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Arranging furniture in a small space can be a daunting task. Lack of wall space, traffic flow, and seating configurations are a lot to consider. At first glance, there might not seem to be anywhere that the TV makes sense— or maybe you're apprehensive about making your TV the focal point in the room (it is a black mirror most of the time). There are tricks of the design trade to help guide you when placing the TV so it doesn't overwhelm the room and distract from your décor. You just have to be clever and a little creative. Here's where to put a TV when space is at a premium.

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Bitcoin hit $3,000 earlier this week. Then it dropped by 30%. In honor of that arbitrary high watermark and even higher volatility, I wanted to share the first year of my journey into cryptocurrency.

I first discovered Bitcoin in February 2013.

On a cold winter morning in Menlo Park, a colleague was talking about blockchain this and crypto that. It didn’t make any sense. Miners and block rewards? What? But I remembered seeing a couple headlines on YCombinator’s Hacker News and figured this was something to learn about. So I went on Coinbase, which had just recently launched. I paid $21.65 for 1 bitcoin. Just because. Of course only a few years earlier the price of a bitcoin was infinitesimally small on the order of fractional pennies.

I should have bought more, but even one felt like a crazy idea. It was unclear how or why this existed. I hadn’t thought through how impactful it could be on the future.

What do you do with a Bitcoin?

I heard about these dark web markets. Like the black market version of eBay. So I downloaded an onion browser to check out the dark web and The Silk Road. It felt like eBay on Netscape in 1996. I didn’t buy anything. But I almost bought some alpaca socks. This was one of the first legitimate businesses to open an bitcoin-only e-commerce site. Silk Road was run by someone (or some group) going under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) who was arrested later that year just a mile from my house in San Francisco. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

I also messed around with some tools like Blockchain.info and read the Satoshi whitepaper. Then I read it again. I transferred bitcoin between different online (hot) wallets I had, just because.

I even tried mining bitcoin

I even bought a USB bitcoin miner off Amazon for $14.49 and paid $4.99 for shipping since it wasn’t part of Prime.

My solar power, when it behaves, overproduces. So this was a way to make use of that energy that PG&E gives me pennies on the dollar for. I mined 0.02 bitcoin before the difficulty got so extreme due to competition from huge industrial miners. Within a couple months, I gave up. But at the time, the amount I mined covered the cost of my USB miner. Score.

Plenty of scams; I got gox’d a bitcoin

I did a bit of trading on vircurex and Mt. Gox, two of the earliest exchanges. Vircurex was connected to my mining pool. So it was easy to transfer my measly 0.02 mined bitcoin into it, in addition to the Namecoin tokens that I also mined. I traded these for two Litecoin ($80 USD today) and forgot about the whole thing since other, better exchanges opened up. Luckily I didn’t have too much on Vircurex since it’s all frozen now.

Then came Mt Gox, which has been the grandest of all bitcoin scams to date. MTGOX stands for Magic The Gathering Online Exchange. Magic being the old school Dungeons and Dragons style card game. Mt Gox entered bitcoin trading very early, in 2010. By 2013 it was the dominant exchange for Bitcoin and within a year it was game over a la Madoff. Insolvent to the extent of 7% of all bitcoin, which would be worth $3 billion today. It’s unclear where those coins went or how they’ll get distributed to creditors, who I implicitly became.

Since the company was domiciled in Japan, bankruptcy proceedings have started there. In 2014, I received the following via international air mail. Considering the complexity of an international bankruptcy, it’s been handled pretty well.

If it’s not your keys, it’s not your bitcoin

This was a valuable lesson learned. Own your keys or risk forfeit. When your coins are on an exchange, they are in the wallet of the exchange owner who is the only one who has access to they keys. Actually, others might have access to they keys too since hacking is common. A hacker might steal keys. Attacks are constant. The only way to secure ownership is to own the wallet and the private key (think: password) and treat it like cash. This is an unregulated world, very different than banking or stock trading. There’s no FDIC and little scrutiny (though increasing) on the cryptocurrency ecosystem. It’s the wild west and everything you do is at your own risk.

Since then, I’ve studied best practices in securing coins. The best options are to store coins in cold storage and hardware wallets. Just a couple weeks ago, someone lost $8,000 because their Coinbase account got compromised by an SMS 2 factor authentication attack.

Over time, we will see more regulation and improved security on cryptocurrency exchanges. Many have popped up over the past few years, though they are constantly under attacks like denial of service (DOS). And even if they are run by credible, ethical people, they can still suffer outages. This happened last week when bitcoin hit $3,000. Many were upset because they couldn’t login to trade, or move their coins in or out of exchanges. This is new territory and there is no prior on how to build and execute these types of systems. But as we traverse the experience curve (warning: MBA terminology), we’ll see more and more robustness.

The post My first year in Bitcoin appeared first on Scott Shapiro.

Though white subway tile still reigns supreme in kitchens and baths, but on the floor, it's another story. If you can't help but notice that your Pinterest and Instagram feeds have a lot of medallion-style floor tiles lately, we're here to tell you that you're not alone.

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While we love the look of a classic white subway tile, we can't help but get a little giddy when we see something a little bit more special. Adding a bold backsplash is a wonderful way to introduce something unexpected into your space. Select a stunning shape or bold color (or a stunning shape in a bold color) for a gasp-worthy backsplash that'll transform your kitchen. Here are nine perfect options to get your inspiration gears churning.

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If you had to create an eau de IKEA, what what it smell like? Freshly unboxed plywood? Sweaty allen wrench? Meatballs? Well, we may soon find out. The retailer announced during their annual Democratic Design Day event this week that they're collaborating with Swedish perfume brand Byredo.

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The girls and I are headed to Austin today for our summer trip together—OH MY GOD. AUSTIN. I just this second realized the significance of this. KAREN! The universe is sending crazy signals that are hard to ignore. Hard. To ignore. So very hard. We...

I recently built a Messenger Bot. This is the third post in a series describing how I built it and what I learned.

My first encounter with my solar power system’s API was not with Messenger but with Alexa. Alexa is the voice recognition and processing system behind the Amazon Echo.

Starting with Alexa

Shortly after I setup my Alexa, I was geeking out on things to do with it. After setting up a wifi lightbulb, I started thinking about other household tasks for Alexa. This was right around the time of the $300 power bill. Putting two and two together, I figured Alexa could help me get smarter about my solar power system.

The first Google search result for “Enphase Alexa” was a winner. I found a github project that did exactly this, except it’s pull not push. It wouldn’t notify me. But it would let me see examples of working with my Enphase solar system’s API. I’m fascinated by what Amazon is doing with Alexa and am always looking for new use cases for my Echo. This was a turnkey opportunity.

It was straightforward to setup. I had to:
1. Configure an AWS Lamba instance.
2. Create an Alexa skill.
3. Provision a developer account with Enphase
4. Enable API access on my solar system.

The human element

I spent around four hours total to get this going. Our landlord owns our rooftop solar power system, which we are very lucky to have! But we had to work together to figure out how to enable system-level API access. The Enphase help center didn’t have clear instructions on how to do this – I provisioned a token and didn’t realize until hours later that the system owner also has to flip a switch.

The technical part

I’m also pretty rusty on tools like vim, bash, and python. But it’s like riding a bike. It’s amazing how some tools are the same as they’ve been for decades but others turnover so quickly.

AWS Lambda is a pretty awesome service. It lets you run stateless python code, taking an input and providing outputs. No data is stored anywhere. The way it works: Lambda receives the processed query from Alexa, pulls data from the solar system’s API, and then returns it to Alexa who speaks the answer back to me through my echo device. All this happens in a matter of milliseconds. I already have an AWS account from a backup S3 storage system, so there was no friction to get this going.

The Enphase solar system’s API is straightforward. Their documentation is okay – I got stuck on figuring out that I had to replace the systemID with my own. They also have a testing endpoint where you can query a fake solar system if you don’t have a real one to query.

Setting up the Alexa skill was easy, just copy/pasting node.js code and linking it to my Lambda instance. Most of this is around recognizing and mapping semantics. I had to redo the Lambda setup a few times as it would only work from US-East and not other AWS datacenter locations.

Here’s a demo where I ask Alexa how much power I produced last month!​ All I do is ask my echo a simple question. 

​

Next step: Push notifications

This was a big step forward – having a talking speaker ask my solar system how much power it’s producing in realtime. Or how much I produced in January. Ten years ago, I never thought I’d have solar power. I definitely didn’t think Amazon would produce a hockey puck sized conversation for $49.99 (Echo Dot).

It works great when I’m home, but I need something I can access from anywhere. I also need something that would push notify me.

Next post I’ll share how I used this experience to get started with Messenger

The post I started with Alexa appeared first on scottshapiro.com.

It’s hard to overstate the significance — and complexity — of the H-1B visa system in the U.S. It is the country’s largest guest worker visa program, and an important channel for high-skilled immigration. It allows companies to hire foreign workers for specialized jobs that can be challenging to fill. It has benefited the tech industry enormously, and other sectors, including health care, science, and finance, have also used it to fill gaps in their workforces.

But in April, just after U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) conducted its annual lottery for selecting H-1B visas (it received 199,000 petitions for the available 85,000 visas), President Trump signed an executive order that will put H-1B and similar programs under new scrutiny. Titled “Buy American and Hire American,” it directs federal agencies to review whether existing policies adequately prioritize American products and protect American workers.

The order is the latest development in a long-running debate over how companies use the H-1B program and how it affects American workers. Much of the dispute surrounds whether companies take advantage of the program to hire foreign workers for lower pay, displacing Americans from those jobs. But it’s important to understand the underlying elements of this debate: one level rests on the heavy use of H-1B visas by outsourcing firms; another rests on the disagreement over whether the program increases companies’ access to scarce skills, or merely helps them minimize costs.

The H-1B Visa Process

Who gets H-1Bs?

H-1B visas are granted through an employer-driven system, meaning employers petition the government for visas tied to specific roles. These must qualify as “specialty occupations,” which typically require a bachelor’s degree (or the equivalent) and are found in fields such as science, engineering, information technology, medicine, and business. Companies have to attest that they will not pay an H-1B worker less than they would an American, and that H-1B workers will not “adversely affect the working conditions” of other workers — but it’s often said that this hardly functions as a rule and is not strictly (if at all) enforced. There is also criticism that it opens up various loopholes that firms can exploit. For example, as a Kellogg Insight research summary explains:

The standards for determining prevailing wages are shaky, and companies can take advantage of loopholes, such as hiring the person through a third-party service. In addition, increasing the supply of workers might drive down everyone’s pay over time because employers have more potential employees to choose from and thus do not have to offer high salaries or raises to attract and retain staff.

The program is most often associated with the tech industry, where H-1B workers hold about 12%–13% of jobs, according to a Goldman Sachs report. (For comparison, they hold around 0.6%–0.7% of U.S. jobs overall.) Being able to recruit globally is supposed to help tech powerhouses like Facebook and Amazon find the talent they need.

The companies that bring in the most H-1B workers, however, are not Silicon Valley tech firms but IT services firms, many based in India, that specialize in consulting or outsourcing. These companies, which include Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant, Infosys, Wipro, Accenture, IBM India, and Deloitte, are contracted by other companies to do IT work. According to an analysis by Ronil Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University, in 2014 nearly one-third of new H-1B visas went to 13 of these so-called “outsourcers.” (Tata received the most visas, with 5,650, while Amazon, the tech company with the highest number, got 877.)

Compared with Silicon Valley firms, IT services companies tend to hire H-1B workers for lower-paying entry-level work. For example, Axios reported that 72.4% of Tata’s H-1B visa filings were for jobs paying between $60,000–$70,000 a year. Companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft mostly filed for jobs that paid well above $100,000.

This difference in pay gets at one of the main criticisms of the H-1B program: Rather than bringing the world’s “best and brightest” talent into the country to work alongside Americans, the system appears to be bringing in cheaper foreign labor that can hurt American workers’ employment and income prospects. It’s a compelling argument: Numerous American IT workers have been laid off (and then asked to train their H-1B replacements) after their employers chose to outsource IT department work instead of keeping it in-house. These decisions by companies have resulted in a few high-profile lawsuits, such as those brought by workers against Disney and Southern California Edison. And a number of studies have found that H-1B workers can have negative effects on American workers, in terms of displacement and lower earnings.

On the other side of the debate, H-1B supporters argue that the program brings needed skills into the labor market, which helps firms remain innovative, productive, and competitive. A wealth of academic literature has documented how high-skilled immigrants, particularly in STEM, and including those who would enter the U.S. on H-1B visas, boost the economy by increasing innovation, productivity, and sometimes even employment.

It is not exactly easy for many companies to obtain H-1B visas, and members of the tech industry have lobbied Congress to raise the cap on H-1B visas to help meet demand. In 2008 Bill Gates testified before Congress to advocate for more H-1B visas to help compensate for “a deficit of Americans with computer science degrees.” (A bill was introduced in 2015 to raise the cap and liberalize other rules around H-1Bs, but died in Congress.) Companies like Tata, Infosys, and Wipro have also lobbied against restrictions on the program, arguing that their services help corporations become more competitive. More broadly, many tech leaders have emphasized the contributions of high-skilled immigrants to the economy — and have spoken out against anti-immigrant actions like President Trump’s travel bans.

Is There a Shortage of Technical Skills in the U.S.?

There is mixed evidence about the existence and the extent of a STEM skills shortage. Companies say they struggle to find qualified workers for specialized positions, suggesting there is a shortage of necessary skills. Some experts say that there are plenty of American workers who could fill these jobs, and that if employers were truly desperate for skills, wages for skilled positions would surge (but they haven’t).

An analysis led by Hal Salzman, a professor at Rutgers University, found that the U.S. graduates more STEM workers than the tech industry needs and that STEM wages have stayed depressingly flat. They write:

For every two students that U.S. colleges graduate with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job. In computer and information science and in engineering, U.S. colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year; of the computer science graduates not entering the IT workforce, 32 percent say it is because IT jobs are unavailable, and 53 percent say they found better job opportunities outside of IT occupations.

A literature review by Yi Xue and Richard C. Larson of MIT found that there is and isn’t a STEM skills shortage — it depends on where you look. In the academic job market, for example, they conclude there is no noticeable shortage; in fact, there is an oversupply of PhDs competing for tenure-track faculty positions in many fields (e.g., biomedical sciences, physical sciences). But the government sector and private industry have shortages in specific areas. In the private sector, for instance, software developers, petroleum engineers, and data scientists were found to be in high demand.

There is other evidence of a strong demand for workers with tech skills. The Economist has reported that the number of unfilled U.S. jobs in computing and information technology could top one million by 2020: “The number of young Americans graduating with qualifications in IT subjects is rising, but nowhere near fast enough to satisfy the burgeoning demand for their skills. Last year, American campuses produced fewer than 56,000 graduates with the sort of qualifications sought by information technology (IT) firms.”

When it comes to how much immigrant and native-born U.S. tech workers earn, research by Gordon Hanson of UC San Diego and Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business has found that while immigrants usually earn less than native-born workers across most occupations (controlling for factors like age, education, and gender), this difference tends to be smaller in STEM fields. They also found that wages for immigrants in STEM have actually increased: In 1990 native-born STEM workers earned more than immigrants; by 2012, this reversed.

“The workers coming in on H-1Bs are a diverse crowd,” Hanson says. “You have superstar computer scientists at Facebook and Amazon and folks doing back-office IT work. But, on average, the earnings of those [foreign] workers, after just a little time in U.S., exceed [Americans’] in comparable jobs.”

Hanson cautions, however, that their results do not discount the possibility that the arrival of foreign-born engineers is driving down earnings for U.S.-born engineers. “Standard economic models would say that’s happening,” he says. “But more engineers is a good thing. There may be some lower earnings opportunities for U.S.-born engineers, but there’s more innovation for the country as a whole.”

Similarly, an analysis of 2010 H-1B petitions by Jonathan Rothwell and Neil Ruiz, both formerly of Brookings, found that H-1B workers earned more on average ($76,356) than American workers with a bachelor’s degree ($67,301), within the same age group and occupation. (It’s worth noting that the process of petitioning for an H-1B visa costs companies thousands of dollars, which suggests that they pay a premium for foreign workers’ skills.)

Hanson and Slaughter’s paper also noted that although H-1B visas disproportionately go to STEM workers, this is not an inherent feature of the H-1B program. “That most H-1B visas are captured by STEM workers may simply be the consequences of strong relative labor demand for STEM labor by U.S. companies,” they write.

Contrarily, Hira, who has been outspoken about abuses of the H-1B visa system, rebuffs the skills shortage theory. “If there was this terrible shortage, I’d think you’d see different behavior and practices,” he says. “If there was really a skills shortage, you’d see more diversity in the tech industry — they’d hire underrepresented minorities and women, they’d be training people and investing, they’d be retaining incumbent workers, not laying them off by the thousands, and you wouldn’t see rampant age discrimination.”

According to Hira, the skills shortage argument is a red herring that has clouded the conversation about how H-1Bs are used. “The top occupation of H-1B workers is computer systems analyst. These are back-end IT workers. I don’t see how anybody could argue there’s a shortage of those folks,” he says. “Hiring an H-1B should, but doesn’t, require an employer to demonstrate any shortage, so the shortage argument is moot. If there is a severe shortage, then it would be easy for employers to show one. Yet they’ve opposed any such requirement.”

How Much of the Debate Is About Outsourcing?

One of the most consequential criticisms of the H-1B program is its heavy use by IT outsourcing firms such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro. Outsourcing has been a trend in information management for years, as companies have increasingly hired contractors (at lower cost) to do tasks such as software programming and data entry, processing, and storage.

Here’s a simplified way to explain how this plays out: Say you’re a big company with your own IT department. To reduce overhead, or to cut costs, or to increase efficiency, you decide to contract out (outsource) some or all of your IT work. So you hire an IT services firm to do that work on a temporary, as-needed basis. That firm sends workers, many of whom are on H-1B visas, to do those tasks. Sometimes, these contract workers supplement your IT staff; other times, you lay off your IT staff and the contractors effectively replace them.

Because these IT firms receive so many H-1B visas, there are fewer for other companies. “No matter what your view on outsourcing is, this was not the original intent of the program,” says William Kerr, an economist at Harvard Business School who has studied the effects of high-skilled immigration in the U.S. “One of the implications of this is it reduces the number of visas available for their original purposes.”

“The outsourcing companies bring lower-level workers than the American tech companies,” Kerr says. “That work has $60,000 salaries, which is not minimum wage by any means, but it’s lower paid than a typical computer scientist at a large U.S. tech employer.”

IT companies in India and the U.S. have lobbied against making the H-1B program more restrictive, arguing that they help American companies become more competitive by handling their IT operations. They’ve also said that the visa programs allow them to keep jobs in the U.S., so reducing the number of visas they’re allowed may result in them shifting work back to India. (However, Bloomberg recently reported that Infosys plans to create thousands of new jobs for Americans over the next two years.)

What Could Change?

Any big changes to the H-1B program would have to be passed by Congress. At least four proposals to reform it have recently surfaced, and USCIS has suspended expedited processing of H-1B applications.

Wider reforms would change the way many companies, especially tech and IT firms, recruit and hire highly skilled talent. Further restricting the number of visas could cost the U.S. a competitive edge in the global war for tech talent.

“This might sound self-serving, coming from someone who works in academia, but one thing that has helped maintain our technological leadership is innovation and technical research, and immigration has helped us do that,” Hanson says. “Immigration is an important part of why the U.S. is able to maintain its elite status.”

Trump’s “Buy American and Hire American” order aims to address some of the concerns surrounding the H-1B visa system. The larger effects on high-skilled immigration — and on the economy — remain to be seen.

 

Editor’s note: We’ve updated this article from an earlier version that said companies applying for H-1B visas have to attest that they could not find a qualified American worker for the position. This requirement is only for H-1B dependent companies, though there are exceptions to this rule.

Fashion evolves faster than decor, which is why home decor Pinterest is still filled with people working out their mid-century and industrial obsessions while fashion Pinterest is almost already to the early '00s in terms of style. Yet the former might be catching up. The '80s influence is starting to appear in kitchen design in a few distinctive ways. It may not be as over-the-top as this fabulous vintage kitchen, but we're definitely seeing glimpses of the trend.

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The Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) in Queens is sharing Jim Henson's magical escapism for generations to come with a new permanent exhibit of his work, including 47 vintage, original puppets and Muppets.

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Ad tech is rife with shady characters. Until now, questionable behavior has frequently gone unchallenged. That's about to change.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau''s Tech Lab has released a proposed standard called "ads.txt" that allows publishers to declare which businesses are authorized to sell their digital inventory. This lets the demand-side platforms, where buyers find inventory, to verify that the inventory for sale in ad exchanges comes from authorized sellers. As a contributor to this spec, I'm biased to its importance, but there's a good reason why this standard has been proposed and why publishers should welcome this.

The industry has made it all too easy for bad actors to participate in the programmatic ecosystem. It's like a party where the invite is distributed too widely. Everybody shows up to your house and you lose track of who is who. Inevitably, some bad actors wreck your house.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, discusses serious misconceptions that the U.S. managerial and professional elite in the United States have about the so-called working class. Many people conflate “working class” with “poor” — but the working class is, in fact, the elusive, purportedly disappearing middle class. Williams argues that economic mobility has declined, and explains why suggestions like “they should move to where the jobs are” or “they should just go to college” are insufficient. She has some ideas for policy makers to create more and meaningful jobs for this demographic, an influential voting bloc. Williams is the author of the new book, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.

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Design preferences tend to change over time, and when you're looking back at vintage interiors a lot of them can seem, well, strange. But it's also true that a lot of "new" trends are really just ones recycled from the past—things that a few years ago would have seemed odd, are now suddenly all the rage. And a lot of times my own reaction to strange old trends is less "that's so strange" and more "why don't we still have that?". Here are five weird old trends I'd love to see make a comeback.

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By Leigh Thompson, J. Jay Gerber Professor of Dispute Resolution & Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Every team seems to have an alpha member — someone who is naturally dominant. Every team seems to also have a problematic or dysfunctional team member. Let’s call that person a delta.

Take the case of Matthew, an executive at a large company in one of my courses last year. Matthew described the delta member on his team — a man he called Neal. According to Matthew, Neal was a “narcissistic, passive-aggressive egomaniac who was impervious to criticism or personal development.”

“How long has Neal been a problem on your team?” I asked Matthew.

Matthew sighed, “Five years.”

I asked Matthew what steps he had taken to deal with Neal. He had confronted Neal several times and told him he needed to change, and Neal had grudgingly agreed. But nothing changed: Neal continued to be dysfunctional.

Matthew tried talking to Neal a few more times, but to no avail. What was Matthew doing wrong?

The mistake that we see leaders make most often is that they want to “fix” the problem team member, much akin to taking a car to the shop.

However, it is likely that the entire car needs a tune-up. Leaders should resist the urge to ambush the delta member and instead, follow a four-step approach:

1. Reassess and, if necessary, reassign the roles.
What are the work tasks? What are the roles and responsibilities? More often than not, by changing one or more of these factors, the problem can be solved. Case in point: In one university task force, one team member was not contributing and was not responding to communications. When we queried this team member, we learned he felt resentful because he did not want the responsibility of scheduling the meeting room or managing the calendar.

Instead, he wanted to focus on conducting an important competitive analysis. Once he was alleviated of “secretarial” responsibilities, he became a productive and positive contributor.

2. If you still have a problem, revise the team process.
How do team members communicate? What are the norms of engagement? What is the meeting style? One member on a financial services team was not contributing, lacked motivation and had no energy. The leader tried an experiment and moved the late-afternoon team meetings to the mornings. The “dysfunctional” team member became a high producer.

On another organizational team, a newcomer stopped contributing because the senior team members arrived 10 minutes late for every meeting. The issue of punctuality was raised in a meeting and the group agreed to hold one another accountable for arriving on time. In many companies, members became resentful when they see others using their smart phones during meetings and openly multitasking. At Edmunds, team leaders bring in a large basket at the beginning of each meeting and collect all phones, computers and tablets, from the CEO on down. The result is a more engaged group.

3. Give everybody a crash course on how to engage in healthy conflict.
Problem team members often emerge in groups because conflict is being repressed. Team members often feel that they need to be polite and accommodating. Group researchers call this the politeness ritual, and it essentially leads to a superficial small talk with no one really knowing where they stand.

Charlan Nemeth and her colleagues coached some teams to follow debate rules, while other teams followed brainstorming rules or did not have any particular rules. The teams who followed debate rules suggested more ideas and better ideas. This was replicated across different cultures.

4. As a final resort, invite the team to coach each other.
Don’t gang up on one person; put everyone under the microscope. We’ve developed an approach at Kellogg called 50-50 Qualitative Feedback, in which all team members give each other one piece of positive feedback and one piece of development feedback using simple notecards. My guiding rules are to write the feedback in a way you would want to see it for yourself. As the facilitator, I collect all the cards, distribute them into envelopes, vet anything that is unnecessarily vicious and carefully instruct members to not reveal or even guess who said what.

On one occasion, I worked with the senior leadership team of a large health care organization. Before everybody opened their envelope, I instructed each team member to anticipate the feedback they thought they would receive. Everybody then summarized the positive and the critical feedback they received and developed a personal action plan for change.

The bottom line: Think of the delta member of your team as a “check your engine” light. Open the hood, roll up your sleeves and test all systems.

Learn more about teamwork
With Kellogg’s Executive Education Program

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Be a team player: let Kellogg Executive Education teach you to be a better team member and leader.

Though it has gone "in" and "out" of style, the white porcelain or enamel farmhouse sink is really a classic element of kitchen design. Sure, it's roomy and it really does work with a wide variety of styles. But sometimes, you want something a bit more dramatic in your kitchen.

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Just when you thought going to the mattresses had gone to the mattresses, Casper and Target announced they're teaming up to completely own the bed-in-a-box industry.

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An outbreak of botulism caused by nacho cheese sauce from a gas station has hospitalized nine people and killed one man in northern California.

(Image credit: Jennifer Oosthuizen/CDC)

To be successful, a company needs to provide something customers want. It must be able to do so for less than they’re willing to pay. And there must be some reason why competitors can’t just copy it when it succeeds. In management terms, it needs a value proposition, a business model, and a strategy.

Snap is doing well on the first two. It has a product that lots of people like, and there’s at least the prospect of Snap eventually becoming very profitable, its first earnings report notwithstanding. But it’s struggling with the third (strategy) because Instagram has been copying its most popular features.

When Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was asked about Facebook, Instagram’s parent company, on Snap’s first earnings call, he quipped: “Just because Yahoo has a search box, it doesn’t mean they’re Google.” That’s true, but it doesn’t necessarily imply what Spiegel needs it to.

In fact, his response reflects a decades-old debate over what strategy is, one that’s being relitigated in the digital age.

In Snap’s S-1, the company says:

Our strategy is to invest in product innovation and take risks to improve our camera platform…. In a world where anyone can distribute products instantly and provide them for free, the best way to compete is by innovating to create the most engaging products.

Raffaella Sadun, a professor at Harvard Business School, says the challenge for Snap is that “great product is different from great strategy.” As Ben Thompson noted, “Most companies use their S-1 to explain how they are building a sustainable competitive advantage — a moat, if you will. Snap is declaring that moats no longer exist.”

One reason why it’s so hard for Snap to articulate a traditional strategy is that, arguably, the best one is already taken by Facebook. The way you make money with a social network is through network effects. The more users you have, the more valuable the platform becomes for all your users; hence scale becomes a powerful competitive advantage. But if that’s where the value is, Facebook will beat Snap every time. For instance, Instagram launched Stories, a feature seemingly derivative of Snapchat, in August 2016. Just seven months later, Instagram Stories had more daily users than Snapchat.

So, Spiegel needs to articulate a theory of why Facebook can’t copy Snap’s product innovations and then use them to capture even more value through its larger network. To date, his answer has been innovation. That puts him firmly on one side of the long-running strategy debate. Is it sufficient to develop capabilities that seem hard for competitors to imitate, like building camera-based social applications? Or does sustainable strategy require more?

The debate over how sustainable “operational advantages” are continues to this day. But even if one grants that certain capabilities can be hard to imitate, Spiegel needs to explain why Snap’s are.

In a recent paper, economists Joshua Gans and Scott Stern argue that execution can form the basis of sustainable advantage for entrepreneurs, but only under certain conditions. In their model, execution-focused strategies help startups get to market quickly and start learning from customers, “allowing the firm to ‘get ahead, stay ahead.’” It’s not clear that this applies to Snap, which came to market later than Facebook and so has had less chance to learn from users.

“Anyone can say they are executing but actually doing it is another matter,” Gans wrote about Snap on his blog in February. “Snapchat hasn’t proven itself out yet.”

And it doesn’t help that Spiegel seems to be misinterpreting Google’s success in relation to Yahoo. Google didn’t get where it is by only building great products. It built great products and then fended off competitors by acquiring them or by using its huge user base and massive data trove to improve its products in ways that rivals couldn’t. Google had a strategy.

Thompson has compared Snap favorably to Apple, an extremely successful company known for its hard-to-imitate product expertise. But Apple has benefited from controlling key ecosystems, like iTunes and iOS. And it has benefited from focusing on a particularly lucrative part of the hardware market: high-end, high-margin devices aimed at wealthier customers. It’s not clear what the equivalent is in Snap’s case.

None of this is to say that Snap can’t succeed. Sadun notes that Snap’s success will depend on whether advertisers see it as a complement to Facebook or a substitute, as well as whether Snap can capture a segment of valuable users and find a way to keep them from switching to Instagram.

Earlier this week the New York Times asked readers which of the big five tech companies they could most easily cut ties with. As of this writing, Facebook was by far the most popular choice. So while Facebook’s network effects are certainly powerful, they’re not necessarily insurmountable.

Okay, HomeGoods fans, we're one step closer to shopping at a new home store by the brand. TJX just announced the name of the new store, and when they'll start opening.

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People love LEGO. They also love Gilmore Girls. Now the two have come together in an idea so pure and beautiful that we can't help but love it. Behold, a replica Luke's Diner made from the toy blocks.

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I’d like to introduce you to my nephew, Rowan Treue. :) He is simply wonderful and I can’t get enough of him.

If you read my post about Cari and Ryan’s maternity session, then you know that Rowan is the product of embryo adoption. It is truly a miraculous act of scientific genius that he exists. He is such a gift to us all, and I’m so happy to get to see my brother and sister-in-law finally become parents. There’s nothing better. <3

Welcome to the family, Rowan. And Happy Birthday/First Mother’s Day, Cari. We love you all!

xo,

Auntie Mel

This is Rowan with his first ever photo as an embryo. :)

A basket made by Cari’s grandfather and a quilt made by one of her grandmother’s…

…and a quilt made by our great, great, great grandmother as well.

 

The post Welcome to the family, Rowan Treue appeared first on McLellan Family - Entrepreneurs + Adventurers.

From Kitchn → Mom Was Wrong: You Don't Need to Pre-Rinse Dishes for the Dishwasher

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By Paul Clarke, Chief Technology Officer, Ocado

One of the more popular business mantras to hit town recently has been: “Forget products, think platform!” The immediate result has been a world increasingly awash with platforms and, if you aren’t operating one, many will label you a strategy Luddite.

So among this melee of platforms, why might there be room for one more — a platform for online grocery delivery? To answer that question, one first needs to understand what makes online grocery delivery so different from other forms of online retail.

Online grocery delivery requires dealing with irregularly shaped products with many different form factors, multiple storage temperature regimens, short shelf lives, and food technology constraints about what can be packed with what. Then there are the many vulnerable products and the ways they can (negatively) interact with each other: if you load a six-pack of beer on top of a box of strawberries, you will most likely end up delivering a smoothie, which is probably not what the customer had in mind.

Then there’s the fact that an average online grocery order is typically fifty items and customers are sometimes ordering more than once a week, both of which have significant implications for how smart and low-friction the ordering process has to enable customers to complete their orders in just a few minutes. Most customers don’t get up in the morning and say to themselves: “Hurray! Today is my online grocery shopping day!” Most people subliminally dream of the day when, thanks to the power of data-fueled machine learning, the right groceries will turn up at the right time, as if by magic, without the customer having to do anything — a broadband of grocery.

Finally, there’s the challenge of creating a profitable ecommerce business: you have grocery products with an average item price of around $3 and typically 30 percent gross margin, leaving only $0.90 to pay for all handling, selling, and delivery. Brick-and-mortar stores are used to their customers doing this work for them; in the online space, that is obviously not an option.

So online grocery is hard, and doing it profitably demands extraordinary levels of efficiency powered by the creative application of technology and automation. For a traditional retailer, building that solution is a massive and daunting prospect. Yet online is also a phenomenon that is here to stay, because customers want the convenience, enjoy the choice, and appreciate the time they don’t have to waste trudging around a conventional store.

The great thing about having an online grocery delivery pipeline into customers’ homes is that, once it’s in place and being used regularly, all manner of other products and services can potentially flow up and down it. If you can do online grocery, then you can do some other forms of online retail; but the reverse definitely does not implicitly follow. The potential size of the worldwide online grocery market combined with these spin-off opportunities is why grocery really is the holy grail of online retail.

That’s the end business case we put forward at Ocado, the world’s largest online-only grocery retailer, currently operating in the UK. Unlike other online retailers, our customers’ orders are picked and packed in huge automated warehouses before being delivered to their kitchen tables in one-hour slots by Ocado’s own delivery fleet. All the technology that powers this disruptive business model has been built in-house over the past 17 years. Ocado has been profitable at an order level for many years but has chosen to invest heavily in building its technology platform.

When considering international expansion, why would we not just launch its service in another country? The answer is that grocery is an inherently local business. It’s an “at scale” game in each local market, and having scale in your home market does not help you enter another one. Branding is local, supply chains are local, and customer behavior and requirements vary.

The smarter alternative is to provide a shortcut to help existing grocery retailers move online fast instead, or grow their existing online operation efficiently. This would follow a model similar to how Ocado helped Morrisons (one of the big four brick–and-mortar grocery retailers in the UK) create its online grocery business using Ocado’s existing platform; Morrisons has since become the fastest-growing online grocery business in the world.

These offline retailers already have their trusted brand, their efficient supply chains, and their loyal customers. What they lack is the time, the technical expertise, and the financial investment required to develop a profitable end-to-end platform for online grocery delivery. Two things are certain, though: some of their competitors will move online and pure-play retailers will enter their markets.

That’s why we built the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP). It’s a one-stop-shop, end-to-end e-commerce, fulfillment, and logistics platform running in the cloud that provides a seamless integrated solution for an offline retailer.

Think of it as a highly configurable Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that also includes the swarm robotics hardware technology needed to build automated warehouses. This combination of cloud-based software and warehouse automation provide the secret sauce of how to make online grocery delivery profitable, and how to deliver enhanced customer delight in the form of massively greater range, greater product life and freshness, lower wastage, very low levels of substitution, and the ability to pick a complete customer order in just a few minutes.

Looking ahead, OSP customers will quickly see the network effects associated with adopting such a platform, including all the data we will collect to optimize the underlying platform and feed our machine learning, while also giving the retailers back their own data. Then there is the increased R&D investment on the back of having multiple customers and creating an ecosystem through easy integration with third-party products and services.

Ultimately, a platform for online grocery is more than just writing smart algorithms, mining customer data, and employing warehouse automation; it is based on understanding and adapting to the realities of the retail market, disrupting its existing business models, and recognizing that customer loyalty is earned through experiences instead of features.

Fifty years ago, customers would telephone their local grocery store. The person at the store already knew what they typically ordered — and would then have someone deliver the groceries on a bike or in a small van. The technologies and formats may have changed, but differentiation through brand, product range, customer knowledge, and customer service are still at the heart of being a great grocer.

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Read more about how the Ocado Smart Platform can transform your retail business.

The ability to focus is an important driver of excellence. Focused techniques such as to-do lists, timetables, and calendar reminders all help people to stay on task. Few would argue with that, and even if they did, there is evidence to support the idea that resisting distraction and staying present have benefits: practicing mindfulness for 10 minutes a day, for example, can enhance leadership effectiveness by helping you become more able to regulate your emotions and make sense of past experiences.  Yet as helpful as focus can be, there’s also a downside to focus as it is commonly viewed.

The problem is that excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in your brain. It can drain your energy and make you lose self-control. This energy drain can also make you more impulsive and less helpful. As a result, decisions are poorly thought-out, and you become less collaborative.

So what do we do then? Focus or unfocus?

In keeping with recent research, both focus and unfocus are vital. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus, allowing you to develop resilience, enhance creativity, and make better decisions too.

When you unfocus, you engage a brain circuit called the “default mode network.” Abbreviated as the DMN, we used to think of this circuit as the Do Mostly Nothing circuit because it only came on when you stopped focusing effortfully. Yet, when “at rest”, this circuit uses 20% of the body’s energy (compared to the comparatively small 5% that any effort will require).

The DMN needs this energy because it is doing anything but resting. Under the brain’s conscious radar, it activates old memories, goes back and forth between the past, present, and future, and recombines different ideas. Using this new and previously inaccessible data, you develop enhanced self-awareness and a sense of personal relevance. And you can imagine creative solutions or predict the future, thereby leading to better decision-making too. The DMN also helps you tune into other people’s thinking, thereby improving team understanding and cohesion.

There are many simple and effective ways to activate this circuit in the course of a day.

Using positive constructive daydreaming (PCD): PCD is a type of mind-wandering different from slipping into a daydream or guiltily rehashing worries. When you build it into your day deliberately, it can boost your creativity, strengthen your leadership ability, and also-re-energize the brain. To start PCD, you choose a low-key activity such as knitting, gardening or casual reading, then wander into the recesses of your mind. But unlike slipping into a daydream or guilty-dysphoric daydreaming, you might first imagine something playful and wishful—like running through the woods, or lying on a yacht. Then you swivel your attention from the external world to the internal space of your mind with this image in mind while still doing the low-key activity.

Studied for decades by Jerome Singer, PCD activates the DMN and metaphorically changes the silverware that your brain uses to find information. While focused attention is like a fork—picking up obvious conscious thoughts that you have, PCD commissions a different set of silverware—a spoon for scooping up the delicious mélange of flavors of your identity (the scent of your grandmother, the feeling of satisfaction with the first bite of apple-pie on a crisp fall day), chopsticks for connecting ideas across your brain (to enhance innovation), and a marrow spoon for getting into the nooks and crannies of your brain to pick up long-lost memories that are a vital part of your identity. In this state, your sense of “self” is enhanced—which, according to Warren Bennis, is the essence of leadership. I call this the psychological center of gravity, a grounding mechanism (part of your mental “six-pack”) that helps you enhance your agility and manage change more effectively too.

Taking a nap: In addition to building in time for PCD, leaders can also consider authorized napping. Not all naps are the same. When your brain is in a slump, your clarity and creativity are compromised. After a 10-minute nap, studies show that you become much clearer and more alert. But if it’s a creative task you have in front of you, you will likely need a full 90 minutes for more complete brain refreshing. Your brain requires this longer time to make more associations, and dredge up ideas that are in the nooks and crannies of your memory network.

Pretending to be someone else: When you’re stuck in a creative process, unfocus may also come to the rescue when you embody and live out an entirely different personality. In 2016, educational psychologists, Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar found that people who try to solve creative problems are more successful if they behave like an eccentric poet than a rigid librarian. Given a test in which they have to come up with as many uses as possible for any object (e.g. a brick) those who behave like eccentric poets have superior creative performance. This finding holds even if the same person takes on a different identity.

When in a creative deadlock, try this exercise of embodying a different identity. It will likely get you out of your own head, and allow you to think from another person’s perspective. I call this psychological halloweenism.

For years, focus has been the venerated ability amongst all abilities. Since we spend 46.9% of our days with our minds wandering away from a task at hand, we crave the ability to keep it fixed and on task. Yet, if we built PCD, 10- and 90- minute naps, and psychological halloweenism into our days, we would likely preserve focus for when we need it, and use it much more efficiently too. More importantly, unfocus will allow us to update information in the brain, giving us access to deeper parts of ourselves and enhancing our agility, creativity and decision-making too.

Is your internet connection running slowly? One of your neighbors might be stealing your Wi-Fi. Here's how to tell and what you should do if you find a problem.

If your justification for jamming out on an air guitar instead of the real deal has always been related to portability issues, get ready to drop that excuse. Meet Jammy, a smart, portable guitar.

The post No room to bring a real guitar on the road? Bring Jammy instead, the foot-long smart guitar from RnD64 appeared first on Digital Trends.

It's almost summer and if you're currently blenderless, you're missing out on some seasonal sips like smoothies, milkshakes, and the boozy craze of summer 2016 (and probably 2017, if we're being honest), frosé. If you're new to blender ownership, there's not much sense in going from zero to Vitamix (unless you have a few spare Benjamins burning a hole in your pocket). But we did catch wind of a pretty sweet deal on a solid entry level blender, for just under a Jackson.

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From Kitchn → This Cute Toaster Is Made Specifically for Grilled Cheese

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Under-sofa organization is a many splendored thing. Not only does it provide you with extra storage room for stashing your stuff, it offers easy access to everyday items—newspapers, magazines, and DVDs—that can often get lost in living room clutter.

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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the assaults keep coming to our beloved FRAKTA bag. Apparently, a $2,145 leather version wasn't enough, because the IKEA staple now has another fashion iteration: A baseball cap crafted from the bag itself.

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