Open up your mind and say, ahh...

El Anatsui, the artist behind more than 30 works at Brooklyn Museum this month, will knock the wind out of you. There are two ways in which this will happen; you’ll be stunned either by the shimmering, monumental beauty of the work or the weighty historical narrative that blasts through Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui. Or both.

Anatsui–who is Ghana-born but Nigeria-based–is that rare kind of artist whose work is both beautiful and critical, ornate and intellectual. He is best known for his hanging sculptures made out of bottle and can tops he collects from around Nsukka, pieced and patched together by a group of workers in his local studio. These are “non-fixed forms,” meaning that the jingly aluminum sheets are transported to the gallery in a suitcase and hung according to the whims of the curator. Each time a piece is shown, it looks different, folds in novel ways, and reflects thousands of light points in new ways. “I don’t believe in artworks being things that are fixed,” Anatsui says. “You know, the artist is not a dictator.”

After building a successful career based on appropriating local Kente cloth symbology (and, for a time, sculpting with a chainsaw), Anatsui started collecting liquor bottle caps in the 1980s. The caps–which come from local Nigerian distilleries–offered him what The New York Times calls “a locally made, in ready supply and culturally loaded” material. Rum, you see, is a by-product of the slave trade. The triangle of trade between Africa, the Caribbean, and the colonial powers went like this: Europeans bartered for slaves using manufactured goods. Then, the slaves would be sent to the New World in exchange for sugar (and other raw goods). In the Americas, the sugar was turned into rum, which went back to Europe to fund another round of the cycle. Soon, distilleries popped up along the Gold Coast, including Nigeria.

Colonialism asserts itself in subtle and obvious ways, both in the names of the liquor brands (Dark Sailor, Chelsea) and in the titles of the works themselves. In Drifting Continents (2009), eight luminant, gold textiles hang on the gallery wall, connected by a single continuous thread of colorful tops. Other works address problems within Nigeria and Africa itself, like the towering Waste Paper Bags, a standing sculpture made from discarded commercial printing plates. As the curators point out, the plates look a lot like a loaded symbol of Nigerian-Ghanian conflict. “The forms resemble large woven bags that became known as ‘Ghana-must-go’ bags in the early 1980s, when Nigerians hostile toward Ghanaian refugees who had fled political and economic unrest suggested they pack their belongings in such sacks and return home,” they explain.

Anatsui’s work reverberates off of works from African-American artists in Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection, creating feedback loops between American and African experiences of postcolonial identity. The museum owns several Basquiat paintings, and though their life experiences couldn’t be more different, it’s hard not to think of them while wandering through the show–Basquiat and Anatsui tread the same thematic ground. The triangle trade is something Basquiat obsessed over, repeating words like “gold,” “sugar,” and “rum” again and again in his paintings. Anatsui’s tone–his rich, rococo wall hangings–is completely at odds with Basquiat’s. But you get the sense that they’re grappling with the same thing, these ghosts that take the form of consumer goods like liquor bottles and sugar bags.

Check out Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui until August 4.

The result is a network of air data, built from very specific niches. Culturally, AirWaves plays to the skepticism of the Chinese of “faceless data.”

Mnemo-Amsterdam
Cross a fitness band, a social network, and a friendship bracelet. What you get is Mnemo. It’s a means to record memories–audio, video, and the friends you’re with–through a simple interaction with your wristband. And it can be personalized, much like a friendship bracelet, with colored string.

You’ll still need a phone for many functions (like snagging videos), but physical gestures drive the interface. For instance, by linking two bracelets, friends can create multiple perspectives of the same moment.

CompassGo-Milan
Even in the age of GPS, to explore cities today, Frog points out our tendency to “pre-Google” our destinations. What’s lost? The feelings of spontaneity and exploration.

CompassGo chooses a simple category (like culture, food or relaxation), displays that category with an icon, then points you the way to your next adventure.

Hello World DIY-Seattle
How do you get tweenage girls interested in technology? Sew it into their clothing. This is a kit of “accessible Arduino projects” that are wearable without programming skills.

Icho-Munich
This navigation aid for the vision-impaired not only enhances perception through sonar proximity sensors, but it uses a combination of GPS, accelerometers, and haptic feedback to lead its user through an urban environment. Imagine a museum audiotour that you can hear and feel.

Kinetik-San Francisco
Kinetik is basically a backup battery for your phone. Its twist?

You wear Kinetic through your life while it harnesses your natural kinetic energy. Fitness becomes a “tangible reward”–and with a bit of extra battery power, you won’t have to worry about your phone running out of juice during an extended adventure.

A companion app builds a network of location-based energy patterns. I imagine it’d be a lot of fun to see the wattage produced at a mass sporting event like a marathon.

MTA Relay-New York
Relay is a band to help navigate New York’s transit system. Its three strands hide dynamic displays, which will glow with the colors of nearby lines and transfers, while providing up-to-date scheduling information.

Over time, the band actually learns your commuting patterns. The only catch? It would rely heavily on underground infrastructure, like RFID or other radio technology, to keep the band in the know beneath layers of asphalt and concrete.

Tree Voice-Austin
What if trees could talk? That’s sort of the idea behind Tree Voice, a wearable for nature.

Its sensors collect data on the environment like noise, temperature, and pollution. And it “sparks” to life with motion sensors and a display for passersby.

Together, these tree bands form a giant network of environmental data that can reveal more about our neighborhoods. Frog imagines a new wave of data to influence everything from government policy to where you buy your next house. To me, it’s a digital equivalent to the networked heart trees in Game of Thrones.

It is that time of year. Everyone is running around like a turkey with its’ head chopped off. SO. MUCH. IS. GOING. ON.  Even if you don’t have “stress at the workplace”, this infographic touches upon some things that everyone can apply to their own lives, no matter the producer. Let’s face it—everyone has stress in their life. Hopefully this infographic will enable you to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It can be incredibly hard at times, even with the right management.

I read an article about a study evaluating the different forms of stress management for one of my social work classes. The study within the article brought up four different ways of managing stress: 1) source management, 2) relaxation, 3) thought management, and 4) prevention (Epstein, 32).  Through the study conducted, the researchers were able to conclude that “the…study showed clearly that prevention is by far the most helpful competency when it comes to managing stress” (Epstein, 34).

So, although things like yoga and acupuncture help to lighten the load, avoiding stress in the first place is the number one way to deter the bad feelings and physical harm caused by it. We must practice self-care. This will enable us to further help others. Happy Sunday, y’all.

Epstein, Robert. (2011).Fight the frazzled mind. Scientific American Mind, 30-35.

So you have a foosball table at work. And an in-house masseuse. And maybe even an ironic conversation pit. But do you have a chair shaped like a molecular model? An art installation made of guitar pedals? How about a nonsensical shade over your desk that says, “If this shade is down I’m not who you think I am”? You do not. But David Byrne does, and for those reasons, his office is cooler than yours.

Brooklyn-based Gil Inoue snapped photographs of the Talking Head-turned-bike evangelist at his expansive, whimsy-drenched office in an old sweatshop in Soho, New York, recently for the Brazilian magazine TRIP. Inoue spent a few hours there, photographing the space and Byrne himself. Originally, Inoue wanted to shoot Byrne riding a vintage penny-farthing on the cobblestone streets of Soho, but they decided against it. “It was too dangerous,” Inoue says. He snapped this instead:

Byrne is one of those polymaths who has remained remarkably innovative into the early evening of his life, excelling in everything from art to music to writing. Now we get a glimpse of the environment that fuels all that creativity.

Note to self: Buy a penny-farthing.

For an extended tour of Byrne’s office, narrated by Byrne himself, go here.

Virgin Galactic is already busily spearheading a whole new industry in space tourism with SpaceShipTwo. But today at the Farnborough airshow the British company revealed it’s also ready to disrupt a long-standing industry and take it in wholly new directions: It’s formally unveiled LauncherOne, a tiny cost-effective rocket system to put small satellites into low Earth orbit. It could change your life sooner than you think. Really.

LauncherOne leverages the expertise that Virgin Galactic has been building up with its space tourism business, and stands on the innovations made by Scaled Composites when it launched SpaceShipOne on its historic XPrize-winning flight. That’s because it uses exactly the same air-launched model for the rocket, with a carrier aircraft lifting the spacecraft high into the atmosphere before dropping it and letting its engines fire it into space. LauncherOne actually employs the same WhiteKnightTwo launch aircraft used for the space tourism flights–which is a proven, existing airframe that instantly reduces costs.

By flying like this, LauncherOne doesn’t need a big, expensive first stage rocket loaded with fuel to get it off the ground. Instead itr requires just two boost stages to take it from launch into space, and then into orbit. This simplifies the avionics and engineering needed to make the thing fly, lowering the cost and reducing the chances that things can go wrong. Ground-launched rockets have all sorts of complex range-safety matters to deal with, involving clearing airspace and, sometimes, the sea in the general launch trajectory because the rocket might fail during flight. Because LauncherOne is launched from an aircraft, it can avoid many of these logistical issues, and it also allows for payloads to be more easily put into unusual orbits–the aircraft simply has to point it in a different launch direction.

The upshot of all of this cost-saving is that according to Virgin, a LauncherOne vehicle can put 500 pounds of payload into orbit for “below $10 million.” That works out cheaper than its likely biggest competitor Orbital’s Pegasus XL–another air-launched vehicle–and Virgin intends it to be able to reach the “world’s lowest prices” for launches.

And that’s just for single-satellite launch scenarios. There’s no reason that LauncherOne couldn’t be configured to release a swarm of low Earth orbit microsatellites in a single launch, and this is one of the most promising areas of space science right now.

In fact when revealing the vehicle’s parameters, Virgin boss Richard Branson even remarked that with LauncherOne, “nations, states, cities and even universities and schools will be able to launch dedicated satellites that will answer their diverse needs.” Satellite launches have nearly always been massively expensive, risky and fall within the purview of government-backed operations, or via defense companies, and even recent commercial space systems have been very expensive–until Virgin’s effort.

Right there is the part where your life will be affected, although it’s difficult to predict how much things will change and how fast. But to see what this could mean, imagine if a news organization like CNN stumped up the millions necessary to fly its own small imaging satellite–or possibly even a small fleet of them. When a global disaster occurs, or a breaking news story hits, CNN may then be able to deliver live or near-time satellite imaging of the event. (And they may even get their facts right.) Because Virgin is a private entity, it’s even possible that other startups may leverage its potential to do their own climate change science, or space-based observations of almost everything on Earth from traffic congestion in cities to tracking ships, or selling very real-time imagery to companies like Apple or Google to drive the “satellite view” that we’re all getting used to using for navigating around with our smartphones.

And lest you think this is all just pop science mumbo-jumbo, VG has already signed up enough launch partners for “several dozen” launches and aims to be commercially operating by 2016.

Image: Virgin Galactic

Maurice Sendak passed away this morning at the age of 83. He’ll be celebrated by millions of fans, and has already been memorialized with great writing all over the internet.

We wanted to take a minute to reflect on the example Sendak set for other creatives of all ilks. He was a fearlessly honest writer. He was a talented artist who illustrated over a hundred books, and designed opera sets, musicals, and television shows. His cultural commentary on pretty much any topic–from publishing and mental health to being a young gay Brooklynite in the 1960s–cut to the quick of human experience. He came of age during a period of cultural sanitization, and was often criticized for being “too” honest in his books, which spoke frankly to the sometimes-terrifying experience of being a child. Some of his best quotes on creativity, publishing, and children are collected below.

The Sanitization of Children’s Literature

Sendak, the child of two Holocaust survivors, refused to shy away from the realities of childhood; nightmares, monsters, rebellion, and arguments make frequent appearances in his work. Talking to Maus author Art Spiegelman in 1993, he described unsavory parental praise thusly: “People say, ‘Oh, Mr. Sendak. I wish I were in touch with my childhood self, like you!’ As if it were all quaint and succulent, like Peter Pan. Childhood is cannibals and psychotic vomiting in your mouth! I say, ‘You are in touch, lady–you’re mean to your kids, you treat your husband like shit, you lie, you’re selfish… That is your childhood self!”

Though he was routinely criticized by conservative groups for portraying what they saw as “adult” themes, he stood his ground, maintaining that parents (and authors) need to be honest with children. In his acceptance speech for the Caldecott Medal in 1964, he had this to say about how adults misrepresent childhood:

“From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions – fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can. And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming wild things.”

The City

Sendak was fascinated by the city he grew up in, and portrayed it often as a sometimes hellish, often wonderful riddle. Though he’s obviously most famous for Where the Wild Things Are, he wrote frequently about his native Brooklyn. As the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson notes today, In the Night Kitchen is one of his most mesmerizing books, telling the story of Micky, a little boy dreaming over Brooklyn (taking cues from the classic turn-of-the-century Little Nemo comics).

Davidson writes that Sendak was unceasingly honest in his portrayal of life in the city: “he found the images and words to let children know that he recognized that their lives had cryptic alleyways.”

On Creative Success

Sendak was honest about struggling to succeed early in his career. He took a job at FAO Schwartz doing window installations, telling NPR’s Terri Gross that eventually he ran out of steam. “I was too frightened. I just lost it.” A friend paid for his first therapy session, and he made it a fixture in his life. He talked often about feeling pressure from his parents and peers: “Everyone said, ‘Oh, you’re so talented and you’re going to get a book and you’re’ — and, of course, nothing happened as soon as I wanted it to.”

Talking to the AP, he described his sucess as mundane, saying “I didn’t sleep with famous people or movie stars or anything like that. It’s a common story: Brooklyn boy grows up and succeeds in his profession, period.”

A Book is a Book is a Book

Sendak was a firm believer in the universality of stories. He laughed at the idea that children’s literature is a separate genre from literature in general. In the same 1993 New Yorker piece with Art Spiegelman, he said “Kids books… Grownup books… That’s just marketing.”

In an era of iPads and Nooks, he dismissed the digital readers an ultimately unimportant fad, telling the Guardian in 2011, “I hate ebooks. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book! A book is a book is a book.”

On Living and Dying

In 2011, he talked about being preoccupied by death (his long-term partner passed away in 2007): “I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. … What I dread is the isolation. … There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.”

One last quote from this 2011 interview speaks to both his life and work: “I can’t believe I’ve turned into a typical old man. I can’t believe it. I was young just minutes ago.”

For the second installment of our weeklong investigation into the business of jerky, we talk to Brian Levin of Perky Jerky. Though its mascot’s presidential campaign is floundering, Perky Jerky posted its first profits last month.

Brian Levin is the founder and “Chairman of the Herd” of Perky Jerky, a brand of caffeinated jerky. Before he got into the performance-enhancing meat snacks space (yes, it’s a space), Levin was a tech entrepreneur, selling one company for a reported $15 million and another for an undisclosed sum. But Perky Jerky is his biggest venture yet, as he tells Fast Company in the second installment of Jerky Week.

FAST COMPANY: Thank you for being the second participant in Fast Company’s Jerky Week. Do you think more business publications should have a Jerky Week?

BRIAN LEVIN: I’m surprised the Wall Street Journal hasn’t already done my charcoal pencil sketch.

You’ve said that your story begins with two jerks in a ski lodge.

About seven or eight years ago, a few of my college buddies and I went out on a ski trip in Utah. We had our gear laid out for the next day, and our supplies–energy drinks and jerky. Amongst the craziness, we spilled some Red Bull in the jerky bag. The next morning, the inspiration set in: how come nobody had ever combined the two?

I thought the hard lesson we learned from Four Loko is that when you cross two awesome things, you get a third thing that is so dangerously awesome it may be illegal.

Well, we’re in a heavily regulated industry. We sprinkle a little guarana on it for flavoring effect. The caffeine equivalent is of a Diet Coke. But what we’ve done is go with an all-natural product that’s more healthy than most of the jerkies with unpronounceable additives and preservatives. Our product is much more hand-processed than the stuff you get from Big Jerky.

You sell in funny places. Home Depot? Best Buy?

We call that alternative distribution. Home Depot is a great place, if you think about it. You have a clientele of professional contractors who go in there every morning, so we’ve developed a loyal following. Also, it’s an impulse buy, getting it at the front, which is why we created packaging that stands out. Our marketing strategy is what we call “bovine oral insertion.”

That sounds wrong.

It’s the art of getting meat in mouths. Once people taste it, they get hooked. That’s why we invented the Jerk Man.

You’ve anticipated my next question.

The Jerk Man is the ultimate international man of meat. For us, it’s all about getting meat in mouths, so we came up with exciting and unique ways to sample our product. We came out with a patent-pending Velcro suit of jerky, and we attach sample bags of the product to the suit. The amount of surprise, shock, awe, and delight when you hear the sound of someone ripping the package of meaty goodness off the Jerk Man… it’s really something.

How is the Jerk Man’s campaign for the U.S. presidency going?

I think it’s kind of gone the way of Rick Santorum. The Jerk Man is taking more of a grassroots campaign, trying to drum up more support at the local level to get written onto every state ballot.

As I begin to develop expertise on the jerky beat, I begin to wonder whether jerky brands are really just another form of humor brand.

I can say that with a product like Perky Jerky, you can’t take yourself too seriously, and yet I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.

You started the text-message voting system used on American Idol, selling it for $15 million in 2004.

Yeah, this is my third startup, and the first two were tech. It’s a stark difference. You write software once, you can sell it a million times. With this, you have to actually make a product and sell it.

Are you profitable?

We are.

When did you post your first profits?

Last month. There was a big party here.

When can we expect an IPO?

I don’t think being public is in the cards for us. The Jerk Man doesn’t want to answer to anybody.

Forbes recently called you the 93rd most promising company in America.

I guess that means we got 92 to go. Lots of work ahead!

But why?

We’re in 21,000 stores right now, and hopefully will be in 100,000 by the end of the year. I guess they actually believe it when I tell them we’re gonna be the next Red Bull, the next premium consumer lifestyle brand.

You’re probably doing alright following the sales of your last two companies. But if something makes you absurdly rich, will it be this?

I’m all in. If this were a poker game, all the chips would be in the middle of the table. Honestly, the potential is so big, and jerky is such a huge market, and nobody has really tackled what we’ve done.

A lot of people read Fast Company because they want to have the next big tech startup. But it sounds like maybe they should get into the performance-enhancing meat snacks space instead?

It’s all about versatility. Anybody can be a tech mogul. First I was in tech, then I got into consumer packaged goods. It’s like being a true, versatile athlete. Why can’t I be the Bo Jackson of startups?

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Voters checking out a politician’s website want a clean, easy-to-use interface that establishes an emotional connection with visitors and teaches them about the candidate — not links asking them to contribute financially to a campaign.

That’s according to a study that literally explored how we look at politicians’ websites — by tracking our eye movements.

Usabilla, a usage-tracking organization, asked 50 voters to navigate the websites of Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. Their eye movements were tracked and they were asked for their impressions of different features on each site.

Many participants reported that they responded well to sites that tugged at their emotions. Some reported that
they connected with pictures of Romney’s family, for example — which is evident from this eye-tracking analysis:

“I always like to know a little bit about a candidate and whether he is a good dad or husband because it tells a lot about his moral character,” wrote one participant.

Many of the respondents also highlighted the easy navigability of Romney’s site. When Usabilla asked participants to find out about candidates’ backgrounds, Romney’s prominently displayed “Meet Mitt” section made the task easy to achieve.

“I’d want to “Meet Mitt” and get to know him,” said one participant of Romney’s site. “I like right off the bat at the top of the page there is a bar that will take me to the page with the info I want to know,” reported another.

Others said that finding similar information was more difficult on former candidate Rick Santorum’s site, which chose the title “Why Rick?” — a prompt some users found confusing and unclear.

So what did the participants dislike about the candidates’ sites? Many took issue with websites that feature “donate now” buttons littered across every page along with stores for candidate-themed merchandise.

“The importance of receiving money is really obvious on this site,” reported one user regarding Romney’s site. “Is this a campaign website or retail store?” asked another.

For Romney, who is often accused by critics of being excessively wealthy and out of touch with ordinary Americans, this issue is particularly salient. A handful of respondents took issue with an image of a large, expensive house used on a Romney page asking supporters to get involved with the campaign. Some wrote that the house image reinforced those critiques of the former Governor.

“This is depicting an upper class home in a wealthy neighborhood,” said one participant of the page. “That is not the life I lead.”

What do you want from a politician’s website? Sound off in the comments below.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, sjlocke

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

The web still hasn’t become its own operating system but, man, parts of it are close. Take these surprisingly powerful and useful app-like websites, for example.

Do you remember how web browsers worked in 1998? Even back in the days of dial-up, Microsoft was so worried that your browser might replace your desktop that they nearly tore themselves apart trying to stomp down Netscape. That’s right, Netscape, a web browser that some of you reading this may not even remember. But take a look around the web right now, and it turns out Microsoft was right to be concerned–you’ll be amazed at just how much it’s possible to do, and do surprisingly well, in a browser.

We’re not talking the obvious, if often impressive stuff: email, calendar, and document management from Google, Zoho, and Microsoft itself. These are the sites that will save you hard drive space and clutter, and help you get by without having to shell out for software to just do that one thing you need. And they are definitely worth a bookmark or six.

Multi-track audio editing and recording: Myna

Need to chop together an audio interview, add some music to a talk, or otherwise tweak some audio? If you don’t have a Mac with GarageBand handy, or you’re not quite trained in the ways of Audacity, you can fire up Myna, Aviary’s free multi-track audio editor. Not only can you drop in audio files and make non-destructive edits, but you can record your voice or ambient sound straight from your browser tab. Aviary makes a whole suite of nifty browser-based tools, including some very handy image editors, but you should really check out …

Photoshop-like photo editing: Pixlr

When you need something more than just crop, resize, and save, Pixlr is where you turn. Multiple layers, a big undo/redo memory, unsharp masks, burn and dodge tools, curves and levels, and a big selection of filters are all packed in here, with much more to discover. That would all be so much pipe dream if the app wasn’t so fast-loading and responsive, even compared to its less-ambitious counterparts.

File conversion/Swiss Army knife: Zamzar

It’s 10 minutes until that Big Thing is due, and you just realized: You’ve got it in X format, and it needs to be Y. Sometimes X or Y can be really tricky, like a WordPerfect document (lawyers!), a TIFF image (publishers!), or a Pages package (Mac snobs!). Head to Zamzar, which isn’t particularly pretty or fancy, but does take in files and email them back to you in whatever format you need. You can also download web videos and send big files from Zamzar, just because, well, they figured they’d make it even more useful.

Chat, particularly Skype chat: Imo.im

In the life of every web-adept worker, there comes an encounter with a person, or an entire team, who uses Skype as their main means of chat. Skype may be free, but it’s also a bit hefty and annoying if all you want to do is chat. So sign into Imo.im, which runs chats through its web interface and doesn’t require a separate account. You can also open your GTalk, AIM, MSN, and Facebook chat accounts within the same frame, if you’d like.

Presentations: SlideRocket

Microsoft’s web-based PowerPoint tools are meant as a complement, a view-and-maybe-fix option, for the desktop Office suite. Google Docs’ Presentations and Zoho Show are decent, if you’re aiming for the standard PowerPoint-style presentation. But SlideRocket was built for the web, and its templates and editing tools are good at helping people with lesser design skills (read: this author) look halfway decent. It’s easy to export and download to standard PowerPoint or PDF files, or you can grab SlideRocket’s own presentation tool for a more interactive show. There are free “Lite” accounts that restrict offline access and cut out analytics, but it might not be hard to impress your boss enough to get them to swing for a Pro account.

Instantly copy tricky little characters: CopyPasteCharacter

Got the keyboard shortcut symbol for trademark (™) memorized? Neat. How about copyright (©), all rights reserved (®), and the upside-down exclamation point (¡)? Didn’t think so. CopyPasteCharacter might not seem impressive, compared to the more server-taxing entries above, but consider what a pain it is to have to search out those characters, either on your laptop or on the web, click them, then press to copy them. On this site, you just click on the symbol you want, and it’s copied to your clipboard. You can even create your own personalized set of oft-copied characters, but try to keep in mind that not everybody thinks ✈ is an acceptable way to tell clients that you’re traveling.

Image: Santiago Cornejo via Shutterstock