Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2019 i Fast Company

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…

In a shoebox-size studio at Sesame Workshop’s headquarters on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, cast and crew members expert in all things Muppet are preparing to film a 90-second video starring Elmo and his new friend, Karli, a lime-green monster with yellow-feathered pigtails who is in foster care. The purpose of the scene, as with so many Sesame stories, is to use pretend play to address a real-world issue “without overstating it,” says Kama Einhorn, a senior content manager for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that creates both Sesame Street and a slew of other educational materials that, like this video, live entirely outside the show. The cast reviews the plan for the scene: Elmo and Karli will use their stuffed animals to construct a castle out of blocks. But when Karli’s…

NATASHA JEN The idea of an operational process, without a philosophy or values, without a specific stance on how to look at the world, is highly problematic because every groundbreaking design has a philosophy behind it, good or bad. KHOI VINH I’m certainly not at the top of the list of defenders of design thinking as a foolproof way of solving problems, but design thinking as a practice has been successful for companies that traditionally don’t have design in their DNA. NATASHA JEN Design thinking avoids the idea of quality, of opinions, of an attitude onto the world. To me, those things are precisely what design is really about. Without design philosophy, products are just products, data just data, algorithms just algorithms. KHOI VINH I don’t see having a value…

Our economic system—once heralded for ensuring customer choice, stoking job creation and upward mobility, and sparking innovation—is failing us. The U.S., the paragon of capitalism, is experiencing crushing income inequality and struggling to provide affordable healthcare and childcare for working families as unprecedented climate change threatens even further disruption. As Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, writes bluntly in this issue: “Capitalism is in crisis.” Business leaders are worried too. We polled members of the Fast Company Impact Council, a cadre of founders and CEOs of fast-growing companies and innovative corporate executives, to assess the state of capitalism, and nearly a quarter of respondents agree with Walker’s statement that we need a major overhaul to better serve society. (For more on the Impact Council, see our feature on page…

As an interpreter manager at Rise Interpreting, Sara Groves makes sure people who are deaf or hard of hearing can still rock out at music festivals like Stagecoach and Coachella. She and a team of more than a dozen nationally certified American Sign Language interpreters spend months preparing for concert season, studying performers’ mannerisms, predicting set lists, and memorizing lyrics while figuring out how to translate them into ASL. Groves estimates that Rise interpreters work 25 music events per year, and she has personally signed for Garth Brooks, the Bangles, and the late Nipsey Hussle (though she still gets nervous in front of crowds). “Most of the time it’s about making sure that I remember all the lyrics and I get the meaning across, and that [audiences] feel that connection…

Back in 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a bold prediction: thanks to technological advancements and the resulting productivity gains, we’d all be working 15 hours a week. Almost 90 years later, the average American is working more than double those hours. For years now, we’ve been told that automation technologies would free us up to focus on more creative work. That vision has also yet to materialize. So my colleagues and I at the Google Media Lab—the team that manages the media strategy for Google’s advertising campaigns—began work on a plan that might make that vision a reality. 1. Find data that predicts results Machines are only as good as the data we feed into them. So we must find real-time data points that could actually help our…

ELIZABETH BANKS HAS A KNACK FOR PORTRAYING women who are easy to underestimate, from the bombshell right-wing media personality on 30 Rock to the Hunger Games’ foppish Effie Trinket. The same can be said for Banks herself. The actor—who will soon play a conservative feminist rival to Cate Blanchett’s Phyllis Schlafly in next year’s FX biopic miniseries Mrs. America—has become a prolific producer. Her company, Brownstone Productions, is behind the Pitch Perfect movie franchise as well as the Hulu series Shrill, starring Aidy Bryant. In 2015, Banks added another position to her résumé: directing Pitch Perfect 2, which became one of the highest-grossing female-directed films, earning $287 million globally. Now she’s doing all three jobs plus one more—cowriting—in the latest Charlie’s Angels, in theaters this month. Charlie’s Angels is a…

“YOU WANT THE TRUTH? IT’S HOPELESS. IT’S COM-pletely hopeless.” That’s what Patagonia founder and chairman Yvon Chouinard told the L.A. Times about the plight of the earth amid climate change. In 1994. Regardless, Chouinard and his company have spent decades—and millions of dollars—fighting for environmental causes around the world while investing in more sustainable business practices. What’s more, Patagonia has embraced and promoted the B Corporation movement, while Chouinard led such efforts as 1% for the Planet, a collective of companies that pledged to donate 1% of profits to environmental groups and has raised more than $225 million since 2002. Meanwhile, over the past 46 years, Patagonia has become a billion-dollar global brand, making it the ultimate do-good-and-do-well company. ¦ But Chouinard remains unsatisfied. The 81-year-old is more focused than…

“To everyone who says it’s just too hard, here’s what I know for sure: Yeah, it’s not easy to make big changes, but you don’t get what you don’t fight for. And big structural changes are worth fighting for.”—ELIZABETH WARREN, U.S. senator, Massachusetts, and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, who has called for a number of initiatives to reform the American financial system in her stump speeches and Medium posts, from imposing a 2% ultra-millionaire’s tax to reining in the private-equity industry and Wall Street speculation ▸A NEW KIND OF 10-K 09 That’s how many pages the artisanal marketplace Etsy devotes to social impact in its 2018 annual report filed with the SEC. Etsy shares both its goals and its progress in empowering creators, building a diverse workforce, and becoming carbon…

▸OUR FUTURE SUCCESS DEPENDS ON A DIVERSE ARRAY of perspectives and backgrounds—and inclusion is key. At Intel, we believe that if you do not intentionally include, then you will unintentionally exclude. We are no longer debating the business case for diversity: We are questioning the business case for homogeneity. But you can’t just hire your way to success. To drive progress, you need an integrated approach of hiring, progression, and retention. Here are five steps we’ve taken to ensure solid representation at all levels of the company REWARD: All of our full-time employees have a portion of their annual performance bonus tied to the achievement of our diverse hiring and retention goals. INVEST: We’ve trained 13,000 managers worldwide through a program called “Managing at Intel,” and focused on intentionally covering…

Scientists and NGOs have been raising concerns since the 1980s over the presence of bisphenol A (BPA) in food and drink containers. The industrial chemical, used to make polycarbonate plastic bottles and food storage containers, along with the epoxy resin linings in canned goods, has been associated with endocrine disorders. Regulators have responded over the past decade: The FDA banned the compound from baby bottles and children’s drinking cups in 2012, and by 2018, 90% of steel food cans were being manufactured without it. But the beverage industry has struggled to get the chemical out of aluminum cans, stymied by the difficulty of finding an alternative coating that stops the corrosion of both steel and aluminum effectively. (Due to manufacturing requirements, the can industry needs a compound that works for…

Manhattan’s West Side Highway is lined by a gleaming wall of glass and metal. The skyscrapers along this stretch tend to be tall and boxy—aside from one conspicuous exception. Forty Tenth Avenue, a 12-story building from Chicago architecture firm Studio Gang, cuts a jagged silhouette against an otherwise rectilinear skyline. The southeastern side of the building tapers back from the eighth floor toward the roof and narrow base, creating an hourglass-shaped carve in the facade (pictured). On the northeastern side, the building slants inward, with a diamond shape carved out. The unusual design is courtesy of Gang’s “solar carving” concept, which uses software to model the sun’s path through the sky throughout the year and allows the studio to shift, tuck, and slant a building to minimize the shadows it…

Kartell’s Componibili storage cabinet series was dreamed up 50 years ago by architect Anna Castelli Ferrieri. The Italian company estimates it has sold more than 10 million of the surprisingly affordable stackable, modular units, and in June announced a more earth-friendly version, made of 100% biode-gradable bioplastic created from farm waste. (Starting at $59, shopkartell.com) Productivity Hack KATIE MCGRATH, CO-CEO, BAD ROBOT How to Send the Perfect Thank-You Note 1. Handwritten is always best. I do admit to emailing more often than I should these days…don’t tell my mother! 2. We always send delicious cookies from Cookie Good—the best you’ve ever tasted! 3. I write on Crane Letterpress cream cards with my name in navy ink. J.J. [Abrams, Bad Robot co-CEO] collects pens. I tend to steal his extra-fine Zebra…

GREGG RENFREW Founder and CEO, Beautycounter “What got us here won’t get us there. The future of business depends on a holistic approach to business as defined by a triple bottom line—people, planet, profits.” IMRAN CHAUDHRI Cofounder, Humane “Steve [Jobs] used to say, ‘You can’t have faith in technology, you have to have faith in people.’ ” GLOBAL CEOS DON’T NEED ANOTHER OUTLET FOR SHARING THEIR IDEAS. THEY HAVE THE Business Roundtable, the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, and countless other platforms for communicating their thoughts to one another—and the rest of the world. But as it becomes increasingly clear that corporate chieftains don’t necessarily have all the answers (see “The New Capitalism,” starting on page 48), we at Fast Company are excited to have launched a…

▸IT USED TO BE, IF SOMEBODY WENT OFF THE RAILS, ONE of your kids, you’d immediately start praying. Now it’s Google. Google literally is our God. You trust Google more than any priest, rabbi, scholar, mentor, or boss. It knows if you’re thinking about getting divorced. It knows what STDs you have. It knows if you’re worried that you’re borderline or bipolar. You don’t tell this shit to your wife or your husband. [If] you type in “how to overthrow your government,” is the first piece of content you see a voter registration form or an instruction manual on how to build a dirty bomb? And we have one company that decides that 93% of the time, and they won’t tell us how they fashioned these algorithms and if there…