• We asked the HR heads at top finance firms like Bank of America, Citi, and Morgan Stanley how to win a spot there — and how to succeed once you do.
• Bank of America looks for good judgment in job candidates.
• Point72 encourages proactivity. If you're feeling unfulfilled, don't wait for challenges to come to you.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Prestigious firms like Citi and Goldman Sachs are notoriously difficult to break into.

Everyone knows you've got to be smart, competent, and ambitious — but what else will help you stand out among a sea of talented applicants... and what will catapult you to success once you're there?

To find out, we tapped the HR chiefs at top finance companies like Bank of America, BlackRock, and Morgan Stanley. These folks are the final gatekeepers when it comes to recruiting, hiring, and granting promotions.

Read on for their best advice on nailing the job interview, leading with humility, and what to do when you're stuck in a rut.

Dan DeFrancesco, Meghan Morris, and Bradley Saacks contributed reporting.

SEE ALSO: POWER BROKERS OF TECH: HR chiefs reveal how to get hired at Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, and other top companies

Dane Holmes, global head of human capital management at Goldman Sachs

The skills you need to work at Goldman Sachs

Curiosity and drive. We need people who are committed to growing and learning, and curiosity is critical to that. Effort can't overcome anything, but effort + talent = excellence. These characteristics maximize our impact for our clients, our communities, and our people.

Read more: Goldman Sachs' head of HR says an 'underrated' factor should make a big difference in which job you choose — especially if you're going to be logging long hours

His best advice for new managers

Lead with humility. Humility is not synonymous with meekness, but rather rooted in confidence. Humble leaders make their people feel welcomed, appreciated, and empowered.

Demonstrating humility means both recognizing and openly expressing your weaknesses (in corporate speak we say "areas of development") and building a team that offsets your shortcomings. Teams want to be led by a real person — not a corporate cutout.

Jeff Brodsky, chief human resources officer at Morgan Stanley

The question you'll have to answer if you interview with him

Tell me about a time you took a contrarian viewpoint and convinced a large group to approach a problem in a different way.

The best question he was ever asked as a job candidate

Walk me through the most challenging conversation you had with a high-performing team member that you were directly managing. Knowing what you know now, how would you have handled it differently?

Paige Ross, global head of human resources at Blackstone

The mindset you need to work at Blackstone

We pride ourselves on maintaining our entrepreneurial culture and want people who share that mindset.

The best way to get noticed and promoted, besides working hard

We want people who are nice and willing to collaborate. We want our people to enjoy working together. It is important to find ways to network across the various businesses and collaborate with groups across the firm.

Lizzy Schoentube, head of campus recruiting at Bank of America

The one skill you absolutely must have to get hired at Bank of America

Judgment. There are many things that we can and do teach our hires about their job, a particular task, or the company. But sometimes a situation can arise where the new hire needs to know how to operate in the gray and make a decision on something.

Having the judgment to know when to escalate a situation or when to contact people to gather further information, make an assessment, and reach the right decision is key.

The most impressive question someone has asked her in a job interview

Once, at the end of an interview with a summer intern candidate, I asked, "Do you have any other questions?" The intern's response was, "No other questions about the bank, but is there anything else I can tell you to help you decide on my candidacy, and to know that I am fully interested in this opportunity?"

I was very impressed by that question — not only was the candidate ensuring I had all the information I needed, but significantly, it was a way of reiterating interest in an internship with us.

Jeffrey Smith, global head of human resources at BlackRock

The attitude you absolutely must have to get hired at BlackRock

We look for people who come to work every day thinking about what they can do to serve our clients. People who are passionate about learning, growing, and innovating. Strong collaborators driven and motivated by contributing to something greater than ourselves.

The first thing he tells employees who are frustrated at work

If you're feeling unfulfilled, you should have an open conversation with your manager focused on your interests and career aspirations. We have an internal mobility policy so our employees can pursue different opportunities at the firm, which keeps people engaged and shares the talent across different teams.

Read more: Hulu's HR chief shares the simple task you should do when you realize you hate your job

We recently launched two initiatives to support ongoing learning and mobility: the Transform Program helps employees build technical skills to transition to full-stack developer roles and the Growing More Great Investors initiative drives diversity, inclusion, and development across our investment teams.

Ariel Speicher, head of human capital for Point72, and Alyssa Friedman, head of business development for the Cubist business at Point72

The traits you need to get hired at Point72

SPEICHER: You have to be intellectually curious and strive for greatness. But you should also have a growth mindset and see the opportunity in failure. The markets are tough and the odds are challenging, so you have to have the courage and resilience to stick with it.

Read more: A former Starbucks HR exec shares the single job-interview question that predicts success better than a résumé

FRIEDMAN: Grit and persistence. Having great ideas is one thing, but implementation is another. The ability to stick with a project, look deeper than the competition, and not give up easily. This is important in research, but also in other domains. We want to hire people who will take on responsibility and initiative to solve problems.

A pro tip for employees who are feeling unfulfilled

FRIEDMAN: If you put in the effort, you can learn and challenge yourself in any role at any institution. Don't wait for it to come to you. It's important to speak up. I like to ask: What are your favorite projects? When do you feel the most energized? I tell my team all the time that I want to design a job that is too good to leave.

Sara Wechter, global head of human resources at Citi

The only type of people she hires

People who are successful at Citi have the ability to make things happen. We need doers.

The most important piece of advice she gives new managers

I have to remind new managers to ask for help along the way. No one expects you to be able to do it all, and somehow people can forget that when they start to manage people. We all succeed together.

The first question she asks employees who are feeling unmotivated

I ask them what they have done about it. Much of the time when people are stuck they don't take action to help themselves, but when you call them out they do! When someone takes the reins on their own professional development, it makes it easier for others around them to take action and respond to their needs as well.

• More American companies eager to help their workers are offering "summer Fridays" as an employee benefit.
• According to CEOs and HR chiefs across the country, letting staff leave early (or take the day off) on Fridays during the warmer months boosts productivity and employee morale.
• Some are suggesting the perk be left in place year-round.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Companies in the U.S. looking to address rising reports of worker burnout are turning in droves to a once minor (though widely beloved) seasonal perk: summer Fridays.

From Memorial Day in May to Labor Day in September, many businesses let their employees take either a half day on Fridays, or skip going to the office altogether. According to a survey by global research firm Gartner, 55% of American companies across industries have instituted a summer Friday policy in 2019, up from 44% in 2018.

Business Insider spoke to several CEOs and HR chiefs who say this spike is no coincidence.

"I think time off — and specifically, time that you're not supposed to be thinking about work — is the best way to combat burnout," Flynn Zaiger, CEO of marketing agency Online Optimism, told Business Insider. The head of the New Orleans-based company says being headquartered in the Big Easy means they take relaxation seriously: Zaiger gives his employees four half-Fridays to choose from in the summer months.

"We have found that while summer Fridays decrease the work hours in a week, the boost in morale more than compensates for the lack of time spent at the office," Zaiger said. "Employees are eager to get to work early and are efficient throughout the mornings trying to ensure that all of their work is done for the week. They come back to work on Monday a little more refreshed, and ready to hit the ground running."

Battling a burnout epidemic

The US already has one of the hardest-working populations in the world, according to statistics gathered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international economic research organization. The research, which tracked employed persons across all ages, genders, and industries, found that Americans worked an average of 1,780 hours a year from 2014 to 2018, slightly more than the global average of 1,746 hours.

Compared to European nations like Germany (1,356 hours), Denmark (1,408 hours), and the United Kingdom (1,538 hours), US workers are spending between 200 and 400 extra hours a year at the office. Meanwhile, a 2018 Gallup study of nearly 7,500 full-time employees found that 23% said they felt burned out at work very often or always, and 44% said they felt burned out sometimes.

Read More:An HR exec who's led teams at WeWork and Citi explains the best way to tell your boss you're overworked

"Burnout is on the rise," business psychologist Sarah Tottle wrote for The Conversation. "It is a growing problem for the modern workplace, having an impact on organizational costs, as well as employee health and well-being. These include possible long-term health risks and, due to its contagious nature, a toxic working environment of low morale, scapegoating, and increased office politics."

The World Health Organization recently classified burnout as a "syndrome," medically legitimizing the condition for the first time. Symptoms include feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one's job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and reduced professional efficacy.

Offering summer Fridays has multiple benefits

The concept of "summer Fridays" as a manager-sanctioned office break reportedly began in the 1960s, when New York ad agencies let restless Mad Men-types skip work early during the warmer months. Offering the perk to new hires eventually became a way for companies to stay competitive: From 2012 to this year, there's been a 43% increase in the number of organizations globally touting summer Fridays as a specific work benefit, according to Gartner's survey.

Dave Gartenberg, CHRO of Avanade, a Seattle-based global consulting firm that employs more than 30,000 workers, told Business Insider that providing staff with summer Fridays was a no-brainer. "Flexible schedules help employees perform at their best by allowing the freedom to find the sweet spot of their productivity and manage their outside obligations," he said. As long as employees manage their duties before bolting early, "only great things happen."

And while reduced office hours sound like they might hurt workflow, research from management services company ADP shows that 66% of workers who take advantage of summer Fridays say it increases productivity.

"During the summer months, we have taken the approach of letting most of the sales staff take Fridays off," Christopher Westfall, CEO of Medicare insurance sales agency Senior Savings Network in Charleston, South Carolina, told Business Insider. "This has not only made the other four days of the workweek more productive, but those folks have actually been able to spend more time with loved ones."

Making summer Fridays a year-long affair

Sarah Stoddard, a community expert for careers site Glassdoor, recognized that "offering summer Fridays can be a way for employers to promote stronger work-life balance during the warmer months." However, she told Business Insider that bosses should avoid treating the time-constrained perk as the end-all of burnout treatment.

"Employers should consider diversifying their benefits and perks throughout the year, such as flexible hours or remote working options, in order to appeal to a wide range of applicants with in-demand skills and retain top talent," she said via email.

In fact, U.S. companies might want to take a page from Japan, where the government introduced "Premium Fridays" in 2017. The bonus benefit lets the country's infamously overwork erd labor force head home early on Friday afternoons. Even Prime Minister Shinzō Abe reportedly takes time off on Premium Fridays to meditate.

"I don't see [summer Friday] going away, and if anything, employers are becoming more and more flexible with how and when their people work," Traci Wilk, former head of HR at Starbucks, told Business Insider.

Wilk is now senior vice president at The Learning Experience, an early childhood education company based in West Palm Beach, Florida. The staff there heads home at 2 p.m. come the end of the summer workweek for what they call (in a very Sunshine State twist) "Flip-Flop Fridays."

"It's to showcase a 'work hard, play hard' company culture and vibe," Wilk said. "I can see this evolving over time where employers offer the perk throughout the entire year, as a means to further boost productivity and engagement."

Winter Fridays, anyone?

SEE ALSO: Why meetings, email, and 'excessive collaboration' are the unholy trinity of burnout

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How to avoid burnout according to a 26-year-old self-made millionaire

• Money is a common source of conflict in relationships, especially when one person spends more money than the other thinks.
• We asked relationship and personal finance experts for signs your spouse is secretly spending more money than you think.
• Red flags include frequent shopping trips, a decreasing credit score, and a reluctance to talk about finances.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

All couples will likely argue over finances at some point.

But there's a difference between discussing them openly versus overspending money behind your partner's back. After all, trust is the foundation of a relationship, including being open about money, especially from a joint account.

Not only is money one of the most commonly reasons for divorce, it's also the No. 1 thing couples argue about, relationship therapist Jen Elmquist, author of "Relationship Reset: Secrets from a Couples Therapist That Will Revolutionize Your Love for a Lifetime," told Business Insider.

"When one partner feels the need to hide spending, it is a red flag that a money issue is affecting the relationship," she said.

We asked Elmiqust and other experts for signs your spouse is secretly spending more money than you think.

Here are the red flags they said to look out for.

SEE ALSO: How to protect your money when marrying someone who's in legal or financial trouble

DON'T MISS: 10 questions to ask your travel agent to save you money on your vacation

You find new items that you didn't know they bought

Hiding purchases is a common sign that your spouse doesn't want you to know about what they bought or how much they spent,Andrea Woroch, a consumer savings writer, told Business Insider in an email.

"Finding secret purchases is a big red flag," she said. "It's important to approach the issue delicately, though — explain that you feel it's secretive and how their purchases affect your finances and future goals."

Woroch suggests implementing a spending rule: Decide on a specific budget in which all purchases over a certain amount must be discussed together.

"This could be anything over $100 or $200, depending on your financial situation," she said. "In some cases, it's a good idea that each partner has some fun money each month, too, with no comments from the other partner."

They intercept bills before you can see them

Trust is the pillar of a healthy relationship, so if your partner is hiding things from you, such as bills before you can see them, it's not a good sign.

"If your partner is being sneaky and keeping statements from you, something's off," Elmquist said. "Once or twice could just be a mistake, but if it's consistent, let them know you need to see the statements."

You discover that they have new accounts, such as credit cards or personal loans

Another sign your partner may be overspending is if you find they have bank accounts or credit cards that you weren't aware of,Nick Holeman, a financial planner atBetterment, told Business Insider in an email. 

"Most accounts and credit cards have a monthly statement, or you may receive a 1099-INT around tax time from any bank accounts that paid interest," he said. "Approach financial planning from a partnership perspective, and have a direct conversation on all bank accounts and credit cards under each person's name."

This way, you can have a better understanding of your larger financial picture as a team, he added.

Andrew Schrage, CEO of the personal-finance site Money Crashers, said to be aware of new credit applications or credit cards.

"If your partner is spending recklessly, it's possible they will apply for an extra credit card or a personal loan to help cover their overspending," he told Business Insider in an email. "If you notice an unusual uptick in letters from credit card companies or promotional offers for credit, then it's possible they're trying to take on more debt."

They frequently splurge or justify big purchases you two didn't discuss in advance

Schrage said that many financially savvy people will shop strategically — they'll get their electronics on Black Friday or wait until the turn of the New Year to buy an appliance as a retailer brings in the next year's models.

"An overspending spouse, on the other hand, might go out to buy groceries and come back home with a new gadget or a litany of additional items that weren't on the shopping list," he said. "If this happens on a regular basis, then it's a sign they're spending too much."

Elmquist suggests that if your partner does this frequently, it's good for you both to agree in advance to a maximum purchase amount.

"This is a boundary that can save your relationship from unnecessary financial conflict," she said.

She added that if your partner doesn't want a boundary or can't honor it, it's a sign of a spending problem.

Their credit score is decreasing

Holeman said another sign your significant other may be secretly overspending is if their credit score decreases. 

"Many behaviors that are associated with a spending problem are also negative dings on your credit score," he said. "For example, carrying a high balance on your credit cards can increase your utilization ratio, which can hurt your score, as can making late payments."

In addition, he said that each time you open a new credit card, your score usually goes down temporarily by a few points.

They'll round down when it comes to purchases

If your partner is ashamed or embarrassed about their spending, they may start to round down their purchases.

"If they bought an item for $65, they might say it cost $60," Schrage said. "While seemingly insignificant, rounding down is a sign that a spouse isn't being careful with their spending or that they're trying to downplay how much they've spent."

He said the danger comes in when these costs add up if a partner does this on a consistent basis.

They don't want to have regular financial talks or check-ins

Holeman said a way to make sure you and your partner are on the same financial page is to have regular check-ins. But if your partner refuses, this could be because they know they're spending too much.

"Check-ins will track your progress towards your financial goals, and see if anything needs adjusting," he said. "If your partner is reluctant, it could mean they just aren't comfortable with discussing money or something more serious, like they are hiding something."

And Woroch said it's not a good sign when your spouse is suddenly hyper-sensitive or uncomfortable about discussing your joint financial situation or budget.

"Someone who doesn't want to talk about money or credit card debt is likely spending more than they should," she said.

They want to control all the finances (and not loop you in)

Elmquist said another sign your spouse could be spending more than they're sharing with you is if they want to control all the finances — and not loop you in. 

"There are many ways for a couple to arrange their finances, but no matter the arrangement, they should both be aware of and have access to what's going on," she said. "This includes accounts, investments, insurance, and credit reports."

She added that if your financial future is connected to another person, you are responsible to be in the know. 

They don't want to speak to a financial professional

While you may think a financial professional could help you and your spouse better align with money goals, if your partner is resistant, there may be a bigger reason behind it. 

"It's good to have both spouses be comfortable speaking with financial advisers or accountants," Holeman said. "Getting more involved with your financial professionals can help you both gain a deeper understanding of what's going on in your finances."

He added that while observing one of these signs may not mean your partner is spending money without telling you, be wary if you see more than one.

"As always, it's best to try speaking openly with your spouse about these things first, and to deal with them together," he said.

• Joannie Fu is the chief of staff and technical assistant, Programmable Solutions Engineering Group, at Intel.
• When she began her career in tech, she was told she didn't look feminine enough and that she had to change her appearance.
• She eventually found a workplace that accepted her for who she is. Now, Fu is a prominent LGBT advocate who wants employees to embrace what makes them unique.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When I was in my mid-20, I had to make an overwhelming decision. After years of studying engineering and business, I received job offers from five companies. They all had similar compensation, attractive opportunities, and welcoming teams. But as a first-generation immigrant, Asian-American, and lesbian, I desired more: I wanted to work for a socially responsible global company where I could be out as my true self.

In the early 2000s, acceptance for gay, lesbian, and transgender employees was not a given. At a company I'd previously joined after college, the management team made it implicitly clear that I could either be myself or advance my career — but not both. I was routinely given feedback that I appeared too androgynous. I was also told that I should not attend client meetings since I might cause distraction or discomfort for those clients, even though I had performed the research and developed the presentation with high praise.

This message came from the exact same management team that continually told me I had great capabilities and an incredible future. After being mired in these mixed messages to the point of dressing femininely and wearing make-up, I eventually realized that I would never get ahead at a company that didn't accept me. I simply would not reach my full potential if I had to invest my energy worrying daily about what I was wearing.

Read more: This top Accenture exec came out as gay to coworkers at an office party 32 years ago. He says it was one of the best career decisions he's ever made.

Finding allies is the best way to grow in the workplace

When I eventually joined Intel in 2000 as a Colorado Fab Senior Buyer and Team Lead, I knew from the start that I never wanted to be in a similar situation again. On my first day, I cautiously came out to my manager and told him that I did not want special treatment, that all I wanted was to be treated like everyone else.

He absolutely surprised me when he responded, "Why do you want to be ordinary when you can be extraordinary?!" He encouraged me to start a local chapter of Intel's IGLOBE employee resource group for LGBT+ employees in Colorado. He also sponsored me to attend conferences to speak about diversity, and pushed me to be vocal when I saw inequalities in the workplace. He was an exceptional ally pioneer, planting leadership seeds in me ― professionally and personally ― that continue to bloom today.

Read more: The 23 most powerful LGBTQ+ people in tech

Several years later, I was offered an expatriate assignment to start Intel's first factory in Dalian, China, which I knew I couldn't pass up. But same-sex marriage was and still is illegal in China. My domestic partner and I had just welcomed our first child, and I was adamant that I would not go to China without them.

It's one thing for a company to claim equal protection for LGBT+ individuals under official policies and another to truly ensure they have access to the same rights, benefits, projects, and opportunities as other employees. My company very well could have pointed to official Chinese government policies and left me to handle the logistics of getting my partner and child to China on my own. But Intel HR, the legal team, PR, and the management team surprised me by providing all the necessary resources to avoid separating our family, from support in coordinating with the government, to help with securing my partner's visa, to ensuring our safety while abroad.

Employees feel motivated when they have managers with diverse backgrounds

My experiences in Colorado and China (as well as the freedom to be my authentic self) are some of the reasons why I've thrived at Intel for 19 years and counting. And they provide lessons that other companies would be wise to take to heart if they want to retain talented employees and build employee satisfaction. According to the 2018 Deloitte Millennial Survey, 69% of millennial employees who believe their senior management teams are diverse describe their working environments as motivating and stimulating, versus 43% who don't perceive their leadership teams as diverse.

Being able to embrace my identity with pride has also helped me grow both professionally and personally in ways that I could not have anticipated. It's given me new leadership opportunities, sharpened my skills, and helped me coach others on their journeys.

Today, I am part of the Intel LGBT+ leadership council and actively lead several initiatives within and outside of Intel, including Lesbians Who Tech, and Out & Equal. It's also led to a tremendous sense of personal fulfillment when I know my efforts have made a positive difference for others. After China, I moved to California to work at an Intel campus that was part of a recent acquisition. While raising greater awareness and acceptance for the LGBT+ community within my new campus, a colleague let me know that after 12 years in the workforce, she finally felt safe bringing her best self to work.

My advice: Find a workplace that will accept you as you are, and not force you into a single mold. Identify allies within your organization that will speak up and advocate for you. And most of all, embrace what makes you unique and learn how to leverage it to reach your full potential. Love your uniqueness even more fiercely than you love your strengths, for they are one and the same. Don't be ordinary ― be extraordinary!

Joannie Fu is the chief of staff for the Intel's Programmable Solutions Engineering group. She partners directly with Engineering VPs as a key trusted advisor to set strategies and imperatives for the PSE Exec Office for an org that spans silicon, hardware, software, IP, platform, manufacturing, and quality engineering which deliver multi-billion dollar revenue for the Intel FPGA business.

SEE ALSO: The 23 most powerful LGBTQ+ people in tech

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian have a combined net worth of $189 million. Here's how they make and spend their money.

• Elizabeth Warren was a standout in the first round of debates.
• Her rhetoric features a signature mix of vision statements and policy specifics.
• This is a display of toggling between different "levels of construal" — going between the abstract and the concrete.
• Effective leaders can do both.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The first round of 2020 Democratic Party debates has come and gone.

Among the field of 20, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts stood out with her policy ideas, which clearly set the agenda on the first night and maybe the second, too.

It started with her opening statement.

"When you've got a government, when you've got an economy that does great for those with money and isn't doing great for everyone else, that is corruption, pure and simple," she said. "We need to call it out. We need to attack it head-on. And we need to make structural change in our government, in our economy, and in our country."

Big structural change — that's one of her two main calling cards. The other: "I've got a plan for that."

What Warren is demonstrating, to the eye test, is a capacity documented in the psychology literature as being essential for effective leadership: being able to go up and down levels of construal.

Read more: 15 large American companies that have the best environmental policies

Construal is how abstract or specific a statement or idea is. High construal is the stuff of vision, grand strategy, and generalization. Low construal is the concrete, the detailed, the nitty-gritty execution.

From their perch atop hierarchies, leaders are contextually nudged toward high-construal stuff, e.g., vision and dreams and the like. They get in trouble when they can't make it down into detail. Batia Wiesenfeld, a management professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, held up Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes as a cautionary tale — focusing on massive growth while skimping on product specifics.

Among the political field, without naming names, it's easy to spot candidates who can pronounce or denounce from on high but aren't getting into detail.

Warren, on the other hand, is alternating from getting into the weeds to speaking from on high.

Again, from the first debate, her take on "Medicare for All":

"I spent a big chunk of my life studying why families go broke. And one of the number one reasons is the cost of healthcare, medical bills. And that's not just for people who don't have insurance. It's for people who have insurance.

"Look at the business model of an insurance company. It's to bring in as many dollars as they can in premiums and to pay out as few dollars as possible for your healthcare. That leaves families with rising premiums, rising co-pays, and fighting with insurance companies to try to get the healthcare that their doctors say that they and their children need. Medicare for All solves that problem."

That's the virtue of being a researcher turned politician. The rubber meets the road. Vision turns into execution. Dreams become plans.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft has been rated the most environmentally friendly company. Here's what it's doing right.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Jay-Z is hip-hop's first billionaire. See how he and Beyoncé make and spend their money.

• Apple on Thursday announced Sabih Khan would be the company's new senior vice president of operations.
• Khan has been with Apple for 24 years.
• There's one famous anecdote between Khan and CEO Tim Cook that shows why he's the perfect man for the job.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

On the same day Apple announced its longtime chief designer, Jony Ive, would leave to form his own company, it also announced another move: the promotion of Sabih Khan, a 24-year Apple veteran, to be the company's new senior vice president of operations.

Khan will report to Jeff Williams, Apple's chief operating officer.

"I've been privileged to work with Sabih for more than 20 years, and you won't find a more talented operations executive anywhere on the planet," Williams said in Apple's press release announcing the news.

As senior vice president of operations, Khan will be responsible for overseeing Apple's global supply chain, which gathers and processes materials to build the company's computers and smartphones.

If you're wondering why Khan is the right man for the job, it's important to know that Khan has been a key executive at Apple for many years. And there's one particular anecdote that captures Khan's reliability.

In a 2008 profile of Tim Cook, who was serving as Apple's chief operating officer at the time under Steve Jobs, Fortune recounted a story between Cook and his "top lieutenants" that perfectly captures Khan's devotion and reliability:

One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia. "This is really bad," Cook told the group. "Someone should be in China driving this." Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, "Why are you still here?" Khan, who remains one of Cook's top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional.

Mind you, this story happened almost 20 years ago. Khan has gained only more experience since then, having helped Apple deliver hit devices like the iPhone and launch entirely new product categories like the Apple Watch.

"He is a world-class leader and collaborator," Williams said. "I have no doubt that he will be the best leader of the Ops team in Apple's history."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The incredible story behind Slack, the app that's taken over offices everywhere

• Ray Dalio is the founder and co-CIO of Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, with about $150 billion in assets under management.
• Dalio discussed key moments from his career in an episode of the Business Insider podcast "This Is Success."
• He explained how his collection of "principles" for life, work, and investing began when he went broke after a bad market call in 1982, which he blames on hubris.
• He also shares what led to his embrace of "radical transparency," what he learned from a succession plan that hasn't always gone smoothly, and what it means to be in the "third stage" of his life.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Ray Dalio is one of the most influential figures in the world of finance. He started Bridgewater Associates out of his apartment in 1975, and grew it into the world's largest hedge fund. It now has $150 billion in assets under management.

Over his career, the billionaire investor has become well known for his unusual management style, rooted in what he calls "radical transparency." At Bridgewater's Connecticut office, employees use iPads to rate each other's performance in real time. Nearly every meeting is recorded, and sometimes those recordings get used in company-wide emails. The culture there can be intense.

And since the 1980s, Dalio's been collecting "principles" — life lessons that can be used in and out of the office. In 2017, Dalio published his principles as a book, and it quickly became a New York Times bestseller. This spring, he released an app that contains the full text of the book, along with internal videos from Bridgewater.

Dalio stepped back from management in 2017. He's still Bridgewater's cochief investment officer and plans on investing for the rest of his life. But now, more than 40 years into his career, he's focused on passing on what he's learned. And he views success much differently than he used to.

Listen to the full episode, produced by Sarah Wyman and Jennifer Sigl, here:

Subscribe to "This is Success" on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. Check out previous episodes with:

• Philanthropist Melinda Gates
• Oracle CEO Mark Hurd
• Former race-car driver Danica Patrick
• Grammy-winning DJ Afrojack

Following is a lightly edited transcript. Narration is in italics.

Learning through experience

Rich Feloni: Ray Dalio was born in Queens, New York, in 1949.

Ray Dalio: I was an only child. I had a mother who really loved me a lot, and I had a dad who was a jazz musician, and he loved me a lot, too, but he was out a lot, and I was, I guess, a pretty classic kid. I loved to play with the kids in the neighborhood. I would say I didn't have a lot of active guidance. I was more kind of on my own, and I loved life, and I played with kids and that was it. Didn't like school.

Feloni: Didn't like school? Were you analytical at that point?

Dalio: No, no, no — I wasn't analytical. People would always say I had common sense. I was curious. I was always curious. Curiosity is a different thing than analytical. I was curious, and I liked to think about a lot of different things and have interesting conversations with adults about interesting things — politics, the world.

I did a lot of odd jobs as a kid: paper route, shoveled driveways, all that. But I earned some money from that, and I caddied, and when I was caddying and I was 12, the stock market was hot and I bought my first stock. It was the only company I ever heard of that was selling for less than $5 a share. That was my criteria. I figured I could buy more shares. Therefore, when it goes up, I'll make more money. That was really naive.

But I got lucky, because the company was about to go broke, but some other company acquired it and it tripled, and I thought the game was easy, and so that's what I got hooked on. So at about 12, I got hooked on the markets, like one might get hooked on a video game.

Feloni: What appealed to you? Was it the risk taking?

Dalio: Well, the game, and the fact that I'd make money if I could do it well, right? So I think it was probably, it might be like, imagine if you had a video game that you made money at if it paid off. The game itself is fun. And then you like the rewards and then the roller coaster begins, right? So OK, can you make money? Can you lose money?

So that had a big effect on my life, how I viewed things.

Feloni: So this approach that you would start to develop in adulthood, of learning things, forming principles around that, there was really no indication of that as a kid?

Dalio: The word learning can mean different things to different people, right? There's kind of this experiential learning, and then there is going into a classroom and remembering, and there's that kind of learning, right? So, for me, it was always this experiential learning. So that I always had as a kid.

The "go into a classroom and do the remembering" kind of learning, I wasn't good at it; I didn't like it. The experiential learning I loved. So it would be almost like saying, "Did you like playing a video game?" Playing the markets was great. Playing with my friends was great. But going in and reading a book and remembering it and getting tested on it just had no appeal to me.

How a disastrous mistake in '82 shaped Dalio's life philosophy

Feloni: Dalio went to college on Long Island and studied finance. He then went on to graduate from Harvard Business School. Two years after getting his MBA, Dalio founded Bridgewater and started to make a name for himself. But then he made a bad bet. It took hitting rock bottom to change how he approached everything, from investing to personal relationships.

Dalio: I had calculated that American banks had lent a lot more money to emerging countries than they can pay back, and I said there'd be a debt crisis. That was a very controversial point of view and got me a lot of attention, and it turned out to be right and that Mexico defaulted. And so, I thought, I'm right. I thought that, you know, I'm arrogant in having confidence, and I was right on the default and I was wrong on what happened because that was the exact bottom in the stock market. As a result of being wrong, I lost money for me, I lost money for my clients, I had to let everybody in my company go, and I was so broke I had to borrow $4,000 from my dad to help pay for family bills.

Feloni: How many people were you employing at that point?

Dalio: Oh, eight maybe.

Feloni: Still, you had to take them out of a job.

Dalio: It was my everything, right? It was my everything. It was my mission. And I loved those eight people. I didn't want to lose them. And so a very, very, very painful experience, but it changed my approach to decision-making because, look, pain is a great teacher. You go forward toward your goals. You succeed and fail, but you really learn from your failures because they're the painful experiences and if you can reflect on them, you change.

My son gave me, in 2014, a book, Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, "The Hero With a Thousand Faces," and he says that what happens is that you will crash in your life at some point, and at that point you will either have a metamorphosis or you won't. That metamorphosis, really, it teaches you humility. Pain teaches you humility.

And so, my experience changed my whole approach to decision-making, like, it gave me the fear that I might be wrong that allowed me to incorporate that with my audacity. In other words, I didn't want to just get off the field and not play. I still wanted to be great and make the best things happen and win, but I didn't want to have less risk in the sense that I didn't want to have less opportunity. I wanted to keep the opportunity the same, but I wanted to then be able to manage my risk better and it changed my whole approach to decision-making because it then made me think, how do I know I'm not wrong?

It made me be much more open-minded, to diversify better, to deal with my not knowing. Whatever success I've had in my life has been due more to my knowing how to deal with what I don't know than because of anything I know.

Feloni: So it was a really profound experience. In that moment, how could you even find the lesson in it?

Dalio: Painful experiences of this sort — when you're in the moment, you may not be able to reflect very well because the emotion is taking control of you. When the emotion passes, you have a choice. You can either move on and just do the next thing and not reflect, or you can reflect. Reflect. I urge you to reflect.

Now, to some extent, maybe meditation helped me. I had learned Transcendental Meditation, so it gave me a certain equanimity to reflect. I think that maybe my habit of trying to figure out, well, what was my mistake in trades and trying to then reflect on the trades so I would learn. But in any case, when the pain passes, don't just go forward, reflect, because that's where your progress is.

Feloni: With Transcendental Meditation, you've said how important that is to you and even how that can help you reflect.

Dalio: There are the two yous in you, basically. There's the emotional you that comes from the subconscious, and, under certain circumstances, it can produce stress, and that stress or that emotion can take you over. And then, there's the thoughtful part of you. Both have advantages, because the subliminal is bringing forward these intuitions and those types of things and then the intellectual, and if you can be calm and resolve those things together, not only does it give you the calmness, it gives you better thinking.

Taking the path to radical transparency

Feloni: In the early '90s, there was a Bridgewater employee named Ross Waller. He was the head of trading at the time, and he didn't make a trade he should have. It cost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. But Dalio decided not to fire him.

Dalio: It's OK to make mistakes. It's not OK not to learn from them. So perfectly good people, I mean, all human beings make mistakes, right? The key is the learning from them. So he was a good person who made a mistake, and then the question was, how are we going to learn from them? I put into place an error log, which we now call an "issue log," in which everybody in the company has to write down whenever anything goes wrong so that they bring it to the surface and we learn from it.

Feloni: Is that for you as well?

Dalio: Of course, anybody.

Feloni: I mean, if you start to incorporate more and more transparency, there's probably going to be some tension that arises, and in 1993 there was a conversation you had with some of your leadership team, where they basically confronted you.

Dalio: To be effective, I think people have to be very truthful with each other. First, that's because they have to try to agree on what is. They've got to get out of their heads, and if they think something's not right, they've got to deal with it. Otherwise, it's not productive, and there's so much misunderstanding unless you lay your honest thoughts on the table. So improvement like that is sometimes difficult but it is also really effective.

So that total amount of transparency and truthfulness was, a couple of people I work with, they said, well, that's demoralizing to people, that you're demoralizing people by putting them in that kind of a position.

Feloni: They used some choice words. They said your approach was making people feel incompetent, unnecessary, humiliated, overwhelmed, belittled, oppressed, and otherwise bad. I mean, how did you feel reading that? That must have been pretty rough?

Dalio: I didn't want to do those things. I didn't want to make them feel demoralized, so what I thought about was, well, the real question is, how do we deal with it together? So we need to have a conversation. What should I do? What should you do? How should I do it?

So I have a general principle. When you're not getting along with somebody or you're having a disagreement, stop, put that aside for a moment, go to a higher level, and then say, "How should we be with each other? What are our ground rules for operating, and why?" Then go back into your disagreement, and follow those protocols about how you should be with each other.

And so that's what I did, because, again, I was faced with, it seemed, a trade-off that was a choice between being totally truthful with each other or making people feel better. And I wanted them to feel better and be able to be totally truthful. So, we face these junctures in our lives, like I said in the earlier juncture; I wanted to have all the upside with none of the downside. And so, in that particular case, I figure, well, if I'm taking risks, how do I have all the upside without those unbearable pains, and you think that that's a choice that exists, but if you pause and you're clever, you can engineer that, if you do that together.

So what I did was to sit there and say, OK, so how should we be with each other? And we had conversations about how we should be together, and that helped to flesh out the rules and the ways that we should be together so that we could deal with that more effectively.

Feloni: It's interesting that your initial thought there was that we're either going to be honest or we're going to be happy, and that the in-between wasn't really there. How come radical transparency is so important where feelings can be hurt? Why not be honest but maybe a little bit more graceful with it, where someone maybe, it could be a little bit more pleasant than harsh?

Dalio: Well, first, I think it's a continuum, right? And then there's better and worse ways of communicating. Continuum like you're saying, you know, there's honest and then there's happy. The way that I look at happy is that you're short-term happy but you're not long-term happy, OK? In other words, I would say, OK, if we don't deal with those circumstances that we need to deal with in a forthright way, we could all be happy, but it's going to have adverse consequences in a lot of different ways. If you start to realize, intellectually, that being really truthful with each other is something that is to be treasured, not only because it'll help you deal with the situations, but also it'll build trust. There's a lot of trust that's going on. There's a lot of trust that everybody knows we'll be talking about it and there won't be hidden agendas and all those things.

And once you start to rethink it and reprogram yourself, that you start to realize, I don't want to be in this highly political environment, with all this stuff going on behind the scenes, and that I really appreciate it, and then you get in the habit of being able to do it well, so that there's really good clear communication and there's trust that's built. That is tremendously beneficial.

So, you have to understand that Bridgewater's success is that, right? In other words, it's knowing what you don't know and knowing I may be wrong. That's the key to success, right?

Feloni: So for radical transparency to work, though, it has to be done at an organizational level, a team level? Otherwise, wouldn't it just be, when you sat down, you're just acting like a jerk, if you're just doing this on your own?

Dalio: Well, yes. You have to agree. Any group of people, it may be your department, it may be your whole company, may be the whole country. Whoever it is, they have to agree on how they are going to behave with each other. Why? Everybody has to do that.

I think that notion of, can we be radically truthful with each other, can we know how to disagree well and then get past that disagreement to the best answers? These are questions that everybody has to face but certainly they're interactive questions, so whether it's in your department, or you can't unilaterally behave that way and you need to talk about it; otherwise you'll have misunderstandings.

Forming the 'principles' Bridgewater is known for

Feloni: And so, the next evolution, really, of this radical transparency kind of happened in the early 2000s, and that was when Bridgewater was really going from, I guess you could say, like a boutique firm to a large-scale organization, correct? And as it was happening, you wanted to retain the culture that you built, to pass on the lessons you learned, the principles you learned. This is when you really started to codify them.

So if you get a packet of your principles that you've acquired over the years, and then you give them to your employees, if Henry Blodget, the founder of Business Insider and the CEO of Business Insider, if he came to us with a packet of his life lessons, I feel like that would be something that we'd be like, "Whoa, where's this coming from? What is this?"

Dalio: Yeah, it didn't happen that way.

Feloni: It didn't happen that way. How did it happen?

Dalio: Well, again, in order to have this radical truthfulness and radical transparency, everything that I did pretty much was recording everything that everybody did was pretty much recorded.

Anything that was not personal, like, if you have a family problem or something, we're not going to talk about it. Anything that's proprietary, we wouldn't talk about. But pretty much anything that anybody could see, because that builds the trust. If you want to have truthfulness, transparency helps a lot because people get to see things for themselves.

And then what I would do is, as I would make decisions, I would write down my criteria for making the decisions. So things were happening on a day-to-day basis. Imagine if Henry, let's say, oh, you're seeing what Henry is doing and he's made a decision, and then he's written down the principle behind why he made the decision, and then he's willing to talk about it with you and he said, "Listen, how should we make those decisions? Do you think those criteria are good or not?"

So it's not like, OK, here's a book. The book is just the accumulation of those kinds of things, and it's easy to go through. And that brings harmony, and that brings consistency, and that reinforces the culture. Part of that is to write that down and understand each other, and part of it is to also develop tools that help to facilitate that. So I developed a number of tools that facilitate that transparency and the understanding.

Feloni: To get back to an earlier point, I understand in terms of writing down what's working and sharing that with the company, that, to me, makes sense. It seems to be a much bigger leap to being that we have to start recording everything so that we're all honest with each other, in the sense that if I go meet with my manager and have a discussion, that all of my colleagues need to be able to see this. Or if we had a discussion that maybe a conflict arose and it was resolved, that that would be shared with colleagues on here's what we can learn from this. I feel like that would be really difficult to adopt for people, especially feeling uncomfortable around that.

Dalio: Yeah, first of all, I want to be clear that anybody can do whatever they want with it and it's all a matter of degrees of what you want to do, but all those degrees have choices, so I chose that particular path for various reasons I can describe. But the question is, how truthful, how transparent do you want to be? And there are real benefits. I chose that radical truthfulness and that radical transparency because I figure there's nothing to be embarrassed about, and you produce understanding, and if people are just going through their evolutionary processes, their successes and their failures, and we made a compact among ourselves, do we want to be this way with each other?

You start to see everybody in their humanity, including the making of mistakes and then the learning from mistakes. And then, also, you avoid all the bad stuff that goes on in the dark. Deception happens behind the scenes, so you avoid all that deception. That's what worked great for us. I'm not saying others necessarily have to do it. They've got to figure out what's good for them.

Emerging from the financial crisis stronger than ever

Feloni: After the financial crisis, this is kind of when more of the public eye was on Bridgewater just because you came out of that strong, because of your analysis of where the economy was headed, and 2010 was the best year that Bridgewater had up to that point. That's when you start having the media looking at you, people not even in finance looking at you, discussing principles. At this point, people were saying, "Whoa, what is this?" Was this hedge fund in the shadows, like some secret cult or something? What did it feel like when you were challenged? Your whole way of approaching things was challenged from a bunch of outsiders at this point.

Dalio: In 2007, we anticipated the world financial crisis because we looked for these timeless and universal principles. We knew that the situation was very similar to the 1929-32 situation because when interest rates hit zero, the Central Bank can't ease anymore, and you have a debt crisis and certain things need to be done.

It was that approach to principles and this way of operating that allowed us to anticipate the financial crisis of 2008, and we did very well in that crisis where most everybody lost money in that crisis. As a result we started to receive attention, and then people started to think, well, what is this, a cult? And I didn't want attention. I didn't want public attention. I didn't want to do this kind of media. I just wanted to be quiet. And so, what I did is I put our principles in a PDF file, and I put it out on our website for anybody who wanted, they could download it. And it was downloaded 3 1/2 million times, and people started to get the understanding and started to say, "Whoa, this is a different way of operating." And so, that's what happened.

Feloni: When you're saying that you have your investing principles, and that's what allowed Bridgewater to be successful, the accumulation of these principles for investing. You've applied that to, kind of, just the human experience as well.

Dalio: All decision-making.

Feloni: Are your principles for life and work — is that almost kind of like the same way that you would write an algorithm for trading, but for a person?

Dalio: Yeah, it's exactly the same. One of the great things I'd like to pass along is the power of having people write down their decision rules when they're making that decision.

Feloni: How do you mean?

Dalio: I think most people just make decisions and instead of just doing that, if you make your decision and shortly after or shortly before, take the time and say, in this particular type of situation, here are my criteria for making that decision, that's the reason why, and you write it down in a very, very clear way, it makes you think about your criteria better. It allows you to communicate with people better.

That idea of writing that down applies to all decision-making. You could do that in all decision-making, and you can even go beyond that. This is the power that we're now in, in the world, with converting thoughts to algorithms. You can go beyond that, and you can take those criteria and then have data input and have that operate in parallel with your decision making and I think that, that's more and more where we're headed and that's what we've done. That's the process.

Feloni: Was there ever a moment throughout your life really, where one of your principles turned out to be incorrect, as something was unfolding you realized maybe this isn't working for me?

Dalio: Oh, yeah. I think the development of the principles is it's an evolutionary process of change just like we personally experience an evolutionary process of change. Our thinking changes as we learn over a period of time. It's just more explicitly progressed. And that's what this compendium of principles is, that's the book, that's the hot book, it's because it just evolves over that period of time and here it is and it's still evolving. I'm still learning.

A succession plan that didn't always go smoothly but was a learning experience

Feloni: After hitting a new level of success coming out of the financial crisis, Dalio began considering what would happen to Bridgewater after he was gone. It was his life's work. And continuing its success would be no easy feat. So he set into motion a succession plan. It started with appointing a new co-CEO in 2010, Greg Jensen.

Jensen was his protégé and Bridgewater's head of investing. But Jensen ran into some of the same problems Dalio did back in 2008, when there was too much overlap between the investment and management sides of the business. And in 2016, Dalio decided that Jensen should return to his former role.

The change meant Dalio's succession plan had to change too. He couldn't back off just yet. In his book, Dalio took responsibility for the botched plan. He also called it his biggest regret during his time at Bridgewater.

Dalio: First of all, I would say, a lot of learning comes from having the same mistake over and over again until you learn it. In my particular case, the company grew up under me, and there I was, and I was handling too many things and I was getting by, and I was figuring out how to get those things by but not adequately. And then I figured, OK, now that's my situation, my dilemma and I should pass along both my dilemma and my circumstances to him and we should try to figure out how to deal with that together but, in other words, I can't not pass it along and yet we don't have a solution yet, and so we will try to deal with that together. And that's the path that we went down and we found out that we couldn't do that together because it was just too much for him, too much for me.

So, I guess I would say, you form a theory and the theory doesn't work, and then you try again and you form another theory and that's part of the learning process.

Feloni: What has been your experience with succession? What has that taught you as a leader?

Dalio: Oh, it taught me so many, many different things. It was. .. first of all I should say when I began my succession process, I thought it was going to take me probably about two years. But when I say I thought that, I also knew not to believe that.

Simultaneously, one can say, I think this is going to happen but I shouldn't bet on it, because if you haven't done something three times before successfully, don't assume you know how to do it.

Feloni: Yeah.

Dalio: And I knew what the arc of my life would be. In other words, as I go from 60 to 70, that I have to transition well and I want to really make the people successful without me, and so I'm going to have that particular experience. I allowed up to 10 years for that to happen. I figured two, but I said, "OK, I better plan for 10 because I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that."

And then I learned. I learned how people see things differently. I learned not to assume that somebody can do something until they're doing it already.

I learned that others had to be involved, that the best thing for me to do was to bring in other people to do that. I originally didn't think I needed a board, for example. I figured I'd run the company in this way for all that particular time and so I don't want some board to come in and operate where they're outside telling me what to do or the leaders what to do. I then realized that I need to have a board that would operate well. So I get the best advice I can from the smartest people. I went to Jim Collins, very smart guy, who's ... that's his expertise.

Feloni: Yeah, management consultant.

Dalio: And I asked him, he said, well, you only have to do two things: You have to pick the CEO who's going to be successful, a great CEO, and you have to have a board that will monitor whether the CEO is successful, and get rid of them and change it if he doesn't. It takes me out of it, it takes those out of it. And so, I learned —

Feloni:That helped you step back?

Dalio: Yeah, I learned about governance systems. How does the governance system work? How do you select the people differently? How do you try those people? So I learned all of those things. You know, I'm still learning, but it was the learning of that, and that made us successful in the transition.

Redefining success in the 3rd stage of life

Feloni: I mean, when you read "Principles," it kind of seems like, here's a very cohesive worldview. I'm now ready to pass it on. But since then, has there been anything surprising that you've learned about yourself, about how to just approach life in general?

Dalio: Well, I learned ... I'm beginning to experience for the first time in my life, the total freedom from obligation, the total freedom. OK, what do I want to do? Of course, I'm in this transition phase, which means that I'm passing things along. But what is it like to be free of obligation and do all the things that you're excited about? I'm doing a lot of things that I'm excited about, and I love the markets. I'm still spending 80% of my time on markets, which is more than I used to, because I had the CEO job. Now I'm in a position where the economy, the markets, that's my game. I'll always play that game.

But with that open canvas, I can do things like pass along these principles. I'm interested in ocean exploration. I love being around my family, my grandkids. I learn all of these different things, so I'm experiencing that element of the freedom of this new phase in my life, and I'm thinking about it. I'm writing down principles about it and that's it.

Feloni: Do you think you're going to miss that engagement with the day-to-day of Bridgewater?

Dalio: I'm going to be the chief investment officer as long as they want me to be. I'm playing that game. They want me to do it, I want to do it, and I'll do it as long as I'm welcome to do it and I love to do it.

Feloni: And I also wanted to know as we're thinking about these different stages of your life, what is your concept of success in this stage right now, as opposed to the Ray who was building up Bridgewater, scaling it, as opposed to the concept of success that Ray had when you were a young man as well?

Dalio: My concept of success is having others successful without me. My concept of success before was being successful myself.

Feloni: And what did that mean, "success"? How did you define that?

Dalio: Well, success was whatever mission I was on. It could be play the game in the markets and be successful. It could be build a company and be successful. It could be, be a successful parent. OK, now it's none of those things, right? It's I've evolved to the stage where to have others successful without me being successful is the most beautiful thing I can do.

Feloni: So that's … you're at the final stage of that hero's journey that you were talking about?

Dalio: Yeah. I'm in that transition to phase three.

Feloni: Well, thank you so much, Ray.

Dalio: It's a pleasure.

SEE ALSO: WeWork's CEO explains why he thinks his $47 billion company is recession-proof and how he keeps his ego in check as a young billionaire

Join the conversation about this story »

• Apple's reported interest in moving some of its product production out of China in the wake of the trade war could take years to realize, supply chain experts told Business Insider.
• The company's complex production system is set up to deliver supplies to and ship products out of China; redirecting that system elsewhere will take enormous time and effort, they said.
• Right now, other countries don't have the infrastructure in place or enough trained labor for Apple to shift a significant amount of its production to them, the experts said.
• But the company could be aided by the fact that many electronics makers are looking to shift production out of China, both because of the trade dispute and because of rising labor and regulatory compliance costs.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Apple is looking for a new country to be its iPhone factory. 

After years of relying on China to build its electronics products, Apple is reportedly casting its gaze across the globe in search of new pastures. The move is due to the growing trade tensions with China, as President Trump threatens hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs that would make the country a much less ideal manufacturing homebase.

But moving out of China will create a variety of problems for Apple that could slow down production of its computers and smartphones, test its reputation for high quality, and, ultimately, not even guarantee that Apple would be completely out of the tariffs' reach. For that reason, Apple is unlikely to move more than a small, token portion of its manufacturing outside of China anytime soon, according to supply chain experts that Business Insider spoke to. 

While it makes sense for Apple to explore alternatives to China as a long-term strategy, the iPhone maker, like nearly all of the consumer electronics industry today, is just too firmly entrenched in the Asian nation and will have a difficult time extricating itself from there, they said.

"This is not stuff you can just pick up and relocate," said Ryan Reith, vice president of mobile devices at market research firm IDC. The process of moving production from China to another country is "a years thing," he continued, "not a months thing."

It's important to note that Apple doesn't actually produce any of its devices on its own. Instead, it outsources production to Foxconn and Pegatron, Taiwan-based contract manufacturers that have extensive networks of factories in China and other countries. Apple coordinates the supply of components to those factories and the distribution of finished products from them.

Read this: The trade war is speeding up tech manufacturers' plans to move out of China, a longtime industry analyst says

On its face, Apple's reliance on contract manufacturers would seem to make shifting production to other countries easier. After all, those companies already have manufacturing plants outside of China. In fact, Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou, who is in the running to become President of Taiwan, recently  urged Apple to move its production from China to Taiwan. And earlier this month, the head of Foxconn's semiconductor group said the company was prepared to help Apple move production out of China if it needed to.

But moving production to other countries involves a lot more than setting up a line of equipment in a new building, the supply chain experts said.  And Apple can't just move iPhone production by placing an order at another of its contractor's facilities.

A plan by Foxconn to build an LCD factory in Wisconsin has been mired in problems and delays since it was announced a few years ago. Apple's plan to shift as much as 30% of its manufacturing capacity out of China to countries such as Vietnam, India, or Mexico, as the Nikkei Asian Review reported last week, is especially ambitious.

Shifting production will be a big challenge

As labor costs have risen in China, companies in industries like apparel, footwear, and automobile parts, have already started to move production out of China to Vietnam, Mexico, and other countries.

There are existing electronics factories in areas outside of China, in countries like Mexico, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India. Some assemble products that use older, less-cutting edge technology, like the older iPhone 6 and 7 models that contractor Wistron Corp makes in Bangalore, India, according to Bloomberg. Apple is preparing trial productions of newer iPhones X models at a Foxconn facility in India, Bloomberg recently reported, but it's not clear what level of output is expected if it successfully moves into mass production.

Right now, nearly all of Apple's supply chain is organized around delivering components to production facilities in China and shipping goods from those factories to retailers and customers around the world, they said. Moving production to other areas of the world would require Apple to reorient its supply chain to those facilities, a daunting task.

Part of the challenge is that many of Apple's suppliers and component makers are themselves located near the plants that make its finished goods, said IDC's Reith. Apple would either have to ask those suppliers to set up shop near its new plants outside of China or figure out how to ship their components to those new factories.

Getting the suppliers up and running in the new countries could make the task of moving take even longer. And sourcing any necessary components for the new factories from China could pose its own problems. Those components themselves could be subject to tariffs. And by not being close to Apple's plants, it could take longer for those component makers to make changes.

"The reason why China is such a manufacturing hub is not really about it having the cheapest labor," Reith said. "It's all those other aspects of manufacturing that take place there."

Skilled workers can be hard to find

Even if Apple is able to find or set up new factories in other countries and find suppliers for them, it still has to find people to work in the plants or for its component makers, the experts said. The company's products are known for the high quality of their manufacturing, said John Jordan, a clinical professor of supply chain and information systems at Penn State University's Smeal College of Business. Building a case for an iPhone or other components often requires precision techniques that few people are trained in, he said.

Few of the workers that have those skills are likely to move to new plants outside of China, he said. But finding workers inside the countries where Apple might move could prove to be a big problem. While Vietnam and other countries have seen a pick up in manufacturing of apparel or other goods, the skills needed for such factories don't necessarily translate into making iPhones, Jordan said.

"You can't really convert what they're doing into what Apple needs anytime soon," he said.

Also read:Inside 'iPhone City,' the massive Chinese factory town where half of the world's iPhones are produced

Apple's Chinese plants have an extensive network of roads they can rely on to connect them to suppliers and distributors. They also have major shipping facilities close by and warehouses needed to store products. That type of infrastructure took decades to develop in China and isn't necessarily in place yet in other areas of the world.

"There's a whole host of infrastructure issues that have to be dealt with," said Abe Eshkenazi, CEO of the Association for Supply Chain Management, an industry group.

Apple likely could shift a small amount of its production outside of China in a reasonably short time frame, said Bruce Arntzen, the executive director of the supply chain management program in MIT's engineering school. But it likely couldn't move a sizeable portion of it anytime soon, because of those labor and infrastructure issues. Other countries just don't have the capability right now to replace even a significant fraction of what Apple produces in China, he said.

"They would pretty quickly tie up most of capacity," Arntzen said.

Moving will be a years-long process

Thanks to such challenges, moving production out of China would likely be a long process.

In a research note last week, Dan Ives, a financial analyst who covers Apple for Wedbush, estimated that the company could shift 5% to 7% of its iPhone production to India in 12 to 18 months. To move 15% of its smartphone production out of China to other countries would take about two to three years "given the complexity and logistics involved in such a gargantuan endeavor," he said.

Those estimates roughly line up with those of the supply chain experts who spoke with Business Insider. Gregor Berkowitz, a longtime tech industry consultant who travels frequently in Asia, for example, thinks Apple could get some manufacturing moved to Taiwan in a matter of six months, but thinks it could take two to three years for it to get facilities up in running countries such as Thailand or Vietnam. Reith, for his part, thinks a move could be a three-year process, although he believes Apple has likely already started working on it.

"I don't see this as something that could happen overnight," he said.

That said, a couple of factors may help ease such a transition for Apple. Because the company is such a major manufacturer and represents such an important client for many of its component makers, many of those suppliers are likely to be at its beck and call, said Berkowitz. If Apple says it plans to set up a factory in Vietnam or Indonesia, those suppliers will likely take their lead from it and move their operations with it, he said.

"For other companies" the question of whether suppliers would move with them to a new location "would be more concerning," he said. "But for Apple, because of their leverage, they're not going to see the same kinds of risks."

And Apple's not likely alone in looking to move outside China. Because of the rising costs of producing there and the trade war, many electronics makers are exploring a shift in production. That's likely to spur even component makers that would be reluctant to set up shop elsewhere to do so anyway, Arntzen said.

"Everyone is in the position Apple is in," he said. "Because everyone's got the same problem," he continued, "it probably will happen sooner that the supply base moves to other countries."

Got a tip about the tech industry? Contact this reporter via email at twolverton@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

• Read more about the trade war:
• Huawei's plan to replace Android with its own operating system is likely doomed from the start, mobile industry experts say
• 3 tech execs who tried to create new smartphone and PC operating systems explain why Huawei's plan to build an Android replacement will be almost impossible
• A longtime industry expert explains why Trump's attack on Huawei could end up hurting Google and other US tech giants
• These 4 charts show why Apple's China troubles aren't going away anytime soon

SEE ALSO: This forgotten investigation into Microsoft, 10 years before the antitrust trial, let it get away with tactics that sealed its tech dominance, according to a key player

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The incredible story behind Slack, the app that's taken over offices everywhere

• Advertisements are everywhere you look, even if you don't notice them.
• Some ads, however, are a pleasure to look at — they break through the clutter and make you laugh.
• Here are 24 of the funniest, most clever ads from the likes of Apple, McDonald's, Bose, Volkswagen, and others.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Advertisements are everywhere you look, even if you don't notice them. But sometimes, an ad is so amusing and clever that it catches your attention and stays with you.

Most ads are annoying and unavoidable. According to ad agency Red Crow Marketing, the average person living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, compared with 4,000 to 10,000 ads today.

We compiled print ads that are, in fact, not a waste of time. They're creative, charming, and have clear messages. While some come from relatively unknown companies or products, others are for major brands like Volkswagen, McDonald's, FedEx, and Apple.

Here are 24 of the funniest and most clever ads to ever be printed.

SEE ALSO: 33 graphic ads that were designed to shock you

Soap brand Life Buoy's unconventional ad turned a pug into a loaf of bread to stress the importance of using soap. "You eat what you touch." (Indonesia, 2009)

Bose took noise-cancellation to a new level when it highlighted the sound quality of their headphones over their look. Untitled. (New Zealand, 2006)

McDonald's magazine ad for extra-large coffee was too big to fit on two pages, aside from some ring stains on the corners. "Extra large coffee." (Sweden, 2008)

Orbit used crying animals to advertise its chewing gum. "Don't let lunch meet breakfast." (Israel, 2012)

The Van Gogh Museum Cafe in Amsterdam used a broken coffee cup to allude to the tortured Dutch artist cutting off his own ear in a subtle ad aimed at art lovers. Untitled. (Netherlands, 2013)

Kraft took the power of strong bones to the extreme with a broken mousetrap. "With extra calcium for stronger bones." (United Arab Emirates, 2007)

Timotei hair products proved that it could even tame a lion's mane. Untitled. (France, 2005)

Eurostar advertised its rail service between Paris and London with unique British caricatures. "It's Summertime in London." (France, 2007)

DHL used a clear plastic sheet in its magazine advertisements to illustrate how quickly it ships across Asia. Untitled. (China, 2007)

In another ad from Bose advertising their noise-canceling headphones, the world is guaranteed to be as quiet as a family of mimes. Untitled. (Singapore, 2009)

Apple's 2007 MacBook Pro was thinner than most laptops in its day, making this magazine ad almost (but not quite) true to life. Untitled. (USA, 2007)

FedEx, like DHL, wanted a clever way to show it could ship around the world, so it ran with the idea of neighbors. Untitled. (Brazil, 2010)

Lazer bike helmets are so good, according to this ad, that your head won't be in any danger. Untitled. (Belgium, 2008)

WMF, the German tableware maker, used two magazine pages to show how sharp its knives were. (Thailand, 2008)

Sedex, the supply chain company, used extreme illustrations like this one to prove its speed. "Trust us. We deliver it fast." (Brazil, 2009)

Volkswagen, known for its unique advertising, dressed a mountain goat (an off-road animal) like a poodle (a city animal) to show its cars could have the best of both worlds. "Touareg. The luxury off-road." (Brazil, 2009)

Heinz hot ketchup's sizzling fry speaks for itself. Untitled. (USA, 2005)

Chupa Chups advertised its sugar-free lollipops by using those universal sugar-lovers, ants. "Ants" (Spain, 2005)

Italian carmaker Fiat took a city family to the country, using the slogan, "We should all get out of the city from time to time." "Squirrel" (Spain, 2006)

Glassex window cleaner's glass is supposedly so clean it'll look like an illusion. "Magician." (Italy, 2006)

Faber-Castell's colored pencils are so true to life you won't be able to tell the difference. "True Colours." (Germany, 2011).

The makers of Softlan fabric softener must have asked themselves, what would wrestling be like if it smelled great? "Wrestling." (Malaysia, 2009)

Mouthwash brand Listermint used a priest with bad breath to show how important a clean mouth is. "Sermon." (Australia, 2008)

Tetra dental snacks illustrated what a dog's breath really looks like. "Bad Dog Breath?" (Germany, 2009)

• Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford University at 19 to start blood-testing startup Theranos, and grew the company to a valuation of $9 billion.
• But it all came crashing down when the shortcomings and inaccuracies of the company's technology were exposed, and Theranos and Holmes were charged with "massive fraud."
• A California judge set a date Friday for the fraud trial to start: July 2020.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In 2014, blood-testing startup Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes, were on top of the world.

Back then, Theranos was a revolutionary idea thought up by a woman hailed as a genius who styled herself as a female Steve Jobs. Holmes was the world's youngest female self-made billionaire, and Theranos was one of Silicon Valley's unicorn startups, valued at an estimated $9 billion. 

But then it all came crashing down.

The shortcomings and inaccuracies of Theranos's technology were exposed, along with the role Holmes played in covering it all up. Holmes was ousted as CEO and charged with "massive fraud," and the company was forced to close its labs and testing centers, ultimately shuttering operations altogether. 

Read more:Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes faces jail time for fraud charges. Her trial is set to begin in summer 2020.

Now, Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison. In the meantime, as she awaits trial, she's reportedly found the time to get engaged, and now married.

This is how Holmes went from precocious child, to ambitious Stanford dropout, to an embattled startup founder charged with fraud: 

SEE ALSO: Take a look inside the $5,000-a-month San Francisco apartment that Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes reportedly once called home with her now-husband, Billy Evans

Elizabeth Holmes was born on February 3, 1984 in Washington, D.C. Her mom, Noel, was a Congressional committee staffer, and her dad, Christian Holmes, worked for Enron before moving to government agencies like USAID.

Source: Elizabeth Holmes/Twitter, CNN, Vanity Fair

Holmes' family moved when she was young, from Washington, D.C. to Houston.

Source: Fortune

When she was 7, Holmes tried to invent her own time machine, filling up an entire notebook with detailed engineering drawings. At the age of 9, Holmes told relatives she wanted to be a billionaire when she grew up. Her relatives described her as saying it with the "utmost seriousness and determination."

Source: CBS News, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Holmes had an "intense competitive streak" from a young age. She often played Monopoly with her younger brother and cousin, and she would insist on playing until the end, collecting the houses and hotels until she won. If Holmes was losing, she would often storm off. More than once, she ran directly through a screen on the door.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

It was during high school that Holmes developed her work ethic, often staying up late to study. She quickly became a straight-A student, and even started her own business: she sold C++ compilers, a type of software that translates computer code, to Chinese schools.

Source: Fortune, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Holmes started taking Mandarin lessons, and part-way through high school, talked her way into being accepted by Stanford University’s summer program, which culminated in a trip to Beijing.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Inspired by her great-great-grandfather Christian Holmes, a surgeon, Holmes decided she wanted to go into medicine. But she discovered early on that she was terrified of needles. Later, she said this influenced her to start Theranos.

Source: San Francisco Business Times

Holmes went to Stanford to study chemical engineering. When she was a freshman, she became a "president's scholar," an honor which came with a $3,000 stipend to go toward a research project.

Source: Fortune

Holmes spent the summer after her freshman year interning at the Genome Institute in Singapore. She got the job partly because she spoke Mandarin.

Source: Fortune

As a sophomore, Holmes went to one of her professors, Channing Robertson, and said: "Let's start a company." With his blessing, she founded Real-Time Cures, later changing the company's name to Theranos. Thanks to a typo, early employees’ paychecks actually said "Real-Time Curses."

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Holmes soon filed a patent application for "Medical device for analyte monitoring and drug delivery," a wearable device that would administer medication, monitor patients' blood, and adjust the dosage as needed.

Source: Fortune, US Patent Office

By the next semester, Holmes had dropped out of Stanford altogether, and was working on Theranos in the basement of a college house.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Theranos's business model was based around the idea that it could run blood tests, using proprietary technology that required only a finger pinprick and a small amount of blood. Holmes said the tests would be able to detect medical conditions like cancer and high cholesterol.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Holmes started raising money for Theranos from prominent investors like Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, the father of a childhood friend and the founder of prominent VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Theranos raised more than $700 million, and Draper has continued to defend Holmes.

Source: SEC, Crunchbase

Holmes took investors' money on the condition that she wouldn't have to reveal how Theranos' technology worked. Plus, she would have final say over everything having to do with the company.

Source: Vanity Fair

That obsession with secrecy extended to every aspect of Theranos. For the first decade Holmes spent building her company, Theranos operated in stealth mode. She even took three former Theranos employees to court, claiming they had misused Theranos trade secrets.

Source: San Francisco Business Times

Holmes' attitude toward secrecy and running a company was borrowed from a Silicon Valley hero of hers: former Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Holmes started dressing in black turtlenecks like Jobs, decorated her office with his favorite furniture, and like Jobs, never took vacations.

Source: Vanity Fair

Even Holmes's uncharacteristically deep voice may have been part of a carefully crafted image intended to help her fit in in the male-dominated business world. In ABC's podcast on Holmes called "The Dropout," former Theranos employees said the CEO sometimes "fell out of character," particularly after drinking, and would speak in a higher voice.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, The Cut

Holmes was a demanding boss, and wanted her employees to work as hard as she did. She had her assistants track when employees arrived and left each day. To encourage people to work longer hours, she started having dinner catered to the office around 8 p.m. each night.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

More behind-the-scenes footage of what life was like at Theranos was revealed in leaked videos obtained by the team behind the HBO documentary "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley." The more than 100 hours of footage showed Holmes walking around the office, scenes from company parties, speeches from Holmes and Balwani, and Holmes dancing to "U Can't Touch This" by MC Hammer.

Source: Business Insider

Shortly after Holmes dropped out of Stanford at age 19, she began dating Theranos president and COO Sunny Balwani, who was 20 years her senior. The two met during Holmes' third year in Stanford’s summer Mandarin program, the summer before she went to college. She was bullied by some of the other students, and Balwani had come to her aid.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Balwani became Holmes' No. 2 at Theranos despite having little experience. He was said to be a bully, and often tracked his employees' whereabouts. Holmes and Balwani eventually broke up in spring 2016 when Holmes pushed him out of the company.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

In 2008, the Theranos board decided to remove Holmes as CEO in favor of someone more experienced. But over the course of a two-hour meeting, Holmes convinced them to let her stay in charge of her company.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

As Theranos started to rake in millions of funding, Holmes became the subject of media attention and acclaim in the tech world. She graced the covers of Fortune and Forbes, gave a TED Talk, and spoke on panels with Bill Clinton and Alibaba's Jack Ma.

Source: Vanity Fair

Theranos quickly began securing outside partnerships. Capital Blue Cross and Cleveland Clinic signed on to offer Theranos tests to their patients, and Walgreens made a deal to open Theranos testing centers in their stores. Theranos also formed a secret partnership with Safeway worth $350 million.

Source: Wired, Business Insider

In 2011, Holmes hired her younger brother, Christian, to work at Theranos, although he didn’t have a medical or science background. Christian Holmes spent his early days at Theranos reading about sports online and recruiting his Duke University fraternity brothers to join the company. People dubbed Holmes and his crew the "Frat Pack" and "Therabros."

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

At one point, Holmes was the world's youngest self-made female billionaire with a net worth of around $4.5 billion.

Source: Forbes

Holmes was obsessed with security at Theranos. She asked anyone who visited the company’s headquarters to sign non-disclosure agreements before being allowed in the building, and had security guards escort visitors everywhere — even to the bathroom.

Holmes hired bodyguards to drive her around in a black Audi sedan. Her nickname was "Eagle One." The windows in her office had bulletproof glass.

Source: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

Around the same time, questions were being raised about Theranos' technology. Ian Gibbons — chief scientist at Theranos and one of the company's first hires — warned Holmes that the tests weren't ready for the public to take, and that there were inaccuracies in the technology. Outside scientists began voicing their concerns about Theranos, too.

Source: Vanity Fair, Business Insider

By August 2015, the FDA began investigating Theranos, and regulators from the government body that oversees laboratories found "major inaccuracies" in the testing Theranos was doing on patients.

Source: Vanity Fair

By October 2015, Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou published his investigation into Theranos's struggles with its technology. Carreyrou's reporting sparked the beginning of the company's downward spiral.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Carreyrou found that Theranos' blood-testing machine, named Edison, couldn't give accurate results, so Theranos was running its samples through the same machines used by traditional blood-testing companies.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Holmes appeared on CNBC's "Mad Money" shortly after the WSJ published its story to defend herself and Theranos. "This is what happens when you work to change things, and first they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world," Holmes said.

Source: CNBC

By 2016, the FDA, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and SEC were all looking into Theranos.

Source: Wall Street Journal,Wired

In July 2016, Holmes was banned from the lab-testing industry for two years. By October, Theranos had shut down its lab operations and wellness centers.

Source: Business Insider

In March 2018, Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani were charged with "massive fraud" by the SEC. Holmes agreed to give up financial and voting control of the company, pay a $500,000 fine, and return 18.9 million shares of Theranos stock. She also isn't allowed to be the director or officer of a publicly traded company for 10 years.

Source: Business Insider

Despite the charges, Holmes was allowed to stay on as CEO of Theranos, since it's a private company. The company had been hanging on by a thread, and Holmes wrote to investors asking for more money to save Theranos. "In light of where we are, this is no easy ask," Holmes wrote.

Source: Business Insider

In Theranos' final days, Holmes reportedly got a Siberian husky puppy named Balto that she brought into the office. However, the dog wasn't potty trained, and would go to the bathroom inside the company's office and during meetings.

Source: Vanity Fair

In June 2018, Theranos announced that Holmes was stepping down as CEO. On the same day, the Department of Justice announced that a federal grand jury had charged Holmes, along with Balwani, with nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Source: Business Insider, CNBC

In September 2018, Theranos sent an email to shareholders announcing that the company was shutting down. Theranos reportedly said it planned to spend the next few months repaying creditors with its remaining resources.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Holmes is now reportedly married to Billy Evans, the heir to hospitality company Evans Hotel Group. She reportedly wears his MIT "signet ring" on a chain around her neck, and the couple posts photos on Instagram together.

Tweet Embed:
//twitter.com/mims/statuses/1098642159085834240?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
For everyone asking about Holmes's social media. It's private. But here are a few screenshots of her and her fiancé we found online. (I personally find it crazy that she's being charged with 11 felony counts, thousands of people's lives were harmed, and she's as happy as can be.) pic.twitter.com/6nYfjltLt4

Source: Vanity Fair, Daily Mail

On Friday, a California judge ruled that the trial for Holmes and Balwani will start in July 2020. Each of them could face up to 20 years in prison, and a $250,000 fine plus restitution for each charge, the government has said.

Source: Business Insider

Maya Kosoff contributed to an earlier version of this story. 

• Many founders wonder how to grow a business that's still relatively new.
• We asked entrepreneurs, investors, and management professors for their best practices.
• The experts advised hiring to fill the gaps in your skillset and prioritizing company culture.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

When it comes to scaling your company, "there is not a one-size-fits-all approach."

That's according to Deepak Hegde, associate professor of management and organizations at New York University. Hegde also directs Endless Frontier Labs, which helps technology and science startups scale. (One alum is Analytical Flavor Systems, a machine-learning and artificial-intelligence platform that predicts individual taste profiles that's now being leveraged to design boutique bread flavors.)

For one startup, Hegde said, scaling might mean locating a large-scale manufacturing facility to get a product out to wider markets. For another startup, scaling might mean hiring a sales team. Whatever your company's challenge, you'll need a customized plan of attack — plus the willingness to experiment.

One of the trickiest parts of scaling is transitioning from founder to people manager. Early on, said Alexi Robichaux, cofounder and CEO of the career-coaching platform BetterUp, "it's about you versus the world." As your company grows, you've got to build an effective team to help you tackle key challenges.

We asked Hegde and Robichaux, plus several other founders, entrepreneurship researchers, and executive coaches, to outline the fundamentals of growing a business. Read on for their best practices — and the most common pitfalls to avoid.

Start planning to scale as early as possible

Formal planning might seem antithetical to the move-fast-and-break-things version of entrepreneurship. And while more research is needed to prove truly conclusive, studies of thousands of startups indicate that having a business plan can boost the odds of success.

One study, published in 2017 in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, looked at data from more than 1,000 entrepreneurs in the US between 2005 and 2011. The researchers compared pairs of founders who were otherwise identical, except one wrote a business plan and the other did not. As it turns out, planners were 16% more likely to succeed than non-planners. (Success was defined as the point when monthly revenues had exceeded monthly expenses for six out of the past 12 months.)

Hegde explained why having a business plan can attract investors. "In order to scale, you need money," he said. "But in order to get money, you need to show proof of scalability."

The plan is (part of) that proof. "Scaling really is about planning," Hegde said. "It requires thinking maybe two, three, four, five years ahead, rather than simply thinking about how are you going to do the best pitch to sell your first customer or your first VC."

A solid strategy is to build a minimum viable product for that would be scalable with the right resources. Then show investors that any money they put in "can be deployed in ways that can meaningfully help expand the markets, or the customer base," and so on, Hegde said.

Know why you're scaling in the first place

Approach scaling with intention.

That's what Hint did. Since 2005, Hint has marketed naturally flavored beverages. It's become a staple at Silicon Valley companies like Google and Facebook. More recently, Hint expanded its product offerings to include sunscreen; soon, the company will sell deodorant as well.

Hint founder and CEO Kara Goldin has explained to Business Insider the logic behind this expansion. Her goal from the outset was to solve consumers' health problems — whether through safe, affordable sunscreen or nutritious, tasty beverages. In both cases, Goldin said, she realized that there were tons of options on the shelf but that people had no easy way to tell which was the healthiest choice. And even if they could, it would probably be out of their price range. Hint could change that.

Remember, too: You're not obligated to scale your business. And it's best to figure out your ambitions around scaling before seeking venture capital. For Hint, scaling has meant reaching roughly 190 employees after 14 years and snagging John Legend as an investor.

Scott Kupor, managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, previously told BI that one of the first things VCs evaluate is market opportunity, i.e. how big your business can eventually get. It's perfectly ok to build a $20 or $30 million company — but it might be hard to convince a VC to partner with you on that.

Hire to fill the gaps in your skillset …

"As a founder, you are so used to doing everything yourself," Hegde said. "Your startup becomes your baby." That mentality can lead to a few mistakes — namely, trying to do much yourself or micromanaging the employees you bring on.

The truth is that no founder is skilled at every aspect of running a startup. Typically, founders are talented salespeople: They can convince a VC to invest, a job candidate to join the team, and a customer to sign up. That doesn't necessarily mean they'll be a good manager — which, if you ask Cat Hernandez, an operations partner at the venture-capital firm Primary Ventures, is fine.

"Let's assume that your business grows really quickly and you have hundreds, if not thousands, of employees at some point," Hernandez said. "Your job is to set the strategic direction of the company and, yes, be able to drive a leadership team. Some parts of that require you to be a good manager — but if you know that's not your core skill, hire people [who have it]."

Read more: A Columbia professor who has taught MBA students for 15 years says graduates no longer aim for Goldman Sachs or Google. Here's what today's top talent want to do with their degrees.

… and do it sooner than later

Don't wait to build out your team until you're comfortable delegating responsibility. Do it now!

Christine Beckman, the Price Family Chair in Social Innovation and Professor of Public Policy at USC Price, conducted research that found the most successful entrepreneurs hired for specialized roles — say, an operations expert or a marketing expert — early on. "They set it up right from the beginning, rather than trying to go back in time and fix systems and processes that were put in place at the beginning, but no longer work as the company has grown," she said.

Beckman analyzed the executive team members at nearly 2,000 startups, plus how long it took those startups to raise capital and to go public. She discovered that founders who try to do everything themselves wind up "trying to cover more functional areas than they necessarily have expertise in" and "slowing things down because there's a bottleneck of decisions needing to go through these general managers," Beckman said. The founders who hired specialized talent were more successful because they saved the entire team time and effort.

Steve Martocci, cofounder of GroupMe as well as CEO of the music-creation platform Splice, learned this lesson the hard way. "I waited too long to hire an assistant," Martocci wrote an email to Business Insider. "In the early stages of building the company, I always felt guilty about the expense, because at that point I was so focused on the product that it seemed okay to go without [an assistant]. But as the stakes got higher, I started missing important meetings that had a material impact on the company."

Martocci added, "Having since hired an experienced assistant, I can attest to the significant value that she has provided me, and by default, the company."

Read more: The cofounder of GroupMe was 27 when the text-messaging platform sold for $85 million just a year after launch. Now, he's raised $107 million for a music startup that could make him even more successful. Here are his lessons for pitching, leading, and building a company.

Learn to delegate

So you've hired some new team members. The next step is letting them do the work they signed up for.

It's not as easy as it sounds.

To Robichaux, cofounder and CEO of BetterUp, it's about deferring to people with more specialized skillsets.

"If you're a really good early-stage founder, you're probably a high performer who's a really talented individual contributor in some vector," he said. "You may not be good at everything, but you're good at programming, you're good at product, you're good at sales. That only gets you so far."

As your startup grows, he noted, you have to get comfortable managing a team that's more high-performing than you are individually.

Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith has explained why delegation can be difficult (for new managers in general, not just founding CEOs). Successful people typically advance by proving over and over again how intelligent they are. They're inclined to do the same once they're in a leadership position — even though that can backfire. The biggest challenge for new managers "is not always winning," Goldsmith previously told Business Insider. Instead, they learn to position others to do the winning for the organization.

Read more: An employee-coaching startup used by Airbnb and LinkedIn just raised $103 million in a Series C round

Prioritize company culture — and tweak where necessary

"Culture" might seem like a fuzzy concept. But Hegde emphasized its importance. He said founders should make sure the people they bring on are aligned with their culture — even if they don't yet have a section of their website that outlines the company's mission statement and values.

Another common mistake is "not subtracting when you add," said Ethan Mollick, associate professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "The things that made you successful early on aren't always useful later." For example, all-hands meetings (a.k.a. all-staff meetings) might not be helpful or even feasible once the company reaches 500 employees. Scaling, in so many ways, is about adapting to the organization you've created. 

Accept that you need to take care of yourself first

Somewhat counterintuitively, your top concern as a team leader is … you. And Robichaux said that's where most founders go wrong. "We think our job first and foremost is to take care of other people," he said, when in fact "your No. 1 job as a leader is to take care of yourself."

Justin Kan, the founder of Twitch and Atrium, recently shared about his firsthand with the challenges of entrepreneurial mental health. "You can be burned out no matter how successful you are, and you can be unhappy no matter how successful you are," said Kan, who sold his first startup for $1 billion. The stress trend is a national one: a 2012 Gallup poll found that entrepreneurs were more likely than other workers in the US to feel worried and stressed.

That doesn't mean you invest in self-care at the expense of the company's well-being. That also doesn't mean you take a monthlong vacation while your company's imploding.

By taking care of yourself, Robichaux means getting "in a good mind space" and having "the emotional resources to be compassionate and not snap at someone." It's why Robichaux prioritizes physical workouts as well as mindfulness exercises in his schedule.

"That is more important than looking at this other document at 11 p.m. That is more important than getting someone feedback late at night," he said. If he doesn't make time for exercise and mindfulness, he's operating from a faulty foundation and everything will suffer."

SEE ALSO: The first-time founder's ultimate guide to pitching a VC

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack and Flickr, says 2 beliefs have brought him the greatest success in life

• Gus Kenworthy became the first Olympic skier to come out as gay in 2015.
• Business Insider talked to Kenworthy about coming out, becoming a pro skier, and LGBT advocacy.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When American freestyle skier Gus Kenworthy publicly came out as gay in 2015, he helped change the landscape of sports.

The then-24-year-old was sick of hiding who he really was, and even though he had just won a silver medal at the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, he was more miserable than ever. So, in an interview for ESPN The Magazine, he decided to be himself and come out of the closet. Now, he balances skiing, a budding acting career, and LGBTQ advocacy. 

Kenworthy has become something of a role model at the intersection of sports and LGBT advocacy. By the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, Kenworthy had not only come out, but shared a kiss on live television with his boyfriend, actor Matt Wilkas, a first for the Olympics and its American broadcaster, NBC. Outsports called it "the gay sports moment of 2018." 

Business Insider spoke to Kenworthy about how he finds the balance in his career, from starring in the upcoming season of "American Horror Story," to cycling 545 miles to raise nearly a quarter million dollars for AIDS research at the AIDS/LifeCycle bike ride. He's also built a colossal social media following, with 1.7 million followers on Instagram.

"I cherish any downtime that I have," Kenworthy said. "Sometimes I get restless when I have downtime."

The beginning

When it comes to skiing, Kenworthy always knew he had a talent. He got his big break when he posted a video of himself on the slopes of his hometown, Telluride, Colorado, for a skiing competition in Europe. Kenworthy knew at the time that going pro was extremely difficult, but the video submission was his shot at success. "This felt like it was a great chance to try and do it," said Kenworthy. "I saw that this was a competition to put these videos online, and I saw some of the ones that had already been submitted, and I thought, 'Oh, I could do that, I'm better than that.'"

When he found out that his video had been selected, his father, Peter Kenworthy, became his manager. "I got a company in France reach out to me via email, and was like 'We wanna sponsor you, we wanna pay you to ski for us.' And I literally thought it was fake. I sent it to my dad and said, 'Is this a prank? Am I getting punk'd?'"

During that first competition, Kenworthy was still in high school, and had not yet come to terms with his sexuality. "When I was younger all my role models weren't gay role models, they were just sports role models," he said. "It was so ski-specific."

He got to meet his hero on that trip: Canadian freestyle skier TJ Schiller. Kenworthy, still an unknown, had been cutting out pictures of his role model out of skiing magazines, but after meeting Schiller, they became peers. "We're friends now, and text and stuff — it's very strange. He ended up just becoming a really good friend and mentor."

Arriving at his identity

Growing up in Telluride, a tiny ski town, Kenworthy didn't have too many role models from the gay community. He looked up to celebrities like Ricky Martin, Ellen Page, and Troye Sivan for coming out, but he only knew one gay person in his immediate circle. "I actually have an uncle who's gay," Kenworthy said, "and my family adores my uncle Sam, but he and I in many ways couldn't be more different. I think that was part of the thing that made it hard for me when I was coming to terms with the fact that I was gay. That was really the only point of context that I had."

But as he got older, Kenworthy understood more about his sexuality and himself. "I realized that 'gay' is just part of someone, it doesn't define anything else about them," he said.

Kenworthy has a motto that he carries around with him. He had used it on high school essays, he said, but didn't embody it fully until he came out. "The quote is, 'Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter won't mind.' And I think it's especially true for someone in the closet. And it's just this theme that you should be who you are, and really not care what anyone says, because anybody that's gonna say anything about you being you is not somebody you have time for anyway."

According to Kenworthy, once he competed for the first time after coming out, his skiing became better than ever, and he grew more comfortable living in the public eye. Ever since, he's been sponsoring clothing products, acting, and advocating for the LGBTQ community. But Kenworthy sees the common thread. "It's all different facets of myself. Skiing and acting may seem like different worlds, but they're both things that I'm passionate about."

Despite being busier than ever, he appreciates the occasional day off. "I'm really trying to learn how to love that," he said. "To use that day to get in a chill workout, and get lunch with friends, and get dinner, and not overdo anything or think about anything too much."

SEE ALSO: Some US embassies are still flying LGBTQ pride flags despite Trump administration advisory against it

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This gay Syrian man narrowly escaped being killed by ISIS

• Recent New York Times interviews with the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates revealed that few of them sleep the recommended amount.
• This could have serious consequences for their health and leadership abilities.
• It also sets a bad example for the rest of the country.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In a recent New York Times story, several prominent Democrats running for president spoke of how little they sleep. As one might expect, many were a bit noncommittal in their answers, saying variations of "it depends," or taking the Jay Inslee route of spouting a campaign line rather than answering the question.

But the general tone was that the overwhelming majority of them wished they slept more. The clear subtext was that most of them acknowledged that they would be happier with more sleep, but that they were just too busy to get as much sleep as they desired.

For example, Marianne Williamson said, "I want to get eight, but I rarely do." And Eric Swalwell said, "I would kill if I could just get four and a half."

We think this is a telling conversation, and it highlights some important issues about sleep. Given our collective expertise on sleep science and effective management, the Democratic candidates' admission about their sleep habits raises a few red flags that could have serious consequences for their health, candidacy, and the country at large.

Lack of sleep can hurt the candidates' health

Sleep that is adequate in quality and duration is obviously crucial for alertness, and it's unlikely that anyone would dispute that their performance is subpar after pulling an all-nighter. But the deficits that result from even mild sleep loss are often underappreciated.

After 17 hours of sustained wakefulness, performance on certain tests is equivalent to that of someone with a blood-alcohol content of .05%, and sleep restriction to six hours a night produces cognitive impairment that matches the deficits seen after two nights of total sleep deprivation.

Of particular concern is that those who are chronically sleep-deprived often lose a sense of sleepiness and therefore don't recognize their own deficits under these circumstances.

Sleep loss not only increases the likelihood that our future leader will have lapses in judgment, but it could result in negative consequences for their general health. The recommendation that adults get at least seven hours of sleep is based on ample evidence linking sleep deprivation to obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, depression, pain, and increased risk of death.

Political chances at risk

From a leadership perspective, there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that sleep deprivation undermines leadership and other work outcomes.

Most directly relevant to success as an effective politician is charisma. Sleep deprivation undermines the ability of leaders to control their emotions, especially their ability to experience and display positive emotions (such as hope and excitement). As a result, their charisma suffers.

Beyond inspiring voters, successful politicians must effectively lead their staff. Dysfunctional working relationships with staff can undermine all the work that goes on off-camera by so many hardworking people behind the scenes. Here again, charisma is important. But poor sleep also increases the prevalence of abusive supervision — like jerky-boss behavior — which in turn lowers the work engagement of subordinates.

In other words, a candidate who is short on sleep will be more likely to be short with staff, and those staff members will tend to invest less of themselves into the job as a result. Indeed, even over longer periods than a single night, sleep deprivation undermines the quality of the working relationships between leaders and subordinates.

Additionally, political candidates seeking office are often derailed by the scariest word in politics: scandal. An important research finding, which has been replicated in multiple studies, is that sleep deprivation increases the prevalence of unethical behavior.

Sleep deprivation leads to decrements in self-control, which leaves people less able to resist temptations to behave unethically. As a result, even the same person can be more or less unethical on different days, based in part on how much and how well that person slept the night before.

Setting a good example for America

From a bigger-picture perspective, we should all be able to look to politicians as people who lead us to a better future. New research indicates that leaders who explicitly devalue sleep end up undermining the sleep of those they lead (which unintentionally leads to an increased prevalence of unethical behavior in the people they lead).

So politicians who attempt to communicate how dedicated they are to the job are also communicating a deprioritization of sleep, which is harmful to their followers as well as those who might be harmed by an increase of unethical behavior by those followers.

The bottom line is that our future president isn't the only one affected by the health consequences of their own sleep habits. Condoning sleep restriction could increase sleep-loss-related errors, accidents, and illnesses in the American people.

This is particularly relevant given a growing recognition of sleep disparities in vulnerable populations such as underrepresented minority groups and socioeconomically disadvantaged. Glamorizing short sleep times could propagate a serious public health problem.

Political leaders have a responsibility to be effective leaders and role models for everyone else. Getting the sleep they need is key to doing this well.

Christopher M. Barnes is an associate professor of management in the Foster School of Business of the University of Washington. His doctorate, in organizational behavior, is from Michigan State University. His research examines human sustainability in the work context, focusing on the relationship between sleep and work.

Cathy Goldstein, MD, is an associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan and a faculty member at the Sleep Disorders Center. Her research focus, through work with mathematics, is the improvement of sleep tracking through algorithm development and validation using consumer sensors.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: MacKenzie Bezos pledged to donate more than half of her life's fortune. Here's how she went from one of Amazon's first employees to an award-winning novelist.

• LGBT students are more likely than their non-LGBT peers to value a commitment to diversity and support for gender equality from their future employers, according to an analysis by employer branding specialists Universum.
• Universum runs an annual survey of trends of thousands of college students, asking new entrants to the workforce what they look for in potential employers.
• LGBT students were also more likely to look for work in the arts, entertainment, and recreation industries, and for non-government and non-profit organizations.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

LGBT students entering the workforce are looking for employers with a commitment to diversity and a strong sense of social responsibility, according to an analysis provided to Business Insider.

Employer branding specialists Universum runs an annual survey of tens of thousands of college students, asking new entrants to the workforce what they are looking for from their future employers.

Universum provided Business Insider an exclusive analysis of which job attributes self-identified LGBT students said were important to them compared with their non-LGBT-identifying peers.

Read more: Where US business students want to work: Disney over Deloitte, Apple more than Goldman, and Google above all

About four-fifths of the self-identified LGBT sample were in Gen Z, with millennials making up most of the remaining fifth. Universum defines Gen Z as those born in 1997 and after.

Universum asked students about 40 employer and job attributes, broken into four groups of ten each: employer reputation and image, people and culture, remuneration and advancement opportunities, and job characteristics. Students are asked to list up to three attributes in each category as being most important to them in their future careers.

LGBT students were more likely to rank certain attributes as being important to them than their non-LGBT peers. Here are eight categories that had a notably higher ranking from LGBT students than non-LGBT students:

LGBT students were more than twice as likely as non-LGBT students to rate support for gender equality and commitment to diversity and inclusion as being important characteristics of their future employers. They were also more likely to value corporate social responsibility, ethical standards, and opportunities for international travel or relocation.

Universum also asked students to select up to three industries from a list of 20 that they would like to work in. LGBT students were much more likely to say they wanted to work in the arts, entertainment, and recreation industry, educational and scientific institutions, and NGOs and non-profits than non-LGBT respondents:

• Read more:
• 30 high-paying jobs of the future — and the skills you'll need to get them
• The 20 wealthiest private universities and colleges in America
• From hair salons to bars, here are 30 industries dominated by millennials
• From cafeteria workers to principals, here's what everyone makes in a public school

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How Tesla CEO Elon Musk makes and spends his $19.2 billion

• I moved from San Francisco to London 10 years ago, and have since lived in Amsterdam and Cyprus.
• Living abroad has taught me a lot about America, and has revealed some aspects of American society that I don't miss at all.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In 2008, I packed up everything I owned into two suitcases and moved from San Francisco to London for love.More than 10 years later, I still live in Europe. 

There have been a lot of changes in that decade. I got married, had a daughter, and moved around, first to Amsterdam, then back to London, then to my husband's native Cyprus where we've been for the last seven years.

Living abroad has taught me a ton about myself and a lot about the countries I've lived in. But more surprising is how much it's taught me about America. 

And I don't just mean the many long and often outraged discussions I've had with foreigners about America's overseas policies, though those have been eye-opening. It's also that the differences you encounter living in another country highlight things you never noticed about your home country before. 

Some of those are positive, giving you a fresh appreciation for the best of your home country, but some of them are also negative. More than 10 years as an expat have showed me there are things I really don't miss about America.

Here are a handful of the biggest. 

SEE ALSO: I moved to the US from China — here are the biggest cultural differences I've noticed between the 2 countries

DON'T MISS: I'm an American living in the UK — here are the 9 American products I miss the most

Terrifying healthcare costs

Dear Americans, you are being screwed. Royally.

I am not a healthcare economist and I can't tell you who is skimming or wasting your healthcare dollars or exactly how, but I am 100% sure something very, very bad is going on with American healthcare. 

How am I so sure? It's not my four years of relying on the publicly funded National Health Service in the UK. It worked wonderfully for routine checkups or the odd vaccination before a trip, but I was fortunate not to need it enough to offer a decent comparison with US healthcare.

What really opened my eyes was moving to Cyprus, which has only a bare-bones public health offering. I was advised to get private insurance. We finally settled on a generous policy covering all non-routine care, here and abroad.

Do you know what we pay as a family of three for this quite decent coverage on the individual market? $3,500 a year. 

When I had my daughter, I had a natural birth at a modern private clinic where I stayed with my husband for two nights after our baby arrived. The total cost before the government and my insurance reimbursed me was $2,300. In the US it would be five times as much on average. Our pediatrician attended the birth and then came to our apartment twice to check up on the baby and help me get started with breastfeeding. Total bill: $450. 

Cyprus isn't America, and the cost of living is lower here. But not that much lower. And no, this isn't a center of medical innovation like the States. But those numbers still shock me.

People often ask if I'd like to move back to the States. The honest answer is yes, we discuss it often. But as two freelancers, the insane cost of healthcare makes the idea seem impossible.

'Family values' hypocrisy

Cyprus, for the uninitiated, is a little Greek-speaking island in the Eastern Mediterranean, and I regularly travel around Greece with my rambunctious 4-year-old daughter.

No matter where we go at no matter what hour — from the poshest Kolonaki restaurant to some little beachside taverna — she is greeted by both the staff and fellow diners as a delight.

This says a lot about the culture here. Greeks really love kids. But this fact has also highlighted something simple I had never fully articulated about Americans before I moved abroad. Despite the endless talk about "family values" in some quarters, we really don't value them.

Of course Americans love their own children as much as any parents anywhere. But raising kids is seen as a private decision, freighted with hardship and annoyances that are to be entirely borne by the parents themselves. Enter many places in America with a preschooler and the unspoken message feels more like, "Please move quietly to the suburbs to suffer in silence. Don't bother the rest of us with your uncool offspring."

This attitude goes deeper than just how families are received in restaurants. It's also reflected in America's pathetic public support for families, our non-existent parental leave policy, sky-high childcare costs, and underfunded schools and universities. Americans talk about loving families, but from the outside, as a country, it really seems to disdain them.

Bread that tastes like cupcakes

Bread bought at a normal American supermarket used to taste like bread to me. Then I moved abroad.

Now when I go back to the States and buy bread it tastes like a cupcake to me. Seriously, it's that sweet. And why, after leaving it out on the counter for a week or more, isn't it moldy? Bread here in Cyprus lasts a few days, max. 

American bread really is different. It's full of chemical additives that are banned in many other countries because of potential health risks.  

During my last visit to my family in New York I started checking labels. Whether I looked at salad dressing, barbecue sauce, mustard, or just about anything else, one of the first ingredients was some version of corn syrup followed by a gobbledygook of chemicals. It does not have to be this way. It should not be this way.

Stingy vacation policies

Here in Cyprus, full-time employees are guaranteed 20 days paid vacation leave a year, not including public holidays (of which there are plenty). In the UK, workers get 28. In the Netherlands, it's 20 as well.

In America, the legal requirement is zero days and the average granted to private sector workers is a measly 10 days. This is crazy, inhumane, and a recipe for burnout. I just cannot imagine going back to it. 

Regulations that hurt consumers

I'm under no illusions that Europe is a regulatory paradise. The EU has passed plenty of ill-considered, overreaching, business-unfriendly regulations. 

But it also seems interested in protecting consumers from being bullied and ripped off. It's nice to live in a place where airlines won't randomly bump you from flights and everyday consumer banking is easy, cheap, and mostly electronic (the overall health of the banking sector is another matter). 

There are fewer hidden fees, outrageous charges, and straight-up scams here. For the life of me, I don't understand why Americans don't demand their government stick up for them too.

• Rachael Parker is a principal engineer at Intel.
• She joined the tech giant in the '90s, and was the first person in the company to transition from male to female in a visible fashion.
• With the support of her wife and coworkers, Parker has gone on to become a prominent trans advocate in tech.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In 1995, I had a new job, a new wife — and an old secret. I'd spent many years struggling with the pain of understanding who I was.

While growing up, I didn't identify with boys and knew I was different, but I had no information about what I was feeling. I had only recently understood what it meant to be transgender, because it wasn't common for trans people to be out at the time (the Internet was much smaller and younger then).

After coming across a trans support newsgroup, I immediately knew that this is who I was and that there were others like me. Although I was terrified, I was also excited to learn more about it.

My family was supportive about my decision to transition. At the time, I'd known my wife since 1989, and it was a gradual process coming out to her. My spouse was there for me, which is exceptionally rare. Often, transition ends in divorce, and I was blessed to have someone who was able to love me just for who I was. She had a friend from college who had just come out to her as being trans, so it helped that it wasn't a foreign concept.

Having two young children, my family was my number one priority. It was important to me not to push them or rush them. The transition was gradual, and they saw me getting happier and healthier, which was positive reinforcement to continue transition and gave me the strength to also be out in other areas of my life.

Read more:Coworkers said my androgynous look was scaring clients, so I switched jobs and found a boss who helped me accept my true self

The importance of creating a professional 'sanctuary'

Navigating the workplace was a different experience. I joined Intel as an engineer and was largely closeted for the first year and a half. After starting, I joined the company's employee resource group IGLOBE (Intel Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, or Transgender Employees), which back then did not include the word "transgender" in its charter — nobody had ever asked them to include the transgender community. To change that, I conducted informational sessions and presentations where I shared my story, taught them what it meant to be transgender, and explained why it was important that the LGB community should be allies with and advocates for the transgender community.

After changing the charter for IGLOBE, it became my sanctuary, and I participated fully. I held multiple officer positions, eventually serving as president of the group. But I wasn't done. Although I was terrified, I knew I needed to transition for my own survival.

Twenty years ago, if you wanted to transition, you would normally quit your job, move to a new place and start a new life, never revealing your status. But I had a wife, a young family — and I had worked very hard to build my career. I wanted to stay at Intel, which was at the epicenter of semiconductor development, and where I had already built career equity through my contributions, patents, and publications.

When I decided that I was going to transition at work, I wanted to make sure Intel was a safe place to do that. It was the '90s, and I was the first person to transition at Intel in such a visible fashion, so there were no policies or processes in place to build from. I started meeting with HR and legal to encourage Intel to change its equal employment opportunity (EEO) and non-discrimination policy to include gender identity. This was key: At the time, Intel's protections didn't include gender identity, and I needed to know that I wouldn't be fired, as that was not uncommon for the times.

While I had advocates, there was still a lot of education to be done around what constitutes harassment. Many people had never heard of what it meant to be transgender. Although I leveraged support from HR on a few occasions, I focused more on working to educate coworkers — as well as my broader workplace — about what was acceptable behavior.

Read more: This top Accenture exec came out as gay to coworkers at an office party 32 years ago. He says it was one of the best career decisions he's ever made.

Why advocating for company-wide change can lead to greater acceptance

Changing Intel's EEO statement and non-discrimination policy was a big step, but there was still a long way to go. I continued my work by advocating for trans healthcare benefits at Intel. It was important to ensure people had access to prescriptions and hormone-replacement therapy, which technically was excluded from coverage for transgender people.

Therapy was another area that wasn't covered: any trans person should have the right to go to therapy and have it covered by their insurance. Today, many companies have added protections for gender expression and identity to their policies, as well as healthcare coverage for people who are transitioning. I'm very proud Intel was among the leaders in this area. 

While I will never stop fighting and advocating for equal rights, it has been wonderful to find a workplace where I finally feel accepted for who I am.

Having my family and finding support at work through this process was critical, and it inspired me to be more active in the community. I began serving as an Intel representative to the Human Rights Campaign and as a board member of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates. As other companies started taking steps to make changes, I was able to act as a resource, sharing best practices and the process we went through at Intel.

There are still places where people are not safe today, and while we must work to change that, it's been very meaningful for me to help create environments where people can truly be themselves. 

Rachael Parker is a Principal Engineer at Intel working in the Mixed-Signal IP group, where she runs a small team that develops hardware security circuits. She has been with the company for 24 years and holds over 25 patents.

SEE ALSO: The 23 most powerful LGBTQ+ people in tech

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Jay-Z is hip-hop's first billionaire. See how he and Beyoncé make and spend their money.

• Rebekah Monson is the cofounder and COO of WhereBy.Us.
• Monson realized she was queer in college, where she found herself debating gay marriage in the classroom and writing the first story on a trans student for her campus newspaper.
• Now, as a media entrepreneur, she sees diversity and inclusivity as "core values" of her company.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

I never planned to be an entrepreneur.

I was a nerdy kid from rural Alabama, but not an outstanding one. I wasn't the smartest, or most ambitious, or really the best of anything in my class of 100 students. But even back then, I was fascinated with — and passionate about — stories, about using technology to tell them, and about the communities those stories affect.

In college, I realized that I was queer right around the time I got obsessed with working for the student newspaper. Just after I came out, we debated gay marriage in a political science seminar. As I very consciously quelled my emotions to recall policies and court cases, I thought, "This will never happen in my lifetime." A little later, I wrote the first story on a trans person for the campus paper. I was astonished and outraged at how hard it was for him to simply use the bathroom on campus.

Throughout my career — from restaurant gigs, to internships, to management, to eventually starting my own company — I have grappled with being a queer woman at work. A steady drip of fear, doubt, and responsibility niggles away at everyone who's ever been "the other." What should I do about my manager using a slur? How can I be most fair with this politician who deeply opposes my relationship? How can I help everyone who works here perform their very best? How can I get the power to make decisions and set priorities?

If you had asked me back at 18 to predict what the world would look like for LGBTQ people 20 years later, I would have landed far short of where we actually are. But people kept coming out. They kept fighting in court, protesting, lobbying, talking to their neighbors, challenging every little thing to try to change the one big thing: equality. And the tides are turning faster than I imagined. We still have a long way to go, but the progress when we work consciously and constantly to improve is obvious.

It's still difficult for LGBTQ employees to navigate the workplace

All that social and cultural success hasn't necessarily been as apparent in our work lives. LGBTQ people still face discrimination, are underrepresented in many companies and industries, and often lack employment protections. We can change this. As entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders, we have a mandate to disrupt broken systems and build a better way forward for our businesses. Diversity and inclusion efforts are often framed as a part of building company culture, but prioritizing diversity is also an essential business strategy.

You've probably read that diverse teams are more innovative, make better products, and make more money. But the benefits of consciously working on diversity stretches beyond internal initiatives. Inclusion is more important than ever in industries like media and tech, which aim to rapidly grow very large audiences of very different people, all while facing radical disruption and a crisis of mistrust with their users. 

WhereBy.Us, the startup I co-founded, is not perfect at this by any measure. But embedding diversity and inclusion into our work helps us to punch above our weight in the highly competitive market for attention. Our teams collect and analyze dozens of feedback reports and metrics each day to understand who we may be missing in our work, to learn more about the needs of our customers, and to find new ways for us to grow. 

We ask a lot of direct questions to our users: What are you curious about? What should we know about your work, your neighborhood, your community, your passions? What can we do better? These questions regularly turn into stories or sales leads, but they're also sending a strong, steady signal of inclusion. We are listening to you. We want to learn from you. We work for you and with you.

Active outreach is key to cultivating a diverse audience and staff

Our teams are constantly working to strengthen relationships in the cities we serve, particularly among communities that are unfamiliar to us. Outreach builds networks that help us grow, find better stories, understand different user needs, and identify new sales and partnership opportunities. Ultimately, investing in stronger, deeper relationships helps us compete against far bigger teams with far bigger budgets.

When diversity and inclusion are deeply rooted in our work as a core value and a strength — rather than viewed as a lofty cultural aspiration — we create a continuing cycle for culture efforts. Extensive community outreach helps us get more highly qualified, diverse candidates in the applicant pool for every job we post. In turn, more diverse teams guide more diverse coverage, welcoming new audiences and helping our work serve more people more effectively. 

It's hard not to be proud of how far LGBTQ communities have come during the time my career has unfolded. Yet we still have a lot more work to do. This requires extending equality at every step to every other "other." As entrepreneurs, we have even more opportunity to do that work through solving problems, disrupting broken systems, and building better businesses. 

Rebekah Monson is cofounder and COO of WhereBy.Us, a platform for local media in growing cities, with a focus on delightful email newsletters and experiences for communities of local explorers, makers, and leaders. WhereBy.Us owns and operates The New Tropic in Miami, The Evergrey in Seattle, Bridgeliner in Portland, Pulptown in Orlando and The Incline in Pittsburgh.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Jay-Z is hip-hop's first billionaire. See how he and Beyoncé make and spend their money.

• To celebrate Independence Day, we've assembled a collection of maps that illustrate who Americans are and how they live.
• Geography matters — where we reside and where we come from affects many facets of our lives.
• The US is a large, complex place, and maps can provide a big-picture sense of how we're doing as a community and as citizens.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

America is a massive, diverse, beautiful, and complicated place

One of the best ways to understand a country like the US is through maps. Here at Business Insider, maps are a big part of how we cover the world— and that's because where we live and where we come from affects many facets of our lives. Maps provide a window into how places vary, and how geography shapes us as individuals and as a nation. Maps like the ones below can provide a big-picture, bird's-eye-view of the country as a whole, illustrating what brings us apart... and what keeps us together.

As America prepares to celebrate its birthday on the Fourth of July, we've put together a collection of maps that provide a sense of how the population is doing both as a community and as individual citizens.

The maps focus on the 50 states and (in most cases) Washington, DC. They're all based on data from the last few years, and provide a snapshot of contemporary America and its people's lives and beliefs.

Scroll down for the full list of maps, or click on one of the topics below to zoom to a section.

Who they are

How they live

What they believe

How they make money

How they spend money

The United States is a massive country, and its 327 million people are scattered across a vast expanse of land. This map shows how many people per square mile live in each county, with the darker blue indicating big cities and their suburbs:

Even though rural and small-town life are still an important part of the American tradition, the population is overwhelmingly urban and suburban, with about 80% of US residents living in a metropolitan area made up of one or more big cities and their surrounding suburban zones.

The urbanization and suburbanization of the US can be seen even more starkly. 50.1% of the country's population lives in one of the 238 most densely populated counties, shown here in darker blue:

Big cities, especially those along the coasts, have an outsized share of the US population. According to the Census Bureau's population estimates, in 2018, the 10 largest metropolitan areas together had about 87 million residents, or about a quarter of the total population.

Big cities in the South and West are quickly increasing in size, while more sparsely populated areas and Northern counties are growing more slowly or shrinking in population.

Four of the 10 counties with the biggest percent increases in population between 2017 and 2018 were in Texas, and another three were in Florida.

Read more: Here are the fastest growing and shrinking counties in America

The biggest factor driving population change in many counties is domestic migration, or Americans moving from one place to another.

The growth of Southern urban and suburban counties is even more apparent on this map. Places in Florida and Texas dominate the list of the 10 counties with the biggest population increases from domestic migration.

Read more: A lot of Americans are moving South — and many are heading to Florida

Americans trace their roots from all over the world. In most Northern states, a plurality of residents described themselves as having German ancestry, while more residents of states along the US-Mexico border described themselves as Mexican. African-American was the most common self-identified ancestry throughout much of the Deep South.

The Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey asks respondents to list up to two nationalities for their family's ancestry. Using individual-level results assembled by the Minnesota Population Center's Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) program, we found the most common self-identified ancestry in each state.

The labels for the ancestry groups shown in the map are those used by IPUMS, and are intended to best categorize how survey respondents described themselves.

A plurality of survey respondents in two states, Kentucky and Tennessee, listed their ancestry simply as "United States," suggesting that they view their roots as more tightly connected to this country than to some far-off region from the distant past.

Read more: The most common ancestry in every US state

The diversity of American origins can also be seen in the languages that people speak at home.

The top map shows the most commonly spoken language in every state other than English and Spanish, again based on IPUMS data from the 2017 American Community Survey. There's a huge variety in the language communities shown, and it reflects the diversity of where people come from.

English is, unsurprisingly, the most commonly spoken language across the US, and Spanish is second-most common in 46 states and the District of Columbia. So, we excluded those two languages in the above map.

Read more: This map shows the most commonly spoken language in every US state, excluding English and Spanish

The lower map shows the overall share of people who spoke any language other than English at home. That share is much higher in states along the Southern border with Mexico and in big urban states like Illinois, New York, and New Jersey, which all host large populations of immigrants.

Read more: Here's how many people in each state speak a language other than English at home

New Americans arrive from other countries every day. Here are the states where they're most likely to settle:

California, Nevada, Texas, Florida, and the urban northeast loom large. All these states have historically been magnets for immigrants and people looking to work and settle in the US.

Read more:Here's how many people in each state were born outside the US

Those new Americans come from all over the world.

Mexico was the most common country of origin for foreign-born residents in 32 states, and so we excluded it from the map above.

As in the earlier maps showing ancestries and languages, there's a wide variety of countries represented on the map above, reflecting the global origins of American immigrants.

Read more: This map shows where each state's largest immigrant group comes from, excluding Mexico

Census population estimates can give a more granular look of where those immigrants are moving.

The dark blue counties saw a large increase in population from net international migration, or the difference between immigrants from another country and emigrants out of the US.

Southern Florida's counties saw a large influx of population from abroad, as did most of Massachusetts.

Read more: There are fewer immigrants moving to the US. This map shows where they're headed.

The sex breakdown of most states is pretty close to balanced, although women slightly outnumber men. Only 10 states — those in red on the map below — had more male than female residents.

North Dakota, Wyoming, and Alaska all had particularly high ratios of male residents to female residents in 2017, the latest year for which information was available.

One possible factor could be the predominance of male-dominated industries like oil extraction and mining in those states.

Read more: There are only 10 states in the US with more men than women

Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Connecticut were the healthiest states in the country last year, according to a study from United Health Foundation.

The study looked at environmental and behavioral factors, including air pollution, smoking and obesity rates, and how many people have health insurance.

Read more: The 50 US states ranked from most to least healthy

Access to healthcare comes with a cost. Total healthcare burdens — the combined cost of premiums and out-of-pocket deductible costs — ranged from about $5,400 in Michigan to almost $8,300 in New Hampshire per year.

The high and rising cost of healthcare in the US is a perennial political issue. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates have put forward plans to address costs through increased government coverage.

The candidates are roughly split into two camps, with several, including former Texas congressman Beto O'Rourke, favoring some form of a "public option" for uninsured Americans to be able to buy in to federal insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Meanwhile, the more left-leaning candidates like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders have proposed a "Medicare for All" plan that would largely end private insurance in favor of a federal single-payer system.

Read more: How much your healthcare costs in all 50 states

Between 2017 and 2018, more people died than were born in 1,342 of the country's 3,142 counties.

As part of its program tracking population increases and decreases across the country, the Census Bureau counts "natural population change," or the net difference between births and deaths in a location.

Counties with the highest population-adjusted rates of net births over deaths were scattered across the US, while three of the 10 counties with the highest rates of deaths over births were in Florida.

Read more: Here are the US counties where more people are dying than being born

Families in the West tend to be larger than Northeastern families.

States like Utah, Alaska, and Arizona had an average of more than two children per family, while families in states like Maine and Vermont had fewer than 1.8 children per family on average.

Just over four years ago, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision making same-sex marriage the law of the land, and LGBT families are thriving.

The first map shows estimates of how many people in each state identify as LGBT, based on an analysis of polling data from Gallup. The second map shows the share of same-sex couples raising children.

Intriguingly, states with smaller self-identified LGBT populations largely tend to have a higher share of same-sex families raising children.

Trends in what people name their newborn children come and go over time.

In 2018, Ava and William were popular names in much of the South, while Emma and Liam were the most common names for girls and boys, respectively, in a wide swath of the country.

Read more: The most popular baby names in every state

A college education is still an expected milestone. The share of adults age 25 and over with at least a bachelor's degree tends to be higher in Eastern states and lower in Southern states.

By this measure, educational attainment is highest in Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC, all of which have at least 40% of their population with a bachelor's degree or higher.

Colleges and universities in the Northeast and West tend to have higher rates of on-time graduation than other states.

A Business Insider analysis of data from the Department of Education looked at the average six-year completion rate for first-time, full-time students at four-year colleges and universities based in each state.

Massachusetts' colleges had the highest average graduation rate, with 73.5% of students seeking a four-year degree finishing within six years.

Arizona had the lowest rate, with just 26.3% of students finishing on time. However, the mostly online University of Phoenix is included in Arizona's Department of Education data. Excluding that school, the state's average graduation rate improved to a much higher 50.9%.

Read more: The 15 US states with the lowest college graduation rates

Like healthcare, higher education in the US can be very expensive. The average student debt held by new graduates ranged from about $19,000 in Utah to over $38,000 in Connecticut.

Also like healthcare, student debt has become an emerging issue in the 2020 presidential election. Both Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders have published proposals to cancel Americans' student debt burdens and dramatically reduce the cost of college for new students.

While milestones like getting an education and raising a family are big parts of Americans' lives, heartbreak is as well. Marriages sometimes end, and states deal with how to split up marital property in different ways.

The two main sets of divorce property rules are "community property," which treats all assets held by a married couple as being held jointly, and thus split evenly in the event of a divorce.

"Equitable distribution" keeps spouses' individual holdings separate, leaving assets to be divided at a judge's discretion in the case of a divorce.

Read more: Billionaire couple Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos live in one of the best states in the US to get divorced if your spouse is loaded — here are the rest

Faith is a big part of many Americans' lives, especially in the traditional "Bible Belt" states.

The Pew Research Center's 2014 Religious Landscape Survey analyzed religious beliefs and habits of Americans. The above map shows the share of each state's population that Pew identified as being "highly religious" based on four measures of religious behavior: attending weekly services, praying daily, believing in God with absolute certainty, and saying that religion was important in their lives.

New England had a relatively low share of "highly religious" respondents in Pew's survey, with about a third of the populations of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts self-identifying with the above devout behaviors.

Meanwhile, over three quarters of Southern states like Missouri and Alabama were highly religious, by Pew's definition.

Americans express their core political beliefs through elections. While President Donald Trump won a surprising victory in the 2016 race, the Democratic party regained control of the House of Representatives in 2018.

Although Republican red visually dominates the map on the right showing the results of the 2018 midterm congressional elections, Democrats largely swept denser urban and suburban districts across the country, securing a solid majority in the House.

The Senate, however, remained in Republican hands, as it has since the 2014 elections.

The right to an abortion remains a hotly contested issue in American politics. A newly more conservative Supreme Court could potentially overrule the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that has secured that right for decades.

Several conservative-leaning states have passed laws that would dramatically restrict the right to an abortion should Roe be overturned. A number of more liberal states have passed laws explicitly protecting abortion rights in preparation for such an event.

Aside from laws that would take effect in the event of Roe v. Wade being overturned, several states have recently passed more severe restrictions on the procedure, including Georgia's controversial "heartbeat bill" and a law in Alabama making abortion a felony, with no exceptions for rape or incest.

Read more: This is what could happen if Roe v. Wade fell

Another contentious issue in the Trump era is immigration, particularly of refugees and migrants seeking asylum status. According to State Department data, states like Texas, New York, California, Ohio, and Washington have settled a large number of refugees.

Business Insider's Michelle Mark reported that refugees "are generally placed in cities where they either have relatives, or an existing community of immigrants from their home countries." The above map shows where refugees were settled in the 2018 fiscal year.

A Pew Research Center analysis found that over half of refugees were settled in just 10 states in 2016.

Read more: The Trump administration has admitted the lowest number of refugees the US has accepted in decades. Here's what people go through to make it to the US.

The Trump administration's crackdown on immigration involves the use of hundreds of detention centers for migrants across the US.

A 2018 Business Insider analysis identified the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers in every state. There were at least two such facilities in all 50 states and DC, with Texas counting 184 detention centers in operation.

Conditions in ICE detention centers have been a controversial issue since last year, as the administration ramped up a policy of separating children of migrants from their parents. In recent days, stories of children being denied access to basic needs like soap, bedding, and toothbrushes have reignited the furor over the detainment facilities.

Read more: Here's how many ICE detention centers are holding immigrants in every state

President Trump's approval ratings have declined in most states since his inauguration.

Polling firm Morning Consult tracks Trump's monthly approval rating in each US state. In the map above, states in blue have a net negative approval rating (that is, more residents disapproving of Trump than approving), while states in orange have a net positive rating.

As of May 2019, Trump's net approval is negative in several of the key swing states that helped his surprise 2016 election victory, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

An emerging hot-button issue is convict voting rights. While many states continue to permanently bar felons from voting, a trend toward restoring rights after convicts have served their time is gaining steam.

In November 2018, Florida overwhelmingly passed a referendum restoring voting rights to felons who have served their time, overturning a particularly stringent ban that blocked 1.5 million residents from voting due to a prior felony conviction.

However, two days before this map was published, the Sunshine State's governor undercut that historic amendment by signing a bill limiting how many felons will be able to vote.

Several of the Democratic candidates for the 2020 presidential election have called for loosening or lifting restrictions on felon voting. Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed allowing felons to vote once they've completed their sentences; Senator Bernie Sanders went further, suggesting that currently incarcerated felons should also be allowed to participate in elections.

Read more: Floridians with felony convictions are now beginning to register to vote after the state restored voting rights to 1.5 million felons

Most states require some form of identification for voters to be able to cast a ballot.

Supporters of the laws argue that they are needed to prevent voter fraud, although there is little evidence that such fraud is widespread in the US. Critics of the laws point out that they tend to disproportionately affect poor and minority voters.

Read more: Most states, including Texas and Florida, now require showing ID to vote. Here's the full state-by-state breakdown.

The death penalty is another perennial hot-button issue in American politics. Several states still actively execute prisoners convicted of capital crimes, though a number of states have recently restricted the penalty.

In March, California governor Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on capital punishment in the country's largest state. In May, New Hampshire repealed its death penalty.

Read more: Here are the states that still have the power to execute prisoners

Marijuana legalization has been on the upswing in recent years. As of last month, 10 states allow sales of recreational and legal marijuana.

Marijuana legalization has become increasingly popular with the overall public. A report from Vox pointed out that in three major public opinion surveys, respondents favored legalization by a roughly two-to-one margin. 

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker just signed a law legalizing marijuana in that state that is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2020. 

Read more: Illinois just became the first state to legalize marijuana sales through the legislature — here are all the states where marijuana is legal

The wage for a typical worker varies widely across the country. The median full-time worker in Washington, DC, earns nearly twice as much as the median worker in Mississippi.

Median wages tend to be higher in more urban and coastal states, and lower in rural states, reflecting the overall economic fortunes of those regions.

Read more: While top CEOs make a median salary of $1 million a month, a typical worker in Mississippi pulls in $3,138. Here's the median monthly earnings of full-time workers in every state.

At the low end of the spectrum, the share of workers with earnings at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is relatively high in Southern states, while pay at that level is much less common in the far West.

Many of the states with extremely low shares of workers at or below the federal minimum have set more generous state minimum wages at a higher level, like California and Washington, making work at $7.25 per hour virtually nonexistent.

Read more: Amazon will raise workers' minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum — here's how many people in each state make minimum wage or less

There's been a big push in recent years by labor groups for states and localities to increase their minimum wages. Several states have wages far above the $7.25 federal level.

The Economic Policy Institute's Minimum Wage Tracker monitors the minimum wage across states and cities. According to the EPI, several states and Washington, DC, are set to see increases in the minimum wage throughout 2019, with some increases taking effect on July 1.

Read more: The minimum wage is set to increase in 21 states and DC in 2019 — here's what it will be in every state

In many states, the lowest-paying occupation as measured by average annual wages is in the food-service industry.

The "Fight for $15" movement, largely made up of fast-food and other food-service workers, has been pushing for higher minimum wages and increased pay and better working conditions. The labor-backed movement, which began in 2012, has called for cities, states, and the federal government to raise minimum wages to $15 per hour.

Read more: Here is the lowest-paying job in every US state

The situation at the top of the income distribution looks very different. In 27 states and DC, CEOs were the non-medical occupation with the highest average annual wage.

Doctors tend to be extremely well payed, and various medical professions are the highest-payed job in most states, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment Statistics program. The above map excludes those medical professions.

Read more: This map shows the highest-paying job in every state, excluding doctors

The gender wage gap in America persists and is widespread. Women earn less than men in every state and DC.

The gender wage gap is widest in Louisiana, where the median full-time, year-round female worker earns 68.8% of what her male counterpart earns.

The gap is narrowest in California and Washington, DC, where the typical woman earns 89.1% of what the typical man makes.

Read more: 6 charts that show the glaring gap between men and women's salaries

Younger workers also tend to earn less than older workers.

The above map shows the percent difference in total personal income between the median full-time, year-round worker in the baby boomer generation (born between 1946 and 1964, per the Pew Research Center) and in the millennial generation (born between 1981 and 1996).

In each state and DC, the typical boomer earned more than the typical millennial. The gap was narrowest in Iowa and Nebraska, where boomers earned just 25% more than millennials. It was widest in Alaska, where the typical boomer made 65% more than the typical millennial.

Read more: Here's how much more the typical baby boomer makes than the typical millennial in every US state

Even though college keeps getting more expensive, the wage premium for workers with a degree remains wide across the country.

Median earnings for workers with at least a bachelor's degree are higher than earnings for those without a degree in every state and DC.

The median college-grad earns at least twice as much as the median non-grad in New Jersey, New York, California, and Washington, DC.

Read more: College grads still earn more than workers with no university degree. This map shows the states with the widest salary gaps.

Labor markets across the country have largely recovered from the Great Recession.

The unemployment rate was below 3% in 12 states as of April 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some states still have relatively high unemployment rates, with Alaska topping the list at 6.5%.

That's a big change from the darkest days of the Great Recession, when state unemployment rates regularly topped 10%. Millions of jobs were lost in the years around the 2008 financial crisis, which saw a near-implosion of the global financial system in the wake of a collapse in the US housing market.

While the recession officially lasted from December 2007 through June 2009, the labor market only slowly recovered from the crash over the last decade.

Of course, work has its hazards as well. Fatal occupational injury rates tend to be higher in states with large concentrations of dangerous jobs like forestry and mining.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries tracks workplace fatalities across the country.

Alaska had the highest fatal injury rate, with 10.2 workplace deaths per 100,000 full-time workers.

America runs on a massive $20 trillion economy, and about 2/3 of that economy is consumer spending. The country's biggest companies — massive employers and household brand names alike — have headquarters scattered across the US.

The map shows the largest publicly traded corporation by revenue with its headquarters in every state, according to the Fortune 1000 list.

Read more: The biggest company in almost every US state

The main measure of economic output, gross domestic product (GDP), totals up the value of all goods and services sold in a state. That measure, adjusted by population, is a good indicator of the overall economic health of a state.

GDP per capita has a wide range across the country, from about $39,000 in Mississippi to a far higher $87,000 in New York — and a whopping $203,000 in Washington, DC.

Even though they tend to have stronger job opportunities and higher wages, large metro areas also have a much higher cost of living than smaller cities and rural areas.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes an annual measure of the relative cost of living across the US. In 2017, the San Jose metro area in California was about 31% more expensive than the national average.

New York City's metro area was about 22% more expensive than average.

Read more: The 15 most expensive cities in America

One of the biggest drivers of the cost of living is the price of housing.

The median homeowner with a mortgage in New Jersey pays nearly two and a half times as much for their monthly housing costs as a similar homeowner in West Virginia.

Read more: Here's exactly how much it typically costs to own a home in every US state

Costs for renters also vary from state to state.

The median renter in Hawaii spends $1,573 on housing each month, more than double the $690 a median renter in West Virginia pays.

Another way of looking at the cost of rent is the wage needed to afford a two-bedroom apartment in each state.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition publishes regular reports on the wage needed to afford a two-bedroom apartment in each state. Affordability here means paying no more than 30% of one's income, so the NLIHC takes the fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment and calculates the needed hourly wage for that rent to be 30% of that wage.

As seen elsewhere, more urbanized states are more expensive, and so the wage needed to afford an apartment is higher. Notably, that wage is higher than the minimum wage in each state and DC.

Read more: A minimum-wage worker needs 1.5 jobs just to afford half the rent for a 2-bedroom apartment in most of the US

While the homeless population declined in most states between 2007 and 2017, rising housing costs have contributed to increases in some states, particularly New York.

In January 2019, the number of people staying overnight at homeless shelters in New York City hit a record high of nearly 64,000 people, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.

Read more: How the homeless population in every state has changed over the past 10 years

Another near-daily cost for many Americans is fuel for their cars.

The amount spent per capita on gas is a combination of both gas prices and the amount people drive. Even though gas is relatively expensive in DC and moderately priced in New York, robust public transportation systems in the capital and New York City reduce the number of miles driven in those locales.

Read more: Here's how much the average person spends on gas in every state

Another dreaded expenditure is taxes. While federal taxes apply across the board, states also set their own tax rates, and there's a wide range of how much tax revenue per person each state takes in.

Many of the states with higher per capita tax revenues fall in the traditionally liberal and urban Northeast and West Coast.

Not all the tax revenue listed above comes from individual taxpayers or businesses. Some resources-heavy states, like North Dakota, had very high revenues from severance taxes levied on oil, gas, and other resources that are shipped out of state.

Read more: The best and worst states to live in for taxes

Finally, putting everything together, this map shows how Americans in every state rate their own overall happiness and well-being.

The drafters of the Declaration of Independence made sure to list fundamental rights as those of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Since then, working hard to attain the good life has become a cornerstone of the American Dream. 

The above map shows how Americans in each state rate their own happiness, as measured by a Gallup-Sharecare index of overall well-being.

The index is based on five indicators of a happy, healthy, secure life: a sense of purpose, a supportive social network, financial security, feeling safe and happy in one's community, and being in generally good health.

By Gallup's measure, states like Louisiana and West Virginia were struggling, with the lowest average scores on the well-being index. But on the happier end of the scale, South Dakota was the state with the highest overall average well-being, followed by Vermont.

• If you don't respond to emails, your coworkers may perceive you as lazy or disinterested, argues Frost & Sullivan CEO Richard Moran.
• Psychologists say the way you clean (or don't clean) your inbox actually does say something about your personality. 
• Those who delete quickly and efficiently might be control freaks, while those with 1,000 unread emails may not be as unorganized as you'd think.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When I texted a friend to say I was thinking about writing an article on what your inbox might reveal about your personality, he immediately texted me back:

"I've got three emails in my inbox. What does that say about me?"

"It means you're the worst," I texted back.

By "you're the worst," of course, I meant, "your ability to manage your digital life is everything I aspire to, and I am therefore insanely jealous."

Read more:10 ways to trick your brain into being more productive, according to a neuroscientist

Managing your inbox is an underrated workplace virtue, argues Richard Moran, CEO of consultancy Frost & Sullivan. When employees don't respond, coworkers perceive them as unorganized and lazy.

At that moment, my personal inbox contained 57 unread emails — but if I'm being completely honest, I'd recently spent a weekend whittling it down from close to 1,000.

As Moran suggests, is my inability to keep a tidy inbox something I should worry about? In other words, if it signaled that I suffered from some deep-seated emotional issue or cognitive deficit beyond simple disorganization. Likewise, I wanted to know if inbox heroes like my friend were actually destined to be more successful than the rest of us.

Of course, it's impossible to look at anyone's inbox and say for sure that he or she is a productivity ninja or a psychopath. Your email management strategy depends heavily on your profession, for example, and the standard flow of email in your office.

But my conversations with experts on psychology and technology still yielded some important (and surprising) insights into the connection between email habits and personality traits. Here's what I found.

The filer/deleter sees a message in his inbox and takes action immediately.

This person reads the email, sends a response if it calls for one, and then either deletes it (because it's no longer useful) or archives it in a specific folder. His email count typically hovers around zero.

Larry Rosen, Ph.D., research psychologist and author of "iDisorder: Understanding Our Obsession With Technology and Overcoming its Hold on Us," admits he falls into this category. Being away from his inbox for too long, he tells Business Insider, makes him nervous — and he suspects it has something to do with his brain.

The brain of a filer/deleter is uniquely wired to react negatively when faced with a bunch of unread messages. "A huge, exploding inbox releases stress-based neurotransmitters, like cortisol, which make them anxious," Rosen says. Keeping a tidy inbox quells that anxiety, at least temporarily.

Ultimately, Rosen suggests, your email-management strategy comes down to your desire for control. Whereas some people are fine leaving their house, their workspace, or their inbox a mess, filers/deleters would go crazy. "They need an external way to have control over the world," Rosen says, and sticking to an inbox-management system fulfills their constant need for order.

The saver has few unread emails, but rarely deletes a message after reading.

According to Pamela Rutledge, Ph.D., director of the Media Psychology Research Center, there are a few potential explanations for this kind of saving behavior. One is perfectionism: "Perfectionists save read emails with the idea that they will get to them [eventually]," Rutledge tells Business Insider. "These same people will have a to-do list that is so long it can't possibly be useful" and a bunch of clothes that need to be mended sitting in the back of the closet.

Essentially, saving emails is a way of deluding themselves into thinking they'll get around to addressing them all.

Rutledge also posits that deleting emails feels too risky for savers. "Some people save read emails for the sense of security it gives to believe they could find stuff if they needed to," she says. "Some of us have more tolerance for uncertainty than others."

The ignorer does not read or delete emails. 

I must confess I was heartened to learn more about the mindset of the email ignorer. According to Ron Friedman, Ph.D., author of "The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace," keeping hundreds or thousands of unread emails in your inbox isn't necessarily a problematic behavior. Although Friedman cautions against "drawing broad conclusions into people's personality and psychological state from their email habits," he offers a few possible explanations for this tendency.

On the one hand, he tells Business Insider, leaving emails unread can signify that you're overwhelmed or disengaged. On the other hand, "it can also mean that you recognize that [monitoring and organizing those emails] isn't helping you achieve progress. And that's a sign of intelligence."

Some email ignorers might actually be more organized and productive than everyone else. After all, Friedman says, "email reflects other people's priorities for you, not necessarily important work that requires your immediate attention."

SEE ALSO: 10 ways to trick your brain into being more productive, according to a neuroscientist

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Scientists figured out how to avoid making a bad first impression

Prestigious firms like Citi and Goldman Sachs are notoriously difficult to break into.

Everyone knows you've got to be smart, competent, and ambitious — but what else will help you stand out among a sea of talented applicants... and what will catapult you to success once you're there?

To find out, we tapped the HR chiefs at top finance companies like Bank of America, BlackRock, and Morgan Stanley. These folks are the final gatekeepers when it comes to recruiting, hiring, and granting promotions.

Check out their best advice on nailing the job interview, leading with humility, and what to do when you're stuck in a rut.

Subscribe here to read our feature: POWER BROKERS OF FINANCE: HR chiefs reveal how to get hired at Goldman Sachs, Citi, BlackRock, and other top companies

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Serena Williams and Alexis Ohanian have a combined net worth of $189 million. Here's how they make and spend their money.