By mid-career, the hard skills that got you the job won’t be the ones that get you promoted.
At the start of your career, chances are good that you’ll be hired primarily for your “hard skills”—the stuff you know that’s relevant for the job. When you’re fresh out of college or even a few years into your career, things like what software you’ve mastered, the knowledge you’ve picked up during internships and in school, and your other technical credentials really matter.
The smart sensor Helium has captured the interest of Silicon Valley—and the insurance industry.
For years now, we’ve been hearing about how the Internet of Things will connect every object in our homes. And for years, the vast majority of those objects stay dumb.
The Cricket Shelter is designed to grow delicious crickets that are both free-range and local—just like we expect for the rest of our food.
Walking up to the Cricket Shelter—a new tent-like structure sitting on a dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—it might not immediately be obvious that it’s full of bugs. But inside pods lining the walls, the prototype is raising 22,000 crickets. Why? To eat, of course.
More employees are mapping out ways to make their jobs more meaningful, and it’s making them happier and more effective.
Creative ideas come from “putting new things in old combinations and old things in new combinations,” according to organizational theorist Karl Weick. The concept of job crafting comes from that exact definition: If you take parts of your work and reconfigure it, you’ll end up with a more meaningful job to better suit your talent and interests.
Savvy moves by yogurt maker Noosa helped it steal major market share from brand behemoths like Yoplait and Dannon. This is how they did it.
In 2005, Koel Thomae was visiting her mother in the Australian seaside town of Noosa when she had a life-altering experience. It involved a cup of yogurt.
InfoScout’s apps sell their users’ shopping data to marketers—and give those users a cut.
While plenty of advertising companies aggregate data about consumers behind their backs, one startup allows users to openly trade their purchase histories for rewards.
It’s less about the money than trying to solve the right problems.
Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at UC San Francisco, spends long hours at the hospital treating patients. But between shifts, he takes calls with health-technology entrepreneurs to offer them advice and feedback.
Working with people who think like you can feel supportive and safe, but it’s also limiting.
When it comes to love, opposites attract, but in business, the tendency can be to gravitate toward people who are similar. Having others agree with and support you feels energizing, but it can also be limiting, says Peter Arvai, CEO of the presentation software provider Prezi.
If someone’s trying to provoke you, the worst thing you can do is show them it’s worked.
Recently, a marketing firm called to solicit my business. They wanted me to sign up for their services, which included an online forum to produce and market classes based on my content. The young marketing rep was explaining all the features and benefits to me. Among them was a commitment to help produce social media posts, he explained, asking me in a rather condescending tone, “Do you know what social media is, Lea?” Could he have been more patronizing—or less informed about his potential customer?
The new version is anonymous—and it aims to direct your queries to experts on any subject.
In 2013, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone released Jelly, a Q&A app that allowed you to crowdsource answers to questions, getting answers from your friends and friends of friends. The idea didn’t exactly take off, and the company opted to pivot away from the Q&A model and launch Super, a social networking app that also didn’t gain a ton of traction.
Now a little over two years later, Stone and his cofounder Ben Finkel are bringing a whole new version of Jelly out of beta, one that they believe will be much more successful.
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