Seth Godin

Whenever advertisers build their business around the strategy of talking directly to the customer, they become slaves to the math of interruption marketing.

Ariel Silverstone

[An] effective way to detect what [customer data] has leaked, and through which possible partner, is to pre-poison the data, sowing into it information that can provide a reference point in the case of a leak.

Moneyball for business: How AI is changing talent management

Fifteen years after Billy Beane disrupted Major League Baseball by applying analytics to scouting, corporations are rewriting the rules of recruiting.

David Butler, Linda Tischler

It’s easier than ever to start a business, but harder than ever to scale one. […] And while there has been a lot of emphasis on starting lean, there has been a surprising dearth of tools and information as to how to cross the chasm between starting and scaling.

Danielle Sacks

Real-time marketing is another gun in the corporate arsenal, and like all the others, it’s damn hard to tell if it ever hits the mark.

Marc Andreessen

On a micro level, everybody likes a new product, a new TV show, new software, a new smartphone. At that micro level, people love change. At the macro level, we hate change. Big, new ideas that challenge preconceptions make people really angry.

Chipotle Eats Itself

Fast Company’s most extensive article in eight years, informed by hundreds of hours of interviews from inside and around the company, thousands of pages of documents that were leaked to us, on-site reporting from farms to industrial kitchens, and revealing discussions with Steve Ells, his co-CEO Monty Moran, and other top Chipotle leaders. It is an eye-opening, entertaining, and unvarnished look at a company and … [ Read more ]

Brian Grazer

Questions are a great management tool.

Asking questions elicits information, of course. Asking questions creates the space for people to raise issues they are worried about that a boss, or colleagues, may not know about. Asking questions lets people tell a different story than the one you’re expecting. Most important from my perspective, asking questions means people have to make their case for the way they … [ Read more ]

Warby Parker Sees the Future of Retail

I spent more than three months embedded within Warby Parker to try to understand the making of this made-on-the-Internet brand. Among other things, I watched employees decide on frames for their winter season, wrestle with the nuances of their burgeoning retail strategy, and obsessively plan an employee ping-pong tournament. How, I asked—in meetings and during presentations in New York and over martinis in Los Angeles—have … [ Read more ]

The Power of Pride at Facebook

Facebook’s HR department worked with Wharton professor Adam Grant to investigate what keeps employees at the company engaged and motivated. Below, they walk us through the results of their internal study.

Unhappy At Work? Swipe Right To Tell The Boss

Startups and established pollsters alike are working to bring the employee-engagement survey into the age of smartphones and big data.

Y Combinator President Sam Altman Is Dreaming Big

The Silicon Valley startup factory that birthed Airbnb and Dropbox has grown even more ambitious under its new leader.

Movie Producer Brian Grazer Explains How Asking The Right Questions Will Make You A Better Boss

Questions are a great management tool.

Asking questions elicits information, of course. Asking questions creates the space for people to raise issues they are worried about that a boss, or colleagues, may not know about. Asking questions lets people tell a different story than the one you’re expecting. Most important from my perspective, asking questions means people have to make their case for the way they … [ Read more ]

The Real Story Behind Jeff Bezos’s Fire Phone Debacle And What It Means For Amazon’s Future

In many ways, the Fire Phone is the perfect symbol of these opposing perceptions of Amazon. It represents everything proponents love about the company—the wild experimentation, the appetite for risk-taking—as well as everything that critics now deride: its huge expenditures, its blithe embrace of an imagined future where the big bets pay off, and its inability to create anything with real style. Understanding Amazon’s journey … [ Read more ]

A Broken Place: The Spectacular Failure Of The Startup That Was Going To Change The World

With almost $1 billion in funding and ambitions to replace petroleum-based cars with a network of cheap electrics, Shai Agassi’s Better Place was remarkable even by the standards of world-changing startups. So was its epic failure. A 21st-century cautionary tale.

Inside Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel’s Entertainment Empire

Snapchat boasts 100 million daily users—yet is wildly misunderstood even by key media partners. Here’s what everyone is missing.

This is a story about understanding Snapchat’s contradictions, the seemingly irreconcilable facts that make Spiegel and his creation as inscrutable—and undeniable—as Kanye West. In interviews with key Snapchat executives, board members, investors, and dozens of advertisers and media partners, the picture becomes clearer. While Snapchat declined to … [ Read more ]

Jennifer Reingold

There is most emphatically a Free Agent Nation today. The thing is, not all of the 9.3 million self-employed asked for citizenship: Downsizing turned many of them into refugees. Some of those who left secure, if staid, jobs for the freedom of free agency now find themselves struggling to pay the rent or offering to do the same work for the companies they left–for less … [ Read more ]

Harry Truman

If your neighbor’s out of work it’s a recession, but if you’re out of work, it’s a depression.