Bek

Symbols to get your message across to customers — and make it stick Illustration: Dan Woodger InInmy old office, I had a wall of Post-it notes with my least-favorite words. The top two offenders were moist and dangle, words that make me, and most people, cringe. When I see an ad with those words in it, I honestly question if the company wants to sell their product. When my last headshot was taken, those two Post-its ended up in the frame. Prospective clients of my research and language strategy...

Learn how to tell who is a great worker, and which of your workers can be great leaders rowing teams need managers, and who better to manage a team than someone who is already part of one? While that may be true, picking the right person to become a team manager can be a lot harder than it looks. While this piece will focus on engineers, the lessons within are applicable to all kinds of worker-to-leader transitions. There’s some pretty great literature on making that transition, on being successful in a new managerial role, and on avoiding common mistakes...

If you told me that a heartbreak would be the basis of me starting a company, I would’ve called you batsh*t crazy. you told me that a heartbreak, debilitating depression, and thoughts of suicide would be the basis of me starting a company, I would’ve called you batshit crazy. But maybe I was crazy all along. Because that’s exactly what I did. I’m now in my third year of building a startup that helps the brokenhearted, having moved to the city that never sleeps, and am living a life I never dreamed possible...

With the new iPhone 11, Apple proves it has no business being a paragon of great design Illustration: Tom guilmard tothe surprise of no one, the centerpiece of the latest Apple special event — as the company's annual product launch announcements are branded — was the new iPhone...

We built our company hoping to source from U.S. farms. It turns out, many wouldn’t work with a woman founder. was 2015 and I had been successfully bootstrapping my e-commerce floral delivery company, Farmgirl Flowers, for five years. I’d started with a clear mission — to support domestic flower farms and use their product to create unique daily arrangements that we’d eventually ship nationally. However, that goal was starting to feel increasingly impossible. As a founder, I was running into just about every startup obstacle — some anticipated, some unexpected...

In the age of A.I. and machine learning, just being more productive won’t cut it. The future belongs to the creatives. The Productivity-Creativity Inversion When leaders face the challenge of scaling their teams, they hire people to replicate many of the tasks they were doing. Sure, you might be able to do the mundane aspects of your job, but you’re better off hiring someone else to do it so you can concentrate on your more important value: thinking creatively and strategically about your product and company’s future...

Lawless startups exploiting the seams of regulation are suddenly feeling the heat—and getting burned. Illustration: Mica Warren Ohto be a heedless startup founder in an unregulated space. To tromp on legacy players, ignore norms and rules, and generally move fast and break things, as Mark Zuckerberg put it a decade ago. To be not just part of a new company, but to lead a mission, a movement. And, not incidentally, become insanely rich. Only, what happens when regulators show up, losses pile up...

Lesson #1: “You black (and that’s a problem).” Learning the Art of being black in white spaces is a lifelong process that begins with a single lesson: “You black (and that’s a problem).” I got lesson number one out of the way in kindergarten when Daniel, the other black kid in my class, informed me, “You black!” I went home sobbing. “But Mom, I’m brown! I’m brown!” Historian and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois also discovered his blackness — and its undesirability — at school. After a white...

Searching for masculinity and maternity in the American Southwest “[T]he strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms...

As you get older, you might have to work a bit harder to find wonder — but it’s worth the effort Hey C (age 4¾), When you find yourself completely overwhelmed by something exciting, surprising, colorful, delicious, tuneful, beautiful, funny, inexplicable, shocking, huge, or joyful, your eyes grow big, your mouth drops open and the rest of the world kind of disappears for a moment. You have no choice but to stand right where you are and just take it all in. Right now, your life is full of moments...

“I’m doing alright, how about you?” For years, the answer was nearly automatic. A friend or co-worker would ask how I was doing, and I didn’t even have to think about it. I’d spit out the same mechanical response and move on. Sometimes it was accurate, but mostly not. There were days I was feeling fantastic, days I was nearly broken, and everything in between. Regardless, the question rarely even reached the conscious part of my brain, even with my closest friends. I had no more desire to share my successes and happiness than I did my failures and sadness...

How do you stay sober when drinking inspires friendships, connections, and even promotions? heers!” I said, clinking glasses of wine with members of the Communist Party in Vietnam’s National Assembly, the equivalent of the U.S.’s White House. I brought the glass to my mouth and tipped it, as if to drink, stopping just shy of the wine reaching my lips. If anyone noticed the lack of gulping (my acting skills are trash) or the never-empty glass, they made no mention of it. There were more important things to discuss anyway...