David Lidsky's Blog, page 2745

Here's What Each Presidential Candidate Would Do For U.S. Workers

The economy and employment are big areas of concern, not just to campaign watchers and Fast Company readers, but to anyone with a job or who's looking for one. So far, the election cycle has been filled with plenty of bluster, so sometimes it's difficult to suss out the candidates' actual policy positions.

So we've done some of the sussing for you. Here's a quick, if far from comprehensive, snapshot of the four leading candidates' major proposals on job creation, employment, and business—some of the items that would have the biggest impact on the world of work.

What she has promised to do. In a plan called "Make It in America," Clinton proposes to invest $10 billion in "partnerships that link together all parts of the supply chain and build on the strength of a region in particular industries," according to her website. "It builds on President Obama's National Network for Manufacturing Innovation and bipartisan legislation written and spearheaded by Senator Sherrod Brown."

The plan would also force companies that outsource jobs to forfeit tax relief and would impose an "exit tax" on companies that move their headquarters abroad in order to lower their tax burdens.

[image error]Photo: Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Clinton has proposed raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour and supports guaranteeing workers 12 weeks' paid leave, "fully paid for by a combination of tax reforms impacting the most fortunate." In a debate in Miami in March, she advocated for equal pay for women and wider support for women- and minority-owned small businesses.

Citing their negative impact on U.S. jobs, Clinton opposed the CAFTA and TPP trade agreements (after initially supporting the latter) yet supports other efforts to facilitate global commerce. "Trade has to be reciprocal," she said at a New Hampshire debate in February. "That's the way the global economy works. But we have failed to provide the basic safety-net support that American workers need."

The praise and criticism for her proposals. Clinton's plans, while more modest in scope and budget than Sanders's, would likely face Republican resistance for both their spending and corporate tax components, and they've been challenged on the left for ceding too much ground to business interests. The Sanders campaign has called Clinton's record on trade "abysmal," citing her initial support for TPP, NAFTA, and other trade agreements.

When Clinton lost the Michigan primary in March, Sanders as well as some observers attributed it to her stance on free trade and its impact on Rust Belt workers. Still, Clinton enjoys considerable support from labor unions, including the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers' union, despite criticism that her positions on labor have been uneven.

In 2009, the AFL-CIO, one of the oldest and largest unions in the country, gave Clinton a lifetime score of 94%, and according to the International Business Times, major labor unions have contributed some $6.3 million to super PACs and other organizations affiliated with Clinton's campaign.

What he has promised to do. Sanders has outlined a "Rebuild America Act" that would dwarf Clinton's proposed job-creating expenditures, pouring $1 trillion into domestic infrastructure projects over a five-year period. "It would be paid for," his website says, "by closing loopholes that allow profitable corporations to avoid paying taxes by, among other things, shifting their profits to the Cayman Islands and other offshore tax havens."

A separate initiative would earmark $5.5 billion to fund state and municipal youth job-training programs. As a senator, Sanders has also introduced legislation to make it easer for workers to form and join unions, and to lower other obstacles to collective bargaining.

[image error]Photo: Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Sanders is categorical in his opposition to free trade, believing most such agreements to reflect the interests of large multinational corporations and their lobbyists as opposed to workers. Asked last October whether he's been satisfied with any free trade agreements the U.S. has negotiated, Sanders replied no. He supports a nationwide $15 minimum wage and, like Clinton, ensuring 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, but Sanders proposes to fund the latter through a $1.61 per employee weekly payroll tax—part of a bill that he and 18 Democrats have introduced in the Senate.

The praise and criticism for his proposals. Sanders's proposals have come under fire for being unworkable given their high levels of spending and the likelihood of a Republican-controlled House (if not Senate), a charge he's countered by underscoring the need for a "political revolution" that could remake the composition of Congress.

An economist claimed earlier this year that Sanders's plan would generate almost 26 million jobs and boost the median income by roughly $22,000, an analysis other economists sharply criticized, including prominent Obama Administration officials.

A University of Massachusetts–Amherst economist claimed earlier this year that Sanders's plan would generate almost 26 million jobs and boost the median income by roughly $22,000, an analysis other economists sharply criticized, including prominent Obama Administration officials. Some of Sanders's leading economic advocates, including Robert Reich, President Clinton's labor secretary, seem to agree with the candidate's critics that a broad electoral shift is the prerequisite to policy initiatives on this scale. They differ over the probability of that. Reich has written that "there's a higher likelihood of kicking Republicans out if Bernie's 'political revolution' continues to surge around America," a premise that the Clinton camp and independent analysts say doesn't look likely.

Still, Sanders's free trade position clearly resonates with many primary voters, which is all the more noteworthy, as New York magazine points out, for breaking with Democratic Party orthodoxy dating back to Martin Van Buren. Sanders receives high marks from many of the leading U.S. labor unions, and last December scored an endorsement from the Communication Workers of America, a major force in the media sector.

What he has promised to do. "I'm going to bring jobs back from China, Mexico, Japan, Vietnam," Trump said in a February debate in South Carolina. "They are taking our jobs. They are taking our wealth." While he has not offered specifics on how this might be accomplished, Trump has framed job growth in terms of tax and trade reforms.

Like Clinton, Trump says he supports free trade as long as it's fair. His website emphasizes a need to reset trade relations with China by, among other things, holding the country accountable for "currency manipulation." In addition, he supports "putting an end to China's illegal export subsidies and lax labor and environmental standards," lowering the U.S. corporate tax rate, and "attacking our debt and deficit so China cannot use financial blackmail against us."

In a debate in November 2015, Trump said he would not raise the minimum wage and has expressed skepticism of federally mandated paid leave. He has been an outspoken advocate of tighter immigration policies, including deporting nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants in a bid to preserve jobs for current U.S. citizens.

[image error]Photo: Flickr user Gage Skidmore

Trump hasn't taken an official stance on collective bargaining, but in February, the Washington Times reported, he struck a diplomatic note, telling New Hampshire voters, "I have tremendous support within unions, and I have tremendous support in areas where they don't have unions . . . my support is really with those workers, those people."

The praise and criticism for his proposals. Trump's support, particularly among white, working-class voters, has survived intense criticism across the political spectrum on the feasibility of his plans to create and protect American jobs. Economists are doubtful as to Trump's ability to reverse outsourcing. According to one Harvard economist who spoke with CNN Money in February, less than 5% of the roughly 20 million Americans who lose or change jobs involuntarily each year do so as a consequence of growing exports. In the same report, a University of Virginia economist puts it bluntly: "I can't imagine anything our government could actually do to return employment in the manufacturing sector to the level it was before."

Less than 5% of the roughly 20 million Americans who lose or change jobs involuntarily each year do so as a consequence of growing exports.

Trump's plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and construct a wall along the Mexican border—likewise in the name of safeguarding domestic employment opportunities—has been ridiculed as unfeasible or inadvisable by his opponents in both parties, rejected by the Mexican government, and estimated to cost up to $600 billion if fully implemented. The Tax Policy Center estimates his tax plan to cost the federal government $9.5 trillion over the next 10 years.

Trump's claims to broad appeal among union workers appear largely true, judging from the intensifying efforts by labor leaders to defeat him. The AFL-CIO, for instance, has announced plans to ramp up its anti-Trump campaign earlier in the political cycle than the organization typically starts by making appeals to members.

What he has promised to do. Like Trump's, Cruz's jobs plan focuses on tax reform as a means of generating employment opportunities. He has proposed virtually abolishing the IRS and implementing a 16% flat tax on businesses in place of existing corporate income taxes, part of a plan that Cruz claims will boost the GDP by nearly 14% above current projections within the next decade and create nearly 4.9 million new jobs.

[image error]Photo: Flickr user Gage Skidmore

He opposes raising the minimum wage on the grounds that it would eliminate jobs, particularly among Hispanics and African-Americans, and opposes paid leave and widening other employment benefits for the same reason. "Extending unemployment benefits does exacerbate the jobless situation," he told the AARP in 2012, "because it subsidizes unemployment and increases the tax burdens on those who are employed. Cruz supports a nationwide "right-to-work" law, similar to a measure adopted by Wisconsin under Governor Scott Walker last year, designed to limit the power of labor unions, which overwhelmingly oppose his candidacy as a result.

The praise and criticism for his proposals. The bulk of Cruz's proposals on job creation and employment focuses on tax reform and rolling back commercial regulations, but he's come under fire for offering few details on which spending cuts would cover the lost revenues from reducing taxes. A nonpartisan tax policy group estimates the cost of Cruz's tax plan at $8.6 trillion. Some observers argue that Cruz's business tax constitutes a value-added tax (VAT) since it would charge companies over the course of production, making them likely to pass those costs onto consumers by raising prices—something that would almost certainly be politically unpopular.

Cruz has underscored his support for small businesses, saying that his tax plans will benefit them the most. Last week he told ABC News, "My focus is very much on small businesses because economic opportunity, jobs, come from small businesses." Cruz's critics argue that his vaunted support comes at the expense of workers, whose employment benefits Cruz would limit, and of labor unions, whose influence he'd seek to curb.

GoPro Launches Developer Program

A day after poaching a leading Apple designer—a move that sent its stock roaring up 19%—GoPro announced the public launch of its developer program.

The initiative, which was quietly rolled out with a few partners a year ago, is aimed at offering official support of third-party companies that want to build products with seamless GoPro integration.

GoPro clearly hopes a program like this will help kick-start its business prospects. Over the last year, its stock has plummeted from a high of $65.49 to a low of $9.01. In recent weeks, it's been bouncing around between $11 and $14, hardly what investors had in mind when the leading action camera company went public in June 2014. In January, the company laid off about 100 people, or 7% of its workforce. Many have speculated that the poor stock performance over the last year has been due to poor sales of its Hero 4 Session camera.

Developers taking part in the new effort can take advantage of three types of integration.

First is having their mobile apps connect directly with GoPro cameras, bringing camera command and control, media management, and live video preview to those apps.

Second is the ability for developers to build devices that can connect with GoPro cameras either physically or wirelessly via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. Those devices would then have camera command and control, video management, and other controls.

Finally, third parties will be able to build mounting and housing products that specifically meet GoPro specifications, much like Apple licenses some outside companies to make cases or cables for its computers or iOS devices.

To date, 100 companies have joined the developer program. Among them are BMW, which has build an app called M-Laptimer that allows racing enthusiasts to use their GoPro to automatically record car telemetry data and video. Toymaker Fisher-Price is developing GoPro-compatible child-friendly housing and mounts for a series of new toys.

And GoPro's initiative is launching with a certification program called Works with GoPro that offers third-party companies integrated marketing help and an official logo.

In Memory Of Linda Tischler

Fast Company editor Linda Tischler died Monday after a long illness. Linda started at Fast Company in 2000 and pioneered the magazine's design coverage at a time when few, if any, mainstream publications paid attention to design. Through her exuberant stories on everyone from architect Michael Graves to industrial designer Yves Béhar, she highlighted both the business of design and the importance of design in business. It is much to her credit that design has evolved into a core business practice, embraced by companies large and small. Here, we asked colleagues and friends to share memories of Linda.—Eds.

Gadi Amit, founder, NewDealDesign

I met Linda at a Fast Company event, when the economy was in a rut. At first, I was quite shy about approaching her, but we started chatting and when I suggested that we should pay more attention to design for the middle class—and less for the 1%—she lit up. With her warmth and intelligence, she said, "Okay, why don't you do that? Write something!" The whole discourse around the democratization of design—Linda had a huge role in that. She always had a social conscience.

Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design, Museum of Modern Art

I have great memories of Linda in many different places—at MIT's Media Lab and at the Aspen Ideas festival, at MoMA at my marathon events and at evening panels with young designers. Everywhere, she was my kindred spirit, holding the design flag high with intelligence, open-mindedness, and generosity. Everywhere, her eyes pierced the air like curious, bemused laser beams, crowned by her bob that reminded me of my favorite Italian singer when I was a child. She was a force. She loved design and was able to explain it to all, very simply, honestly, and elegantly. I will personally miss her tremendously, and so will the design world.

Linda received a lifetime achievement award at the 2014 Innovation By Design conference

Rinat Aruh, cofounder, aruliden

Linda taught me about what really mattered. Not just about design, but about friendships, business, and people. She always had to time to listen, looked out for me and gave the most appreciated feedback—straight to the point without any fluff! She was our biggest champion, constantly encouraging us to keep doing what we do while sharing her point of view with enthusiasm and humor! I will miss her dearly.

Yves Béhar, founder, fuseproject

Through great times and tough ones Linda was a force with a smile. She was understanding and inquisitive, always curious about the world. I will never forget those qualities, and aspire to them. A couple of years ago, we spoke on stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival—it was fun and entertaining, it was just a solid human conversation about design and life. And this moment reminded me of how every conversation with Linda was always just that: a human story at the center of design. All of us designers are lucky she applied her talent and wit to design. I am lucky to have known her. It aches to say it: So long Linda.

Ken Carbone, founding partner, Carbone Smolan Agency

Every designer owes Linda their deep gratitude. Linda was a courageous champion for all design disciplines and no one expressed the value of what we do better that her. Through her brilliance, curiosity and generous spirit, her influence on design and business was nothing short of singular.

Beth Dickstein, founder, BDE

If you're lucky, you get to work with good people. If your luckier, you get to make a great friend. I was luckier, as Linda and I were great friends. One I will miss tremendously. Her brilliance, humor, generosity and warmth were always there. When her illness was getting worse, I said, "I'll pray for you everyday." In her wonderful witty way she said, "Okay, better put it in overdrive, baby." I know the industry lost a dynamo, a straight shooter, a true journalist. Her family lost an irreplaceable force. I lost an amazing and caring friend.

Walter Herbst, professor, Segal Design Institute, Northwestern University

Like all who met her, it was an instant love affair.

Linda visited our Management program in Product Design and Development at Northwestern University, some years back, which started it all.

I invited Linda to speak at our annual design event, Design Chicago, which I knew came at the same time as the Milan Fair. She quickly shot back, that she had seen enough chairs in her life, and agreed to come. She captured the entire audience, which included our own design and development master's students as well as our Kellogg MBA's, our engineering students, as well as the president and the Deans of the university. Her influential talk may have led to what Northwestern University has now—"Design" as one of our pillars.

We were always checking in, and she was always finding time to talk about our kids and of course design. I will miss her, as will everyone who knew her.

Judy Klavin, president, Kalvin Public Relations

Nobody covered the intersection of design and business the way Linda did. We started working together in 2008 when I arranged meetings for her with my design firm clients. Before the meeting, we'd spend hours reviewing story ideas that we thought for sure she'd be interested in. Then she'd zero in on a completely different angle or something she saw on a designer's desk that caught her eye. And, the story she'd develop and write was always smart and engaging. Shortly after, she was recruiting design leaders to be guest bloggers on the inaugural FastCoDesign site. She had a gift for encouraging the creative community to articulate their vision and bring it to life. I am so grateful for her friendship, honesty, insight and determination. Thank you, Linda, for uncovering so many stories that might never have been told. We all learned so much from you.

Cliff Kuang, founding editor, Co.Design

Linda was a giant. Our readers today often remark how Fast Company has brought design into the realm of business and innovation; Linda pioneered that ideal as an editor here in the early 2000s. Moreover, she kept with it. Through the relationships she cultivated in the profession, she helped make the very first iterations of FastCompany.com into a platform for designers to be heard. And it was because she believed in the power of design, and she believed in the optimism inherent in making the world a little bit better with the things you do every day. All of us at Fast Company, who've found our careers bringing design stories to the world, owe Linda a debt. Hopefully, we can repay it by continuing the work.

[image error]Nicholas Calcott

Stuart Leslie, president, 4sight Inc.

Conversations with Linda about design were always the highlight of my day and I looked forward to each one. Her enthusiasm in understanding the unique angles she was exploring was contagious and left me energized, thinking differently about design each time. What a rare treat it was to be able to escape the day to day routine and have a few minutes of thought provoking discussion to remind me of all the reasons I became a designer.

Danielle Sacks, senior editor, Inc.

The first time I encountered Linda Tischler was through her words. I was 25, and had just started my first journalism job as a lowly fact checker at Fast Company. I was fact checking a colorful profile on Howard Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, written by a senior writer at the magazine—Linda Tischler—who I had yet to meet. I was taken with the story's attitude, its writerly flair. I needed to meet this Linda woman.

Little did I know that Linda and I would soon become fast friends, despite the years between us. She became the person I decided I wanted to become when I "grew up." As a young writer, she always took me seriously as a peer, even though I was learning what she had already been doing for decades. When she began immersing herself more deeply in the design world, she let me pick up the pieces of the advertising beat, which she had once carved out for herself. But she graciously relished in watching me take it on, and we'd gab endlessly about stories and reporting strategies and industry scuttlebutt.

She was able to do what very few writers can—she wrote just as she spoke. When you read her work, you could hear her whispering in your ear—her sharp sense of humor, her wit, her word choices, her energetic voice always filled equally with edge and compassion. She'd pluck a word out of thin air that wouldn't reveal pretension, but her dimension, her worldliness, her many selves as a lover of language, of culture, of the arts. And she was timeless, ageless. Her stories had the hipness and energy of a twentysomething, with the depth and perspective of a much wiser soul. She could go head to head with anyone—and you'd want to be a fly on the wall to watch.

Thirteen years since we first met, Linda is still the woman I want to be when I grow up. She managed to raise two children whom she was fiercely protective of, become a grandmother (albeit, too briefly), a domestic goddess and a feminist, and a successful career journalist who left the field different than she found it. She has helped me navigate my journalistic career with two young kids, just as she did. She has been an incredible friend, making me laugh even during her darkest days with cancer. From a hospital bed, she managed to turn the most mundane, ugly moments into a rollicking, laugh out loud story. It's hard to imagine a world without another Linda Tischler conversation.

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Chuck Salter, senior editor, Fast Company

For years, I had the best seat at Fast Company's New York offices: the one next to Linda Tischler. Our friendship traced back to the magazine's early years, when we bonded over our newspaper backgrounds. But we had always worked out of different cities. In New York, we became next-desk neighbors.

Hearing Linda do countless interviews gave me a deeper appreciation of her craft—how she tirelessly developed and worked her design beat, how quickly she thought on her feet to dig another layer deep, and how she treated people. No wonder her subjects trusted her enough to open up: She was fearlessly human—candid, curious, funny, empathetic. Long before facing cancer herself, she wrote memorably about the professional and personal impact of the disease on the designer Michael Graves and IDEO's Tom Kelley.

Linda was a generous spirit in a business that's often competitive and territorial. She shared sources, story ideas, an honest critique — and so much of her time. Her gushy emails when she connected you to a source could make you blush.

As anyone who knew her will attest, Linda was a force. A veteran journalist wired with the energy of a 25-year-old. A critical and creative thinker. A prolific and elegant writer. A devoted friend. My inbox is filled with emails that start more or less, "How are you?"—after a big story, the birth of my son, my mom's heart surgery. Being friends with Linda made you almost like another beat that she followed with the utmost attention.

I will miss her terribly. Fortunately, her voice remains, not just in her stories, but in our wonderfully rambling email conversations over 16 years. In recent years, although I knew she was often struggling with chemo or pain, she sounded as vibrant and irreverent as ever. In December, she joked that the implant she was getting for pain might let her stream the new season of "Transparent."

Cancer took her life but not her soul, and definitely not her humor. She wouldn't let it. That much was clear from one of her earlier notes to me following her diagnosis:

I'm trying to think of this as a reporting experience. Taking notes. All of life is fodder, right?

Keep the jokes coming.

And later, from another note:

Love the idea of a line of Chemo Cupcakes. Maybe coded to specific toxic drugs. Tangerine for taxol, cherry for carboplatin, etc. Who could resist? Step aside, Martha [Stewart]. I claim this niche

.

That was, and to my mind, will always be, Linda.

Ravi Sawhney, founder, RKS

Linda Tischler was such an incredible person, one of the truly inspirational, loving, insightful and passionate ones. There was a certain spirituality in Linda that I always wanted to be close to and valued dearly. She showed incredible strength and optimism as she battled her cancer, never giving up. I feel blessed to have crossed paths with her, to have become friends, and to have had many conversations about life, design, politics, and mortality. There are those who not only touch your life but somehow become part of the fabric of your world. Linda was such a person, as all her friends and family would tell you. She'll be so dearly missed.

Leslie Smolan, founding partner, Carbone Smolan Agency

Linda Tischler was my design hero. She could also be called a design aficionado, advocate, supporter, inquirer, explorer, groupie, devotee, maniac, evangelist and connoisseur. She loved design and designers. And she loved to tell the world about us — what we do, why we do it, and why it matters. Losing Linda means we've lost an incredibly important voice in the ongoing dialogue about design. And we've lost an incredibly kind and generous friend.

[image error]Nicholas Calcott

Bill Taylor, cofounder, Fast Company

I'm sure that many of the tributes to and remembrances of Linda will focus on her wit and smarts, her mastery of design, and the legacy of articles and books she left behind. But as I have reflected over the last two days, saddened and stunned at her passing, I thought back to that often-repeated quote from Maya Angelou: "People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

I will never forget how Linda made me, and all her colleagues in the early days of Fast Company, feel. She was an essential part of Fast Company during the crazy boom times, she was there for the dark and challenging down times, and she was my office next-door neighbor for a chunk of that time. Every single day, she was one of the few grown-ups in an organization filled (professionally speaking) with gangly adolescents. To many of the young people on the staff, she was a mentor and a sounding board. To me, she was a peer, a pal, a trusted colleague to whom I looked for advice and reassurance. Linda exuded a sense of quiet strength, of emotional and intellectual maturity, that is all-too-rare in the world in general, and in the world of media in particular. Those times when I would stroll into her office, pull up a chair, and say, simply "Do you have ten minutes to talk through something?" were some of the best times of my week.

Truth be told, I can't remember much of what she said in those conversations so many years ago, or what I did as a result of them. But I remember like yesterday how they made me feel. And I feel so blessed to have known and worked with Linda.

Rick Tetzeli, editor-at-large, Fast Company

When I came to Fast Company in 2010, I arrived with one question: Why does this magazine spend so much time on design coverage? It didn't take me long to figure out the answer, thanks to Linda. Editing her stories, and listening to her patient, humorous, skeptical, and good-natured explanations, I came to understand that the best design writing shows readers how gnarly problems get solved creatively. Linda had been doing this for years—she was a real pioneer. But she was wide open to telling those stories in new ways. One of my favorite experiences with her was working together on a story about architect Bjarke Ingels. As we discussed Ingels, she talked about his energy, his intellectual agility, his almost superhuman capacity for complex projects across the world. We decided that the best way to tell the story was through a comic strip, and the result was one of the freshest things I've worked on at Fast Company. The story delighted Linda, who loved the challenge of continually expressing herself—and highlighting work she deeply admired—in new ways. At its best, Fast Company encourages original thinking across creative enterprises. Linda lived this.

My daughters attend a school that's just a couple of blocks from Ingels' recently completed apartment complex on West 57th Street in Manhattan, which was featured in our comic strip. In the midst of that dreary neighborhood of glass blocks, Ingels' building stands out for its angular optimism, a bold, light and unusual burst of energy. Kind of like Linda.

We will all miss her deeply. She had spirit to spare, and we are lucky she shared it with us.

Alissa Walker, writer, Gizmodo (via Facebook)

Even if you didn't know Linda Tischler you very likely read one of her stories in Fast Company over the years. She was a true champion of the design industry, introducing this sometimes complicated world to the mainstream press and explaining its importance in an incredibly accessible way. She was also a great friend and mentor to me in those early days of my writing career. I will never forget her pulling me aside at one of Fast Company's first design events—after she had moderated a panel with her signature quick wit—and telling me that us ladies in design had to stick together. I will miss reading her work and knowing she was always on my side.

Alan Webber, cofounder, Fast Company

Everyone knows that magazining is a team sport. That's even more true in the early days of a magazine, when it takes everyone on the team to figure out what it is you're trying to do, not only in the pages of the magazine when it comes out, but also in the creation of the ideas that go into the magazine, the culture of the office where there's no substitute for good energy, all the things that create magic and sustain it.

That was Linda. She got it. She relished it, for the very first moment of the first day. It was like she'd been invited to be one of the hosts of the very best party you could ever hope to throw or attend. You could see it in her smile, her enthusiasm for the whole venture/adventure. Infectious energy, unstinting generosity, unlimited colleagueship—and of course, remarkable talent, curiosity, work ethic, and heart.

One of the early tenets of Fast Company was that a great organization needs leaders at all levels. Linda was a leader—without seeking a leadership role. Sure, she was smart and able and good at her job. But the thing about Fast Company was, it never was all that clear what your job was, except to demonstrate every day that we were all in it together, and that none of us was as smart as all of us—and she was one of the people who lived that and made it happen.

A magazine is the people who put it out. We were incredibly fortunate to have Linda to help put it out. I loved her then and I will always love her.

If you'd like to share a story about Linda, email slabarre at fastcompany dot com.

Gilt Groupe's Founder Launches New Shopping App

A decade ago, Alexis Maybank founded Gilt Groupe, a luxury daily deals website that has gradually amassed over eight million customers. This February, Gilt was sold to Saks Fifth Avenue's parent company for $250 million, a figure much lower than its $1 billion valuation.

But Maybank is ready to put Gilt firmly in the rearview mirror. She's spent the last few months plugging away at a brand-new shopping app with Leah Park, who led the creative operations at Gilt for several years. The app, called Project September, launches today.

Named for the month that the fashion calendar begins, the app allows users to upload photos and see other people's photo streams. Unlike other visual social media platforms, it allows you to click on any item in an image to buy it immediately. "Whenever I saw an item I liked on a friend's social media feed, it would take me ages to locate it at a store where I could buy it," Maybank explains. "I wanted to create a platform where you could see a product you liked in a photo, then tap it to buy it on the spot."

Maybank wasn't the only one who was frustrated with the inability to shop directly from photos. She had noticed that Gilt's website receives a lot of traffic from users leaving social media sites, who are clearly searching for an object they have just seen. While Facebook has made it possible to set up a store on a profile page and Like2Buy allows users to save items they like on Instagram to a wish list, both platforms require many steps to make a purchase.

[image error]Alexis Maybank

Project September's interface is highly visual, with rows of images and no commentary. Maybank explains that it is designed to look like a spread in a fashion magazine. Users can follow their friends, influencers, and brands, swiping left and right to go from photo to photo. They can also create profiles and upload their own content.

The Project September team has been working with many brands and retailers to enable users to make a commission from any items that sell from their photos. When they post an image, they can link each item on the picture to a store where it can be purchased; if that item sells, they can earn between eight to 15 percent of it's value and Project September will also get a small cut. (The exact figures vary depending on the type of product and the retailer.) Project September users can purchase items from Bloomingdale's, Net-a-Porter, Saks Fifth Avenue, Coach, Ferragamo, Fendi, Nasty Gal, and Free People, among many other brands. The company is actively bringing on others.

Bloggers, fashion editors, celebrities, and others with large follower bases stand to make a lot of money from encouraging people to purchase products that they recommend. Project September has recruited Marie Claire creative director Nina Garcia, beauty expert Frederic Fekkai, and model Christy Turlington Burns to be fashion advisors; they have each created profiles and will share content. "This is one way to start building our follower base," Maybank explains. However, she makes it clear that the platform is not designed exclusively for influencers with huge audiences. "The platform is open to any users who want to share their creative work," she says.

To get off the ground, Project September has received an undisclosed round of angel funding from investors such as First Round Capital, Greylock Partners, Built by Girls Ventures, and Female Founders Fund Ventures.

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Can Silicon Valley Help The State Department Track Weapons Of Mass Destruction?

The Paris and Brussels attacks got a lot of people thinking about dirty bombs. After all, what if the ISIS perpetrators had acquired a radiological weapon? Top U.S. officials have worried about nuclear terrorism ever since the Soviet Union collapsed and its warheads threatened to roll away into unsavory hands. Indeed, just last month, at the international Nuclear Security Summit, President Obama asked fellow world leaders to contemplate that very prospect. But the U.S. government is also looking to Silicon Valley, and the innovation community as a whole, to help come up with solutions to this frightening problem—and a host of other difficult issues.

Last week, members of the State Department descended on Stanford University to host a daylong brainstorming session on how to contain all sorts of weapons of mass destruction, including nukes. The 150 people who showed up were a far more eclectic group than you'd find at a usual WMD confab. Wireless executives hobnobbed with criminal investigators. Analysts from microsatellite companies traded business cards with military officers. Data-mining experts rubbed elbows with some of the world's top disarmament officials.

Keeping track of warheads used to be relatively straightforward. Only a few countries had them, and they tended to stay tucked inside giant missiles. If you knew where the missiles were, you knew where the nukes were. It was no cakewalk, but the United States felt fairly confident monitoring Soviet military movements from space.

[image error]Rose Gottemoeller (L) and Zvika Krieger (R)[Photo: courtesy of E.B. Boyd]

Now, however, it's potentially much easier to build a radioactive bomb the size of a suitcase. Keeping track of all the "hot" stuff, that can be broken down into smaller pieces, is a fundamentally different puzzle than knowing how to spot big Russian trucks. The sophisticated containment system the world spent decades constructing isn't suited to this new problem. That's why some high-ranking officials—including Rose Gottemoeller, the State Department's under secretary for arms control and international security—are embracing the notion that some of the best ideas on how to tackle the new challenge might come from people who've never heard of terms like "isotopics" or "dismantlement queue." "If Amazon Prime can track billions of small objects," Gottemoeller told the crowd at Stanford, "there's no reason we can't figure out how to better track WMDs."

"If Amazon Prime can track billions of small objects, there's no reason we can't figure out how to better track WMDs."

The workshop was the latest project in a larger innovation jag spearheaded by Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Floppy-haired, blues-guitar-loving Blinken stepped into his new role early last year as the second-in-command at the State Department. In addition to his formal duties, a deputy gets to champion a few pet projects. For Blinken, building bridges to the tech community has become one of those areas of focus. "I've spent 23 years in government," he told me at a sunny campus café not far from the workshop. "More and more, it was becoming evident that many of the problems we were trying to solve were at the intersection of foreign policy and technology." The dirty bomb issue is a prime example—it takes diplomacy to coordinate other governments in the fight against terrorism, and technology to track such hard-to-trace weapons.

Standing at a podium at Stanford, Blinken described how technological innovation is now as crucial to the State Department's work as its traditional focus on economics and political affairs—even though the department isn't exactly fluent in tech. As Blinken put it, sometimes it feels like "we need scientists and technologists in the room just to tell us whether we need scientists and technologists in the room." That's why Blinken has instituted an "Innovation Forum" at the State Department, which works on convening gatherings like the WMD workshop, and which he hopes will inspire self-starting, out-of-the-box-thinking, unconventional-solution-producing innovators in the tech community to dedicate some of their time and brainpower to tackling major international issues.

For example, in January, the State Department gathered a different group, also at Stanford, to explore ways to educate the hundreds of thousands of Syrian children now living in refugee camps. Without education, those children will have limited economic opportunities in the future—and young adults with limited prospects are especially vulnerable, as Blinken put it at that gathering, to "the siren call" of terrorism. Another meeting, in New York, explored FinTech. Historically, the United States and its allies controlled bad actors by cutting off their bank accounts using antiterrorism laws. But cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin now let criminal networks make end runs around such controls. A third gathering in Washington sought new ways to monitor adherence to ceasefires, such as using smartphones and geolocation for crowdsourced reporting of violence.

[image error]Antony Blinken[Photo: courtesy of William Russo, State Department]

At the Stanford WMD conference, participants were broken into small groups, where they dove into energetic exchanges about how sensors, data, and social media might help officials track fissile material—and maybe even help identify, Minority Report-style, when someone might be planning an attack. One of the participants, Brian MacCarthy, who recently opened a strategic innovations office for Booz Allen Hamilton in Silicon Valley, listened to the discussions—and was impressed. Before he moved out West, he worked inside Washington, selling products and services to government agencies on behalf of a large IT provider. "I was in D.C. for 10 years," he noted, "and I never could have gotten this kind of a conversation going."

Blinken's ideas fall in line with a larger push in Washington to build more bridges to the tech sector and leverage the industry's creative, can-do spirit to improve the way government operates. Hillary Clinton was the first secretary of state to turn to the modern tech sector for help on the international front. The Pentagon opened an office in Silicon Valley last year, as did the Department of Homeland Security. And, as this publication explored in depth last summer, President Obama has made it a priority to get all-star tech natives to do tours of duty inside the halls of government.

Still, engineering a cultural transformation at the State Department isn't easy. Washington, like any large, powerful institution, can be set in its ways. "Just the concept of trying new things is an uphill battle," said State Department senior advisor for tech and innovation Zvika Krieger in a phone conversation after the WMD event. Krieger told me that, when he was planning one of the earlier workshops, he invited some key D.C. stakeholders to participate—but "they were very skeptical. Their point of view was, 'We've never worked with tech before, and we've been fine without them.'"

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Krieger himself doesn't share that old-school orientation. He's a thirtysomething former journalist and innovation specialist who once worked for Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter back when Carter was the number-two guy at the Pentagon. Krieger is taking an iterative approach to the workshops, designing successive events based on learnings from previous ones. "We're prototyping how we approach Silicon Valley," says Krieger, who always seems to have a merry twinkle in his eye. "We're seeing which formats work and what issues we should engage on."

The difference between traditional government approaches and Silicon Valley methods were visually palpable at the WMD event. Nuclear Security Summits, which take place biannually, are solemn meetings at which world leaders sit stiffly around enormous round tables (that, ironically, and most likely unintentionally, bear an unfortunate resemblance to the ominous war room in Dr. Strangelove). The large conference room at Stanford, by contrast, was strewn with Post-it notes and Sharpie markers, and chairs were pushed aside in favor of casual small-group discussions.

By the end of the day, the teams came up with a handful of ideas—for example, testing how effective crowdsourcing can be at identifying nuclear sites in visual data, or holding a competition to see how well various sensing technologies could identify the presence of dangerous types of radioactive material in a crowded area. The participants were clearly excited by the challenge. "I've been working on some pieces [of my research] for 20 to 30 years," said Kent Langley, a professor at Singularity University and a data-science entrepreneur. One of his companies has developed a platform that crunches large amounts of data to predict the intentions of potential customers, so a company can better market to them. One of the workshop small groups, by contrast, discussed how data could be crunched to figure out a potential terrorist's intentions. The workshop, Langley said, made him realize his work could help "save lives." "Let's do that!" he said.

This is exactly what the State Department is banking on. Blinken and Krieger know that single daylong sessions can hardly hope to produce immediately actionable solutions, but they want to spread the message that the government no longer feels a need to retain a monopoly on solving these problems. Blinken's team hopes top minds in the Valley and other innovation hubs will be inspired to take a stab at these big, gnarly questions. Their plan might be working. Just weeks after the workshop on Syrian education, some participants forged ahead on their own and tinkered with some of the ideas born during the session, such as using mobile phones for language instruction, or distributing tablets preloaded with educational content in refugee camps and recruiting solar companies to provide the panels needed to power them.

This kind of scrappy, just-dive-in response from Valley denizens gives Krieger hope. "In D.C., we would have spent months battling different bureaucratic hurdles to get all of the different stakeholders to buy in," he said, "and we would have had to find the money for it when so much of our money is apportioned years in advance."

On the other hand, Blinken and Krieger have precious little time to make headway. Obama leaves office next January. Even if a Democrat wins the White House in the fall, it's standard practice for political appointees, like Blinken, to step down, so that incoming secretaries can bring in their own teams. Blinken's "minimal viable product," then, is just to produce a credible proof of concept for his meeting-of-the-minds program. "My hope is that this becomes institutionalized by the time we leave," he said. "And that whoever follows us wants to continue it."

Photographs courtesy of E.B. Boyd, with the exception of the mushroom cloud (via Wikipedia) and the portrait of Antony Blinken (courtesy of William Russo, State Department)

U.S. Companies Dodge Paying Billions In Taxes—And You're Paying For It

Tax dodging by multinational companies is estimated to cost the U.S. government up to $111 billion a year. At the same time, companies avoid paying $100 billion in taxes to developing countries, UN figures show. Tax "leakage" (the polite term if you don't want to ascribe any agency to the companies that are very intentionally doing this) has reached epidemic dimensions, and we really ought to care more than we do. This loss of income jeopardizes public programs and ups the amount other taxpayers have to pay.

[image error]Gabriel Zucman

A new report from Oxfam America sheds light on this dark area of corporate activity. The international charity analyzed publicly available information for the 50 largest U.S. companies, looking at how they stash profits overseas (to avoid taxes at home) and how they take advantage of various tax breaks and loopholes. The numbers are jaw-dropping. Between 2008 and 2014, the corporations received 27 times more in federal loans, loan guarantees, and bailouts than they paid in federal taxes. They kept $1.4 trillion in profits offshore (just four financial institutions had 10,688 offshore subsidiaries in 2014). And they paid an effective tax rate of 26.5%—well below the statutory rate of 35%. (Oxfam's estimate is likely conservative; others have put the effective rate at nearer 20%.)

The 50 largest U.S. corporations kept $1.4 trillion in profits offshore. And they paid an effective tax rate of 26.5%—well below the statutory rate of 35%.

Take a look at the interactive table here. It shows what the 50 companies received in loans, guarantees, and bailouts; what they paid in taxes; what they held offshore; and how much they spent in tax-related lobbying. Heavy machinery group Caterpillar is a good example. Between 2008 and 2014, Oxfam says it received $5.5 billion in federal support, had $3.7 billion in profits, paid $837 million in all local and federal taxes, got tax breaks worth $459 million, and held $2 billion offshore in 72 subsidiaries. At the same time, it spent $26 million in tax-related lobbying, and had an effective rate of 22.6%.

[image error]Pew Resarch

Usefully, the Oxfam report explains how corporations avoid taxes. First, they claim profits are "permanently reinvested" in places like Bermuda. (In 2008, the Government Accountability Office found 18,857 subsidiaries registered at a single office in the Cayman Islands.) But this money isn't useless. They can still use it as collateral against domestic borrowing, in effect repatriating it in another form.

Second, companies can shift assets such as intellectual property to offshore locations, then pay royalties to that location from the U.S. base, thus reducing their taxable profits. Technology companies are particularly adept at this. According to a report in Fortune, Uber has transferred its IP to Bermuda, leaving less than 2% of net revenue taxable in the U.S. Airbnb does something similar.

Uber has transferred its IP to Bermuda, leaving less than 2% of net revenue taxable in the U.S.

Third, they do what's known as "earnings stripping," where a subsidiary in a high-tax country will borrow money from a low-tax jurisdiction, allowing the parent company to pay interest to itself. The company as a whole doesn't lose money, but it can show fewer profits in the location where it's taxed at a higher rate, thus reducing its tax bill.

And, finally, and perhaps most egregiously, companies can carry out an "inversion." That's where they buy a foreign competitor for the sole purpose of establishing a tax base in a lower-rate location. That was the maneuver behind drugmaker Pfizer's proposed (but now rejected) merger with Dublin-based Allergan. (Ireland's tax laws make it a common location for tax-dodging schemes, which is why many companies inexplicably have a Dublin office.)

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Oxfam concedes that its 2008-2014 federal support figures are inflated by the Wall Street bailout and the auto bailout, and that a lot of federal loans are returned with interest. However, it says "the data is useful to observe in aggregate because it puts in stark relief the taxpayer-financed benefits large companies in general enjoy in relation to the taxes they pay."

Also, it says some of the tax calculations are probably generous to companies, because they're based on their own disclosures and include "deferred tax liabilities," which are monies companies owe (and book as taxes) but don't actually pay.

The report shows corporate tax avoidance running amok, enabled by complicit lawmakers, an extensive offshore industry of lawyers and accountants, and a normalized moral calculus that says dodging taxes is okay because everyone is doing it.

Except everyone isn't doing it. Companies say they do a lot of good with the money they don't give to government, including job creation, charitable giving, and producing innovative products. But the question we have to ask is this: How come it's okay for multinationals to go to extraordinary lengths to avoid taxes, when small businesses and individuals have to pay the full rate? It's this double standard that needs addressing.

How To Make A Better Business Case For Diversity

Pondering the business case for diversity, Todd L. Pittinsky, a professor of technology and society at Stony Brook University, observes something isn't quite right. "Different kinds of people will come up with different kinds of ideas, and the more variety, the better," he writes in Harvard Business Review. Multiple studies have backed this up.

However, he asks, if that's the case, then why has Silicon Valley consistently been a locus of innovation? Pittinsky rightly notes that there are other kinds of diversity in the Valley, particularly foreign workers on H-1B visas. And just touting the boost to the bottom line by having more women and people of color doesn't really stand as an argument when tech is an industry that consistently delivers profits.

"Should we just drop the subject? Abandon the cause?" he asks. "No, we shouldn't. But we do need to be more honest about our motives and about the case to be made for diversity." Pittinsky argues that there are more accurate business cases to be made.

Much the way the gender pay gap can't be boiled down to one single cents on the dollar figure, Pittinsky illustrates that there are nuanced ways to approach support for diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Workplace diversity has an impact on social good, Pittinsky says. A global study from Harvard University indicates that countries with social cohesion experience greater economic growth. How to get more socially cohesive? By diversifying the population.

Companies investing in diversity shouldn't expect a quick return. But the long-term gains are evident.

"The more the members of an organically diverse society enjoy that diversity and see the visible benefits of investing in shared prosperity and the common good, the more secure and resilient that society will be," he writes.

This has been true for the U.S. economy as waves of immigrants have come through and assimilated over centuries. And this is the other side of this argument: Companies investing in diversity shouldn't expect a quick return. But the long-term gains are evident.

Multiple studies show that positive emotions boost individual and team performance. Bias, on the other hand, is laden with negative emotions such as fear, contempt, and anger, which are collectively detrimental to collaboration and creativity.

But people who are not like us should not merely be tolerated. Pittinsky cites his own research that measured allophilia, otherwise known as positive and not just tolerant attitudes toward a group other than one's own. Teams and organizations with higher allophilia were more likely to display "open communication, feelings of inclusion, mentoring across genders and ethnicity, and bringing one's whole self to work," he writes. Who wouldn't want to work for a company that fosters this kind of environment?

Building an "us plus them" mind-set is essentially laying the foundation for a company's entire culture. Pittinsky's own research finds that leaders are able to bring together not just a group of diverse individuals, but their respective subgroups, too. The trick is to not have to turn all those people into a collective "we" to achieve consensus quickly.

To be truly innovative, there has to be an exchange of ideas through debate among diverse groups. A cohort of researchers who wrote "Collective Genius," a paper on leadership and innovation, found:

All too often, leaders and their groups solve problems through domination or compromise, resulting in less than inventive solutions. Innovation requires integrating ideas—combining option A and option B, even if they once seemed mutually exclusive—to create a new and better option.

This, the researchers argue, can only be achieved through these three methods:

Creative abrasion. The ability to generate ideas through discourse and debate
Creative agility. The ability to test and experiment through quick pursuit, reflection, and adjustment
Creative resolution. The ability to make decisions that combine disparate and sometimes even opposing ideas

A leader is able to create the context to allow innovation to unfold by encouraging ideas from a diverse team whose members believe they can truly bring their whole selves to work. This has implications far beyond the company's walls. As Pittinsky says: "If we can become more disciplined and precise in learning how to create and maintain [diversity] in the right ways, this will make for a more prosperous and productive economy in the future."

via HBR

7 Essential Lessons From The Harvard Innovation Lab

Jodi Goldstein knows a thing or two about innovation. With more than 20 years' experience as a high-tech entrepreneur and investor with a focus on consumer technology and a stint as a venture capitalist, she's held leadership posts at several startups, including PlanetAll, a social networking site that sold to Amazon in 1998 for more than $100 million.

Now, she heads up the Harvard Innovation Lab (I-lab), a collaboration and education space launched in 2011 to help develop students' interest in entrepreneurship and innovation. A Harvard MBA herself, it's her job to get students to develop bold creative ideas and bring them to fruition. She uses a cross-disciplinary approach—her bosses are the deans of all 12 schools within the university, so no pressure there—to foster new ways of thinking.

"The diversity of ideas is pretty profound," she says. Current I-lab entrepreneurs are working on projects that range from creating snack foods from insects to improving the lives of those in the military. The lab has been the incubator for more than 600 startups since its launch.

Over the years, Goldstein has learned some important lessons about how to create an environment where innovation thrives. Here are seven essentials.

Innovators are intellectually curious and thrive on absorbing new information that may help their ideas. The I-lab holds regular programming and has a mentoring program to help innovators learn as much as they want to learn. Even if you don't have the benefit of the I-lab, continually seeking out the information you need and people who can teach you essential skills and information is an important part of being innovative, she says.

"Pick a vertical. Pick a focus area. Keep it simple."

Big ideas are great, but most of us have limited resources. Trying to be the next Amazon or Google right out of the gate is going to lead to burnout and frustration. Instead, try a more focused approach and grow from there, she says. If you want to lay the groundwork for a big idea, focus on developing one segment of it until it has strong roots. "Pick a vertical. Pick a focus area. Keep it simple," she says.

Whether it's in the marketplace or between peers, competition can create a sense of urgency and motivation that can spur innovation. Goldstein tells her students that finding a competitor already in the marketplace is a sign that someone else has looked into the idea and found a market for it. To succeed, they just have to do it better.

The I-lab also holds challenges where students are given a problem in the world and form teams to come up with solutions. That kind of creative exercise and working with teammates in a competitive environment can develop problem-solving skills that help innovative thinking, she says.

Many people can come up with a good idea. However, from the team you assemble to how your product or service will be formed, marketed, and delivered, the real opportunity for innovation lies in how you make it happen, Goldstein says.

"A diversity of backgrounds and experiences is absolutely critical," she says. If you have a group of people who all have the same experiences, viewpoints, and backgrounds, you're limiting the potential for innovation. The I-lab's cross-disciplinary approach brings together people who may never have met, she says. A student with a public policy background may be working with a PhD in chemistry or a law school student. I-lab founders often say they never would have come up with their ideas or ventures if they hadn't met people who thought differently than they did, Goldstein says.

People who go to Harvard are not really used to failing, Goldstein says. She encourages them to get over it. Being creative and innovative means that you're going to try many things that don't work. You have to develop prototypes that aren't right and try approaches that bomb before you get to the combination that works, she says. If you get your feelings hurt or throw in the towel because your first iteration was truly awful, you're not going to be able to free yourself to be truly innovative.

If you throw in the towel because your first iteration was truly awful, you're not going to be able to free yourself to be truly innovative.

"We do a lot around here around design thinking and human-centered design, testing early ideas with customers, really giving them the opportunity to fail fast before you spend six months or a year building a product that no one wants to buy. We work with them quite a bit on that," she says.

When Goldstein brings in founders to speak with students, she doesn't want them to share the "happily ever after" version of their stories—she wants to hear about what went wrong and how they handled it. You learn more from mistakes—and from hearing about mistakes—than from successes. She wants her students to know that the stories of "overnight successes" are often predicated by long periods of frustration and attempts at innovation.

"We all know too well that [immediate success] is the exception, not the rule. That's what you end up hearing about, but that's not reality. It's a long slog, and it takes a lot longer than they think it's going to be," she says.

How To Handle Clashing Personalities On Your New Leadership Team

Picture this: You're an entrepreneur ready to get your startup off the ground, and you have just the right people in mind to build your team. A friend of yours, a former CEO at a publicly traded company, has agreed to be a partner. Another friend, also a former executive, is excited to sit on your board.

Before you know it, you've got a team of former execs on your hands, and you're beginning to wonder how they're all going to get along when none of them is the sole person in the driver's seat.

A lot goes into building the perfect leadership team for a startup. You want someone who's motivated and doesn't let the small failures discourage them. You want someone who has the resources to commit to your business for the long term. You may also want someone with past entrepreneurial or leadership experience and knows what it takes to run a successful enterprise.

Chances are that each of your new partners covers one or two of your bases and not others.

It would be great if everyone you bring on board checks off all of these boxes equally, but that's far from likely. Instead, chances are that each of your new partners covers one or two of your bases and not others. And that's just when it comes to experience, not personality.

All this is fine—even if it does mean your team ends up looking like a mishmash of former executives and C-level managers. The truth is that having a variety of backgrounds and experiences in different industries can be an asset. And while it's sometimes a bad idea to hire too many people with executive experience into rigid corporations, seasoned employees who can fulfill a multitude of business roles can generally give a huge boost to a startup.



"The most successful businesses result from the marriage of different skills, backgrounds, and personalities," Jon Smith, CEO of Pobble, tells me. "You'll have different opinions and ideas. However, invariably, those are the tough conversations that catapult you forward."

But just because an employee used to be in the C-suite at their old job doesn't mean they're guaranteed the same position in your startup. Making that transition isn't always easy. As the founder, you face a big challenge you might not have counted on: To get your very first handful of employees—your startup's leadership team—to work with you, not for or against you. Setting the tone and ensuring your whole team is on board with your vision and business concept is the prerequisite for getting anything done together.

That starts by recognizing that while you may have recruited a bunch of execs to join you, they're all entrepreneurial-minded in one way or another—otherwise they'd never have come on board. That's potentially a major factor in any personality clashes you may have to mediate. Entrepreneurs are largely defined by their innovative spirit and passion for trying new things. Your first step should be to identify your new team members' individual passions and plan how to use them to your company's advantage.

So while keeping everyone focused on the piece of the business you've hired them to cover is an organizational challenge—the marketing expert as CMO, the data wonk as CTO—it doesn't stop there. A successful founder needs to keep egos from clashing as well. Chances are that your new marketing head, especially if they're someone with C-level experience elsewhere, will have opinions about more than just your company's marketing strategy. That can be either an asset or a problem, depending on your approach as ringleader.

So how do you encourage a group of individuals who've never worked together before, let alone in a new startup, to communicate with one another and work as a team?

If these folks have agreed to work with you, chances are they already agree with your overarching vision for the new company, its goals, and your shared values.

The key to uniting a group of diverse individuals is to play on each team member's passion for your business—even when that leads to different perspectives on it. Coax out their individual entrepreneurial instincts rather than try and suppress them. If these folks have agreed to work with you, chances are they already agree with your overarching vision for the new company, its goals, and your shared values. As long as there's agreement there, differences of opinion on more tactical and strategic issues can still be productive, even if they get occasionally heated.

At team meetings, explicitly outline how each of your team members, with their different backgrounds, will help accomplish the goals you set for the company. Clarify—explicitly and repeatedly—how each person's job function is as important as the next. Especially in the early days, when a single person fulfills a role there will one day be an entire department to cover, this can be particularly useful.

Finally, it isn't overstepping to tell your team members to bring a positive attitude and smile on their faces, because you're all working together. It was their accumulated past experience that made them experts in leadership roles at established companies, not the titles they held there. It's skill sets and mind-sets that you need more than impressive CVs. After all, that's what separates a successful team of entrepreneurs from the pack.

Why Criticism Is So Tough To Swallow (And How To Make It Go Down Easier)

A few years ago, I was working hard on a scrappy document that would eventually blossom into my first-ever book. It was still very early in the project, and I was hungry for guidance. So I was delighted that a colleague, who I'll call Matt, had agreed to review my efforts and offer some constructive feedback. When he did, it went something like this:

Matt: "You're doing great! Here's what I think you should change . . . [followed by a thoughtful explanation of six suggestions for improvement] Other than that, it's great!"

Me: "Um, okay, thanks."

Matt was diligently following advice he'd once been given about the right way to give feedback. In his mind, he was making a tasty "praise sandwich"—saying one positive thing on either side of his criticism in order to make his comments feel less demotivating. He was trying to be considerate, yet I'd walked away feeling strangely discouraged. It was the opposite of what he'd intended.

That was hardly surprising, though, given a few things we know about the way our brains work.

Praise is a social reward that's very appealing. But on balance, we are more sensitive to threats than to rewards.

At any given time, brains are subconsciously scanning the world around us for dangers to defend against—ready to launch a fight, flight, or freeze response that will protect us from predators or poisons. But the brain doesn't just guard us against physical threats. Research has found that it also goes on the defensive in response to things that threaten to undermine our social standing and safety, including interactions that make us feel even mildly rejected or incompetent. Since even being glanced at askance by a stranger can be enough to trigger our defenses, you can bet that receiving critical feedback is pretty likely to spark a fight, flight, or freeze response.

That matters because when our brains are in defensive mode, studies have shown that there's . That's where our most sophisticated mental machinery generally lives: the neural systems responsible for self-control, reasoning, and forethought.

So it's no wonder we don't always respond graciously to feedback; it's quite likely that our most thoughtful, attentive, flexible selves are somewhat offline. In fact, it's possible that we're not even properly listening. By the time Matt got to the third of his six suggestions, I was daydreaming about giving up the whole idea of writing a book (and considering what would happen if I perhaps punched him, gently).



And as for Matt's praise? Surely his warm words should have offset the sense of threat in my mind, right? Not exactly. It's true that our brains constantly seek out rewards as well as threats. That's why we're drawn toward things that make us feel good—and praise is a social reward that's very appealing. But on balance, we are more sensitive to threats than to rewards. From an evolutionary standpoint, it's more important to be able to bolt from a burning house than to charge toward a cozy fireside sofa.

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What's more, it's easier for our brains to process and remember specifics than to handle conceptual ideas. Research has found that we remember concrete words like "chair" better than abstract words like "comfort." As a result, if we hear a generic positive statement ("It's great! You're great!") followed by a list of specific things we should change, our brains will quickly discount that quick splash of praise and focus entirely on the negatives.

That's what made it so hard for me to digest Matt's praise sandwich. He meant well, but he might just as well have said, "Hey, here's a bunch of things you need to do better," since that's pretty much all I heard.

Thankfully, this understanding of the brain reveals a little routine that we can all use to ensure that helpful feedback lands as it's intended. It goes like this:

Tell the other person: "What I like about this is . . ." Give meaningful, specific examples of what you like, and explain why you like them. Aim for as many concrete positive points as you can. Don't rush.
Then say: "What would make me like it even more is . . ."

The goal in the first of these two steps is to be at least as tangible and forthcoming in your praise as you are in your criticism—not just saying "it's great," but what specifically is "great" about it. (Matt might've said, "I really liked the way you pulled in survey data to support your argument, for example in the section on page two. It tells a great story and sticks in the reader's mind.") These sorts of details matter; they make it far more likely that the person properly absorbs the fact that you value aspects of whatever they've said or done.

Be at least as concrete and forthcoming in your praise as you are in your criticism.

Then, when you introduce your suggestion for improvement with the phrase, "What would make me like it even more," you're framing your comment as an idea that—if explored—could take the other person from good to great, rather than something they were really dumb not to have done. You're still making the point you need to make, but it feels much less threatening to your listener's competence and self-respect than the usual, "How about doing this differently?"

Taken together, these two sentences can greatly improve your chances of keeping the other person's brain out of defensive mode as you give them feedback, making it far more likely that you'll have a productive and good-natured conversation. This way, they can actually process your feedback intelligently and decide whether to act on it.

For what it's worth, this "What I like . . ." feedback model can help you as the feedback-giver, too, because being forced to find something you like—however hard it is to uncover it—often reveals something useful that you might've missed had you led with your criticisms.

Finally, if you're the one habitually receiving feedback rather than giving it, you can do what I eventually did with Matt, which is to simply ask him to give me brain-friendly feedback. I didn't have to use any jargon, either. "First of all, can you tell me exactly what you liked and why?" I said. "It's important for me to learn from that. I want to know what I should keep doing, or do more of. Then you can tell me what would make you like it even more!" The result? A fine, fistfight-free working relationship—and a finished book to boot.

Caroline Webb is the author of How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavior Science to Transform Your Working Life (Crown Business, 2016) and is CEO of Sevenshift, a firm specializing in science-based coaching.

Update: A previous version of this article ran with the headline "Why Sweetening Your Criticism With Compliments Makes Everything Worse."