Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Confirming the report from earlier this week, Sony president and CEO Kazuo Hirai said the company will cut 10,000 jobs globally as part of a big “One Sony” reorganization.

The company has five immediate goals: it wants to strengthen its core businesses — digital imaging, gaming and mobile — turn around its TV business, expand into emerging markets, create new businesses and fuel innovation and, finally, realign the business portfolio and optimize its resources.

The 10,000 layoffs and the management shuffling (Kazuo Hirai replaced Howard Stringer as president and CEO in February 2012) pretty much cover that last bit.

The details on strengthening its core businesses include a lot of consolidation — for example, Sony will integrate its smartphone, tablet and VAIO businesses, and reduce the number of product models in its TV business.

As for innovation, Sony is entering medical technology and life science industry, and it plans to “aggressively promote” 4K technology, which brings four times the resolution of Full HD. We’ll see 4K-enabled products in pro equipment, but Sony also promises to bring the technology into the high-end consumer product segment, which means our brand new Full HD TVs might look obsolete in a couple of years.

All of these will cost around $926 million, and Sony projects it will result in net sales of 6 trillion yen ($74 billion) and an operating income margin of 5% in its electronics business by 2014.

If you want to be charismatic, your mind can’t wander while you’re one-on-one with a customer or colleague. Here’s a simple one-minute exercise to help you focus.

Charismatic behavior can be broken down into three core elements: presence, power, and warmth. These elements depend both on our conscious behaviors and on factors we don’t consciously control. People pick up on messages we often don’t even realize we’re sending through small changes in our body language.

In order to be charismatic, we need to choose mental states that make our body language, words, and behaviors flow together and express the three core elements of charisma. And presence is the foundation for everything else.

Have you ever felt, in the middle of a conversation, as if only half of your mind were present while the other half was busy doing something else? Do you think the other person noticed? If you’re not fully present in an interaction, there’s a good chance that your eyes will glaze over or that your facial reactions will be a split-second delayed. Since the mind can read facial expressions in as little as 17 milliseconds, the person you’re speaking with will likely notice even the tiniest delays in your reactions.

We may think that we can fake presence. We may think that we can fake listening. But we’re wrong. When we’re not fully present in an interaction, people will see it. Our body language sends a clear message that other people read and react to, at least on a subconscious level.

Not only can the lack of presence be visible, it can also be perceived as inauthentic, which has even worse consequences. When you’re perceived as disingenuous, it’s virtually impossible to generate trust, rapport, or loyalty. And it’s impossible to be charismatic.

Luckily, presence is a learnable skill that can be improved with practice and patience. Being present means simply having a moment-to-moment awareness of what’s happening. It means paying attention to what’s going on rather than being caught up in your own thoughts.

Now that you know the cost of lacking presence, try this exercise to test yourself and learn three simple techniques to boost your charisma in personal interactions.

First, find a reasonably quiet place where you can close your eyes (whether standing or sitting).
Set a timer for one minute. Close your eyes and focus on one of the following three things: the sounds around you, your breathing, or the sensations in your toes.

1. Scan your environment for sound. As a meditation teacher told me, “Imagine that your ears are satellite dishes, passively and objectively registering sounds.”
2. Focus on your breath and the sensations it creates in your nostrils or stomach. Pay attention to one breath at a time, but try to notice everything about this one breath. Imagine that your breath is someone you want to give your full attention to.
3. Focus your attention on the sensations in your toes. This forces your mind to sweep through your body, helping you to get into the physical sensations of the moment.

Did you find your mind constantly wandering even though you were trying your best to be present? As you’ve noticed, staying fully present isn’t always easy. There are two main reasons for this.

First, our brains are wired to pay attention to novel stimuli, whether they be sights, smells, or sounds. We’re wired to be distracted, to have our attention grabbed by any new stimulus: it could be important! It could eat us! This tendency was key to our ancestors’ survival. Imagine two tribesmen hunting through the plains, searching the horizon for signs of the antelope that could feed their family. Something flickers in the distance. The tribesman whose attention wasn’t immediately caught? He’s not our ancestor.

The second reason is that our society encourages distraction. The constant influx of stimulation we receive worsens our natural tendencies. This can eventually lead us into a state of continuous partial attention, in which we never give our full attention to any single thing. We’re always partially distracted.

So if you often find it hard to be fully present, don’t beat yourself up. Presence is hard for almost all of us. A study coauthored by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert estimated that nearly half of the average person’s time was spent “mind wandering.”

The good news is that even a minor increase in your capacity for presence can have a major effect on those around you. Because so few of us are ever fully present, if you can manage even a few moments of full presence from time to time, you’ll make quite an impact.

The very next time you’re in a conversation, try to regularly check whether your mind is fully engaged or whether it is wandering elsewhere (including preparing your next sentence). Aim to bring yourself back to the present moment as often as you can by focusing on your breath or your toes for just a second, and then get back to focusing on the other person.

One of my clients, after trying this exercise for the first time, reported: “I found myself relaxing, smiling, and others suddenly noticed me and smiled back without my saying a word.”

Don’t be discouraged if you feel that you didn’t fully succeed in the one-minute exercise above. You actually did gain a charisma boost simply by practicing presence. And because you’ve already gained the mindset shift (awareness of the importance of presence and the cost of the lack of it), you’re already ahead of the game.

Image: Flickr user Paul Alegria

Ari Wallach, 37, heads a consulting firm that draws power from an eclectic mix of unconventional experts. Resolving conflict through discourse is the theme of a career spanning politics, commerce, and religion.

As the founder of Synthesis, a strategic consulting firm based in D.C. and New York, Ari Wallach helps government, NGO, and corporate clients–including CNN, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. State Department, and United Nations Refugee Agency–find innovative solutions to complex problems. For the student of political philosophy who once considered going to rabbinical school, synthesis–resolving seemingly incompatible views and experiences–has been the theme running through his eclectic career that’s ranged from conflict resolution at UC Berkeley, to finance work with the Democratic National Committee, new-media projects, consulting with the nonprofit Coro Foundation, and the “Great Schlep” campaign to get out the Jewish vote for Obama in 2008.

FAST COMPANY: How is Synthesis different from other, bigger consulting firms?

ARI WALLACH: All Synthesis is, is myself and my partner running the back end. It’s like cloud innovation; we’re really trying to build a next-generation consultancy, drawing on a different kind of expert network. All the rock stars I know now are freelancers and perma-lancers, but there’s no mechanism for them to work together as teams–for a few days or a year or two. We’re working to figure out the infrastructure for this kind of organization.

We’ll hire a stay-at-home mom who doesn’t want to return to a position at McKinsey, but will give us 15 brilliant hours a week in between everything else she’s doing in her life. We can bring in an urban-graffiti practitioner or someone who builds amazing shelters at Burning Man and used to build DARPA-contract structures and get them to reframe what they do so it’s relevant to a client’s issues. We don’t have a one-size-fits-all process like other consulting firms have. It’s like going to a Freudian or Jungian therapist–I’m more comfortable with the gestalt school. We bring a lot of curation–knowing what fits but also what doesn’t fit. We also have a heavy reliance on academics–especially in anthropology and social psychology.

How does your experience in conflict resolution inform your consulting work?

There is a false premise that innovation is about ideas. But ideas are actually relatively simple to come up with. True innovation is about culture and execution. The heart of innovation is conflict–you are challenging the status quo. Another thing I learned from working on conflict resolution throughout high school and college is that the problem you’re talking about is usually not really the problem. We often end up solving something that wasn’t part of the original brief. That’s why it’s important to bring diverse skills and beliefs and not write anything off.

Where does your interest in conflict come from?

I grew up in a home steeped in conflict, watching black-and-white World War II movies on TV. My father was a Holocaust survivor whose father was shot in front of him and whose sisters and mothers were sent to Auschwitz. He escaped under gunfire and fought with the Jewish underground in Poland. He’d been in Cuba for 11 years during the revolution, where speaking Spanish and Russian was a real advantage. But my mom is a professional artist whose teacher was Buckminster Fuller, so as very young kid I was exposed to that. Trying to reconcile what that meant to what happened in WWII, and preventing that from happening again–there you have the underlying thesis of my life.

Did your upbringing also influence your desire to seek out diverse perspectives?

I had an eclectic upbringing, to say the least. My two older sisters and I were born in Guadalajara, where my dad ran a successful pipe business. My dad spoke 11 languages by the time he passed away 17 years ago. In San Francisco, I remember going to restaurants in the ’80s and he’d disappear–he’d be back in the kitchen talking with the staff in Spanish. From that, I learned that everyone is a source.

Pioneers of the new (and chaotic) frontier of business

Flagship Fluxers, Photo: Brooke Nipar

In our February 2012 issue Fast Company Editor Robert Safian identified a diverse set of innovators who embrace instability, tolerate–and even enjoy–recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions. People like author/Onion digital media maverick Baratunde Thurston, Greylock Data Scientist DJ Patil, Microsoft Senior Researcher danah boyd, and GE’s Beth Comstock. This series continues to explore the new values of GenFlux. Find more Fluxers here. And tweet your contributions using #GenFlux.

What’s motivated you to keep trying new things?

Figuring out what you don’t want to do is as important as figuring out what you do want to do. As I was exposed to different things and seen the trade-offs, I’ve opted out. I’ve gone through the entire bucket list of everything I thought I wanted to do when I was growing up. When I was 18 I was in the hospital in a body cast. I did medical rounds with my doctor and saw that I wasn’t interested in the mundane part of working in a hospital. I spent time in an architecture firm and saw how much time you needed to put in as an apprentice to get to Geary level.

By the time I left school, I’d done time with the Clinton-Gore camp and a think tank in DC. I knew I didn’t want do presidential campaigns or work in a think tank. In the mid-90s, I founded a startup called InForum–a live-events forum for Gen-X politics–which grew to be pretty big in the Bay Area. After that, I went to New York and worked with the nonprofit Coro Foundation–an externship program based on the medical rotation model–where I worked as a consultant with the Loews Hotel Group, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and New York’s largest public-employee union, rotating through different stakeholders in civic matters. Half of the people in New York City government are Coro alumni. That really laid the groundwork for the business model of Synthesis. After Coro, I unsuccessfully tried to get funding for a Gen-X Charlie Rose-style TV called ReThink. After that, I went on to do some consulting and corporate business development.

How did the Great Schlep lead you into starting your own firm?

During the 2008 campaign, it became obvious that Obama had a perception problem with Jewish voters. I had a good idea that what needed to be done, but it was outside of the campaign brand playbook–something more politically dangerous but with a huge potential upside. Using raw humor–Sarah Silverman made video for us–and guilt, the Great Schlep was about mobilizing young Jewish Obama supporters, largely through social media, to get out the elderly Jewish vote by actually going to places like Florida where their grandparents lived. After that campaign, I got several calls from Fortune 500 firms looking for Chief Innovation Officers. I was really torn about what to do next and got connected with an executive coach–even doing what I do, you still need to go to someone else to do for you what you do for others. Talking with him, I came to the realization that I didn’t want to work for anyone ever again. He said, “It sounds like you want to build a consulting shop and turn some of these job offers into clients.”

Do you consider yourself a risk-taker?

People from outside might see me as a risk-taker, but I’m actually very conservative–even more so that married with 3-year-old twin daughters. Restlessness and curiosity are driving forces for me, and I always want to be learning from what I’m doing. But I’ve always known that this is my life, so I’ve saved up for exploration–some of the things that you don’t see on LinkedIn, like a residency at Green Gulch, the Zen monastery in Marin Country; or going to Santa Barbara to learn how to surf; or doing PR for Deepak Chopra on a book tour, where I learned individual branding.

Is it possible for everyone to have the kind career you have, though?

In 2012, no. The model of an evolving career is not possible for everyone. I went to state school and had no student debt. I did well at a couple of dot-coms. I’m a big fan of internships–I would love to see a formally instituted “gap year” for graduates, where you could rotate through diverse fields and learn about them very quickly. We don’t live in culture where we go out and ask people to teach use what they do, and we’ve done away with the kinds of mentorships and rotations that would let people get the flux-iness out of our system without so much risk.

Are you done job-hopping?

I’m working with all kind of clients–my day might include a meeting with imams and reverends, then getting on a video link with Geneva to talk about building shelters in Nairobi, and discussing national security issues. I’m thinking, wow, this is really cool. What appeals to me are big, Talmudic-level ideas that give you a lot to wrestle with and work with. This is it for years to come.

Image: Flickr user Iversen Rönnlund

Google+ has failed to take off. And it’s not even necessarily a fault of the product: Facebook is the de facto social network of our time. If there’s a second in command, it’s the more quick and casual Twitter. There are only so many social networks that we can all be social on every day.

But that’s not stopping Google from announcing a major redesign of Google+ today. It’s better in almost every way, focused on real-time trends, customization, and playing to Google’s few advantages they have in the space. But, you know, it’s just a little too late for design alone to save the day.

The biggest change, aside from the upsized pictures and videos, is the new Navigation Ribbon. Whereas the old Google+ tucked away your homepage or profile links near the top search bar (which is just so Google, right?), the Navigation Ribbon makes these buttons big and touch-friendly, filling up the former huge void of white space on the left side of the page.

Furthermore, this Navigation Ribbon is a step toward a platform filled with deeper customization options. As of now, you can pretty much just rearrange its buttons as you see fit, hiding what you don’t want to see and hovering over each for more information. But into the future, it has the potential to become every bit as robust as OS X’s dock. It could be the core of an app-driven Google+ OS.

Google’s other series of changes leverage the company’s technical prowess. There’s a new bar that shows your friends who are online all the time. (It’s shamelessly identical to Facebook’s.) But there is more to this design scheme than blatant copying: Google is now pushing immediate communication (what Google+ actually does best). This “who’s around” bar is just part of Google’s renewed push to their Hangouts–their remarkable, real-time video chats that support a whole host of friends talking together. If Google+ has a killer app, it’s always been Hangouts.

Hangouts now has its own page that allows you to see, not just your friends who are talking, but jump in “popular” conversations with anyone from around the world (and surely some celebrities that Google plants from time to time). This is a shift in strategy for Hangouts, sure, but it’s actually an expansion scope for Google+ and social networking altogether. Through design alone, Google is pushing users to, not just “friend” an acquaintance, but to actually meet up face-to-face with someone they might not know.

A lot of what Google announced today was pure catch-up. It snagged a new “Trending on Google+” function from Twitter. It now features a profile page with a top, landscape portrait that’s nearly identical to Facebook’s Timeline. But if Google is going to copy, at least they’re copying some good ideas. And at least they haven’t given up on the vast potential of the one ace up their sleeve: Hangouts.

It’s just, well…my grandma’s birthday is already on Facebook.