Why Facebook is blue: The science of colors in marketing

Why is Facebook blue? According to The New Yorker, the reason is simple. It’s because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind. This means that blue is the color Mark can see the best. In his own words Zuck says:

“Blue is the richest color for me I can see all of blue.”

Not highly scientific right? Well, although in the case of Facebook, that isn’t the case, there are some amazing examples of how colors actually affect our purchasing decisions.

After all, the visual sense is the strongest developed one in most human beings. It’s only natural that 90% of an assessment for trying out a product is made by color alone.

So how do colors really affect us and what is the science of colors in marketing really? As we are also trying to make lots of improvements to our product at Buffer, this was a key part to learn more about. Let’s dig into some of the latest, most interesting research on it.

First: Can you recognize the online brands just based on color?

Before we dive into the research, here are some awesome experiments that show you how powerful color alone really is. Based on just the colors of the buttons, can you guess which company belongs to each of them:

Example 1 (easy):

Example 2 (easy):

Example 3 (medium):

Example 4 (hard):

These awesome examples from Youtube designer Marc Hemeon, I think show the real power of colors more than any study could.

How many were you able to guess? (All the answers are at the bottom of this post!)

Which colors trigger which feeling for us?

Being completely conscious about what color triggers us to think in which way isn’t always obvious. The Logo Company has come up with an amazing breakdown which colors are best for which companies and why. Here are 4 great examples:

Black:

Green:

Blue:

Especially if we also take a look at what the major brands out there are using, a lot of their color choices become a lot more obvious. Clearly, everyone of these companies is seeking to trigger a very specific emtion:

On top of that, especially when we want to buy something, the colors can play a major role. Analytics company KISSmetrics created an amazing infographic on the science of how colors affect our purchases.

Especially the role of “Green” stands out to me as the most relaxing color we can use to make buying easier. We didn’t intentionally choose this as the main color for Buffer actually, it seems to have worked very well so far though.

At second look, I also realized how frequently black is used for luxury products. It’s of course always obvious in hindsight. Here is the full infographic:

How to improve your marketing with better use of colors:

This all might be fairly entertaining, but what are some actual things we can apply today to our website or app? The answer comes yet again from some great research done by the good folks over at KISSmetrics.

If you are building an app that mainly targets Women, here is KISSmetrics best advice for you:

• Women love: Blue, Purple and Green
• Women hate: Orange, Brown and Gray

In case your app is strictly targeting men, the rules of the game are slightly different. Here it goes:

• Men love: Blue, Green and Black
• Men hate: Brown, Orange and Purple

In another amazing experiment Performable (now HubSpot) wanted to find out whether simply changing the color of a button would make a difference to conversion rates.

They started out with the simple hypothesis of choosing between 2 colors (green and red) and trying guess what would happen.

For green, their intuition was this:

“Green connotes ideas like “natural” and “environment,” and given its wide use in traffic lights, suggests the idea of “Go” or forward movement.”

For red, their thinking went like this:

“The color red, on the other hand, is often thought to communicate excitement, passion, blood, and warning. It is also used as the color for stopping at traffic lights. Red is also known to be eye-catching.”

So, clearly an A/B test between green and red would result in green, the more friendly color to win. At least that was their guess. Here is how their experiment looked like:

So how did that experiment turn out? The answer was more surprising than I had expected:

The red button outperformed the green button by 21%

What’s most important to consider is that nothing else was changed at all:

21% more people clicked on the red button than on the green button. Everything else on the pages was the same, so it was only the button color that made this difference.

This definitely made me wonder. If we were to read all the research before this experiment and ask every researcher which version they would guess would perform better, I’m sure green would be the answer in nearly all cases. Not so much.

At my company Buffer, we’ve also conducted dozens of experiments to improve our conversion rates through changes of colors. Whilst the results weren’t as clear, we still saw a huge change. One hypothesis is that for a social media sharing tool, there is less of a barrier to signup, which makes the differences less significant.

Despite all the studies, generalizations are extremely hard to make. Whatever change you make, treat it first as a hypothesis, and see an the actual experiment what works for you. Personally, I’m always very prone to go with opinion based on what I read or research I’ve come across. Yet, data always beats opinion, no matter what.

Quick last fact: Why are hyperlinks blue?

This is something that always interested me and is actually a fun story. It’s to give the best contrast between blue and the original grey of websites:

Here is the full explanation:

“Tim Berners-Lee, the main inventor of the web, is believed to be the man who first made hyperlinks blue. Mosaic, a very early web browser, displayed webpages with a (ugly) gray background and black text. The darkest color available at the time that was not the same as the black text was that blue color. Therefore, to make links stand apart from plain text, but still be readable, the color blue was selected.”

I think it is extremely fascinating that simply changing something as small as the color, can completely chance the outcome of something. What have been your findings in terms of colors and marketing? I’d love your ideas on this.

Solution to the riddle: Example 1: Facebook, Example 2: Google, Example 3: Flickr, Example 4: LinkedIn

by Leo Widrich

blog.bufferapp.com

IS AN MFA THE NEW MBA?

COMPANIES ALL ACROSS AMERICA ARE STARTING TO SEE A CRITICAL TALENT GAP AS OLDER EMPLOYEES RETIRE. ARTS STUDENTS MAY NOT HAVE ALL THE TRADITIONAL SKILLS, BUT THEY HAVE THE MOST IMPORTANT ONE: CREATIVITY.

An estimated 10,000 Baby Boomers will turn 65 every day for at least the next 17 years, according to data from the Pew Research Center. And while many of them might choose to work beyond the traditional retirement age of 65, leaders everywhere are facing the same daunting issue: A great tsunami of Baby Boomer retirement is coming.

Though it’s likely to reshape the workplace for years to come, many organizations say they aren’t prepared for such an unprecedented brain drain. The projections of younger workers entering the workforce are even more shocking.

In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for the 10 years between 2010 to 2020, the number of workers between the ages of 16 to 54 will decrease by about 1 million--while the number of workers over the age of 54 will increase by more than 11 million.

Statistics as bracing as those have many organizations redoubling their efforts at retaining older workers.

But as a leader, your biggest human capital challenge is this: Where will you find enough next-generation workers with the skills required for success? This challenge is even greater when you factor in the nature of today’s flexible and contingent labor market.

Consider this: Today’s contingent economy has people moving constantly from one job to another, one type of work to another, one industry to a different industry. In fact, on average, a person between the ages of 25 and 45 will hold 11 different jobs in their lifetime. Thirty percent of us will work in more than 15 different jobs over the course of our careers.

Organizations far and wide--perhaps even yours--will compete intensely for workers who are adaptable, resourceful, and can quickly learn and apply new skills to a variety of challenges. Where can you find such workers?

One answer runs counter to much conventional wisdom: Ask an artist.

Artists know the world of adaptability and resourcefulness very well. In fact, according to an annual survey tracking the career trajectories of more than 65,000 artists from hundreds of arts schools, the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), close to 60 percent of arts graduates hold more than two jobs at once, and approximately 20 percent have more than three.

What’s more, regardless of whether they work in the arts or in other businesses, more then three-quarters of arts graduates say that critical thinking, creativity, and the ability to work with others are skills they both learned in school and use on a regular basis in their current work. Arts graduates are plucky and understand how to use their creative skills in a variety of settings.

It’s common today to debate the comparative merits and economic value of various college majors, but those of us who track issues and trends around the nation’s creative economy contend that much of the comparisons miss the mark in important and fundamental ways.

But don’t just take me at my word: No less a force in global business than IBM found, in a global study of more than 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries and 33 industries, that the most important skill for successfully navigating our increasingly complex, volatile, and uncertain world is none other than creativity.

Is art school the next B-school? Hardly, though artists often possess the skills and temperament that business leaders regularly say are in short supply: creativity, resiliency, flexibility, high tolerance for risk and ambiguity, as well as the courage to fail.

Here’s what business leaders might consider in tapping talent from the creative economy:

Integrate arts on the job
The arts are not just a hobby. Employees trained in the arts can draw on their creative talents and apply what they might do naturally in the studio or while recording music or making a film to the types of puzzles they deal with every day.

Arts-trained employees won’t leave their creativity at the doorstep when they join our firms or organizations. Ask them to explicitly think about puzzles using their artistic hat/lens. Invite a local theater group to work with employees on improvisation exercises to free up their creative juices. Research has shown that when people engage in improv they later generate more creative ideas to a range of issues and challenges.

Fail more often
Encourage employees and students to take more risks and to stretch their creativity. Give them space and permission to fail. Figure out how to incorporate critical feedback into an ongoing process of improvement and innovation. Ask an artist to come in and run a "critical feedback" workshop for employees. Or someone with design experience to help people think about "rapid prototyping" as a way to audition new ideas. Artists understand that you need to fail often in order to succeed.

Sit with ambiguity
Employees in a lot of settings should become more comfortable with ambiguity. In my classes, students writhe in pain when I give them an ambiguous assignment. They naturally want to know exactly what they need to do to get the desired grade. Not only do we as teachers and employers need to be comfortable giving work assignments where we build in ambiguity, but we need to help those we mentor learn how to begin a process or a task without knowing what the outcome will be. Again, having an artist facilitate a workshop where a creative task is emergent, shifting, and where new information requires adjustments and negotiation, would be a great first step.

The U.S. graduates more than 130,000 visual and performing arts graduates every year. Like virtually every other college major, close to one-half of all these graduates will end up working in professions largely unrelated to their degree. These arts graduates walk among us; many find their way into our businesses; some are sitting next to us in board meetings. And many others have started their own businesses to rave reviews.

More often than not, arts graduates are invisible to us when we search for new talent. But based on the SNAAP research findings, one of the largest surveys ever conducted of college graduates, these former art students have many of the skills and habits necessary to navigate a circuitous career--including the constant reinvention and "retooling" necessary for any environment that values innovation.

Many people see artists as shamans, dreamers, outsiders, and rebels. In reality, the artist is a builder, an engineer, a research analyst, a human relations expert, a project manager, a communications specialist, and a salesman. The artist is all of those and more--combined with the imagination of an inventor and the courage of an explorer. Not a bad set of talents for any business challenged to innovate in a world of volatility, uncertainty, and change. 

BY: STEVEN TEPPER

Fastcompany.com

WHAT STEVE JOBS TAUGHT ME AFTER I SAID "NO" TO HIM BY JAMES GREEN

JAMES GREEN, CEO OF THE SEARCH RETARGETING COMPANY MAGNETIC, WAS ONCE HIRED BY JOBS AS A VP AT PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIOS. AND, CURIOUSLY, IT WAS WHILE WORKING FOR ONE OF HIS BIGGEST BUSINESS HEROES THAT GREEN LEARNED WHAT NOT TO DO WHEN LEADING A COMPANY.

I worked for Steve Jobs at Pixar Animation Studios in 1997 and '98 before he sold Pixar to Disney. I don't have many heroes in my life, but Steve was (and still is) one of them. Meeting him and having him ask me to work for him were dreams come true.

Like so many dreams, reality was very different from what I had envisioned. While I don’t regret any of the time I spent working for Steve, some of those times were hard moments. But that's when you learn the most.

IT WAS NEVER, EVER, A GOOD SIGN WHEN STEVE DROPPED BY AND SAID 'HI JAMES, LET'S GO FOR A WALK.' 

John Lasseter, the director of the early Pixar movies (he now runs Disney animation) recommended me for the position. My first interview was actually at Steve’s house. You can probably imagine the giddy feeling I had as I walked up to the front door, rang the bell, and waited for him to greet me. This was the first time I'd talked to Steve or seen him in person. We began to talk about my past experience, and Steve explained that this role was to be a liaison between Disney and the producers at Pixar. In one of the most surreal moments of my life, I actually said "no" to Steve Jobs. Although I'd love to work at Pixar, I explained, having "middle people" doesn't work, as it’s better to just put everyone in touch directly. Although I declined the initial role, Steve ultimately offered me a job running new business development and marketing.

Pixar is an awesome place to work. My title was "International Man of Marketing." As soon as I started, I began learning, absorbing, and doing as much as I humanly could. Turns out, when you worked for him, Steve Jobs was almost impossible to say no to. If you had an idea that he disagreed with, Steve would respond with persuasive arguments about why you were wrong, enumerating them for you immediately. "James, here's seven reasons why you are wrong.” At the time, this was very intimidating because even if you know you're right, it's almost impossible to stand up to his relentless intellect. If he felt it was going to be a particularly difficult conversation, he'd take me out for a walk. It was never, ever, a good sign when Steve dropped by and said "Hi James, let's go for a walk.”

The combination of my enthusiasm for Pixar and Steve's relentless vision ended up with my job looking more and more like the one I said no to: the marketing middle man between Pixar and Disney. After a period of time I found myself in a room with Steve knowing that if I didn't resign I would be shown the door. I resigned.

So what did I learn from Steve Jobs?

I learned that you must pay incredible attention to what someone wants to do when you hire them. If what they want isn't exactly what the company needs, you shouldn’t hire them, no matter how smart, driven, or successful they are. In hindsight, Steve probably shouldn't have hired me. If someone isn't working out in the position you hired him or her for, it rarely turns around. If the fit is wrong, as a leader you should end it quickly, but not aggressively, and don't make it about the person. I remember when I walked out the door he said, "Life is long and I'm sure our paths will cross again." And sure enough, Steve and I stayed in touch.

Steve also taught me about transparency. He was actually a bit of a contradiction when it comes to this, because while he was great at marketing and coming up with fresh ideas, he wasn’t a great communicator. He tended to sit back and not tell his staff what he expected from them. From watching him operate, I learned to always let my employees know what I want and expect from them at the outset. If you explain to your employees what your company’s goals are and why, it will be motivating for everyone involved.

Building relationships first and doing business second is another lesson I learned from working with Steve. When you are going into a new situation, build relationships with people before anything else. Make sure everyone is on board before you make decisions or you will alienate people (sometimes your best ones) in the process.

Walking out of Pixar was one of the lowest points in my life. Steve also suffered humiliation in his life (being ousted from the company he founded), yet he returned to even greater victory. My victories aren't on the same scale as Steve’s, but the sweetness of the comeback is so much richer and multifaceted than that of the first win. And Steve gave me that, too.

--James Green is the CEO of digital ad technology company Magnetic, which specializes in search retargeting.

Meg Whitman Jolts HP As Its Reluctant Savior

To understand Meg Whitman, the former eBay chief executive who now runs Hewlett-Packard, it’s essential to revisit something she did 26 years ago. She had just become a junior partner at Bain Consulting, working for the brilliant but domineering Tom Tierney. One morning Whitman walked into his office, impromptu. The 31-year-old asked her feared boss if he wanted staff feedback about his leadership style; he nodded. With that Whitman grabbed a felt-tip marker and sketched a giant steamroller on a nearby flip board. “This is you, Tom,” she explained. “You’re too pushy–you’re not letting us build consensus leadership.”

Tierney was stunned. But he eventually absorbed the message and toned down his stridency. All of Bain benefited. “There was a real courage to her,” recalls Tierney. “What she told me was a gift. Even though her feedback was negative and unsolicited, it left me liking Meg more.”

Jump ahead to last year, soon after a boardroom uprising brought Whitman to power as HP’s chief executive. She stepped into a mess: HP’s stock had tumbled 42% in the year before she took office, while operating margins had sunk to just 2.5%. Archrival Dell was gaining ground in the server market, and HP seemed powerless to stop it. When the two computer makers vied for a $350 million server order from Microsoft’s Bing search engine team in April 2012, Dell won the job. Familiar story: Bing’s previous four face-offs had all gone Dell’s way, too.

Whitman refused to shrug off defeat. Within minutes she was on the phone to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, demanding the same candor she once offered Tierney. “Tell me where we came up short,” Whitman asked. “Don’t sugarcoat it. I’d like to know so that we can do better the next time.” Soon afterward Microsoft sent a multipage memo to Whitman, listing nine ways that HP had fumbled its opportunity. “Even if your bid had been price-competitive, you wouldn’t have won,” a Microsoft lieutenant declared.

For Whitman the memo wasn’t an insult; it was a battle plan. She convened a war team of HP’s enterprise computing chief, Dave Donatelli; the company’s operations chief, John Hinshaw; and supply chain wizard Tony Prophet. Their job: figure out how to make HP more competitive. Match Dell’s ability to suggest cost-saving steps that hadn’t occurred to Microsoft. Done. Promise to fix software bugs in two days, not four weeks. HP was on it. By summer HP had crafted a far more customer-friendly approach. When Bing bought a further $530 million of servers in January, vindication arrived. This time HP, not Dell, seized the order.

Blunt, folksy and persistent, Meg Whitman is the leader that Hewlett-Packard desperately needs. She’s decisive without being abrasive, persuasive without being slick. She’s a team builder who knows that turnarounds call for repairing hundreds of small failings rather than betting everything on a miracle cure that might be a mirage. In the words of HP director Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists, “She’s the best CEO the company has had since its founders.”

But fixing the world’s biggest tech company–with $120 billion in annual revenue and 330,000 employees–is a herculean task. Bloated by more than 70 acquisitions in the past 15 years, HP isn’t just sprawling and stalled out; it may actually be running in reverse. Revenue has been shrinking for most of the past seven quarters. HP’s return on capital is a pitiful 7% over the past five years. (By comparison, IBM is at 29%, and even Dell, which has its own troubles, is at 24%.) HP is still profitable before its enormous asset writedowns, but with its stock trading at a feeble price/earnings multiple of six, one major investor suggests HP can’t totally shake the fear that it might go to zero.

Too gruesome for Whitman’s tastes? Guess again. “Problems are good, as long as you solve them quickly,” says Whitman over a Cobb salad lunch at HP’s facilities, now chockablock with posters of Whitman’s favorite sayings, including this aphorism: “Run to the fire; don’t hide from it.” “Meg thrives on these sorts of challenges,” says Howard Schultz, the Starbucks CEO and a longtime friend who has known her since their time together on the eBay board.

When Whitman took command 20 months ago, following her own hiccup–a personally expensive thumping in the 2010 election for governor of California–she walked into a company that had squeezed out its previous four CEOs. In 1999 genial insider Lew Platt didn’t deliver enough sizzle, charismatic marketer Carly Fiorina couldn’t hit earnings targets in 2005, and hard-nosed numbers guy Mark Hurd got tangled up in an expense-account scandal in 2010. Whitman’s immediate predecessor, aloof European import L?o Apotheker, lasted just 11 months. His undoing: ill-advised strategic thrusts that sent HP’s stock crashing.

Nobody on HP’s board wanted the hazards of trying to pick and train another total outsider. Internal candidates were scarce. So in August 2011, as Apotheker’s stormy tenure neared its end, directors began to coalesce around Whitman as their best choice. She had been a successful Silicon Valley CEO. She had joined the HP board in January 2011 and was well aware of the company’s challenges. And with Jerry Brown ensconced in the governor’s mansion in Sacramento, she was available for a new full-time job.

One problem: Whitman didn’t want the gig. She told HP directors Raj Gupta and Andreessen that she would be busy enough with board work, private equity and perhaps an appointed political post. “I’m done running companies,” she told one board member. But on a private-jet flight back to the Bay Area after an HP board meeting, other directors began lobbying her. They invoked HP’s extraordinary heritage as Silicon Valley’s first garage startup, begun in 1939 by engineers Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. They talked about how important HP was to the California economy and as a global symbol of innovation.

“Suddenly the conversation changed to what she might do if she took the job,” Andreessen recalls. “I saw this twinkle in her eye. And I said to myself: ‘I think we got her.’ ”

THE TECH SECTOR, Whitman well knows, is unusually stingy with second chances. Fall behind and you die. The two great exceptions date back to the 1990s: Steve Jobs’ resurrection of Apple and Lou Gerstner’s transformation of IBM. Asked about those templates, the 56-year-old Whitman quickly rules out a Jobs comparison. “Steve was the business genius of our generation,” she says. “It’s hard for anyone to emulate him.” Besides, no magical iPod or iPhone beckons in HP’s future. The Gerstner turnaround, by contrast, “is probably more relevant,” she says.

Like the outsider who got Big Blue back on track, Whitman started her first board meeting as CEO in October 2011 by declaring: “Rule number one is to fix what we have.” She reversed Apotheker’s plans to sell off the PC business at what would have likely been a fire-sale price. She believed that business could be fixed, especially if it focused harder on the booming market for tablets and other mobile devices. And she stuck with Apotheker’s proposed purchase of British software company Autonomy for $11 billion, which backfired.

To keep things simple, Whitman has arranged HP into two clusters. One grouping aims at corporate tech customers, led by Donatelli’s enterprise hardware shop. Its servers, storage and networking delivered 43% of overall operating profits in the most recent quarter. In theory all this iron and silicon should be buttressed by adjoining software and services divisions. But when it comes to software acquisitions, Autonomy was merely the most high-profit misstep. All told, over the past decade HP squandered nearly $19 billion to buy myriad outfits that contribute only 7% to overall profit. The services unit, which staffs other companies’ tech projects, is barely at break-even. It is trying to rebuild after an $8 billion writedown last August.

HP’s other cluster sells printers, PCs, laptops and mobile devices, chiefly to consumers worldwide. Unfortunately for Whitman, the days of being able to rely on the lucrative printer business for outsize profits are over. (In 2002 printing actually contributed 104% of HP’s total operating profits because everything else was below break-even; today that contribution is only 29%.) Corporations still buy lots of printers and ink, but consumers’ appetites have dimmed. The likes of Google, Facebook and Dropbox have facilitated a burgeoning era of ink-free photo- and document-sharing.

To get both of HP’s legacy businesses moving, Whitman started by overhauling how the company sells. Internal surveys showed that HP’s more than 20,000 salespeople rated their own in-house sales tools at about a 7–on a scale of 1 to 100. It took HP as long as three weeks to work up a price quote on a complex order. Competitors could do the same in a few days. Many customers chafed. Others just looked elsewhere. When Whitman’s operations chief, John Hinshaw, recommended yanking out Oracle’s aging Siebel sales software in favor of new salesforce.com tools, she gave him the go-ahead to get the company converted as fast as possible. HP’s price-quote queue has shrunk 75%, while those internal metrics have soared into the 70s. Sellers’ ulcers are gone, and customer rapport is on the mend.

Along with timelier terms, HP’s customers need reassurance that the company knows what it it’s doing. At the end of the Apotheker era, “We were quite concerned that HP wasn’t well glued together,” recalls Dana Deasy, group chief information officer at oil giant BP.

So Whitman hit the road. In the past year she has held a staggering 305 one-on-one meetings with customers or sales-channel partners, aides say, as well as another 42 roundtable chats with small groups. A peek at her calendar the past 60 days shows trips to Munich, London, Brazil, India, New York and Bentonville, Ark., the home of Wal-Mart. “She’s made herself more available than her predecessor ever did,” says Chris Case, president of Sequel Data Systems in Austin, Tex.

Jim Fortner, an IT executive at Procter & Gamble, says he quizzed Whitman at length last year about HP’s personal computer strategy. He was relieved to get consistent answers. “That’s important for us,” Fortner says. “We buy a lot of PCs.” BP’s Deasy says that during one of Whitman’s London visits, he griped about an HP software installation that wasn’t happening on time. She made some calls and discovered a fractured team that didn’t hold anyone accountable for speedy delivery. The project, Deasy reports, is now back on track.

AS BAIN’S TOM TIERNEY LEARNED the hard way, Meg Whitman is fond of making her points graphically. As I push her on HP’s long-term challenge–how to get her company’s growth engines firing again–she reflexively grabs a sheet of paper. “You’ve got to start launching new products when your existing ones are still growing,” she says. “It is not helpful to start a new product here,” as she points to the downward slope of a sales curve that crested too long ago. The result, Whitman says, “is that we’ve got acorns when we need oak trees.” She can’t make up ground through acquisitions: The stock is too cheap, Wall Street too hostile given the spendthrift track record, and HP is trying to reduce last year’s $5.8 billion operating company debt to zero.

Instead, Whitman needs to heap fertilizer onto those acorns–fast. Products with the most promise include Moonshot servers, which are small, energy-efficient and flexible; 3PAR storage devices, which can go up and down in size without busting budgets; and its inkjet office printers, which match the speed and quality of laser printers at a much lower cost. But even in these areas it’s tough to see marginal revenue growth outpacing the sales deterioration of tired old products.

The acorn/oak tree problem is especially acute in the fast-growing tablet market. HP should dominate, in the same way that it has become the world’s biggest maker of PCs and laptops. But HP’s tablet strategy for years has been a baffling mix of launches and retreats, culminating with Apotheker’s August 2011 decision to kill the TouchPad model introduced just seven weeks earlier.

Belatedly, HP has jumped back into the hunt. Since February new models have been streaming into the market, most notably the Slate 7, priced at $169–less than Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD. More machines are about to hit the market, and tech reviewers have generally liked HP’s efforts so far. Still, once market leaders are set, it’s very hard to barrel past them.

HP faces a similar challenge in the server market. Its ?industry-standard machines, based on Intel chip designs, have been big sellers since the early ’90s. But cutting-edge customers like Google and Rackspace now prefer to build their own servers, arranging parts in the most optimal way for their needs. The new Moonshot server line is attracting interest from banks and energy companies, which like its compact design and ability to run many different types of microprocessors. But the data-crunching tech giants, which buy more servers than anyone, may be gone for good as HP customers.

Previous CEOs hoped that big ad campaigns would make HP seem cool again. Whitman’s brand messaging, centered on the motto “Make It Matter,” seems most likely to bolster the spirits of HP’s workforce. For wooing the public at large she is taking a page out of Jobs’ playbook. “Look at Apple,” says Whitman, referring to its design. “Or look at websites like Zaarly, Path or One Kings Lane. When I got involved in the Internet in the 1990s, websites weren’t beautiful. Now they are. Design is a differentiating characteristic in our markets. We need to take advantage of that.”

So HP now has an overall vice president for design, Stacy Wolff, who oversees a fast-growing 40-person team of recruits from the likes of BMW, Nokia and Frog Design. A new, big-screen, all-in-one PC has a nifty hinge that holds its tilt at any viewing angle; power buttons on PCs and printers now glow the same green color; even perforated cooling grilles look sleeker yet more friendly. It’s not quite Apple-elegant, but it no longer looks like metal shop either.

WHITMAN, a Harvard M.B.A. with an economics degree from Princeton, might not have engineering chops or her name on any patents, but unlike HP’s previous three CEOs, she is Silicon Valley informal through and through. When she joined eBay in 1998, the then-tiny auction company was defined by the sweet, New Age-ish values of the company’s founder, Pierre Omidyar: Change the world, have fun, believe that most people are good. Whitman figured out how to combine his vision with big-league business practices that let eBay enjoy sustainable hypergrowth. She worked marathon hours at one stage, rebuilding eBay’s technical team until the site could handle booming traffic without crashing. But she also embraced the jokey, college-dorm atmosphere of an ambitious startup, filling her desk with goofy eBay auction items and dressing up as a witch one Halloween.

So the new HP attitude starts at the front door of its low-slung Palo Alto headquarters. She dumped the barbed wire and locked gates that once separated executive parking spaces from the general lot. “We should enter the building the same way everyone else does,” she says. Once inside Whitman works from a small, sand-colored cubicle. (Her predecessors’ somber office has been turned into a conference room.) Whitman has a swim cap tacked to one partition, a picture of her mom on another. A Thomas Jefferson ?biography tops the heap of books next to her computer. Management tracts reside in the middle, treatises on cloud computing on the bottom. On the road she often settles for a $139 room at the Courtyard Marriott, despite the fact that she’s worth $1.9 billion. “You check in at 10 p.m., and you’re out of there at 7 the next morning,” she shrugs. “It’s not like you’re moving in for a week.” It’s also a painless and visible way to lead by example.

But her tough, hands-on streak, often displayed at eBay and bolstered by two years of taking and throwing vicious political haymakers, comes through when things go wrong. Her printing team’s weak explanation, in a three-hour meeting, of why their business kept falling short of financial goals quickly led to two marathon brainstorming sessions, where she focused on hard-to-spot bad habits like excessive use of rebates. By the time Whitman was done the printing team had a new cap on rebates –and a new division boss to enforce it.

And Whitman has picked a fiercer fight against Autonomy’s original management team. Last November HP took an $8.8 billion charge in connection with that purchase, blaming the setback on “serious accounting improprieties” in Autonomy’s books at the time of sale. Autonomy founder Mike Lynch instantly disputed that claim, blaming HP instead for poorly managing its new acquisition. He declined to comment for this story.

Ongoing arguments have kept the Autonomy mess in the news, but as HP presses authorities in the U.S. and U.K. to investigate fraud claims, its willingness to fight sits a lot better with employees than watching top management shrug off another blunder and hoping it fades from memory. Almost 80% of HP employees at Glassdoor.com, a website packed with anonymous feedback on thousands of companies, say that they have confidence in Whitman, placing her in a tie with IBM’s Virginia Rometty and slightly ahead of corporate stalwarts such as Cisco’s John Chambers (76% ).

Whitman has more work to do to win over Wall Street. She warned investors and her board early on that getting giant HP back on track would be a five-year job, defining 2013 as a “fix and rebuild” year, with no assurances of sustained growth until 2014. When fiscal first-quarter results topped analysts’ scaled-down expectations, she spoke of “a long road ahead.”

If Whitman can lift the doomsday anxiety, HP’s shares could roar ahead. “Meg and the team are delivering everything they said they would,” says Pat Russo, an HP director and the former CEO of Alcatel-Lucent. “We are committed to her.” Adds fellow director Raj Gupta, the former CEO of Rohm & Haas: “As long as she’s enjoying it and the company is on track, the board would like to see her stay as long as she wants.”

Whitman is beyond financial motivation. She’s playing for legacy: “There’s quite a bit of pride in being part of something that means so much to the Valley and to this country. It’s a nice company. Nice people. And I think we’re going to turn this.”

Forbes.com

Here's Why Janet Jackson Is Not On Our Billionaire's List

I was as well surprised to see the internet awash with news about Janet suddenly being a billionaire. But here is an important analysis from Forbes:

The Internet is abuzz with news that singer Janet Jackson is a billionaire. In fact several news outlets are saying she is “officially” a billionaire.

There’s just one problem: it isn’t true.

The reports stem from a story in Variety this week about Jackson titled “Behind the Velvet Rope.” The story is connected to Jackson’s work with the charity AmFAR and is surrounded by full-page ads congratulating Jackson on being “a billion dollar entertainer.”

To be fair, the story does not specifically say that Jackson is a billionaire. It just lays out the money that her work has brought in over the span of her career including $81 million from music and book publishing, $260 million in album sales and $458 million from touring. Together with other areas of business, the revenues add up to $1.2 billion.

But that’s very different than a net worth. Net worth is based on the value of the cash and assets you have at the moment, not on how much your work has brought in over a lifetime. When we evaluate whether people will make our annual list of theWorld’s Billionaires, we look at things like stock holdings, real estate and art collections. Oprah Winfrey is a billionaire because of the value of her holdings in things like Discovery and Harpo Productions, not because of the ad revenue her show generated over the years.

This isn’t the first time the general press has mistaken the money brought in by someone’s business for the net worth of that individual. Jessica Simpson has been called a billionaire. My colleague Clare O’Connor did an excellent take down of claims that the Kardashians are billionaires. Madonna is also rich, but not a billionaire.

This is the same kind of situation. The word “billionaire” generates plenty of hits (we know) and so reporters, who don’t obsess about people’s wealth 12 months out of the year, don’t bother to check the facts, they just regurgitate.

Jackson owns a lot of valuable songs, likes to take ownership stakes in the products she endorses and is married to reported billionaire Wissam Al Mana (who has also never shown up on our billionaire list). She certainly may be sitting on $1 billion worth of assets. But her net worth is not at all clear from what’s being reported.

While we’re on the subject, poor Julia Louis-Dreyfus is getting pulled into this story. Several outlets have reported that Jackson’s new (fake) billionaire status puts her in the same strata as Steven Speilberg, Oprah and Louis-Dreyfus. While Louis-Dreyfus’ father is certainly extremely rich, that doesn’t mean the actress is worth the same amount of money. A source says that when Louis-Dreyfus dies, his money is set to go to hundreds of people, not just his daughter.

Class of 2013: The Advantages of an Accent

Adapted from Smith College Commencement Address, May 18, 2013

Congratulations. You have reached the light at the end of the tunnel. And I'm sure that when you first arrived at Smith you never would have imagined that at the other end of that tunnel would be a lady talking to you from behind a podium in a funny accent. This accent, incidentally, was the bane of my existence -- until, that is, I moved to New York in 1980 and met Henry Kissinger, who told me not to worry about my accent, because you can never, in American public life, underestimate the advantages of complete and total incomprehensibility.

Commencement speakers are traditionally expected to tell graduates how to go out there and climb the ladder of success, but I want to ask you, instead, to redefine success. Because the world you are headed into desperately needs it. And because you are up to it. Your education at Smith has made it unequivocally clear that you are entitled to take your place in the world on equal footing, in every field, and at the top of every field. But what I urge you to do is not just take your place at the top of the world, but to change the world.

What I urge you to do is to lead the third women's revolution.

The first was led by the suffragists over a hundred years ago, when brave women like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought, among other things, to give women the right to vote. The second women's revolution was powerfully led by Smith alumnae, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. They fought -- and Gloria continues to fight -- to expand the role of women in our society, to give us full access to the rooms of power where decisions are made.

And while the second revolution is still in progress, we simply can't wait any longer for the third revolution to begin. And I can't imagine a place where I would be more likely to find the leaders of that revolution than right here at Smith.

At the moment, our society's notion of success is largely composed of two parts: money and power. In fact, success, money and power have practically become synonymous.

But it's time for a third metric, beyond money and power -- one founded on well-being, wisdom, our ability to wonder, and to give back. Money and power by themselves are a two legged stool -- you can balance on them for a while, but eventually you're going to topple over. And more and more people, very successful people, are toppling over. Basically, success the way we've defined it is no longer sustainable. It's no longer sustainable for human beings or for societies. To live the lives we want, and not just the ones we settle for, the ones society defines as successful, we need to include the third metric.

Now I guess it's no big surprise that the image of success created by men would be, yes, a long, phallic-shaped line.

But if we don't redefine success, the personal price we pay will get higher and higher. And as the data shows, that price is even higher for women than it is for men. Already, women in stressful jobs have a nearly 40 percent increased risk of heart disease, and a 60 percent greater risk for diabetes. And in the last 30 years, as women have made strides and gains in the workplace, self-reported levels of stress have gone up 18 percent.

Here's another fact that will likely be no surprise to you: the Millennial Generation, aka you, is the most stressed generation of all, outranking Baby Boomers and the gently euphemistic "Matures." Right now, America's workplace culture is practically fueled by stress, sleep-deprivation, and burnout.

Another Smith graduation speaker, Alistair Cooke, notoriously told the class of 1954 that their way to the top would be determined by whom they married.

I want to do old Alistair one better, and tell you that you don't get to the top by marrying someone. A much simpler way is to sleep your way to the top. Right now I imagine President Christ is thinking she probably should have vetted this speech.

But no, I'm talking about sleep in the literal sense. I know of what I speak: In 2007, sleep deprived and exhausted, I fainted, hit my head on my desk, broke my cheekbone and got four stitches on my right eye. And even as it's affecting our health, sleep deprivation will also profoundly affect your creativity, your productivity, and your decision-making. The Exxon Valdez wreck, the explosion of the Challenger Space Shuttle, and the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island -- all were at least partially the result of decisions made on too little sleep.

According to researchers at Walter Reed hospital, the only thing that gets better with sleep deprivation is "magical thinking" and reliance on superstition. So for those of you majoring in fortune telling, go ahead and burn the midnight oil. The rest of you: not so much.

As you can tell by now, I'm a major sleep evangelist. The Huffington Post's office in New York sports two nap rooms: at the beginning our reporters, editors and engineers were reluctant to use them, afraid that people might think they're shirking their duties. We have to change workplace culture so that it’s walking around drained and exhausted that’s stigmatized. I’m happy to say, our nap rooms are now always booked. Although the other day I was walking by and I saw two people walking out of one of the nap rooms. But, hey, whatever it takes to recharge. Just don't tell HR, ok?

What adding well-being to our definition of success means is that, in addition to looking after our financial capital, we need to do everything we can to protect and nurture our human capital. My mother was an expert at that. I still remember, when I was twelve years old, a very successful Greek businessman coming for dinner. He looked rundown and exhausted. But when we sat down to dinner, he told us how well things were going for him. He was thrilled about a new contract he had just won to build a new museum. My mother was not impressed. "I don't care how well your business is doing," she told him bluntly," you're not taking care of you. Your business might have a great bottom line, but you are your most important capital. There are only so many withdrawals you can make from your health bank account, but you just keep on withdrawing. You could go bankrupt if you don't make some deposits soon." And indeed, not long after that, the man had to be admitted for an angioplasty.

The problem is that as long as success is defined by just money and power, climbing and burnout, we are never going to be able to enjoy that other aspect of the third metric: wonder.

I was blessed with a mother who was in a constant state of wonder. Whether she was washing dishes or feeding seagulls at the beach or reprimanding overworking businessmen, she maintained her sense of wonder, delighted at both the mysteries of the universe and the everyday little things that fill our lives. And whenever I'd complain or be upset about something, my mother had the same advice: "Darling, change the channel. You are in control of the clicker. Don't replay the bad, scary movie."

Well-being, wonder, and now I'd like to talk about another indispensable W -- wisdom.

Wherever we look around the world, we see very smart leaders -- in politics, in business, in media -- making terrible decisions. What they're lacking is not IQ, but wisdom. Which is no surprise, since it's never been harder to tap into our own wisdom. Because in order to do so, we have to disconnect from all our ever-present devices, our gadgets, our screens, our social media, and reconnect with ourselves. Your very own, very wise Smith sophomore, Erin McDaniel, wrote in the Sophian about her decision to disconnect from all her social media. "We have eschewed real social connections in favor of superficial, technology-bridged ones … We have become, in many cases, nearly as (socially) robotic as our computers."

Back to my mother. The last time she got angry with me before she died was when she saw me reading my email and talking to my children at the same time. "I abhor multitasking," she said, in a Greek accent that puts mine to shame. In other words, being connected in a shallow way to the entire world can prevent us from being deeply connected to those closest to us -- including ourselves. And that is where wisdom lies. Don't worry -- you don't have the head of a digital news operation telling you to disconnect from technology altogether. What I’m saying is: learn to regularly disconnect from technology in order to connect with yourself. Learn to unplug in order to recharge. I'm convinced about two fundamental truths about human beings. The first truth is that we all have within us a centered place of wisdom, harmony, and strength. This is a truth that all the world's religions -- whether Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Buddhism -- and many of its philosophies, hold true in one form or another: "The Kingdom of God is Within."

The second truth is that we're all going to veer away from that place again and again and again. That's the nature of life. In fact, we may be off-course more often than we are on-course. At The Huffington Post, we even came up with an app, called GPS for the Soul, that helps us get back to that place. I know there is something paradoxical about using technology to disconnect from technology, but the snake in our digital garden of Eden has been hyper-connectivity with technology. And we have to be more wily than the snake, hence using technology to help us disconnect from technology.

When we're in that centered place of wisdom, harmony and strength, life is transformed, from struggle to grace, and we are suddenly filled with trust, no matter the obstacles, challenges and disappointments. Because there is a purpose to our lives, even if it is sometimes hidden from us, and even if the biggest turning points and heartbreaks only make sense as we look back, not as we are experiencing them. So we might as well live life as if -- as the poet Rumi put it -- "Everything is rigged in our favor."

We've talked about well-being, wisdom, and wonder. And now, the last element of the third metric of success: empathy, compassion, the willingness to give back.

The founding fathers wrote about the pursuit of happiness, and if you go back to the original documents -- as I'm sure all of you have done -- happiness did not mean the pursuit of more ways to be entertained. It was the happiness that comes from feeling good by doing good.

I was at a neuroscience conference this week in Madison, Wisconsin, with the Dalai Lama, and there was plenty of scientific data provided that shows unequivocally that empathy and service increase our well-being. So that's how the elements of the third metric become part of a virtuous cycle.

So please don't settle for just breaking through glass ceilings in a broken corporate system or in a broken political system, where so many leaders are so disconnected from their own wisdom that we are careening from one self-inflicted crisis to another. Change much more than the M to a W at the top of the corporate flow chart. Change it by going to the root of what's wrong and redefining what we value and what we consider success.

And remember that while there will be plenty of signposts along your path directing you to make money and climb up the ladder, there will be almost no signposts reminding you to stay connected to the essence of who you are, to take care of yourself along the way, to reach out to others, to pause to wonder, and to connect to that place from which everything is possible. "Give me a place to stand," my Greek compatriot Archimedes said, "and I will move the world."

So find your place to stand -- your place of wisdom and peace and strength. And from that place, lead the third women's revolution and remake the world in your own image, according to your own definition of success, so that all of us -- women and men -- can live our lives with more grace, more joy, more empathy, more gratitude, and yes, more love. And now, Smith College class of 2013, onward, upward and inward!

Arianna Huffington

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