Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Josh Tolan is the CEO of Spark Hire, a video-powered hiring network that connects job seekers and employers through video resumes and online interviews. Connect with him and Spark Hire on Facebook and Twitter.

You’ve researched the company and practiced your interview answers. What else is there to worry about? Unfortunately, many candidates flub their interview attire and make themselves undesirable hires in the process. Here are some of the worst fashion horror stories and what you can learn before you suit up for your next job interview:

You’re Not an Employee Yet

Companies come in all different shapes and sizes — and all different levels of formality. One of the biggest mistakes job seekers make is to show up for the interview dressed like an employee instead of a candidate.

“Since we’re a casual work environment with no dress code, we occasionally get the candidate that matches our attire and it comes off as overly presumptuous, overconfident or just plain sloppy,” said August Nielsen, HR Manager of Veterans United Home Loans.

Instead, you should dress for a job at least one rung on the career ladder above the one for which you’re applying. This will be highly impressive to your interviewer and show just how seriously you’re taking this opportunity. Plus, it will convey the message to your potential employer that you’re interested in moving up and bettering yourself.

“I also interviewed a guy that wore old tennis shoes with a suit. What was that all about?” Nielsen wondered. “They weren’t even new tennis shoes.”

Remember, the interview is not the right moment to try out a quirky new style. You’re not Mark Zuckerberg, and hoodies or old tennis shoes won’t make an impressive interview statement.

You Forgot Your Pants

A recent survey showed six out of ten companies use video interviews in the hiring process. So, chances are, you’ll have one — and you can’t afford to think the video interview is somehow less formal than a face-to-face meeting — it’s not.

Just because the interviewer is looking directly at your top half doesn’t mean you can ignore what you wear below the waist.

“We had a candidate who was very impressive from the waist up,” said Sandi Webster, Principal for Consultants 2 Go. “However, he had to run to his printer for a sheet we had sent and he was wearing pajama bottoms.”

It’s important to dress exactly as you would for any in-person meeting. While video interviewing provides the luxury of interviewing from home, you should still present yourself as if you’re going to the office. Not only does it help you avoid the pajama debacle, but also it helps give you a psychological edge. If you’re dressed for the part, you’ll be more likely to act the part, as well.

You’re Repping Other Companies

Because your clothes tell a story about your candidacy, if you don’t pay attention to the small details, employers will think you’ll miss the big picture on the job as well.

“If you’re interviewing at LL Bean, don’t wear J. Crew. If you’re interviewing at CNA Insurance, please don’t carry a portfolio emblazoned with the Prudential logo,” said Lida Citroen, branding specialist and founder of LIDA360. “These small missteps make the interviewer question your attention to detail and commitment to going the extra mile for the job.”

Instead, keep things neutral. It’s good practice to stay away from loud prints or company logos altogether, which might be a distraction anyway. So, swap your branded briefcase for a plain case to avoid any issues.

You Didn’t Check the Thermometer

Job interviews make many candidates extremely nervous. If you live in a hot climate or your interview is during a hot summer day, this can be a recipe for a sweaty disaster.

Resume writer and career counselor Gaye Weintraub remembers a job candidate who showed up for the job interview with professional attire that was too tight, and he had giant sweat stains under his arms.

“While he dressed appropriately for his interview, it was difficult to get past the sweat stains and his unbelievably red face. I felt sorry for him, which is not the type of reaction any job seeker wants from an interviewer,” Weintraub said.

It’s important not to forget you are only human, and the combination of nerves and raising temperatures can be lethal. Instead, Weintraub advises candidates to bring an extra shirt along if the temperatures rise and the candidate is prone to sweating. This way, job seekers can change in a nearby bathroom before the interview and appear fresh and ready for the actual meeting.

“I tell my clients that it takes an interviewer only a few seconds to form an opinion of them. It is imperative that when they walk into the room, they are well-groomed, well-dressed, smell nice and have a smile,” Weintraub said.

You Treated the Interview Like a Tailgate

You want to dress for your interview, not for your next social engagement. Catherine Bell, former fashion designer and President of PRIME Impressions tells the story of how a man showed up for a mass interview for Sears wearing shorts and a sleeveless tank top. To top it all off, he was also holding an open can of beer in his hand.

“He obviously had another agenda outside of landing a job that day,” Bell said.

Carving out time in your hectic life for an interview can be tough, especially if you already have a job keeping you busy. It’s important, however, to focus all your attention on the interview at hand, instead of what else you have going on for the rest of the day. Turn off your mobile devices so nothing will beep, vibrate or chirp during your interview. And if you’re planning on tailgating after your interview, leave the drinks in the cooler.

If you can avoid some of these fashion pitfalls, you’ll be able to impress hiring managers with your appearance, so what you wear doesn’t detract from what you say.

What are some of the worst job-interview fashion mistakes you’ve seen? Share in the comments.

You know the profile well. That lippy underbite. Those downturned jowls. But recreating the contours of director Alfred Hitchcock’s face on screen for the movie Hitchcock involved months of trial and error — and some hurt feelings along the way.

“We did six different versions,” says makeup artist Howard Berger, who began by laboriously crafting a near-exact replica of Hitchcock on the head of actor Anthony Hopkins. “The first one looked like Hitchcock, but it was super heavy.”

More than six weeks out from shooting the movie, camera tests were conducted and screened for the producers. “People were harsh,” recalls Berger. “Producers nitpicked my work and, at first, I was offended.” But Berger, a seasoned pro who has been doing makeup for movies since 1985, heeded the wise advice of his wife. “She said, ‘Why are you offended? Wouldn’t you rather have this happen now than first day on set?’”

His resolve was firm, at last: “We’re all working towards the same goal.” Still, he goes on, “Getting everybody to agree that we were going down the right path was the hardest part.”

That’s about the time when it became clear what everyone involved in this loving tribute to the work of Hitchcock absolutely didn’t want. They didn’t want Hopkins to end up looking anything like Leonardo DiCaprio did in J. Edgar, the 2011 biopic that has become an object lesson in how to overdo prosthetics and get in the way of a fine actor’s performance.

“They’re incredibly talented,” Berger says, defending that film’s makeup artists. He explains that their work is the inevitable result of the often painful interference of a committee of executives who often oversee the creation of a movie, especially one at a studio J.Edgar was produced by Warner Bros..

“We had to do prosthetics,” Berger explains. Not every movie takes that route; see Lois Burwell’s prosthetics-free transformation of Daniel Day-Lewis into Abraham Lincoln. “We knew we had to do appliances. But as we felt more comfortable we removed aspects.” In subsequent tests, Berger pulled back, leading to a less-is-more approximation of Hitch. Smaller nose, smaller ears. They lost the dentures that had reshaped Hopkins’ jawline. There had also been a strong center brow line Berger had created, “but it only made more problems for Tony” — that’s Anthony to you and me — “limiting his performance.”

What had begun as an exacting likeness had become what Berger aptly deems “a portrait of Anthony as Hitchcock,” which gets at the essence of the character rather than duplicating the real man. “We wanted to create a transformation, a combination of the two,” says Berger. “There’s a good mix there.” And not a moment too soon: In the final makeup test — the night before production began — he abandoned the lip: “Tony decided to push out his lip into a pout.”

Berger sings Hopkins’ praises, not just as a person (“He’s such a sweet man, with a wicked, wicked sense of humor”) but as a canvas for his makeup (“He was very, very still. Some actors are like moving targets; you end up constantly chasing them”).

Doing makeup for movies was a childhood dream for Berger. He grew up in Los Angeles, so he was well aware of the career possibilities. “At 8, I said, ‘I’m going to be a makeup artist.’” As a teenager he started “stalking my idols.” He skipped college and started working on movies as he finished high school.

He started out doing horror, working on Day of the Dead, followed by Night of the Creeps. “That’s what makeup guys did in the 80s and 90s,” says Berger, who was eventually able to diversify, thanks to Kevin Costner, who came calling for Dances with Wolves. “He figured if we can do bloody people we can handle bloody buffalo.”

“We” are Berger and his partner Greg Nicotero. Together they formed KNB EFX Group. Both are credited with work on The Walking Dead and Hitchcock, but in recent years Berger has let Greg take over the gory stuff while he’s stuck to fantasy and reality. “I don’t like it,” he says of blood and guts. “I don’t like having it on me, I don’t like the sticky feeling. Whereas Greg wears it like war paint.”

Berger realized there was more to life than blood and guts when he got to work on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which came out in 2005. “I said, ‘I’m done wrangling fake bodies and dragging them around.’ I like the fantasy world, creating characters and creatures, and running giant makeup crews.” Projects like next year’s Oz: The Great and Powerful, Sam Raimi’s reimagining of The Wizard of Oz, coming out in March 2013, have placed Berger solidly in the world of fantasy.

It’s a world he’s thrilled to inhabit as it brings him back to what first captured his imagination as a child: monster movies like Planet of the Apes. No blood, no guts. Just good, old-fashioned movie magic.

Images: Fox Searchlight Pictures

Ezra Stoller was an architecture student at New York University when he bought his first camera, sometime in the late 1930s. But that purchase marked a significant shift in the trajectory of his career. Over the course of the next several decades, Stoller would become known for photographing buildings, not designing them. His shots of modern masterpieces like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Guggenheim Museum often helped those structures attain their iconic status. Now, his work is being collected in a new book, Ezra Stoller: Photographer, that includes many of those famous photographs as well as much of his lesser-known work.

Stoller was a meticulous photographer. According to Nina Rappaport, a professor of architecture and the editor of the new book, it was common to see Stoller “exploring every angle, spending a day on site to understand the passage of the sun on the building.” Of course, with a career that coincided with the golden age of modern architecture, Stoller had plenty of good subjects to shoot. But he had a way of composing and framing shots, Rappaport says, that brought out the formal and structural qualities of those buildings.

“He was an artist,” she contends, “but never considered himself as one.”

In the preface to the book, Erica Stoller, Ezra’s daughter, offers an anecdote that transpired when he was shooting Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute, illustrating the photographer’s exacting eye:

I recall hearing about a problem at the Salk and his fearing that the equipment had been damaged; even with the tilts and shifts of the view camera, he couldn’t get the lines straight. Finally, he realized that the camera was okay–it was the building that was the problem. In construction, some of the concrete pours had bellied, creating vertical lines that were not exactly straight.

While Stoller’s architectural photography has proven to be his most enduring work, Rappaport points out that his oeuvre is a bit more diverse. In addition to photographing interiors for publications like Ladies’ Home Journal, he also had a great deal of personal interest in industrial subjects, shooting factories, machines, and equipment “in a time of a postwar optimism, focusing on the idea of production and progress,” Rappaport explains.

The new book, published by Yale University Press, is the first complete survey of Stoller’s career, during which he took nearly 50,000 photographs. It’s currently on Amazon for just over $40.

Even among haters of postmodernism, it’s tough to find someone who doesn’t possess a soft spot for Ettore Sottsass. That’s in part because the Italian maestro left behind such a varied legacy that includes something suited to everyone’s taste. He was responsible for Olivetti’s Valentine portable typewriter, now a bona fide classic, but he also was one of the founders of the experimental Memphis Group, churning out quirky, sculptural pieces of art-furniture throughout the ‘80s. He at once changed with and defined the eras in which he lived, producing work for six decades up until his death in 2008.

A show at New York’s Friedman Benda gallery, Ettore Sottsass: A Survey, 1992–2007, celebrates the last 15-year leg of his career, which was marked by an enduring appreciation of bold color, traditional craft, and totem-like stacks. Few designers enjoyed exploring materials more than Sottsass, mixing and matching them with artistic vision and artisanal know-how.

Check out slide show for a selection from the show; see them in person here before August 10.

All photos courtesy of Friedman Benda

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

Last week, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York kicked off a retrospective dedicated solely to VHS film. DVDs may have eclipsed videotape years ago, but we’re still nostalgic for the rickety plastic cassettes of yore. There’s something about the exposed magnetized spools–it’s like being able to see into your own body. And compact discs (or MP4 files) just don’t have the same I-taped-over-your-dance-recital-to-record-the-new-Beastie-Boys-video tactility.

VHS tape has fascinated New York-based Lithuanian artist Zilvinas Kempinas for a decade. “It’s supposed to be this safe container of the past,” he explained in this 2009 Museo interview. “But it is destined to vanish like a dinosaur, to become obsolete, pushed away by new technologies.”

Kempinas began his career working with microfiche and 35mm film, but soon graduated to VHS, seduced by the long spools of reflective, lightweight tape. In 2006, he began using unwound tape to create architectural space. In Parallels (2007), the artist strung thousands of lines of tape across the ceiling of the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius. He experimented with setting celluloid in motion: In Double O, a piece from 2008 (and shown at MoMA in 2010), two high-powered fans keep two reels of tape airborne in constant rippling motion. A residency at Atelier Calder produced Tube, a circular walkway of tightly threaded tape that produced eerie optical illusions.

Kempinas was selected to represent Lithuania at the 2009 Venice Biennale. He reconstructed and enlarged Tube in a famed 16th-century church called the Scuola Grande della Misericordia. In Tube, Kempinas painstakingly strung thousands of feet of unspooled VHS tape between two white doorways, creating a featherlight portal of rippling black lines. Walking through the portal, the strings of tape dance and undulate around you. From certain angles, the strands disappear. From other angles, they reflect their surroundings.

What Kempinas is doing, in essence, is drawing with celluloid. “Videotape is inexpensive,” the artist commented in 2009. “It’s a container of visual information, data carrier, but you can perceive it like an abstract line.”

Images courtesy of Galerija Vartai; h/t Architizer

Call it vocational Darwinism: Seeing similarities between the Galapagos Islands and our recession-era ecosystem, Nacie Carson wrote The Finch Effect to help you be more like those titular birds–which adapted their beaks to environmental changes within a single generation–and less like the species that have perished around them.

Fast Company spoke with the author about the evolutionary benefits of owning your career, the intersecting axes of personal branding, and why natural selection is not survival of the strongest.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

FAST COMPANY: The Finch Effect is all about adaptation. What is it that we need to adapt to?

NACIE CARSON: What we need to adapt to as modern professionals is the rapid changes that we’re seeing in the job market. The start of the recession caught people so off balance. People were standing around, thinking “What are we supposed to do, what’s going to happen, how are we supposed to deal with this?”

The truth is that because of different factors like outsourcing and how fast communication happens, the pace at which changes in the job market happen is not going to slow down.

It’s really important for individual professionals to be aware that the price of poker is going up and to really take responsibility for our own careers into our own hands–instead of placing them into structures that might not be able to adapt as well as an individual could.

How do you take that responsibility? 

I spent several years freelance writing, and one of the really great things about that experience is that the onus is completely on you for making yourself financially stable, but also directing your own career. The question of what’s next? is not the question that you ask the corporate structure that you’re trying to climb the ladder in; it’s a question you ask yourself.

There are things we can do on our own to go out and get new experience, to diversify our incomes sources, and to help us be more buoyant as things might change in the job market.

So how do we add to our buoyancy?

The first piece is really the shifting of this perspective. Once you’ve done that, I think understanding the professional brand that we’re sharing with the world and taking the lead in terms of that is key. All of us are emitting a brand at all times whether we are aware of that or not, and if we understand that, we can have greater control of the message that we’re sending to other people.

Additionally, take responsibility for our own professional development when possible. It’s important for professionals to be comfortable and willing to hold up their hand to get more skill development, to improve the skills they’re already great at, and not wait for a company to do that for them, to really take ownership of their own skill development.

Think of yourself as someone who can collect different opportunities. That might mean in your company thinking strategically but acting like an employee. Thinking like an entrepreneur, acting like an employee, it might mean seeking additional opportunities for yourself outside of your full-time job, some tangential gig opportunities to develop your skill set and your resume, or it might mean entertaining the concept of actually stepping out and becoming a full-time freelancer or entrepreneur.

What are some first steps toward taking control of that personal brand?

The really important first step is understanding that you have one whether or not you’re purposefully trying to send one out. People are going to be attaching adjectives and descriptors to you all day, every day, and it’s your responsbility to grab onto that and potentially shift those adjectives, if necessary.

Additionally, you want to think about who your target audience is for your professional brand. For some people it might be their boss and their organization. “My target audience is impressing the people I work with because I’d like to stay here and get more opportunities.” For some people it might be new business opportunities, it might be “Hey, I’m just out of school, and I need to find work, so my target audience for my professional brand is going to be recruiters.”

Like all brands, it’s important that you’re speaking to your market about what your brand offers in a language and context that they’ll most hear.

So what are the axes of branding?

There is a huge online component. Your Facebook and your Twitter and your LinkedIn, and all of your social media profiles, and your blog if you have one–they all reflect your professional brand.

I think really leveraging Twitter as an individual is a powerful social media way to brand yourself. I think you can do that by sharing articles that reflect something that speaks to your brand’s mission statement, or providing a service of some kind, sharing a tip for other people, or engaging in conversations, or reaching out to experts, or even job recruiters who are active in the brand space you’re working in.

There’s also the in-person axis. We forget that there’s also a need to ensure that we’re transmitting the right message in terms of our physical presentation, the way we articulate ourselves, the ability to make eye contact with people.

It seems the antecedent to this personal branding is knowing one’s own strengths and weaknesses and interests. How does one go about obtaining that knowledge of self?

For me, the strategies that I’ve found valuable to get to the heart of these things is really being able to ask yourself the right questions and give yourself an unvarnished answer.

What are some of those questions?

One of the questions I really love is, “How am I seen by other people, or how do I think I’m seen by other people, and how do I want to be seen by other people professionally?” And then the next question is, “What am I doing to project how I want to be seen? How am I supporting that vision, and how might I not be supporting that vision?” One of the great things that you can do is ask the people who you’re close to.

With your parents, with your siblings, your friends, or a good coworker you can have an honest conversation, saying: “I’m really putting some thought into this: What are a couple words you might use to describe me as a professional, and how am I supporting that description?”

The Finch Effect is about professional evolution. How does one become a member of the fittest, if it’s the fittest that will survive?

The way that one becomes a member of the fittest is by learning to be adaptable–in this case that adaptability is empowering yourself to make decisions and drive your own career.

It’s funny because when you say “survival of the fittest,” people are like, “oh yeah, dog-eat-dog, only the strong will survive,” like it’s some sort of a WWE match.

It’s not going to do anybody any good to be the strongest, or the biggest, or the meanest kid on the playground if they can’t change with the times. There is such a powerful lesson in that core message that you don’t need to be the best or the strongest or the brightest–you just need to be able to change and to grow, and that’s going to take you a long way to being successful.

Image: Flickr user Jo Christian Oterhals

What do The Beastie Boys, Katy Perry, and PayPal have in common? They all pivoted.

When the Beastie Boys formed in 1979, they were a hardcore punk band that dabbled in performance art, a fixture at clubs like CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City. Their first full-length album, Poly Wog Stew, with bombastic minute-and-a-half paroxysms like “Transit Cop,” “Jimi,” and “Holy Snappers,” owed as much to the Sex Pistols as it did Dadaism. Always on the prowl for the absurd, they started rapping in rehearsals, mainly as a joke. But when they tried it during performances something magical happened: Audiences liked it better than the punk.

So in Eric Ries’ parlance, The Beastie Boys performed a “zoom-in pivot,” turning a feature of their product into their main offering. In 1983, they recorded “Cooky Puss,” their first track that incorporated elements of hip-hop, using a prank call to Carvel Ice Cream as inspiration. It quickly became an underground hit in nightclubs, so they added a DJ and layered hip-hop into their sets, until they had mastered a sound all their own.

Three decades and 40 million records sold later, the group was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. Although the late Adam Yauch (MCA), along with Mike Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Ad-Rock) were and are prodigiously talented, it’s likely we never would have heard of the Beastie Boys if they hadn’t pivoted to hip-hop.

Now, pivoting is usually reserved for businesses that do a triple axel into a new business strategy, but Patrick Vlaskovits and Brant Cooper, authors of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development and the forthcoming Lean Entrepreneur, say it can apply it to whole raft of disciplines. In fact, many Lean Startup methodologies–pivots, minimal viable products, product-market fit–can be used as an analysis tool for consumer-packaged goods, finance and investment, social entrepreneurship, art–anywhere there is innovation. Pivots and the like are as relevant to musicians and artists as they are for startups.

The speed of today’s well-funded startups is brutal.

But it does allow for change in direction. This series explores those destiny-altering decisions made by companies that have gone on to great success. Read more about their course corrections–and alternate endings–here.

But what’s the difference between a pivot and, say, an “iteration” or “reset”? For an apt analogy they say you should turn your radio dial. “If you’re twisting the dial to tune into a new station, going from 98.5 FM to 93.1 FM, then you’re pivoting,” they say. “If you’re trying to tune into a strong signal, and switching from 98.7 FM to 98.5 FM, then it’s an iteration. A reset is a ‘leap’ to a new business model, and that change is not based on real validation or learning.”

That last part is key. Pivoting has to be evolutionary, based on sifting through the appropriate data. It’s at the heart of the “fail fast” concept. The sooner you realize a hypothesis is wrong, the faster you can update and retest it. “It’s paramount to understand that a pivot isn’t simply a change in one element of the business model,” they add, “but rather a change precipitated by something the founder has learned and validated to be true or untrue about a hypothesis she has tested.”

This, of course, is exactly what Adam Yauch and his Beastie bros did. They market-tested punk and when customers gravitated to a specific feature of the product (hip-hop) they pivoted to that. And they aren’t the only ones. Pop music and artist development are clearly domains where artists can be viewed as startups trying to find product-market fit. Vlaskovitz and Cooper, who say they’re working with L.A.-based music producers on how to apply these principles to artist development, point to Katy Perry as an example. She began her career as Katy Hudson, a Christian gospel singer, releasing an album aimed specifically at specific audience, and the album didn’t make the charts.

What did she do? She underwent a “customer segment pivot,” repositioning herself to reach a different audience by altering multiple elements of her business model, including:

• Her marketing/look: Christian girl-next-door to sexy pop princess.
• Her product/subject matter: Christian worship themes to edgy, sexually suggestive songs.
• Segment: Teens who listen to Christian soft rock to mainstream teenagers.

It wasn’t a smooth road. Between her first album and second, she was dropped by two record labels. Nevertheless, she persisted (like any good entrepreneur) and went from her Christian-themed debut album praising Jesus to “One of the Boys,” which featured the hit “I Kissed a Girl,” as well as three other Top 40 singles. The album, which boasts some explicit lyrics and themes, went on to sell more than 5 million copies.

Vlaskovits and Cooper are even willing to stretch Lean Startup methodology to Picasso, who, they say, pivoted from work that was photo-realistic to cubism and the distortion of the human form. They also see clear connections between musicians/artists and technology startups. Both innovate in uncertainty and endure financiers: Musicians have record labels and startup entrepreneurs have VCs, with both historically playing the roles of arbiters of good ideas. And because of digital technology, it’s cheaper than ever to record and distribute music and launch a startup.

“Musicians can and do build Minimal Viable Products starring themselves,” they say. “This allows for faster and better market feedback on how to inform their ultimate vision for success.”

In other words, while the odds may be stacked against her, that guitarist croaking Adele’s “To Make You Feel My Love” on the subway platform could be the next PayPal, which, like Katy Perry, performed a customer segment pivot that also paid off.

Adam L. Penenberg is a journalism professor at NYU and a contributing writer to Fast Company. Follow him on Twitter: @penenberg.

Images: ReadySetRocket

Like many people I know who consider themselves good-natured–or at least are doing their best–I have a tough time saying “no.”

My instinct is always to take on more, to acquiesce, to give the answer people want to hear. Those who know me are perhaps raising an eyebrow of skepticism right now–okay, it’s true that I have no problem being assertive when there’s something that I want. It’s more an issue of declining or pushing back when it’s something others want: My natural inclination is to please at all costs. I even took a personality test at the behest of my first boss in advertising, and right under the Strategic heading, I displayed a quality called Woo, which means, if I remember correctly, a desperate need for people to like me (it may not have been that harsh, but that’s how I interpreted it).

I would never advocate that anyone try to become less generous or more stubborn. Openness, generosity, and a willingness to change one’s mind are some of the most important qualities a person can have. But there are also times, in business and in life, when you just have to say “no.”

1. Say “no” to clients if: They’re asking for something that’s truly detrimental to their business. This is a tough one, because we all become attached to the work that we do, and it’s very hard to honestly evaluate whether or not we’re digging in our heels in a way that’s self-serving (i.e. we love the work so we insist they love it too, period). In many ways, clients know their business better than an outside partner ever could, and it’s crucial to respect that. We also have an ability to push back in a way that internal staff never would, which we must use wisely and sparingly. My partners and I rely on each other for this valuable perspective–whoever is least close to the process will weigh in on whether or not a battle is worth fighting. And it’s only worth fighting if it’s truly going to help your client succeed (or prevent them from making a big mistake). The good news is, if you limit the number of times over the course of a relationship that you flat out refuse to do something, they’re much more likely to take it seriously.

Always say “yes” when: clients can justify their request with a strategic business decision that’s a whole lot bigger than your involvement.

2. Say “no” to favors when: Someone tries to make you an unofficial advisor to their business or project, without requesting that you take on an ongoing role. I am always happy to meet with people who are starting businesses or looking to rebrand–I would be nowhere today without generous souls who freely gave me their perspective. But this should really only happen once or twice. If someone is requesting ongoing meetings or a series of favors, then it’s appropriate for them to acknowledge your involvement in some sort of official capacity. Whether it’s creating an advisory board, compensating you for your time, or even just having a conversation where they outline their needs and ask you to define how much you are willing to be involved–any of these routes are preferable to casual but continuous contact. Your time and advice are extremely valuable and should be treated as such by those benefiting from your expertise.

Always say “yes” when: someone is just starting out in their career and needs advice. Every one of us relied on mentors to get started, and success means it’s time to pay it back.

3. Say “no” to plans when: You haven’t had a night to yourself in far too long, and you need some time alone. This includes business-related plans, as well as catching up with friends, even those you haven’t seen in ages. If you need a night off for your health and well-being, say “no.” Somehow it’s not socially acceptable to say that you can’t do something because you’re not busy, but it should be. So for our collective, overscheduled sanity, let’s make it so.

Always say “yes” when: you are just being lazy, and you know deep down you’ll have a great time or a meaningful experience if you get off the couch and go.

“No” is not a word that we typically associate with anything positive. But “no” is an inherent part of prioritization and defining what you stand for. When we think of it that way, saying “no” can actually open up the space for greater potential and possibility.

Image: Flickr user Adam Naddsy