A new study says powerful people feel taller than they are. What does it mean for your company?

Studies have long shown that tall people earn more and are treated with more reverence. The last American president with below average height was William McKinley, at 5'7'', and that was over a century ago. It's a pecking order that precedes humanity, in fact, "an evolution from the days of primates," as one CEO told USA Today. 

A new study puts a twist on this established fact, though: Height not only makes one likely to acquire power; as Jack Goncalo of Cornell University and Michelle Duguid of Washington University write in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, "the powerful may actually feel taller than they are."

Goncalo and Duguid performed three experiments with 266 men and women. "Using different manipulations of power and measures of perceived height, we found that people literally perceived themselves as taller when they occupied a more powerful position," they write in their paper. One metric they used, for instance, was to have people assign height to a video game avatar; another was to have people estimate their height relative to a pole. Feelings of power were evoked by asking participants to remember situations where they had wielded power over another.

The new findings add to already rich and decades-old literature surrounding the relationship between height and power. In 1968, an Australian psychologist brought the same man into a room, presenting him to five different groups of students. With each different group, he altered the supposed status of the man, presenting him as student, lecturer, or professor. Later he had each group estimate the man's height. As Jonathan Rauch wrote in his 1995 article "Short Guys Finish Last": "Not only was the 'professor' thought to be more than two inches taller than the 'student'; the height estimates rose in proportion to his perceived status."

What are the implications of such findings for business? For one thing, if a mere sense of height is so closely correlated with feelings of power, perhaps it would possible to leverage the findings to help empower the meek. Goncalo wonders if it would be possible, even, for a short person to gain an ego boost by occupying a top-floor office.

More importantly, though, the findings might be used to help the powerful mitigate the consequences of their height-related hubris. Goncolo and Duguid, in their paper, point to one famous instance. In the wake of the BP's disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the company's Chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, gave a press conference in which he insisted, "We care about the small people." Though BP begged off the matter as a question of translation (Svanberg is Swedish), the new paper suggests that in a way, Svanberg may have just been giving a glimpse into the psychology of the too-powerful.

In the end, the business lessons of the new study, and of all height-and-power studies, is simply to bear this strong and seemingly hard-wired relationship in mind. If you want to succeed in business, it probably doesn't hurt to stand a little straighter. And if you're fortunate enough to wield so much power that it sometimes gets you into trouble, try slouching a little, to share the perspective of "the small people."

Just don't ever call them that. 

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If 2012's CES gadget fest has a theme already it's "thin, thinner, thinnest." But in the endless quest for skinny devices, what gets left out?

The MacBook Air isn't solely responsible for tech's body image issues. But in 2008, it was the Kate Moss of gadgets, the one that helped solidify a trend toward wafer widths. And at this year's CES, which won't play host to any of this year's "blockbuster" products, manufacturers are instead touting their products as the thinnest there is. But the electronics industry, like the fashion industry, seems unconcerned with whether skinny is healthy. 

Acer, desperate to mop up the PC end of the ultralight laptop market, has just revealed what it's calling the "world's thinnest ultrabook." The Aspire S5 is just 15mm thick at the fattest part, weighs under 3 lbs., and for fun also sports a Thunderbolt port (previously a Mac-only feature). Interestingly Toshiba's Z830 ultrabook is a machine it had previously claimed was the lightest and thinnest--and at 8.3mm at the front, sloping to 15.9mm at the rear, and just 2.5 lbs. in weight it's a close call. The ultrabook flood hitting the shelves throughout 2012 will warm over this battle many times, you can be sure.

Also at CES LG is promoting its Cinema 3D line of HDTVs, and among the line is a super-skinny machine that has a bezel around the screen that's just a vanishingly-small 1mm on three sides. The Korean firm also has a demonstrator TV on show that sports expensive future-friendly OLED tech for its display, meaning it too has a tiny bezel all-round, and a front-to-back depth of just 4mm. It's basically just a flat panel you stick to your wall, and there's almost nothing to the TV apart from its screen.

Meanwhile Toshiba's got a device on show at CES that it's saying is the thinnest tablet PC yet. The Excite X10 is priced above the iPad, but is just 7.7mm deep and around 1 lb., which really is insanely tiny--the iPad 2 is 8.8mm front to back, and the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is 8.6mm. 

Then there's the new Galaxy Tab, originally demonstrated before the iPad 2's debut--now it's a thinner, better reimagination of the iPad 1. And when Apple showed their product, Samsung's bosses apparently ordered a re-jig of the Tab so it beat Apple's size constraints. This was a pure one-upmanship effort for absolutely zero gain to the consumer. Can you detect a difference between an 8.8mm tablet in your hand and an 8.6mm one? Maybe, but that's not a test you'll be doing every day. And yes, Toshiba's tablet definitely beats both the Samsung tablet and Apple's in thinness. But all this allows Toshiba to do is plaster "world's thinnest" all over the PR for the device in the hope that the average Joe shopping for a tablet PC is actually seduced by a phrase like that.

Rich Leigh of 10 Yetis PR, and the man behind GoodAndBadPR, notes, "When fighting a seemingly unwinnable battle in any sector, minute product differences, such as a millimeter or two's difference in size--are often marketed to death in a bid to stand out from the crowd. A new product could have the best specs, but if it's not as aesthetically or ergonomically crafted as the leader, it will fall short of intriguing the masses" and that's why specs like Toshiba's get aired. Leigh notes, "rarely if ever have I seen Apple ads highlight the technical side of their products at the expense of focusing on the user experience or appearance aspect of their products."

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That average Joe may also never realize that innovating thin portable devices comes at a cost. There's only so much room inside a thin, flat machine like a tablet PC for a screen, cameras, glass protection for the screen, the electronics, a battery and a solid, inflexible, hard-to-damage chassis. To get your tablet PC thinner you have to engineer compromises in all of these components. It's a technological tour de force of course, but with the current state of tech it's perhaps easiest to go for thin by making a thinner lithium battery unit--a battery that simply doesn't last as long for powering your device. 

In terms of thin laptops, Apple's innovation was to use a single block of aluminum for the chassis of the Air. By precision machining this block it acts as both pretty exterior case and strong internal mounting chassis for all the components. In pursuit of pure design, the Air was made thin to make it ultra-portable, and this forced Apple to ditch a spinning hard drive (in the later models) and a clunky DVD drive. The design is now a standard for many an ultrabook--each of which tends to follow the same hardware choice--but manufacturers are having difficulty matching Apple's model for the chassis and are opting for cheaper plastic, with the attendant problems of cheaper build "feel" and less rigid construction. In this case thinness itself presents unique design and end-usability compromises.

Meanwhile makers of ultra-thin TVs like LG and Samsung face a slightly different problem. It's not an issue for them to have their devices handled as they're meant to be static (although shipping these ultra-skinny TVs may pose a different fragile packaging headache), but an ultra-skinny TV with a super-slim bezel presents an unexpected problem: branding. Where, on a machine that's all but invisibly hidden behind its screen, do you put a big logo that tells the watcher they're an LG customer? Samsung solved that on its current range of SMART-TV LED TVs, that have a slender but still noticeable silver bezel, by sticking a bigger lump at the screen bottom with an LED-lit Samsung logo inside. LG's following a similar route with their OLED unit. LG and Samsung will have to innovate by slapping their logo all over their TVs smart user interfaces if they want to get increased brand exposure on skinny TVs. Is that desirable from a consumer point of view?

And there's another innovation issue with the relentless pursuit of thin. When you've boiled down a gadget to its purest physical form (an ultrabook that's just a keyboard, trackpad, screen, and a few ports, or a tablet PC or TV that's essentially just a screen with a rigid chassis behind it) where do you go from here in design terms? There's no definite answer, though you may worry that a backlash in the form of over-adornment and frills in 2013's gadgets may be the result. One solution is to consider it the peak of a paradigm, and take your industry in a wholly new direction--something we've hinted may be the fate of the laptop. A different answer is to innovate what's inside the gadget instead, get clever with the tech and really deliver winning, lovely or completely unexpected features and usability to the consumer through its UI. For example, perhaps one way to get around thinness issues with charging or interface ports is to adopt wireless charging or syncing--something that looks to be another 2012 CES theme.

This forced innovation is great for us as consumers, of course. But it's tricky for the manufacturers. Once their hardware is honed to perfection, they have to hone the software too ... and delivering sleek experiences and novel features that differentiate your product in this way is no way as easy as coming up with a super-shiny hardware design.

Thinnovation. It's chic, it's everywhere, it's good for your bag-carrying back. But it comes at a cost for some device powers, and in terms of making manufactures really think about what consumers want and need. (Then again, Jobs, the Godfather of Air, once famously said it wasn't the consumers' job to know what they want.) This position leads us to wonder exactly what direction makers will take their gear in for the CES of 2013: Will they go for "thinner still" or, perhaps, "experience our amazing voice-controlled interface"? Could there even be a wicked backlash: "Our 2013 tablet is thicker, sure, but it's ten times more powerful than the skinny, wimpy competiton."

Chat about this article with Kit Eaton on Twitter (FYI he's pretty thin) or a chunky Fast Company too.

"Do you do good at work, or is doing good something you do outside your job?" That, to paraphrase, was the question that sat before some fellow marketers/corporate communicators and me at a gathering some time back.

The question seemed a simple one to me. Surely, I thought, people get into a field like communications because they have a desire to align with causes they believe in, or they desire to help audiences find out the information they might want or need to know. At the very least, even if out-and-out passion isn't there, I had presumed people had the desire to promote products that they felt deserved to be shared.

Despite all the cynicism I had seen about the marketing world--so often depicted as subversive brainwashers, spin doctors, or snake-oil salesmen--I'd often imagined that even those who seemed aligned with mind-boggling products, causes, or political candidates must believe in what they do.

That's my eternal optimism speaking, or perhaps my naivete.

Instead, I was shocked to hear a good number of people in the room express the opinion that the field of marketing was not about doing good nor bad; instead, it was about having a skill (effective communications and persuasion) that could be employed for any cause indiscriminately. From this view, work was work--nothing personal--and doing good was something a marketing professional might do in their downtime. The justification line, it seemed, was something along the lines of: "We're capitalists; we take on paying clients."

Many of us who were part of that discussion seemed surprised to see such a split. And--for a second, at least--my inclination was to judge. After all, this is just the sort of logic the industry I had entered gets blasted for from the outside. But then I stopped to think from the perspective of those espousing this belief. They were smart, principled, likable individuals who I had both personal and professional respect for. And they were serious in their conviction that personal judgment should be checked at the door and that "doing good" is something one concerns themselves with after the workday is through.

That conversation occurred some time ago. But I often think back to it as I ponder "what I'm doing here" in strategic communications, a transplant from the academic world who came to marketing and consulting out of the desire to take the types of change I was espousing from academe and see what ways I might be able to contribute to disseminating some of those ideas into industry practice.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm lucky; my employers at Peppercom stated overtly when I started with the company that--should any project come along that I had a fundamental disagreement with--I would never be expected to work on that business. At times, we've worked with controversial clients, but I've only been expected to engage with those clients if and when I agreed with their stance, at least on the particular issues we were advising them on. (For the record, I have not yet encountered a project at Peppercom that I found objectionable to take part in.) I've occasionally worked with clients over the years who I did not always agree with the actions of, but I took pride that the counsel I gave them was "right," even if it was not always adhered to.

I now understand the perspective of those in my field who hold this "dispassionate practitioner" stance toward marketing. Those people often feel a strong ethical obligation to provide superior counsel and service to those who pay them. And those people also hold strong concerns about the ethics of the field in general, ensuring that marketing is not done in underhanded or manipulative ways. (I'm honored, for instance, to be a member of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's Membership Ethics Advisory Panel. As a group, we don't consider the "moral correctness" of a company's actions but rather the ethical practice of marketing.)

Yet, while we may not always be passionate "fans" of some of the companies we do business with--and while we likely have worked with companies whose policies or actions we disagree with from time to time--I'm amazed to occasionally run across people in marketing jobs who are working with a client whose cause they are actually diametrically opposed to or that they believe is in some way harmful to society.

In some cases, people are doing such work because they have to: They don't work for a company who has a policy like mine, or they are not in an economic position to stand on principle. In others, they adhere to the idea that "capitalism doesn't discriminate on the basis of scruples or actions." In fact--at least in public relations--one of the tried and true explanations for the industry's reason for being has been akin to that of a defense lawyer: that everyone is entitled to adequate communications counsel to tell their story.

I personally find that line of argument quite faulty. Defense against criminal prosecution is one thing; under no circumstance do I think every public figure or organization has a "right" to communications strategy. (Awfully presumptuous of us marketers and corporate communicators to paint our desire for billings as some constitutionally inspired cause...)

I don't mean to simplistically direct scorn at people who espouse such views. As I mentioned, I've heard people in my industry for whom I have great respect espouse similar opinions. But I am concerned about the commitment people feel and--particularly--about the responsibility people take for their actions, in a world where they feel their professional life is not having any positive impact (or, perhaps, even feeling that it has a negative impact).

As I've written about in the past, I'm of the firm belief that a more transparent communication environment is forcing companies to be more ethical than ever. And I believe real business success can be found from companies who see themselves as a connected part of the communities they operate in and the audiences they serve--from companies who concern themselves with putting themselves in their audiences' shoes and aligning themselves more closely with the wants and needs of those who buy, build, or support their products.

However, it seems impossible to make that change in thinking within an organization if marketing professionals feel detached from the work they do; agnostic about the good they might achieve; and a lack of responsibility about the repercussions of their actions. I'm not suggesting marketers need to always agree with a client, or that they should cease doing business with a company every time an unsavory crisis unfolds. But I do believe we have to feel some culpability in the repercussions of the work we do and some concern about the impact of our work, beyond the money it puts in our pockets today.

What's your take? Do you agree? Or am I akin to the entrepreneurs of the dotcom era, believing everyone should think their toilet brush e-commerce site should be seen as the first step toward world peace? Am I being too idealistic? Do, for instance, the moral concerns of keeping employees in jobs trump the distaste a marketing firm might have for a potential client? I'd love to hear your take.

Sam Ford is Director of Digital Strategy for Peppercom Strategic Communications, a Futures of Entertainment Fellow, a research affiliate of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, and an instructor with Western Kentucky University's Popular Culture Studies program. He was recently named 2011 Social Media Innovator of the Year by Bulldog Reporter. He is co-editor of The Survival of Soap Opera with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington and co-author of the forthcoming book, Spreadable Media with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green. Follow him on Twitter @Sam_Ford.

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The future of business is pure chaos. Here’s how you can survive--and perhaps even thrive.

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DJ Patil pulls a 2-foot-long metal bar from his backpack. The contraption, which he calls a "double pendulum," is hinged in the middle, so it can fold in on itself. Another hinge on one end is attached to a clamp he secures to the edge of a table. "Now," he says, holding the bar vertically, at its top, "see if you can predict where this end will go." Then he releases it, and the bar begins to swing wildly, circling the spot where it is attached to the table, while also circling in on itself. There is no pattern, no way to predict where it will end up. While it spins and twists with surprising velocity, Patil talks to me about chaos theory. "The important insight," he notes, "is identifying when things are chaotic and when they're not."

In high school, Patil got kicked out of math class for being disruptive. He graduated only by persuading his school administrator to change his F grade in chemistry. He went to junior college because that's where his girlfriend was going, and signed up for calculus because she had too. He took so long to do his homework, his girlfriend would complain. "It's not like I'm going to become a mathematician," he would tell her.

Patil, 37, is now an expert in chaos theory, among other mathematical disciplines. He has applied computational science to help the Defense Department with threat assessment and bioweapons containment; he worked for eBay on web security and payment fraud; he was chief scientist at LinkedIn, before joining venture-capital firm Greylock Partners. But Patil first made a name for himself as a researcher on weather patterns at the University of Maryland: "There are some times," Patil explains, "when you can predict weather well for the next 15 days. Other times, you can only really forecast a couple of days. Sometimes you can't predict the next two hours."

The business climate, it turns out, is a lot like the weather. And we've entered a next-two-hours era. The pace of change in our economy and our culture is accelerating--fueled by global adoption of social, mobile, and other new technologies--and our visibility about the future is declining. From the rise of Facebook to the fall of Blockbuster, from the downgrading of U.S. government debt to the resurgence of Brazil, predicting what will happen next has gotten exponentially harder. Uncertainty has taken hold in boardrooms and cubicles, as executives and workers (employed and unemployed) struggle with core questions: Which competitive advantages have staying power? What skills matter most? How can you weigh risk and opportunity when the fundamentals of your business may change overnight?

danah boyd, 34 Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research Studied at Brown, MIT Media Lab, and UC Berkeley; named "High Priestess of the Internet" by the Financial Times; has advised Intel, Google, Yahoo, and more; worked on V-Day, a not-for-profit focused on ending violence against women and girls. "People ask me, 'Are you afraid you're going to get fired?' That's the whole point: not to be afraid." More »

DJ Patil, 37 Data Scientist, Greylock Partners Researcher at Los Alamos; Defense Department fellow; virtual librarian for Iraq; web-security architect for eBay; head of data team at LinkedIn, where his team created People You May Know. "I don't have a plan. If you look too far out in the future, you waste your time."More »

Look at the global cell-phone business. Just five years ago, three companies controlled 64% of the smartphone market: Nokia, Research in Motion, and Motorola. Today, two different companies are at the top of the industry: Samsung and Apple. This sudden complete swap in the pecking order of a global multibillion-dollar industry is unprecedented. Consider the meteoric rise of Groupon and Zynga, the disruption in advertising and publishing, the advent of mobile ultrasound and other "mHealth" breakthroughs (see "Open Your Mouth And Say 'Aah!'). Online-education efforts are eroding our assumptions about what schooling looks like. Cars are becoming rolling, talking, cloud-connected media hubs. In an age where Twitter and other social-media tools play key roles in recasting the political map in the Mideast; where impoverished residents of refugee camps would rather go without food than without their cell phones; where all types of media, from music to TV to movies, are being remade, redefined, defended, and attacked every day in novel ways--there is no question that we are in a new world.

Any business that ignores these transformations does so at its own peril. Despite recession, currency crises, and tremors of financial instability, the pace of disruption is roaring ahead. The frictionless spread of information and the expansion of personal, corporate, and global networks have plenty of room to run. And here's the conundrum: When businesspeople search for the right forecast--the road map and model that will define the next era--no credible long-term picture emerges. There is one certainty, however. The next decade or two will be defined more by fluidity than by any new, settled paradigm; if there is a pattern to all this, it is that there is no pattern. The most valuable insight is that we are, in a critical sense, in a time of chaos.

To thrive in this climate requires a whole new approach, which we'll outline in the pages that follow. Because some people will thrive. They are the members of Generation Flux. This is less a demographic designation than a psychographic one: What defines GenFlux is a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates--and even enjoys--recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions. Not everyone will join Generation Flux, but to be successful, businesses and individuals will have to work at it. This is no simple task. The vast bulk of our institutions--educational, corporate, political--are not built for flux. Few traditional career tactics train us for an era where the most important skill is the ability to acquire new skills.

DJ Patil is a GenFluxer. He has worked in academia, in government, in big public companies, and in startups; he is a technologist and a businessman; a teacher and a diplomat. He is none of those things and all of them, and who knows what he will be or do next? Certainly not him. "That doesn't bother me," he says. "I'll find something."

The New Economy Is For Real More than 15 years ago, this magazine was launched with a cover that declared: "Work Is Personal. Computing Is Social. Knowledge Is Power." Those words resonate today, but with a new, deeper meaning. Fast Company's covers during the dotcom boom of the 1990s described "Free Agent Nation" and "The Brand Called You." We became associated with the "new economy," with the belief that the world had changed irreparably, and that yesterday's rules no longer applied. But then the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, and the idea of a new economy was discredited.

Baratunde Thurston, 34 Director of Digital, The Onion Harvard philosophy major turned consultant turned stand-up comedian. Mayor of the Year on Foursquare. The promo letter for his new book, How to Be Black, begins, "If you don't buy this book, you're racist." "I can't wait for the middle-management level to die off and the next generation gets in there. Then we'll have a revolution." More »

Beth Comstock, 51 Chief Marketing Officer, GE TV news reporter turned PR pro turned marketing powerhouse. She's responsible for Ecomagination and Healthymagination, GE efforts that account for billions of dollars in sales. "Today everyone feels out of control. Some people say, 'I declare bankruptcy.' But they're not embracing change. They're giving up." "More »

Now we know that what we saw in the 1990s was not a mirage. It was instead a shadow, a premonition of a new business reality that is emerging every day--and this time, perhaps chastened by that first go-round, we're prepared to admit that we don't fully understand it. This new economy currently revolves around social and mobile, but those may be only the latest manifestations of a global, connected world careening ahead at great velocity.

Some pundits deride the current era as just another bubble. They point out that new, heady tech companies are garnering massive valuations: Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn. And beyond the alpha dogs, the list of startups with valuations above $200 million is long indeed: Airbnb, Dropbox, Flipboard, Foursquare, Gilt Groupe, Living Social, Rovio, Spotify--the roster goes on and on.

Setting aside the fact that the majority of these enterprises, unlike the darlings of the late-1990s, have significant revenue, so what if some companies are overvalued? That still doesn't discount the way mobile, social, and other breakthroughs are changing our way of life, not just in America but around the globe. And in the process, these changes are remaking geopolitical and business assumptions that have been in place for decades. This was not true in 2000. But it is now. Chaotic disruption is rampant, not simply from the likes of Apple, Facebook, and Google. No one predicted that General Motors would go bankrupt--and come back from the abyss with greater momentum than Toyota. No one in the car-rental industry foresaw the popularity of auto-sharing Zipcar--and Zipcar didn't foresee the rise of outfits like Uber and RelayRides, which are already trying to steal its market. Digital competition destroyed bookseller Borders, and yet the big, stodgy music labels--seemingly the ground zero for digital disruption--defy predictions of their demise. Walmart has given up trying to turn itself into a bank, but before retail bankers breathe a sigh of relief, they ought to look over their shoulders at Square and other mobile-wallet initiatives. Amid a reeling real-estate market, new players like Trulia and Zillow are gobbling up customers. Even the law business is under siege from companies like LegalZoom, an online DIY document service. "All these industries are being revolutionized," observes Pete Cashmore, the 26-year-old founder of social-news site Mashable, which has exploded overnight to reach more than 20 million users a month. "It's come to technology first, but it will reach every industry. You're going to have businesses rise and fall faster than ever."

You Don't Know What You Don't Know "In a big company, you never feel you're fast enough." Beth Comstock, the chief marketing officer of GE, is talking to me by phone from the Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park, California, where she's visiting entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. She gets a charge out of the Valley, but her trips also remind her how perilous the business climate is right now. "Business-model innovation is constant in this economy," she says. "You start with a vision of a platform. For a while, you think there's a line of sight, and then it's gone. There's suddenly a new angle."

Within GE, she says, "our traditional teams are too slow. We're not innovating fast enough. We need to systematize change." Comstock connected me with Susan Peters, who oversees GE's executive-development effort. "The pace of change is pretty amazing," Peters says. "There's a need to be less hierarchical and to rely more on teams. This has all increased dramatically in the last couple of years."

Executives at GE are bracing for a new future. The challenge they face is the same one staring down wide swaths of corporate America, not to mention government, schools, and other institutions that have defined how we've lived: These organizations have structures and processes built for an industrial age, where efficiency is paramount but adaptability is terribly difficult. We are finely tuned at taking a successful idea or product and replicating it on a large scale. But inside these legacy institutions, changing direction is rough. From classrooms arranged in rows of seats to tenured professors, from the assembly line to the way we promote executives, we have been trained to expect an orderly life. Yet the expectation that these systems provide safety and stability is a trap. This is what Comstock and Peters are battling.

"The business community focuses on managing uncertainty," says Dev Patnaik, cofounder and CEO of strategy firm Jump Associates, which has advised GE, Target, and PepsiCo, among others. "That's actually a bit of a canard." The true challenge lies elsewhere, he explains: "In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, ambiguity is rising to unprecedented levels. That's something our current systems can't handle.

"There's a difference between the kind of problems that companies, institutions, and governments are able to solve and the ones that they need to solve," Patnaik continues. "Most big organizations are good at solving clear but complicated problems. They're absolutely horrible at solving ambiguous problems--when you don't know what you don't know. Faced with ambiguity, their gears grind to a halt.

"Uncertainty is when you've defined the variable but don't know its value. Like when you roll a die and you don't know if it will be a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. But ambiguity is when you're not even sure what the variables are. You don't know how many dice are even being rolled or how many sides they have or which dice actually count for anything." Businesses that focus on uncertainty, says Patnaik, "actually delude themselves into thinking that they have a handle on things. Ah, ambiguity; it can be such a bitch."

Be Not Afraid What's "a bitch" for companies can be terror for individuals. The idea of taking risks, of branching out into this ambiguous future, is scary at a moment when the economy is in no hurry to emerge from the doldrums and when unemployment is a national crisis. The security of the 40-year career of the man in the gray-flannel suit may have been overstated, but at least he had a path, a ladder. The new reality is multiple gigs, some of them supershort (see "The Four-Year Career"), with constant pressure to learn new things and adapt to new work situations, and no guarantee that you'll stay in a single industry. It can be daunting. It can be exhausting. It can also be exhilarating. "Fear holds a lot of people back," says Raina Kumra, 34. "I'm skill hoarding. Every time I update my resume, I see the path that I didn't know would be. You keep throwing things into your backpack, and eventually you'll have everything in your tool kit."

Kumra is sitting in a Dublin hotel, where earlier she spoke on a panel about the future of mobile before a group of top chief information officers. She is not technically in the mobile business; nor is she a software engineer or an academic. She actually works for a federal agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, as codirector of innovation for the group that oversees Voice of America and other government-run media. How she got there is a classic journey of flux.

Kumra started out in film school. She made two documentaries, including one in South America and India, and then took a job as a video editor for Scientific American Frontiers. "After each trip to shoot footage," she says, "I'd come back and find that the editing tools had all changed." So she decided to learn computer programming. "I figured I had to get my tech on," says Kumra, who signed up for New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. She then moved into the ad world, doing digital campaigns at BBH, R/GA, and Wieden+Kennedy before launching her own agency. Along the way she picked up a degree from Harvard's design school, taught at the University of Amsterdam, and started a not-for-profit called Light Up Malawi.

"So many people tell me, 'I don't know what you do,'" Kumra says. It's an admission echoed by many in Generation Flux, but it doesn't bother her at all. "I'm a collection of many things. I'm not one thing."

The point here is not that Kumra's tool kit of skills allows her to cut through the ambiguity of this era. Rather, it is that the variety of her experiences--and her passion for new ones--leaves her well prepared for whatever the future brings. "I had to try something entrepreneurial. I had to try social enterprise. I needed to understand government," she says of her various career moves. "I just needed to know all this."

You do not have to be a jack-of-all-trades to flourish in the age of flux, but you do need to be open-minded. GE's Comstock doesn't have as eclectic a career path as Kumra--she has spent two decades within GE's various divisions. But just because she can dress and act the part of a loyal corporate soldier doesn't mean Comstock is not a GenFluxer. She's got a sweet spot for creative types, especially those whose fresh thinking can spur the buttoned-up GE culture forward. She's brought in folks like Benjamin Palmer, the groovy CEO of edgy ad firm Barbarian Group, to help inject new ideas and processes into GE's marketing apparatus. "We're creating digital challenge teams," she explains. "We're doing a lot more work with entrepreneurs. It's part of our internal growth strategy. It creates tension. It makes people's jobs frustrating. But it's also energizing."

Pete Cashmore, 26 CEO, Mashable At 19, he founded a tech blog in Scotland, which has grown into a monster site for social news. Mashable has more than 2 million Twitter followers. "I don't have any personal challenges about throwing away the past. If you're not changing, you're giving others a chance to catch up." More »

Comstock, once president of digital media at NBC, is now one of CEO Jeff Immelt's key confidants. "I've always gravitated to the new," Comstock says, in trying to explain her comfort with change. "Part of it is who you are. I grew up in media, in news, and developed almost an addiction to go from deadline to deadline. It's intoxicating." And profitable. Comstock is the architect of Ecomagination and Healthymagination, GE initiatives that have helped reconfigure the company during this financial crisis. While it's too early to tell what Healthymagination could produce, the Ecomagination group has to date accounted for $85 billion in revenue.

Nuke Nostalgia If ambiguity is high and adaptability is required, then you simply can't afford to be sentimental about the past. Future-focus is a signature trait of Generation Flux. It is also an imperative for businesses: Trying to replicate what worked yesterday only leaves you vulnerable.

Baratunde Thurston is a quintessential GenFluxer. When I met up with him recently, he had just pulled an all-nighter. At 1 a.m. that morning, the New York City police had descended on Zuccotti Park to roust the Occupy Wall Street crowd, and Thurston--who is digital director for satirical news outlet The Onion--was called on to help cover the event. He was at home, in Brooklyn, but he didn't jump on the subway or into a taxi to hustle his way to lower Manhattan like a traditional journalist. Instead he fired up his computer. "I found the live streams of video from the site, so I could see what was going on. Then I monitored police scanners, to hear what they were saying. I looked at news feeds and Mayor Bloomberg's statements, and then I accessed all my social-media feeds, screening by zip code what people down there were saying. Some people in the neighborhood were freaked out by helicopters overhead, shining floodlights into their windows. They had no idea what was going on, said it felt like a police action. Which it was, you know."

For three hours, Thurston pieced together what he was seeing and hearing, and rebroadcasted it via digital channels. "I had a better sense of what was happening and where the crowds were moving than the people on the ground," he says. By eschewing well-trod practices and creatively adjusting to a fluid situation, he built an authentic narrative in real time, one that reflected the true story far better than the nightly TV news.

Thurston calls himself "a politically active, technology-loving comedian from the future." He works for The Onion, does stand-up comedy, and has a terrific book coming out this month called How to Be Black. "I was a computer programmer in high school, but I discovered I wasn't very good at it--it was too tedious," he says. "I was a philosophy major. I did management consulting right out of college. But then I started doing comedy, and I love it. People say to me all the time, 'What are you? You need to focus.' Maybe so. But for now, this smorgasbord of activities is working."

Thurston is telling me all this over lunch at Delicatessen, a restaurant in SoHo on the corner of Prince and Lafayette. "I'm the mayor of this corner on Foursquare. Last night, the Occupy crowd walked right by here, and I tweeted them: 'That's my corner. Sorry I'm not there, I promise I'd be a better mayor for you than Bloomberg.'"

Thurston is not bashful. At 34, he's not a kid (though he says, "I have the technological age of a 26-year-old"). And he's cheering on the pace of change. "You can knock on the doors of power and make your case for access. That's the way it's usually done. Or you can be like Mark Zuckerberg and build your own system around it." Thurston is utterly lacking in nostalgia. "I was talking to some documentary filmmakers at a conference, and they all just talk about loss, the loss of a model. I can empathize. But I'm not upset that the model is dying. The milkman is dead, but we drink more milk than ever. Do we really want to return to a world of just three broadcast channels?"

Nostalgia is a natural human emotion, a survival mechanism that pushes people to avoid risk by applying what we've learned and relying on what's worked before. It's also about as useful as an appendix right now. When times seem uncertain, we instinctively become more conservative; we look to the past, to times that seem simpler, and we have the urge to re-create them. This impulse is as true for businesses as for people. But when the past has been blown away by new technology, by the ubiquitous and always-on global hypernetwork, beloved past practices may well be useless.

Nostalgia is of particular concern to GE's Peters, keeper of the company's vaunted leadership training. Since 2009, she has been aggressively rethinking the program; last January, she rolled out "a new contemporized view of expectations" for GE's top 650 managers. That's a mouthful, but basically it's a revolution to the way execs are evaluated at the company known as America's leadership factory. "We now recognize that external focus is more multifaceted than simply serving 'the customer,'" says Peters, "that other stakeholders have to be considered. We talk about how to get and apply external knowledge, how to lead in ambiguous situations, how to listen actively, and the whole idea of collaboration."

Not everyone at GE is excited about the shift. "Some people question changing our definitions," Peters says. "When they do, I ask: How many of you use the same cell phone from five years ago? The world isn't the same, so we need new parameters." At GE's Crotonville leadership center, in New York, "we are physically changing the buildings, to make it better for teams," she says. A large kitchen has been installed, so teams can cook together "with all the messiness and egalitarian spirit involved." Managers who are uncomfortable playing second fiddle to more culinary-inclined staffers "can sit on the side and have a glass of wine," says Peters. "But usually, after a while, they realize they're on the sidelines, and they get in the game." And then there's the building known around campus as the "White House," which dates back to the 1950s. "It's where executives would go after dinner to have a drink," Peters explains. "We're gutting it, replacing it with a university-like all-day coffeehouse. Some colleagues who've been here for 20, 30 years, they tell me, 'This is terrible.' I tell them, 'You are not our target demographic.'"

Raina Kumra, 34 Codirector of Innovation, Broadcasting Board of Governors The documentary filmmaker, digital strategy guru at Wieden+Kennedy, and founder of Light Up Malawi is now a civil servant. "I work on a mission: to use mass platforms to change the world. It's a mission, not a job title, not a career."More »

Bob Greenberg, 63 CEO and founder, R/GA After founding his firm to create visual effects for movies like Alien and Zelig, he now delivers cutting-edge digital programs for Nike, Nokia, HP, and more. "People talk about change and adaptation, but they have more competition than they think." More »

So much for nostalgia. At this year's meeting of GE's top executives, presentation materials will be available only via iPads. "Some are scrambling to learn how to turn one on," Peters says. "They just have to do it. There's a natural tendency for some people to pull back when change comes. We're not going to wave a magic wand and make everyone different. But with the right team, the right coaching, we can get them to see things differently."

Thurston is less forgiving of the iPad-challenged. "It's irresponsible not to use the tools of the day," he charges. "People say, 'Oh, if I master Twitter, I've got it figured out.' That's right, but it's also so wrong. If you master those things and stop, you're just going to get killed by the next thing. Flexibility of skills leads to flexibility of options. To see what you can't see coming, you've got to embrace larger principles."

There Are No Perfect Role Models Bob Greenberg, chief executive of digital advertising agency R/GA, doesn't do the comb-over. Nor does he crop his hair short or shave his scalp, in the way of so many modern admen. Instead, beyond the patch of baldness on top of his head, his hair is long and flowing and bushy. It's as if he's saying, Look, I am who I am. So deal with it.

I met with Greenberg several times this past fall to talk about how he's managing a growing business in an industry experiencing total upheaval. The first time we sat down, in September, he dropped that his company had dozens of job openings. The agency, Greenberg explained, had grown 20% since the start of the year, from 1,000 staffers to 1,200. And to net those 200 additions, Greenberg had hired 500 new people. That math doesn't exactly add up, I pointed out.

Here's the rub: R/GA's young GenFlux staffers are leaving at such a steady pace, sticking around for such short runs that Greenberg finds himself constantly replacing them, endlessly slotting one talented young person into another's place. Many CEOs would react to this news with alarm: What are we doing wrong? Why can't we keep our young talent? Greenberg talks about this intense transition with nonchalance. He's not upset by it; he's not fighting it; and he assumes this is the way life will be for the foreseeable future.

But that doesn't mean he's standing still. Despite strong business momentum, he's pushing R/GA into a radical reorganization--the fifth time he's hauled the firm into a new business model. "If we don't change our structure, we'll get less relevant," Greenberg tells me. "We won't be able to grow." This time, he's integrating 12 new capabilities, from live events to data visualization to product development, into R/GA's platforms. "People talk about change and adaptation, but they don't see how fast the competition is coming," he says. "We have to move. We have no choice."

R/GA's flexibility is instructive for large firms and small. Many businesses are struggling to recast their strategies, with top execs hunting desperately for successful models that they can replicate. (Which might explain why you've probably heard the phrase, "We're the Apple of . . ." once too often.) But there is no new model; you may well need to build one from scratch. "Command-and-control hierarchical structures are being disintegrated," says danah boyd, a social-science researcher for Microsoft Research who also teaches at New York University. "There's a difference between the old broadcast world and the networked world."

In a world of flux, what succeeds for one industry or company doesn't necessarily work for another; and even if it does, it may not work for long. One reason Facebook has thrived is that it is continually changing. Users and pundits routinely carp about new features or designs. But this is the way Facebook has been from its inception--including the critical decision in 2006 to open its doors to those not in college. Mark Zuckerberg knows that if he doesn't keep Facebook moving, others will come after him. Steve Jobs applied a similar approach at Apple: He disrupted his own business in dozens of ways, from refusing to make new products compatible with old operating systems to dumping the iPod's successful track wheel to embrace touch screens--ahead of everyone else.

Just because a specific tactic worked for Apple doesn't mean it is right for your business. Maybe the world's best marshmallow maker just needs to keep churning out the best marshmallow (even if it should have its own Facebook page and a Twitter feed). Every enterprise needs to find--and evolve--the structure, system, and culture that best allows it to stay competitive as its specific market shifts. Business leaders need to be creative, adaptive, and focused in their techniques, staffing, and philosophy.

An instructive analogy comes from the world of software. In a recent book called Building Data Science Teams, chaos expert Patil explained how software used to be developed: "One group defines the product, another builds visual mock-ups . . . and finally a set of engineers builds it to some specification document." This is known as a "waterfall" process, which was practiced by large, successful enterprises like Microsoft that, on a designated schedule, issued large, finished releases of their products (Windows 95, Windows 2000, and so on). Today that process is giving way to "agile" development, to what Patil calls "the ability to adapt and iterate quickly throughout the product life cycle." In software, such work follows the precepts of "The Agile Manifesto," a 2001 document written by a group of developers who stated a preference for "individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software over comprehensive documentation; [and] responding to change over following a plan."

It's not just the apps on your iPad: The entire world of business is now in a constant state of agile development. New releases are constant; tweaks, upgrades, and course corrections take place on the fly. There is no status quo; there is only a process of change.

But if your business is primed to be adaptable, flexible, and prepared for any shift in the economy, isn't it also primed to be whipsawed by constant change?

I visited Nike CEO Mark Parker on the company's campus outside of Portland, Oregon, and I asked if he had ever considered having Nike-branded hospitals, or Nike-branded doctors, or Nike-branded health food. After all, Nike is dedicated to improving its customers' health. The health-care business is in tumult, and presumably an innovative new entrant could make a lot of money. Parker replied that, however tempting those business opportunities might be, they didn't intersect with Nike's core focus on sport.

That doesn't mean Nike is avoiding new areas--including ones that touch on health. Spread across a couple of buildings on the west side of its campus are the employees of Nike's digital sports operation. This burgeoning startup is focused on remaking how casual athletes train, stay motivated, and connect with one another. More than 5 million people interact on the Nike+ website, which connects to sensors in your shoes, phone, or watch to provide GPS-linked data about your exercise, as well as health facts such as heart rate and calories burned. By deploying new technologies and tools in the service of its long-term mission, Nike has deepened its customers' brand experience--and reinforced, rather than fractured, its sense of identity.

The key is to be clear about your business mission. In a world of flux, this becomes more important than ever. Netflix's recent troubles with its ill-fated Qwikster product is a telling example. Netflix's core proposition has always been delivering a better, simpler, cheaper consumer experience. CEO Reed Hastings rattled video stores like Blockbuster with his no-late-fee DVD-by-mail model; he then obliterated them with his embrace of online streaming. But along the way, Netflix began to see itself as a first-mover technology leader more than a leader in consumer-focused experiences. That's when the company stumbled, by forcing its customers to go somewhere they didn't want, more because it made sense for Netflix's business model than it did for them.

The twist to all this: Given the need for more frequent iteration in our age of flux, missteps like Netflix's may become more prevalent. And over time, we'll become more forgiving as a result. That will encourage even greater embrace of innovation by businesses, as the costs of failure decline. And in the process, flux will destabilize--and energize--our economy even more.

Lessons Of Flux Our institutions are out of date; the long career is dead; any quest for solid rules is pointless, since we will be constantly rethinking them; you can't rely on an established business model or a corporate ladder to point your way; silos between industries are breaking down; anything settled is vulnerable.

Put this way, the chaos ahead sounds pretty grim. But its corollary is profound: This is the moment for an explosion of opportunity, there for the taking by those prepared to embrace the change. We have been through a version of this before. At the turn of the 20th century, as cities grew to be the center of American culture, those accustomed to the agrarian clock of sunrise-sunset and the pace of the growing season were forced to learn the faster ways of the urban-manufacturing world. There was widespread uneasiness about the future, about what a job would be, about what a community would be. Fringe political groups and popular movements gave expression to that anxiety. Yet from those days of ambiguity emerged a century of tremendous progress.

Today we face a similar transition, this time born of technology and globalization--an unhinging of the expected, from employment to markets to corporate leadership. "There are all kinds of reasons to be afraid of this economy," says Microsoft Research's boyd. "Technology forces disruption, and not all of the change will be good. Optimists look to all the excitement. Pessimists look to all that gets lost. They're both right. How you react depends on what you have to gain versus what you have to lose."

Yet while pessimists may be emotionally calmed by their fretting, it will not aid them practically. The pragmatic course is not to hide from the change, but to approach it head-on. Thurston offers this vision: "Imagine a future where people are resistant to stasis, where they're used to speed. A world that slows down if there are fewer options--that's old thinking and frustrating. Stimulus becomes the new normal."

To flourish requires a new kind of openness. More than 150 years ago, Charles Darwin foreshadowed this era in his description of natural selection: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives; nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change." As we traverse this treacherous, exciting bridge to tomorrow, there is no clearer message than that.

A version of this article appears in the February 2012 issue of Fast Company.

A month after its hire of Politico's Ben Smith, BuzzFeed raises $15.5 million in Series C financing. How has the site changed over the past month?

BuzzFeed is more than a few steps on its way to becoming a fat cat of web publishing. The site, which startled the media world (including us) by hiring Politico's Ben Smith last month, has just raised $15.5 million in funding to help advance its plan of building out a talented newsroom obsessed with shareability. As BuzzFeed undergoes its peculiar metamorphosis from aggregating caterpillar to scoop-delivering butterfly, it's an opportune moment to peer inside the chrysalis and see how the site is handling its transformation. 

Mostly, with aplomb. A real milestone was reached five days ago, when CNN Chief National Correspondent John King filed his story about Sen. John McCain's plan to endorse Mitt Romney. Here was the sort of story King has surely broken countless times. And so it must have been a bitter pill to swallow when he typed the story's last words: "News of the endorsement was first reported by BuzzFeed Politics."

But just because BuzzFeed is off to a good start doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement. In the best spirit of shop talk, here are a few suggestions we have for BuzzFeed as it tries to grow up.

1) Embrace the weirdness of your situation.

When we first reported on the Ben Smith hire, we included a meme-y photo we found with the caption: "Mr. President, Ben from BuzzFeed. What are your top ten honey badger mashups"? Smith rolled with the punches--going so far as to make that very image his Twitter thumbnail. A healthy sense of self-parody is essential in pulling off this tightrope walk of a transition.

2) But at the same time, tame it.

The Huffington Post, another site with something of a dual identity--BuzzFeed's Jonah Peretti was its early CTO, new Buzzfeed executive chairman Ben Lehrer cofounded HuffPo, new Buzzfeed board advisor Greg Coleman is a former HuffPo president--at least does a decent job of parceling its content into sections. Load the homepage, and you'll be presented, usually, with a top political story front-and-center; only once you scroll down do you inevitably get lured into that Katy Perry slideshow. BuzzFeed, by contrast, seems to have shoehorned in its new political content. The site has allotted election coverage a box on the homepage, and a colorful "2012" campaign button serves as a link to collected political news. But where HuffPo mostly separates its superego from its id, BuzzFeed curiously conflates them. And thus a story on Chris Christie heckling OWS protesters gets branded not just with "2012" but also with "Fail," a section that currently contains stories on outmoded celebrity endorsements and pictures of what Justin Bieber might look like in 10 years. 

3) Figure out the relationship between sharing and caring.

If Ben Smith is a serious political journalist, and he is, then he should recognize that while social sharing is an increasingly important way we get our news, there is important news that isn't always compulsively shareable. When I posed this conundrum to Smith last month, he was a tad evasive, saying he worried more about the search engine optimization of the news than BuzzFeed's prizing of shareability. In an early post labeled "Welcome to BuzzFeed Politics," the team promised, "this is the first step in BuzzFeed’s growth this year from being the place where you find the hottest, smartest, and funniest content on the Web to also reporting out original news stories and answering hard questions." The unfortunate truth is that often, the latter kinds of stories--the original ones answering hard questions--may not always become as viciously viral as posts like "The 25 Funniest Auto-Corrects of 2011" (6 million views and counting). There may come a time where Smith may have to stand up to his bosses in defense of content that is "underperforming," but nonetheless important.

4) Admit you want to be HuffPo 2 already

When I asked Peretti about his relationship with the Huffington Post, he told me, "I don't want to comment on the Huffington Post." He dodged a similar question put to him by BusinessInsider. But as BuzzFeed sits poised to unfurl new sections with the help of HuffPo alumni, it's becoming pretty clear in what image BuzzFeed is remaking itself. Is a new media clash of the titans arising? How exactly will BuzzFeed differentiate itself? Are cocktail parties with Arianna now getting awkward? Now, that would be a story we'd share.

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Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.

NPR In Your Ford, Facebook In Your Mercedes. NPR and Ford are teaming up for a new fixture on Ford's SYNC in-car infotainment platform, Ford has announced at CES. The NPR smarphone app will link up with Ford's SYNC AppLink to let drivers switch channels and make playlists by speaking out loud. Also at the show, Mercedes is expected to unveil a version of Facebook for its communication system, which will let drivers publish pre-written posts, follow on friends and "Liked" locations that may be nearby. --NS

Kinect Coming To Windows On Feb 1. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced at the Consumer Electronics Show yesterday that Kinect for Windows will start shipping on February 1, bringing motion sensor technology to your Microsoft PC. (The company has said this version will be incompatible with the Xbox, though.) A beta version was out to developers late last year, but this is the first commercial release of the device. --NS

Visa Approves Smartphones For NFC. Visa payWave NFC payment tech can now find its way into select RIM, Samsung and LG phones, Visa has announced today. Visa approvial means that financial institutions and retailers can start offering NFC to customers around the world, via the models checked off by the credit card company. --NS

--Updated 5:45 a.m. EST

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Yesterday's Fast Feed: Nuance's Voice Control TV, OLPC's Tablet For Schoolkids, Netflix Debuts In U.K., PayPal Testing Mobile Payments At Home Depot, and more!

A look at Baratunde Thurston, the Director of Digital at The Onion, a Harvard philosophy major turned consultant turned standup comedian and author of How to Be Black. Flux to the core.

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Baratunde Thurston had been up most of the night. When the New York City police descended on Zuccotti Park at 1 a.m. to roust the Occupy Wall Street crowd, Thurston--who is a writer for The Onion--was called on to help cover the event. He was at home, in Brooklyn, but he didn't jump on the subway or into a taxi or onto a bicycle and hustle his way to lower Manhattan. Instead he fired up his computer. "I found the live streams of video from the site, so I could see what was going on. Then I monitored police scanners, to hear what they were saying. I looked at traditional news outlets and what Mayor Bloomberg's statements were, and then I accessed all my social media feeds, screening by zip code what people down there were saying. Some people who lived in the neighborhood were freaked out by helicopters flying overhead, shining floodlights into their windows. They had no idea what was going on, said it felt like a police action. Which it was, you know."

For three hours, Thurston pieced together what he was seeing and hearing, and rebroadcast it using digital channels and social media, capturing the unfolding event in depth. "I could never have seen all that if I'd actually gone down there. I had a better sense of what was happening and where the crowds were moving than the people on the ground."

Thurston calls himself "a politically active, technology-loving comedian from the future." He writes for the Onion, does standup comedy, has a terrific book coming out this month called How To Be Black, and does public speaking, using satire. "I was a computer programmer in high school, but I discovered I wasn't very good at it--it was too tedious," he says. "I was a philosophy major [at Harvard]. I did management consulting right out of school. But then I started doing comedy, and I love it. People say to me all the time, "What are you? You need to focus." Maybe so. But for now, this smorgasbord of activities is working."

Thurston is telling me all this over lunch at Delicatessen, a restaurant in Soho on the corner of Prince and Lafayette. "I'm the mayor of this corner on Foursquare, have been for like forever. Last night, the Occupy crowd actually walked by right here, and I tweeted them: That's my corner. Sorry I'm not there, I promise I'd be a better mayor for you than Bloomberg."

Thurston is not bashful. At 34, he's not a kid (though, he says, "I have the technological age of a 26-year-old"). And regarding the pace of change in our world: He's cheering it on. "You can knock on the doors of power, and make your case for access. That's the way it's usually done. Or you can be like Zuckerberg and build your own system around it. That's the way things are now. It's revolution."

There is no hint of nostalgia in Thurston, and that gives him an advantage. "I was talking to some documentary filmmakers at a conference, and they all just talk about loss, the loss of a model. I can empathize. But I'm not upset that model is dying. The milk man is dead, but we still drink milk, more of it than ever. Do we want to return to a world of just three broadcast channels or where five or six labels control the music industry?"

"It's irresponsible not to use the tools of the day," he charges. "People say, Oh, if I master Twitter, I've got it figured out. That's right, but it's also so wrong. If you master those things and stop, you're just going to get killed by the next thing. Flexibility of skills leads to flexibility of options. To see what you can't see coming, you've got to embrace larger principles."

Among those principles: "The uncertainty is the certainty. Change is the constant. Experimentation is rewarded. Stability is an impediment." So what are the important skills, given that environment? "To manage large amounts of information is super important," he says. "And the ability to tell a story is more important than ever. Coalition building is an important skill, the ability to connect. You can have a distinct edge if you can take advantage of community." Growing up, Thurston says, "I used online bulletin boards, hacked into libraries, I was using the web as it was being written, so I got an early understanding of how to leverage the platform. I'm not a very good programmer. Programming is very tedious. But everyone should try it."

He talks about a startup resource he uses, knod.es, which allows him to sift and manage all of his social media contacts and interactions, identifying the people who are most important to spreading his content. "In the old days, you'd need an army of administrative assistants to do that," he notes. He recalls being in Paris, getting ready for an event, "and I decided I wanted to rock a Windsor [knot on his tie]. I didn't know how to make one, I didn't have a father to teach me. But thanks to technology, I now have access to the whole world. I found a video online that stepped me through it, and I was ready to go."

Thurston's career path has been nontraditional, even as a comedian. "The comedy world has an established strategy for success: You do an HBO special, move into sitcoms and then movies. If I could get a big check from TV, that would be cool. But I'm not desperate for those things; I don't have a TV show. TV people want me to pick: You're a black comedian, or a political comedian, or you're a social media guy. 'You need something more stable, you need to fit into a category.' I'm comfortable with a lack of certainty. The way things used to be, you have to trim off something of yourself to be successful, to fit into a silo. Now you can build your own definition of you, you can maintain more of your integrity of yourself."

Thurston's book, How to Be Black, is an assault on nostalgia--a satirical, biographic attack on the idea that "blackness" or any label should be derived from historical description. "Blackness is what black people are doing, all of it. Thinking in the plural is the important part. I'm reacting to narrowness of ideas--You're not black enough, or too black--imposed by old-school storytellers. Identity has been an imposed structure. Media pours out terabytes of information about what being black is, and that's horrible."

Thurston's self-definition includes "political activist," but he has avoided joining the established process. "I could seek elective office, learn how to write a bill and manage lobbyists. 'I can be slightly less corrupt in your corrupt world.' Do I want to knock on that door? That's not how we have to get things done."

He sees two paths for the world ahead of us: "There's a heavy cost if we don't weather this transition well. If the political class doesn't prepare, if our education system doesn't prepare, if our corporate system doesn't prepare--that's a crime against the future." He's agitating for the second path: "Imagine a future where people are resistant to stasis, where they are used to speed. A world that slows down with fewer options, that's the old way and frustrating. Stimulus becomes the new normal. Grandma gets bored without her heads-up display glasses."

Read the full feature and check out other profiles.

Last week, an Indian hacker crew successfully broke into a secured Indian military government network. The group, the Lords of Dharmaraja, posted documents that infer Apple, Nokia, and Research In Motion gave the Indian government backdoor access to their devices in exchange for mobile phone market rights. Indian government officials say the files are forgeries; however, they fit in perfectly with what we know about mobile phone surveillance in 2012.

Fast Company has reported extensively on smartphone and computer security fears. In the documents, which have been posted on multiple mirrors, India military intelligence refers multiple times to a system known as RINOA SUR. According to ZDNet India's Manan Kakkar, the RINOA portion of the acronym refers to “RIM, Nokia, Apple,” while the SUR portion is unknown. The documents describe a backdoor mobile phone surveillance system in great detail. The documents also infer that network access was granted to the Indian government in exchange for the right to sell to Indian consumers.

The pervasiveness of government smartphone and computer surveillance in the United States is unknown. Several days ago, a federal appeals court revived the Jewel vs. NSA [PDF] lawsuit, which alleges that the National Security Agency (NSA) routinely engages in warrantless surveillance of electronic communications. According to privacy watchdog group EPIC, a secret 2002 executive order granted the NSA the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance of electronic communications. The Jewel vs. NSA lawsuit was filed by Carolyn Jewel, a Los Angeles-area romance novelist who found evidence that showed details about her online activity were being given to the NSA by her Internet service provider.

Other intelligence agencies may be involved in warrantless surveillance of mobile telephone and Internet communications as well. The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit in late October alleging that the PATRIOT Act has “secret interpretations” that allow government agencies to conduct dragnets of e-traffic. Under these interpretations, it seems that large numbers of Americans--both individuals and businesses--can be targeted for surveillance if the FBI has determined they are “relevant to a government investigation.” No warrant is required.

Unfortunately, this isn't just tinfoil hat chat. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Mark Udall (D-CO) have both publicly expressed concern about possible or already-extant surveillance. Udall and Wyden both serve on the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, which helps monitor information warfare and cyberintelligence.

The Lords of Dharmaraja posted about their alleged discovery on Google+ and Pastebin. According to one of the hackers, "Yama Tough":

Other alleged discoveries made by the Lords of Dharmaraja include portions of original source code for Norton AntiVirus, which Symantec has confirmed was authentic (although from an older 2006 version). A copy of the source code was quickly posted to Pastebin. What the source code for Norton AntiVirus was doing on secure servers belonging to Indian military intelligence is unknown.

But the most disturbing discovery from the Lords' hacking exploits are documents indicating that the Indian military was spying on the United States. The RIM/Apple/Nokia surveillance documents also contain what appear to be private email excerpts belonging to employees of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC). The USCC is a Congressional-mandated commission whose duties include monitoring Chinese cyberwarfare and hacker attacks; Fast Company reported previously that Chinese cyberespionage has been a major concern for India. Most alarmingly, the documents infer the Apple/RIM/Nokia backdoor was used by India to obtain the U.S. government emails.

It is important to remember that the Indian documents are unconfirmed. Foreign intelligence agencies and other parties have used hacker attacks to spread disinformation in the past. However, even if the RINOA SUR documents have been falsified, it's a safe bet that widespread surveillance of Internet and mobile phone traffic takes place in the United States on a daily basis.

While the NSA and other government agencies may have a mandate to fight the bad guys, they're only human. The odds are likely that, within the next three years, we will see a corporate espionage case involving data used by unscrupulous government employees. Corporate secrets and sensitive business information are routinely sent by email; without proper encryption such as PGP or Tor, the worst can easily happen.

For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Email Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, here or find him on Twitter and Google+.

A few months ago I wrote a piece for the Washington Post. The next day, my friend Lew emailed me with a link to an article about motivation through rewarding others that appeared on the page opposite my piece.

"The juxtaposition," Lew wrote, "was likely coincidental, yet apt."

The article about motivation discussed a growing body of research showing that rewarding others leads to greater satisfaction that rewarding ourselves.

This conclusion doesn't seem intuitive: If I were to ask you if you would prefer to spend your year-end bonus on yourself or spend it on your coworkers, you would likely choose the former.

Pret, a U.K. food chain that is expanding in America, believes the opposite to be true.

Stephanie Clifford, reporting for The New York Times, described how the incentive system works at Pret:

"When employees are promoted or pass training milestones, they receive at least £50 in vouchers, a payment that Pret calls a 'shooting star,' but instead of keeping the bonus, the employees must give the money to colleagues, people who have helped them along the way."

To install Pret's incentive system in the academy would be to blow it up.

Recently direct motivation systems have been gaining traction. ClassDojo won NBC's "Education Nation" in September. I know a few people trying to build similar motivational iPhone applications for children.

In all cases I know of, the rewards are direct. With ClassDojo, you get points when you turn in your homework or answer a question correctly. With the motivational iPhone applications, children receive a prize (or hard cash) in exchange for doing the dishes or cleaning their room.

What if when students got gold stars on ClassDojo they didn't keep them, but rather gave them out to other students who helped them along the way? No longer would students be motivated solely to perform the best--they would be motivated to help their classmates.

This motivational system is the beginning of community-directed learning.

Dale Stephens was homeschooled and then unschooled. Now he leads UnCollege.org. Perigee/Penguin will publish his first book about hacking your education in early 2013.

[Editor's note: Dale Stephens is one of the inaugural Thiel Fellows who stopped going to college in exchange for a place in an innovative mentoring program. Read more from Dale--and about PayPal founder Peter Thiel's education experiment--here.]

[Image: Flickr user Katherine Anderson]

It's when companies under-promise and over-deliver that people experience memorable moments that will affect their habits for a lifetime.

In a small restaurant in Shinjiku, a suburb of Tokyo, I ordered sake. First, the waitress placed a small wooden box in front of me. Then she arrived with a large tray carrying 40 cups. Each one, she explained, represented a different personality. I chose a blue cup, which she removed from her tray and carefully placed in the box.

As she began to pour the traditional drink into my small blue cup, things took a decidedly unusual turn. I had, as most would guess, expected her to stop below the rim. Instead she continued pouring, the clear liquor overflowing into the wooden box. And then, when most of the cup was submerged, she stopped, smiled, bowed, and said, "Enjoy."

As I nimbly attempted to fish for the cup, I asked her why she had poured so much. Her answer surprised me. She said, "Martin-san, I do this to show gratitude--to deliver a little bit more than what you expect."

Do you remember the last time you got more than you expected? Perhaps you were shopping for groceries or even buying something online. Am I right in assuming that, rare as these occasions are, when they happen you don't forget them? When I was a kid, I was a devoted Lego builder, collecting box after box. I came to realize that Lego always placed a few extra bricks inside the box, bricks never accounted for on the list of inventory. Over the years I began to accumulate a secret collection of Lego's gifted bricks. Funnily enough, I valued this collection above all others. It took on a kind of sacred quality.

Some years later, I visited the factory and the manager told me that those extra bricks were more a matter of practicality than goodwill. They were included in an attempt to circumvent thousands of requests from distraught parents who had unsuccessfully searched for that missing piece lost under the carpets or beneath the furniture.

Devalued as my collection of special bricks may have been in that childhood moment, what Lego had inadvertently achieved was to over-deliver and under-promise. And that's what stuck with me.

These days, we seem to be following a reverse philosophy. We over-promise and under-deliver. Or, at best, we deliver exactly what was promised--nothing more, nothing less. Just think of that pre-packed shrimp salad you bought, where you found that there was not a single shrimp among the lettuce, only the four at the top of the plastic container. Or the big bag of potato chips that is more air than chips. In general, we are more familiar with a leaner scenario than we are with excess.

Several years ago, I checked into the Peninsula Hotel in Chicago. I asked the concierge if it was possible to borrow some music CDs. Over the years, I'd grown accustomed to listening to music supplied by other hotels in the Peninsula group. It's a service they offer to all their regulars. As the hotel was new, the clerk politely informed me that this particular Peninsula had no CD library. Oh, well, so it goes. Yet minutes later, the concierge called to ask me what my favorite music was. Eminem, ABBA, and the Beatles, I replied. I was curious about this, but it slipped my mind as I continued working.

About 20 minutes later, I heard a knock on my door. When I opened it, the concierge handed over a small bag containing three CDs. You guessed it: Eminem, ABBA, and the Beatles. "This is a personal present from us to you," the concierge said. "Welcome to the Peninsula."

Now's let's pause here for a second. I've related this anecdote to hundreds of thousands of people attending my conferences--and to millions who have watched my TV appearances. My guesstimate would be that some 15 million people have heard this story. The cost to the Peninsula? About $22.50.

Needless to say, the Peninsula experience is far from common. However, every time I hear consumers raving about a brand, almost without exception it's been the result of the brand over-delivering. In a world where promises are routinely ambiguous or broken, when we encounter such service we find it, quite literally, remarkable. Small acts of generosity imbue us with that rare feeling of being cared for or considered by a company. Perhaps, when it comes down to it, we're still kids falling under the spell of surprise. If it's better than what we expected--or hoped for--we remember it above all else.

Who knows? Maybe the brand manager responsible for your favorite brand will not only read this article, but will act on it. Don't get your hopes up--catering to you may cost a few dollars more than what has been budgeted. After all, few people are willing to step outside the plate and eat into the budget that's already been set aside for things like consultants or social media ads.

Martin Lindstrom is a 2009 recipient of TIME Magazine's "World's 100 Most Influential People" and author of Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy (Doubleday, New York), a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best--seller. His latest book, Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy, was published in September. A frequent advisor to heads of numerous Fortune 100 companies, Lindstrom has also authored 5 best-sellers translated into 30 languages. More at martinlindstrom.com.

Read more by Lindstrom: Trust Me: Here's Why Brands Sell Trust, Subconsciously

For more leadership coverage, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn

[Image: Flickr user David Lofink]

Pandora's Tim Westergren says licensing fees eat up a massive chunk of cash. SoundExchange's Michael Huppe says artists deserve it. And both agree satellite radio is getting a free ride.

Pandora cofounder Tim Westergren would love to slash the high performance royalties that cost his business dearly. "Last year, we paid over half of our gross revenues in royalties just from performance fees," says Westergren, referring to the fees his Internet radio company must dole out under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's music license. "That compares to satellite radio, which pays 7.5% or 8% of gross revenue, and broadcast radio, which is completely exempt from it."

So even as Pandora enters this year's CES buoyed by tremendous growth--125 million registered users, 18 hours of average monthly user listener time, and a 68% market share of Internet radio--the company's revenues still take a sizeable hit from the DMCA's fees. True, last quarter Pandora did post an unexpected net income of $638,000, but it warned not to expect any more profits for the rest of the year. Pandora's share price has also dropped significantly since its IPO in June, partly out of investor concern for high licensing fees. Worse yet, the rates Pandora and other digital music services pay to artists and labels won't be open for renegotiation until 2015, and until that time, Pandora will just have to "grin and bear it," Westergren says. "We're fans of paying royalties. We think performers should be compensated, but this massive uneven structure doesn't make sense, and needs to be fixed."

Not all players in the industry agree with Westergren's viewpoint. For the artists and labels, possibly lowering fees received from streaming services is all but a nonstarter. "There's no way we'd want [the rates] to come down," says Michael Huppe, president of SoundExchange, the nonprofit that collects and distributes performance fees to rights holders. "I would be shocked if there was an economic rationale for having them lowered."

From Huppe's perspective, artists deserve more for their contribution to the space, not less. SoundExchange helped pay out somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 million to rights holders in 2011, thanks in part to increased usage of services such as Pandora. But as much as Pandora might want to take credit for its contribution--creating a new revenue stream for artists through personalized web radio--Huppe believes it's the content providers themselves who deserve most of the credit. "Pandora would not exist if it weren't for the recordings that are provided to them through this process," he says, in somewhat of a chicken-and-egg argument. "We like what they do; it's a very exciting company. But if you remove the sound recordings from the mix, I would say the value proposition of Pandora drops off substantially."

Asked about the disparity in fees paid out by services such as Pandora and SiriusXM radio, according to Westergren's figures, Huppe says it's an unfair comparison. "I like Tim--he's a nice guy--but it's a bit disingenuous to simply look at percentage of revenue as a marker that you judge everything by," he explains. "It's no secret that Pandora's focus over the last five years has not been on generating revenue. They've been trying to work on their product, their brand, and building a huge following. I salute that. But it's not unusual for companies in the early stages to focus on things other than cash flow."

What's more, Huppe adds, Pandora's fees are already incredibly low. SoundExchange's licensing team break down the numbers for me: "The 2012 rate for Pandora’s free service is $0.0011 per performance, or 1.65 cents per listener per hour (assuming 15 songs per hour)." So, assuming you have a $0.0165 rate per hour, at the maximum 40 hours of free listening per month, that amounts to just "$7.92 per listener, annually," according to SoundExchange, for 480 hours of consumer engagement over the course of the year. Huppe says that's next to nothing for the amount of targeted advertising Pandora can do during that time.   

Though a flat fee might seem the fairest solution to charge the various services, it's not likely to ever to happen. The economics of each product are looked at to determine the rates. Just as you'd expect the fees for broadcast and Internet radio to be different, you might also expect different costs for a song used in a movie, a Super Bowl commercial, a Hallmark greeting card, or a musical toothbrush. Both Pandora and SoundExchange have found common ground in some areas, though. Westergren and Huppe hope broadcast radio will start to pay a performance fee, too. "We are 100% in agreement with Pandora," says Huppe. "It is an accident of history and politics that FM radio gets away with paying nothing for this primary input to their service."

Still, Westergren wants a fairer shake for his own platform of Internet radio, despite whatever rates they decide in the future for broadcast or satellite radio. "Legislation was created at a time when Internet radio was just too young to represent itself properly," he says. "The early negotiations around the statutory rates and the language in the bill was just not properly argued by Internet radio. We're a more mature industry now. Ultimately, there will be a rational answer to this--we've just got to hang tight."

Until then, however, hanging tight might just be the only solution. No matter what Pandora shows off at CES this year, whether that's new automotive partnerships, new mobile devices, or new usage statistics, it's not likely to affect its business as much as renegotiated performance fee rates. "In 2015, they'll cough up another number for the ensuing five years," Westergren says. "It's something that we'll be arguing for in Washington--it's an ongoing flag we carry."

[Image provided by Shutterstock]

Nic Adler's blogged, tweeted, and Myspaced his way to keeping The Roxy, his 40-year-old music venue, fresh for its fans. As the social media landscape changes, here's how he's staying on top.

When you run a business that has played host to musical heavyweights like Nirvana and Bob Marley and launched cultural icons including The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Pee-wee Herman Show, it would be pretty easy to get complacent. Not Nic Adler, owner of The Roxy Theater. Growing up in the business and spending time in the trenches as a band manager gave Adler a unique perspective on delivering a musical experience.

And though he comes from a time when social media meant more than clickable thumbs on Facebook, he’s been an early adopter of all forms of online interactivity. From Myspace and a blog to Pinterest, Adler’s diligently embraced each new platform as a means of banishing the “velvet rope” and keeping the Sunset Strip’s illustrious denizen fresh and relevant to legions of fans both new and old. 

For Adler, it’s less important to have a formal strategic approach to social media; it’s best to grow organically. Now he’s starting his own agency that’s focused on delivering the best execution across platforms to help businesses cultivate loyal followings, just like The Roxy. 

Adler chatted with Fast Company about his own best practices.

Be Early To Be Influential

"My dad said about five years ago to just be careful with social media because it’s the Wild West. I didn’t realize it at the time but it is this land grab that’s happening. If you are on early you can move your base. By the time it becomes an awesome network to be on, you are already at 20K followers. So check it out, go on, if it doesn’t work that’s okay, but definitely try. If you are there early, you will own that space. Our followers know that we are that kind of company. When we introduce a new platform they will want to go and try it out. It’s pioneering. Whoever gets there first is in a position to be influential."

Keep Moving 

"We started on Myspace. Back then there were only a few places to go. So we started learning about followers and getting excited each time we got a new one. But the conversation is so much richer now and you want multiple people to be part of that and to share. If you miss a beat they’ve passed you by, so be everywhere. That is why we find ourselves in so many different networks. If we were just on Myspace we’d only be talking to a small group. If we spread out we have a better opportunity to reach more people. "

Forget Search. Discover 

"The web is going through this transition from people using it for search to using it for discovery. It’s a very visual place. I go on Pinterest without anything in mind, I’m just looking and discovering in this different mode. That hasn’t happened in a long time. Though we are all accustomed to sharing, now we are starting to become curators. So say you are a business and you have this idea to find the best 20 beers, so you ask your fans. Then you build a new board of your followers’ favorite beers and turn around and tweet that out. Your fans are then going to a place where all their ideas are visually placed with links.

On Instagram, too it’s not about the words we are saying, not about anything but lens of the camera. With better apps we all became amateur photographers and there’s so much in a picture. Every time we put up a really great picture we get a lot of traction."  

Be Generous

"It’s about watching that feed and seeing someone tweet, 'Hey I’m broke but I wish I could go to that show,' and I’ll turn around and say, 'Hey you are on the list plus one.'” What does one ticket mean to me? But it means so much more to them. It’s better than a contest. It’s not something we do every day but the response is amazing. One of the things we’ve seen is that our early followers still interact with us on a daily basis. I saw these girls had made their own shirts that said 'I love The Roxy.' I hadn’t seen that since I took over ownership. It means we are really connecting with people.

If you look at our feeds we sell the club about 10% of the time and 90% of the time we talk about other things so we can be that place where people want to go. Two out of 10 tweets are about shows or tickets, the other tweets are about a great new beer or a community effort. We do the same with our newsletter. One percent of the content is about shows, the rest is about the community. We did this back in the early days of the recession when we tweeted about our competition. If you want people to live with you every day and go to sleep with you every night you have to be more that a sales pitch. We lead because we are supporting others."

Be Authentic

"Being authentic and organic are the two biggest things we talk about at The Roxy. It’s about a slow build and being honest, and if we are wrong we are honest about that, too. When we are wrong and we make it right, those are almost the most important marketing moments we have at The Roxy. If we fix something right away and the customer tweets about it, that is as authentic as it gets. They are putting that out because they believe we have the ability to correct problems in real time." 

Change The Way You Think About ROI

"Social is a mirror, it will be very honest with you. It’s so much more than amplifying. It’s important to listen. When I am building ads on Facebook I actually try to name the person I’m targeting. I see if they are male or female, put clothes on them, see if they are drinking Red Bull or Monster, driving vs. taking the bus. If you listen, you can market to a person, not to a genre and you’ll win every time.

For us, Facebook is more about communication and awareness than trying to get people in the door. People use Facebook as this tool for selling, but more of our content is about music, food, TV. It’s about living, because we are an international community on Facebook. More than 50% of fans might not ever come to The Roxy but we all have this interest in music and pop culture in common. I can only hold 500 people in the club, so it’s less about ROI and more about ROE. The "E" is for energy. It really is about more than a dollar figure on social media. I’m building social equity." 

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[Image: Flickr user The Roxy Theatre]

Nicholas Kristof has been writing for The New York Times for more than a quarter century and has appeared on that paper's op-ed page since 2001, often penning articles about the struggles of people in distant parts of the world. He has even been dubbed the "moral conscience" of his generation of journalists. Less well known is his role as an innovator in journalism. In 2003, he became the first blogger for The New York Times website. Ever since then, Kristof has been a pioneer among journalists in the digital world. He's active on Twitter and Facebook. In 2012, he even plans to venture into online gaming.

Kristof made his mark covering human rights crises around the world: the ongoing protests in Bahrain (he was tear-gassed there last month), to war in the Congo, to the genocide in Darfur (the latter won him a Pulitzer Prize). Kristof and his wife, journalist Sheryl WuDunn, won a joint Pulitzer for their coverage of China's Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989. Despite Kristof's print pedigree, he's not afraid to jump into social media and experiment publicly. For six years, Kristof has been bringing readers directly into his work with his annual "Win a Trip" contest. The student with the winning essay travels with Kristof on a reporting trip to a developing country and then blogs about it. The 2012 edition of the contest recently opened for applications. We spoke with Kristof about how journalism is evolving in a digital world.

Fast Company: In your columns and online posts you encourage reader dialogue and response. What kind of responses do you get?

Nicholas Kristof: One of the biggest complaints readers have about my work is that I don't tell them often enough what they can do. I do think this is an area where journalism sometimes falls short. We describe a really grim situation but don't really explain to people what they can do about it. So, a few years ago I started doing a year-end list of amazing charities. The first time, I had real anxiety about whether it was appropriate. But the response was so overwhelming, it seemed to be a real service to readers and I've continued to do it. It also happens when I'm not especially encouraging people to give. For instance, a few months ago I profiled a group called Room to Read and I later learned they raised $700,000 as a result of people hearing about them from my column.

That's a pretty powerful impact.

It's pretty amazing. It really took me aback. It makes me a little bit nervous because it's not what we, as journalists, have traditionally done, but again it responds to real desire on the part of the reader to do more than just read the article, but to get involved. Increasingly journalists have to recognize that we need a real multi-party dialogue with readers. I think we in journalism were really late to social networks. We had a built-in network already in terms of our readers and we didn't capitalize on that.

Yet you were one of the earliest adopters of social media at The New York Times.

I was the first blogger on the Times's website. That happened during the Iraq war, when I wanted an outlet for the things I was seeing every day that couldn't fit into just two columns a week. Then I became interested in using multimedia, specifically as a way to engage young people. All of us in the news business are wondering what the future is going to be. It seemed to me that social networks were part of the answer to that, so I wanted to experiment and see how they could be used.

How do you think about your social media interaction?

I tend to regard them as very informal, but I learn a lot from them, especially Twitter. During the Arab Spring I learned all sorts of things from Twitter. I wouldn't necessarily trust that information, but it gave me ideas about questions to ask. You can really learn things from the wisdom of crowds. When I was going to Haiti I was looking for interesting things to write about, so I asked people for ideas on Twitter and Facebook, and got some great responses, some of which I ended up writing about.

Is this a revolutionary shift in journalism or a more natural progression?

In some ways, it's just an adaptation of traditional journalistic approaches. I used to call a bunch of experts about who I should interview in Haiti. I still do that, but now I also send inquires through social media. That change feels incremental. We're moving from a format where we "proclaimed the news" to the world on a fixed schedule to one where we converse with the world on a 24/7 basis. That does feel like a significant change. I don't think what we do 20 years from now will look much like what we're doing today. I don't think op-ed columnists will be limited to two 780-word columns a week.

There's a lot of debate about the role of social media in journalism, especially on the part of the major print news institutions. While the Times was developing strategies and policies, you just started doing it. Why?

In the process of industrialization, the people who mastered one technology tended not to be those who came to dominate the next technology. The stagecoach people didn't produce motorcars. The motor vehicle people weren't the ones who ended up producing trains. The train people weren't the aviation companies and so on. I worry about that all the time in the platforms of journalism. That's one reason I'm willing to experiment with new media and platforms as they come along. Some of them are dead ends; often I'm not very good at them. I do think there's a natural tendency to be very proud of your existing platform and to be a little bit skeptical of new technologies. But I think it's useful to push back at that skepticism and try new things. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. I think gaming might be the next big platform for news organizations and causes. There's some snobbery about games. Some people think games are just "what teenagers do" or that they are too fun to be worthy of our attention. But there are a lot of people who spend a lot of time playing games online, so we in the news business would do well to think about how we can use games to attract eyeballs. My wife and I are doing a TV documentary of our book Half the Sky, but we're also creating a Facebook game as part of it.

How will the game work?

It's being built by an organization called Games for Change. It will be vaguely analogous to FarmVille. You'll have a village, and in order to nurture this village, you'll have to look after the women and girls in the village. Actions in the game will also have real-world effects. In other words, there will be schools and refugee camps that will benefit if you do well in the game. It will go live when the documentary debuts at the end of this year.

Is there a more problematic side with the journalism in the digital age? Do you worry that citizen journalism diminishes overall credibility, for instance?

I think that there will always be a hierarchy of credibility. We in the media have historically been gatekeepers. Now I think that's largely lost, and that's a disadvantage. But having people shooting videos everywhere provides a useful level of accountability. A lot of people including me were really taken aback by the videos of police violence during Occupy Wall Street. A decade ago nobody would have known about that because there wouldn't have been a reporter there and even if someone did write about it, it wouldn't have been that dramatic. Likewise in Syria, widespread video does provide some constraint on a government if it knows that if it massacres people, there will be video of that. They may still decide to massacre people, but it raises the price.

One of the other big changes in journalism we've seen in recent years is the rise of advocacy journalism. That's different than what you do. Take Fox News for instance.

Fox News hosts have every right to be advocates and to be opinionated. In the case of Fox News, it's been a little bit uncomfortable because they've been very close to the Republican Party. Bill O'Reilly less so--I disagree with him on everything possible, but I think he's more independent. It doesn't strike me as problematic for commentators to be very opinionated whether it's Bill O'Reilly or Keith Olbermann. But I wish that some of that passion and heat could also shed more light on other issues. I think that's where journalism tends to change minds and where we can have an impact. I once invited Bill O'Reilly on a trip to Darfur with me. He was harrumphing about the "War on Christmas" being a terrible injustice. I wrote a column saying that if you want to see injustice and terrible things happening, then put that aside and come with me to Darfur.

Did he come?

No.

But you have taken some other people with you to cover these stories with your Win a Trip contest. How did that first come about?

The impetus for the Win a Trip contest came when I was writing about Darfur. I was very frustrated that I would write these columns and it felt like they were disappearing into space. I was trying to figure out how to engage young people and bring them into the op-ed world. So I had the idea to choose a student who would come with me on a trip to Darfur and blog about it. I proposed this internally and the Times's lawyers said something along the lines of, "Hmm. So you want to take a student into a war zone?!" So I modified it to take a student along with me on a reporting trip to the developing world. It's been a big success. I think other students get particularly interested in the writing of a fellow student in these places, whereas they might tune me out. I really encourage the student to take different perspectives and write whatever they want to write.

You once described yourself as "basically a fraud" in the opinion business.

When I first got the column I was thrilled, but I was also a little bit horrified. I'm not particularly an opinionated person, and here I was being asked to write strong opinion pieces twice a week. But I went into journalism because I wanted to make a difference in the world. This spotlight that we carry with op-ed columns can really have a powerful effect on shaping agendas and on issues I feel passionately about: social justice, equality, and opportunity.

How do you negotiate the line between activism and journalism?

Occasionally somebody will come up to me and say, "Oh, you're such a wonderful crusader" and I'll flinch. I'm wary of the idea of being an activist or a crusader. I'm an advocate as a columnist but there is a faint, almost wandering line between advocacy and activism. One of the perils of activism is that you become so much a part of a cause that you lose your objectivity. There can be a tendency to start speaking for a cause rather than for yourself. I try to navigate this terrain, but frankly there are a lot of blurry lines. Especially when I was writing a lot about Darfur, I sometimes worried about where I was in a relationship to that line. Because of the Times's rules I don't speak to fundraisers or closed-door meetings of specific organizations. This is one way to try and keep a certain amount of journalistic distance. On the other hand, when it feels like there are an awful lot of lives at stake, it's hard not to want to do everything that you can to save those lives. There are real difficulties in trying to figure out when it's appropriate for journalists to dive into the arena. But sometimes that's what you have to do.

Note: This interview has been edited for content, clarity, and length.

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David D. Burstein is a young entrepreneur, having completed his first documentary 18 in '08. He is also the Founder & Executive director of the youth voter engagement not for profit, Generation18. His book about the millennial generation will be published by Beacon Press in 2012.

Soon, you'll be able to use Facebook in your Mercedes-Benz. (You roll in a Benzo, right?) Is Facebook suffering from "mission creep"?

Facebook is coming to cars, reports Reuters. Mercedes-Benz USA is putting a pared-down version of Facebook in its vehicles, and will be unveiling the tech this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, tech which Reuters says is "specially designed for drivers and centered around the locations of friends and businesses." Facebook has long jockeyed to maintain its position as the central hub of our digital social lives. But as the service shows hints of expanding to just about any screen with an Internet connection, it's worth asking: Is Facebook experiencing a kind of mission creep?

In one sense, Facebook has already conquered the world: It has 800 million users who check in on their computers, smartphones, and tablets. But the ever-ambitious company thinks it can do better: The company's Dan Rose said to expect Facebook apps coming to an increasing variety of screens, including TVs (also expected in abundance at CES).

Facebook and Mercedes collaborated on the app over the last six months (it was actually mostly made by a Mercedes team in Palo Alto), which will form part of the "mbrace 2 telematics system," which will run on a high-res screen near the dashboard of the 2013 SL-Class Mercedes and other 2013 models. Google and Yelp will also have apps that form part of the system.

For Google and Yelp to exist in cars makes, of course, perfect sense: Their informational services can prove crucial on the road. Facebook, though, is considered by many to be a frivolous distraction, a tool for socializing rather than acquiring mission-critical information. With its upcoming presence in cars, though, Facebook is making the claim that even driving can be social. For instance, according to the Reuters report, drivers could share their destination and ETA with the push of a button.

To Forrester analyst Charles Golvin, Facebook's move isn't entirely surprising: "They are already present on PCs, smartphones, and tablets so it makes sense for them to extend that presence to the next screens that consumers are likely to spend time interacting with: TVs and those in their cars, and in the future to any other device," he tells Fast Company. "It's hard to see the reason why the owner of an Ecobee-connected thermostat might want to access Facebook ('status: house getting chilly! time to up the heat a bit'), but who knows."

Facebook's central thesis is that the world is, at root, about how we socialize and share. It's a bold assertion, but one that is already transforming industries: Entire news organizations, for instance, are being built on the premise. Facebook's expansion to unlikely places--the car, the television--raises the question of whether the social network is becoming something more than a social network. In its ubiquity, at least, Facebook is acquiring the reach of an operating system, powering our experiences across a variety of devices. In November, reports emerged of a "Facebook phone"; though the phone is said to run on Android, Facebook will reportedly be deeply integrated. And in the wake of Facebook's F8 conference, the Los Angeles Times wondered if it was time to start calling Facebook a "social operating system." "I think the social operating system is already here," Dave Morin, a former Facebook exec (now CEO of Path), told the Times.

Golvin thinks the metaphor somewhat belabored: "I don't think of [Facebook] as an OS in this context," he tells Fast Company, "but rather a set of applications that pervade consumers' lives. I suspect that no matter where its customers are and what they're doing, Facebook wants to ensure that it's present and available to them."

As it hits the road, and much else, Facebook is sure doing a good job of that.

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[Image: Flickr user Pedro J Pacheco; thumbnail: Garret Voight]

It’s hardly breaking news that marketing leaders have become more empowered–-and their results, more measurable--than ever before. 

In fact, any good marketer these days should be able to answer questions like these in his or her sleep:

“How many page views did your latest white paper garner?”

“How many sign-ups resulted from your latest Twitter contest?”

“How ‘engaging’ was last week’s webinar?”

But I have one last question for you: How much revenue did each of those activities generate?

[Insert record-scratch halt here.] 

Now you’re thinking, “Revenue? Well…I know we delivered 548 leads to sales last quarter, which was a record high…”

Well, I hate to break it to you, but that answer isn’t good enough anymore. Especially for your CEO, who doesn’t think in terms of engagement or leads, but rather, in cold, hard cash. 

Now, imagine being able to answer that last question absolutely down to the penny. Knowing which campaigns are performing, which are not, and being able to base future marketing investments on this information. For any company that wants to grow fast, being able to do so is imperative. And it’s not impossible. Far from it! 

So, what can marketers do today to drive revenue and earn a coveted seat at the revenue table? Here are four things you can do now to make an immediate impact on your company’s revenue trajectory:

1. Embrace–-no, love-–today's new buyer.  Today’s buyer, whether it’s for a 3-D flat-screen TV or a multimillion-dollar defense contract, knows more about what they’re looking for than ever before. That’s because the Internet has turned the way we make buying decisions on its head. We no longer rely on a sales representative to educate us. Instead, we do the research ourselves, turning to a multitude of online resources (review sites, social media, user forums, white papers, news, webinars) to find this information. 

In order to adapt, businesses must embrace this reality and engage us across these channels by publishing content, establishing review/user resources, and making an effort to regularly inform us via social sites. Marketers need to both influence and track our buying decisions as early as possible, in as many ways as possible.

2. Scrap "sales" and scrap "marketing"--instead, think "revenue cycle." The changing buying process above is part of a new reality and key concept you must embrace to succeed. It’s called the "revenue cycle." Essentially, the revenue cycle begins with the first interaction that a potential buyer has with your company, and ideally ends when they become a happy, and even repeat or referring, new customer. 

Many companies are familiar with the concept of a sales cycle, the process that occurs after marketing generates leads and sends them over to sales to "close" through a very metered and measured funnel. While this worked in the world of mass marketing, huge trade shows and big list buying, the world of online marketing and online commerce has changed all of this. From the ability to segment marketing down to some incredible levels, to the rise of content’s importance in search engines, the level of detail and work that goes into marketing can’t just end with hope. 

It’s time to establish an infrastructure in which sales and marketing are fully integrated and equally responsible for revenue generation. Don’t stop your process just because a Twitter contest gave you 100 new web visitors. Follow through: What happens next? And did sales end up converting any of these people to paying customers? If so, how? If not, why? 

There should be a new kind of tenacity about measuring revenue that results from marketing, and viewing all marketing and sales activity as equal parts of a greater revenue cycle. This is a new way of thinking that will transform your company in an incredible way. 

3. Form a revenue team.  A "revenue cycle" means more than just tacking marketing onto the front of an existing sales process with a few new metrics and calling it a day. Rather, it requires sales and marketing to work together and collaborate around important activities from one point to the next. 

For example, start by establishing common definitions for critical terminology, terms that marketing and sales might be using completely differently to the detriment of their own revenue performance. Even terms like "lead," "suspect," and "sales-ready" can mean one thing for a high-energy marketer and another for a stressed-out sales rep just trying to reach quota. 

Reporting together is equally as important. Work with your sales peers to decide on dashboards and metrics that will matter most when you’re in front of the CEO and CFO. While "feel-good" metrics like number of leads collected at trade shows, Twitter followers, or webinar attendees are important for marketers to track, they lack impact at the executive level. You should be thinking "opportunities" rather than "leads" and "investment and return" instead of "cost and spend." Above all, you should frame all activity, even from marketing, in terms of revenue, cash, profit, and growth. Deciding together on performance terms and metrics that clearly show each team’s impact on the top-line numbers is a huge step forward.

Finally, have at least a weekly check-in with your sales peers to see how your own demand generation efforts are going in their world. Are leads being passed to sales actually ready for outreach, or is sales frustrated and instead spending time searching out names to add to their databases? Is there any feedback from prospective buyers? Maybe the white paper you published is lacking content that only the sales team has heard about. Viewing these "little things" as important as the big agenda items will go a long way in creating mutual respect, collaboration, and a sense that everyone is part of "The Revenue Team" in your business. 

4. Streamlining your revenue toolkit.  With so many activity demands for marketing, the number of tools and plug-ins competing for use has exploded. From multi-client Twitter platforms to Google Analytics, email-marketing systems, content hubs, search-engine marketing (SEM) and more, the solutions available for marketers are as fragmented in nature as the audience types themselves. But for marketers today, getting a clean read on how much demand is being generated at a high level, knowing which leads are most ready to purchase, and associating this data with actual sales that have closed are the big-picture metrics that matter most. 

And thankfully, a new set of broader solutions that help support better revenue performance management are becoming available, in addition to innovative developments from CRM leaders on the best way to measure the success of sales and marketing alignment.

While it’s not quite completely "set it and forget it," these systems enable companies to communicate with customers and prospects in new, automated, and trackable ways. They also come with reporting and analytics modules to help marketing prove their contribution to the top line and answer those key revenue-impact questions.

We know this stuff works because we’ve seen it in our own endeavors. In fact, we’ve grown our own company by more than 1,400% in the last three years, and a couple months back, we were named the fastest-growing private company in Silicon Valley. We did this buy aligning sales and marketing, and measuring the revenue impact to make changes that helped us grow.

Intelligent and revenue-minded marketing is more important than ever for any company looking to grow in 2012. Our own numbers show 80% of our business is touched by marketing in some way (that’s compared to a norm of 20%) and that half of our booked business is from so-called "slow leads," the kind that take time and nourishment, which supports the new type of buyer laid out above.

2012 presents a massive opportunity for marketers to reinvent themselves as a core part of a company’s revenue machine. It’s time for marketers to step up to the plate and make their organizations key contributors to top-line growth.

Author Phil Fernandez is President and CEO of marketing software company Marketo. You can follow him on Twitter at @philf1217.

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[Image: Flickr user zen]

If Google's to be trusted, Google is the only source you need when Googling around for information. At least, that's the impression one gets from Google's new "Your World" feature.

Google's official press blog about the news sets things out pretty clearly: "Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you," it begins, then points out that, "Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about." According to Google, it's been letting you down since, "These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of webpages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met." But now the fix is in, as today it's "changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search."

But it mainly works if your world is hinged on a Google+ profile, or you use Picasa, and so does everyone you know.

[youtube 8Z9TTBxarbs]

Google argues that it's merely a continuation of the trend it began by introducing Social Search and expanded on with Google+, and it does give a couple of useful case studies where its system really has value. Google can know who you are and who your friends are, even in a complex social network. Or, as Google puts it, "When I search for [Ben Smith], I now find my dear friend Ben every time, instead of the hundreds of other Ben Smiths out there (no offense to all of them!)." That's definitely useful, as is the fact "you’ll find profile autocomplete predictions for various prominent people from Google+, such as high-quality authors from our authorship pilot program." 

But when you select an author profile, if you’re a signed-in Google+ user, you’ll be prompted to add them to your circles "right on your search results page," Google says. So this is not only mostly about expanding my use of Google+ by heavily emphasizing that I use it when I'm merely searching for something. According to Google, now when you're signed in to its services, and Your World is working "if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page." 

Google closes its blog by emphasising privacy and options--you can turn off Your World with a jab at a switch on the search page to see unemphasized search results as you would've previously (or if you're not logged in), and you can even set that as your default. Attention is also drawn to the added security of SSL encryption of personalized results data, and the public-versus-private options within Google+'s sharing options.

But that's beside the point. Google is splattering personal and social-inferred results all over its search results page from one social network source only: Google itself. Not Facebook, which is the world's biggest such net nor Twitter--which once drove Google to amazing heights of real-time search and newsiness. Sure Google+ is apparently growing fast (although some question the data as dubious), but isn't Google really pulling a land grab with this trick? Isn't it subtly and continuously promoting its own social network at every opportune moment in its search service, at the detriment of its better peers? 

"As always, our goal is to provide you with the most relevant and comprehensive search results possible," a spokesperson tells Fast Company via email. "That’s why for years now we’ve been working with our social search features to help you find the most relevant information from your friends and social connections, no matter what site that content is on. However, Google does not have access to crawl all the information on some sites, so it’s not possible for us to surface all that content. Google also doesn’t have access to the social graph information from some sites, so it’s not possible to help you find information from those people you’re connected to." Fair enough, but it may not be enough for to help Google fend off accusations of preferential treatment--what do they expect their peers to do, let Google scrape their precious social graph? The spokesman also confirmed Your World is turned on by default, and that while there's no super-direct way of preventing your data showing up in someone else's World data it wants "users to be able to search over any content they have access to see. The important part is to ensure you’re sharing content with right people. If you change access rights in Google+ or Picasa, those changes will be reflected in search."

Still, there's an inherent PR risk in exposing to every logged in user exactly how deep Google's insight into their social sphere is--a creepiness factor that's hard to combat. And considering how Google has been repeatedy slapped for privacy issues, misleading search results, and allegedly monopolistic practices the world over, I'd say you can set the timer on a Your World-related lawsuit in 3 ... 2 ...

Update: The launch of this new service has caused a veritable explosion of disbelief online. Twitter decided to register its distaste, citing the lack of "real time" news Google+ has and noting it's a biased system. Google, incredibly, first said (using Google+, of course) it was "surprised" by Twitter's comments then blamed Twitter for Google's actions, noting Twitter decided not to renew the real time search contract in mid-2011. Although we can only guess what the terms and conditions of the deal were, Twitter obviously decided it was unfavorable--and it came shortly before Google launched its own competitor to Twitter. Google's Eric Schmidt even spoke in an interview to argue Google+ isn't "favored" at all in Your World...despite the fact it's the only social graph available in Your World, and Google's decided not to even link to the publicly accessible statuses for, say, a popular band or brand from Twitter or Facebook.

[Image: Flickr user dullhunk; thumbnail: AZRainman]

Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.

With Moonbot Studios, a children's animation star remakes the cinematic experience. And that's just his first trick.

WHAT'S GOING ON HERE? Brandon Oldenburg, who cofounded the studio with William Joyce, explains the space his staff works in. CLICK TO EXPAND | Photo by Daymon Gardner

William Joyce once helped design Woody and Buzz Lightyear. But now he's taking on giants like his former employer, Pixar, from an unlikely base: Shreveport, Louisiana, where he and his team at Moonbot Studios are intentionally acting nothing like a typical studio.

"We don't have a core business," says Joyce.

"Storytelling," adds another cofounder, Brandon Oldenburg.

"Make cool shit," says the third cofounder, veteran movie and TV producer Lampton Enochs.

Why would anyone in the entertainment industry take this kind of talk seriously? It's hard not to. Moonbot's first project came out last year; it was The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, a short film followed by an interactive iPad children's book of the same name. The app sold more than 90,000 copies, briefly unseating Angry Birds as the best-selling app, and the short film earned Oscar consideration.

Now there's a list on a whiteboard in Enochs's office, which includes the names of an A-list film director and a legendary pop star. Written above it all is the word inquiries.

Moonbot opened in 2009 in Shreveport, Joyce's hometown, in part for the economics: A bevy of local tax incentives allowed the founders to staff up quickly, and a local tech foundation built them a dazzling office space for free. But being "away from the noise" of Hollywood, as Oldenburg puts it, had a deeper payoff. It let Moonbot focus its priorities, without worrying about building buzz.

"Pixar had to make commercials for years before Toy Story; Blue Sky Studios had to feed the beast for 12 years before they had the time and technology to produce [Oscar-winning short film] Bunny," says Joyce. "We decided to make our passion project the very first thing we did."

That thing was Lessmore. It was to be an animated short and, later, a children's book--but during production in 2010, the iPad came out. "I remember saying to Brandon, 'Fuck, this is going to change everything,'" Joyce says. "The iPad was the missing third way of expression."

At age 54, Joyce had largely conquered those other modes of expression. He's written and illustrated more than 50 children's books, been the subject of a traveling art exhibition, created Christmas window displays for Saks Fifth Avenue, helped design characters for Pixar, and is currently codirecting an animated DreamWorks feature.

The team pivoted, imagining every way possible for how to interact with the device. Out of that came what Moonbot calls "story apps," designed to be more movielike than e-books, more interactive than films, and more immersive than interactive games. Lessmore is just that--a movie with pages to turn and detours directly into its world. "It went further emotionally than even we thought it would," Joyce says.

Business exploded--as has its office. "During story development, we pride ourselves on how messy the room gets," Oldenburg says, in paper-covered space that clearly makes him proud. "You know things are being drawn and discarded, drawn and discarded. We don't treat anything too precious up front."

In Moonbot's cavelike animation department, Oldenburg says, a "very Tony Stark-like" game experience is being designed for Ford. (Moonbot isn't above work-for-hire projects; it helps keep the lights on, and the studio treats them as R&D experiences for its young staff.) And in the high-ceilinged story room where Moonbot develops and refines its own properties around an L-shaped conference table with a monster-size bite missing from it, the walls are covered in concept art for a dozen new story apps--including more adult fare like Specters, a mystery-horror novel set in a New Orleans populated by well-heeled ghosts.

"Imagine someone reading a novel on their iPad and seeing something out of the corner of their eye that makes them scream out loud," Joyce says. "How fucking cool will that be?"

Joyce has heard it before: Could Moonbot be the next Pixar? He'd rather it not. "I was at Pixar when they were still small," he says. "Chris Wedge [director of Robots, a 2005 film that Joyce cocreated] once told me, 'Small is the future.' I'll get worried after we hire our 100th employee."

Right now, Moonbot's staff is at 35--a nice fit for the studio's beanbag-chair-strewn screening room. One day in November, the crew is critiquing a clip from The Numberlys, a story app (embedded with 18 educational games) being developed in time for Christmas. On screen, bug-eyed characters react in exaggerated horror to an unseen calamity. Joyce belly-laughs. A young animator worries about the way light strikes a character's head. The tweak is noted, queued for revision. In 20 minutes, they're all back to work.

Moonbot moves fast--sometimes from a sketch to a finished product in six months (as with The Numberlys, a project hastily launched after Michael Tchao, Apple's vice president of product marketing, casually asked Enochs what the studio had planned after Lessmore).

To stay nimble, it recruits young, multitalented creatives (average age: 25) who veered from the typical studio machine. "This is not a place for specialists," says Adam Volker, who graduated from art school in 2008 and was hired after chatting with Joyce about video games. Since then, he's designed characters, concepted stories, art-directed, and helped lead the studio's interactive division. "If I worked for a studio in California, my whole job would be animating a background character's shoes."

Joyce believes a company like Moonbot wouldn't have been possible five years ago--but thanks to ever-cheaper production tools and computing power (Moonbot's "render farm" is just one server rack), "there will be a lot more companies doing what we're doing five years from now."

Which means that, in five years, Moonbot will be doing something different. Enochs expects to have finished an animated feature, produced entirely in-house. Oldenburg would like to design live events: "An opening ceremony for the Olympics--that'd be perfect."

Joyce knows the lessons of the land he's on. His dad was a geologist who advised Louisiana's oil wildcatters in the 1960s. "You'd have a one in 100 chance at best of striking oil. It's all about intuition," he says.

"There's a gambling spirit in this part of the country. What's the iPad of five years from now going to be? I don't know. Big studios are afraid of that because it threatens their business model, but we don't have one. So we don't have to be afraid."

A version of this article appears in the February 2012 issue of Fast Company.

Shazam is used to hearing music--now it's playing it back at you.

The startup behind the popular smartphone app, which enables users to identify music by scanning and matching short audio clips, today unveiled the Shazam Player, an iTunes-like service for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch that takes advantage of Shazam's unique, patented technology. Not only does the Shazam Player let users play songs and build playlists, but it also provides discovery tools, such as scanning songs for streaming lyrics, social sharing, tracking concert dates, or viewing related YouTube videos.

It's the startup's first new app since Shazam launched on the iPhone in 2008, and an indication of the company's ambitions beyond being just a music-fingerprinting service. Shazam, which raised roughly $32 million in new capital this summer, has for the most part always been a middleman--a way to discover music that you'll inevitably purchase via a third party, whether iTunes or Amazon. But after facilitating roughly $100 million in music transactions last year (of which it takes a slight cut), Shazam has recognized the larger potential for the service in everything from music to television to advertising.

"Our real focus in the business right now is to drive engagement," says Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher. "That is, driving daily engagement, and giving people reasons to come back to the service on a more frequent basis than they have done before."

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More than 165 million people have downloaded the Shazam app, and they identify about 5 million pieces of content every day. But user behavior has trended away from music matching. "The primary use case has shifted from almost exclusively name-that-tune years ago to actually buying songs," Fisher says. "The reality is people know it's the Chili Peppers or Lady Gaga playing. They're not using Shazam to name the song--they're using it for convenience to actually buy the music."

Now the company hopes Shazam's application will spread beyond music itself. It has partnered with brands such as Old Navy and General Mills to allows users to "Shazam" commercials in order to see promotions or extra content. It's also started to compete against services such as Yahoo's IntoNow and GetGlue, which let users "check in" to television shows and movies to chat with friends. "Historically, we wanted to be the world's leading music discovery company," Fisher says. "Today, we want to be world's leading mobile discovery company, meaning we're not tied to music."

Of course, launching the Shazam Player indicates yet another way that the service is tied to music, but it also shows the extent to which Shazam aims to grow its influence. The company, according to Fisher, is doing "tens of millions of dollars in revenues [a year], and trending toward hundreds of millions of dollars." And with about 1.5 million new users joining the service each week, it's no surprise Shazam would want to add new services to expand its reach.

"We want to evolve the brand," Fisher says. "When people think about the most convenient way to discover, buy, and share content, or engage with an advertiser or brand that they're interested in, we want them to go to Shazam."

[Image: Flickr user Erik Mauer]

As the election season heats up, grads from Harvard and Stanford aim to bring civil political conversation through gamification.

Comment is free--but maybe it shouldn't always be so free. So goes the reasoning behind a site called PolicyMic.com, which uses virtual currency and gamification techniques to help foster civil and enlightening discussion forums. The Harlem-based startup completes a round of angel financing this month, and is about to launch a similar site, PolicyMic.fr, in France next week.

There are a number of oft-cited problems with political discourse on the web: segregated echo chambers, Godwin's law, and a general surfeit of armchair punditry among them. This is unfortunate; healthy debate is crucial to a healthy democracy, and yet the Internet has not yet become a place animated by the spirit of the best traditions of offline debate.

Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz want to change that. The Harvard and Stanford grads were, as they put it on their site, "longtime friends, but political nemeses who have been debating each other for as long as we can remember." Their debates were civil, enlightening, fun--and they wanted their peers to be able to engage in similar debates online.

At the heart of PolicyMic is its innovative commenting system. The site uses a virtual currency called "Mics." When you first sign up on the site, you have 0 Mics, and your voice is limited; comments are limited to 300 characters. If what you write is insightful though, people can vote up your comments, earning you Mics in the process. As you gain more and more Mics, you level up, first to become a "Contributor," then an "Anchor," and finally a "Pundit." A "Pundit" is someone who has earned 150 Mics, and is allowed to go on at a leisurely 750 characters per comment.

The "gamification of everything" trend can become a bit tiresome, perhaps, but here is an instance where its use is almost transcendent. Though the PolicyMic team says their system is about making political debate fun, and thereby more engaging for disengaged youth, it's real genius lies elsewhere. By anchoring its comments system with a rewards system, PolicyMic has the capability to tame what is often the most depressing part of many otherwise interesting websites. Scanning through articles on PolicyMic, there is still a fair share of griping and snark to be found. But the overall vibe of the comments forums--readers use their real names and photographs, as well--has more in common with a college debate society than the black hole that follows most articles on the web.

Altchek tells Fast Company that the team carefully designed the system "to push users to think before they write." In one high-profile instance, Condoleezza Rice once debated on PolicyMic, and "we did not have to remove a single comment," says Altchek.

PolicyMic is not brand-new; it actually launched in June. But many of the most interesting developments have only come recently, or are on the horizon, Altchek says. "We've continued to launch new features to make getting informed and discussing politics fun for millennials," he says, pointing to a community-run story ideas queue and an allies/rivals follow system, among other features. (The ability to follow rivals--people "your respect but disagree with," Altchek calls them--is key to preventing PolicyMic from becoming another online echo chamber.) Altchek also tells us that the team is launching a site in France in time for the French presidential elections--Altchek's mother is French, and he follows France's politics closely--and that the team will be finishing a round of angel investing at the end of this month.

As the election season gears up, PolicyMic is poised to gain a larger following; Altchek says the site's traffic is up 50% over the last week. "Millennials will follow this election," he says. "We believe millennials want to have a place for fun and smart discussion."

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[Image: Flickr user L.Bo]

Aristotle delivers valuable (and detailed!) data to candidates about potential supporters. In fact, don't be surprised if the candidates know more about you than you do about them.

In political campaigns, as in everything, knowledge is power. Data about potential voters is of great value to candidates, and Aristotle, a company that has dealt in political technology for almost 30 years, is finding new ways go about collecting and delivering that data in the 2012 election.

Aristotle mines data from various sources--credit card purchases, public records, grocery discount card records, magazine subscriptions, social media sites, the list goes on--and compiles detailed profiles of voters. The data considered relevant is often surprising: It's not just about whether a given voter has identified with a certain party or indicated that particular issues matter to them.

In the absence of more easily actionable data like that, campaigns turn to other clues to make inferences about how good of a target you might be: How many children do you have? Where do they go to school? What kind of car do you drive? What are your hobbies? You'd be surprised at the relations the data crunchers can find. AzCapitolTimes.com sums it up nicely: "A preference for football indicates Republican leanings. Basketball indicates Democratic leanings. Religious purchases can say a lot about social-issue stances. Professional licenses can help paint a picture of a voter. Owning a motorcycle strongly suggests libertarian leanings and gun-rights advocacy. A subscription to Good Housekeeping says someone will favor female candidates."

John Phillips, Aristotle's CEO, tells Fast Company that Aristotle gathers some 500 attributes on voters, "such as interests and charitable causes, educational level, homeowner/renter, estimated income or presence of children in the household."

Phillips is the first to admit this may seem weird to the unitiated. "While some may initially see information such as magazine subscriptions and the type of car one drives as irrelevant, many consultants use these unique fields to form theories on how people will vote," he tells Fast Company. The pollster John Zogby has used data like Aristotle's to parse people into "neo tribes" that vote alike.

Data that might seem devoid of political content are nonetheless seen as useful enough indices to lure many campaigns onto Aristotle's client list. "Every U.S. President--Democrat and Republican--from Reagan through Obama, has used Aristotle products and/or services, as have many U.S. Senators, members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Democratic and Republican state party organizations and other major campaigns worldwide," Aristotle boasts on its site.

Aristotle's data crunching goes beyond identifying potential voters; they'll also help you manage your campaign and bolster pre-existing support. Around the 1:15 mark in this YouTube video pitching some Aristotle software, it touts a "briefing book" that can help you remember details about your supporters, like "spouse's names, important birthdays, and interests," to aid in your schmoozing.

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And they'll put together webs to help you visualize your network of supporters. Just don't let that big donor know you have software that sometimes refers to him as a "node."

But it's the data mining and micro-targeting that's the new, exciting frontier. "We are constantly developing and field-testing new products. At the moment, data-mining products are hot," says Phillips. According to AzCapitolTimes, the idea of micro-targeting dates back about 10 years. Karl Rove was one its architects, resulting in a national database used by Republicans called the Voter Vault. The 2008 Barack Obama campaign led Democrats to create a rival, and some say stronger, database of their own, called VoteBuilder.

The insight of political microtargeting is this: that voters are just another kind of consumer, and a candidate is just another product to be sold. As one Republican microtargeter put it to AzCapitolTimes: "I’d be very surprised if country music listeners don’t get Republican messaging in their Pandora stream within the next year."

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[Image: Flickr user Gage Skidmore]