David Lidsky's Blog, page 2747

Six Leadership Lessons From The Presidential Campaign Trail

Aside from the mudslinging and name calling this election cycle, launching and running a successful presidential campaign has a lot in common with starting and running a business. Not only does it take considerable entrepreneurial chops—from raising and managing funds to building an organization from scratch—it demands many of the same leadership skills a president needs to draw on once in office. Here's what the high stakes, breakneck pace, and unpredictable twists of the campaign trail can teach business leaders everywhere.

Planning ahead for virtually every possibility can help campaigns avoid wasting money and getting blindsided by opponents. In a campaign, much of the planning goes toward legal resources and contingencies. Business leaders don't have end goals as concrete as winning the presidency, which actually makes this even more imperative.

If you think coordinating your own staff is difficult, try this level of coordination across the nation with unpaid volunteers.

Start asking questions about your progress and objectives as early as possible, and revisit them continuously: What's the one big goal your company needs to reach? And what are the shorter-term achievements you'll need to win on the way before you do? A presidential campaign has a separate plan for each and every state, county, and city. Ideally, staffers and strategists know the rules, regulations, and voters in each and every one. That goes right on down to the volunteers at the front lines—who is doing what, when, and how come?

If you think coordinating your own staff is difficult, try this level of coordination across the nation with unpaid volunteers. There's a very detailed plan, and everyone needs to be clear on the end goal. Your business is no different. Do you have a detailed plan, does your entire staff know and understand it, and are they fully equipped to execute their piece of it?

Inside Bernie Sanders's Social Media Machine
How To Deal With The Donald Trump In Your Office
The Subtle Ways Candidates Look Spontaneous (Or Fail To) During Debates
An Incredibly Dorky Look At Each Presidential Candidate's Technology Stack
How The Hillary Clinton Campaign Built A Staff As Diverse As America

It doesn't matter which news channel you prefer to watch or listen to—you've seen past and present presidential advisers sparring over political ideas and strategic steps and missteps. These people have spent careers immersed in party politics. They have a network, a set of tactics, a track record of wins and losses, and a deep historical knowledge of what's worked and what hasn't—and they deploy all of that expertise to accomplish one thing: helping their candidate win.

Who is doing this for your business? Where is your all-star think tank or advisory board? Who are your coaches and what experience can they bring to the table? As a business leader, you need reliable experts on hand who are committed to what you're trying to accomplish together. Let them do what they do best so you can focus on your piece of it.

Politics aside, President Obama was the first presidential candidate to effectively use social media as a major part of his campaign strategy, which had an outsize impact on younger voters. Rather than writing off that demographic, he tapped into their potential. As a business, consider how you're leveraging technology and connecting with younger users. No matter your product or service, no viable 21st-century company can afford to dismiss millennial and gen Z customers.

By the same token, none can do without a robust digital strategy, either. Marketplaces are too volatile and Internet-driven to simply draw up a business plan and execute it. Companies have to be responsive and listen, readjusting wherever necessary in order to connect with what people want and need, and the technological and data-based tools for doing that have never been more sophisticated or widely available.

Know your platform, and make sure it sets you apart. As a business, your constituents are like voters. You can't please and appeal to everyone, so what segment are you going after? What do they want, and do they know who you are? Can they explain that to someone who doesn't?

Think about any given candidate and you can quickly come up with at least two to three soundbites you've probably heard them say over and over again. Decide from the get-go on the value or idea that will resonate the most with your target market. Then repeat, repeat, repeat.

At every rally or gathering a candidate puts together, there's a backdrop of supporters holding signs and banners with the candidate's name, and a catchphrase or two that says what they stand for. What does your company's metaphorical sign say, and who will hold it up each and every day? Ideally, every employee will be a vocal advocate for your brand, customers, and vendors. If that isn't happening already, it's up to you as a leader to determine what your message is and who will stick up for it.

Decide from the get-go on the value or idea that will resonate the most with your target market. Then repeat, repeat, repeat.

Being a leader is never easy, and listening to advisers, employees, and customers takes work and patience. But campaigning politicians face a similar conundrum, trying to respond to the advice of strategists, the needs of voters, and their own guts. The key is to remember that the information available is always limited, even if it sometimes seems you're up to your neck in it or, at other times, don't have enough.

Few campaign decisions are made alone by a candidate. Each one is usually researched and discussed and researched again. Granted, you may not have the polling, statistics, and public commentary (so to speak) when making most decisions, but every business leader has the ability to ask stakeholders, do research, and crunch the latest numbers before making an informed choice.

The list can certainly go on from here, but for every entrepreneur, startup founder, and CEO from now until November, here's a challenge: Imagine your company's strategy as a presidential campaign. How would you differentiate yourself from the field of competitors, what would you look for in campaign advisers, and how would you position yourself to win?

Kristen McAlister is president/COO and co-owner of Cerius Executives. She has extensive experience in leading major acquisitions, sales, and operations initiatives with small and large privately held companies to publicly held international companies.

It May Take Years For Virtual Reality To Go Mainstream, Says New Report

Virtual reality is becoming a more popular technology in the wake of high-profile product launches like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive but it is still several years away from "hypergrowth" and mainstream adoption, a new study found.

In the 2016 Virtual Reality Industry Report, issued jointly today by Greenlight VR and Road to VR, and which offers a 10-year roadmap for the VR ecosystem, the researchers predicted that while there will be 2 million—non-Google Cardboard—virtual reality headsets in consumers' hands by the end of this year and 36.9 million by the end of 2020, the VR industry is still six to eight years away from hypergrowth or a tipping point in adoption of the medium.

That said, the study predicted that by the end of 2025, there are likely to be 135.6 million VR headset in use, of which 122 million will be mobile.

The consumer VR era kicked off in earnest last fall with the launch of Samsung's mobile Gear VR and was further bolstered over the last few weeks with the launch of the tethered—meaning, connected to a powerful computing device by wires—Rift and Vive. Sony will complete what some might call the end of the beginning of this era later this fall when it releases its tethered PlayStation VR system. Analysts from Digi-Capital have previously predicted that the VR ecosystem would be worth $30 billion by 2020.

The report offered plenty of fodder for both those who are skeptical of VR's prospects and those who are enthusiastic about the technology's future. Still, it's hard to escape the study's most significant conclusion, that it will be several years at a minimum before consumer virtual reality is a major market. And that's in large part due to the fact that there is no killer app on the immediate horizon.

"Unlike smartphones, where there was a stronger need for consumers to have these devices," the report's authors wrote, "the use cases that will drive broad consumer adoption are still early in development."

That said, they continued, they do expect that a killer app is coming at some point. "We believe mainstream adoption of [VR gear] will be accelerated by the development of a 'killer consumer app,' which will likely come from social networking in virtual reality."

A sentiment like that, if eventually proven accurate, would likely be great news for Oculus, which is owned by Facebook, whose CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has lauded the technology's potential social impact.

Still, Oculus should not start celebrating just yet. While the Rift may well get the lion's share of headlines in the early going, the PlayStation VR may very well be the long-term winner. Because of its lower price—Sony's hardware will sell for $399, versus $599 for the Rift and $799 for the Vive—the report suggested that by 2018, Sony will have sold 3.1 million units, "just over half of the tethered [head-mounted display] market."

What's uncertain, according to the study, is how the various VR systems will differentiate themselves over time. "There will be a natural sorting-out process, by which various hardware configurations...evolve to optimize each vertical/use case," the authors wrote. "For example, gaming platforms may evolve ultra-robust audio capabilities, while military platforms may evolve deep [augmented reality], or information overlay capabilities."

As in any medium that mixes hardware and software, the success of virtual reality is entirely dependent on the development and availability of content that consumers want, and are willing to pay for. And while there are a growing number of developers building VR content, the people doing that work seem like they don't expect to be able to make much money doing so anytime soon.

According to the study, developers expect "dramatic" growth of between 200% and 300% by 2018, and "believe [VR's] 'inflection point' is still two-to-three years off."

More to the point, developers seem aware that in the short term they won't be making a lot of money off their VR efforts. That's in part because they think there will be multiple models of VR content, and prices for that content that are either very low or very high. In total, 51% of all VR content is expected to cost $24 or less.

Still, developers are flocking to virtual reality, with 44% of all of those working to build VR content having started to do so within the last year. Just 19% have been doing so for more than a year, and 17% for more than two years, the report found.

Of those currently working on VR content, 61% have been doing so for the Oculus Rift, while 57% have focused on the Gear VR, 46% on Cardboard, 30% on Vive, and just 11% on the PlayStation VR.

Those numbers should change over time, though. The study predicted that developers' focus going forward will shift, with 46% building for the PlayStation VR, 44% for the Vive, 37% for the Gear VR, 30% for the Rift, and just 24% for Cardboard.

As the VR industry expands, one of the brightest spots could be what is called "standalone" headsets. These are devices that are neither tethered nor connected to a smartphone. Rather, they have integrated computing and communications systems. Both Google and GameFace Labs are thought to be working on such systems.

Google successfully pulling off such gear could be a major boon to the industry's growth.

"If Google can release a standalone headset that requires no external computational source, wires, or unnecessary tinkering to get working," the authors said, "we estimate that it will greatly appeal to the average consumer. Eliminating any unnecessary cognitive burden to the user is paramount for emerging technologies, and VR is no different."

Inside Sean Parker's $250 Million Bet To Cure Cancer

Sean Parker is deathly allergic to peanuts. If he accidentally eats a rogue nut and doesn't receive an epinephrine injection, he will stop breathing.

Parker's struggle with life-threatening allergies hasn't stopped him from achieving fortune (as the first investor in Facebook), fame (Justin Timberlake played him as a charismatic hustler in the film The Social Network), and a track record for changing entire industries (remember Napster?). It did, however, inspire him to spend countless hours in an Internet rabbit hole researching the mysteries of the human immune response.

"I'm totally fascinated by the immune system," he told me by phone this week, while trying to escape the New York rain. "Like my interest in other scientific fields, I took a deeper dive and got more and more invested."

In December 2014, he got his feet wet by making a $24 million donation to the Stanford University School of Medicine, which is earmarked for allergy research. Today, he is announcing the $250 million-funded Parker Institute, a research effort to develop targeted therapies to treat cancer, which is noteworthy in its ability to evade the immune system. That's the single largest financial contribution to the field of immunotherapy ever. It's also Parker's most ambitious effort in biotech.

To discover breakthrough therapies, Parker has personally helped recruit a brain trust of more than 40 laboratories and 300 researchers from the top cancer centers, including MD Anderson, Memorial Sloan Kettering, Penn Medicine, Stanford, and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Strategic advisers include Jeff Huber, a longtime Googler who is now working to develop a blood test for cancer detection, and executives from a variety of pharma companies including Amgen and Merck. Dr. Jeff Bluestone, a well-known researcher and a former provost at UCSF, is leading the initiative as its chief executive offer. "I've been following the explosion of cancer immunotherapies in the past five years," Bluestone says. "I met Sean a few times, and he asked if I'd join."

Parker seems confident he can create momentum outside the ivory towers of medical research, even though $250 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of drug development, which is typically in the billions. The Parker Institute is hoping that its partners, the pharmaceutical companies, will fund the early clinical trials and shoulder the costs of bringing a new therapy to market. "From my perspective as an entrepreneur, I know we can see results faster," he says. He's identified two major flaws with research today: The lack of collaboration between researchers, and the frequent intellectual property disputes over new technologies.

As a condition of partnering with the Parker Institute, researchers are expected to work with each other instead of pursuing personal glory. They must also agree to license any new technology they develop through the institute. After watching scientists behind one of most important biotech breakthroughs in recent history, a gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, get embroiled in a messy legal battle over patents, Parker is desperate to avoid a scenario in which technologies sit on the shelf for decades while researchers duke it out in court.

"I joke around that if you were to roll back the clock and design an industry or field that would produce a breakthrough technology for treating patients and curing disease, this is the last structure you would come up with," Parker adds.

[image error]Photo: Flickr user Ach K

In 2011, Parker's good friend, the legendary film producer Laura Ziskin, passed away from breast cancer. The two had frequently discussed the potential of immunotherapy, which was also a subject close to Ziskin's heart. After she died, Parker set about quietly deploying capital into immunotherapy. "I set up a dream team in the scientific establishment, which hadn't embraced the idea yet," he says.

But the field quickly entered into a kind of renaissance. Today, immunotherapy is central to the Obama Administration's "moonshot" to cure cancer. Vice President Joe Biden recently predicted that immunotherapy will progress cancer research more in the next 10 years than it has in the past 50.

Broadly speaking, cancer immunotherapy researchers seek to understand the mechanisms by which cancer cells evade detection. They are bringing new therapies to market, notably immune checkpoint inhibitors, which help the immune system recognize and target cancer cells as foreign. These therapies are more specific than chemotherapy, which causes damage to many healthy cells.

"I see patients all the time that have five-inch tumors that are totally ignored by the immune system."

"The way I describe it to my patients is to think about the last time they had a bacterial infection and got really sick," says Dr. Dale Shepard, a medical oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic. "That's an example of a robust immune response." By contrast, some of Shepard's patients have advanced cancers that present with few symptoms. "I see patients all the time that have five-inch tumors that are totally ignored by the immune system."

Oncologists like Shepard are cautiously optimistic about the prospects of cancer immunotherapy, as they've seen it work firsthand. Some of the newest treatments, which have been most effective at treating kidney, colon, prostate, and lung cancers, have brought some of Shepard's patients with advanced tumors back from the brink of death. The therapies have even proved tolerable to nonagenarians, like former president Jimmy Carter. But for some patients, such as those with slower-growing cancers, the response has been minimal at best.

That said, cancer immunotherapy is not quite a home run yet. The next step for researchers is to better understand why some patients aren't receptive to immunotherapies at all, while others show near-miraculous improvement. Oncologists are also hoping to see new therapies for hematologic cancers, like leukemias and lymphomas. Some 1,500 cancer immunotherapy drugs are currently in the research and development pipeline.

Bluestone, who is heading up the Parker Initiative, has already scoped out some near-term research initiatives for the coming year, such as new ways to modify T-cells (the immune system's anti-cancer warriors) to better recognize and kill cancer cells. Additionally, the initiative will provide sophisticated technology to labs such as machines for DNA sequencing. And Bluestone is researching how to apply medical imaging technology, which can offer a three-dimensional picture of tissues and tumors to better understand how these cells communicate with each other. "We want to look deeper than ever before," he says. "We want to identify what cancers come back, and seek out subtle changes in the immune system that we can exploit."

[image error]Photo: Flickr user Milosz1

Dr. Prateek Mendiratta is a clinical associate of medicine at Duke Cancer Center. He treats patients with cancer every day, and is keeping a watchful eye on developments in the field of immunotherapy. I ask Mendiratta for his thoughts on Sean Parker making a big impact in the space.

"If more patients can see durable responses and remissions, I'm excited to see people outside of the industry step in."

"Oh wow," he said, seemingly puzzled that a household-name tech billionaire would want to plant a flag in this particular area of research. But on further reflection, Mendiratta came around to the idea of Silicon Valley types investing their time and resources into the space. "We have to keep thinking outside the box," he says. "If more patients can see durable responses and remissions, I'm excited to see people outside of the industry step in."

The oncologists I spoke to recognized that physicians desperately need a new set of tools to treat patients. And if an outsider from the tech industry can do it, all power to them.

For his part, Parker asks every researcher who wants to get involved about the projects they wish they were doing (a very Silicon Valley question). He says he wants to fund the ideas that have been deemed "too complicated or too ambitious" for the status quo.

Shepard is ready for this kind of thinking. "It's a daily frustration for me that traditional chemotherapies don't work as well as we'd like," he says. "I think enough people are willing now to stand up and do the right thing for patients, even if that means changing the way we do things."

Facebook's 360 Degree 3D Camera Unveiled At F8 Conference

It captures two hours of 360 degree video, but Facebook "doesn't want to be in the camera business"—so it's all open source.

Facebook revealed a 360 degree video camera and software system today at its F8 developer conference. The camera includes 17 different capture devices that are synchronized, and can record two hours of 360-degree video at up to 60 frames per second, as much as 8k per eye.

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How Facebook's Big Bet On Chatbots Might Remake The UX Of The Web

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Enter The 2016 Innovation By Design Awards now through May 5!

At F8, Facebook's massive annual developer conference, the big news is bots—specifically bots on Messenger, Facebook's messaging app.

Messenger now boasts 900 million users per month, which presents a tantalizing user base for companies eager to get their wares in front of customers. That's where the bots come in. Facebook is turning Messenger into an open platform, and any company can now build a chatbot that users can talk with. If you're an airline, you can build a chatbot to book tickets; if you're OpenTable you can build a chatbot to take reservations.

"To me it's about bringing back all the best parts of the interaction between people and businesses," David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook, says in an interview. "What we're trying to build with bots are rich conversational experiences. That's what we believe will be the future of interactions and services."

The chatbots are designed to guide you through a lightweight user flow that doesn't leave you guessing about what to do next.

Chatbots seem like a new fad in software design: Microsoft just announced its own suite of bot-building tools; Kik, the messaging platform massively popular among teens, announced one as well. But there are deep reasons why chatbots make sense. The app model has stalled out: People don't use a ton of apps, and they don't download many either. The reason is simple: There's an enormous amount of friction associated with learning about a new app, downloading it, signing up for it, and then remembering you even have it.

The promise of chatbots is that from within Facebook Messenger you can do anything you'd like. For example, you can book an airline ticket for the the first time or call an Uber, with a speed and ease that would be impossible if you were toggling between apps. Moreover, because you're already in Messenger, there's no need to sign up all over again if you're trying out a new service. Messenger already knows who you are, and once you start a conversational thread, your transaction history is right there, threaded into one neat, tidy stream of conversation that you and the bot can access. "We have a two-sided network," explains Marcus. "There are 15 million businesses using pages and 1.6 billion people using Facebook as their identity. These can now come together in threads that are contextual and canonical. For the lifetime of your interaction everything stays in one place, unlike email." And, unlike email, your Facebook profile becomes the keystone of your online identity.

Your Facebook profile becomes the keystone of your online identity.

The other issue is discovery—exactly the problem that the app ecosystem failed to solve. To that end, Facebook is making sure that the bots are piggybacking onto the existing user flows of the mobile web. If they're successful, bots will become something like the new Like button: There will be new plugins that companies can add to their websites, which will fire up their chatbots in Messenger. There will also be codes that businesses can slap onto stickers in their real life spaces—much like Kik does—which will allow patrons to fire up chatbots on the spot. Both Facebook Newsfeed and SMS messages will now have a prompt letting you continue a thread inside of messenger.

In that way, Facebook is really hoping to create a new paradigm for the web altogether. You might start off at an airline's website, but tapping a "chat" button leads you right back into Messenger, where you can complete your reservation. You might start off by browsing your Facebook feed, but end up chatting with CNN's chatbot. With a tap from almost anywhere, users can be led right back into Messenger, exactly where Facebook wants them. Wherever you are—checking out on a website or reading an article in your needs feed—there will be a new chatbot option that could become a default for millions of people, if they're designed right.

Facebook has created widgets that allow vendors to put Messenger links on their site, so that you can start a transaction on the web and continue it in the Messenger app.

Designing a chatbot seems perhaps easier than it is.

For Facebook, the process began with a design sprint. Holed up in an Airbnb for three days, the Facebook Messenger team focused on a few problems that they had encountered in the experimental chatbots that they had created for clothing retailers Everlane and Zulily. Perhaps the biggest challenge was teaching people what the bots could even do.

In that sense, Facebook's increasingly powerful natural-language AI—Wit.ai, which is also being opened up to third-party developers—was a potential hinderance. Let's say you fired up a bot. What's the first What does it do? What doesn't it do? What's the first think you say? That's why the experience with bots is less free-form than real chat. You're presented with a series of options that you click, progressively telling the bot your preferences for how often you'll be notified or what kinds of information you'd like to receive—"Like a Goosebumps choose your own adventure book," explains Jeremy Goldberg, a product designer for business and platform at Facebook.

[image error]The search functionality in Messenger will now also allow you to select bots to chat with.

But there are some particulars about how the chatbot itself should behave. Facebook boils these down to four design guidelines, that all bots should adhere to: That the bots should be conversational, issuing messages in a natural tone of voice and short, pithy responses paced quickly but not so quickly that the bot is oppressively present—like a chat partner hanging on your every word and expecting just as quick of a response. The responses themselves can be interactive bubbles. Some let you horizontally scroll through a list of sweatshirts via Everlane or a list of popular stories via CNN. Others present options that you can tap—for example, you could share your present location with a weather app like Poncho—thus quickly making your your conversations more useful.

Chatbots in Kik and elsewhere work much like this already, with guided options that push your chat along. But Facebook believes that the future will yield deeper and deeper integrations between the chatbots and the sensors and data on your phone. "We will keep pushing that forward. More and more kinds of messages and information that you can exchange," says Austin Bales, product-design manager at Facebook. Moreover, the natural language AI will get better, as bots hoover up more and more data about the things people say and the questions they ask. Over time, according to Marcus, this mix of natural language chat and tappable bubbles will yield a chatbot UX that feels increasingly fluid and intuitive.

Facebook, for its part, believes that chatbots are already surprisingly intuitive to use. "It's like before you order a cab or takeout on your phone. Before you did it for the first time, you probably thought that calling a phone number or using a website was just fine. But then you use an app and it just makes so much sense," says Bales. To which Goldberg, his colleague, adds: "There was an 'aha' when we showed people the prototypes. They hadn't thought about interacting with businesses the same as you would with a person. But then it just seems like, 'Of course you should be able to do this.'"

Which makes sense. Then again, we'll see how well users cotton to chatbots, which have, after all, been around since the days of IRC. Only users will decide if they really are faster and more fluid than apps; the proof will be in both the numbers and the nuances of how useful the chatbots prove to be in aggregate. Facebook probably has to get it right, if for no other reason that as a hedge. With users reportedly sharing less and less on Facebook every year, it makes sense for them to create a business-friendly platform where users already are: Happily chatting away, devoting as much time as ever to talking directly with friends on their messaging apps, with less and less need for Facebook proper.

RedWorks Wants To Build Your First Home On Mars

NASA projects we'll be on Mars by the 2030s. RedWorks has created a 3-D printing system to build your first home on the red planet.

For most of history, the idea of humans journeying to Mars has existed purely in the realm of imagination. As early as the 1880s, science fiction writers began publishing alternate realities in which people built flying machines to visit the red planet. Last year, movie audiences were captivated by Matt Damon's struggle to stay alive in The Martian. But the prospect of putting men on Mars is no longer a fantasy. It's now just a question of sorting out the logistics. NASA is working to achieve a manned Mars mission by the 2030s.

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A Detailed Look At How Complex Equal Pay Day Really Is

Several new reports illustrate the complexity of the gender wage gap, why it persists, and why there's hope for closing it.

Today is Equal Pay Day. That's the approximate day in the year where the average woman working full time gets to catch up to the salary of her male counterpart (or about 79¢ for every one of his dollars).

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Google Built An App That Critiques Other Apps

Snapchat. Facebook. Netflix. Spotify. Kik. Which app best accommodates disabilities? Google's new Accessibility Scanner tells us.

If you haven't heard the term "inclusive design" yet, you will soon. It's a simple idea: By designing to accommodate people with disabilities, we can make products that are better for everyone. Just look at the typewriter, originally invented to help a blind person write letters. The idea is old, but the movement is picking up speed as companies such as Microsoft are using it at the core of their design philosophy.

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Inside Real Madrid's Game Plan For Digital Domination

The world's most valuable sports team reveals an exclusive look at key social metrics, and the strategy behind its digital transformation.

Even if you've never watched a minute of soccer, chances are you still know Real Madrid. The Spanish team is not only one of the winningest, most successful clubs in all of world football, it's also the richest sports team on the planet. And like all of the world's major brands, the club has identified digital and social innovation as the future of its growth.

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This Brilliant Chair Solves The Inescapable Problem Of Being Too Hot Or Too Cold At Work

What if, instead of having to wear a sweater in the office in the summer, your chair kept you warm?

If you're at work right now, you're probably too cold. Or too hot. If you have a working thermostat nearby, there's a good chance that it's the thing you disagree about most with the person sitting next to you.

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