Fast Company May 2015

The last half-dozen or so years have not been kind to traditional electronics stores—Circuit City has vanished, Best Buy has struggled, and RadioShack has filed for bankruptcy protection. Then there’s SparkFun, an untraditional online retailer selling supergeeky stuff like microcontrollers and circuit boards. Its annual revenue, while still modest, has tripled since 2009, reaching $32 million. Defying convention, the 154-person company has never taken investor money, staying profitable as it has grown. Unless you’re a computer-hardware hacker, you probably haven’t heard of SparkFun. It’s a beneficiary of the rise of the maker movement, that convergence of old-school hobbyist tinkering and the age of programmable electronics. Like previous tools that have democratized digital creation, customizable hardware is making it cheaper and easier for do-it-yourselfers to create their own gizmos and gadgets, and people…

As the February 2011 meeting of the board of the Walt Disney Co. came to its close, the directors gathered at Team Disney headquarters in Burbank, California, broke into applause. They were cheering themselves for having just approved a nearly $1 billion investment CEO Bob Iger said he needed to complete an ambitious project, called MyMagic+, that could transform Disney World, and possibly all of Disney’s theme parks. They were celebrating Iger, whose five-year tenure had been marked by the success of these kinds of bold bets: spending $7.4 billion to buy Pixar; remaking Disney Animation; pushing ahead on Shanghai Disneyland; and buying Marvel Entertainment. They were applauding the chairman of the Parks and Resorts division, Tom Staggs, who clearly seemed to be driving the MyMagic+ project in the right…

I don’t like to boss people around. I don’t get motivated by telling people what to do, I don’t take any pleasure in it. So I manage with curiosity, by asking questions. In a typical day, I may have 50 conversations of some substance. But I so prefer hearing what other people have to say that I instinctively ask questions. If you’re listening to my side of a phone call, you may hear little but the occasional question. Questions are a great management tool. Asking questions elicits information, of course. Asking questions creates the space for people to raise issues they are worried about that a boss, or colleagues, may not know about. Asking questions lets people tell a different story than the one you’re expecting. Most important from my perspective, asking questions…

Sometime around the year 2035, NASA hopes to fly a manned spacecraft to Mars and land astronauts on the planet. How will it achieve this daunting goal? Who will create the necessary technologies? And just as important, how will it teach the American public about the difficulties—and value—of such a distant, expensive, and audacious mission? At the moment, much of the responsibility for all of that rests on Ellen Stofan, NASA’s chief scientist. Here’s what we can learn from someone trying to solve a problem that no one has ever faced before. (S) PACE YOUR SELF When it comes to achieving such a (literally) distant goal, the key is to keep the process manageable, according to Stofan. “We have to ask, ‘How can we break a huge challenge like sending humans to…

WHEN MY FACEBOOK ACCOUNT was hacked in March, I didn’t panic. I changed my passwords, and I enabled two-step authentication on Facebook, Twitter, and Google. I knew that once a single account was compromised, it could lead to a domino effect of unauthorized access far beyond a single social network. I was proud of my calm, surgical demeanor. Then I remembered that I use my Facebook, Twitter, and Google accounts to access other websites, apps, and services. I looked at which apps had access to my Twitter account: There are more than 200 (a printout is 24 pages long). Calm surgeon? More like a naive epidemiologist dealing with a potential viral outbreak. THE BIG THREE GATEKEEPERS HAVE AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF DATA ABOUT US. THEY’RE LIKE SANTA: THEY KNOW WHEN WE’VE BEEN BAD…

1939 Walt Disney starts sending animators on research trips to state fairs and carnivals. “Once he got this bug about the park, it was an obsession,” said animator Ward Kimball. “It’s all he thought about.” 1948 Walt’s internal memo on “Mickey Mouse Park” envisions a “Main Village” with train station and town square, “Wild West town” with cowboys and horses, Disney-themed rides, and even a working post office. 1952 What comes to be known as the Imagineering lab is born. Its goal: dream up theme parks, resorts, attractions, cruise ships, and real estate developments. Its motto: “We make the magic.” 1955 On July 17, Disneyland opens in Anaheim, California. Demand is so high that people counterfeit the invite-only passes. Concessions run out. The Mark Twain Steamboat ride nearly capsizes. 1959 Matterhorn Bobsleds opens as Disney’s first roller coaster–style attraction.…