UPDATE
kets and entrepreneurs, and if there
is a role for the private sector in the
distribution of vaccines.
JOHNSAUER
Washington,D.C.
Great story of how analysis can
amplify good work and provide a
basis for prioritizing investment
on impact. Interestingly, incentives for vaccination in the form
of government-funded family-assistance payments have long
been in place in Australia. My first
instinct on reading about it was
to feel a little patronized, but subsequent exposure to the often polarized views about immunization
has led me to feel a little more
comfortable with government being proactive rather than passive.
JASONQUIN
AliceSprings,Australia
Women at Work
I was glad to see statistics about
women in the workforce included
in the September issue (Now).
However, the graphic accompanying the article had inappropriate
icons from what seems to be another decade. The image shows a
woman at a sewing machine with
the label “Women’s share of the
labor force.” Attitudes about ste-reotypical gender roles are part of
workplace discrimination and
contribute to women’s likelihood
to be hired less, promoted less,
and paid less than men. I hope the
visuals in future articles will be in
concert with the times and with
what I suspect is Fast Company’s
attitude toward working women.
CHLOE RE YNOLDS
Berkeley, California
Cooling Off
As your fascinating article on Japan’s post-earthquake energy crisis reveals, we do pay significant
financial and greenhouse-gas
costs for cooling our buildings
(“Undress for Success”). Moreover,
Japan’s urgent campaign to prevent nationwide blackouts
has shown that cultural changes—
wearing sandals, shorts, and
short-sleeved shirts to work in the
summer!—can lower energy use as
much as technological ones. Perhaps the U.S. government could
lead the way in rolling out its own
hybrid of cultural and technological changes to reduce energy expenses for its buildings. There’s
another interesting wrinkle to this
story: In an aging population such
as Japan’s, people devote a lot more
of their consumer budgets to energy to mitigate temperature extremes. Now is the time to change.
GREGO’NEILL
Washington, D. C.
Clear Content
We’ve been talking about personalization since the “olden days,” when
email was our main source of outreach to our target audiences ( Tech
Edge). It seems we have a hard time
getting it right unless we ask people
directly what information they’re
looking for. It’ll be interesting to see
if discovery engines can finally
crack the code.
KAT Y MCCLELLAND
SanDiego
KEEPING CURRENT
It’s been a busy few months for David Bohrman, one of
our 2011 Most Creative People in Business. In March, the
television vet left his post as CNN’s Washington bureau
chief to become the network’s chief innovation officer.
Now, he’s left CNN entirely to head up Current TV, the
progressive-news brainchild of Al Gore and business
partner Joel Hyatt. “It was more than anyone’s first
day of school,” he says of his first day as president of
the six-year-old network, where one of his biggest tasks
is to turn the network’s success with Countdown With
Keith Olbermann into the momentum for full-on political television programming. Bohrman plans to
rapidly “catch the election wave” and position Current
to compete with formidable broadcast players such as
Fox, MSNBC, and his old CNN. “In three, six, nine
months, you’ll see a very different programming
schedule and three nervous broadcast networks,” he
says. Some might say leaving a massive global team
like CNN’s for Current’s team of hundreds has its downsides, but Bohrman sees it differently: “It forces you to
be creative, and that’s a good thing.” —CHRISTINA CHAE Y
Fast Fix
In September’s “They Have Hacked Your
Brain,” we incorrectly stated the owner of
NeuroFocus. It is Nielsen Holdings NV.
