Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2015 i Fast Company

What’s new with members of our MCP 1000 Then President, Rhode Island School of Design Now Design partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers When John Maeda landed in Silicon Valley in 2013 to take on a new role as a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufeld & Byers, he didn’t have a car—or even a place to stay. But instead of booking a hotel, he decided to navigate Menlo Park via the sharing economy. “People said, ‘Oh, you must be learning so much in Silicon Valley from all the CEOs,’ ” he says. “And I’m like, ‘No, I’m learning through Airbnb hosts and Uber drivers.’ It’s so easy to stay within our biases. But what inspires creativity is exposing yourself to what might make you feel uncomfortable or different.” Since leaving…

Standing before a large crowd at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in January, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich laid out the company’s plan to change the future of technology. He debuted a 3-D printer that’s 10 times faster than any of the others on the market. He chatted with the CEO of iRobot, who rolled onto the stage via a teleconferencing automaton that faunted Intel’s new emotion-detecting cameras. Then he closed his keynote with a plan that might prove far more challenging than either of those other innovations: Over the next five years, Intel plans to invest $300 million in something called the “diversity in technology initiative,” which will aim to bring the company’s workforce to “full representation” by 2020. “It’s time to step up and do more,” Krzanich said. “It’s…

Keep track of the impact of climate change With satellites and radar, NASA will monitor the melting ice sheets of West Antarctica and Greenland. “So much of that ice is likely to end up in the ocean and contribute to sealevel rise, which is extremely worrying,” says Stofan. “We’re making that data accessible to decision makers so they can start saying, ‘How can we mitigate and cope with these effects of climate change?’ ” Look for potential life in space If they find evidence of living organisms, it could change our view of humanity. “We may find that life did evolve on Mars, and there’s a chance life evolved on Jupiter’s moon Europa. If we find that life is present in our solar system, we’re going to try to understand…

Katia Beauchamp’s 8-month-old twin boys both have colds. Birchbox’s co–CEO, wearing a dark monochrome dress that provides an understated canvas for her impeccable jewelry game, isn’t feeling well either, having spent the weekend dealing with her boys, their germs, and—ugh—the boogers clogging their nostrils. “You know how our parents used those little bulbs that you stick into your nose? Now it’s, like, a straw,” Beauchamp explains to Hayley Barna, her co–CEO and best friend, who’s sitting next to her in a conference room in the company’s New York headquarters. “I don’t like it at all! But it’s really effective. You just go . . . sluuuuuurrrrpppppp!” Barna doubles over laughing. “She’s up close and personal with the bodily fluids of her babies,” Barna tells me. Beauchamp and Barna aren’t looking…

The first thing you notice about Klaus Lackner’s new laboratory at Arizona State University is how it’s littered with thin, white pieces of plastic. The stuff is everywhere— in large sheets crumpled on counters; in small strips stacked on lab benches; and in shreds attached to stiff wires, so as to resemble the boughs of an artificial Christmas tree. “Here, feel this,” says Lackner’s research partner, Allen Wright, holding out a fresh sheet. “It’s almost like leather.” He’s right, but it’s an odd, stiff, pale sort of leather—and, anyway, what is it good for? You wouldn’t make a baseball glove out of it. The three of us are gathered around a sealed glass chamber, about the size of a large terrarium, in the experimental hub of Lackner’s new endeavor, the…

FASTCODESIGN.COM A second career, made by hand After losing her first business to the recession, Alicia Shaffer gave it another whirl, this time with an Etsy store full of handmade goods. Now, Shaffer’s shop, ThreeBirdNest, rakes in $80,000 a month, and business shows no sign of slowing down. “I want ThreeBirdNest to become a household name,” says Shaffer. “After I lost my last business, I said, ‘I don’t want that to be on my gravestone.’ ” FASTCOEXIST.COM Coconut water that’s easier to swallow The booming coconut water business hasn’t been healthy for everyone. Most coconut farmers live in poverty, and crops are often subject to pesticides. That’s why Douglas Riboud and Justin Guilbert founded Harmless Harvest, which sells fair-trade, organic coconut water and trains farmers in sustainable practices. “If we…

Catching up with MIC alumni SodaStream When SodaStream appeared on the Most Innovative Companies list in 2013, the DIY carbonator was just reaching America. But with thirst for sugary soft drinks waning, its U.S. revenue has slid by nearly 35%. CEO Daniel Birnbaum announced a rebrand last fall, reformulating more than 100 flavor offerings into lowcalorie, all-natural options such as kiwipear and cucumberapple. “It felt like the natural thing to do,” says head of product innovation and design Yaron Kopel. Milestones: Partnered with Pepsi last fall to offer naturally sweetened drinks; its stock price increased by 15%. Challenges: Convincing U.S. customers, somehow, that SodaStream is not a soda product. Buzz: “THE SHIFT IS GOING TO HELP US MOVE TO THE RIGHT CUSTOMER. THIS IS MUCH MORE OUR IDENTITY. WE ARE…

1 /EARLY CHILDHOOD Black Girls Code This national program works to encourage interest in tech among young black girls through daylong hackathons and workshops. BGC recently helped launch an initiative to teach 1,000 Latina girls coding skills. Institute for Broadening Participation Funded in part by NASA, IBP develops a variety of STEM– focused projects. Its Pathways to Science database lets users comb through more than 1,500 camps, workshops, and fellowships, from kindergarten to postdoc. 2 /HIGH SCHOOL StreetCode Academy Mentors from the local tech scene help youths ages 14 to 24 in poverty-stricken East Palo Alto learn how to code software and develop websites. All-Star Code This New York City–based initiative prepares high school–age boys of color for tech careers through internships, coding classes, and mentorship. 3 /COLLEGE City Startup…

WHERE OTHERS SEE roads, I see networks. Whenever I drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles down I-5, I wonder to myself whether McDonald’s and every other fast-food chain would have thrived had there been no interstate highway system. Would FedEx exist but for the invisible but very real infrastructure of airports, air routes, and roads? Railroads, freighters, factories, mass production—everything happened because the power of steam was made mobile. That created the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian age, and it altered the face of the entire planet. Today, it’s the increasing mobility of “computing engines,” the marriage of microprocessors and Internet ubiquity, that is poised to reimagine our society. More than a billion people bought smartphones last year—or to put it differently, we added 1.2 billion nodes to what…

Planned Parenthood has endured its share of crises in the nine years since you became president—everything from defeats in the courts and in Congress to the murder of George Tiller in 2009. How do you handle that as an organization? We were born in controversy. [Planned Parenthood] started before birth control was even legal, so I don’t think controversy is something that rocks the organization. That said, I think the difficulty is, when there are always potential crises, how do you figure out if you’re spending enough time on offense as you are on defense? Four years ago, when the new Congress came in, they took a whack at Planned Parenthood. [They] wanted to basically eliminate the ability of millions of women to come to Planned Parenthood health centers for…

When Michele Roberts, a white-collar defense attorney, was named the leader of the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) in July, she became the first female executive director of any major men’s professional sports union in the country. It was a significant achievement, but she still faced a daunting challenge: remaking an organization that had fallen into disrepair. The problem After years of misman -age ment—including some questionable financial dealings on the part of Roberts’s predecessor, Billy Hunter, who also caved on a deal that dramatically reduced members’ collective bargaining power—the players no longer had faith in their union. When Roberts arrived, she was appalled. “It was like a mom-andpop shop,” she says. “That’s how pathetic this place has been.” The epiphany To get the job, Roberts had to interview with…

Sometime around the year 2035, NASA hopes to fly a manned spacecraft to Mars and land astronauts on the planet. How will it achieve this daunting goal? Who will create the necessary technologies? And just as important, how will it teach the American public about the difficulties—and value—of such a distant, expensive, and audacious mission? At the moment, much of the responsibility for all of that rests on Ellen Stofan, NASA’s chief scientist. Here’s what we can learn from someone trying to solve a problem that no one has ever faced before. (S) PACE YOUR SELF When it comes to achieving such a (literally) distant goal, the key is to keep the process manageable, according to Stofan. “We have to ask, ‘How can we break a huge challenge like sending…

I don’t like to boss people around. I don’t get motivated by telling people what to do, I don’t take any pleasure in it. So I manage with curiosity, by asking questions. In a typical day, I may have 50 conversations of some substance. But I so prefer hearing what other people have to say that I instinctively ask questions. If you’re listening to my side of a phone call, you may hear little but the occasional question. Questions are a great management tool. Asking questions elicits information, of course. Asking questions creates the space for people to raise issues they are worried about that a boss, or colleagues, may not know about. Asking questions lets people tell a different story than the one you’re expecting. Most important from my…

Name Cecile Richards Title President, Planned Parenthood Federation of America; president, Planned Parenthood Action Fund Hometown Waco, Texas Previous jobs Deputy chief of staff, then-House minority leader Nancy Pelosi; founder and president, America Votes; founder, Texas Freedom Network; board member, Ford Foundation (current) Famous friends Gillian Robespierre, director of Obvious Child; Lena Dunham On having the dream job “My youngest daughter, Hannah, is an organizer. She texted me the other night saying, ‘I just interviewed 100 young people who want to be organizers, and one of the things I asked is, “What would be your dream job?” I’m telling you, all of them said, “Work for Planned Parenthood.” ’ How cool is that?”…

WHEN MY FACEBOOK ACCOUNT was hacked in March, I didn’t panic. I changed my passwords, and I enabled two-step authentication on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. I knew that once a single account was compromised, it could lead to a domino effect of unauthorized access far beyond a single social network. I was proud of my calm, surgical demeanor. Then I remembered that I use my Facebook, Twitter, and Google accounts to access other websites, apps, and services. I looked at which apps had access to my Twitter account: There are more than 200 (a printout is 24 pages long). Calm surgeon? More like a naive epidemiologist dealing with a potential viral outbreak. THE BIG THREE GATEKEEPERS HAVE AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF DATA ABOUT US. THEY’RE LIKE SANTA: THEY KNOW WHEN…