And that means working your way through these three phases:
For years I was embarrassed that I worked at Walmart. At parties or industry events, I answered the question the same way many of my coworkers did.
Them: So where do you work, anyway? Me: Retail. Them: Cool.
Eventually, I started to realize that masking is a form of self-judgment. I wasn't confident about working at Walmart. I was afraid to mention the company because I was afraid of people's perceptions: Main-Street-obliterating, fair-wage–damaging, soul-destroying behemoth corrupting society.
That may not have been true, but whatever they were going to think, I wanted to avoid confronting it. Rather than acknowledge this part of my identity, I hid it. I didn't mention it in my biography, my blog, any of my books, radio lead-ins, or newspaper interviews.
And I called this humility. But it was really fear. After a few years, I finally figured this out and decided that from then on, I would tell anybody exactly where I worked if they asked. Of course, I did this in a tentative, awkward way.
Them: So where do you work, anyway? Me:(grimacing) Uh . . . Walmart? Them: Oh, uh, okay, haha . . . yeah, I heard of the place! Haha, uh . . .
By acting awkwardly, I made things awkward for others. By apologizing for myself, I forced others to apologize, too. Eventually, I realized that apologizing was a form of self-judgment in the way that hiding my job history was.
Arguably, it even made things worse. I was communicating a part of myself, then immediately sounding a Family Feud–style buzzer after my own response:
"We surveyed 100 people and the top five answers are on the board. Name a place you have worked."
"Uh . . . Walmart?"
NNNNNNN!
Apologizing avoids ownership. It creates distance. It suggests a mistake—one that you then need to account for. Apologizing is what you do when your dog craps on the neighbor's lawn and then you notice your neighbor watching from the window. (Sorry, Keith!)
Do this kind of thing on a job interview, even unwittingly, and a hiring manager will notice immediately. Eventually I clued in to this bad habit myself, and after a couple years of apologizing for my own resume, I finally moved on to the third and final step.
Them: So where do you work, anyway? Me: Walmart. Them: Cool.
Sounds silly, but it really was that simple. Gone was the tendency to hide the truth from others that reflected my desire to hide it from myself. Gone was the tentativeness and questioning, telling others that I was questioning part of myself—and inviting them to question me, too.
Instead I gained a clear and simple truth, grounded in fact: This is where I've worked, and whatever others may think, I still gained some valuable experience from it—experience that helped me make better decisions about my career later on. Ask me about that, and I'd be glad to talk about it.
This way, I consciously remove myself from any possible judgment. And if I am judged negatively, that needs to be wholly owned by the other person—I won't do their judging for them. The physicist Richard Feynman has said, "You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing."
Accepting yourself communicates confidence, which is a well-known career asset. More than that, it insulates you from the tide of emotions that wells up whenever other people's views intersect with your own—sometimes muddling your thoughts and bending your beliefs.
What do you do with their views? How do you stop judging yourself? Laugh at it! At least to yourself. A big laugh helps you look deep, examine your self-judgments, and push through the steps to embracing the most (no-longer) cringeworthy parts of your work experience:
H—Hide
A—Apologize
A—Accept
HAA!
Listen, we're all full of self-judgments: We tell ourselves we're fat, lazy, don't exercise enough, aren't worthy of a raise, aren't worthy of love, wouldn't find another job if we were fired or a new significant other if we're dumped. Those can become dangerously self-fulfilling prophecies if you let them, especially in the job market. Sometimes we forget that we're all trying our best—all of us—to do better.
It's a process. And that's nowhere truer than in our careers; tell yourself you've finally "arrived," and your skills, curiosity, and potential will stagnate in short order.
Find what's hidden, stop apologizing, and accept yourself. It's the best thing you can do for your occasionally humiliating resume—and the career you're rightly proud that it's led to.
Even when we're eager to share negative feedback in the spirit of helping to improve a person's or team's performance or improve an outcome, it could be making people avoid you. The researchers found that when people receive feedback that is threatening to their self-image—such as being told that they're not doing a good job—they begin to actively avoid the person who delivered that feedback.
Gino says that's problematic because the feedback that helps us develop most is often that which is tough to hear. "In my own career, when I think about the people who have been the most important in helping me grow into a better scholar or even a better person, the people who come to mind gave me that tough feedback that maybe I didn't want to hear," she says.
The findings have different implications for those receiving and delivering negative feedback. While it's not clear whether varying personality types respond differently to negative feedback—that's a point of study Gino is considering for the future—recipients need to be aware of this avoidance tendency in order to overcome it and get the information needed to improve performance.
The study found that people who ask for feedback typically don't need it because they are performing well. Those people were eager to develop and didn't typically have the weaknesses of those who shied away from hearing an assessment of themselves, she says.
"I think there are lessons, as people who can always improve and find ways to get better, to be a little bit more open with our ears when the feedback that we hear is not as positive as we thought it would be," Gino says. In addition, we should actively avoid trying to wall off truly constructive feedback, even when it's not rosy. Doing so may actually hurt our professional development.
For managers, the implications are twofold: Be aware that delivering negative feedback may be off-putting, so consider how you can deliver it so that it's not as threatening. For example, you could change the conversation and help the person self-evaluate, emphasizing the areas where you feel they're honing in themselves on areas of weakness. Raising such questions can help you be a more effective leader and overcome the defeating nature of negative feedback. At the same time, Gino says it's important to not emphasize positive attributes to the point where the employee or team can simply focus on that feedback and ignore the areas that need work.
Gino believes studies such as these, which draw out lesser-known behaviors that can get in the way of effectiveness and productivity in the workplace, are important in helping people be aware of behaviors. Awareness can lead to reflection, she says, which is necessary for development and performance. That can actually make people more comfortable with receiving the feedback they need to improve.
Nobody—not even Samsung—knows exactly why the Note 7s blew up. These are the leading theories.
The first thing Samsung talked about during a pre-launch briefing on its Galaxy Note 7 back in July was the phone's battery and its new "fast charging" technology. The subtext was pretty clear: "Our phone has a bigger battery and charges up faster than the (then-forthcoming) Apple iPhone 7."
This new feature has become one of the main theories on why the battery in the Note 7 had a tendency to blow up—a malfunction that necessitated one of the biggest and costliest product recalls in consumer tech history.
Ultimately, the reason Samsung took the dramatic step to discontinue the Galaxy Note 7 was that it was unable to pinpoint with certainty the reason the batteries in the phones were blowing up. As Samsung engineers struggled to recreate the problem, the pressure grew from regulators and the media to make a decisive move.
After the first wave of Note 7 explosions were reported, Samsung thought it knew what the problem was. On September 2, when I asked Samsung for a technical explanation of the Note 7 battery problem, the company replied:
"An overheating of the battery cell occurred when the anode-to-cathode came into contact which is a very rare manufacturing process error."
Samsung thought at the time the problem was occurring only in batteries made by its SDI subsidiary. So it set about replacing all the suspect phones with ones containing batteries made by another supplier, ATL (Amperex Technology Ltd., a subsidiary of TDK). That SDI would have botched the production of the batteries sounded odd because, as IDC analyst Will Stofega pointed out, the subsidiary has a long history of making batteries that work and don't blow up.
On September 23, reports that those phones were also blowing up began coming in. Today, Samsung has a far less definite-sounding answer to the question of "why."
"A thorough investigation takes time, and it would be premature to speculate on outcomes of the investigation," a Samsung spokesperson said in an email statement Wednesday. "In the U.S., we have received a small number of reported cases of issues with replacement Note 7 devices. We are working around the clock to analyze the causes of the reported cases."
The New York Times reported that many Samsung engineers have been trying to replicate the fault that made the SDI and ATL batteries explode, but have failed. So on the day the Galaxy Note 7 became a discontinued product, the cause of its demise remained a big fat question mark.
Several theories have emerged over the past few weeks about why both the SDI and ATL batteries overheated. One theory goes that it was the design of the battery, not the "manufacturing process" (as Samsung originally said), that caused the problem. The battery design could have been completed by Samsung engineers then fed to SDI and ATL to manufacture according to spec.
A Korean government regulator concluded that the positive and negative charged plates inside the batteries were too close to one another at the rounded edges of the phone. When positive and negative poles in a lithium ion battery physically touch, a very rapid and violent chemical reaction takes place. The regulator also pointed to defective coating material on the negative electrode.
The reason these findings are interesting is because they suggest that the phone's overall design may be affecting the safety of the battery. The plates being too close together may have resulted from the intense competitive pressure to produce ever thinner phones. And not just thinner phones, but phones that also contain more components. The Note 7, for instance, had a new iris scanner on board, and also retained the analog headphone jack, which takes up a lot of space. The regulator also pointed to the battery design within the phone's rounded edges—another new design trait in the Note 7.
There's also an intense market demand for phones that charge faster, and it's Samsung's attempt to meet this demand that may be the most compelling explanation for the explosions. Samsung said its new fast-charging technology lets the battery in the Note 7 charge to 50% capacity in 30 minutes, a claim born out in my tests.
Here's how fast charging works: USB chargers with fast-charging circuitry built in can send a higher power output into the smartphone. Any charger with an output of greater than 10 watts is considered "fast charging." The Note 7 uses a USB-C charger with fast-charging tech inside. Specialized power management chips inside the phone moderate the power level it can handle without overheating the phone or overcharging the battery.
Qualcomm supplies its 820 Snapdragon processor and various power management chips for one of the two versions of the Note 7. The company points out, however, that those chips aren't involved in the regulation of the power flowing into the battery during charging. "Qualcomm does not provide any of the battery charging electronics commonly used in both versions of the Note 7," a Qualcomm spokesperson said in an email to Fast Company.
Qualcomm also points out that the power management chips it supplies for the Note 7 are also used in other mass market phones (Samsung's Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, Xiaomi's Mi Max, and ZTE's Nubia Z9 Max) that don't blow up. Qualcomm's own QuickCharge technology was indeed used in one version of the Note 7, but only for its protocols used in communication between the various power management chips in the device.
Lithium-ion batteries in phones contain three major physical structures: a positive electrode made of Lithium cobalt oxide, a negative electrode made of carbon, and a separator layer made of micro-perforated plastic. The layers are submerged in an organic solvent substance. During charging, lithium ions move through the plastic barrier layer from the positive lithium electrode and attach to the negative carbon electrode. As the battery is used (discharged) the opposite happens: Lithium ions move back over to the positive electrode.
Lithium-ion batteries can become unstable if charged at a higher-than-specified voltage rate. The cathode material can become an oxidizing agent, losing its stability and producing carbon dioxide. If pressure within the cell continues to rise, a safety interrupt is supposed to kick in. If such an interrupt doesn't happen (for whatever reason), pressure within the cell can continue to rise and the safety membrane around the cell can burst, causing the cell to "vent with flame." When battery manufacturers say "vent with flame," they mean "explode."
"It casts a pall over the whole fast-charging technology; you have to be concerned," says Steve Rizzone, CEO of the long-range wireless charging tech supplier Energous. "The whole idea of rapid charging is going to have a negative connotation to it." Rizzone says that problem points to the need for a new way of charging devices. While the technology has yet to be productized, Rizzone believes the constant over-the-air charging Energous is building will let users constantly be "topping off" the charge in their phone's battery, which would lighten the load on the battery.
So the Note 7 debacle, whatever the exact cause, may have been the result of a smartphone maker trying to respond to the marketplace and simply asking too much of the battery technology we have today. "What you're seeing is proving more and more that powering larger batteries, and charging those batteries quicker, the battery chemistry can't keep up with those requirements," Rizzone says.
Lithium-ion batteries are far more reliable and safer than earlier battery technologies, but there are limits to the amount of miniaturization, power capacity, and rate of charging phone makers can impose on them.
Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe Samsung was just unfortunate enough to be the first phone maker to (loudly and violently) run smack into the wall, the outer limits of what lithium-ion technology can safely be asked to do.
Though it's likely that Donald Trump could sue for breach of contract, it would be an uphill climb, says an entertainment lawyer.
Ever since those hot-mic recordings of Donald Trump on Access Hollywood dropped like a bombshell last Friday, the media has been salivating at the prospect of getting outtakes of the candidate on his former hit show, The Apprentice, which are said to be "far worse" in content. And yet it's been almost a week—an eternity in the current news cycle—and we're still waiting.
All week, MGM Studios and super-producer Mark Burnett have been insisting that contractual restrictions prohibit either of them from unilaterally making the footage public. The reality-TV hit aired on NBC but is owned by MGM, which bought Burnett's production company last year.
A lawyer for the studio doubled down on that stance in a statement to news outlets earlier today. "MGM has agreements with artists across a wide spectrum of creative properties, including The Apprentice," he said. "These agreements typically contain provisions related to confidentiality and artists' rights. MGM has every intention of complying with its agreements with artists and honoring their rights, including with respect to The Apprentice."
Not everyone buys that defense, however. If the studio is indeed sitting on newsworthy footage involving a presidential candidate, would releasing that footage really open it up to legal action? Television contracts are indeed tricky things—rife with dense legalese and arcane provisions that can't be easily parsed without the help of teams of lawyers. But can they really hamstring a TV studio's ability to disseminate information that could determine the course of the election?
For guidance, I spoke with Nicole Page, a partner at Reavis Parent Lehrer in New York who specializes in entertainment law and often works on reality-TV contracts. She says it's impossible to know for sure without being privy to the specific contracts between Trump and MGM, but generally speaking, she says producers of reality-TV content require talent to sign releases that would limit their ability to pursue legal action.
"Part of what you're agreeing to when you agree to be on TV is you're releasing the network from pretty much everything, from all claims," Page tells Fast Company. "The networks are generally so cautious about this, because they so don't want these lawsuits, especially a big company like MGM."
The industry has learned from experience. Lawsuits from reality stars and past contestants are not uncommon, and sometimes arise because someone doesn't like how he or she is portrayed. As a result, Page says, releases tend to be pretty strong in favor of the producers and networks.
"The networks are already anticipating lawsuits," Page says. "They know they're big targets, and they have a thousand lawyers going over this stuff. If you put somebody like Donald Trump on the air who's known to be litigious—he sues everybody for everything—they have to draft their contracts in a way that they don't leave them open."
Granted, all of this is speculative, and none of it may apply to a show like The Apprentice, an outlier in the TV world in that it was built around a real person. The Trump brand was central to the premise and execution of the show. (In 2004, Trump even unsuccessfully tried to trademark his catchphrase "You're fired.") It's likely that the famous mogul negotiated a ironclad deal that was far more favorable to him than a typical contract.
"When someone is so high-profile, they obviously have a lot more bargaining power and leverage in what they can get a network to agree to," Page says.
Still, it's hard to imagine Trump having final say over every bit of footage that airs, especially given that Burnett himself is one of the savviest producers in reality-TV history. Page also didn't seem too convinced by MGM's explanation that "confidentiality" issues are preventing the footage's release. "Confidentiality" typically refers to information regarding someone's personal life or a company's proprietary trade secrets, but not something the person does while the cameras are rolling. It would also be hard for Trump to prove defamation since, presumably, we're talking about stuff he actually said.
If Burnett or MGM did release the footage, a worst-case scenario would be a breach of contract lawsuit from Trump himself or Trump Productions, which is part of the Trump Organization and listed as a producer on The Apprentice. A spokesperson for MGM did not respond to a request for an additional comment about its relationship with Trump Productions or whether it has received specific threats of a lawsuit.
In the media world, there's a kind of Murphy's Law-type adage that says anything worth seeing will eventually be seen. Revisit, for argument's sake, the infamous footage of Rob Ford, the late Toronto mayor, who was caught on video smoking crack cocaine. The news media knew of its existence for years before the footage finally made it to the public. But it eventually came out. Ford's lawyer reportedly sent an email to Gawker, threatening legal action but never actually followed through.
Another possibility—a likely one, actually—is that someone will end up anonymously leaking the Trump outtakes to the press. In that case, media outlets that aired the footage would be protected by the First Amendment. Trump could still sue them, but the bar is pretty high when it comes to reporting newsworthy information about public figures. The hypothetical leaker, however, could be open to litigation if the footage were obtained illegally.
Either way, if these outtakes exist, there's a lot at stake, which is why so many thousands of Americans are calling on their release before the election.
Count Page among them. "This guy's running for president," she says. "I feel like the public has a right to know. I mean, nobody wants to get sued, and everybody's running for cover, but they should be released."
There was proof of Trump's conduct around women before the tape or this week's harassment claims. A psychologist weighs the belated exodus.
When HBO's Last Week Tonight host John Oliver took to the air on October 9, two days after a 2005 tape of Donald Trump making lewd remarks about sexually assaulting women came to light, dozens of Republican lawmakers had already unendorsed their party's nominee for president. Yet Oliver chided them: "All of you have insistently supported him . . . so the only way that you get to be shocked and outraged now is if you were cryogenically frozen until Friday afternoon and that Access Hollywood tape was the first thing you saw upon being reanimated."
He had a point. While Trump's taped comments are vulgar and utterly inappropriate, they don't exactly reveal an unexpected side to the candidate's character. Over the course of this year's long campaign, there's been ample evidence indicating Trump's misogynistic attitudes and behavior around women—not to mention his steady chorus of incendiary statements about Muslims, Mexicans, and people with disabilities. And just last night, two women came forward to the New York Times to recount past incidents in which Trump had made unwanted physical advances.
To be sure, "Tapegate" is a much more egregious campaign gaffe than, for instance, Mitt Romney's 2012 comment that 47% of the electorate would vote for Obama because they were "dependent on the government," but the "straw that broke the camel's back" argument still seems insufficient. After all, many of Trump's most prominent supporters had a clear sense of his flaws. Ted Cruz withheld his support until well after the Republican National Convention, and Paul Ryan was amazingly public about his reservations before finally offering his endorsement.
The New York Times reckons the number of prominent Republicans who've ruled out voting for Trump now exceeds 160, 51 of whom deserted as a result of the tape. But that exodus was a long time in the making, and there are three likely reasons why it arrived only when it did.
First, of course, is the widespread distaste many top Republicans have felt for Trump since the beginning of his candidacy. Many have found themselves apologizing for his behavior rather than being able to focus on the issues they'd prefer the election cycle to be about. They were all but looking for the next best opportunity to rescind their support, and Trump finally gave it to them.
Second, the election was already starting to tilt away from Trump. Observers and polls agreed that his performance in the first presidential debate was poor, with Clinton beating him handily. In its aftermath, Trump made several comments that rankled supporters and undecided voters, rather than instilling new confidence that he'd be able to bounce back.
Finally, as more Republicans backed away from Trump, the risk began to shift: Un-endorsing quickly began to seem less risky than continuing to endorse. No one wants to be the last one left on a sinking ship, which caused a mad rush for the lifeboats. This behavior is what psychologists call "goal contagion," in which the goals of a few very visible people are quickly taken up by others around them, for fear of being the last, lone outlier.
In fact, there's even evidence that this mentality may have kicked in too quickly for some: Four member of Congress who'd initially called for Trump to step aside have since changed their minds and reaffirmed that they're still voting for him. But even this, from a psychological standpoint, anyway, is understandable. As I noted in a previous article, the constant availability of political news and real-time polling data, coupled with the way political events are reported, lead us to think of campaigns like sporting events.
Ideally, election coverage should help voters accrue enough evidence for or against an option in order to be able to make a well-informed choice. A sports game, on the other hand, isn't over until the clock runs out; the next turn of events could be the decisive moment, so fans place an inflated value on whatever's happening right now. That may be why so many voters remain undecided until the very last days of a campaign.
So while you might think (or hope) that voters and politicians alike have everything they possibly need to make an informed choice about the candidates on offer, it's entirely conceivable they're still looking for more. If "Tapegate" can spark a mass exodus of Trump supporters four weeks before Election Day, it's far from impossible that another surprise can still keep things in flux as the clock ticks down further. If you're Donald Trump right about now, that may even be your last best hope.
A billion people have diminished lives due to the cost and stigma of in-ear devices. The solution? Bring prices down and style up.
Glasses are cool, hearing aids are not. Eyeglass frames in countless varieties are popular fashion statements. Beige earplugs aren't a fashion statement people want to make, and many can't even afford to. Although designer glasses can be pricy, there are stylish, budget-friendly options like Warby Parker's $95 models. Hearing aids average $4,700 a pair in the U.S.
"Our goal is to be the Warby Parker of the hearing-loss world, starting with developing countries," says Audra Renyi, a 34-year-old former investment banker who's been a hearing care advocate since 2007. She's launching a company called Hearing Access World that aims to cut the price of hearing aids by 75%. It's a reasonable goal: Costco has brought down prices about two thirds in the U.S. by buying and selling in bulk. "Our goal at Hearing Access is to go from the existing market, which is a low-volume, high-margin retail market, to a much higher-volume, lower-margin business and market," she says.
According to the World Health Organization, 360 million people have severe hearing loss. Add everyone with some level of impairment, and you get about a billion potential customers. How many hearing aids are sold every year? A mere 13 million, mostly in developed countries.
Renyi knows her market well as executive director of World Wide Hearing. The Montreal-based nonprofit provides testing and low-cost hearing aids in poor countries like Guatemala and Vietnam. She hopes to bring prices down globally by playing directly in the market with her new social venture.
Hearing Access World and other startups—such as the budget hearing-aid maker Sound World Solutions and the sound-filtering headset company Doppler Labs—point to the huge advances in consumer tech products like Bluetooth headsets that have been made more fashionable by Apple's new AirPods. The same cheap, ubiquitous components in those devices could improve hearing for everyone, they say.
"Are hearing aids going to be the new status symbol for the rich?" says Janice Lintz, an advocate and consultant who advises companies and institutions on accommodating people with hearing loss through her company, Hearing Access & Innovations. Like Renyi, whose father and aunt are severely hearing-impaired, Lintz has a family connection. Her adult daughter has been hearing-impaired since childhood.
The U.S. government doesn't cover the cost of hearing aids for older adults under Medicare, nor do most private insurance plans for any ages. "If Medicare starts covering something, a lot of insurance companies will follow," says Meg Wallhagen, professor of nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. Medicaid, which serves the poorest Americans, varies by state. Some do cover hearing aids, mainly for children. The coverage is generally small compared to the overall cost of devices and care.
"There's so many consumers every day that I hear say, 'I need something, but I have to decide between [buying hearing aids] and putting my kid in daycare or paying rent. I can't afford $5,000 out of my pocket,'" says 38-year-old Kristen "K.R." Liu, a Silicon Valley marketing veteran with severe hearing loss. "They just suffer," she says. Liu is also on the board of the Hearing Loss Association of America and a promotional "ambassador" to World Wide Hearing.
One reason for high hearing-aid prices: They bundle services by the audiologist. This includes hearing tests, cleaning, and maintenance, in addition to fitting the device and tuning it to a person's needs by checking deficiencies in certain frequency ranges. "It's not like eyeglasses. You don't put on a pair of hearing aids and start hearing automatically," says Chris McCormick, CMO of Starkey Hearing Technologies, one of the six hearing aid manufacturers that control over 90% of the market.
How much do these audiologist services cost? Who knows? You can't buy a Starkey or most other hearing aids unbundled. The problem is compounded, says Lintz, because there aren't uniform descriptions of the specs and features so people can compare models. "Who purchases a $6,000-to-$8,000 item without doing research?" says Lintz. "Just because the office you walk into, that makes a huge profit on it, says, 'This is good for you'?"
Most audiologists sell a single hearing aid brand most of the time, says the President's Council Of Advisors On Science And Technology. In an October 2015 report on hearing aids, the government agency recommended unbundling so that, as with glasses, people can get testing done in one place and elect to use the report, called an audiogram, to buy their hearing aid and get it fitted someplace else. Potential benefits of unbundling were also mentioned in the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine report.
Some companies do sell hearing aids directly to consumers, who simply sign a waiver acknowledging that they are buying on their own, without guidance from an audiologist. (Online, it could just mean clicking a box on the checkout page.) That doesn't help people who want guidance from a specialist but don't want to be locked in to buying from them.
Unbundling all hearing aid sales could be tough on mom-and-pop audiologists, who spend years consulting with patients to close those deals: The average time from first visit to sale is seven years. The solution is to reform health insurance coverage, says Wallhagen, who chairs the Hearing Loss Association of America's board of trustees.
Before patients reach the point of needing hearing aids, audiologists can help with evaluations and teaching lifestyle strategies to deal with impaired hearing; they can also provide continued help for people who have hearing aids. Known as aural rehabilitation, it can be anything from explaining to friends and family what you can and cannot hear to learning how to make sense of the flood of new sounds you can now pick up with hearing aids. "If we could get those services covered, it could shift the model to where there's less focus on selling hearing aids and more focus on: What really are your hearing needs?" Wallhagen says.
While hearing aid sales are minuscule, consumer electronics companies are selling hundreds of millions of audio devices, such as Bluetooth headsets, that do many of the same things. Mass-market CE components are going into devices called personal sound amplification products, or PSAPs, which have become unofficial budget hearing aids.
Emphasis on "unofficial." The U.S. Food and Drug Administration prohibits claiming that the devices can help people with hearing loss. (We contacted the FDA, but they declined to be interviewed.) "They look like hearing aids, they act like hearing aids. For all intents and purposes, many people would consider that they are hearing aids," Renyi says. The President's Council report sort of agrees, recommending that PSAP makers be allowed to say that their products can at least help people with "age-related hearing loss no worse than mild-to-moderate."
A June study by Northwestern University compared 11 products, a mix of official hearing aids and PSAPs ranging in price from $8 to $3,200. It found that some PSAPs did as well or better than some hearing aids. Some super-cheap ($49 or less) PSAPs were abysmal, but so were some low-cost ($199) devices with FDA designation as hearing aids.
"The technology in our hearing aid and in our personal sound amplifier is exactly the same," says Shawn Stahmer, VP for business development at Sound World Solutions. "The restrictions are all on the marketing side." Its Companion Hearing Aid sells for $449 each, while the very similar CS50+ Personal Sound Amplifier sells for $349. (It's one of the companies that sells hearing aids directly to consumers.) Sound World has brought down prices by eschewing custom components. "The chip that we're using for our [device's] brain is part of hundreds of millions of units that are already in the field for Bluetooth products," Stahmer says. Some fudging is required to install custom signal-processing algorithms on a chip that wasn't designed for hearing aids.
Sound World's hearing aid (left) and PSAP (right) use the same technologies.
There's a problem with mass-produced chips from companies like Qualcomm or Intel, according to Starkey's McCormick. "They don't understand ultra-low voltage," he says. "Think about the battery that's in your iPhone. Try putting that in your ear." Hearing aids have to run 24/7, for a week at a time on a battery about the size of an aspirin, he says.
Renyi says her company's hearing aids will get a week of battery life. Sound World Solutions claims 18 hours battery time for its Companion,
which recharges like a Bluetooth headset. Most hearing aids still use disposable batteries that add up to about $50 per year.
Starkey's Muse
Starkey is offering a lot with its latest bespoke chip, called Synergy, which powers its new Muse, Halo 2, and SoundLens hearing aids. The 1.2-volt system chip has a quad-core processor running two "compressors"—software that filters out distracting noise. One optimizes speech, while a second processes music. The chip is fast enough to detect and reduce the noise that occurs in between syllables as someone speaks. Directional microphones allow the devices to identify and filter out environmental noise from behind or the side. "We can analyze if a person is sitting in a restaurant talking to a person and there is significant background noise, and the hearing aid makes decisions based on the particular type of audio input," McCormick says. For example, it can automatically dampen the sound of a coffee grinder at a café. "We're essentially delivering [audio quality] for hearing-impaired people at levels exceeding those of people who have regular, normal hearing," says McCormick.
"If you just want to communicate with your family and friends, you're not going to need all this high-rent stuff," Wallhagen says. "And if the new ones come into the market, some of the older ones [now] don't cost as much, but they're really good."
The Halo 2 has Apple's "Made for iPhone" designation. It streams all audio, be it iTunes or Siri, and is adjustable through an iPhone app. Halo 2 uses the phone's GPS to identify a location and call up the audio settings that worked best there in the past. At a recent tech conference, says McCormick, "People would come up…and say, 'I don't need a hearing aid. I have normal hearing. But why can't I have that?'"
They may get their wish. "You can make these for normal-hearing people, and that's certainly an area of consideration that we're exploring aggressively," says McCormick. "Stay tuned, it's very likely you can have them in the near future."
A startup called Doppler Labs is also aiming for people who want to hear better than normal. It launched on Kickstarter in 2015 with Here Active Listening, a $249 set of AI-driven wireless earbuds that recognize and filter ambient sounds, such as bringing down background noise in a subway or boosting voices during a conversation. A smartphone app lets users pick filters and effects (like simulating the ambience of a concert hall), adjust volume, and tweak a five-band equalizer. Doppler's next product, Here One, debuts in November for $300 and adds wireless streaming from smartphones and other devices.
Doppler's Here One
Doppler's headphones drift into hearing-aid territory, starting with the setup. It begins by creating a "personal listening profile," which sounds a lot like a hearing-aid fitting. "What that does is, it actually takes a snapshot of each of your ear's unique characteristics and calibrates the entire system to your hearing," says Doppler's 29-year-old CEO Noah Kraft, who came up with the idea for the company because of his love of music. He then blurts out what could be mistaken for the disclaimer in a TV commercial for pharmaceuticals: "To be very clear," he says, "Here One is not a medical device. It is not meant to be a medical device. It is not meant to replace a hearing aid. If you have severe hearing loss, you should go to an audiologist."
I tried the original product while chatting with Doppler Labs at a slightly noisy café in San Francisco. With me was K.R. Liu, who joined Doppler about a year ago as director of accessibility and advocacy. Selecting a filter for restaurants dampened the background sounds of milk steaming or people chattering, and selecting the Human Speech enhancer zoomed in on Liu's voice. Still, I had the feeling I was listening through an intermediary and had a sense of being under water. Doppler folks say the final Here One (which they didn't have on hand) will perform better, and that I might need tips in a different size to better fit my ear canals.
There's still quite a distance between Here One and a hearing aid like Starkey's Halo 2, and not just on price or legal status. Doppler advertises a five-hour battery life for Here One. (They come in a battery-powered charging case, similar to the Apple AirPods.) "That's unusable for us," says McCormick. The Halo 2 automatically adjusts the sound filters to environmental noises. It's a manual selection process with the Doppler app, although it will suggest what setting to use.
Starkey's Halo 2
The Here Ones are also bulky, although Doppler plays that up as fashion. "The Warby Parker example is great. People go to Warby Parker who don't even have vision loss," says Liu. "They go to wear it because it's fashionable. I would love to see somebody say that about in-ear tech." (We asked Warby Parker for its opinion on these comparisons. The company declined to comment.) A self-described "fashion victim," Liu has short blond hair like Robin Wright that leaves her ears exposed. When we met, her compact hearing aids (which cost $12,000 a pair) were scarcely visible. She wore a blouse with an abstract print in stark black and white, which are the two color options for Here One.
Liu seems awfully excited about a product that officially won't help her ears. With a little prodding, CEO Kraft admits that Doppler wants to go farther. "Long term, if the FDA changes the regulations, Doppler would love nothing more than to be able to provide tech to all ears," he says. "If we can provide tech to mild-to-moderate [hearing-loss patients], we will create tech for that. If we can provide tech to people with severe hearing loss, I guarantee you, we can create that tech."
As consumer electronics companies nudge into the hearing-aid space with PSAPs, and as hearing-aid companies nudge into the CE space, a new wearable tech category may be emerging. Called "hearables" by their boosters, the gadgets could encompass a range of over-the-counter, in-ear devices that allow people to hear better—either by making up for diagnosed hearing deficiency or tweaking how live music and voices sound.
There are a lot of barriers in the way: public health regulations like the FDA's labeling rules; health care concerns that people will get safe products; ensuring a correct fit; hearing aid makers and audiologists wanting to recoup costs; and technological challenges like getting battery life up and making devices easy to configure. If money and interest flow into hearables, audio technology could advance faster and prices could come down for all devices.
Fashion could also have a hand in determining the trend, though wearable tech has a patchy record. Headphones go in and out of style, with big cans currently en vogue again. Google Glass flopped. Glasses themselves took centuries to become cool and affordable, but they've certainly arrived. If companies can get the right mix of tech, style, and price, hearables could be the new glasses.
Twitter's live video app isn't just for smartphone cameras anymore.
Since its launch in early 2015, Periscope has become a go-to app for live content. The Twitter-owned service has hosted live feeds of everything from concerts to breaking news such as the flooding currently happening on the East Coast. Despite the diversity of topics presented on the platform, every live video has had one thing in common: It was shot using a smartphone.
Now all that is changing with the launch of Periscope Producer, a new feature in the app that gives news organizations, individuals with their own web shows, and the rest of us the opportunity to stream video on Periscope from somewhere other than their smartphone. It positions service—which also feeds its streams to Twitter—as a stronger player in the growing live video space, and transforms the platform into a more useful tool for professional video creators.
"When when we launched Periscope over a year and a half ago our focus was almost exclusively mobile content," says Kayvon Beykpour, CEO of Periscope. "The idea with Producer is, we're taking a big step toward allowing any live broadcast, whether it's captured on a mobile device or otherwise, to be essentially be piped into Periscope and, vicariously, [to] Twitter."
In order to work with Producer, a video just needs to be streamed online somewhere. A link to that content—be it from a studio camera or just your computer's desktop—can be added within your Periscope settings as an additional source. Then it will replace the traditional stream from your smartphone's camera within the app. From there, you can start and stop a broadcast and interact with viewers just like any other Periscope.
During a press event, Beykpour showed a demo by Periscoper Alex Pettitt. With the help of a piece of software called OBS Studio, Pettitt was able to create an upper-third overlay where he displayed information about the topic he was talking about—similar to a TV news program—as well as display ads and switch seamlessly between content on his phone and desktop computer, all while maintaining a single Periscope broadcast.
And he's not the only one who has been trying the feature out. Brands such as Xbox, Univision, Disney, ABC News, and Fox have all been test-driving Producer over the past six weeks. You may have even seen a Producer broadcast. Louis Vuitton used it to broadcast its Fashion Week runway show live, and a number of news stations have used the platform to broadcast everything from on-scene coverage to simulcasts of their traditional news programs.
Twitter is doing deals to broadcast high-profile events such as the presidential debates and NFL games. Producer opens the door for others to live-stream professional-looking content on . And it can also be used to do things like live-stream gameplay from a console or mobile phone, or virtual reality content from a set of VR goggles.
"While we haven't announced anything publicly, we've been behind the scenes getting access to partners," Beykpour says. "We've been working with partners to actually test out how the model works, how the quality of the video works, and all the mechanics around actually making a live stream not from a mobile device come to life."
While you can live-stream mobile gameplay now, Beykpour suggests that in the future developers might choose to enable Periscope-specific game functionality. For instance, giving a heart to someone who is live-streaming a game of Flappy Bird might make the bird move faster, or typing "Bigger" in the comments might make the pipes in the game larger and harder to navigate.
"That kind of extends the boundary of what you can do in a live medium," says Beykpour. "The reason why we started Periscope is not just for the novelty of being able to create a live broadcast; that's interesting but it's been done before. What we found interesting was what can you do with a live audience when you have [a] synchronous group of people watching the broadcaster who can respond to that."
Periscope Producer is available now to select Twitter brand partners, video creators, and media organizations and currently requires the feed to be initiated from an iOS device (Producer users can then pull the live feed from any URL). Beykpour says that anyone who want to the opportunity to try the feature out can express interest by filling out an online form.
The shadow of the financial crisis continues to haunt big banks. Can digital products like Marcus exorcise those ghosts?
One hundred and sixty-eight years ago, at a time when U.S. states still minted their own currency and the Statue of Liberty had yet to be built, a Bavarian immigrant by the name of Marcus Goldman first stepped foot on American soil. For two decades our humble hero made a living as a peddler and shopkeeper. Then, in 1869, he reinvented himself as a banker, brokering IOUs from a basement office next to a coal chute in the shadow of Wall Street. He died at age 82, father to five children and the beginnings of a financial empire.
Chances are you'd be happy to borrow money to pay off your debt from a hardworking family man like Marcus, his success story writ in sepia tones. Or that at least is the theory behind Marcus by Goldman Sachs, the lending product for everyday Americans that the Wall Street firm unveiled today, more than a year after installing Discover executive Harit Talwar at the product's helm. Marcus lives online, powered by a custom-built technology stack, but traffics in nostalgia, with old-fashioned typefaces and illustrations. Visiting the Marcus home page feels a bit like posing in the "old time" photo booth at an amusement park, your hoodie and jeans hidden behind a dapper three-piece suit with cravat.
Marcus.com's home page
The sense of history is very much by design. Marcus joins a crowded field of online lending startups, all chasing after a U.S. market worth as much as $1 trillion, excluding mortgages. But none benefit from the direct backing of a parent institution like Goldman Sachs, with its longevity and balance-sheet billions. As an extension of GS Bank USA, Marcus can fund unsecured personal loans without simultaneously having to find investors willing to buy them. For consumers, that arrangement translates into more flexible loan terms and an interest-based business model that eliminates the need for fees—if, of course, potential borrowers can stomach the idea of doing business with a financial institution that many labeled a pariah during the financial crisis.
"We were eyes-wide-open to the attending challenges," Stephen Scherr, chief strategy officer for Goldman Sachs and CEO of GS Bank USA, says of the process that led the bank to commit to launching a consumer-facing product. Scherr has helped shepherd Marcus from its earliest days as part of a task force of five senior leaders evaluating growth opportunities. "We would be facing off against a different customer set. We would be subjecting ourselves to a wider scope of regulation. We would be opening the franchise and the brand to something that it had not been open to before. But at every one of those forks in the road, we always came to: 'Do it.'"
To some extent, all the big banks became the target of public anger in 2008 for enriching themselves while leveraging the financial system to a point of near-collapse. In the Great Recession that followed, millions lost their homes and millions more watched, helpless, as portions of their retirement savings evaporated. The hostility directed at Goldman Sachs has been particularly intense, with Matt Taibbi's condemnation of the bank for being "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity" becoming an era-defining viral sound bite.
But the bank's great sin was not its ability to make money (though the power of its profit-machine certainly generated envy—and some resentment—among its peers). Instead, it was that Goldman Sachs lost sight of its focus on serving clients. "Long-term greed," a principle the firm enshrined in the 1950s, had given way to a culture that could accommodate hot-shot millionaires brazenly celebrating "shitty deals" over email at clients' expense as they floated in pools of bonuses in loosened Hermès ties.
"The whole building is about to collapse anytime now . . . only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab," Goldman vice president Fabrice Tourre, who was later found guilty of securities fraud, wrote in a 2007 email to a friend—hardly an example of "client first" service.
"What really snapped my head back were the callous emails," CEO Lloyd Blankfein says in an internal company video, from 2011. "When people are telling us we're too clever, and we're saying we're not in the wrong and that clients come first . . . and then we go out and confirm their thoughts with emails like that—you have to remember the firm only has one reputation. If you have a problem in one space, it affects us all."
At the time of the crisis, Goldman's clients were corporations, hedge funds, and fellow banks, plus a select group of high-net worth individuals. While Congress and the broader public were railing against Goldman for its staggering bonuses (in 2009, the average employee made $498,000, even after the firm set aside $500 million from its bonus pool to donate to charity), those wholesale clients were beginning to question the firm's conflicts of interest. Sometimes Goldman was making bets with client money, and sometimes with money of its own: Where did its loyalties lie? In 2010, a client survey conducted by the Boston Consulting Group revealed widespread "trust issues with Goldman as a whole," according to an executive quoted in the resulting Harvard Business School case study. The survey dumped cold water on the idea of Goldman, Sachs & Co. as Wall Street's patrician fortress; somewhere along the way, that proud history had become a myth.
Internal reforms have to some extent appeased the bank's traditional client base. But the long shadow cast by public anger continues to haunt Goldman Sachs's reputation, undermining its ability to attract talent and fuel growth.
With Marcus, its first consumer product, Goldman has a shot at redemption—and an opportunity to leverage the influx of deposits on its balance sheet, added in response to post-crisis capital requirements that reflect its new identity as a bank holding company. The institution hired Talwar, a Goldman outsider and consumer banking veteran, to lead the startup business unit, then code-named "Mosaic," in May of last year. Under his watch, Marcus has maintained its narrow focus on a particular subset of personal loans, one that is sure to placate regulators concerned about consumers' financial health and rankle Goldman's fee-hungry banking rivals: credit card debt consolidation, a market worth more than $450 billion.
"We are building a startup inside Goldman to help Americans manage debt better," Talwar says. "To be able to do that well, we have kept the customer at the center of everything that we do."
The fixed-rate, no-fee loans will range from $3,500 to $30,000, to be paid back within two and six years. Talwar plans to target borrowers with decent credit but ballooning debt, a task that requires destigmatizing a delicate topic. Marcus's marketing materials are direct, but encouraging: "Debt happens. It's how you get out that counts." APRs will range from 5.99% to 22.99%, with an expected median in the 12% to 13% range.
At Marcus's offices, located on the 26th floor of Goldman Sachs's lower Manhattan headquarters, there are numerous reminders of that customer-centric mission and the flat management structure that Talwar prefers. Long walls of windows face north and east, punctuated by posters of example customer journeys and signs that reinforce the Marcus brand: "On your side," they read, supported by brand pillars like "value" and "transparency." In the northeast corner, with its sweeping views, there is not an executive office but rather a shared "living room," complete with popcorn machine ("Goldman Snacks," says the printout above).
The New York-based team, almost 200-strong, gathered here on a recent Wednesday morning for their weekly huddle, which provides an opportunity for cross-functional "squads" to report on progress. Talwar started making hires last July and initiated the first two-week product sprint last November. He glances at his Apple Watch and steps forward as the group quiets. In Salt Lake City, more than 60 customer service team members have joined via dial-in.
"Everyone, thank you," Talwar says with a nod and a smile. His leadership posture is one of Yoda-esque understatement, with sloping shoulders, graying tufts of hair, and a habit of standing hands clasped, elbows close to his sides. "First of all, apologies for doing [the huddle] a little later today. We were upstairs with senior management doing a product demo and showing them the marketing materials. I want you all to know, they were feeling very good about what they saw."
"No changes, right?" someone calls from the back of the room.
"No changes," Talwar responds, joining the team laughter. Marcus may be a startup of sorts, but its leaders are well aware that their investors are just an elevator ride away. Talwar's tone grows more serious: "But feeling good means that our burden of responsibility keeps increasing, correct? We're going to need all your reservoir of stamina and energy moving forward."
Launch is weeks away, after nearly a year of sprints. But the real work is just beginning.
Online lending has exploded over the last few years, thanks in part to a low-interest rate environment that has been friendly to startups, who in turn have been friendly to lower-credit borrowers. With a few clicks, consumers can pay off their credit card debt, refinance their student loans, or cover their medical bills. In 2013, U.S. online lenders generated $4.4 billion in loan volume, according to a joint report published in April by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Last year, their total volume hit $36.2 billion.
Startups like Lending Club and Prosper have led the way, introducing consumers to this new type of credit in the form of personal loans. More recently, financial technology startups that initially focused on refinancing student loans, like CommonBond and SoFi, have added open-ended personal loans to their roster of products.
Marcus enters the fray at a time of reckoning for this still-nascent industry. In May, market leader Lending Club ousted its founder and CEO, Renaud Laplanche, after discovering that he had knowingly sold loans to an institutional investor that did not meet the investor's explicit criteria. Lending Club's stock plunged and Laplanche, once an industry hero, became a persona non grata (Goldman's investment bank helped Laplanche take his company public in 2014).
More troubling, though, than the management malpractice at one company was the crack that Laplanche exposed in the marketplace model he had championed. With help from banks, marketplace lenders create tranches of loans and sell them to investors. Thus packaged, the loans become a security, like a stock or a bond, that investors can buy and sell. Marketplace lending is an attractive model for startups in that it enables them to quickly ramp up their loan volume. But it leaves the lending startups vulnerable, every quarter, if investors decide to walk.
"You can't really stockpile funding to use for a rainy day," says Jefferson Harralson, who covers Lending Club for Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.
Online marketplace lenders, the U.S. Department of the Treasury cautioned in a recent report, have not "yet been tested during a downturn in the credit cycle." Treasury also questioned the "durability of technology-driven operations and credit underwriting" and the "sustainability of investor demand for loans."
As a result, many startups are now keeping some loans on balance sheet or at the very least diversifying their funding sources. Most believe that the top players will pull through. "I don't think there's going to be a massive ongoing hangover from the Lending Club events, I just don't," says Sam Hodges, cofounder of small business lender Funding Circle USA, though he acknowledges that the fallout "slowed down" some investor conversations. But for marketplace lending's minor league startup teams—there are more than 200 players in the U.S. alone—consolidation looms on the horizon.
Marcus, in contrast, relies on parent Goldman Sachs's balance sheet, billions of dollars strong, to fund its loans. The benefits are significant, and Talwar plans to take advantage of them.
"Too many banks give customers a feeling that they don't have options," he says. The same is true of most marketplace lenders, in the sense that they slot customers into standardized loans that facilitate securitization. Marcus starts where customers are likely to start: with how much they can afford to pay per month. "'I can pay $400. Now tell me what options there are,'" Talwar recalls hearing focus group participants say. Unlike its competitors, Marcus can turn that preference into a loan term of 31 months, for example, as opposed to 24 or 36 months. If taking out a marketplace loan is like buying a suit off the rack, taking out a balance sheet loan is like ordering a suit made to measure.
In theory, large banks like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase could develop and fund a product like Marcus via their balance sheets, which dwarf Goldman's in scale. But in practice, doing so would cannibalize their credit card businesses. (There is a chance that Goldman's capital markets division might lose out on marketplace lending securitization deals as a result of Marcus, but Scherr says the product is unlikely to have a material impact on those relationships.)
Marcus's personalized approach, says Talwar, is a result of being able to combine the best of online lending (modern technology) with the best of legacy banks (cheap funding, via balance sheet deposits). "That is what we mean when we say that our competitive advantage is [being a] startup with heritage."
The product's brand positioning—Marcus by Goldman Sachs—is designed to convey that duality.
"We learned that Goldman Sachs brought a lot of good equities to this consumer—things like being known for technology and financial expertise, and having this heritage for over 100 years," Dustin Cohn, head of brand and marketing communications for Marcus, says of the research his team conducted. "At the same time we knew there was an opportunity to infuse a level of techie, Silicon Valley-type vibe, a freshness, a modernity that a brand like this would need to have."
Marcus.com's "About us" page
After choosing the brand's "by Goldman Sachs" structure, Cohn and his team developed more than 2,000 possible names to place before the colon. "'Marcus' really came across as friendly and accessible and personal," as opposed to names that contained words like "loan" or "digital" and were more "telegraphic," Cohn says. Plus, he adds: "Down the road could we offer different kinds of loans, different kinds of financial services—it gives us that sort of runway," all under the Marcus banner.
There is early evidence that Goldman-affiliated retail products can gain traction. The online deposit platform the firm acquired from GE, for example, has grown from $8.75 billion to $11.14 billion in savings deposits in the six months since the deal closed, thanks in large part to 43,000 new accounts. (Though it doesn't hurt that GS Bank is paying depositors a premium interest rate, now at 1.05%.) Similarly, the active, quant-driven exchange traded funds (or ETFs) that the bank introduced last year have already attracted $2.4 billion in assets—three times the total of a similar product developed by JPMorgan, which had a year's head start in the market.
Goldman has "a real panache" with registered investment advisers in small-town America, David Nadig, ETF director at FactSet Research Systems, told Bloomberg.
Brand cachet, of course, does not always translate into product quality. "We are looking forward to competing with Goldman Sachs on customer experience," Scott Sanborn, then Lending Club's chief operating officer, told the audience at an American Banker conference last fall. Now, as CEO, he'll get his chance.
Customer experience in online lending is as much about what happens before you arrive on a landing page as it is about what happens once you get there. The most sophisticated lenders operate finely tuned funnels that take high-potential prospects from printed mailer or Google ad to cash in hand. To encourage prospective borrowers to complete their loan applications, lenders pre-fill forms and minimize the amount of information required to generate an offer.
"The holy grail is one field," ideally an email address, says Peter Renton, founder of Lend Academy and the LendIt industry conference.
Marcus's savings calculator
Marcus launches today with a direct mail campaign targeting prime borrowers carrying a revolving balance on their credit cards. Letters containing offer codes will go out to a few million homes, giving the team an opportunity to continue refining the product before making Marcus available to all, on a to-be-determined date. (In 2015, 13.7 million Americans took out an unsecured personal loan.) It may seem counterintuitive, but direct mail is generally considered the best way to reach pre-qualified prospects, because of the profile data available through credit agencies; industry-wide, online lenders source roughly half of their borrowers in this way.
Marcus's direct mail collateral, printed in brand colors navy blue and salted caramel, does not shy away from competitive comparisons. In one example page, a table calls out Lending Club, Prosper, Wells Fargo, and Discover for their high APRs, late fees, payment date constraints, and more (Talwar was not involved in managing Discover's personal loans). The table suggests that relative to other financial services companies, Marcus—and by extension, Goldman Sachs—doesn't look so bad.
To cater to prospective customers who arrive via digital means the product team has developed two interactive tools. One takes direct aim at banks: "Marcus versus credit cards: Calculate your savings," the site says. When visitors enter their anticipated loan amount, Marcus generates a savings estimate in a green bubble. In my product demo, taking out a Marcus loan for $18,000 led to $2,686.46 in savings.
The second tool is a pair of dollar-range "sliders," which invite borrowers shopping for offers to experiment with loan amounts and monthly payments, a feature that echoes one that startup lender Earnest previously developed.
"When I arrived we had these grandiose ideas," like clickable bars and charts, says Carl "Boe" Hartman, chief technology officer for Marcus. "It became very clear to us that we were over engineering that experience." Hence the calculator and the sliders, both pared down to their simplest form: "You put in a number, you get a result."
Early on a September morning, with the product undergoing its final tests and launch day looming, Talwar and I meet for breakfast at Gee Whiz diner, a couple of blocks from Goldman headquarters in Tribeca. The year-plus since he joined the firm has some in the industry wondering why it has taken Marcus so long to enter the market, but Talwar operates at his own pace. ("Did you hire someone?" his wife of 28 years would ask each night over dinner, last May and June. "Not yet!" he'd reply.) His own recruitment was itself a roundabout process; he declined to return repeated calls about the job, only agreeing to engage after Goldman managing director Sumit Rajpal tracked him down in Washington, D.C., for a brief dinner.
Some hires might have tried to proactively protect against parent-company interference, but not Talwar. "I didn't agree on any explicit ground rules" about how Marcus would operate, he says, after we order our omelets. "If you have to rely on ground rules, then you need to question. I did my due diligence, but it was on trust, chemistry, commitment."
Omer Ismail, Marcus COO
In his first weeks on the job, Talwar relied on an internal team on loan from Goldman's merchant bank and a crew of McKinsey consultants to help him develop a business plan. By Labor Day, he had made nearly a dozen hires, including the merchant bank's Omer Ismail as his chief operating officer. By around Thanksgiving, when the team wrote its first lines of code, 40 Marcus employees, often dressed in jeans, were attracting side glances in the Goldman elevators.
Team dynamics are central to how Talwar approaches hiring. "In a consumer business there are no rainmakers; it's not some star trader or star banker or star asset manager," he says. "It requires a lot of teamwork across different functions." In interviews, he asks candidates what makes them angry—"that to me reveals their value system."
Soon Talwar will have to start delivering against the business plan he presented to Goldman's board of directors. "Everybody understands that in a consumer business you've got to invest for some time before you make money," he says, when asked about the bank's appetite for burning cash while Marcus gets off the ground. "It's very clear we are in this for the long run. We will make the investments required to build a business."
It remains unclear whether that business will have a major impact of Goldman Sachs's overall fortunes. Like its peers, Goldman has been struggling to maintain a return on equity in the 10% to 12% range that investors have expected of banks. "Unsecured consumer loans have high ROEs," Talwar says—as high as 20% or more, according to Goldman equity research. Like other retail banking products, their quarterly profits also tend to be more stable than those of trading-based business lines.
Yet Talwar also makes clear, as we settle the bill and finish our coffees, that more is at stake than the usual Wall Street metrics. "We are very much a business of the firm. We will be measured on the revenues, the expenses," he says. "But as everybody tells me, more importantly we'll be measured on customer satisfaction."
A lot has happened in the century between Marcus Goldman's death and today's launch. For the most part Goldman Sachs thrived, first as an investment bank and later in securities trading and risk arbitrage. But in the early 2000s the financial system began to unravel, along with the bank's vaunted reputation.
The money-music came to a screeching halt in 2007 to 2009. One pivotal bankruptcy, three major shotgun mergers, three federal takeovers, and over $430 billion in TARP funds later, Wall Street had survived, but barely. In the years since, it has become harder for banks to compete for talent. Average pay per Goldman employee has dropped by 39% (the firm used to offer the best pay on the street). The firm has also cut headcount and implemented a strategy known as "juniorization," whereby it demotes underperforming partners and eliminates positions left empty by departing managing directors.
The "living room" in Marcus's offices, on Goldman's 26th floor
"Ten years ago Goldman or one of the large banks would have been viewed as at the top of firms to which our MBA students would love to go," says Darrell Duffie, a financial economist at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. "Now I would say that's not as much the case."
Efforts to rebrand banks as technology-focused innovators have done little to change that narrative. "We're a technology firm, we're a platform," Blankfein asserted on Bloomberg last June, in a rare TV interview.
That may be true insofar as Goldman uses software developed in-house to evaluate risk and manage trades. Indeed, the firm's SecDB software played a pivotal role in helping Goldman survive the near-implosion of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998 and the housing crisis in 2008. But client-facing software has not been a priority. If Marcus succeeds, it will represent a transformation of the firm's technology capabilities. Roughly two-thirds of Marcus's hires have come from outside Goldman, with backgrounds ranging from Lending Club and OnDeck to Etsy and Google.
Marcus arrives at a precarious time for the world's major banks, Goldman included. Since 2009, more than $100 billion in financial services revenue has gone up in smoke, according to research firm Coalition. While Congress grills Wells Fargo and the Department of Justice lobs fines at Deutsche Bank, a debate is raging in the background over the rules that banks are now required to follow, and whether they are having the desired effect. "Have big banks gotten safer?" former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers and Harvard PhD candidate Natasha Sarin ask in a recent working paper. They argue no, based on evidence that it's now a lot less valuable, by definition, to be a bank. In the meantime, the shadow banking world—from small hedge funds and fintech startups to Silicon Valley giants like Apple and Google—continues to encroach on banking territory.
Goldman, still led by Blankfein at age 62, has been soul-searching amid the turmoil. When the public pounced, eight years ago, other banks did not rush to the firm's defense. Now, as the overall pie is shrinking, the firm is angling to undercut its competitors' lucrative credit card businesses. If Marcus succeeds, it will not win Goldman any new Wall Street allies. But it may prove valuable in a variety of other ways: engendering goodwill with regulators, making new friends on Main Street, recasting the bank a more benevolent and tech-savvy employer, and maybe even contributing to Goldman's bottom line.
Marcus's achievement of any or all of those goals depends on its ability to convince consumers that it is a new-fangled product with old-fashioned values—in fact, Goldman's original values, which promised that clients' interests should always come first. "Good ethics is good business," former Goldman chairman John Whitehead, who died in 2015, wrote in his memoir. Sometimes, it's just that simple.
A handful of new companies want to help solve America's sleep problem with pajamas designed for optimal slumber.
Like clockwork, right when department stores start to display enormous Christmas trees and red poinsettias to get shoppers in the holiday mood, they also begin to put out stacks of neatly folded two-piece pajama sets. Most will be made of flannel. There will almost certainly be a Santa or Rudolph motif in the mix. And come the summer, these pajamas will have totally lost their charm.
This is unfortunate, because the vast majority of pajamas worn in the U.S. are purchased during the holidays. The market research firm NPD says that for the last four years, 17% of annual sleepwear transactions occur across the first three quarters and then shoot up to 50% during the last quarter. This would indicate that a lot of sleepwear is purchased for gift giving during the holidays, which makes sense: Pajamas are cheery, practical, cozy, and perhaps most importantly, since they aren't worn in public, they don't need to reflect the wearer's taste. They don't even have to fit all that well.
This also suggests that the sleepwear industry is not paying attention to consumers' year-round needs. In fact, many holiday pajamas are designed primarily to look cute in family photos taken in front of the fireplace rather than ensure wearers a comfortable snooze. Given that we spend a third of our lives asleep, this is not optimal.
The National Sleep Foundation makes the case that what you wear to bed can impact the quality of your slumber. Sleepwear shouldn't be too hot because when you overheat, your body does not produce enough melatonin, which precipitates sleep, or growth hormone, which helps the body repair itself overnight. The organization encourages people to think carefully about fabric, fit, and even small elements like buttons, snaps, or tags on their pajamas that might irritate their skin and disrupt their sleep.
The question is, do sleepwear companies also take these factors into account when designing garments? Rebecca Smith, founder of the new brand Recliner, says no. "For a long time now, sleepwear has been designed for the fourth quarter," Smith says. "But I don't think that this is what the consumer needs."
Rebecca Smith, founder of Recliner
Smith launched Recliner to create sleepwear designed for women's actual sleeping and relaxing needs. Her introductory collection, which launched last year, included several practical little touches. For instance, the sleep shorts, which cost $65, have pockets and a waistband that flattens the stomach and does not ride up. They are long enough so that you wouldn't feel embarrassed wearing them outside while grabbing the mail. They are made of a Japanese satin polyester that feels like silk but is also machine washable. "Luxury brands often sell silk pajamas that they then expect women to get dry cleaned," she says. "Who has the time to dry clean their pajamas?"
Smith says her customers have responded well to these garments, but since the fabric was better suited for the warm months, she wanted to create a new collection suitable for year round. As a fashion veteran who spent 12 years at Herve Leger and Lulu Guinness, she began speaking to her sourcing contacts in Europe and Korea to find a material that would help regulate a person's temperature so they felt warm while lounging around in the winter and comfortably cool under the sheets.
This quest led Smith to a bamboo jersey fabric that is light, soft, and smooth on the skin but has all the temperature-regulating properties you might find in a high-performing technical garment. Bamboo fibers have micro-gaps that trap cool air in the heat and warm air in the cold. It is also more absorbent than cotton so it prevents sweat from pooling on the skin. "I thought it was the ultimate performance fabric," she says.
I tried one of Recliner's bamboo nighties, which costs $85, in between seasons, just as summer was turning into fall—the ideal time to test its effectiveness. The first thing I noticed about the fabric is that it feels like a blend of silk and cotton, since it is both smooth and porous. The gown comes down to below my knees and has a racerback cut, so it looks like a summer maxi dress. I could wear it on a quick Starbucks run while the weather was still warm, and I didn't feel indulgent wearing it while working at my desk from home. It was extremely comfortable to sleep in. It didn't trap heat when outside temperatures were still high, and when they dipped, the gown felt cozy, helping my body warm up under the duvet.
The 25-year-old organic cotton and natural home furnishings brand Coyuchi has also been working on making more effective sleepwear. Eileen Mockus, who spent her early career in fabric development at Patagonia and North Face, became the company's CEO three years ago. "I've spent a lot of time thinking about whether something works," she says.
The company is committed to using organic cotton and does not incorporate synthetics. (It also has a social mission to avoid using cotton that has been treated with toxic chemicals known to harm entire communities of farmers in the developing world.) Mockus explains that cotton is a very versatile fiber. It is strong, so it can be made into towels and sheets that will be used, then washed, over and over. It is absorbent and breathable. And it can be knit in various ways to manage heat differently. Flannel, for instance, can be thick and heavy, while pima can be thin and silky. "It's a workhorse fiber," Mockus says.
According to Mockus, creating a garment for sleeping is a particularly challenging proposition because your temperature changes over the course of the night. One signal that your body is tired is that you feel a bit cold, but then as you get under your sheets, you warm up. "You want something that is immediately soft and warm to the touch," she says. "But then you want something that is absorbent and breathable so that if you do overheat you won't notice it."
Coyuchi's organic cotton line of pajamas for both men and women (priced between $68 and $198) was designed to do just that. The fabric is extremely soft and not too thick. I tried the shorts-and-tank-top pajama set and found it extremely downy against my skin. Mockus says that the fabric has a slightly napped texture that makes it particularly cozy. "Jersey with a slight brushing on it fills that tactile sensation that registers as warmth to most people," she says.
And yet, even though it felt warm on my skin, it didn't make me feel too hot under the bedding. This is probably because any sweat would get absorbed by the fabric, wicking away from my skin before it had a chance to get uncomfortable. When I washed the pajamas several times, they did not degrade in texture or pill.
Lunya, a two-year-old brand, has also been trying to improve women's sleepwear. For founder Ashley Merrill, this comes down to thinking more like a tech firm than an apparel company. Rather than creating collections by season or organizing the supply chain to be more efficient, Merrill has taken a problem-driven design process. This means her team does very elaborate research about how women actually relax and sleep, then tests fabrics to make sure they solve the problems that women experience.
The brand discovered, for instance, that women really love wearing silk pajamas because they find them comfortable and luxurious, but they don't have the time to care for them. Lunya went through an extensive fabric-testing process to find a silk that could be washed. Merrill discovered that a high-end silk with a matte finish could be washed by machine and would not leave water marks or fray the fabric. The brand recently launched a $168 two-piece washable silk set.
Rather than focusing on a particular fabric like cotton or bamboo, Lunya incorporates a range of materials to make garments meant to serve different purposes. To help with temperature regulation, the brand sells a collection made from Meneya, a fabric that blends Pima cotton and Lycra with Celliant, a technical fiber that uses infrared energy to stimulate cell performance and increase circulation in the wearer. Merrill explains that the textile is meant to increase oxygen levels in the body, which helps cells rejuvenate and even minimize pain. (I was not able to test the silk or the Meneya sleepwear for this article.)
These brands believe the stakes are high in the sleepwear industry. According to a study by the CDC from this year, one in three adults in the U.S. does not get enough sleep. The report pointed out that sleeping less than seven hours a day is associated with an increased risk of developing obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and mental distress, among other ailments. There are many reasons for our unhealthy sleep habits, including stress and our constant use of technology. How much a cozy pair of pjs can mitigate those issues is what the founders of these sleepwear brands want to nail down. If the right nightshirt or pajamas can improve the quality of sleep even a little bit, that's reason enough, they say, to keep innovating. "It's already hard enough to get a good night's sleep," Recliner's Smith says. "It seems so silly to have your sleep disrupted because of an uncomfortable pair of pajamas."
Startups and big brands are increasingly finding ways for customers to create their ideal products, tailored just for them.
To quote my fiancé: "You pressed a few buttons and suddenly you're Estée Lauder?"
I had been acting a bit cocky after having crafted a new, never-before-seen color via the cosmetics startup Finding Ferdinand, which produces custom-made lipstick shades. I selected a good chunk of fuchsia, a bit of cranberry, with just a hint of mauve. And behold, I gave life to a new shade of lipstick! I am an original. A creator. A genius, really. I had to give my color a name. I went with "The Seduction of John Stamos."
It was quite a simple process: Finding Ferdinand sends a lip palette in the mail, which you use to mix your preferred shade. Then, you submit a rough estimate of the colors through the company's website, which allows up to 65,000 color combinations.
It might be just a beauty product, but I felt powerful, like I owned that cosmetic.
"Beauty is a very personal thing," says Finding Ferdinand founder Nhu Le. "People don't want to be told. They want to choose what looks good."
As Le sees it, customization is what today's consumers desire of all industries, not just cosmetics. "There's definitely a subset of the market that wants customization, especially with millennials and the 'selfie generation,'" she says. "They want to dictate what's [personally] looking good."
Finding Ferdinand is particularly popular with panicked women who discover their favorite shade is being discontinued, as well as brides who demand their bridal party wear the same exact lip color. The company has grown 150% annually in the last three years and has plans to extend into into eyeshadow, blush, and face products. Currently, Finding Ferdinand produces 10,000 units roughly every four months, but it can handle hundreds of thousands of units through its various factories, should there be consumer demand.
Finding Ferdinand customers can choose among 65,000 possible color combinations.
Consumers are savvier than they used to be, says freelance beauty expert Bahar Takhtehchian. With access to information about every product on the market literally at their fingertips, the public expects record highs of satisfaction. "There is a need to innovate with that in mind," Takhtehchian says. "Not everyone has the same color skin... It makes sense that companies are stepping outside the box and responding to people's needs."
The ability to compose a unique product versus pacing a store floor has inspired a new generation of startups to take aim at the beauty industry. These companies are reimagining how we purchase everything from nail art to hair products.
MatchCo is an app that turns the iPhone video camera into a colorimeter to determine a customer's skin tone. The company's technology can blend a perfect color within minutes from its Santa Monica fulfillment center.
Founders Andy Howell and Dave Gross, who share a background in launching customization programs for companies such as Nike, Reebok, and Zazzle, saw how important a perfect color match was to customers. "We've essentially built a search engine for makeup with a self-improving algorithm," says Gross. "We have now collected what we think is the largest database of skin colors."
While many of their competitors match a customer's skin tone to an existing product line, MatchCo creates a hue unique to the customer's specific coloring. "This is not one of 110 colors; this is your color," Howell says. "Since we started, we've never blended the same color twice."
The company may rely on high-tech software, but its philosophy is old-school. It's the same approach that once gave us bespoke Louis Vuitton suitcases.
"We believe [customization] is the new form of luxury, which is really a return to the old form of luxury in the idea of having something made just for you," Gross says. "Except with using technology, we're able to scale that and address a much bigger market and make it accessible to more people... The phone is uniquely positioned to be at all places at all times—that's a huge opportunity."
Since its January 2016 launch, MatchCo has been downloaded over 100,000 times and fulfilled thousands of individual orders. Its list of investors reflects the intersection of tech and beauty, including former Kiehl's president Jami Morse Heidegger, Clarisonic president Jack Gallagher, and Silicon Valley investor George "Skip" Battle of Netflix and LinkedIn. The young company plans to build new manufacturing plants as close as possible to growing areas of customers, such as Dallas, in an effort to limit shipping time. Eventually, it hopes to expand into retail to let people see how the magic happens.
Howell and Gross initially thought the service would interest a younger, more tech-focused audience, but a good majority of orders come from women in their 30s and 40s, all the way up to the 60s. These are busy women who don't enjoy the paralyzing paradox of choice and endless hours of testing at beauty stores. Now they not only get a bottle quickly, but it's also a perfect fit.
MatchCo's app blends a custom foundation color via a few simple iPhone scans.
MatchCo intends to serve all women, but it is specifically focused on addressing a sensitive issue within the beauty industry: diversity. The founders witnessed satisfied customers cry upon learning they no longer had to spend their lives blending two colors together or tending to a drawer full of unused foundation that didn't match their skin. "It was a motivational factor for us," Gross says.
The way Howell sees it, no customer should have a product that almost matches them. "No one should ever say your makeup looks great," he says. "They should say your skin looks great."
Industry giants are catching on. Lancôme released a custom-made foundation service called Le Teint Particulier, which is currently available in 11 Nordstrom locations. It too uses patented technology to scan your complexion, but the difference lies in the personal attention you receive thereafter. Since not every woman wants to wear her exact match—some prefer to look tanner, or warmer, or lighter—a brand representative tweaks the product to the client's liking.
It's an involved experience that, as Rosemarie Cirminiello, VP of Learning of Lancôme, explains, builds a strong relationship between brand and customer. "We're starting to see clients stay longer, wanting to play with makeup," she says. Lancôme plans to expand the service to roughly 30 more Nordstrom stores in the coming year.
Consumer involvement can create strong bonds. Like the do-it-yourself "maker" movement, people increasingly want to create. "From start to finish, you feel like you're involved and getting a product that you like," Takhtehchian says.
MatchCo uses this sentiment to further its database. Each time a shopper submits her unique color, it becomes part of their algorithm. "Consumers change when they become co-creators with a brand," Gross says. "From a customer's perspective, it's redefining the way they think about how they should be served.... It's disruptive in that they'll never think about beauty the same way again when they know they can have something made just for them."
Haircare is also benefitting from personalized treatment. Function of Beauty sells customized shampoo and conditioner, with users picking everything from its properties ("anti-frizz," "prevent hair loss") to color ("amber," "sage green") to the scent ("grapefruit hibiscus," "cucumber mint"). There are over 12 billion possible combinations to allow the company to live up to its official credo: "celebrate individuality."
Function of Beauty saw 50% month-over-month growth in revenue in its first six months. The company also went through the Winter 2016 Y Combinator and closed with a seed round of $1.5M. According to Function of Beauty founder Zahir Dossa, the entire market is headed toward personalization.
"If you look at any other industry, from social media to fashion, from technology to food, you will notice that customization is definitely the trend and the future," Dossa says. "Beauty is the only industry that is lagging, and the boom of Birchbox and others demonstrates that people are still searching for the perfect products. The problem is that the only way to make a perfect product for someone is to tailor it just to them."
Lancôme's Le Teint Particulier uses patented technology to scan your complexion for a custom-made foundation.
How are these items made? For Function of Beauty, a series of individual computer-controlled pumps are connected to ingredient supplies. Once the client has made her selections in her haircare profile on the company's website, a computer looks up the precise ingredient amounts from a database and controls the necessary pumps to output the desired amount of each ingredient into the bottle. Next, a machine prints the name of the customer and product directly on each bottle and places a barcode on it. The whole process takes under one minute.
Some companies personalize through curation—or "assembling" several products together into a unique whole. Ittsē allows customers to pick and choose cosmetic staples—like shadows, blushes, lipsticks, and brow powders—into a one-of-a-kind palette. The company launched in May 2015, and as of September 2016, sales had gone up 200% in 12 months.
In many instances, big brands provide more "tweaking" and "mixing" than full-on customization. Makeup brand Cover FX sells Custom Enhancer Drops to alter a pre-existing moisturizer or foundation. Skincare company Kiehl's recently released their Apothecary Preparations, a line of tailored-made facial concentrates as well as an in-store service to address unique complexion concerns.
Skin Inc., available on Sephora.com, offers a computerized quiz that asks you everything from stress levels to daily hours of sleep to level of pollution exposure. After nearly two dozen questions, an algorithm recommends a serum-based skincare program for individual needs. The program, created in part with Shekhar Mitra, who pioneered technology for popular products such as Crest White Strips, won more than 80 beauty awards worldwide. It entered the U.S. market in 2012 and doubled its revenue last year, becoming a top seller for Sephora.
Over the past five years, the beauty retail giant has seen a dramatic increase in interest for customized products. "The trend of customization reflects how our clients are consuming media in the digital age—at the touch of a button you can access anything and filter to find just what appeals to you," says Artemis Patrick, SVP of Merchandising for Sephora. Thanks in part to beauty bloggers, brand sites, and social media marketing, the consumer is more educated, more engaged, and super-selective.
Skin Inc. asks customers a host of questions, including lifestyle choices, medications and even how old their parents look.
Sephora also boasts numerous apps targeted to the picky shopper. Most are cross-referenced against thousands of SKUs: The ColorIQ system, built in conjunction with color authority Pantone, uses a scanner to help find the best matching foundation and concealers; Sephora Virtual Artist lets you try on over 3,000 lipsticks and 90 false eyelashes; Skincare IQ is an in-store gizmo that analyzes customers' dermatological needs.
Even fragrance is seeing a spike in clients requesting bespoke, with artisanal brands releasing multi-scent sets designed for layering. While customized scents aren't necessarily new, they were primarily restricted to a very small, high-end market, not something you'd see at a mass retailer. "Back in the olden days, you would never layer fragrance," Patrick says. "But now it's all about customizing." To this end, Sephora carries brands like Atelier Cologne, Commodity, and Derek Lam, which offer perfume-blending kits.
Sephora's myriad efforts will only intensify in the coming years. From apps to in-store services, the company has every intention of maintaining—and building upon—its status as the one-stop-shopping destination for today's beauty enthusiast.
"We definitely want to ramp up efforts," Patrick says. "This is not a trend. This is something our clients are wanting and demanding... We're going to do it the right and meaningful way."
Making the experience meaningful, according to many companies, comes down to providing customers with the satisfaction that they've created something unique. "What would make a woman feel happier than a custom experience?" says Lancôme's Cirminiello. "It's like finding your soulmate."
At times of crisis, leaders have a tendency to batten down the hatches, bark orders, and assign blame. Those are all bad moves.
When your team is in trouble, it may seem like any way out is a good way out. It often isn't. Taking a team in the right direction is crucial at any time, but when the pressure is high and things aren't going well, getting everyone back on track is especially difficult. Here are a few ways to do that, without falling prey to the common mistakes managers often make when trying to set things aright.
When something goes wrong, too many leaders seek to blame others—it's an understandable instinct. First reactions in crisis situations are often about sorting out what went wrong and assigning fault. And to be sure, sometimes it really is a person or group of people who screwed up. But often it's the systems or processes they work within that's enabled their missteps.
It helps to zoom out a bit before pointing fingers. Take these steps right away:
Closely examine your current strategy. How well was your team executing it before things went awry? What changed? Consider those execution methods from the perspective of your current situation to determine whether changing circumstances have made them less effective.
Next, analyze the impact of the work of your team, partners, and customers. Where did the results start slipping or sales begin to fall off?
Finally, evaluate your present capabilities. Despite the bad turn, what's your current capacity to execute? What assets and resources do you still have at your command to try something new?
This assessment of your processes should make it easier to take a fresh look at your team's or company's strategy, so you can make decisions about how to move forward that aren't based on personalities or office politics. Usually if there's turmoil, it means that there's a part of your process that hasn't worked as intended for longer than you'd realized. But you need to pin that down before making rash choices. When decisions are made in haste without understanding their full impact, even the most effective leaders fail to get their teams back on track.
In 2009, Ed Whitacre was appointed as the chairman of General Motors when it was on the verge of bankruptcy. He immediately combined GM's sales and marketing organization under one leader—a hasty decision that turned out to be wrong. A few months later, GM had to split up sales and marketing again.
As Bloomberg reported, "Whitacre realized that all of the change had rattled the workforce, so he sent a companywide email: 'A smart company changes and adapts to the needs of the business. So, while there will always be individual moves within GM, I want to reassure you that the major leadership changes are behind us.'" It took a lot more than his email to reassure Whitacre's team, but ultimately, under his direction, the company went on to an enormous, $20-billion IPO under his direction.
When we find some common reasons to be optimistic, we're often able to channel that positive energy into finding a solution. Morale sinks when things go wrong, so it's essential to reinvest in a shared purpose before moving ahead. Many leaders already know they need to emphasize their team's shared vision in times of turmoil, but few do it the right way. You need to explain in concrete, practical terms how the changes underway tie into your company's redefined objectives—what new steps need to be taken, and how those steps should be executed.
After all, sometimes your sense of purpose does need redefining. It may be that a pivot is exactly what the doctor ordered. It might actually be a bad idea to return to underscoring your core vision if that vision has steered you wrong. In the rush to blame "bad apples," this is something struggling companies tend to miss.
Instead, effective leaders re-instill self-worth in their teams by making them feel good about the urgency that the task at hand requires of them. Get comfortable with the reality that in the face of crisis, the future is often hazy—then ask your team to embrace that uncertainty, too, showing how confident you are that they can pull it off. Leaders don't necessarily need to singlehandedly push their organizations in a new direction, just keep a steady ship as the crew does the steering together.
Change may or may not be woven into the fabric of your company culture, but sometimes circumstances require it. Whatever the case, it can be a good thing. People often learn more about each other when they have to change together. And a crisis is arguably the best time to instill this team-building attitude. This way, when turmoil hits next time, your organization will be better equipped to carry itself through.
To do that, leaders may need to do the opposite of what they're used to doing during tough times; instead of buckling down, handing out directives, and showing "strong" leadership, it may be better to start experimenting and giving others more responsibility, not less.
After all, the worst thing you can do is fall back on the old ways of working—the ones that got you into this pickle in the first place. It's often at the edge of a crisis where the most innovative solutions are found. When things are going well, innovation tends to offer incremental benefits, but when we need to make wholesale changes fast, the ability to experiment can sometimes transform even the most dire situations.
But in those situations, leadership usually doesn't come from just one person. Leaders and managers may not be in best positions to see the disruptive parts of the puzzle themselves. If every team member is encouraged to speak up and has the authority to take on their own portion of problem-solving themselves, the solution can be all the more robust.
When a team owns the route out of the quagmire, they'll be better experienced at climbing out of the next one they stumble into.
Forget the tome that gets tossed into a drawer the first day on the job—create a culture book instead.
Employee handbooks are meant to be helpful, but too often they sit in a desk drawer or computer folder and never see the light of day. If you want to deliver a manual that will be read, consider creating a culture book instead, suggests Jurgen Appelo, author of Managing for Happiness: Games, Tools, and Practices to Motivate Any Team.
"Employee handbooks are usually written by [the human resources department] and contain boring things like vacation day policies and expense policies, and maybe a list of corporate values," he says. "Culture books are stories of how the organization actually lives those values. Many organizations have bad cultures; Wells Fargo is just one example," Appelo says. "Culture books can help bring out the best of what might be hidden in organizations."
Here is Appelo's five-step process for creating an employee culture book:
Ask staff for real stories of how people are applying the company's values, says Appelo. Ask them to talk about the last time they felt great working for the organization.
Print a big list of team values and let team members and managers pick the core values and wish values based on the stories you've collected.
Compare team members' and managers' results. Everyone then agrees on a final set.
Make the values easy to refer to by keeping them visible. Values are offered as bullet points and accompanied by rules, policies, and legal disclaimers.
Turn your values and stories into a culture book that's maintained by employees instead of the HR department.
Several large companies have created engaging employee handbooks that are posted online and can serve as inspiration:
A culture book should spell out values, and the design company IDEO creatively displays theirs—which include "be optimistic," "embrace ambiguity," and "make others successful"—in the The Little Book of IDEO.
Handbooks and culture books only work when employees actually use them and know what they say, says Appelo, and IDEO's handbook engages employees right away. It reads:
For a human-centered organization, it of course makes perfect sense that our inner core, the magma at the center of our earth, is our people. Put most simply, IDEO is all about our talent: finding, supporting, keeping, growing, and nurturing them, not to mention, inspiring, supporting and enabling them once they're inside. That's you, or hopefully you, if you're reading this—it's now official: You are literally the center of our universe.
The handbook should be created by employees and not the HR department, suggests Appelo. The gaming company let a team of developers create its Handbook for New Employees, which contains illustrations, jokes, and stories, serving as proof that employee handbooks don't have to be boring.
"This book isn't about fringe benefits or how to set up your workstation or where to find source code," the book reads. "Valve works in ways that might seem counterintuitive at first. This handbook is about the choices you're going to be making and how to think about them. Mainly, it's about how not to freak out now that you're here."
Zappos also has a Culture Book written by employees and updated each year. It shares stories of how people feel about the company. It explains:
As we started to grow, we asked ourselves, how can we sustain this culture? How can we remember it while simultaneously inspiring ourselves for the next year? Our answer was the culture book. It's packed with each employee's idea about our culture, as well as photos, our core values, and more. We hope that it will inspire you to create a workplace where everyone loves to be.
Creating a culture book is a sign that your company is avant-garde and forward thinking in terms of management innovation, says Appelo. Netflix's employee handbook is a 128-page SlideShare that the company made public in 2009. It includes the company's hiring and firing process, as well as how they motivate and manage employees.
"Some say, as an example of how a company can create and reinforce a culture with values," says Appelo, it is the most important document ever to have come out of Silicon Valley."
Its stock tumbling and potential suitors losing interest, the social network's fate is the talk of Silicon Valley.
It's the latest guessing game in Silicon Valley: What will happen to Twitter? Though the company continues to grow its revenue, losses are mounting and it hasn't meaningfully increased its user base in the last year. It's pivoted by marketing itself as a hub for live news and entertainment, with some buzz surrounding its NFL and debate live streams, but it's still too soon to tell if that transformation will work. A month ago, it was being actively pursued by Disney, Google, and Microsoft, however they all lost interest and now Salesforce seems to be its last potential suitor, causing its stock to tumble in value below the pre-rumor price.
But in the end, the business world loves a Cinderella story and in recent days, there have been some glimmers of hope for the flailing company as its stock price has inched upward. Some optimistic analysts even believe that it may still be possible for it to forge ahead as an independent company. Twitter is at a crossroads and there are only a few potential scenarios for its future.
"There are a couple of roads to go down when you're faced with this opportunity. One is to go the fire sale route" and sell itself to a willing buyer, says Forrester Research analyst Melissa Parrish. Alternatively, she says, it could turn itself around using its stores of capital or continue to flounder indefinitely.
In a blog post, John Hempton, chief investment officer at Bronte Capital, laid out a case for why an "aggressive financial buyer" should scoop up Twitter rather than a strategic investor like Disney or Google. Someone, he argues, needs to cut costs and boost Twitter's operating margins.
Between 2013 to 2015, Twitter raised annual revenues from $665 million to $2.2 billion; and revenues are still going up. "Costs have gone up commensurately," writes Hempton. "Losses seem stubbornly stuck at half a billion per annum. That is real money—just burnt—and burnt by a business that is already established." Building up losses isn't a problem in and of itself, he writes. Amazon, for example, grows losses. However, big expenditures have to amount to something valuable like expansion into new product categories in order to justify them.
For all the money Twitter is spending, its product hasn't changed a lot. Harassment and spam continue to be a problem for some users and the actual experience is still limited to posting 140-character messages to a social stream. But some of its recently forged partnerships could open up promising revenue streams.
Since its inception, Twitter has also been devoted to real-time conversations. Events like the Olympics, the World Cup, and the U.S. election cycle have proven to produce meaningful engagement on the platform. There were 35.6 million tweets about the brutal World Cup match between Germany and Brazil alone. To further the focus on live, Twitter has landed a deal with the NFL to live-stream Thursday-night games. "Actually focusing on the technology they have that facilitates real-time communication and news sourcing and video watching and all of that—that to me was a really interesting concept," says Parrish. Most people on Twitter don't tweet a lot, but when they do more than half the time it's about news, according to a Pew Research study from 2015. If Twitter becomes more of a platform for news and entertainment consumption and reduces the pressure on users to tweet, it might actually draw more people in.
Already, Twitter could use Periscope, a live-streaming app it acquired in 2014, to help push more such content to the platform through a deeper integration. For instance, Twitter could feature curated Periscope streams much the way it does for NFL games. That in turn could help make the case to media companies looking to capture mobile and streaming audiences fleeing traditional cable that Twitter is the place to be. People are already live-tweeting through their favorite shows; it seems to reasonable to assume that they might also watch them there.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is all-in on this opportunity. In a recent upbeat memo to staff obtained by Bloomberg, he said, "People choose us for news because we're the fastest. Fastest to get news, and fastest to share news with the whole world. Now let's strive to be the first. The first place people check to see what's happening…and the first place to break what's happening. In the moment LIVE, or a fast recap of what we know so far…what matters."
But in order for Twitter to become a sustainable independent company, it will need to clean house. As Hempton points out, the company needs to cut or make better use of its costs. It also needs to build better tools for detecting and squashing abuse in order to stop users from ditching the platform. Most importantly, it will have to turn around its reputation. A recent 3,000-person survey from digital marketing analytics firm LivePerson indicates that only 2% of people ages 18-65 consider Twitter a must-have app. The same survey says only 3% of the millennials interviewed felt that Twitter was an important app. Twitter needs to figure out a way to recapture the public's attention.
Of course, Twitter might not be able to tighten up its business. In which case, it could continue to occupy this strange space as both a media company and a social network with no firm identity. Other companies have similarly suffered from such a crisis. Yahoo, for example, never quite figured out what its focus should be after Google surpassed it as the leading site for online search. There were questions about whether Yahoo was a media company or a tech company right up until it was acquired by Verizon this year. As Twitter digs deeper into media, it too faces this question.
There's a chance its trajectory will be more like Apple's, which also had a midlife crisis in the 1990s. Apple suffered in the years after CEO and founder Steve Jobs was fired, right up until he regained control of the company. Twitter's Dorsey was similarly dethroned and re-crowned. But a year after retaking Twitter's helm, he has yet to define a path forward for the company. By comparison, Jobs was able to make meaningful progress in mere months, according to writer Frank Rose.
Whatever is to be, hopefully there will be a glimmer of what's to come in Twitter's next earnings statement, which is coming at the end of the month.
You've taken a new job and it was a terrible mistake. Here's what to do next.
The interviews went well. You liked the people, and the job seemed like a perfect fit. But now that you've been working at your new company for a couple of weeks, you've realized that nothing is as it appeared and you've made a terrible mistake.
What now?
First, take a beat and determine whether what you're feeling is a normal "fish out of water" phenomenon that many people experience when starting a new job, says David M. Long, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the College of William and Mary's Mason School of Business. Think about your past.
Long asks:
Do you often feel uncertain in new situations? This can even be with relationships, and other commitments. If yes, it might just be your normal sentiment in new situations. The second is your new coworkers. Do they communicate to you that everyone feels the same when they first start in this organization or career, and that over time it gets better?
If the answer to either is "yes," you may want to give it more time before you make a decision. But if you're certain that the job is a bad fit or you're in a bad environment that won't get better, you've got some decisions to make. What you do next depends on your situation.
If you're really certain this isn't the job for you, look at your options immediately, advises Kathi Elster, partner in executive coaching firm K Squared Enterprises and author of Working for You Isn't Working for Me. You likely still have contacts and perhaps even prospective interviews, depending on whether you were engaged in a full-scale job search and how recent it was, she says. Speak with your executive recruiter if you worked with one. While they may have a vested interest in you staying in the job, they may also be able to help make the transition out easier.
In addition, you'll have some practical considerations, such as whether you should enroll in the company's health insurance or roll over your retirement plan, Long says. "Any decision that has an initial buy-in cost or high switching costs should be avoided. Does it benefit you to consider the timing of your leaving?" he asks. "For example, if your current employer offers a discounted stock purchase plan at the beginning of every month, it might make sense to take advantage of that opportunity before leaving," he adds. If you have a financial adviser, now is a good time to tap them for advice.
You're also likely to need some insight and support to keep you grounded, Long says. He recommends finding a "mentor who is more of a friend or counselor who offers calming advice and reassurance about the non-technical aspects of a job," he suggests. Because this is an emotional decision, the type of support you'll need is likely different than what a more "traditional" mentor who offers guidance on the organization and the job duties might provide, he says.
Television producer and writer Tracy Rowland took a bad job, and "17 years later, I'm still having sweat-soaked nightmares about that job," she says. She had moved from Hong Kong and wanted to go to Los Angeles. So she landed a great gig with a new children's network. But soon after arriving in California, she realized that she'd been the victim of a "bait and switch"—the job wasn't what had been described, and her supervisor's temperament was very difficult.
"She'd tell you how much she hated something, and she wanted it fixed, and how stupid you were to have done it that way in the first place, and you'd spend all night fixing it to show her the next day, and she'd be like, 'I don't want that. Why did you do that?'" Rowland recalls.
Rowland heard from colleagues that her former supervisor had criticized her performance. Although they didn't believe it, Rowland says she was concerned about the damage this woman could do to her reputation. Rowland says if she had to do it over again, she would have walked out the door the minute she realized how bad it was and not risk the negative word of mouth.
There are downsides to a "take this job and shove it" approach, according to search consultant and interview coach Donna Svei. A 2016 survey from Rise Smart, Inc., found that 41% of recruiters "usually" or "always" present unemployed candidates to clients, while 48% "sometimes" do, and 11% "rarely" or "never" do. So, being unemployed could potentially work against you.
And while it may be tempting to burn such a short-term bridge, Svei says that it's important to stick to the high road and remain professional. Leaving a company in the lurch or leaving on negative terms can hurt you if a future employer ever contacts the company. As Svei observes, "That can follow you for years."
A rebound will depend on how well consumers believe Samsung handled the situation, but opinions are divided.
Earlier this week, Samsung announced a massive recall of its Galaxy Note 7 following reports of exploding batteries.
This wasn't the first time a company had to take back faulty or even dangerous products. Over the last two years alone, recalls have been the unfortunate byproduct of rapid technological innovations ranging from furniture to vehicles.
In 2014, Nest recalled 440,000 Protect smoke detectors after they failed to sound an alarm. In 2015, Fiat Chrysler recalled 1.4 million cars because of a major security flaw that made it possible for hackers to gain access to the vehicle, and earlier this year, Ikea recalled 29 million dressers after six children were crushed to death. Earlier this year, Volkswagen was also forced to fix or buy back 500,000 cars equipped with fraudulent emissions software.
The success of a company following a major recall of dangerous or faulty products is a different story that often depends on how the organization responsible handles the situation. How will the way Samsung's leadership reacted be viewed by their customers?
"On a scale of 1 to 10: a 1," suggests Mark Johnson, an associate professor of operations management at Warwick Business School in the U.K. Johnson explains that the company appears to have fallen victim to the "sunk-cost fallacy." Samsung was too eager to see the product through in spite of the potential problems because of how much time, money, and energy they had already dedicated to its development.
"The reality is that everything was rushed, even the first attempt at a recall, when they didn't get to the root of the problem," he says. "Now they are paying a huge price."
Johnson adds that transparency is key for winning back customers following a massive recall. Whether Samsung deliberately withheld information or simply wasn't aware of the problem is irrelevant from the consumer's perspective. "Samsung just didn't know what was wrong. A lot of this stems from them rushing the process, so they weren't aware of where the problems came from, didn't know where the faulty phones were, nor did they turn around immediately and say how they would respond to it," he says.
Johnson explains that whether or not the company was aware of the faulty batteries before they began shipping the Galaxy Note 7, they seemed too eager to release the product ahead of the iPhone 7. As a result there is a perception that the South Korean tech giant put time-to-market ahead of customer safety, something consumers won't soon forget.
But not everyone believes Samsung acted inappropriately in this particular circumstance. Ken Daly, the CEO of U.K.-based consumer product company JML, believes Samsung dealt with the incident "pretty well." He suggests that the global technology manufacturer is an easy target because of its size and influence, and that it's far too easy for outsiders to suggest how they could have acted faster or done things differently.
"They took action, replaced faulty handsets while presumably investigating the manufacturing issue, and then recalled all the phones," he observes. "They've since said they are not going to manufacture the Note 7 smartphones again. I'm honestly not that sure what else they could realistically have done," he says.
Daly's biggest concern with the recall is not how Samsung acted, but rather how the South Korean Finance Minister, Yoo Il-ho, said to reporters: "If they do scrap the model, it will have a negative impact on exports."
"It appeared to encourage the idea that it's okay for manufacturers, and to a lesser degree retailers, to put profit over safety," says Daly.
In spite of what may be perceived as an overstep by the finance minister, Daly believes the company's reputation will recover "quite quickly."
"If Samsung does everything in their power to reassure customers that they have identified the issue with this product, know what went wrong, and can learn from the issue," Daly says, "then I don't see any reason why their reputation should not fully recover."
Samsung did not respond to multiple requests for interview.
Encryption on dark websites is no match for a tried-and-true law enforcement technique: impersonating vendors of illegal merchandise.
According to prosecutors, a Houston man arrested last month on federal explosives charges tried to buy dynamite, a grenade, and a remote detonator through the anonymous "dark web" market called AlphaBay.
The man, 50-year-old Cary Lee Osborn, allegedly took precautions to keep his identity a secret, as he sought explosives to ensure a building "burns to the ground" and to "send [a] message" to its occupant, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation transcripts of his alleged online messages.
In addition to shopping on a black market site only available through Tor, the anonymizing web service, and paying with bitcoin, Osborn wrote of using a "multi hop VPN" to further obscure his digital address, according to the transcripts. He allegedly rented a post office box with a false name and fake driver's license in order to receive the explosives, officials say.
"Dont know exactly whats inside but person using for apartment," he's alleged to have written to an AlphaBay vendor, explaining his need for the explosives. "Person will not be there when set off."
But despite his alleged use of modern cryptographic tools and old-fashioned deception, Osborn was quickly arrested for a surprisingly simple reason: The online vendor he's accused of contacting to order the materials was an undercover employee of the FBI. According to court records, the explosives he received were fake, and he was arrested soon after opening the package.
The case, in which prosecutors say Osborn could face up to 10 years in prison, is one of a number of recent incidents where alleged buyers of illegal goods on dark web sites have been arrested attempting to buy from vendors who are actually undercover law enforcement agents. The sites, which can offer anonymized marketplaces for drugs, weapons, and other illegal goods, complete with Amazon-style vendor reviews, allow users to do business without revealing their internet protocol addresses, email addresses, or phone numbers.
But to buy physical goods, they're still ultimately forced to trust those unknown vendors with some sort of address where they can receive their merchandise, which leaves them vulnerable to old-fashioned sting operations.
"We see fraudsters of all kinds, whether it's health care or just trying to steal your banking transactions, trying to operate in a way that we can't see," FBI director James Comey told Congress last September. "And so they think if they go to the dark web—the hidden layers, so called, of the internet—that they can hide from us. They're kidding themselves, because of the effort that's been put in by all of us in the government over the last five years or so, that they are out of view."
An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the number of investigations, past or present, that have involved undercover work on the dark web. But the FBI and prosecutors have previously mentioned cited work in a number of cases. Last year, a then-22-year-old Manhattan man named Cheng Le was sentenced to 16 years in prison, after being convicted on charges that he attempted to buy the fatal poison ricin from an undercover FBI employee on an unnamed dark web site.
"This might sound blunt but do you sell ricin?" he allegedly asked, before repeatedly hinting at reselling the poison or using it for murder for hire, according to court documents.
"I'll be trying out new methods in the future," he wrote, according to the documents. "After all, it is death itself we're selling here, and the more risk-free, the more efficient we can make it, the better."
Also last year, a computer programmer from Liverpool, England, named Mohammed Ali was sentenced by a U.K. court to eight years in prison, also accused of attempting to buy ricin from an undercover U.S. investigator, who reported the case to British authorities. Ali told the court he was simply curious after exploring the dark web and learning about ricin from a Breaking Bad episode and didn't realize the chemical was illegal, according to a report in The Guardian.
In a more controversial case, dubbed Operation Pacifier by the FBI, agents seized a server last year belonging to a notorious dark web child pornography site called Playpen and obtained a warrant letting them install malware on visitors' computers in order to locate them despite Tor's anonymized connections. Since the illegal goods were entirely digital, users would be unlikely to supply physical addresses or other identifying information. Officials arrested more than 135 people, though some of those accused are challenging the legality of operating the server and distributing malware, even with a warrant.
"The FBI carried out thousands of searches and seizures, in locations around the world, based on a single warrant," the Electronic Frontier Foundation has argued. "The particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent precisely this type of sweeping authority."
But in cases where law enforcement officers are simply impersonating sellers of illegal goods, and not hacking computers belonging to potential buyers, there's likely little legal protection for those caught in such a sting, says Frank Rubino, a defense lawyer with offices in Houston and Miami. The technique is essentially the same as one that's been used offline long before the dark web existed, he says.
"The government is allowed to act as a seller of illegal objects, no matter what they be," he says. "It's been going on for years, where the government poses as, for example, a drug dealer."
And while laws protect against actual entrapment—where someone's induced to commit a crime they otherwise had "no predisposition to commit," he says—there's no legal problem with the government pretending to offer illegal merchandise to those clearly looking to buy.
"If a guy's out there looking to buy bomb material to blow you and I up, I'm thrilled the FBI is the one selling it to them, because they're going to bust him," he says. "And you and I are going to live happily ever after."
The small Burbank-based firm uses a stable of 100 published sci-fi writers to help workshop scary futures into real products.
Do Fortune 500 CEOs dream of electric sheep? No, they dream about the hundreds of ways their companies could be put out of business by the radical idea that they never see coming. A new business model, or some gadget. At first it's a novelty, easy to laugh off, but then it evolves, people begin to get it, and it catches on. Next thing you know, your company is Kodak, Blockbuster, or a taxi cab.
There's no shortage of research and consulting firms that offer to help companies avoid these fates. Some might tout their design thinking chops, others employ improvisational comedy tropes. But a small Burbank, California, consulting and prototyping firm called SciFutures caught my eye for its own slightly odd approach. The firm works with a panel of 100 published science fiction writers to help its clients visualize their worst disruption nightmares, and then begin to imagine the products or business ideas that might offer them an alternate reality.
SciFutures CEO and founder Ari Popper and CTO Scott Susskind truly believe that the biggest and most influential technologies of the future are often foretold in science fiction writing. Examples of this aren't hard to find. In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke came up with the idea of using satellites for global communication. The internet was foreseen in the cyberpunk tales of William Gibson in the early '80s when people in university labs were just beginning to connect networks of computers. Oculus chief scientist Michael Abrash credited The Matrix for showing that virtual reality (VR) is a viable idea. The augmented reality (AR) startup Magic Leap hired Snow Crash author Neal Stephenson to be its chief futurist.
Scott Susskind
The secret of innovation, according to SciFutures, can be unlocked by understanding how the realities, the knowns, of the present logically move toward the as-yet-unknown realities of the future.
Science fiction prototyping—turning futuristic ideas into applied technologies—has been successfully used in the past, notably by futurist Brian David Johnson while he was working at Intel. Their integrated circuits had very long life cycles of between seven and 10 years, which meant the company had to anticipate the needs of the marketplace a decade in the future in order to design the next generation of chips. Companies had already been prototyping products using scenario-based design; Johnson had the good idea of using science fiction writing techniques to cast those scenarios 10 years in the future. He soon expanded the idea and wrote it into an Intel product design framework called the Consumer Experience Architecture.
Johnson may have introduced the concept to the world, but Popper says SciFutures is the first company to found a business on Science Fiction Prototyping. The story goes that Popper was doing a sci-fi writers group when he had an epiphany that sci-fi might help unlock the corporate creative forces that give birth to game-changing products. He says he wasn't completely sure the idea could become a viable business, but he decided to try it anyway. He later brought on Susskind to focus on the physical prototyping part of the business. As Popper and company have refined their "future-casting" workshops and the way they work with sci-fi writers, the SciFutures idea started to work. Now the firm's client list includes Samsung and Intel, consumer packaged goods companies like The Hershey Company and Clorox, and financial services companies such as Visa and the Ford Motor Company.
Ari Popper
SciFutures' best-known project was helping the Lowe's hardware store chain conceive of and create the HoloRoom, a 20-by-20-foot physical space in which shoppers can see how various Lowe's products (like paints, flooring, or window coverings) would look in their own homes. Customers use a tablet to pick out the products—3D representations of them—then use an AR headset to see the products placed in context in the home. They can then quickly flip through different paint and window covering combinations, for example. The first HoloRooms were opened in two Lowe's stores in Canada in 2014, then in 19 U.S. stores starting in 2015. Since then Lowe's has continued developing the HoloRooms with different technology partners.
The HoloRoom was one of the ideas that bubbled up when Lowe's Innovation Lab went through the SciFutures process, complete with science fiction writer punch-ups and product prototyping. Augmented reality-aided shopping isn't exactly new, but SciFutures and Lowe's brought it to consumers well in advance of other major retailers. Ikea, for example, launched its AR shopping app this past April. The online furniture retailer Wayfair.com launched its WayfairView app in June using Google's Project Tango AR software.
The SciFutures office is nestled between an audio/video rental shop and a rehab center in a cluster of office buildings. The top floor is an open space with large skylights, a couple large conference rooms, an open kitchen, one large office where Popper and Scott sit, and a couple of large worktables where the company's account reps, marketing people, and support staff work. On the first floor I saw a shop loaded with tools for building demos and prototypes, and a big industrial space where large physical exhibits are built, such as a car interior exhibit built to demo Visa's in-car mobile payments.
The most interesting place in the building was across the hall: the emerging technology and prototype demo lab. The space is partly for show and partly for work. Half of it is outfitted with the couches, tables, and TVs you always see in Internet of Things (IoT) or smart home demos. VR headsets were there for use by visitors. And underneath one of the TVs was a dense bank of digital production gear, a keyboard, and some headgear. Some serious VR or AR programming—real prototyping and development work—had been going on there before I arrived.
Maybe the L.A. heat had got to me, but in this room I started to pick up on a sort of Disney World "anything can happen" vibe. The room is full of tables on which staff are busy "playing" with emerging technologies that will be combined in various ways to create something as yet unseen. Most of the prototypes are top secret at the moment, but a few were already public. One table was littered with home appliances and tablet PCs, with an Amazon Echo voice-based personal assistant device in the center controlling it all. In fact, SciFutures has become a leading developer of new "skills" for Alexa, the natural language brain that powers Echo. They just built a skill for Glad that tells you what's recyclable and gives advice on how to do it.
One table was littered with the fronts of credit card payment terminals; the SciFutures engineers were demonstrating how thieves use them to easily "scrape" credit card information at the countertop or the ATM. SciFutures has at least one military client, NATO's Allied Command Transformation, who it is helping "imagine the future of warfare," says Popper. And that's about all he would tell me about it.
The freelance writers who work with SciFutures aren't given a whole lot to go on, and they never meet or talk to the client. That's by design. They're given a short brief about the client's products and industry, and about the outcomes of a workshop (more on that later). The writer then creates a two- to three-page story treatment over the course of a few days that shows where the technology might go. The treatments use a familiar format and story arc; they usually focus on one or two main characters and their discovery and interaction with the technology, as well as the cultural context in which it happens—the political, social, and psychological effects on people.
SciFutures exerts some influence on the result by selecting which writer or writers will work on a specific client account. SciFutures categorizes writers by their focus areas, interests, research areas, hobbies, prior careers, age, geography, and psychographic information. It's also important that the writer targets the right kind of "future" in the treatment. Popper says he looks for the right balance between the fantastic and the realistic.
"The work we do is more like predicting, like projecting 10 to 15 years out into the future," one of the writers from SciFutures' panel, Devya Breed, told me. "It's not so much fantasizing but more like thinking wishfully—thinking of fun ways the tech could be developed."
Breed, who once worked as an engineer at a tech company, says now that she's a professional writer she's still immersed in tech; she still runs in social circles where it's usually the topic of conversation. Emerging technologies are also the subject of her research for her own sci-fi work. All of that can potentially influence her take on the technology described in the assignments she gets.
Another SciFutures writer, Brenta Blevins, is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and focuses her research on virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality tech. "The writers are trying to produce multiple science fiction treatments that show multiple different ways these products can change people's lives," she told me.
Brenta Blevins
I asked Blevins why she thinks the SciFutures process works. "It's the power of story; stories are the original reality simulators," she says. "These are thought experiments that provide this wide range of ways to think about these products." The narratives offer a chance to portray all the ways new technologies might impact human beings, she says.
The imaginings of writers like Breed and Blevins brings a very different flavor to SciFutures' process and deliverables, compared to that of other consultants. "You kind of remove a layer of abstraction between the person sitting in a lab and the user deriving pleasure from using the product," says Breed. "It helps bridge that gap and helps people make new product real."
The work done in the workshops, and the further ideation by the sci-fi writers, culminates in an array of deliverables for the client company. It might be written or verbal consulting, animations, or videos, or a graphic novel.
Devya Breed
SciFutures also provides clients with a graphical map that shows all the ideas discussed and the technologies that would need to be brought to bear to create them. The map looks something like a solar system map, with each idea placed by type into a pie slice around the middle. Within each of those segments the supporting technologies for the ideas are arranged closer or further from the center based on their viability score. That is, technologies closer to the middle are mature, ready to deploy, while less mature technologies (like mind-machine interfaces) are placed toward the outside solar system.
For Hershey, SciFutures created a graphic novel that portrayed how people might use 3D-printed food (not just chocolate) in the future. The point is to place the ideas created in the workgroup or by the sci-fi authors into real-life settings and human situations to bring the whole thing closer to reality.
Hershey had already built and productized 3D-printed chocolate after the company's CEO met a 3D printing company executive at a conference and told his new friend "we should do business together." Soon after, it became Hershey innovation group manager Jeff Mundt's task to figure out how the technology might evolve, how people might want to 3D-print food in the future. "We have created very intricate [chocolate] shapes, but now what?" Mundt says. "What's the commercial path for this? If people are going to use it, what might that look like? Are you really going to print out your breakfast while you're sleeping?"
Understanding what chocolate consumers want today requires only traditional market research, Mundt points out, but understanding the wants of people in the future is something different. The SciFutures process helped Mundt and his group tackle some hard questions about 3D printing. "The story can help you create that roadmap," Mundt says. "If that's going to be true, then what are the steps that are going to be necessary to get us there? So you can kind of work backwards."
Mundt points out that the SciFutures process was just one possible approach, and that approach isn't for everybody. "We are a conservative company, and what you get from working with SciFutures is something that looks like a comic book," Mundt says. "It's actually an illustrated narrative, but a senior manager at a conservative CPG (consumer packaged goods) company might be looking for Nielsen data, [and might ask] 'Why would I do that?"
"There's definitely a healthy tension between being too close in, where you're not really disrupting and pushing, and so far out where it becomes ridiculous and meaningless," Popper says. "[We] know how to really get the best out of both worlds, so it will be disruptive and imaginative enough that you're pushing the boundaries, but have enough of a link back to today so that you can build to that."
SciFutures earns consulting fees for their initial ideation work with clients, but the hope is that the process will graduate to the next phase. "What we then hope it does is trigger the prototyping so that we can start to build early-stage articulations of [actual products]," Susskind says. The entire bottom floor of SciFutures' space in Burbank is reserved for just that.
SciFutures has had its failures. A couple of young and energetic executives from a large consumer products company (Popper asked me not to mention the name) came to SciFutures to help them conceive of some new and futuristic ways of marketing a new technology they'd invented.
The first major step in SciFutures' process is a "grounding" meeting with the client in which Popper, Susskind, an in-house sci-fi writer, and some staffers work to orient the client to emerging technologies in general, and to the emerging technologies that might impact the client specifically. The workshops involve anywhere from five to 30 people.
After the foundations have been laid, a new phase begins: the "disorienting." The client is told to forget about the day-to-day concerns of the business and complete a number of writing exercises in which they imagine the dystopian future of the company, and the technology and services that might be in it. "Let's put ourselves out of business applying what we've learned," Popper says (speaking for the client).
For instance, during a workshop SciFutures did with Ford's Future's Group, the Ford people imagined a future in which nobody owns cars but rather shares or borrows them. "It helps everyone articulate unconscious fears that they might have about their business that they've never brought up or have frankly never even thought about," says Popper.
After the client has scared the daylights out of themselves by imagining a future where their company has been disrupted out of business, they start to think about how a happy ending might come about. "They do a little dystopic diligence and use that information as a way to elevate their company, their product, business model, whatever it might be," Susskind says.
Some of the ideas generated in the workshops, if acted upon, could mean major strategic changes and reallocation of resources. That's scary to people with children and mortgages. Popper says these people often hit a breaking point when those self-preservation instincts kick in. They often use statements like: "That will never work," or "You can't do that," or "Why?" or "You just can't," Popper says.
"The body language is funny," Susskind says. "It's like a threat; I'm protecting my body against a threat."
Popper says when his team initially began to witness this type of response, they thought they were doing something wrong by going too far. But they soon recognized it as a symptom of something going right. "We push them, and sometimes they're just too afraid, and they stop," Popper says. "We've had clients where we've had to go, 'Okay.'"
In the case of the unnamed consumer products company, the junior execs who championed SciFutures internally were full of energy and good intentions, Popper says. But more senior people within the company were only interested in "giving lip service" to innovation without really doing anything. They had even set up an "innovation fund" and allotted some cash to it. One high-ranking exec pulled Popper aside and said: "Look, I'm not supposed to say this, but I'm going to tell you guys anyway. We need to change—and we never will."
And that's why the SciFutures process ultimately didn't work there. "You can't do this halfheartedly, Popper says. "It's painful and it's bruises, but that's when you get to the really great work; they just didn't give themselves the permission or the space to get into it."
Popper is a very convincing guy. He's a very likable guy. His customers say he's extremely energized about technology, a true believer, and that his excitement has a way of rubbing off on others. Popper's personality is important because SciFutures wants to do more than just sci-fi ideation and prototyping. They want to evangelize; they want to help win the battle for hearts and minds within the client's walls. Popper and Susskind told me they are very concerned about finding people at the client who get the need for change and new ideas, but also a budget, and the political juice to push the ideas to fruition.
Popper: "We feel that if we haven't changed behavior or if we haven't created a need for product or a meaningful new way of doing business, then we actually haven't been that successful, all we've done is entertain people, and you can go see a sci-fi film to do that."
Susskind, too, exudes the kind of blue-sky, optimistic vibe I felt in Burbank. He's also an engineer—steeped in a kaleidoscope of near-field and far-field emerging technologies—a kind of MacGyver, the guy who knows how to gather all the right hardware and software ingredients. For one prototype, Susskind might source technologies from 10 different partners and piece them altogether into a device that's never been seen before. The tables down on the first floor at SciFutures are littered with such parts.
The trouble with prototyping is that it's expensive. Building just one can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's why SciFutures has begun creating virtual prototypes using augmented reality tech, to show clients how a product might work in the real world, and allow people from the client to share it with other people in the company. The difference is that the product is seen through the screen of a tablet or through a headset like Microsoft's HoloLens. "People can see them and almost have a visceral experience, just short of actually physically holding it in your hand, but it will still show potential," Susskind says.
But no matter how real the simulation or convincing the prototype, for executives who can't or won't confront change and embrace their fears, the future will remain a scary, dangerous place.
And those who do choose to change have to survive sometimes painful internal transformations, overcoming lots of doubt along the way. Popper makes it sound almost spiritual: "In order to start something new you have to stop doing what you were doing," he says. "It's about realigning your efforts, and it ultimately leads to a new place of knowledge, confidence, and wisdom."
Fighting against long odds can be a powerful motivator and a smart marketing move, if you do it properly.
Everyone loves an underdog—the person or group that's expected to lose but somehow manages to pull through. For startups and small companies taking on big competitors, underdog status can be an asset. It can help you craft a "come-from-behind" narrative that strikes a chord with customers, and it can even ignite a sense of purpose and drive in your team members. But if you aren't careful, underdog status—or even just the perception of it—can do you in. Here's how to stay on the right side of that line.
As an underdog, you're constantly forced to find ways to be different from your competitors—fast. And that necessity can be a powerful resource. "We believe that an underdog mentality is essential for motivating our employees and shareholders," says Jacob Laukaitis, cofounder of the online coupons site Chameleon John. "There's something to be said about walking into work every day thinking that you have something to prove. It makes you hungry, creative, and filled with a sense of urgency."
That puts pressure on small companies to continuously rethink their products and services, internal processes, and business strategies, and to anticipate what customers expect from brands in the future. And it may pay off better for them, too: Even if this same level of innovation takes place inside some bigger companies, it's their smaller, "underdog" competitors that often have more agility to act on it.
That advantage may extend to branding as well. Market research has shown that consumers may be more likely to identify with the brands perceived as underdogs. Harvard Business School professor Anat Keinan has observed that effective underdog narratives inspire and give hope to customers. In a 2010 study she coauthored for the Journal of Consumer Research, Keinan found that brands that persevere in the face of relatively disadvantaged market positions tend to hold an outsized appeal.
She and her team began to explore this phenomenon after noticing that nearly all the candidates in the 2008 presidential election positioned themselves as underdogs, despite previous psychological research suggesting that people prefer to associate themselves with winners. But that doesn't prevent them from rooting for underdogs, too. "Consumers identify with the disadvantaged position of the underdog," Keinan tells the Harvard Business Review, "and share their passion and determination to succeed when the odds are against them."
This makes intuitive sense, doesn't it? Think for a minute about whom you relate to, both as a friend and a consumer. Your friends' circle is made up of people you feel a connection to, whether through similar interests or because of shared experiences. You formed those friendships because you could relate to that individual. As a consumer you identify with brands that share the same passions and values as you do. Oren Berdichevsky, the co-CEO of ad-tech platform Sekindo, explains that attitude this way:
Consumers relate to companies that are humble, especially those that started off small and grew with time, including those acquired or bought by a big name. We started off in a living room, were eventually bought by Universal McCann, and now we have 65 employees and growing. When customers see that we're like a family, they connect much more and we gain their loyalty.
So it's no surprise this underdog marketing tactic can be particularly effective in times of economic depression, when struggling through adversity is an especially powerful narrative. Following the 2008 economic downturn, New Balance released a series of videos as part of a "Made in America" campaign, highlighting the shoe brand's domestic manufacturing, and how one-quarter of its footwear production is based in the U.S.
The campaign showcased the company's roots in Maine and featured ordinary employees in a bid to resonate with American consumers worried about the future and in need of some optimism. Today, New Balance continues to compete directly with global brands like Nike and Adidas, bringing in global sales of $2.73 billion in 2015.
But not all underdogs are created equal, and just like any marketing campaign, you need to manage your underdog narrative carefully. Brands that begin in a disadvantaged position can just as easily be seen by consumers as incompetent, so it's important for startups and scrappy newcomers to frame themselves as worthy challengers from the get-go.
After all, you aren't an underdog without long odds against you. So while that can inspire some to prove doubters wrong, it can also provide an easy out for businesses and entrepreneurs that fail. As a small or new company, you'll inevitably face times of struggle, so it's important to find ways to motivate your team and keep morale high.
To do that, stay connected with your customers on social media as you roll out your brand narrative—one that highlights your underdog status but at the same time demonstrates your competence. Build communities around people who care about the same things. Celebrate the victories that come your way, no matter how small they may appear to be. Underdog brands can also excel in the service area, placing a priority on superior customer experience to win over users from established competitors.
As a startup, securing your first customer is a significant milestone that should be rewarded; you wouldn't be able to celebrate signing on your first client in a large corporation, because that's to be expected. But by the same token, if you miss opportunities like these, your underdog status can start to sabotage you—turning a "David and Goliath" mind-set into run-of-the-mill defeatism.
Finally, succeeding as an underdog requires sticking to your narrative. Consumers are adept at sniffing out authenticity, so if you choose to play up your underdog story, it needs to be coherent. That means that once you've knocked out your competitors, grown bigger, and emerged as the established player, you're no longer an underdog—so you can't keep pretending to be. But what you can do is remember your roots. Remind your customers and employees what got you there, then use that original mentality to drive innovation forward.
This week's top stories may help you cut back on aimless emailing, build a stronger case for that raise, and make better use of your stress.
This week we learned how to write more concise, actionable emails, how to make small doses of "acute" stress work in our favor, and where the top tech talent may be heading in 2017 and beyond.
Got your eye on a raise or promotion by the end of the year? To get it, you'll need to make a case for what you're worth to your company. This week one CEO shared the basic math he uses to make decisions like these, saying, "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."
There's plenty of advice out there for faking confidence, but the better approach may actually be to persuade yourself to actually feel the vibe you're trying to project. Here's a look at the latest psychological research on how to trick your brain into greater self-assurance.
Where are the sector's top developers, designers, and product managers moving? It's worth asking, because keeping an eye on the flow of talent is usually a pretty good indicator of the tech industry's trend lines overall. This week we dug into the latest data on where they seem to be heading.
Email is only as effective as what it gets done, so this week we learned how to trim the inefficiencies out of our messages to make sure they accomplish more in fewer words.
Chronic stress can be a workplace killer, but researchers believe that smaller doses of "acute" stress may actually help us develop our skills and boost productivity. Here's a look at a few ways to make limited amounts of job-related stress work in your favor.
It may lack sophistication, but the new Amazon Unlimited Music has convenience and price going for it. And that should win it some fans.
Amazon's new streaming music service comes with some features that are both delightful and terrifying. Well, "delightful" to you or me as ravenous music listeners with a bias toward convenience, but for competing services like Spotify, the whole thing must be a tad scary. Why? It's too damn easy to dive into Amazon Unlimited Music. It's also cheaper.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not canceling my Spotify subscription anytime soon. Other than the price ($7.99 per month for Amazon Prime members like me), there isn't much that Amazon's new bare-bones service offers that Spotify doesn't. In fact, Spotify—blessed as it is with a decade head start and a huge, more singularly focused team—is a substantially better product. But if Amazon poses a threat to Spotify, it's not in its feature set or some innovation in listening or design. It's all those casual but still uncommitted music listeners that Amazon is likely to nab as they breeze by Amazon.com to order socks, discount leaf blowers, or whatever else they just remembered they needed.
For starters, Amazon Music Unlimited does meet the bare minimum for a music subscription service in 2016. It has a catalog of millions of songs from all of the major labels, and many indies and smaller distributors. It lets you create radio stations dedicated to specific artists. It also has playlists of music curated by in-house music editors, lists of new releases and popular tracks, a search box, mobile access, and offline listening. If you haven't yet taken the plunge and paid for a service like Spotify or Apple Music, Amazon's new offering is a perfectly reasonable place to start.
That catalog is as thorough as you'd expect, including most of the household names in music. The more hip, somewhat lesser-known indie stuff is there, too, at least to a point. Unsurprisingly, Prince and Neil Young are absent. Taylor Swift is there, but her most recent album, 1989, isn't (Spotify lacks Swift's music because she objects to the service's free, ad-supported tier—Amazon has no free listening option). Frank Ocean's Blond is there. In running a number of searches across genres, I couldn't find any glaring, deal-killing omissions in Amazon's catalog compared to Spotify or Apple Music. At this point, all of these services offer most of the music that most people will want to hear.
Any palpable shortcomings in Amazon's selection are likely to come up when Apple or Tidal scores the next album release exclusive from a big name artist like Drake or whoever they throw a wad of cash at—that is, at least as long as the consumer-hostile scourge of streaming album exclusives continues, which may not be for long.
Like Spotify, Amazon offers a desktop app that scans your local music so it can be included in your library within the Amazon service. But also like Spotify, Amazon doesn't make it dead simple to get that music onto your mobile devices. This is something Google Play Music nailed from day one by offering a desktop music uploader that quietly scans your hard drive for new music and seamlessly merges it into your Google Play account. And of course, Apple Music is built on top of iTunes so it naturally merges the music you own with the music you're subscribing to (however flawed and confusing Apple's initial execution of this may have been). This sort of functionality won't matter to most casual listeners, but for people with extensive collections of music that isn't available on subscription services, the ability to keep everything in one place is a big perk. As a bonus, people who have purchased physical albums from Amazon will find that music is automatically included in their streaming library.
The music curation and discovery on Amazon Music Unlimited is decent but not mind blowing. Apple has set pretty high standards with its hand-curated playlists and Beats 1 radio, while Spotify has been wowing listeners with semi-automated features like Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix. For its part, Amazon offers decent human-built playlists broken down by genre, artist, moods, and activities. They're not quite as good as Apple's, but it's an impressive-enough start for a brand-new service, and its curators seem to be churning out new playlists pretty quickly.
Amazon takes a stab at personalization, but its recommendations feel somewhat obvious at first, seeming to take cues from your shopping history and any songs you may have streamed from its previous, more limited music service. It may just be that Amazon's algorithms need time to learn about your listening habits (and those of similar listeners), which is something Pandora and Spotify have each had a decade's worth of experience doing. As you use the service—listening to music, adding albums to your library, and so forth—it does appear to get smarter. There's also a bit of classic, Amazon-style collaborative filtering going on here: As you stream songs, it offers up suggestions based on the collective listening habits of other users. People who listened to the Frankie Cosmos song I clicked on, Amazon tells me, also listened to Angel Olsen and Mitski. Sounds about right.
As is standard for music services like this, Amazon Music Unlimited includes a radio feature that lets you create stations based on a given artist, complete with Pandora-style thumbs up and down buttons. In this case, the results are usually pretty predictable. Amazon lacks the music-data-science muscle of Pandora or Spotify (which smartly acquired the music intelligence platform the Echo Nest in 2014) and it shows. While its radio stations likely won't wow any vinyl crate diggers or music geeks, it's a sufficient enough of a "lean-back" listening experience for more casual music fans.
From a design standpoint, Amazon Music Unlimited has kept things as simple as possible. Its minimal interface feels like a stripped-down version of Spotify, perhaps more akin to Rdio (RIP), and definitely a breath of fresh air for those who have grown tired of the visual bloat of iTunes.
So how does it stack up against the key competition? There's nothing here that will lure anyone away from Spotify or Apple Music, both of which have excellent curation and discovery features and are more mature products overall. Amazon is certainly more of a proper subscription service than the still-maturing SoundCloud Go (which rumors suggest may wind up getting acquired by Spotify anyway). Tidal, insofar as it manages to stay afloat, does have unique advantages like a high-fidelity streaming option for audiophiles and access to holdout artists like Neil Young and Prince.
At launch, Amazon Music Unlimited feels a bit like Google Play Music: A decent music streaming service built by a giant tech company that hits all the basic, expected marks for such a service without blowing anyone's minds. It's perfect for people who haven't yet signed up for a service like this, especially if they're already an Amazon Prime member.
For Spotify—currently the biggest player in this space—the threat here comes less from Amazon's ability to lure away subscribers (although, who knows—this thing is brand new and it could evolve quickly if it's a priority for Amazon) and more what it symbolizes about the competitive landscape. Increasingly, Spotify's competition comes from huge, deep-pocketed tech companies like Apple, Google, and now Amazon, which can afford to withstand the tricky economics of the music subscription business while they rake in revenue from other things. Meanwhile, Spotify is under much more pressure to turn streaming music into an actual, profitable business as it gears up to go public.
This not-so-level playing field may seem like an unfair disadvantage for Spotify, but so far the Stockholm-based company has weathered the storm. Even a player as big and well-established in the music industry as Apple hasn't yet made a dent in Spotify's dominance. The summer 2015 launch of Apple Music and its superbly handcrafted playlists and radio programming was met by Spotify with a rise in its own subscribers and the wildly successful launch of its Discover Weekly personalized playlist. Indeed, whatever the long-term impact of these "me too" music subscription services may be, their proliferation offers at least one glimmer of hope for music listeners: The potential for more innovation. Amazon may not have reinvented music with its new service, but it may well help nudge things along into the future.
