Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The 1-ton Curiosity rover used its arm-mounted drill to bore a hole 0.63 inches (1.6 centimeters) wide and 2.5 inches (6.4 cm) deep in a section of sedimentary bedrock on Friday (Feb. 8). The activity paves the way for the first-ever analysis of fresh Martian subsurface material and provides the last major checkout of the robot’s gear and instruments, researchers said.

“The most advanced planetary robot ever designed now is a fully operating analytical laboratory on Mars,” John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. “This is the biggest milestone accomplishment for the Curiosity team since the sky-crane landing last August, another proud day for America.”

Curiosity will process the sample over the next few days, researchers said. The rover will use some of the material to scour its sample-handling hardware clean of any residues that may remain from Earth before transferring any powder to the analytical instruments on the rover’s body.

“We’ll take the powder we acquired and swish it around to scrub the internal surfaces of the drill bit assembly,” said Curiosity drill systems engineer Scott McCloskey, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “Then we’ll use the arm to transfer the powder out of the drill into the scoop, which will be our first chance to see the acquired sample.”

Drilling so deep into a Red Planet rock is a complex and unprecedented maneuver, so the mission team worked its way up to the first effort in a steady, stepwise fashion.

About two weeks ago, Curiosity began assessing the target rock, which is part of an outcrop called “John Klein” that was exposed to liquid water long ago. The rover first pressed down on the rock with its arm-mounted drill in a series of “pre-load” tests. It then used the drill’s percussive action to hammer the outcrop without spinning the drill bit, which cleared the way for a recent “mini-drill” that bored into rock but didn’t collect samples.

Getting Curiosity ready for all these steps — and for yesterday’s successful full-up drilling run — also took a lot of prep work here on Earth, researchers said.

“Building a tool to interact forcefully with unpredictable rocks on Mars required an ambitious development and testing program,” said JPL’s Louise Jandura, chief engineer for Curiosity’s sample system. “To get to the point of making this hole in a rock on Mars, we made eight drills and bored more than 1,200 holes in 20 types of rock on Earth.”

Curiosity landed inside Mars’ huge Gale Crater on the night of Aug. 5 to determine if the area has ever been capable of supporting microbial life. Along with its 10 science instruments and 17 cameras, the rover’s drill is considered key to this quest, for it allows scientists to peer deep into Martian rocks for evidence of past habitability.

Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Twitter unveiled some of the upcoming changes to version 1.1 of its API that could have a drastic impact on the service’s third-party ecosystem.

As promised, Twitter is squeezing the knot around the neck of third-party Twitter apps that mimic Twitter.com with a more stringent set of API rules.

The changes in Twitter API V 1.1 are all designed to foster “a consistent Twitter experience” and include universal endpoint authentication, per-endpoint rate-limiting and a number of crucial changes to the “Developer Rules of the Road.” It may be the latter changes that prove most troubling to the remaining collection of third-party, consumer-focused Twitter clients.

The new rules start by transforming the fuzzier “Display Guidelines” into “Display Requirements.” Guidelines are something you can choose to work with or not. Rules are, well, rules. Those clients that do not adhere to rules like proper scaling per device could have their application key revoked.

Similarly, all of these apps have to be certified by Twitter before pre-installation (say prior to consumer delivery). Failure to do so could result in application key revocation.

Twitter may also be seeking to limit the number of users these third-party tools can have. Its last Rules of the Road update says that developers who need a large number of user tokens will have to work directly with Twitter to acquire them. The company does acknowledge that some third-party developer apps are already past these new limits and is willing to work with them, but only to a point. When they grow to 200% of their current size, they’ll need to get the okay from Twitter to grow further.

Paul Haddard of Tapbots, the company behind the popular iOS client Tweetbot responded to the new user token caps, saying:

He also added that Tweebot for Mac is “still on track” and that the beta will be out soon.

Twitter developers currently using version 1.0 of the Twitter API will have six months to migrate to version 1.1.

Shifting the Focus on the Ecosystem

By changing the rules for developers — especially developers of traditional Twitter clients — Twitter is also hoping to refocus developer activity on its overall ecosystem.

In the post outlining the Twitter API 1.1 changes, Twitter’s Michael Sippey organized apps that use Twitter data into four quadrants.

Going forward, Twitter is explicitly telling developers not to focus on the upper right-hand quadrant — traditional Twitter clients and syndication — and is instead urging developers to focus on other quadrants for their apps and services.

This mirrors advice Twitter gave to developers) back in March 2011 — focus on projects that are not traditional Twitter clients.

Although Storify and Favstar.fm are mentioned as falling into the upper-right quadrant, Ryan Sarver, director of platform at Twitter, clarified that those two services are examples of what types of activity Twitter wants to see moving forward.

Ostensibly, that means that pure third-party clients, such as Tweetbot, Echofon and Twitterrific are out of luck.

Moving on From Here

The early response from some of the major Twitter client developers is one of an uneasy calm. Twitter has been threatening to take a harder stance against third-party clients for almost 18 months and many developers were already operating under the assumption that another shoe was about to drop.

The question becomes, will these developers — many of whom have helped shape Twitter as a service and community at a fundamental level — continue to invest in the platform.

Right now, it’s too early to tell. Still, today’s announcement is a great endorsement for Dalton Caldwell’s App.net. App.net recently raised more than $600,000 in crowdfunding with a goal of creating a Twitter-like platform that isn’t funded by advertising and that doesn’t limit users or developers rights with the API.

The impact on users won’t be visible until the new changes take effect — but for some users, it could mean a drastically different experience.

What do you think of Twitter’s API changes? Let us know in the comments.

Lance Ulanoff contributed to this article

Imagine you are Taylor Grey Meyer and you have worked very hard on acquiring a future in the business of sports. You started at age 15 by volunteering at a minor league team. You’ve interned at a national league team. You’ve acquired a degree in sports commerce and you’re on your way to a law degree. You move to the city where you’d love to work and you send no fewer than 30 resumes in for various roles, eventually dropping into the “entry level” category, just in case. They reject you there, too.

And then you get a letter asking you if you want to PAY for a camp that will teach you more about the sports business from the very same organization.

That’s exactly what happened.

The Article Above Is Required Reading Before We Talk Further

If you skipped over that link, you should read it and then come back. It’s okay. I’ll wait.

What’s interesting to me is that most people’s reactions were in the vein of “I wouldn’t hire her” and “Oh, she just burned all her bridges.” I’m stuck. Because I understand how it’s not professional to ask prospective employers to suck one’s dick (doubly interesting because Taylor’s a female), but I also know that she must be so frustrated, and that by pointing out all her qualifications, it’s even more obvious that she’d had enough.

To me, she’s got a lot of guts and character and she’s clearly passionate. She just found the end of her rope is all. But that’s the real question, isn’t it?

Would You Hire This Person?

Most people disqualified her because she lost her cool. Others disqualified her because she cursed. Me? I think her only sin is that she kept trying to send resumes instead of looking for another way to land the role she sought. To me, the problem isn’t that she’s ballsy, not that she swore, but that she wasn’t inventive enough to try something other than mailing pieces of paper and/or pixels to a company that was ignoring her.

Have you tried everything to get where you want to go? The answer is almost always no. We have such creative brains, and yet, we forget to use them when we get stuck in the Matrix of what is “typical.”

I’m not counting Taylor Grey Meyer out, but I’m definitely saying she is invited to get a lot more creative with her attempts to find a sports organization worthy of her qualifications and talents.

What say you?

Ambulance chasing only gets you so far. Hitching a ride, metaphorically speaking, on rockets funded by private corporations seeking fortunes beyond Earth’s atmosphere is where it’s at for eager legal pioneers.

There are stellar opportunities for lawyers specializing in space exploration. Space law is quickly becoming an integral part of the evolving aerospace industry. These lawyers exist in a tightly knit industry that deals with all kinds of practical issues and some that seem cribbed from science fiction. Depending on whether the space lawyer is in private practice or academia, he or she could handle anything from liability laws pertaining to litigious space tourists to the legal framework surrounding human encounters with E.T.

“Space tourists are usually high-income earners whose survivors can use high powered lawyers–insurability for private space travel flights is a big issue at this time,” says space lawyer Doug Griffith, a former Marine Helicopter pilot now working within the commercial space industry. Like him, lots of space lawyers are veterans. And nearly all of them are space and science geeks who found a way to combine their passion for outer space with legal practice.

Space lawyers even have their own legal journal and university programs. The marvelously titled Journal of Space Law is published by the University of Mississippi Law School’s National Center for Remote Sensing, Air, and Space Law. Articles in the current issue deal with, among other things, death liability in commercial space flight accidents, international law relating to suborbital flights, and mineral rights for lunar mining. Students interested in space law also have the option of studying in the Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; other law schools also offer space law courses within larger programs.

Surprisingly, it’s not the legal profession’s equivalent of a degree in fine arts. Far from it. Short of bumping into Alf, the final frontier for space law is extraterrestrial mining. Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining venture backed by filmmaker James Cameron and Googlers Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, is entering a legal gray area. “Outer space mining, in legal terms, is the Wild West,” Griffith tells Fast Company. Lawyer Michael Listner wrote an article on the topic that notes no one has truly figured out sovereignty laws for outer space and private, non-governmental exploration—the United States or China cannot claim sovereignty over an asteroid, but private corporations might. Planetary Resources, for their part, claims that asteroids do not count as “celestial bodies” regulated by the 1967 treaty because meteorites, which are asteroids that fell to earth, are not covered under it. If Planetary Resources really does succeed in starting up extraterrestrial mining operations, the value of the minerals it finds might pale in comparison to space lawyers’ billable hours.

Satellite issues, however, are the bread and butter of space law. Satellites handle television transmissions, GPS signals, and a host of other projects for commercial, military and government clients alike. Several binding international treaties such as the 1972 Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused By Space Objects, and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty address liability and risk concerns over satellites–red meat for these interstellar legal eagles. (Specifics regarding fault for either non-functioning satellites or people or property on the ground hurt by falling satellites depends on the locality.)

Even NASA and the United Nations have put space lawyers on retainer, asking them more recently to update old legal guidelines or create new ones for the occasion that humanity reaches other planets. The NASA policy for quarantining humans who met extraterrestrials while visiting these other planets was created by Apollo-era space lawyers. It was repealed in 1991. The extraterrestrial regulations were part of a larger law primarily aimed at quarantining astronauts who, in those Cuban Missile Crisis days, were feared might bring pathogens home from the Moon. (Sorry, conspiracy theorists!). The Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) is an international organization based in France dedicated to space research with experts drawn from academia and the private sphere worldwide. Although the bulk of COSPAR’s work these days deals with GPS issues and satellite law, the organization published a planetary protection policy several years ago that issued non-binding guidelines for astronauts visiting other planets.

Other space law experts have since written papers on topics like international law and permanent lunar bases. Eventually, many more regulations written in the age of Apollo and Soyuz will need to be updated for the era of the International Space Station and SpaceX.

The sky’s no longer the limit for ambitious lawyers.

For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Find Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, on Twitter and Google+.

Not too long ago, as I was putting the final touches on a client presentation, I stumbled across a surprising observation. The best insights in my report didn’t emerge in my office, during conference calls, or at meetings. They somehow appeared in the bathroom.

Research on the nature of creativity suggests my experience isn’t all that unique. Often, the most effective way of solving a difficult problem is simply walking away. The moment we allow ourselves to disengage from the individual pieces of a puzzle is the moment a solution appears. It’s why Albert Einstein regularly went sailing and why Charles Darwin planned his day around a countryside stroll. Thomas Edison simply napped.

In many ways, problem solvers are like artists. Taking a few steps back provides painters with a fresh perspective on their subject, lending them a new angle for approaching their work. Problem solving follows a similar recipe, but it’s not always the physical distance that we need. It’s psychological distance; mental space for new insights to bloom.

In a world where finding solutions makes up the crux of a typical workday, we are all artists. Cognitive artists. And to deliver our best work, we need revitalizing breaks. Distancing ourselves from our work grants us a broader view, activating a global perspective that precedes breakthrough.

So, why the bathroom?

If you’re like most office employees, access to sailboats, the countryside and a relaxing couch is in short supply. A walk to the bathroom is one of the few opportunities you have for disengaging, letting go of trivial details and refocusing on the bigger picture–even Steve Jobs recognized the bathroom’s potential, insisting that Pixar only build two in its studios, to provide employees with maximum enforced mixing. Neurologically, it is during these moments away from your desk the right hemisphere of your brain comes to life, making you more appreciative of the forest and less sensitive to the trees.

While most of us give little thought to our workplace bathroom, there’s good reason to believe it can have an impact on the quality of the work we produce — especially in organizations that rely on creativity and problem solving to stand out. Over the past decade, studies have shown that both our thoughts and behaviors are heavily influenced by our surroundings, in ways we often fail to recognize.

A few examples:

• The sound of classical music makes consumers spend more money
• The smell of cookies makes shoppers more likely to help a stranger
• The sight of red hurts intellectual performance but improves physical performance

Psychological findings like these are now commonplace, pointing to one irrefutable fact: Our environment shapes our thinking in powerful ways.

Which brings up some intriguing questions: How can we make the most of our time away from our desks? Is there a way of designing bathrooms to make them more inspiring? And what can organizations do to maximize the insights its employees get out of each bathroom visit?

Recent research on the science of creativity provides some helpful suggestions.

Rethink Muzak

One of the ways we become more creative is by exposing our minds to a broad variety of stimuli. The wider the selection of information you mentally digest–whether it be foreign movies, experimental novels or exotic travel–the more remote associations you’ll have in your arsenal. Or, in laymen’s terms, the more creative you’ll be.

Hearing unusual music primes us to think different–inspiring ideas, emotions and experiences that increase the associations active in our brain.

Surprise The Senses

 Another creativity nugget: We tend to find more insightful solutions to a problem when we’re in a good mood. One method experimentally proven for improving people’s moods is enjoyable scents. Positive scents don’t just make us feel better–they lead us to set higher goals for ourselves and experience a greater sense of self-efficacy.

Now, if you’re like most people, the restroom isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think of positive scents, and partly that’s because of how hard custodians work to mask negative smells, leaving most bathrooms feeling like an assault on the senses. But in our case, that’s a good thing. It means the bar for surprising people with positive scents is that much more accessible. A few opportunities for enhancing the scent of a workplace bathroom: unusual soaps, exotic candles, and the hallway outside a bathroom, boosting people’s mood before and after a visit.

Encourage Mental Stimulation

Part of what makes bathroom visits a boon to creativity is that they represent one of the few times during the workday when our physiological attention is directed inward, mimicking the psychological experience of insight. But it’s not just inward attention that’s needed–it’s inward attention in the context of fresh ideas.

Think about the last time you saw graffiti in the bathroom. Chances are, not only did you read it, you probably thought about the person who wrote it, perhaps wondering what (the hell) was going through their mind. We can’t help but think about the things we see, but we can choose what we look at. Providing a diet of mentally stimulating material in workplace bathrooms can be done in a number of ways: posting unusual artwork, leaving out thought provoking magazines or using digital picture frames to keep the imagery fresh. The key is for the material to be stimulating and indirectly related to work you do.

Once upon a time, going to the bathroom was a distraction. Something that kept us from work; an unfortunate bodily shortcoming that compromised efficiency. But that world doesn’t exist anymore. Today, our economy is powered by an engine of insight. Creativity in the workplace isn’t a “nice to have”—it’s what keeps companies in business. Which is why it’s ironic that most office bathrooms offer a bleak and unwelcoming environment. One that discourages insight and implicitly chides us to get back to our desks.

There’s just one problem. Creativity doesn’t work that way.

And if the science has taught us anything about the creative process it’s this: Finding unexpected solutions often requires an unexpected approach. Why not start in the bathroom?

Image: Flickr user Christophe Verdier

Shortly after his arrival in early 2002, Nick Wilkinson, as managing director of Dixons Retail, one of the largest consumer electronics retailers in Europe, actively tried to combine an already high level of internal competition by adding a team reward. As a consequence, many of his best salespeople left, discouraged by what they felt was a system intent on watering down their individual contributions.

However, to cater to the spirit of competition that is part of the young recruits eager to progress up the career ladder, he designed a plan in which stores were encouraged to compete against other Dixons stores of a similar size but in a different region. He also encouraged recruits to be transparent about their career ambitions via an internal, online application system. Everyone had access to whatever anyone else was planning as a career. Internal competition wasn’t so much eradicated as reoriented: some of it toward other stores, and some of it channeled toward career development rather than competition for the next customer.

As Wilkson’s story shows, getting the balance between competition and collaboration right is one of the most difficult team-leadership challenges.

Greed and Altruism

The tension between greediness and altruism among team members is subtle.

Intuition tells us that selves individuals should be popular; after all, they give a lot to the team yet ask little in return. It is equally obvious that selfish behavior is undesirable: if people were into it solely for themselves, they might free ride if given the chance, leaving some tasks either undone or poorly done. Here, the selfless might pick up the pieces and compensate for others. However, a surprising finding from recent experiments proves intuition wrong. Who would have thought that team members value charitable individuals much less than we (or even they) might expect.

Psychologists Craig Parks and Asako Stone came to this entirely unexpected finding after an experiment designed to study the expected ostracism of cheaters. Early results showed that team members were as likely to select the generous minded for exclusion. Using a computer simulation of a simple game, participants were given ten points per round to keep or place in a “public goods” kitty. Whatever points they put in the shared pool would double, after which participants could withdraw up to 25 percent of the pool (irrespective of their original investment). There was an incentive to withdraw less than 25 percent, namely, a bonus would be paid if the pool exceeded a certain threshold after an unspecified number of rounds. After the game, the psychologists asked the participants which of four players (one of whom was either a Scrooge or a martyr) they would like to play in another round. Unsurprisingly, the selfish person proved unpopular, but so did the selfless. So bewildering was the result that they reran the experiment four times while simultaneously testing alternative explanations.

So why is it that people are as likely to exclude selfless people as those who are greedy? Might it be that people are inherently bad at correctly estimating the contributions of those around them? So, if you take a smaller share, it reflects on you as having given less in the first place. Or, similarly, if you take less than others, this indicates the value you place on your own contribution, meaning that if you don’t value yourself, why should team members? The researchers’ first explanation–that the selfless person was perceived as incompetent or unpredictable, or the kind of person psychologists know will be disliked in this sort of game–proved to be false. When questioned, participants reported that seeing others take less than their fair share made them feel bad, and that the only way to rescue their own reputations (and make themselves feel better by comparison) was to eliminate the martyr. Virtue had become vice.

The Downside of Trust

Trust and vigilance coexist in varying degrees, as trust comes in different guises. For instance, it could signify confidence in team members’ technical competence, in their reliability, or in their benevolence. In much research on trust, the concept remains relatively poorly defined and referring to some combination of these three varieties, making it difficult to pin down. Nevertheless, some researchers exploring the topic of trust in teams have offered interesting suggestions. Penn State professor Kimberly Merriman, for example, thinks that low-trust teams are best rewarded according to individual effort. The fact that an estimated 85 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies use some form of team or group-based pay would thus suggest that they either think their teams have transcended the low-trust barrier or hope that pay might promote trust. If the latter is true, it seems ironic that cooperation is far better fostered by shared perceptions of fairness, of which the allocation of specific roles and individualized rewards are key features.

More trust isn’t necessarily better. One can have too much of a good thing. A recent experiment with teams of executive MBA students given two hundred colored-plastic bricks (from which they were asked to craft nothing more sophisticated than a coat stand) finds that trust can be the death knell to creativity. While trust is associated with creativity–not least because it signifies a psychologically safe space in which people can tinker freely without fear of losing face–this really only applies up to a point. Beyond this, trust becomes a liability. Team members placed a higher premium on harmony than on solving the problem at hand. The creative tension that results from questioning each other’s suggestions gives way to trying to please one another.

Tensions Ignite Outstanding Individual Performance

These seemingly contradictory forces coexist, in a perfectly natural way. Competition weeds out inefficiency in an otherwise collaborative environment. Trust can lower transaction costs but also lead to free riding if not paired with some degree of vigilance. Control can prevent waste, particularly when dealing with less experienced team members, yet autonomy is what allows them to make mistakes and learn from them, or to handle difficulties with clients they know well rather than those more senior but also more detached. Charisma can become manipulative if those who are more analytical do not rein it in. Analysis without charisma can fuel cynicism. Patience is a virtue but, if too widely shared, could cause a team to be indecisive; hence it helps to have someone on board who is more decisive, even if being too decisive can lead to hasty choices. Granting colleagues autonomy provides scope for personal growth and flexibility, yet too much autonomy enables them to build their own empires.

This means that control is required, although too much control can be seen as autocratic, off-putting, and ineffective. Open-mindedness allows for flexibility and creativity, but too much of it can render teams indiscriminate. Loyalty to key ideas, to ground rules, or to those in charge might balance that out, but loyalty that is too strong can cause teams to miss opportunities.

These tensions can quite easily make a team of high performers seem fragile, even if it is perfectly functional. The tensions can make even the most effective teams feel off-balance occasionally, as teammates work to reconcile, or reconcile themselves, to the contrary pulls. The potential for conflict is never far away, not just because those team members often fall prey to their own insecurities, but because they believe things should be done in particular ways.

The point is clear: what feels dysfunctional need not be. Tension may be unpleasant–but not illegitimate.

Image: Flickr user Kai C. Schwarzer

When it comes to content creation–even in short bits and blasts on Twitter—the human touch is what will keep marketers relevant and real. A look at J.Crew, Wegmans, NASCAR, and other brands that are getting it right.

Last weekend I snagged a lounge chair at our community pool next to a friend and fellow marketer I haven’t seen in weeks. We’re both managing the demands of family and careers and rarely get a chance to catch up with each other or with our reading. I pulled out Runner’s World from my bag, she pulled out J.Crew. Before long we were swapping magazines, and, as like-minded marketers, our conversation quickly shifted gears to how J.Crew had snagged us (cynical shoppers that we are) to become advocates for its brand.

Consider the catalog–a source of poolside perusing–that is now called the J.Crew style guide. It’s less about the specs and more about the style. I had the opportunity to share a stage recently with Diego Scott, the company’s CMO. Our panel discussion was all about “moving beyond the ‘like’” to more engagement with stakeholders. He shared the story of J.Crew’s evolved thinking in this area and its recognition that the catalog is a catalyst for the brand to offer a point of view. The J.Crew created content, online and in print, shares ideas from in-the-know fashion and jewelry designers on current fabrics, cuts and fashion trends while remaining unmistakably J. Crew: polished and fresh and conversely, appropriately classic. The revamped catalog–disguised as a style guide–is an example of company-created content done right.

When it comes to generating compelling content, fashion companies may have it easy. But, every marketer can take a page from J.Crew’s guide on how to create and manage a lot of content while maintaining a consistent voice across multiple channels. And, oh yes, to generate interest in your content in ways that drive actions that benefit your company. It’s that new nuance of paid, owned and earned media singing Kumbaya together.

Help is available. At a time when it is imperative for brands to communicate 24/7, a growing number of tech and media companies make it possible to automate content creation and curation. A few keywords typed in here and there and—voila!–content. The Huffington Post, for one, offers to create web sites for brands and use algorithms to repurpose relevant HuffPo content. Meanwhile, there are tech companies that can generate articles that look as if they were penned by real writers.

Like many of my peers, we’re exploring these tools and doing so with an eye toward simplifying content management while maintaining an authentic and engaging brand voice. Algorithms can do amazing things, including suggesting topics of discussion and identifying popular issues that will resonate with a target audience. But they can’t put together a style guide, say, that motivates customers to engage regularly and meaningfully with the brand. When it comes to content creation–even in short bits and blasts on Twitter—the human touch is what will keep marketers relevant and real.

The companies that are truly winning over audiences and driving consumers are the ones that are experimenting with a balance of automated aggregation and human-directed curation. It’s a process of out-sourcing and in-sourcing.

I’ve been following Intel’s approach. It recently launched iQ, an employee-curated digital magazine created to connect with a younger audience and share with them the bigger, living brand story. Not only does the site provide original stories about tech, it also aggregates top tech stories from other sites that Intel’s audience will find interesting. Readers and employees dictate much of the moment-to-moment interaction on the site, but it is all closely watched by editor-in-chief Bryan Rhoades, who spurs conversations by judiciously placing some stories on the iQ homepage.

NASCAR, too, is experimenting in this space. A partnership with Twitter includes a site that compiles #NASCAR-related tweets from popular drivers, who send 140-character blasts from the track or wherever they may be– along with those from sports writers and other industry folks. They pull it off by using a search algorithm and human editors who understand narrative—and appropriate content.

My friends over at Wegmans (I call them my “friends” hoping the Wegman family will open a store in Fairfield County, Conn.), were among the first to the table in using relevant content to connect with consumers. In 2001, way before Twitter and Facebook and before actor Alec Baldwin proclaimed his mom’s love of Wegmans on the Late Show, the company created Menu magazine. It’s a “tuck-in-your-pool bag” food guide that is sent to consumers free of charge and features practical, balanced yet appetizing meal ideas that even the most harried of parents (that would be me) can make with the help of a Wegmans’ shopping list, of course. The company is connecting shoppers with relevant content–among the many reasons Wegmans was recently named one of 16 brands with fanatical cult followings.

Bill Gates was right in noting that content is king. Today, we are all publishers. It’s a daunting prospect. New content curation tools make automating the job easier–but easy may not always be as effective. It would be a mistake to let algorithms do the entire job for you. No one knows your audience like you do. And, keeping the human touch in the process is more real, which is really important to today’s info-overloaded consumer. This begs the question, which brands are serving up content to you poolside?

Image: Flickr user Gwen Vanhee

How L’Oreal uses games to find and hire the kind of smart leaders that rarely show up in resumes.

Every talent-recruitment executive knows how hard it is to make a good new hire. But L’Oreal, the French cosmetics giant, is making hundreds of successful hires each year from a pool of thousands of highly qualified young prospects who connect with L’Oréal through business games.

Hiring at most corporations begins with a job posting. Each posting draws a seemingly infinite number of applicants responding through websites, social media, email and (sometimes) even snail mail. To process the onslaught, technology is used to screen the sea of applicants.

But the typical Applicant Tracking System filters for keywords tied to relatively worthless data such as schools attended, previous work experience and personal affiliations. Any manager who trains new hires will tell you that one’s alma mater and previous work references are poor predictors of job performance.

What qualities do you really want in your next new hire? How about smarts? Not just academic knowledge, but the ability to think, solve problems, and be creative. But how can a corporation wade through an endless stream of applicants to identify that kind of much more complex criteria?

L’Oréal does it by inviting the world’s most promising students to play games. For 20 years, L’Oréal has been using business games to identify potential employees, and many students hired through L’Oréal’s recruiting games have now risen to management level positions.

L’Oreal launched Brandstorm in 1993. In Brandstorm, international undergraduate marketing students are challenged to function as brand managers in re-imagining one of the company’s well-known global brands. Last year, Brandstorm attracted more than 7,000 participants.

Now in its 20th year, Brandstorm is such a remarkable success that in 2010, L’Oréal introduced its second recruiting game, Reveal. In Reveal, players work through a simulated product launch. The game moves through three phases–development, production, and launch–and players solve a challenge at the end of each of 12 scenes.

L’Oreal spokesperson Laurence Balmayer says Reveal is “the first ever multi-disciplinary digital platform which allows players to undergo a professional career discovery experience within the context of an international business like L’Oréal.”

Brandstorm and Reveal have done a phenomenal job of elevating the L’Oréal name among the next generation of business leaders. More than 50,000 students from 43 countries have participated in Brandstorm, and in just two years, Reveal has attracted more than 100,000 students from 165 countries.

“These business games have successfully attracted a diverse pool of young talents and have opened up all these participants to the universe of L’Oréal,” Balmayer said. L’Oréal is consistently ranked among the most desirable companies to work for in the world.

The games have become the fast track for employment at L’Oréal. “Each year, there are about 150 Brandstorm players and around 100 Reveal participants that are recruited by L’Oréal,” Balmayer said.

Not only are hundreds of promising employees being hired each year, but some are now advancing to management positions, Balmayer said. “The best Brandstorm players who have been initially recruited by L’Oréal as trainees have accelerated into becoming marketing and commercial directors in the countries or regions in just a matter of six or seven years.”

L’Oreal’s recruiting games are excellent example of using recruiting methods that predict performance. Participants are challenged to demonstrate in the games the very qualities and capabilities that L’Oréal wants in its work force. So, it’s obvious that the real winner of these recruiting games is L’Oreal itself.

Image: Flickr user Ben Bunch

Job number one as an entrepreneur is landing the first 10 or so core employees. You need to have a clear idea of the kind of talent you want to attract, because this core group sets up your employee brand and your startup’s DNA. As a startup, you’re unproven. You need to have a clear sense of the different types of people you need in the company and how to unify them under a common culture with its own customs, beliefs, and procedures. You also need to be a leader who’s easy to follow, with a clear mission and a strong sense of the results you want to achieve. Your employee brand is the kind of people who represent your company’s values, work style, and personality.

Thinking in terms of employer brand and employee brand can be a powerful strategy for creating a culture that champions its people and helps them flourish. Having a strong internal brand can help grow your business, because you’re more likely to attract the best talent and everyone will feel challenged.

Creating A Growth Culture

You’re not trying to run a social club. Your goal is to win in the market. But to do that you need to create a special culture.

Make sure that you hire people who have skills, resources, and knowledge that you don’t have. Even the most well-rounded entrepreneur isn’t good at everything. You’ve got to figure out your shortcomings and fill the gaps with team members who have those aptitudes. Otherwise, it is unlikely that you’ll be around after the start-up phase. Make sure that you have people who can help you land business and bring in revenue–critical tasks in the start-up phase.

You need to create a workplace with the right amount of challenge and expectations, the right amount of freedom and control. You want everyone to be a growth agent empowered to do her job and help grow the business.

Studies show that the worst work environments are those in which people have little say over their day and always have to follow someone else’s orders. They feel like a cog in a slow-moving corporate machine and consequently don’t do as well as those who work in companies where people have more freedom to decide how to handle projects and assignments. According to these studies, money isn’t the key driver for most people. It’s working in an environment where people have the ability to grow and develop their potential.

Radical Creativity

How do you create a dynamic, innovative culture where it’s everyone’s job to come up with ideas and grow the business?

First, create a culture where it’s OK to fail. The most innovative people are the ones with the most ideas. Most of them are bad ideas that fail. Some companies are even rewarding risk-taking that fails with employee-recognition bonuses and trophies, or setting aside time in the week for new idea generation.

Second, set up the offices and common areas so that there is lots of mingling in the workplace. Contrary to the image most people have of the solitary inventor or entrepreneur, it turns out that most breakout ideas don’t come from loners. Innovative ideas aren’t solitary things. Most successful ideas come from people interacting with each other in environments where ideas are discussed and shared.

That’s why there is a long history of simultaneous inventions. Transformational ideas like the electric battery, the telephone, and the radio were all made by several people who came up with the same idea at practically the same time. Most of them didn’t even know each other, but they were plugged into what was happening in their industry and influenced by similar ideas, what some researchers call the hive mind. That’s the kind of culture you want to create for your business, with all your people, not just the senior people, reaching for innovative ideas.

You want to create a company where people are dying to work because it’s not just work–it’s fun and things are happening. To win the war on talent, many Silicon Valley companies offer elevated perks like free gourmet lunches and on-site haircuts and dry cleaning. You can take your pet to work at some companies; game-maker Zynga will even pay for pet insurance. (The company is named after the CEO’s dog, after all.)

Resist the Copycat Syndrome

Groupthink is when everyone in a group starts thinking alike, and it’s alive and well in the business world. Most entrepreneurs generally resist group-think and the copycat syndrome, but they can creep in as your company expands. People in the same company share so many of the same influences and belong to so many of the same clubs and organizations that they can even start to dress alike.

Don’t try to copy the competition’s culture no matter how successful they are. You want to stay on top of what your competitors are doing to be competitive, but you need to create your own company customs and ways of staying in the lead. The best way to be a leadership brand is to harness the creativity and business thinking of every member of your diverse organization. That can only happen when you encourage and reward out-of-the-box thinking and new ideas for making the business more competitive.

The business world is dynamic, so you have to be strong with your external customers and with your internal customers–your employees. Don’t leave an opening for a new entrepreneur to gallop on the scene with something new and steal away your best talent. You want your company to be the one everyone is clamoring to join. To do that, you need to:

· Make everyone a corporate entrepreneur who is a growth agent for the company.

· Encourage innovation and ideas at every level, especially the frontlines.

· Create a culture with customs and rituals that are special to your company.

· Make sure all employees know their objectives and key results

· Be easy to follow as a leader.

Image: Flickr user dvidshub