David Lidsky's Blog, page 2746

Forget Millennials--Why You Should Hire Someone Over 55

If Silicon Valley companies are supposed to shy away from hiring people with gray hair, no one told Maggie Leung.

The senior director of content at NerdWallet, a San Francisco-based financial information website, has made a point of seeking out experienced hires since she joined the company in 2013. She was "immediately at least 15 years older than most people" at the roughly 50-person firm, which has since grown to more than 300 people.

"When considering applicants, we look for candidates with experience at outlets with high standards. This tends to include older people, because they often spent years working to reach that level," she says. Since her arrival, Leung has added about a dozen people over age 55 to her team.

While the unemployment rate for people age 55-plus was just 3.9% in March 2016, there are also some harsher realities for mature workers.

Labor force participation in this age group was just north of 40% in March 2016, versus 81.5% of people aged 25 to 54, according to the St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Forty-five percent of job seekers 55-plus were out of work for 27 weeks or more in 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A 2015 report by AARP found that almost half (48%) of the re-employed respondents said that they were earning less in their current jobs than their most recent job before unemployment.

And while those numbers paint a pretty dismal picture, there are two contradictory trends going on, says Ruth Finkelstein, associate director of the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center at Columbia University. People are staying in the workforce longer for a variety of reasons, which includes enjoying their jobs, wanting to delay retirement, being healthy and physically able to do so, or economic reasons.

But if you lose your job after age 55, it can be much harder to find another one, she says. Finkelstein says that research indicates employers worry about older workers' ability to perform job functions or their health care costs. But overlooking the benefits of hiring older workers is being shortsighted, she adds.

Mature workers offer some important advantages, including staying in their jobs longer, Finkelstein says. BLS data backs this up. The 2014 Employee Tenure Report found that 58% of older workers had 10 or more years of tenure compared to an average of 37.3% of people in their 40s. That loyalty can mean lower turnover costs.

Lisa Sterling, executive vice president and chief people officer in the Milwaukee office of Ceridian, a global human capital management technology company, says that while many companies are focused on Gen Y or "Gen 2020" employees, there is vast opportunity in the 55-plus market to find skilled, experienced employees. "They understand how businesses work, have important people and office skills, and often require less training to get up to speed," she says.

Mature workers also come to the table with a wealth of contacts and a track record that illustrates their strengths, says Lauren Griffin, senior vice president at staffing firm Adecco Staffing USA. While some employers worry that older workers aren't adept in tech tools or platforms, that's more related to the individual than the age, Griffin says. She recently told a millennial job candidate to update his LinkedIn profile.

"They also communicate well. Years of navigating the workplace environment often give them the diplomatic skills to navigate the workplace," she says.

At SYNERGY Home Care of South Jersey, it's not unusual for owner Dennis Crippen to hire workers who are in their 60s and 70s. Concerns about their physical ability are unfounded, and he finds they are able to connect with the clients who need the company's home care services. Crippen says it's important to get beyond stereotypes, whether it's "assuming that older workers can't fulfill certain tasks, or that younger workers are always on their phones." When you think of people that way, you miss out on good hires, he says.

As companies become more aware of the benefits of hiring older workers, there are also entities and programs ready to help.

iRelaunch is an organization that helps people re-enter the workforce after they've taken a break.
Workforce50.com helps mature workers connect with jobs.
Senior Job Bank lists jobs for people 50 and over.

Of course, good, old-fashioned outreach works, too. Leung recently hired an automotive writer she found on LinkedIn who was near retirement. She says he hesitated because he thought he'd finish his career with his previous employer, but she won him over with "a compelling offer" because she thought he'd be a good fit for the company.

"It's important to think of it as a mind-set rather than an age-related thing. It's about really being able to grow and adapt and have the humility to learn rather than to say, 'Only people of a certain age can do that,'" she says.

How Women And Minority Leaders Can Avoid The Glass Cliff

We've all heard about the "glass ceiling"—that unseen, unbreakable barrier that tends to keep women and minorities from reaching top corporate jobs. It turns out there's also a "glass cliff." In 2013, Utah State University researchers Alison Cook and Christy Glass found that corporate boards are more likely to promote women and minorities to top leadership roles at times of crisis, then replace them with more "traditional" leaders when things improve.

If things don't improve, poor firm performance justifies companies pushing out so-called "risky" hires. Cook and Glass call this process the "savior effect" since, in the majority of cases, companies replace women and minorities with white men. In fact, women succeeded other women or minority CEOs in only four of the 608 transitions over a 15-year period, according to the researchers.

Women succeeded other women or minority CEOs in only four of the 608 transitions over a 15-year period, according to the researchers.

This tells us that not only do women and minorities have a disproportionately harder time moving up the talent pipeline in the first place, they also get riskier leadership opportunities when they get there. So how do you avoid the glass cliff in an otherwise great promotion offer? By staying vigilant, even when you've reached the top. Here's how.

Self-awareness can go a long way before and after you say yes. Ask yourself why you, and not someone else, are being picked for this promotion.

Every successful leader needs to know not just their own strengths and weaknesses, but also how others perceive them. Yes, you're hardworking, intelligent, and charismatic, but organizations promote people for more reasons than just those. Furthermore, research shows that we are poor self-evaluators: The average correlation between our sense of self at work and objective assessments is pretty low. We're likely to both overrate and underrate key skills.

Women and minorities have been found to underrate their performance as leaders at higher rates than others. Yet studies have also shown that the most effective and successful leaders have more accurate self-perceptions than others. To understand why you're being selected for a top job, you need to reflect on your capabilities as objectively as possible.

Julia Pierson was the first woman , in 2013, with explicit instructions to clean up the agency in the wake of a prostitution scandal. Pierson's appointment came after her predecessor's seven-year tenure, a job he kept even after revelations that two civilians had crept past multiple layers of security to crash a state dinner at the White House. Moreover, prior to Pierson's arrival, the Secret Service was known to be understaffed and underfunded—its problems may have stemmed from poor leadership, but they also came from scarce resources.

Whether or not Pierson took this into account, the glass cliff phenomenon was clear: The organization had hit a rough patch and recruited a qualified woman to shake things up. Yet, unlike her predecessor, Pierson was asked to resign amid heavy criticism after an intruder entered the White House.

Each organization has a history, and you should know it. To avoid being caught off guard, learn the ins and outs of your company, establish your footing as you advance in your career, and keep a certain amount of skepticism about top jobs. You should always be well aware of your company's performance as evaluated by key stakeholders—consumers, employees, the board, and the public.

The more you know, the better you can negotiate an arrangement that doesn't leave you absorbing unmerited blame in the end.

You may be thought to have qualities that make you a better leader in a crisis, like being empathic or fair, but the higher chances of failure that you're likely to face might override those. The more you know, the better you can negotiate an arrangement that doesn't leave you absorbing unmerited blame in the end.

When Irene Rosenfeld was hired in 2006 as CEO of Kraft (now Mondelez), her job was to "effect company turnaround." Reflecting in Forbes three years later, Rosenfeld says her biggest achievement was "rewiring the organization."

In her first year, she "changed over half of the top levels of management," ensured that "key leaders are well-aligned on the objective of changing Kraft's trajectory," and placed "the right people in key jobs to essentially support and execute against that agenda." To do all this, Rosenfeld had to connect across all stakeholders, including actively engaging difficult investors. She calls this "servant leadership," a way to "engage the hearts and minds" of followers.

The key to her success, in other words, was influence. Contrary to Rosenfeld's case, women are forced out of top jobs at higher rates than men, according to a 2013 Strategy& report. Researchers in that study say one reason is because women are often recruited from outside the company—35% of women compared to 22% of men.

That makes those women more vulnerable—as external hires, they're more likely to lack the institutional knowledge needed to diagnose problems quickly. "That women CEOs are more often outsiders may be an indication that companies have not been able to cultivate enough female executives in house," one of the report's authors writes.

Yes, you're hardworking, intelligent, and charismatic, but organizations promote people for more reasons than just those.

What's the best way to combat this? According to Geri Denterlien, the owner of a communications firm who has 30 years of experience coaching executives, women who stay at the top know how to "travel outside of the C-suite." As she explains, "Women are often hired after the organization has faced an ethical problem, precisely because they are perceived as ethical leaders. The most effective women who take these posts also have the ability to conduct 'retail politics'."

That's a powerful lesson. These leaders, Denterlien says, "don't insulate themselves with the corporate message; they connect across all levels of the company to win people over. This is hard to do in tough times, but necessary to be influential." Building that influence may not rely on the leadership skills you feel the company has in mind when offering you a leadership role, but if you fear there may be a glass cliff on the other side of the offer, it's smart to start getting people in your corner.

And as Rosenfeld's experience makes clear, this isn't just about self-preservation. Call it "servant leadership," "retail politics," or whatever you like, but without first getting as many people in your corner as you can, you'll have a hard time getting done what you were brought in to do. What's worse for a leader than being cornered in at the top is when the ground falls out from underneath.

How Mark Zuckerberg Is Making His Weird Video Future Happen

"In the future, you'll be able to snap your fingers and pull out a photo and make it as big as you want."

"A lot of things that we think about as physical objects today ... will actually just be $1 apps in an AR app store."

"In a decade, video will look like as big of a shift in the way we all share and communicate as mobile has been."

These are just a few of the wide-sweeping proclamations that Mark Zuckerberg made on stage during his keynote at Facebook's annual F8 conference yesterday, during which he waved to a live-streaming drone and pulled out a comedically oversized, eight-foot-tall carbon fiber engine pod for a Facebook plane built to extend the world's Internet access.

Today, Facebook's CTO Mike Schroepfer showed off the company's interactive VR platform for the first time, which included the ability to transport to a famous landmark and shoot a photo of yourself with a virtual selfie stick.

It should all sound like a very bad Carrot Top gag. But more and more, it seems like the most remarkable thing that separates Zuckerberg from his contemporaries is his ability to plant signposts that point to the future, describing his vision for Facebook very clearly—and convincing an entire tech industry to get in line and help build the road that leads to it.

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At F8, those signposts were about the future of virtual reality, augmented reality, and video streaming. Facebook announced that any camera will soon be able to stream to Facebook Live—including drones. And it even created a $30,000 open source 360-degree camera that anyone can build to share immersive, VR-ready video. What could you do with such a thing? Facebook showed that, too—how about create a virtual environment at a famous landmark, where you could visit, shoot selfies, and share those images in your Facebook feed?

And this is all on top of Facebook's updated, chatbot-controlled Facebook Messenger.

[image error]Facebook

Zuckerberg has talked in grandiose terms before, of course, but maybe it's time that we all start taking him seriously when he does it. His earlier ramblings, which included the idea that within 10 years Facebook would become what's been described as a "metaverse," or a second world constructed in virtual reality and augmented reality, may have seemed crazy just a year ago. But take a quick look at Zuckerberg's recent track record: He's figured out how social networks can actually make money (while Twitter still can't). He's taken over news by deciding that Facebook could be the world's largest publisher. And all of the very real, virtual reality headsets that just started shipping to the public? Zuckerberg's $2 billion investment in Oculus—in an objectively out-there vision for the future—singlehandedly drove the whole tech industry to invest in this space.

Not a lot of other companies call their home runs before they swing.

Not a lot of other companies call their home runs before they swing. Apple develops its designs in total stealth mode, to be unveiled, hopefully, at the perfect time to change the world by being ahead of the pack (see the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad). Microsoft calls some of its shots, but it fails too often to take seriously. Will Hololens be a hit? It looks incredible, but then again, when is the last time Microsoft succeeded at breaking entirely new ground? When it tried to launch tablets in the early aughts, it failed. The Microsoft Surface is gaining traction, but it stands on the shoulders of the iPad.

[image error]Facebook via Mashable

And then there's Google. Don't get me started on Google. It just bets on everything, and in doing so, it sort of bets on nothing. The company will back out of a new piece of hardware or software overnight (see: Google Reader, Google Talk, and Picasa). If I had to compare Zuckerberg and Facebook to any person or company, it might be Elon Musk—the only other guy who can show us something like the Hyperloop and get at least half of Silicon Valley's investors to join in a slow clap for the idea. The main difference is that I imagine Zuckerberg spent more of his youth watching Lawnmower Man and The Matrix than reading Cold War-era Soviet rocket manuals.

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Zuckerberg may fail. He certainly has before. Maybe virtual reality won't take off in five to 10 years, and no one will share video on Facebook because all the young people are using the great great grandchild of Snapchat. Maybe his vision of the future isn't the one we'll actually want when we get there.

But when I read about virtual selfie sticks and drones live-streaming video to Facebook, all I can think is, "Sure, Zuck, if you say so, man!" Zuckerberg's big talk and bullish investments already have me stumbling around my dining room with a smartphone strapped to my head. He might actually pull this whole thing off.

Cover Photo: The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images

An Infographic Look At Who 7,000 "Game Of Thrones" Fans Think Will Die This Season

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate of everybody drops to zero. On Game of Thrones, though, pretty much everybody's timeline seems to get truncated a whole lot faster. One determined GoT superfan recently tried to anticipate how the valar morghulis philosophy will play out in the coming season.

[image error]Photo: Helen Sloan, courtesy of HBO

Someone who goes by the handle Iron Bank of Braavos surveyed more than 7,000 fellow Redditors to get an idea of the consensus votes for most likely to meet an end soon. Following the prodigious voter turnout, Iron Bank was kind enough to assemble an infographic with the data that functions as a sort of Westerosi deadpool. Considering that the Reddit audience are more likely to go beyond casual fandom into the realm of those who've watched every episode, read the books, and gotten house sigil tatts, these choices are less than random.

At a whopping 12.8% of the vote, Balon Greyjoy is pegged for death this season. Seems like a bet Co.Create would take! All the way down at the bottom of the list with 0.2% of the vote is Arya Stark, whose chances of seeing Season 7 do seem all but written in the blood of wildlings. Perhaps the proof that people are voting from educated guesses, though, and not merely their hearts' desires, is that Ramsey Bolton is all the way down at No. 9. He would be way higher in Co.Create's personal deadpool.

Have a look at more picks in the infographic below, and let us know in the comments who you think is a goner.

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[via SomeEntertainment]

Amazon's Kindle Oasis: The Highest-End High-End Kindle So Far

For years, the conventional wisdom about Amazon's Kindle e-reader was that the company, which likes to say that it wants to make money when customers use its products, would eventually make buying e-books irresistible by offering a Kindle e-reader for free. But Amazon has refused to play along. For the time being, the cheapest Kindle is $80, which is actually 10 bucks more than the least expensive model of a few years ago.

My hunch is that Amazon isn't under much pressure to slash Kindle prices to nothing—or at least next to nothing—because most of us already own free Kindle e-readers, in the form of smartphones that can run the company's Kindle app. That's left the company free to pursue a strategy that I sure didn't see coming: It's been releasing ever-more refined, high-end Kindle e-readers, aimed at people who love the idea of a device that's optimized for reading, and only reading.

This trend became clear in 2014, when Amazon released the $200 Kindle Voyage. With its sleek industrial design and ultra-readable E Ink display, it supplanted the Kindle Paperwhite as the the top-of-the-line Kindle.

And now the company is introducing the Kindle Oasis, teased by Jeff Bezos last week and then leaked in more or less its entirety. The $290 model, which starts shipping on April 27, does to the Voyage what the Voyage did to the Paperwhite. But it accomplishes that with some new twists which, if it weren't for the leak, would be wholly unexpected.

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In designing the Oasis, Amazon made most of the device really thin via a unique design gambit: It shoved most of the electronics into an thicker, 8.5mm pod on the left-hand side of the device. (Or, if you choose, the right-hand side—the e-reader has an accelerometer, and will flip the display around if you rotate it by 180 degrees.) That let it shave the rest of the case down to 3.4mm, or less than half the thickness of the Voyage. The thick-thin design gives the Oasis a handle of sorts and evokes both a folded-back dead-tree paperback and the original 2007 Kindle, which sported a quirky angled case that disappeared in the second-generation model.

Amazon also greatly reduced the e-reader's bezel—except on that edge with the rear hump, which provides room for page-turning buttons—leaving the case size far more pocketable than before. It's so diminutive that you might be tempted to call it the Kindle Mini, if it weren't for the fact that the display size remains 6", the same as with nearly every other Kindle ever made. This time around, the monochrome E Ink display isn't a radical upgrade from the excellent 300-dpi version in the Voyage, but Amazon did move the LED lighting from the bottom of the screen to the side, thereby allowing it to boost the brightness by squeezing in additional LEDs.

One of the Kindle's signature features has always been its marathon battery life—up to six weeks in the case of the Voyage, assuming that you read on average for a half hour a day. I always assumed that such endurance was sacrosanct, but with the Kindle Oasis, Amazon has messed with its recipe in a new way. The device is so small and thin that it packs a rather dinky battery, which Amazon says provides up to two weeks of power, again based on an average of 30 minutes of reading a day. But every Oasis comes with a posh leather case with a much beefier built-in battery. The case snaps on magnetically—its battery sits next to the hump on the e-reader, and fills in the surrounding area—turning the whole package into an e-reader that can run for up to two months, a new Kindle record.

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When the Oasis is in its case, it automatically draws power from the battery; if you plug it into power, the e-reader and case charge as if they were one. And the cases, which are available in three styles, are beautifully crafted. Basically, you can choose between having a really thin Kindle with reasonable battery life and a chunkier one with incredible battery life, and switch back and forth on the fly.

The Oasis is polished in an idiosyncratic, Amazonian way.

Judging from a bit of hands-on time I had with a Kindle Oasis during a briefing by Amazon executives, the device pushes the Kindle line a bit closer to the original vision that Jeff Bezos articulated back in 2007, which was that a Kindle should disappear in your hands. It looks wonderfully polished. But it's polished in an idiosyncratic, Amazonian way. I can't imagine that cramming all the electronics in a gadget into a lump on one side will start a trend among other gadget makers, and many Kindle aficionados, I suspect, will be perfectly happy with the battery life of a lesser Kindle.

At $280, the Oasis is the priciest e-reader that Amazon has offered in many years, and it may cater to a niche rather than being the romantic ideal of every Kindle still to come. Anyone who doesn't want to pay that sort of money for a Kindle still has lots of options. All the current models will remain on the market: the $200 Kindle Voyage, the $120 Paperwhite, and the $80 plain old Kindle.

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In an era of smartphones and tablets, you might assume that a monochromatic computer devoted to reading would be an anachronism, doomed to suffer through a long decline until it finally goes away. But Amazon, which is famous for not providing actual sales figures for its products, says that Kindle sales continue to grow. The arrival of the Oasis is confirmation that the device has avoided the fate of a frozen-in-time gizmo such as iPod: It's not just still on the market, but evolving in ways that go beyond superficial tweaks and cost reductions. For now, at least, there's life in the old e-reader yet.

The Company That Brought You Talking Barbie Will Now Help You Make A Chatbot

When ToyTalk's founders, Oren Jacob and Martin Reddy, began the company in 2011, the most obvious application for their automated conversation technology—which orchestrates speech recognition, natural language processing, and selection of dialogue in real time—was toys. Both founders were familiar with children's stories, having 26 years at Pixar between them, and they began making mobile games, like The Winston Show and SpeakaLegend, with characters that could converse with kids. Soon, they hatched partnerships that gave voice to characters like Barbie and Thomas the Tank Engine.

What ToyTalk had done differently was to loop creative writers directly into the process of authoring automated conversation—instead of just voices, the characters got personalities. Through an authoring program called PullString, these writers were able to create dialogue for the characters without having to have any programming knowledge.

Now, as chatbots—software programs that communicate with humans by using artificial intelligence—have proliferated, that's something more and more companies want to do. To reflect a shift in strategy, ToyTalk has now changed its name to PullString; while it will still use its technology for toys, it will also market its authoring tool to other types of companies that want to chat with customers on platforms like Facebook or Slack. (Facebook recently unveiled new functionality for chatbots on Messenger, envisioning users making dinner reservations, booking flights, and making purchases via automated chat conversations.) "Like you would download Photoshop to play with a digital image, like you would download Excel to play in a spreadsheet," Jacob says, "developers who want to create bots can download PullString and create an experience using that technology."

Back in 2011, on the same week Jacob and Reddy closed their first round of venture capital, Apple launched its voice-controlled assistant Siri, who not only conveyed information, but told an occasional joke. "That has opened up talking to characters and talking to computers, and the use of natural language as a message beyond keyboard and mouse and touchscreen to interact," Jacob says.

Amazon's Alexa and Microsoft's Cortana followed. As did chatbots that act as nurses, who both question patients about medical conditions and commiserate with them. The proliferation of chat interfaces like WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Slack have extended potential applications for chatbots even further. NBC-owned Breaking News made a chatbot that pings users with customized news alerts inside of Slack. Taco Bell made a Slack TacoBot that will take your order. Kik and Microsoft both recently released tools for authoring chatbots. So did native advertising startup Outbrain.

[image error]Photo: Flickr user Georgie Pauwels

PullString will compete on the premise that its tool was built with character building in mind—that you're freed up to focus on conversational style rather than coding. "When a company is texting to a customer back and forth, the word choice matters," Jacob says. "The tone. The mood. The style of what is said matters. It matters because Coke isn't Pepsi, and Pepsi isn't Coke. It matters because people don't want to be spoken to in preselected word choice."

Some technology companies are hiring playwrights, poets, and other creative writers to author personalities for automated conversations. For this new type of writing, PullString is betting that they'll also need a new type of notebook—and that they'll want to borrow Barbie's.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated the number of years ToyTalk's founders worked at Pixar.

Two Questions Every City Must Ask In The Age Of Autonomous Taxis

The taxibots are coming. GM and Lyft are using different words to describe them, saying that they'll partner to make an "integrated network of on-demand autonomous vehicles part of people's daily lives." But that's just the long way of saying "Johnny Cabs." (You know, from Total Recall.)

So whether we want to call them taxibots, robot cabs, or the inevitable brand names that will follow, technology companies and automakers are already hard at work right now solving the design and engineering challenges required to make them a reality.

[image error]Flickr user Elvert Barnes

This work is essential, but there's plenty of other important work that has nothing to do with lasers, sensors, user interfaces, or 3-D maps, and everything to do with the strategic choices individual cities will need to make for themselves. What's right for Paris may not be right for Peoria, so every city should be preparing now to answer two important questions about the type of taxibot network it wants for its specific future.

How a city answers this question expresses what it believes—at a philosophical level—it should be providing to all citizens. Most cities in the developed world have evolved to provide—or at least manage the provision of—everything from water and electricity to mass transit and garbage collection. But why these services and not others, like Internet connectivity? Are citizens better served by industry?

Maybe, maybe not. In big brush strokes, industry wants customers that it can serve most efficiently and most profitably, which is why rural communities are far less likely to have broadband connectivity than their urban counterparts. In similarly big brush strokes, cities tend to think about the services they provide in more egalitarian terms, which is why all neighborhoods get stop signs—not just the wealthy ones. This difference, between industries and cities, will inform the design and operation of entirely different taxibot networks.

The city must own and operate its own taxibot network, rather than simply taxing and regulating an industry-run network.

So if a city believes that all of its citizens deserve equal access to transportation—including citizens at the edges of its geographic limits, citizens with disabilities, and other people who will be less convenient for industry to serve—then we believe the answer to this question of ownership is clear: The city must own and operate its own taxibot network, rather than simply taxing and regulating an industry-run network.

But what "ownership" of a taxibot network actually means is potentially confusing. That's because a taxibot network will consist of at least three core components: 1) the taxibot fleets; 2) a physical infrastructure that allows the taxibots to communicate with the city, like an elaborate network of Wi-Fi routers; and 3) a set of operating systems and protocols that allows the taxibots to communicate with each other, as well as with other cars on the road.

Who will own the taxibot fleets is an open question. It could be a selection of small companies, as is currently the case in many American cities, or it could be that one company is granted an exclusive citywide taxibot license. Or, the city itself might choose to own the local fleet. Regardless, the access points for vehicle-to-infrastructure communication will have to be owned and controlled by the city. And the city will have to have profound influence over the protocols that govern that communication as well as the vehicle-to-vehicle communication.

This will push the city outside of its comfort zone. In the same way that carmakers will have to become software companies—or become merely hardware manufacturers for technology companies—cities will have to do the same, or become merely "street providers" to industry-run taxibot networks. This evolution will be essential to the city's ability to provide equal access to transportation, and to align the interests of cities and citizens with the desires of carmakers and their shareholders.

[image error]Andrew Ruiz via Unsplash

Every taxibot will be a node on a network, producing all sorts of data. This data will be valuable for the same reasons that any kind of consumer data is valuable: It can be used to improve products and services (which is a good thing) and market things to people that they may not need (which is a bad thing). At a high level, we believe a city that owns its own taxibot network will also own the data generated by the network on behalf of citizens for the purposes of continuously optimizing network performance and integrating with other city-run services. In this scenario, a city owns the taxibot-generated data, and policies governing its use are managed by the city.

Alternatively, a city that opts for industry-run taxibot networks could unintentionally create opportunities for those networks to exploit passenger data for the purposes of competing with other public transportation systems and monetizing data through advertising platforms that don't deliver any benefit to citizens. Theoretically, a city could also opt to monetize the data through advertising platforms for the purposes of offsetting citizens' fare payments, essentially creating the taxibot equivalent of the Amazon Kindle "With Special Offers."

There is already no future for the anonymous use of public transportation.

Either way, we believe there is already no future for the anonymous use of public transportation, a future already signaled by the rise of cashless fare payments. This will be upsetting for many, but the emergence of taxibot networks will finalize the end of anonymous use, forcing the city to engage in the legal and moral complexities of data ownership and understand how it will—and will not—use taxibot passenger data. Industry has been grappling with personal data and privacy issues for a long time now, as have many cities. But others will need to begin working through these complexities now to catch up.

These questions about who should own a city's taxibot network and the data it generates sound like potentially dull governmental policy matters. They are definitely not. Different answers to these questions create starkly different futures that work very differently for citizens. They even look starkly different. Consider that Los Angeles could support a million two-seat taxibots by 2040. Now imagine all of those taxibots are owned by an entity or entities other than the city itself; that's a million branded vehicles occupying city streets.

In a straightforward evolution of the illuminated placard adverts atop cabs today, maybe these future taxibots are even displaying high-definition video adverts continuously. Their cameras are tracking the eyeballs of passengers and passersby alike, serving up targeted promotions and urging pedestrians to ride rather than walk. Okay, so perhaps we're making that scenario more nefarious than it needs to be. But now imagine those million taxibots are owned by the city. The city wants its taxibots to reflect and celebrate the city—in the same way its bridges and boulevards do. So while these taxibots are driving citizens from point to point, the mirrored finish of the city's taxibots might literally reflect the city's river walks and sunsets—a quiet and aesthetically cohesive transportation network that almost disappears while in use, beautifully complementing urban infrastructure rather than competing with it. Those mirrored-finish exteriors might even be networked canvases for public artists, turning freeways into moving, digital art installations.

It's unlikely that citizens will be better served by an industry-run network of taxibots primarily motivated by profit than they'll be by city-run networks primarily motivated to serve all citizens equally.

These opposing visions point to unreconciled tensions about the future of cities, who's really running them—governments or corporations, and what citizens want from them. Public art isn't better just because it's art, and the mere presence of advertising does not make a dystopia. After all, there are already plenty of print ads on public transportation as well, not just cabs. That said, no one saw the advertising blimp in Blade Runner and said, "Wow, I can't wait until one of those is hovering over my house." And yet advertising is not the problem. Advertising is just a potent indicator of interests beyond the citizen. The inevitable presence of those interests is why we believe it's unlikely that citizens will be better served by an industry-run network of taxibots primarily motivated by profit than they'll be by city-run networks primarily motivated to serve all citizens equally. So there, we said it.

There's a maxim shared by futurists that states we tend to overestimate what will happen in 50 years (see: flying cars), and underestimate what will have in five years (see: pre-Internet 1990s). Taxibots sound like they're part of a far-off future. But remember that GM and Lyft have already announced their half-billion-dollar partnership to create them. And there will be more partnerships focused on taxibot futures as well, with Uber's massive capitalization especially well positioned to transition from "Everyone's Private Driver" to "Everyone's Private Robot Driver."

Most cities would admit that they were not well prepared for the emergence of Uber and Lyft several years ago; some are still struggling to figure out how those services fit into their city. So cities need to learn from those mistakes and start thinking rigorously about the futures they want from taxibot networks by answering these important questions about network and data ownership. If a city is slow or unwilling to answer these questions, industry will be happy to answer them for it.

Devin Liddell leads Teague's brand strategy practice. You can follow him on Twitter at @devinliddell.

Churu Yun is a senior designer at Teague focused on defining elegant and well-considered ways we can live with and use technology in the future. You can follow him on Twitter at @churuyun.

Eric Spiegelman was appointed to the Los Angeles Board of Taxicab Commissioners by Mayor Eric Garcetti in March 2014 and has served as the board's president since July of that year. He recently served as a peer reviewer for the Transportation Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences, on the rise of technology-enabled transportation services. You can follow him on Twitter and Medium at @taxicomisionado.

Could Menstrual Leave Be The Next Work-Life Benefit?

Women's menstrual cycles are one of the few topics that still make people uncomfortable, especially in the workplace. Perhaps this is a result of the antiquated sexist notion that women's emotions are tied to their period, or that women fear that they will be viewed as weak if they ask for time off, and often end up keeping what can be crippling monthly pain to themselves.

But could paid leave for period pain catch on? British company Coexist made headlines when it introduced a period leave policy that would allow women to take time off that wouldn't count toward sick days. Bex Baxter, the director of Coexist, thought of the idea last year when she noticed a female employee who could barely stand from the severe pain she suffered. Baxter then reached out to Alexandra Pope, cofounder of the Red School—which aims at bringing "menstruality consciousness" to the world—and the two organized a one-day seminar opened to the public called "Pioneering Period Policy: Valuing natural cycles in the workplace."

The idea is not that women be given special concessions, but that women could be flexible...they still have a job to do and they organize their time accordingly.

Although Coexist is reportedly the first company in England to implement a paid period leave, it isn't the first in the world. In February, China's eastern province Anhui became the third in the country to introduce a "period leave," joining Shanxi and Hebei provinces. Japan has had a policy in place since 1947, shortly after the Second World War when an influx of women joined the workforce. Other Asian countries, like South Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia also grant some form of menstrual leave. In 2013, Russian politician Mikhail Degtyaryov drafted a policy that would give female workers additional days off for severe pains.

In theory, while it's just plain humane to give women time off when they're dealing with excruciating pain that would prevent them from working, taking advantage of this policy would also mean revealing when you're on your period—which could be awkward with male bosses and colleagues.

As women continue to climb ranks and take on higher positions, women's health issues are getting more attention. Research has shown that one in 10 women's menstrual cramps are so severe, it disrupts their daily lives. Or that there's a disease associated with menstruation called "endometriosis" where a tissue that normally lines the inside of the uterus grows outside of it. Girls writer and actor Lena Dunham brought attention to endometriosis, which causes severe pelvic pains and even infertility, when she wrote about living and working with it in the essay, The Sickest Girl.

As more research and stories gain attention, it's clear that menstrual pain is a serious medical problem for many women. For some, it's a real struggle that causes chronic pain, yet still feels shameful to discuss openly in a work environment. Instead, most women suffering from severe cramps likely take a sick or vacation day or work from home, if their companies allow it.

Whenever rights for any group of people are imbalanced, discrimination and stereotypes are high likelihoods. While countries in Asia have been first to implement period leave, actually taking the leave is still not culturally accepted. For instance, in Indonesia where a monthly two-day menstruation leave is provided by law, companies need to perform physical examinations on female workers before they can take off. Hence, it's no surprise employees rarely use the provision, especially in male-dominated workplaces.

"We don't live in a world where culturally we've caught up with the fact that just because you might be going through PMS doesn't mean you're not capable of making good rational, logical decisions."

That broadcasting your cycle so openly can lead to discrimination and stigma is one of the major reasons Naama Bloom, founder of HelloFlo, a tampon-subscription-service-turned-women's health-company, says she's "torn" for the women who take the leave.

"I absolutely want people to be more comfortable and have the resources they need and the time they need," Bloom tells Fast Company, especially those that have debilitating pain. "I'm just worried we don't live in a world where culturally we've caught up with the fact that just because you might be going through PMS doesn't mean you're not capable of making good rational, logical decisions."

As an example, Bloom points to her former years working for American Express when the company decided to allow employees to work remotely. Shortly after, American Express abandoned that plan—because culturally they weren't ready yet 15 years ago—and the people who volunteered first were the ones who suffered professionally.

"That obviously wasn't about menstrual leave," says Bloom, "it's just about being the first people to take advantage of a corporate initiative … that's my concern."

Bloom says it's a possibility, but there needs to be a high level of training before companies can actually institute it, especially in educating managers and leaders that there's a difference between the physical pain that comes with menstruation and emotional instability.

When the Red School's Pope led Coexist's seminar, the focus was on menstrual policy, not menstrual leave.

"It was about creating a more cycle-literate workplace, in general, and specifically for women to be more conscious around the menstrual cycle...actually for men to be conscious around it too," says Pope. "The idea is not that women be given special concessions, but that women could be flexible...they still have a job to do and they organize their time accordingly.

Pope believes that real-life implementation of any kind of period policy needs to first

emphasize education around the cycle overall.

If men suffered from chronic period pains on a monthly basis, would we still be having this conversation?

"It should not be something that is imposed from above," says Pope. "It should be something that a company comes at from a point of well-being. It will involve trust."

Granting women time off every month for her period may seem too much of an alien idea now, but so was making a bigger deal about paternity leave in many areas and industries until enough dads spoke up. What if we were to think about period cramps like any other general health issue?

If we're serious about tackling the gender wage gap and other gender disparities that have plagued women since they entered the workforce, we need to be serious about all sort of complex issues that have a hand in determining the gender roles we've tied women and men to. We also need to be serious in asking ourselves, if men suffered from chronic period pains on a monthly basis, would we still be having this conversation?

Do You Have One Of The Worst Jobs Of 2016?

The threat of bodily harm from heavy equipment, chemicals, or enemy attacks isn't enough to make jobs such as logger, pest control worker, or enlisted military rank at the bottom of CareerCast's Jobs Rated report. That distinction goes to newspaper reporter for the third year in a row.

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It's easy to see why as CareerCast's jobs search portal breaks down key factors across 200 professions to determine which professions are the most and least desirable. Using data from the Census and the Department of Labor, the jobs are graded based on the following:

Environment —measuring both emotional and physical factors such as competitiveness, personal hazard, and degree of public contact along with stamina, physical demands, and the degree of confinement. The average length of a work week is also factors in. According to CareerCast's methodology, approximately equal weight is given to both emotional and physical scores which is why jobs with high stress often rank alongside those with adverse physical conditions.


Income—a score that's computed by adding the estimated mid-level income of the job and the percentage of its growth potential at the highest level of that job.


Outlook—calculated from employment growth through 2024 based on forecasts from the Department of Labor, unemployment rates, as well as how much a worker can increase their earnings potential.


Stress —scored for 11 factors including travel, deadlines, working in the public eye, putting one's own or another's life at risk, competition, and hazards encountered.

Each of the four core criteria are equally weighted in the final score.

"Declining employment opportunities contributed to the inclusion of many of the 10 worst careers in the 2016 Jobs Rated report," says Kyle Kensing, CareerCast's online content editor. "Traditional news media is particularly hard hit due to newspapers folding or moving to digital-only, and waning advertising revenue."

Kensing says broadcasters' employment outlook is also expected to decline, by 9%, or 4,800 total positions, by 2024 according to the Department of Labor. For those seeking to transition, the skills they've acquired in their current jobs can be transferred to podcasting, online news production, or data journalism.

Data is hot right now, thanks to the massive amounts of information both individuals and companies throw off on any given day. So it's no surprise that CareerCast found that Data Scientist topped its list for the best jobs of 2016, just as it did on Glassdoor's annual ranking. CareerCast's list also included statistician, mathematician, and actuary, all of which require skilled computational thinking.

The problem is that there aren't that many people who have those skills. A McKinsey report predicted that by 2018, "the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills, as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions."

Currently, most data scientists hold PhDs, but new education and recruiting opportunities are launching to address the future deficit.

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What Every Startup Needs To Know About The Psychology Of Choice

There are two types of people in this world, or at least in my New York City neighborhood: Those who get bagels from David's, and those who get bagels from Bagel Boss.

Both bagel shops sit on one side of First Avenue between 15th and 16th streets. They're just about next door. So if you live within a six-block radius of that stretch of sidewalk, chances are you've got an opinion—in some circles, they're the House Lanniser and House Stark of the local bagel world.

[image error]Bagel Boss (left) and David's (far right), the House Stark and House Lannister of East Village bagels.Photo: Brian Scordato

You wouldn't know it just by looking, though. The shops are nearly identical. Sure, you'll hear people talk about David's being fluffier or Bagel Boss tasting fresher, but I don't buy it. There's only one substantive difference: Bagel Boss is kosher. If you want a bacon, egg, and cheese ,  you're going to David's. Anything else, and you're good at either spot.

I've even brought friends who prefer Bagel Boss some bagels from David's, and they've never noticed the difference. Why the heck would I do that? Because I'm firmly House David's—I wouldn't be caught dead in Bagel Boss.

The reason all this matters is because I care—deeply—about a bagel place. And for anyone who makes stuff and sells it, that's a pretty big deal.

People think they want choices. They don't. Choices increase anxiety.

Ask any entrepreneur and they'll probably tell you it's getting harder to forge meaningful relationships with customers, as choices for just about everything multiply. That makes the little anomalies—products that elicit real emotions—really important.

So let's talk bagels and behavioral science.

A big part of an entrepreneur's job is to notice things other people miss—to understand the motivations behind the series of decisions that lead a customer to take some sort of action, with that action hopefully being to buy your thing. Your understanding of how your users feel during that process is what differentiates your business. The better you know that differentiator, the better your product will be.

I get a toasted everything bagel with scallion cream cheese from David's every Sunday. This delicious decision is far more complex than you'd think. Here's my "bagel decision flow":

I wake up. It's Sunday morning and I'm hungry.
I live in New York — the breakfast world is my oyster.
Nevertheless and without fail, I return to David's, over and over.

Why? People think they want choices. They don't. Choices increase anxiety. Choices also create opportunity cost. When I have too many choices, my breakfast becomes great only if it's better than how good I perceive the place we didn't go would've been. The last thing I need is brunch FOMO.

What's more, choices, after a certain point, are demotivating—too many options, it turns out, can paralyze.

So when Sunday starts with an open-ended question like, "Where should we eat breakfast in NYC this morning?" my mind starts cranking away at how I can lower the stakes of that decision. It's Sunday morning. I don't want stakes.

I unconsciously scramble for some way to make a quick, stress-free decision. I search for what psychologists call "relativity." Here's how Dan Ariely explains it in his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions:

Humans rarely choose things in absolute terms. We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another, and estimate value accordingly.

It's tricky for me to directly compare a bagel shop to an upscale sit-down brunch, a breakfast burrito truck, a diner, and cooking eggs and bacon at home. It's easy, though, for me to compare David's to Bagel Boss.

I'm conditioned to choose between two easily comparable choices, and these literally could not be any more straightforward: The conversation goes from "We could do bagels, or brunch, or maybe a truck — could also just make stuff?" to "Are you a David's or Bagel Boss person?" David's is able to push me down the decision funnel, removing the competition. And I'm confident that my David's bagel was better than a Bagel Boss bagel would've been.

"We don't have an internal value meter that tells us how much things are worth. Rather, we focus on the relative advantage of one thing over another."

As a business, the key is to insert yourself into that type of conversation with your customer as early as possible—to create a trigger that reminds them you exist and you're the right decision. To understand that there will be something your customers do already that they're comfortable with, and being close to that — with a very clear, key differentiator — will make that switch decision easy.

David's does this by accident, because Bagel Boss happens to be next door and not serve bacon. You, however, can do it on purpose.

But if the way people make decisions partly accounts for why I go to David's so much, it doesn't explain why I'm so passionately loyal to it.

It starts while I'm in line. David's is a quirky, not-quite-Soup-Nazi-but-not-quite-not-Soup-Nazi establishment. There are always a lot of people waiting impatiently and looking at their phones. This creates an uncomfortable, crowded-but-silent atmosphere, raising the stakes on your ordering technique. If you screw it up, you get yelled at.

You're then rushed to the front of the line where you pay — cash only — as your bagels are made and tossed down the assembly line. The process is pretty awful. But I know that. It's awful, but it's my awful. This process makes me feel like an insider as much as watching my 16-year-old cousin rip through Snapchat makes me feel like an outsider. Each quirk within the David's ordering process is subtly hinting that I wouldn't understand the flow at a different bagel shop.

Further, there's a study that claims a huge contributor to strong, lasting relationships is constantly choosing the person (or company) you're with over a viable option. Each time I choose David's, my emotional tie with the place gets stronger. First, I was hooked with the trigger of bacon, then locked in by the quirky bagel flow. Each bagel reinforces that decision and deepens my love.

Your customer's current process will be unique. Understanding it and building a product that works hand in hand with what they do already is crucial.

Take the legalization of marijuana (I realize I'm writing about weed and bagels, but here we are)—you can now buy it legally in many cities where you couldn't before. This means startups are flocking to automate the process, building delivery portals and so on — all great things.

But lots of states haven't legalized delivery yet, even though you can legally buy marijuana from a dispensary. So plenty of other startups are sitting on their hands until delivery becomes legal.

If you ask me, those are the startups that don't know their customer. The process for people making their first marijuana purchase will be new and uncomfortable. It'll be like the first time you're in line at David's times 1,000: The last thing they want to do is go to a dispensary and ask a bunch of questions.

A startup called Stemless lets them learn a bit about what they may want, then order online so the only in-person interaction is picking up—genius. (Full disclosure, Stemless went through my company, Tacklebox Accelerator, though I'm not an investor.) Only startups that don't adequately know their customers try to reinvent their existing ways of doing things.

[image error]The Temptress: Black Seed, serving Stumptown coffee.Photo: Brian Scordato

I'll never forget the day I broke up with David's. It was a brisk, fall Sunday in 2015. I asked a friend if they wanted to hit up David's for breakfast.

"Have you heard about Black Seed? Just opened up. They have Stumptown coffee."

Uh oh.

There's something important I hadn't realized about my Sunday morning decision flow: The one thing I think of before food is coffee. Little did I know that that was the true decision driver. So when Black Seed framed the breakfast conversation around coffee before it even got to food, David's was in trouble.

Frame the conversation in a way that allows your customers to easily opt into whatever you're building. Help them skip to the bottom of that funnel they want no part of going through.

If you're building a concierge travel app that helps people find destinations, advertising on a flight aggregator is too late. People already know where they're going, they're just closing the logistical loop. You need to be in the conversation when the trip is a twinkle in your customer's eye, when they're having dinner with friends who just got back from vacation — or however these trips are born.

Then, you want to frame the conversation in a way that allows your customers to easily opt into whatever you're building. Help them skip to the bottom of that funnel they want no part of going through.

I liked David's more because Bagel Boss exists. It helped me create relativity around a complex decision. But Black Seed ultimately won the Sunday Breakfast Battle by entering the conversation earliest with delicious coffee.

Figure out what your Stumptown coffee is and get in the conversation with your customers as soon as the decision flow begins. Next, understand the nuances of their process so you can reinforce their actions, not change them.

Nail this, and you'll sell a whole bunch of bagels.