Table of contents for May_2016 in Fast Company

BP America THE MILLION STEP CHALLENGE More than 23,000 employees enrolled in the company’s challenge, and nearly 2,000 surpassed 2 million steps within a year. Employees who reached step goals earned points toward eligibility for a lower-deductible health plan. Indiana University Health HEALTHY RESULTS After a three-month step challenge that began at the end of 2014, 40% of the 4,000 participants had decreased their BMI, 67% said they were coping better with stress, and 67% reported healthier eating habits. Kimberly-Clark LIVE WELL CHALLENGE As an incentive for completing biometric screenings, employees were challenged to take 10,000 steps a day. Forty-seven percent of participants increased their cardiovascular fitness; 50% of them lost weight and increased strength and flexibility. Appirio CLOUDFIT Appirio’s health insurance company, Anthem, invested $20,000 to help the company…

1 Catalyst Nonprofit research organization providing insights on women in the work -place; the organization’s Corporate Board Services includes a directory of CEO–recommended female candidates, available to member companies. 2 WomenCorporate-Directors Foundation Worldwide community championing female leadership and good governance. The foundation, which maintains a job board of open director positions, facilitates introductions between CEOs and executive recruiters and members. 3 Women in the Boardroom Offers tools, advice, and networking opportunities throughout the U.S. to prepare women for director positions. VIP membership (from $900 a year) comes with notifications for open board seats and access to the organization’s “matchmaking” program. 4 Thirty Percent Coalition National organization with a mission to grow the proportion of female board members at public companies from 19% to 30%. The coalition encourages institutional investors, in…

Jay Z After more than 16 years of collaboration, Jay Z and Young Guru are a well-established team. Many of the superstar’s hits bear Guru’s studio touch, from “Girls, Girls, Girls” to “99 Problems” to the Jay Z and Alicia Keys smash “Empire State of Mind.” Mariah Carey Young Guru helped Carey turn Cam’ron’s “Oh Boy” (which he had also worked on) into “Boy (I Need You),” from her 2002 album Charmbracelet. He also worked on the album’s “You Got Me,” which Jay Z appears on. Beyoncé The engineer contributed to her song “Welcome to Hollywood,” from 2006’s B’day, as well as the Jay Z hit “ ’03 Bonnie & Clyde,” on which she’s prominently featured. Kanye West Guru helped record “Never Let Me Down” from Kanye’s debut, The College…

1 EdX WHAT IT IS: An open-source online-course platform cofounded by Harvard University and MIT; serves up everything from computer science classes from the world’s top universities to specialized tutorials from organizations such as Amnesty International. BEST FOR: People looking for a name-brand education. 2 Codecademy WHAT IT IS: Five-year-old startup with user-friendly online coding classes, including basic HTML for novices and higher-level tutorials covering Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, and Python. The best part? It’s totally free. BEST FOR: Career switchers who want to learn on the cheap and at their own pace. 3 General Assembly WHAT IT IS: Coworking venture turned academy offering eight- to 10-week-long immersive courses in web development, data analytics, and user-experience design at 15 locations across four continents. BEST FOR: Skill-seekers who learn best in…

Fashion entrepreneur Andy Spade is known for bringing a retro-chic sensibility to the clients he advises through his Partners & Spade branding studio. But fans got a rare look at his personal style and decorating choices this winter when he consigned dozens of artworks and collectibles from his recently sold Long Island home through the virtual auction house Paddle8. By the time the sale closed in early February, the startup had sold everything from a Jean-Michel Basquiat drawing (valued at $50,000) to a six-foot-tall stuffed giraffe ($200 to $300). The sale was a triumph for Paddle8 cofounder Alexander Gilkes, who first floated the idea when he ran into Spade at a dinner at Tory Burch’s New York apartment. Gilkes, a former Phillips auctioneer and Old Etonian with a penchant for…

LEBRON JAMES HAMMERS DOWN A THUNDEROUS DUNK, AND 18,000 FANS AT THE 2016 NBA ALL-STAR GAME ERUPT IN A REVERBERATING “ OOOHHH!” It’s Valentine’s Day at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, where James, Stephen Curry, Kobe Bryant, and other stars are dazzling the crowd. A-list entertainers, from Drake to Kevin Hart to Jon Stewart, fill the courtside seats, while NBA commissioner Adam Silver monitors the action at half-court a few rows back. But one of the most significant people attending tonight’s game is someone most fans probably don’t recognize, an inconspicuous Irish math geek seated in row nine: Nigel Eccles, the 41-year-old CEO of FanDuel. Over the past year, Eccles has turned FanDuel into the most controversial player in the world of sports entertainment. The company’s web and mobile apps let…

Unshakeable shelter SHOP ARCHITECTS How can great design make a difference when it comes to natural disasters? That’s what SHoP Architects is hoping to answer this summer, when the New York City–based firm opens the first of 50 earthquakeresistant schools in Nepal, which was devastated last year by an 8.1-magnitude temblor. The not-forprofit Kids of Kathmandu tapped SHoP to build schools that can not only withstand the impact of a quake but also function as meeting points for families in the aftermath. “We didn’t want to do just a pretty design that would get published,” says Kim Holden, a founding principal at SHoP. “We wanted to do something that would actually get built.” Over numerous Skype calls, her team worked with officials to solve logistical challenges, such as finding locally…

Most mornings, Brett Broviak rises at 4:30 for a walk around a nearby track before work. The winters in his native Indiana are long and cold, but Broviak trudges on. Occasionally, he steals a glance at his Fitbit to check his progress toward his daily goal: 20,000 steps, or about 10 miles. It wasn’t always that way. In 2014, Broviak’s cholesterol and blood sugar levels were sky-high. After years of unhealthy habits, his weight had ballooned to 255 pounds. Like many Americans, he regularly indulged in fast food and drove almost everywhere, including to the Indiana University Health Center where he worked as a respiratory therapy manager. “I was borderline diabetic,” he says. “I knew I had to make some changes.” Broviak is now the poster child for his employer’s…

Karla Martin remembers the phone calls. A recruiter would be putting together a slate of board candidates for a company and would reach out to see if she was interested. The hitch: She would have only until the next day to decide. Martin, a former director of global business strategy at Google with more than 20 years of experience advising companies on how to drive growth, was certainly qualified to sit on a board. But her mentors warned her to be wary of becoming the token female and African-American candidate: If recruiters were seriously considering her for the position, they would have reached out earlier. “I’m sure there’s a good number of women and people of color who respond, and they do get the board seat,” Martin says. “But my…

Todd Carmichael, cofounder of the growing Philadelphia-based craft-coffee authority La Colombe, had a beef with iced lattes: He couldn’t stand the watered-down beverage that results from cooling steamed milk over ice. So last year, he invented a draft latte system for his cafés. Cold milk is infused with nitrous oxide (producing a silky microfoam), mixed with cold-pressed espresso, and poured from a keg. When sales at one of his Philadelphia outposts jumped 17.5% the week the draft latte was introduced, Carmichael began to think about how to take the drink from his cafés to store shelves. The problem Pouring a draft latte into cans or bottles would kill its signature texture. To develop a shelf-stable product, Carmichael had to find a way to make the nitrous oxide infusion happen in…

When she reached her early thirties, Amanda Steinberg was frustrated to realize that her net worth was negligible— despite a lucrative career in computer programming. A search for guidance proved equally frustrating: The women’s magazines she usually read focused more on controlling spending than building wealth, and sites like MarketWatch and Yahoo Finance were full of photos of men and assumed a level of knowledge she lacked. “It’s been a man’s job to think about long-term financial planning,” she says. And it shows: The Asset Funders Network reports that single women have 32 cents for every dollar of wealth owned by single men. In 2009, Steinberg set out to empower women with more information. She launched DailyWorth, a website and newsletter where she publishes advice on investing and financial security…

2009 March Three years after Congress exempts “skillbased” games from the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, Nigel Eccles and four cofounders create the daily fantasy sports (DFS) site FanDuel, where users can win money by competing against other players. 2012 April Boston-based DraftKings is founded by three Vistaprint execs. Through a series of acquisitions, it will become the secondbiggest DFS site, making it FanDuel’s chief rival. 2013 December FanDuel awards its first $1 million prize, to a player named Travis Spieth who spent $10 to enter a football competition. The sevenfigure payday is a DFS industry record. 2014 March DraftKings strikes marketing partnerships with Major League Baseball and the NHL. FanDuel receives $70 million in funding from NBC Sports Ventures and Comcast Ventures and partners with the NBA (which gets…

PADMASREE WARRIOR Then CTSO, CISCO SYSTEMS Now CEO, NEXTEV U.S. Padmasree Warrior wants to make your car as smart as your computer. After leaving Cisco Systems last fall, she was hired in December to run the U.S. division of Shanghai-based electric-vehicle startup NextEV, a Tesla rival that is working to integrate advanced Internet technology into automobiles. “Machine learning, computer vision, data science—all the things we’ve learned in the consumer Internet space we can now apply to the vehicle,” says Warrior. “I was trying to decide what to do [after Cisco], and I wanted to pick an area where we could apply technology to solve big problems, things with a global impact.” NextEV is planning to release its first consumer-targeted vehicle later this year, a “supercar” that is expected to crank…

Can my Fitbit tell if... 1 I’M PREGNANT? Perhaps. According to University of California, San Francisco, cardiologist Ethan Weiss, a lot of physiological changes occur during pregnancy, including an elevated heart rate and temperature. Some may appear as early as the first trimester. 2 I’M ONLY PRETENDING TO BE SICK? Yes and no. Fitbit devices don’t have diagnostic abilities, but their trend data can suggest if something is up. When you’re sick, your resting heart rate may rise and you often require more sleep. 3 I’M NERVOUS IN A MEETING? Heart rate is a useful, albeit not totally reliable, indicator of stress and anxiety. Although your heart may feel like it’s racing during that high-profile presentation, it may not be as dramatic as you think. 4 I’M TRYING TO HIDE…

Let people know you’re looking “Make it known that this is something you want to do. I got a lot of executive recruiters saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got this marketing position.’ I would always say, ‘I’m happy where I am at right now. I love Salesforce. But if you have any public board seats, here are my criteria.’ ” Be picky “Beth Comstock of GE, who is on the board of Nike, told me that given the reality of our jobs, you can only take one public board seat with the time commitment and demands of our current careers. So I wanted to be sure it was the right fit.” Identify what you want “I knew I wanted a seat with a company that is passionate about transforming their relationship with…

LaShana Lewis knew she could find a better job than managing a help desk. Growing up, Lewis had been intrigued by technical problems, and a high school teacher, recognizing her aptitude, had encouraged her to pursue a computer science major in college. Lewis managed to complete three and a half years of a degree before running out of scholarship funding, but on the job market, her coding skills seemed worthless. “It was a lot of people asking me, ‘Did you complete your degree?’ Not, ‘Do you know how to code?’ ” she says. Adding to her frustration, Lewis kept hearing companies claim that they couldn’t find tech talent in St. Louis. “You’re jumping up and down, waving your hand,” she recalls. “[You’re yelling,] ‘I’m here! I’m here!’ ” No one…

1 Commodity crops Researchers at DuPont and Caribou Biosciences are using CRISPR to create plants that are drought resistant and produce higher yields. The new plants should hit the market in five to 10 years— remarkably faster than the 10 to 17 years it takes most biotech crops. 2 Bananas The Cavendish banana, the most common type, is on the verge of extinction due to a fungal disease. But Korean researchers are attempting to save it, using CRISPR to snip out the receptor that the fungus uses. 3 Pigs A group of Chinese researchers have created a pig that is extra muscly, so it can yield healthier cuts of pork, while American researchers have successfully edited pigs to make them resistant to porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome, a common disease…

As a member of Uganda’s Bahima tribe, Olivia Byanyima carries a deep reverence for the African An kole cow. “Our culture revolves around this animal,” she says. But in recent years the number of purebred Ankoles— known for their majestic horns and commanding presence—has dropped as farmers cross Ankoles with breeds that produce more milk. Researchers have predicted that Ankoles could be extinct by the middle of the century. Byanyima, who moved to the U.S. in 2003, saw a chance to help. In 2014, she and social entrepreneur Shanley Knox founded Olivia Knox to create a luxury market for the horn, incentivizing farmers to raise more purebred Ankoles. “Now the farmer is not just raising it for meat and milk. It’s for the entirety,” Byanyima says. The pair works with…

Zac Posen The designer’s namesake line is famous for its celebrity fans, including Uma Thurman (below). When Caitlyn Jenner attended an Oscar party in February, she donned a Posen gown. “I think she feels a great deal of responsibility to be herself and feel comfortable,” he says. Brooks Brothers Posen’s favorite piece for the retailer: the white shirtdress, which he updated with pockets and a self-tying belt. “It’s the essence of effortless Truly Zac Posen “For a lot of women, her wedding is her one red-carpet moment,” Posen says. In 2014, the designer brought his love of voluminous and structured gowns to the masses with an affordable wedding line for David’s Bridal. The dresses, all priced at or below $1,500, can be ordered in sizes 0 to 26. Delta Airlines…