Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2015 i Fast Company

“French and Italian cuisine have such a stranglehold on the restaurant imagination. I break through by visiting Kalustyans, an Indian spice store. Cans of huitlacoche, a million sacks of dal . .. ideas go off in my brain like fireworks.” Amanda Cohen Owner and chef, Dirt Candy, a New York–based restaurant “My best childhood memories are from the Oakland A’s Coliseum and watching the Bash Brothers. You will find me there every weekend.” Joel Flory Cofounder and CEO, VSCO “I recently came across Vita Kin, a Ukrainian fashion designer, on Instagram. Her embroidered and tasseled dresses have a fantasy-folklore feel. I want one in every color!” Christene Barberich Cofounder and editor-in-chief, Refinery29 “I’ve fallen for Vice’s HBO specials. You don’t get to see raw, well-reported footage of difficult situations anymore.”…

Five years ago, Helena Morrissey set herself a seemingly impossible challenge: persuade the chairmen and CEOs of Europe’s largest corporations that their boards should be at least 30% female. Today, she’s tantalizingly close to achieving her goal—and is expanding her efforts to reach companies around the world. The problem Early in her tenure as CEO of Newton, a U.K.–based investment management firm, Morrissey started an initiative to increase women’s representation in the higher ranks of the company, which at the time was less than 15% female. Five years later, with no results to speak of, she was almost ready to give up. The epiphany Morrissey studied up and found that 30% tends to be the threshold where a minority voice becomes more than just a token part of a group.…

Campus FOUNDED: 2013 LOCATIONS: 30 in the San Francisco Bay Area, 4 in New York, and shared vacation homes in Napa, California, and North Lake Tahoe, California VIBE: Cozy and collegiate, with an emphasis on community. Residents evaluate and choose their own potential roommates. The Embassy Network FOUNDED: 2012 LOCATIONS: 2 houses and 1 apartment in San Francisco; 2 houses in Berkeley, California; 1 house in Oakland, California; and 1 house in Port-au-Prince, Haiti VIBE: Varies. Locations are individually managed, and each has its own unique character, from a Victorian mansion to a tropical bungalow. Pure House FOUNDED: 2012 LOCATIONS: 14 houses in Williamsburg, Brooklyn VIBE: Artsy and entre -preneurial. Events range from film screenings and DJ residencies to storytelling and yoga nights.…

Howard Schultz doesn’t have all the answers. It’s early April, just five days after a police officer fatally shot Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, in South Carolina, and the Starbucks CEO is on stage at Spelman College, the historically black institution of higher learning for women. He’s here for a panel discussion with United Negro College Fund chief Michael Lomax and Spelman president Beverly Tatum, author of the best seller Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? Schultz is seated in an awkwardly large white sofa-chair, fielding tough questions from the crowd, mostly black students who have come to hear this white, 61-year-old billionaire speak about racial inequality. Not long ago, he might have looked more out of place. But the crowd already knows that…

TAVI GEVINSON Then FASHION BLOGGER Now ACTOR, EDITORIN-CHIEF OF ROOKIE MAGAZINE When she appeared in Fast Company’s 2010 Most Creative People issue, Tavi Gevinson was a 14-yearold student writing a world-famous fashion blog, Style Rookie, from her home in the Chicago suburbs. With a wise-beyond-her-years voice and unique take on the industry, Gevinson drew some 54,000 daily readers, including Anna Wintour and Karl Lagerfeld. Since then, Gevinson has expanded the blog into an influential online magazine that’s written by and for teenage girls. Called Rookie, it employs five full-time staff members, has produced three print “yearbooks,” and is attracting a passionate fan base. “I can’t control how many people read Rookie,” she says. “I would rather just put out stuff that I think is good and hope other people think…

Our collective future lies in cities—that much, at least, seems clear. According to UN estimates, 68% of the world’s population will live in metropolitan areas by 2050, and in the U.S., more than 80% of us are already city dwellers. To get a sense of where life is headed, Fast Company scouted 20 of the most exciting ideas being implemented in cities around the country, including Louisville, Kentucky’s approach to urban agriculture, Denver’s aggressive rethinking of its transit system, and Portland, Oregon’s emphasis on sustainable design. Taken together, these initiatives paint a picture of tomorrow. What can your hometown do to get there? Read on to find out. 1. Commit to social equality SEATTLE This year, Seattle has passed provisions to offer both male and female city employees paid family…

Getting fired from a high-profile job might seem like a humiliating experience, but for news anchor Mika Brzezinski, it proved to be an important career catalyst. The daughter of former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mika had spent more than 15 years working in TV news, climbing to a position as a correspondent at CBS. But in 2006, the network unexpectedly let her go. Struggling to find work, she settled for a gig as a freelance MSNBC reporter at a tenth of her previous salary. It was a humbling development, but Brzezinski embraced the opportunity, and when former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough was looking for a cohost for MSNBC’s new a.m. program, she was eager to give it a try. Eight years later, Brzezinski is still at the Morning Joe…

FOR ERIC MALAND, THE WHOLE THING GOES BACK TO THAT SAN FRANCISCO WEDDING. MIKEY WASN'T THERE-WELL, WAIT, ACTUALLY, MIKEY WAS THERE. BUT ERIC DIDN'T MEET HIM AT THAT POINT. ERIC MET SOME OTHER FOLKS AT THE WEDDING WHO TOLD HIM THEY WERE DOING SOME FIX-IT STUFF IN WASHINGTON, AND IT SOUNDED KIND OF INTERESTING. And now we’re chatting about it in front of the White House security gate, where we’re waiting to talk with the leaders inside about why guys like Eric are now wandering around this neighborhood with MacBooks in their shoulder bags and code in their heads. These are the “new techies,” as longtime Washingtonians tend to say, but that’s somewhat imprecise. These are people whose pedigree in Silicon Valley gives them the whispered reputations of gods and…

1988 Motivated by an employee dying of AIDS, Howard Schultz persuades Starbucks’s board to extend full health benefits to part-time workers. 1991 The company begins contributing to the relief organization CARE, eventually becoming its largest donor. Starbucks becomes the first privately owned U.S. company to offer a stock option program—called Bean Stock— that includes part-time employees. (From here on, employees are dubbed “partners.”) 1997 The Starbucks Foundation is established to help local literacy programs. 1999 The company creates a corporate social-responsibility department, with Dave Olsen as its first SVP. 2000 Starbucks starts selling fair-trade certified coffee in the U.S. and Canada, helping ensure that farmers are ethically compensated and educated in sustainable practices. 2004 The C.A.F.E. (Coffee and Farmer Equity) program debuts, offering farmers premium prices for their coffee beans…

ETSY Ten years after its founding, the online marketplace for handmade goods went public in April. Etsy’s IPO represents much more than a cash prize, though: It brings validation to New York’s tech-startup scene, where IPOs are scarce (and where the last significant financial success was Yahoo’s $1.1 billion acquisition of N.Y.C.–based Tumblr in 2013). Because Etsy is a B Corporation— a company that follows socialgood guidelines established by the not-for-profit B Lab—the public offering could also potentially fuel more interest among investors toward socially conscious companies. (Etsy offers employees paid time for volunteering, for example.) “Etsy’s strength as a business and community comes from its uniqueness in the world, and we intend to preserve it,” CEO Chad Dickerson said in a blog post the day of the IPO. “We…

Fast Company: From the outside, looking at all the different things that your digital teams are doing, it can feel diffuse, because it is dispersed. What are the overarching goals here? President Barack Obama: If you think of a startup, you figure out, Is there something big enough that is worthwhile doing? How do you get the best people on board? How are you going to make sure that you’re serving your customer out there well? And what we’ve tried to do with the U.S. digital team—and our whole conception of technology generally— is to identify some big projects that will impact a lot of people. Because of this upgrade in technology, in delivery systems, in data . . . x million people are getting their veterans benefits faster. Or…

CVS Health Last year—partly in an effort to polish its health care–focused brand—the pharmacy chain yanked all tobacco products from the shelves of its now 7,800 stores, releasing a report that showed that at least 6% of its customers picking up asthma or COPD medication would buy cigarettes the same week. Caremark, its benefits management arm, announced it would charge a $15 copayment for prescriptions purchased at tobacco-selling pharmacies, bolstering CVS’s position and revenues. One month after the tobacco ban, year-over-year quarterly revenue at CVS was up 10%. H&M The world’s No. 2 clothing company collected more than 7,600 tons of used garments in 2014 for recycling, partly by offering discounts in exchange. It also increased its total use of sustainable cotton from 16% to 21%, and says that by…

The fears of science fiction—robots subjugating humanity, cities destroyed by machine wars, humans made nearly extinct and forced to live underground in some sort of 1990s New York City rave culture—have expanded from the fantasy world of books and films to fact-based conversations at TED and on Twitter and in the blogosphere. The folks now warning of the existential threat posed by artificial intelligence include Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking. Even real-life Iron Man Elon Musk tweeted last year, “We need to be super careful with AI. Potentially more dangerous than nukes.” Maybe this is why he’s so eager to get to Mars. It’s shocking to hear technology barons, who usually embrace any advancement and reject government intervention, urging caution and suggesting regulation. The worst-case scenarios of AI usually involve…