5 Tips to Get a Productive Night's Sleep BY ABIGAIL TRACY

A good night's sleep should make you more productive. Here are a few tips to getting not just more sleep, but the right kind of sleep.

There is no denying the relationship between sleep and productivity. The two go hand in hand and for the entrepreneur--who at times may be juggling the workload and stress of a small company by themselves--sleep may be the key to success.

Before you roll your eyes and say, "I can sleep when I'm dead," check out what happens to your brain when you stay awake too long:

Inc.'s Margaret Heffernan writes:

The reason sleep is so important is because fatigue isn't simple. When we are tired, our performance doesn't degrade equally. Instead, when you lose a night's sleep, the parietal and occipital lobes in your brain become less active. The parietal lobe integrates information from the senses and is involved in our knowledge of numbers and manipulation of objects. The occipital lobe is involved in visual processing. So the parts of our mind responsible for understanding the world and the data around us start to slow down. This is because the brain is prioritizing the thalamus--the part of your brain responsible for keeping you awake. In evolutionary terms, this makes sense. If you're driven to find food, you need to stay awake and search, not compare recipes.

After 24 hours of sleep deprivation, there is an overall reduction of six percent in glucose reaching the brain. (That's why you crave donuts and candy.) But the loss isn't shared equally; the parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex lose 12 percent to 14 percent of their glucose. And those are the areas we most need for thinking: for distinguishing between ideas, for social control, and to be able to tell the difference between good and bad.

The good news: You don't have to really get all this brain science to do something about your sleep problems.  

Check out the best tips to make sure your night is a productive one.

1. Wind down late in the day. A recent Harvard Medical School study recommended that you schedule your day so the more time-consuming and intensive tasks are addressed in the morning. Leave the easier, less pressing tasks for the evening so your mind and entrepreneurial drive and cool down before bed.

2. Create a cut-off time. "Decide when you will stop working each day, no matter what,"writes Inc.'s Jeff Haden.Every night set a goal time to wrap up all your tasks for the day. This may leave a few loose ends, but stick to it. If you leave things unfinished work on them right when you wake up--refreshed. Make a list before you go to sleep for the following day.

3. Track your sleep and be consistent. "By measuring how you sleep it's much easier to see how different factors affect you, and then you can use that knowledge to help optimize your sleep quality," writes Haden. At least track your sleep for a while so you become cognizant of your sleeping patterns. There are tons of apps available to keep tabs on your sleep. Even just a sleep journal can be beneficial. This will make you more aware of the sleep (or lack of) you are getting and will help you establish healthier patterns. Try to stick to scheduled sleeping and waking times.

4. Don’t worry about sleep. Seriously, don’t stress over your sleep schedule. Don’t stay awake watching the clock take away potential shut eye moments. The Harvard sleep study recommends that if you find yourself unable to fall asleep after 15-20 minutes in bed, take a break. Get out of bed and read with a dim light until you find yourself tired. Don’t change when you are supposed to wake up because you couldn’t fall asleep.  

5. Don’t forget about the quality of your sleep. According to the Harvard study (and common sense), you should create a good environment for you to fall asleep--and stay asleep. Make sure your bed is comfortable and your room is dark and quiet. Use a sleep mask, earplugs or a white noise machine to compensate if your sleeping environment is less than ideal.

Inc.com

9 People You Must Remove From Your Inner Circle BY JEFF HADEN

When you're trying to get a business off the ground, the people you surround yourself with matter. Keep these nine types at a distance.

You are what you eat, and you definitely are whom you associate with. The people closest to you make all the difference--in a good and a bad way.

Of course, it can be tough to find great new connections and friends to add to your inner circle; people who will support you, help you, and encourage, motivate, and inspire you.

It's a lot easier to spot the people in your inner circle who are holding you back.

If you have people like these in your inner circle, remove them:

Devilish Advocates

Devilish advocates are rarely advocates for anything other than their own egos and points of view. "Perspective" is often just bragging in disguise. "Voice of reason" is often just the voice of ego or the voice of a person who tried and failed and therefore thinks no one can--or more likely should--ever succeed.

Keep the people who ask smart questions, share lessons learned and ways to do things differently, and offer to help you if a problem does pop up.

Get rid of the people who always forecast doom and gloom based solely on their bad experiences. Your results may vary because you aren't them.

And you don't need them.

Raving Fans

On the other end of the spectrum is the person who thinks your every thought and deed is astounding, amazing, incredible. You're Michael Scott and he's Dwight Schrute (well, most of the time).

Unconditional praise is fun but rarely helpful. None of us are that smart, that insightful, or that talented. Often we do get it wrong. Often we do make mistakes.

But often we don't realize it until someone tells us.

It's easy to tell someone he or she is great. It's much, much harder--it takes a real friend--to tell someone he or she can do better.

Hype is the enemy of improvement. Be nice to raving fans, but don't pay much attention to what they say.

Let your mom be the only raving fan you need.

Inside Scoopers

It's hard to resist inside information and gossip. Finding out the reasons behind someone's decisions, the motivations behind someone's actions, the inside scoop about someone's hidden agenda--jeez, that stuff is hard to resist.

The problem is, the person who gives you the inside scoop on other people is also giving other people the inside scoop on you.

The people you want in your inner circle are willing to share the inside scoop on only their own thoughts or feelings--that's not gossip, that's just truth.

Backstabbers

The people in your inside circle should have one another's backs.

Backstabbers have no one's back but their own.

Geocentrists

Before Copernicus, most people thought Earth was at the center of the solar system. Too bad there hasn't been a Copernicus for people who think everything revolves around them.

Self-interest is good. Enlightened self-interest is better. Self-centered just sucks to be around.

So don't be a Galileo and try to change their minds. Just move on. It's easy.

They won't even notice you're gone.

Roadblock Prophets

The seer of all roadblocks has the uncanny ability to foresee a long list of potential barriers and problems that in reality will not appear and sometimes even cannot appear.

Granted, none of us want to make a mistake we could have avoided. But when someone always counters every single idea with a never-ending list of reasons it just won't work, then he or she needs to go, because unreasonable doubt is the enemy of achievement.

If my idea truly won't work, I definitely want to know. Tell me, tell me why, and then tell me what might work instead. Then you're helping. Then we can go places together.

Otherwise, we should just go our separate ways.

Schmoozers

Building connections is important. But networking isn't a numbers game. Connections aren't an end; connections are just a beginning.

Too many beginnings means lots of starts and no finishes. There's no way to build meaningful connections with dozens or hundreds of people.

Be nice, but otherwise keep the schmoozer outside your inner circle. He cares just about making connections.

He doesn't actually want to connect.

Maintenance Schedulers

It makes sense: You need to service some equipment regularly so it doesn't fall apart.

What doesn't make sense is when you need to "service" some personal and professional relationships or they fall apart: They need regular check-ins. They need regular contact so they can feel reassured that you still "care." When they don't get serviced, they make you feel you've somehow let them down.

In short, they're needy.

Real professional relationships are based on only one kind of need: The people you truly want in your inner circle are there when you really need them--just like you are for them.

The Walking Dead*

Some people just drift like zombies. They wander aimlessly from task to task, from day to day and year to year with no plan, no purpose, no goal.

Surround yourself with people who have ambitious plans, meaningful purposes, and big goals. Even if their goals are different from yours--and they probably will be--you'll feed off their energy, and they'll feed off yours.

And stay away from the walking dead. They won't kill you, but they'll definitely kill your motivation and enthusiasm.

Inc.com

Elon Musk Explains the Hyperloop, the Solar-Powered High-Speed Future of Inter-City Transportation

Almost a year after Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors (TSLA) and SpaceX, first floated the idea of a superfast mode of transportation, he has finally revealed the details: a solar-powered, city-to-city elevated transit system that could take passengers and cars from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes. In typical Musk fashion, the Hyperloop, as he calls it, immediately poses a challenge to the status quo—in this case, California’s $70 billion high-speed train that has been knocked by Musk and others as too expensive, too slow, and too impractical.

In Musk’s vision, the Hyperloop would transport people via aluminum pods enclosed inside of steel tubes. He describes the design as looking like a shotgun with the tubes running side by side for most of the journey and closing the loop at either end. These tubes would be mounted on columns 50 to 100 yards apart, and the pods inside would travel up to 800 miles per hour. Some of this Musk has hinted at before; he now adds that pods could ferry cars as well as people. “You just drive on, and the pod departs,” Musk told Bloomberg Businessweek in his first interview about the Hyperloop.

Musk has built his entrepreneurial career attacking businesses he deems inefficient or uninspiring. He co-founded PayPal in a bid to shake up the banking industry, then used the fortune he made selling the startup to eBay (EBAY) to fund equally ambitious efforts in transportation. Tesla Motors, for example, has created the highest-performing, highest-rated all-electric car and a complementary network of charging stations scattered around North America. Meanwhile, SpaceX competes against entire nations in the market to send up satellites and resupply the International Space Station.

In the case of the Hyperloop, Musk started focusing on public transportation after he grew disenchanted with the plans for California’s high-speed rail system. Construction on the highly political, $70 billion project is meant to begin in earnest this year, with plans to link cities from San Diego to Sacramento by 2029. “You have to look at what they say it will cost vs. the actual final costs, and I think it’s safe to say you’re talking about a $100 billion-plus train,” Musk says, adding that the train is too slow and a horrendous land rights mess.

Musk thinks the Hyperloop would avoid many of the land issues because it’s elevated. The tubes would, for the most part, follow I-5, the dreary but direct freeway between L.A. and San Francisco. Farmers would not have swaths of their land blocked by train tracks but could instead access their land between the columns. Musk figures the Hyperloop could be built for $6 billion with people-only pods, or $10 billion for the larger pods capable of holding people and cars. All together, his alternative would be four times as fast as California’s proposed train, at one-10th the cost. Tickets, Musk says, would be “much cheaper” than a plane ride.

As for safety? Musk has heard of it. “There’s an emergency brake,” he says. “Generally, though, the safe distance between the pods would be about 5 miles, so you could have about 70 pods between Los Angeles and San Francisco that leave every 30 seconds. It’s like getting a ride on Space Mountain at Disneyland.” Musk imagines that riding on the Hyperloop would be quite pleasant. “It would have less lateral acceleration—which is what tends to make people feel motion sick—than a subway ride, as the pod banks against the tube like an airplane,” he says. “Unlike an airplane, it is not subject to turbulence, so there are no sudden movements. It would feel supersmooth.”

The Hyperloop was designed to link cities less than 1,000 miles apart that have high amounts of traffic between them, Musk says. Under 1,000 miles, the Hyperloop could have a nice edge over planes, which need a lot of time to take off and land. “It makes sense for things like L.A. to San Francisco, New York to D.C., New York to Boston,” Musk says. “Over 1,000 miles, the tube cost starts to become prohibitive, and you don’t want tubes every which way. You don’t want to live in Tube Land.” Right?

www.businessweek.com

The Secret To Unleashing Genius

Amazon isn’t an easy place to work. Its managers set steep goals, scrimp on budgets and expect long hours. But there aren’t many better places to be employed if you like the messy work of coming up with new ideas, because its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, has made that a priority for everyone and in so doing has avoided the usual curse of having a dynamic and creative founder at the helm.

“I encourage our employees to go down blind alleys and experiment,” says Bezos. “We’ve tried to create tools to reduce the cost of doing experiments so that we can do more of them. If you can increase the number of experiments you try from a hundred to a thousand, you dramatically increase the number of innovations you produce.”

In our work over the last ten years with business leaders, we’ve identified an interesting pattern (to learn more about our work, visitlearn.innovatorsdna.com). On average, creative leaders can increase a company’s innovation capacity, but having someone at the top who is too much of a genius can be dangerous for the organization because that may squelch others’ skills and ideas.

According to more than 1,000 assessments we gave, we’ve noticed that 10% to 15% of the most innovative leaders in the world (based on others’ evaluations of their skills) don’t bother to encourage the people around them to innovate as well. These leaders often believe their ideas are so much better than their colleagues’ that they see little value in building talent around them. Many also lack the patience required to give others the chance to develop and deliver their ideas, so they do the work alone. This can be okay in the short run but disastrous over time. Employees stop coming up with ideas; their creative muscles atrophy. This can pose a serious threat to a company’s performance if and when a highly innovative leader leaves, especially if that person is famous.

Investors started fretting about Apple ‘s ability to come up with big new ideas even before Steve Jobs died in October 2011. In the last two years Apple’s innovation premium (market capitalization less the net present value of future revenue from existing products and services) fell from 50% to 22%. The company dropped from No. 5 on our list in 2011 to No. 79 this year. Apple might continue to change the game without Jobs, but investors have voted with their feet.

The same scenario happened at Starbucks . Its CEO, Howard Schultz, left that job in 2000. The company’s innovation premium remained a healthy 45% through the next year, but several years later that was down to 11%. Schultz’s return in 2008 restored the coffee chain’s creative luster, and today its premium stands strong at 41%, making it one of the top 20 on the list. Schultz’s presence makes a difference to investors’ expectations of Starbucks’ ability to innovate and grow.

The more enlightened leaders know the importance of building creative capabilities in others. As Salesforce founder Marc Benioff emphatically put it during a recent conversation with us: “I can’t do it all. I don’t have all the ideas. That isn’t my job. My job is to build a culture of innovation. That’s something that we try to enforce. We encourage it. We value it. We notice it. We compensate for it. We require it.” Salesforce, by the way, has been No. 1 on the Innovative Companies list three years running.

Lately Benioff has been acquiring innovators as well training them from within. He has spent close to $4 billion since 2011 buying smaller software firms. “I’m willing to acquire a company that might not have a lot of revenue but has a lot of innovation.” He added, “We’ll take innovation any way you can give it to us. … I don’t care if it’s my idea, an employee’s idea, a competitor’s idea, a partner’s idea or some other associate’s idea.”

Benioff spends most of his time these days with customers, and he’s encouraging his team to do the same, getting new ideas from the likes of GE, Bank of America, Toyota and Philips. He admits, though, that strengthening this ability in others while he’s still present is challenging and that whatever “innovation capital” he has built up over time cannot be handed off to someone else. Whoever ultimately takes his place will need to earn his or her own capital.

Jeff Bezos told us he thinks Amazon will be a long-term innovator because he’s made it part of everyone’s job. A lot of big companies appoint a chief innovation officer; Amazon has purposefully chosen not to. Bezos doesn’t want his leaders delegating that to anyone in particular. While Bezos has done many things to build an innovative culture, he emphasized three things that he thinks make the biggest difference:

First, he surrounds himself with people who have a creative track record. He requests all job candidates to tell him something they’ve invented: “Their invention can be on a small scale?say, a new product feature or a process that improves the customer experience?but I want to know that they will try new things.” He also looks for a combination of stubbornness and flexibility. “Even though these two attributes seem to be at odds with each other, I don’t think they are,” Bezos told us. “I want people who are stubborn about their vision of creating something new and valuable. I want them to be relentless on their vision but very, very flexible on the details of how to get there.”

Second, Bezos has radically decentralized the work of coming up with new products or services so that the majority of employees feel like it is expected of them. Most employees are given an innovation challenge on one of Amazon’s now famous “two-pizza teams” (a team small enough that it can be fed with two pizzas). “Each has its own software developers, its own business people, its own design people and so on,” he explained. “I think that kind of decentralization is important for innovation because your hands are closer to the knobs of what you’re trying to build.”

Third, Bezos teaches these teams how to experiment their way to innovations. “Experiments are key to innovation because they rarely turn out as you expect and you learn so much,” he told us.

Business leaders can never know how strong their company’s ability will remain to bring new ideas to market after they’re gone. It’s the biggest danger zone of all?not knowing what you don’t know until it happens. Until then the world’s best-run companies, including Salesforce and Amazon, will continue to hone their skills at observing, experimenting and questioning the status quo.

forbes.com

Bezos, Heraclitus and the Hybrid Future of Journalism

 

One of the first people who came to mind when I heard the news last week that Jeff Bezos was buying the Washington Post was a fellow countryman, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who around 2,500 years ago said, "No man ever steps in the same river twice." Or, as James Fallows put it, the sale was "one of those episode-that-encapsulates-an-era occurrences." But as it encapsulates one era that has passed, it also has the potential to expand the era we are in. This combining of the best of traditional media with the boundless potential of digital media represents an amazing opportunity.

First, it's an opportunity to further move the conversation away from the future of newspapers to the future of journalism -- in whatever form it's delivered. After all, despite all the dire news about the state of the newspaper industry, we are in something of a golden age of journalism for news consumers. There's no shortage of great journalism being done, and there's no shortage of people hungering for it. And there are many different business models being tried to connect the former with the latter -- and Jeff Bezos will no doubt come up with another.

The future will definitely be a hybrid one, combining the best practices of traditional journalism -- fairness, accuracy, storytelling, deep investigations -- with the best tools available to the digital world -- speed, transparency, and, above all, engagement.

Though the distinction between new media and old has become largely meaningless, for too long the reaction of much of the old media to the fast-growing digital world was something like the proverbial old man yelling at the new media kids to get off his lawn. Many years were wasted erecting barriers that were never going to stand.

According to AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, who once worked at the Washington Post, this did not include Don Graham, whom she calls "one of my personal heroes, for both his honorable ethics and his stalwart decency." She recalls covering the early days of AOL and seeing the "stubborn resistance by old media" to adapting to the changes. But, "[t]o be fair," she writes, "of all the many media types I met, Graham tried hardest to keep up, and was always looking at the latest trend in the Internet space."

However, Graham's (comparatively) small company didn't have the answer to losses of $54 million in 2012, or $21 million in 2011. And though Bezos can obviously cover those losses more easily, the significance of having the Amazon founder as an owner isn't just found in his much deeper pockets -- though that of course will give the Post more time to find answers -- but in the sort of thinking that led to those deeper pockets. Just as the members of the Graham family weren't ordinary old media owners, Bezos isn't an ordinary new media mogul.

Appearing on Meet the Press, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius remarked that once the shock of the sale wore off, Post staffers began to feel some excitement themselves:

“And when we picked ourselves off the floor and began thinking about this, it began to dawn on people that having someone with $25 billion of net worth acquire your paper, and also to have that person be a proven disrupter of technologies, somebody who made it easy to read print, to read print content (books, magazines, newspapers) on the Kindle, which I think really preceded the tablet as a new way of reading, that's pretty exciting. So by the end of the week, people were thinking, "How do we go on the offensive? How does this dynamic new owner take us into a space where we're going to be more exciting?"

Nobody really knows what Bezos' plans are for the Post -- including, most likely, Bezos himself -- but he has a combination of qualities that make him uniquely positioned to seize the opportunities available in journalism's hybrid future.

First, he's somebody who has already been successful in a business with low margins. Though Amazon is a retail giant with an equally giant valuation of $140 billion, Bezos started out selling books -- not exactly an easy business from which to grow a retail giant.

That foundation also speaks to his respect for reading and the written word. He has famouslybanned PowerPoint presentations in meetings of his senior "S-Team" at Amazon. Instead, those with presentations to make write six-page memos. Meetings open with 30 or so minutes of silence in which people read and digest the memos, called "narratives." Then the discussion begins.

He's also a man who loves to experiment. In the early days of Amazon, since there was no model for what they were doing, they would just try something and make adjustments later. It's a strategy that came to be called "ready, fire, steer." To Bezos, putting too much thought into aiming might mean you never fire. And to encourage that spirit, one of Amazon's in-house awards is called the "Just Do It," given to employees who create something good for the company without asking their boss first.

As he made clear in his initial statement to Post employees, that spirit of experimentation will continue at the paper. "There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy," he wrote. "We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment."

Luckily, of course, he's got the money to finance that experimentation. But there's a difference between covering the losses of a declining business model and covering losses from experiments in coming up with a new business model.

Another essential quality Bezos possesses is his understanding of the power of engagement. In Amazon, he has created the most responsive retail experience online (or off-line, for that matter). This is especially important as the media moves from a model of presentation to one focused on participation. News is now an ongoing two-way conversation. And, as with any conversation, listening is as important as talking, and Amazon is a monument to the power of listening. Bezos seems to always be innovating new ways for Amazon to listen to its customers and create new ways for them to be involved in -- and have control over -- their shopping experience. If the purpose of journalism is to give people information about their world and thus more power to control it, Bezos' commitment to engagement has obvious potential for journalism.

And because nobody believes reviving the Post will be an easy process, another quality that will surely be useful is patience. Bezos is legendary for his preference for long-term, sustainable growth over the quick rewards of Wall-Street-pleasing short-term profits. Though Amazon was founded in 1994, it didn't make a full-year profit until 2003. "Take a deep breath and be patient," he told AllThingsD's Tricia Duryee when asked last year about his slow road to profitability. "Deep yoga breaths, people!" And, of course, this long-term view helps foster the atmosphere for experimentation. "We like to invent and do new things," Bezos toldHarvard Business Review editor Adi Ignatius, "and I know for sure that long-term orientation is essential for invention because you're going to have a lot of failures along the way."

That long-term orientation is symbolized in the 10,000 Year Clock he's helping to build in west Texas. Meant to encourage long-term thinking, the clock would tick once a year, a "century hand" would move only once every 100 years, and every millennium a cuckoo would appear. "As I see it, humans are now technologically advanced enough that we can create not only extraordinary wonders but also civilization-scale problems," he writes on the clock's website. "We're likely to need more long-term thinking."

Another of his projects is an effort to rescue parts of the Apollo 11 rocket from the bottom of the sea. "We want this hardware to tell its true story," he said to the Los Angeles Times. Resurrecting a shared part of our history while investing in the exploration of new horizons and new space travel (as he's currently doing) -- that description could just as easily apply to the Washington Post purchase.

Of course, if you're trying to think outside the box, it's a whole lot easier to do it from space. As Bezos shows, a combination of big vision and attention to small detail is a pretty effective recipe for innovation.

Bezos' philanthropic work through his Bezos Family Foundation, established with his parents, focuses mainly on education and seems also to embrace an experiment-to-see-what-works ethos while focusing on education and "new approaches to old problems."

New approaches to old problems -- exactly what newspapers need. And one thing a new approach should include is a commitment to widen the discussion. Much of the debate about potential new business models for newspapers has been about preserving journalism. But we need to do more than just preserve journalism. In this time of disruption and change, how about a discussion of how to improve journalism, of what's missing, of what can be strengthened in this new hybrid model?

Among the benefits the Internet brings is the ability to relentlessly stay on a story long after a lot of the big, traditional outlets have moved on. The participation enabled by the Web allows people to engage with the story, contribute, develop it in small ways, take it deeper and keep at it until it gets the attention it deserves. We've had too many autopsies, but not enough biopsies (most notoriously over the invasion of Iraq and the financial meltdown), and we need to change that.

In the debate over new media vs. old media, the lament is often heard that one of the things we're in danger of losing from the heyday of old media is muckraking, crusading journalism. But by enabling participation, new media can actually help fuel stories that lead to real change.

While Bezos has not been explicitly political, he has, as David Weigel writes, "earned a reputation as a libertarian with a targeted style of giving." In addition to contributing $2.5 million to the referendum effort that successfully legalized same-sex marriage in Washington state, Bezos has also donated to the Reason Foundation, which publishesReason magazine. So while we're dreaming, allow me to hope that one of the causes that the Washington Postunder Bezos will engage the public in is the war on drugs, which is one of Reason's big issues. As Reason's Matt Welch wrote Monday, "[T]he attorney general of the United States today is declaring America's drug-war-led over-incarceration a moral failure, and announcing new federal rules to deliberately evade mandatory minimum laws for drug offenses." Of course, this is but a baby step toward ending the insanely destructive -- and increasingly unpopular on both ends of the political spectrum -- war on drugs.

The Washington Post could be in a position to mobilize the public on these beyond-left-and-right issues by bringing the innovative tools of engagement and participation Bezos created at Amazon to the news arena. By enlisting readers, the Post can decide to take on issues like this and make it impossible for the D.C. establishment to ignore.

Another thing that's often missing from traditional journalism is news about what's working. Yes, it's important to know about what's broken and what's gone wrong, but if that's all we get, we won't have a true picture of what's really going on in our lives and our communities.

Too often news about things that are actually working is looked down on by traditional media or saved only for Thanksgiving or the last five, feel-good minutes of a local newscast. The reason most often given? Because news about what's working isn't popular. But I can definitely say this is not true. At HuffPost, we've made a commitment to report on what's working, in our communities and all over the world. And our experience shows that people are in fact hungry for these kinds of stories -- they are always among our most shared, and we found out that advertisers love them too.

This kind of reporting is especially important at a time when our government is so dysfunctional and the expectation of real solutions coming out of Washington is so low. By shining a light on individuals, nonprofits, entrepreneurs and local officials who have found a way to make a difference, we can encourage others to build on these successful efforts and have an even larger impact. Profile a civic-minded entrepreneur who's created two jobs and the attention can help scale that idea up and create a dozen jobs.

It's about expanding our definition of what is news. Bezos has already changed the definition of what retail is; our definition of what constitutes news could use the same level of rethinking.

Of course, this is all speculation. But it's also a real opportunity -- not just for the Washington Post, but for all of us to think about how we can make the most of this new hybrid future. "What technology has taken away, technology can return," Bezos said in a speech 13 years ago. And as Heraclitus made clear, it won't return it in the same way. But that's not a bad thing. It will be different, and it can also be better. Debates over business models for the news media are going to continue for a long time, and there will never be a single answer. But it's a very good thing to have Jeff Bezos as part of that conversation. The Washington Post has a great history. I have no doubt that now it will have a great future as well.

Arianna Huffington

President and Editor-in-Chief at The Huffington Post Media Group