Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2019 i Fast Company

Hyundai Motor Group The Korean automaker has become the most aggressive traditional Asian player in the EV space, and it just partnered with Croatian electric-sportscar maker Rimac on a new model. Q1 Sales:* 21,148 Goals: Spend $40 billion to build its own electric platform so it can launch 44 EV models by 2025 BMW Launched the i3 in 2013, but it’s always been an odd duck—it doesn’t look like a BMW—and the company has been criticized for not exploring new business models. Sales: 9,227 Goals: 12 fully electric models by 2025 Volkswagen Aggressively boosting production of new models, and both Porsche Taycan and VW’s ID.3 have racked up tens of thousands of preorders. Sales: 5,811** Goals: 70 models and 22 million cars produced by 2028 GM First rolled out the…

Daniel Baker and Joel Martinez COMPANY Showtime POSITION Talk-show hosts EARLY JOBS DB Columnist for Black Enterprise magazine JM Middle-school teaching assistant BRONX NATIVES DANIEL BAKER (DESUS NICE) AND JOEL MARTINEZ (THE KID MERO) met in high school. After honing their rapid-fire cultural commentary on Twitter, Baker, a former small-business columnist, and Martinez, a onetime public-school teacher, parlayed their viral popularity into a podcast on Complex before adding TV, first with an ill-fitting stint at MTV2 and then with a hit nightly show on Viceland. Now, the sons of Jamaican and Latino immigrants, respectively, are working with a writers’ room for the first time and translating their off-the-cuff humor for a broader audience with the seven-month-old Desus and Mero. Desus and Mero doesn’t follow the same template as other late-night…

THINK YOU’VE GOT WHAT IT TAKES? Learn more at Fastcompanypress.com We’re looking for authors who ignore the status quo. Business professionals who have stories of innovation in technology, leadership, or design. WHAT MAKES FAST COMPANY PRESS PEERLESS? ▶ Author ownership of rights▶ National retail distribution▶ Premier production quality▶ Advertising to Fast Company readers…

What’s your best habit, and your worst? My best is my discipline and that I practice daily meditation. My worst is my capacity for procrastination. What advice are you glad you ignored? “Hire to your weaknesses.” It’s every entrepreneur’s dream to pass off the aspects of the business that they don’t feel comfortable with, but until you fully understand how something needs to be done, it is hard to hire the right team to execute for you. What advice would you give your younger self? Don’t be so impatient. Everything you wish for will happen at the right time. Is there a businessperson you admire? Oprah created an empire and stayed true to herself while doing it. She has certainly overcome obstacles, but she’s made it look effortless. What’s the…

In a world where privacy is evaporating, one tech organization is taking a stand. Mozilla works to preserve an open, global internet by advancing public policy and creating technologies that protect people’s right to explore and create online without fear of surveillance. Mozilla began in 1998 as a community open source project. Today, it’s an internet leader with a team of more than 1,000. Its well-known web browser, Firefox, protects user privacy with features like Enhanced Tracking Protection, a now default setting that blocks cookies so companies can’t track you. Like all Mozilla solutions, it’s the product of international collaboration and diversity of thought. FROM THE OUTSIDE-IN Mozilla’s ability to innovate across borders—with the purpose of ensuring the internet is a global public resource, accessible to all—earned it a spot…

HITMAKERS LIL JON METRO BOOMIN T.I. ORGANIZED NOIZE Rico Wade, Ray Murray, and Sleepy Brown MOGULS WILL PACKER Will Packer Productions TYLER PERRY Tyler Perry Studios L.A. REID AND Babyface LaFace Records* LUDACRIS Disturbing tha Peace JERMAINE DUPRI So So Def TRICKY STEWART RedZone Entertainment MULTI-HYPHENATES JANELLE MONÁE DONALD GLOVER FORERUNNERS GUCCI MANE MONICA KANDI BURRUSS ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT Speech, Tasha LaRae, 1 Love, JJ Boogie, and Fareedah USHER OUTKAST Big Boi and André 3000 TONI BRAXTON STREAMING STARS FUTURE LIL YACHTY YOUNG THUG 21 SAVAGE 2 CHAINZ MIGOS Offset, Quavo, and Takeoff LIL NAS X…

3M MAPLEWOOD, MN The manufacturing conglomerate famous for Post-it Notes and Scotch tape earns about 3,000 patents every year and encourages its 91,000 employees to devote 15% of working time to projects outside the normal scope of their jobs. AMD SANTA CLARA, CA AMD, a semiconductor company, uses “leapfrog teams”—discrete groups of engineers who simultaneously work on successive generations of core chip designs—to ensure the consistent communication, preservation of knowledge, and enforcement of best practices that can help spur innovation. Cloudflare SAN FRANCISCO To create products that improve website security and performance, Cloudflare’s R&D lab incubates new ideas through rapid iteration. Cloudflare also conducts two-week experiments called “spikes”: Employees test new ideas to determine whether they warrant further investment. In 2018, the company launched eight new products and services, including…

Intuit MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA The company behind QuickBooks, Turbo-Tax, and Mint supports employees developing new ideas for communities that most need them. Through a project called Mission Hope, Intuit’s customer-success team is opening new customer service call centers in local economies that have experienced serious downturns. In the past two years, the initiative created more than 900 jobs in Wise, Virginia, and Johns town, Pennsylvania. Intuit has recently announced a third center (in Bluefield, West Virginia). Compass NEW YORK Real estate brokerage Compass runs on a proprietary tech platform that elicits internal feedback through a digital forum that allows up and down voting from all of its agents and employees. Suggestions that make it to the top of the leaderboard become eligible for some of the hundreds of millions in…

1986 The event starts on Baker Beach near San Francisco, when Larry Harvey and Jerry James burn an 8-foot-tall wooden model of a man as bystanders watch. 1988 Harvey names the statue “Burning Man,” and he and James start promoting their Baker Beach event with posters, flyers, and T-shirts. 1990 Police break up the event at the beach on Memorial Day. At the suggestion of the Cacophony Society, a group of neo–Merry Pranksters, it moves to the Black Rock Desert over Labor Day weekend. About 90 people attend. 1991 Burning Man receives a permit from the Bureau of Land Management. After inspecting the site, post-event, the BLM concludes that “no trace of the burning ceremony or the campsite can be found,” inspiring Burning Man’s “leave no trace” edict. 1992 Attendees…

Yo Elon, you okay? Asking for a friend. I think you know her: the planet. Over the past year, Tesla cofounder and CEO Elon Musk’s leadership has been as erratic as his company’s performance. He announced that Tesla would close its stores, only to reverse that decision less than two weeks later. He promised for almost a year that the “Enhanced Summon” feature, which would allow drivers to have their Tesla pick them up curbside, was imminent, only to acknowledge at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in June that “there’s a lot of complexity in parking lots.” Perhaps most important, after months of stressing that Tesla must become profitable as a matter of “life or death,” Musk changed his stance yet again, saying that growth is paramount and profitability can…

Tech billionaires are pouring millions of dollars into education causes every year in attempts to revamp schools, build a better workforce, and even win over America’s youth. Here’s a look at their signature education projects, and who stands to benefit from them. Marc Benioff $100,000 The amount that 21 middle school principals in the San Francisco Unified School District each received annually since 2013 from Benioff’s spin-out, Salesforce.org, to support “innovation” as they see fit Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Facebook CEO and his wife back Summit Learning, a digital platform that manages students’ tasks and progress—and is subject to a growing backlash. Who’s using the platform: 100 BROOKLYN STUDENTS STAGED A WALKOUT IN 2018 OVER THE PLATFORM’S INEFFECTIVENESS. Michael and Susan Dell 32.2 MILLION…

ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ U.S. Representative, New York’s 14th Congressional District “It’s funny watching people [claim], ‘You’re not really from the Bronx,’” Baker says of their first guest on Showtime. “When we’re talking to her, she’s making references you cannot Google, that unless you lived in the Bronx, you don’t know.” CHRIS HAYES Host, All In With Chris Hayes, on MSNBC “He was the coolest person in middle school, which makes absolutely no sense,” says Baker. The two were classmates at Pablo Casals Middle School in the Bronx. “Girls would be like, ‘Oh my God, Chris.’ He would always get picked as the quarterback. I make this joke: I didn’t know Chris Hayes was white until seventh grade. I thought he was just light-skinned. When I had a crappy job a couple…

Technology is the primary driver of innovation at all kinds of businesses. It’s widely used in areas such as marketing, supply chain logistics, commerce solutions, and others. Businesses that embrace technology are much more likely to develop a culture of innovation than those that don’t. When that mindset is expanded to include the human resources function, the impact can be dramatic. The lion’s share of the costs involved with common HR tasks are labor-related, according to a recent report by consulting firm EY. For example, labor accounts for 95% of the average cost of onboarding a new employee. Using technology to automate HR processes can return significant savings: 7% on talent acquisition, 15% on people management, and 37% on HR analytics, in the case of one economic analysis recently conducted…

Berlin-based designer Sophie Rowley, who began experimenting with recycled materials as a master’s student at Central Saint Martins, in London, creates the marblelike surfaces of her Bahia Slate Tables from used denim, collected from recycling centers in Germany. She dips the fabric in bioresin (a plastic made from organic compounds) and dries it into a mold to make a sturdy three-dimensional shape. The final table feels more like fabric than plastic. “The exposed surface is jeans, so it has a soft and warm sensation,” says Rowley. (Prices starting at $700) NECESSARY VICE Casamigos Reposado (STARTING AT $ 25.99, CASAMIGOSTEQUILA.COM) “I love the taste of this tequila. I look forward to my Friday night Casamigos on the rocks—and my kids look forward to my extra-entertaining bedtime stories. It’s a parenting winwin.”…

Instagram @HUMANSOFNY Humans of New York is brilliant. It’s a reminder of how vast and diverse and inspiring the world is. Twitter @IANBREMMER @PREETBHARARA It’s a tie between two friends who have a way of cutting through the BS without losing their sense of humor. Podcast THE ASSASSINATION The BBC’s The Assassination, by Owen Bennett-Jones, goes into great detail investigating the murder of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. TV Show THE WEST WING I’m a West Wing fan for life. I also really loved The Americans and The Tudors. I recently binge-watched The Man in the High Castle. Website FUNNYORDIE I’d be lying if I didn’t say Funnyordie.com is my favorite website.…

“LOOK AT THIS, MAN,” TRISTAN WALKER SAYS AS HE LEANS INTO A WOODEN LAWN CHAIR IN HIS BACKYARD. He forms his thumbs and index fingers into a rectangle and squints through it at the seven-bedroom literal house on a hill before us. It’s a warm April afternoon, too early yet for Georgia’s notorious swelter. Blues singer Tyrone Davis’s “Baby, Can I Change My Mind?” plays from a glowing Bluetooth speaker that doubles as a sleek outdoor light. “When I was 20 years old, and I was like, ‘What does the vision of [my] world look like?’” he recalls. “This frame is it.” Walker and his family have been in this house, in Atlanta’s northern Buckhead neighborhood, for all of two weeks. It’s the first time the Queens, New York, native…

These days, the marketing playbook for any innovative company looking to scale must include automation, AI, and machine learning. The rapid data analysis and subsequent predictive algorithms that machine learning allows is a sure-fire way to reach new customers—and quickly. But what if you’re a small but beloved business that has only four full-time employees? That was the problem Paolo Mentonelli faced when he founded BioRepublic Skincare four and a half years ago. “We didn’t have the capabilities to do advanced segmentation and customizing of our message to specific groups of customers,” he says. What Mentonelli really needed was a robust marketing strategy, one capable of “specifically targeting groups of customers based on purchase history, demographics, even psychographics.” Mentonelli found his solution in Mailchimp. The company that made its (whimsical)…

Amazon SEATTLE One way Amazon cultivates ideas from more than 600,000 employees is via a process called “working backwards”: Any employee with a big idea is encouraged to create a plan that includes a customer-impact statement, a mock press release, key questions, and perspectives from different business areas. It’s how site features such as Prime Now and Amazon-Smile began. Ansys CANONSBURG, PA A small group of Ansys developers had an idea: Use graphics processing units rather than slower conventional central processing units for the company’s core software product. Management gave them dedicated working space, servers, and relief from their normal duties. Discovery Live launched last year—the first engineering software that provides real-time physics simulation and geometry editing. Epsilon-Conversant IRVING, TX Recently acquired by Publicis, the marketing company has an “automate…

More than a decade ago, a serious car crash nearly destroyed one young Australian woman’s jaw, breaking it in three places. A series of agonizing surgeries failed to reduce her unrelenting pain, and in 2017 her jaw began locking up to the point she could barely eat. Her oral surgeon recognized that the problem was a failed bone graft. She needed a new bone created from scratch using 3D-printing technology. Craniomaxillofacial surgical device designer OMX Solutions turned to ANSYS's engineering simulation software to measure, design, and then produce a new piece of simulated bone to be surgically implanted. The implant surgery took less than an hour, thanks to a perfect fit, and minutes after the anesthesia wore off, the patient was able to talk pain-free. The life-changing surgery was only…

Katherine Power COMPANY Clique Brands POSITION Cofounder and CEO PREVIOUS JOBS Cofounder of fashion blog Who What Wear, editor at Elle magazine This past May, Target debuted Versed, a 19-piece skincare line free of 1,300 toxic ingredients, priced at less than $20 per item, and packaged in sleek mint-green, teal-blue, and pink tubes and bottles. It’s the latest brainchild of Katherine Power, the cofounder and CEO of Clique Brands, which includes 16 million–person online fashion community Who What Wear and a number of retail lines. Power began her career as an editor at Elle magazine, but found a new media-business model in turning reader insights into e-commerce and products. In 2016, she cocreated the Who What Wear clothing line, sold exclusively at Target. In 2017, she partnered with Target on…

At its core, machine learning is a way to label and analyze huge data sets quickly and on an infinitely larger scale. Here's how you can apply machine learning to drive growth. Audience: Find Your Most Valuable Customers Let’s say you’re trying to get your app into the hands of long-term, paying users but they’re not opening it much after initial download. You wouldn’t be the first to encounter this issue. In fact, only 37% of app installs remain in use after seven days. So how can you find the right audience? 37% of app installs remain in use after seven days. If you’re using siloed sources to identify your audience, you might be missing out. Machine learning can sort and analyze sources to help you learn which users are…

1 The Gastronomical Me MFK FISHER Fisher’s 1943 memoir, of her years growing up in California through her early adult life in Europe, inspired me to pursue writing and a career in food. 2 What You Do Is Who You Are BEN HOROWITZ (OUT OCTOBER 2019) Horowitz looks to different leaders (the leader of the slave rebellion that freed Haiti, the head of a Michigan prison gang) to draw insights for work culture. 3 Happiness Is Baking MAIDA HEATTER Heatter’s writing reminds me that it’s substance and quality that matter. Her writing on home baking has been the gold standard for decades. 4 Delivering Happiness TONY HSIEH Business pressures often put a company at odds with its customers. This book explains the customer-first culture at Zappos. It’s a reminder that…

1 Buckhead This affluent, mostly white district in north Atlanta is home to entrepreneur David Cummings’s seven-year-old startup incubator, Atlanta Tech Village. 2 Downtown The 42,000-squarefoot National Center for Civil and Human Rights opened here in 2014, on land donated by Coca-Cola, near Centennial Olympic Park. It contains many of Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal papers and items. 3 West End With the BeltLine Westside Trail underway, activists are fighting rising rents. Atlanta BeltLine founder Ryan Gravel, who resigned from the project to protest its gentrifying influence, is now developing a mixed-use building with affordable housing in the area. 4 Midtown Atlanta’s corporate heart is now home to the Technology Square innovation hub. Georgia Tech, Tech-Square Labs, and the AT&T Foundry are here, along with the new Coda building, which…

SIEMENS MUNICH Industrial manufacturer Siemens holds more than 15,000 patents in the United States alone, with more than 43,000 R&D-focused employees worldwide. Its Quickstarter program allows Siemens employees to independently (and democratically) allocate company money to support the development of colleagues’ ideas. Attivo Networks SAN FRANCISCO The cybersecurity firm, which deploys technology to help businesses detect and respond to attacks, assigns a “champion” to mentor each new hire, boasts a 93% annual employee-retention rate, and reinvests one-third of revenues into research and development. Blue Prism WARRINGTON, ENGLAND The robotic-process automation company makes its proprietary software and training materials available to universities (including Texas A&M, Aditya Engineering College, and the University of Manchester), and in January opened a new artificial intelligence lab in its London facility. B-Reel STOCKHOLM Three times a…

1973 The Indiana-born Warner enrolls at George Washington University and is the first in his family to finish college. After Harvard Law School, he works for Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and the Democratic National Committee. 1982 In the wake of an FCC policy change that establishes a lottery system for awarding cellphone licenses, Warner has an idea. He begins applying for licenses on behalf of investor groups, negotiating a 5% stake in the ones he secures. He then resells these licenses at higher prices. The practice, which is entirely legal, reportedly earns him $150 million over 10 years. (The FCC reverts to an auction-based method of assigning licenses in 1994.) 1989 Serves as campaign director for Douglas Wilder, who becomes Virginia’s first African American governor. This same year, he co-launches…