Why Walking Meetings Can Be Better Than Sitting Meetings

Walking meetings are a kind of a big deal at LinkedIn. On any given day you can find workers strolling and talking together on the bike path at the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters. The path takes about 20-25 minutes to circle -- perfect for a half-hour one-on-one with a colleague.

The walk and talks have obvious benefits. Desk-bound office workers can all use a bit more exercise. Sitting too much is killing us. Yet the walking meeting’s upsides go far beyond the physical. Walking helps break down formalities, relaxes inhibitions and fosters camaraderie between colleagues -- and less eye contact can fuel more personal conversation. Meeting on the go also minimizes distractions -- no phones, no email, no texts, no colleagues interrupting you.

Perhaps most intriguing, walking leads to more creative thinking, according to a recent study from researchers at Stanford University.

With sit-downs indoors, you face each other across a table. “You feel like you’re at the principal’s office,” Igor Perisic, LinkedIn’s vice president of engineering told The Huffington Post. “That’s not what you want.”

Perisic recounted a time when he and a colleague were trying to solve an issue with LinkedIn’s search function. They spent hours in a room with a white board trying to work it out. Still he felt that he was missing something.

“So we went out on a walk and talked about it,” Perisic said. When they got back indoors, they had the solution. “And it seemed like the obvious choice.”

You can find many big-shot fans of the walk and talk -- including Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and this guy named Barack Obama. There’s even a TED Talk devoted solely to the topic.

Obama (left) is reportedly a big fan of the walking meeting.

We all intuitively understand that it's nice to get some fresh air outside, but new research shines a light on why walking could be especially good in a work environment.

When we walk we let our guard down, said Marily Oppezzo, who researched walking and creativity, along with her professor Daniel Schwartz, when she was a doctoral student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Their paper was published online last year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

“Walking releases your filter,” said Oppezzo, now a post-doc at Stanford’s School of Medicine. Ideas you hold back in a conference room come spilling out when you’re moving.

To gauge walking’s effect on creativity, Schwartz and Oppezzo had test subjects walk and sit, and then asked them to find alternate uses for everyday items like tires or buttons. One person suggested using a button as a doorknob for a dollhouse, a tiny strainer, something to drop behind you to keep your path, for example.

They found that people who walked were able to come up with more unique ideas, both while they were walking and immediately afterward. And, it didn’t matter much if they walked on a treadmill or outside.

“Walking opens up the free flow of ideas,” they write in their paper.

This doesn’t mean you should convert all your conference rooms into gyms. Sometimes you’re going to need to sit down.

The Stanford researchers found that sitting is the better option when you have to solve a problem for which there is only one right answer. For example, they asked test subjects to come up with a single word that combines with the words “cottage, Swiss, and cake.” The sitters were better able to figure out the answer: cheese.

LinkedIn’s Perisic said that sometimes he needs to be near a whiteboard to work on a project. For difficult conversations -- say, letting someone know their performance isn’t measuring up -- he likes to talk in a more formal setting. “It’s tough to have the conversation outside.”

Mark Zuckerberg (left) and Jeff Weiner are both big fans of the walk and talk.

Still, Perisic, who oversees about 220 people, can often be found walking with someone on his team. And his CEO, Jeff Weiner, has been positively evangelical on the subject.

“It's energizing to get outside for a 30 minute walk a few times a day,” he said in a recent interview published on LinkedIn. “[It] just changes the whole state of things.”

Other Silicon Valley companies get the whole walking thing, too. Facebook just put in a half-mile loop on the roof of its new headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and workers there do a lot of walking meetings.

LinkedIn’s walking tradition was born more out of necessity than a careful review of research. During the firm’s early days, when it was growing quickly, it was really hard to book a conference room, Weiner told Bloomberg recently. “We had a lot of people and not enough space.”

A colleague suggested walking meetings as a fix -- solve the space issue and get some exercise. “It was very practical,” Weiner said.

The company's expanded since then, and it now has more space. But no one’s going back inside.

The Future Of Driving, In One Provocative Chart

In the future, only rich people will own cars and only robots will drive them.

That’s the takeaway from a new research note from Morgan Stanley auto analyst Adam Jonas. Like Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, he predicts that improvements in self-driving technology will eventually lead to bans on human driving on most roads.

Ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, which have already been widely adopted in major urban centers, have paved the way for cities, and eventually suburbs, to adopt mega-fleets of public vehicles that will taxi passengers around. This will dramatically lower the cost per ride to about 25 cents per mile, which is roughly one-tenth of what a traditional taxi costs, Jonas said. He provides no clear timeline for when this might occur.

By contrast, wealthy people -- at least in the near-term -- will own self-driving vehicles, a fact on which Mercedes-Benz and Tesla seem to be banking.

Again, Jonas provides no clear timeline. But an increasing number of luxury carmakers are already adding autonomous features to their vehicles. In October, Tesla's Musk estimated that fully driverless cars will be on the road by 2023.

Here’s how the chart breaks down:

• Quadrant 1: Today, most drivers own or lease their own vehicles, which they drive themselves. Autonomous driving technology is only beginning to emerge.
• Quadrant 2: Over the past few years, ride-hailing services such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar have alleviated the need to own a car in many major cities, making a driver much more accessible. Jonas said this is a logical step toward the so-called mega-fleets of public, autonomous cars.
• Quadrant 3: Over the next decade, rich people will likely swap out the cars they drive for cars that drive themselves. Already, Tesla is planning to roll out a version of its Model S sedan that has limited autopilot features sometime this summer. The latest version of the car, announced on Wednesday, starts at $67,500 after a Federal Tax Credit.
• Quadrant 4: This is the final evolution in the car industry and there is no clear date for when this will come to fruition. But with few exceptions, most people will be driven by cars that are either a public utility or part of a privately-owned fleet that users subscribe to use. At this point, laws will likely restrict human driving to select roads, Jonas wrote. Other forms of public transportation, such as subway systems, may become obsolete.

Pepsi's Latest Ad Campaign Has Little To Do With Soda

Pepsi wants to sell you a feeling, with a little soda on the side.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the soda giant's famous "Pepsi Challenge" campaign, which asked people to do a blind taste test to see if they preferred Pepsi or Coke. To celebrate, the company is re-launching the challenge, complete with celebrities like Usher and Serena Williams, as well as Vine and Snapchat sensation Jerome Jarre. But instead of picking Pepsi or Coke, the new campaign asks fans to take part in sports, tech, design and music challenges.

A new Pepsi ad released as part of the challenge. The can dispenses emojis instead of soda.

The modernized challenge isn’t completely devoid of images of Pepsi cans, and there will be a taste test component in some markets. But the ad push centers largely around creating an emotional connection with the Pepsi brand and less on lauding the taste of its cola.

That's because the company's ethos is about more than just a bubbly drink, said Brad Jakeman, the president of PepsiCo's Global Beverages Group.

“This is a brand that has stood next to major cultural moments all around the world; it’s a brand that always operates in the consumer zeitgeist,” Jakeman said. “The brand is much bigger than a product concept, and actually that has allowed us to do a lot of interesting things with this brand beyond soda.”

It makes sense for Pepsi to minimize the campaign's focus on soda because the sugary, carbonated drink is falling out of fashion. Americans in particular are opting more often for energy drinks and enhanced waters as the nation becomes more health-conscious. PepsiCo’s snack division, Frito-Lay, has helped buoy the company amid sluggish soda sales in recent years.

The decline in millions of liters of soda sold in the U.S.

The Pepsi Challenge was first imagined as a direct provocation to the company's main rival, Coke. At the time, Coke was a big-time national brand, while Pepsi was mostly popular regionally. As a result, Pepsi had to focus on innovations -- plastic two-liter bottles and aggressive marketing -- to make a dent in Coke’s lead, according to former Pepsi CEO John Sculley.

“Everything that I was expected to do at Pepsi was about competition with Coca-Cola,” said Sculley, who is also the author of Moonshot! Game-Changing Strategies to Build Billion-Dollar Businesses.

An early Pepsi Challenge ad.

Forty years later, that strategy doesn’t make sense in a world where Coke isn’t Pepsi’s main problem. Now, changing tastes and smaller upstarts offering a wide array of alternatives to soda are some of the biggest threats to the company.

“If you’re Pepsi, you have to do something,” said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “Trends are not going their way.”

This isn’t a problem unique to Pepsi. Legacy companies like McDonald’s and Coke are also searching for ways to give people a warm and fuzzy feeling about their brands even as shoppers eschew their products. Coke’s Super Bowl campaign encouraged viewers to make the Internet a more positive place by adding the hashtag “Make It Happy” to negative tweets, which flagged a bot to turn the text into cute cartoon images. McDonald’s also courted controversy after the chain released an ad highlighting messages like “thank you veterans” and “keep jobs in Toledo” that franchisees often feature on the signs outside their restaurants.

“What you’re seeing now is less emphasis on the product because they find themselves in this situation where the product itself is not that appealing,” said Denise Lee Yohn, a brand consultant who has worked with Burger King, New Balance and other top companies.

It’s hard to say whether creating a halo around a brand actually translates into selling more soda or burgers, Calkins said. It's easier to track the impact of old-school promotion tactics, like giving out coupons, than campaigns based on social media.

Now, the company will wait and see what kind of success it can have with a Pepsi Challenge that relies heavily on people liking it enough to tweet about it or talk about it on Facebook. “The challenge is can they come with something that’s really compelling," Calkins said.

Burger King Follows McDonald's Lead, Drops Soda From Kids' Meals

Burger King is saying bye-bye to sugary sodas in kids' meals, a quiet change that follows similar moves by McDonald's and Wendy's earlier this year.

USA Today first reported the unannounced menu switch, which will involve replacing fountain drinks with fat-free milk, low-fat chocolate milk and apple juice in Burger King Kids Meals. Soft drinks will still be offered, but they'll be nixed from the Kids Meal menu.

The fast-food behemoths have reportedly stopped marketing sodas to kids due to pressure from consumer advocacy groups working to end childhood obesity. McDonald's, for instance, has partnered with The Alliance for a Healthy Generation, founded by the Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association, NPR reports.

Burger King made the switch as part of an "ongoing effort to offer our guests options that match lifestyle needs," Alex Macedo, president of Burger King North America, told USA Today.

Margo Wootan, director of the consumer advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest, says she lobbied for two years to get Burger King to make the change. USA Today reports:

"It will help children eat better now, as soda is the leading source of calories in children's diets," says Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy for the group. "It also helps to set kids on a path toward healthier eating in the future, with fewer kids becoming conditioned to think that soda should be a part of every eating out occasion."

Sugary soft drinks are a top source of calories in children's diets and can contribute to obesity, Wootan says. The percentage of children ages 6–11 years in the U.S. who were obese increased from 7% in 1980 to nearly 18% in 2012. Similarly, the percentage of adolescents ages 12–19 years who were obese increased from 5% to nearly 21% over the same period, reports the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The menu change will have a colossal impact on the beverage industry, USA Today reports, because so many Americans who drink soda now started when they were kids.

But it also signals a nationwide mindset change. Major fast-food chains are beginning to improve the quality of their food and drink choices in the face of public demand. McDonald's announced last week that it's removing human antibiotics from its chicken, a move that advocates hope will eventually raise the quality of all meat products, from the processing plant to the restaurant.

10 Talking Points For Any Apple Watch Conversation

The Apple Watch is coming. We're about to get more details, but we know it'll ship in April and start at $349.

Expect a lot of water-cooler conversation about the new gadget as we get closer to people actually being able to buy the thing. (Too much conversation, perhaps.) You'll want some smart things to say, so we dug through some insightful writing to help you piece together an opinion.

Will anyone buy the thing?

• Yes: "What matters for adoption of a technology isn’t what’s possible for the user -- what matters is what’s easy." -- Christopher Mims, The Wall Street Journal

• No: "I don't see myself texting, getting directions, or browsing cherished photo memories on my wrist. I have a smartphone for that." -- Eugene Kim, PCMag

• Maybe: "Solid survey research suggested not only that the iPhone would fail, but also that it would fail particularly hard in the United States because our phones and cameras are good enough, already." -- Derek Thompson, The Atlantic

• Who cares? "They say [the Apple Watch] will revolutionize the way we slowly and loudly repeat ourselves into electronic devices." -- Jimmy Kimmel, "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"

Who's the device made for?

• Fashionistas: "Any tech worn that close to the body is going to have more of an emphasis on design specs and aesthetics, because it’s just so intensely personal." -- Dominic Basulto, The Washington Post

• Fitness buffs: "It reminds you to stand up at least once an hour, it suggests goals for how many calories you should burn each day, and it keeps track of your exercise." -- Lisa Eadicicco, Business Insider

• Apple fanboys: "I suspect many are jumping to the conclusion that the only reason someone will pay thousands of dollars for [a gold] Apple Watch is to wear it forever as a status symbol. Instead, people will pay thousands of dollars in order to have the opportunity to buy an Apple product that can be worn." -- Neil Cybart, Above Avalon

What else does Apple have going on?

• iPhone sales are superb: "Apple’s iPhone sales in the last three months of 2014 were more than triple Google Inc.’s total revenue reported in its last quarter ($16.52 billion). That means the iPhone is worth more than Android, Google search, Windows and Office combined." -- Thomas Halleck, International Business Times

• It's launching a streaming service: "You better believe that when Apple’s streaming music service comes out later this year, it’s going to come hard." -- Josh Constine, TechCrunch

• It might be making a car: "The Cupertino, Calif., company has several hundred employees working secretly toward creating an Apple-branded electric vehicle, according to people familiar with the matter. The project, code-named “Titan,” initially is working on the design of a vehicle that resembles a minivan, one of the people said." -- Daisuke Wakabayashi and Mike Ramsey, The Wall Street Journal

So there you have it: 10 things you can bring up whenever someone mentions the Apple Watch. You're welcome.

Courting Disaster: Obamacare Is Back At The Supreme Court, And These 6 Lives Hang In The Balance

Obamacare is back before the Supreme Court in a case that could gut the health care law and leave millions of Americans facing severe consequences.

King v. Burwell, a lawsuit that originated in conservative and libertarian think tanks, alleges that a stray phrase in the Affordable Care Act -- “an exchange established by the state” -- means the federal government isn’t allowed to provide subsidies to the residents of states that refused to establish health insurance exchanges under the law.

Only 13 states and the District of Columbia have their own exchanges. If this bid to derail the Affordable Care Act succeeds, the subsidies would disappear -- maybe immediately, maybe a little later -- for Obamacare enrollees everywhere else.

Behind the numbers, however, is a very human story. Without the subsidies, health insurance costs would spike beyond the means of low- and moderate-income recipients. As a result, close to 10 million people would lose their health coverage. Many others would face major increases in the premiums they pay for insurance.

The Huffington Post interviewed six Americans at risk of the worst effects of a high court ruling against Obamacare. We wanted to know how the law has affected their lives already, and how the absence of subsidies might affect them in the future. They told stories of life and death, financial ruin, lifelong plans in jeopardy and families disrupted. Here are those stories, as told by the people who would be living them. Karen Hines
Virginia Joe Lucas
Pennsylvania Jay Joshi
Texas Dave Price
Illinois Sheila Tyson
Alabama Jared Blitz
Arizona

Costco Says It's Replacing American Express With Visa And Citi

NEW YORK (AP) — Costco says it struck a deal for Citi to be the exclusive issuer of its co-branded credit cards, with Visa replacing American Express as the card network.

The deal is subject to Citi buying the company's co-branded credit card portfolio, Costco said.

Costco and American Express ended their partnership after failing to reach an agreement on renewal terms. American Express said earlier this month that the relationship, which goes back 16 years, is set to expire March 31, 2016. Costco says the deal with Visa and Citigroup Inc. would take effect the next day.

The company said it would provide its customers with information about the transition in coming months.

Costco Wholesale Corp., based in Issaquah, Washington, has 474 locations in the United States and 88 in Canada.