Corner Office: Brad Garlinghouse of YouSendIt, on Clear Leadership

Q. You joined YouSendIt with a mandate to turn it around. What changes did you make in terms of culture?

A. I think any great culture is born out of transparent, authentic communication. You almost can’t overcommunicate. You can try, and you might think, “Oh, do I really have to say this again?” And the answer is yes. One thing I started doing was to send out every Sunday night an e-mail to the whole company. The e-mails aren’t particularly structured, and they might be on all kinds of topics, like what’s really going on with our monthly results.

We also started a free Monday lunch to bring everybody together to share a meal. The first Monday lunch we did, some people got their food and went back to their desk. So I started to talk at these Monday lunches for a few minutes and then just take questions. I set the tone that all questions are fair game. The third thing I did was require everyone to do what we call a “fly along” with our customer support desk for several hours so they could really understand our customers.

Q. How did you develop these ideas about culture?

A. We are all products of our experiences, good and bad. Sometimes you learn as much from the negative experiences as you do from the positive. I’ve had the good fortune of working for a number of profound leaders. But I’ve also been in companies where the communication increasingly became noncommunication — where the C.E.O. would do an all-hands meeting, and at the end of it I would be wondering: “What did they just say? I don’t even know what that meant.”

I was most engaged with leaders who made it clear to me what we were trying to do, and where we were trying to go. I became invested in that. With people who didn’t do that, you feel a little bit alienated because you don’t internalize what they’re saying.

Q. Other steps you took?

A.We rewrote the company values. So our three values are: be in, be real, and be bold.

Q. Can you unpack those for me?

A. “Be in” is all about passion. Life is short. There are so many interesting things we can do in our life, and I feel like if someone is just kind of showing up, it’s not worth it for them or for us.

The second value, “be real,” is really about being authentic in our communication. I have seen different cultures in my career that I felt had atrophied and needed revitalization, and they were the ones where you just didn’t feel like people were being real in terms of their communication. You’d sit in a meeting and work through something and think you got somewhere, and then you walk out of the room and someone’s putting the parking brake on and you don’t even know they’re doing that.

And the last one’s about being bold. As some companies grow and develop, that instinct is almost beaten out of the system. To me, if we’re not failing a little bit, we’re not trying hard enough. I think great cultures encourage risk and are tolerant of failure. If you don’t do that, you’re going to end up with a culture that is stagnant and not thinking about the next generation of products and experiences.

Q. How do you hire?

A. I think there’s a certain amount of serendipity that is healthy to acknowledge. You spend a few hours with someone, and no matter how deep you go, you don’t know what it’s going to be like to work 60, 70, 80 hours a week with them.

The thing I look for more than anything else is passion. If someone brings passion to their work, it compensates for myriad potential weaknesses, and that passion manifests itself in hard work and commitment. It manifests itself in authentic communication. For really passionate people, it’s hard for them to keep their opinions to themselves because they feel so strongly about something.

Q. So what questions do you ask?

A. One of the questions I love to ask is, “How would your friends describe you in college?” And then they’ll say a few words, and then I’ll say, “All right, so after you graduated from college and started working, how would your first group of colleagues describe you?” I think you get more real answers that way than if you say, “Hey, describe yourself.” You definitely see some evolution as people mature.

For another question, I’ll start by saying that any successful leader, if they have been bold, has had some detractors over their career. And I will tell them a story about someone who was a detractor of mine. And then I will ask, “If you’ve had a detractor in your career, and I don’t need their name, who was that person? Why were they a detractor? What was it about that relationship that didn’t work?” It’s just interesting to see how they talk about it. If somebody tries to pretend they haven’t had one, that’s actually a warning sign. It’s also a warning sign if they say, “Oh, I’ve had 10.”

Q. What other qualities are you looking for?

A. Humility is certainly something I look for. I try to find someone who is self-aware and confident, but not to a fault. So one of the things I like to ask about that is: “Have you ever had to fire someone? How did you fire them? What was that experience like?” And you get from that a sense of their empathy. I think when people are empathetic, they’re less likely to be high on the hubris scale.

Q.What career advice do you offer people?

A. My dad told me at a relatively early age about this idea of “take the professor, not the class,” meaning just seek out the best professors, whatever they’re teaching. And the idea of taking the professor, not the class, applies to your professional life, too.

I think one of the mistakes people make is to go and work for the “hot” company. By the way, I’m guilty of this at various times in my career. But if you go work for the hot company, you could end up working for a 26-year-old who’s never managed anybody and is not thinking about how to make you a better employee, better manager and better person. But if you have a fabulous mentor or an engaging leader, that experience can help you launch a career.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

DealBook: Kodak Spinoffs Clear the Path for Emergence From Bankruptcy

Yuri Gripas/ReutersAntonio Perez, Kodak chief, said its imaging units would be spun off to a pension plan.

Kodak said on Monday that it would spin off its document and personal imaging units to its British pension plan for $650 million in cash and noncash considerations, a move that paves the way for Kodak’s exit from bankruptcy protection.

Kodak had been seeking to sell off the two imaging operations. Two weeks ago, Eastman Kodak announced a plan to sell its document imaging business to Brother of Japan for $210 million, with the provision that it could revisit the deal if it could sell both units together.

Now the bankrupt film pioneer has struck an even more advantageous deal after a protracted sales process.

More important, the pension plan will settle its bankruptcy claim of $2.8 billion, paving the way for the company to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States. On Tuesday, Kodak plans to file a draft plan to emerge from bankruptcy.

“In one comprehensive transaction, Kodak will realize its previously announced intention to divest its personalized imaging and document imaging businesses and settle its largest legacy liability,” Antonio M. Perez, Kodak’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement.

The company had filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2012 and has been selling off various assets since then. In December, Kodak reached an agreement to sell 1,100 digital imaging patents to a consortium of technology companies for $525 million, far less than expected. But as part of that sale, Kodak retained a license to use the digital imaging portfolio patents in its future businesses, and for those businesses that it is selling.

Kodak is being advised by Lazard and the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

Brains as Clear as Jell-O for Scientists to Explore

Scientists at Stanford University reported on Wednesday that they have made a whole mouse brain, and part of a human brain, transparent so that networks of neurons that receive and send information can be highlighted in stunning color and viewed in all their three-dimensional complexity without slicing up the organ.

Even more important, experts say, is that unlike earlier methods for making the tissue of brains and other organs transparent, the new process, called Clarity by its inventors, preserves the biochemistry of the brain so well that researchers can test it over and over again with chemicals that highlight specific structures and provide clues to past activity. The researchers say this process may help uncover the physical underpinnings of devastating mental disorders like schizophrenia, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder and others.

The work, reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature, is not part of the Obama administration’s recently announced initiative to probe the secrets of the brain, although the senior author on the paper, Dr. Karl Deisseroth at Stanford, was one of those involved in creating the initiative and is involved in planning its future.

Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which provided some of the financing for the research, described the new work as helping to build an anatomical “foundation” for the Obama initiative, which is meant to look at activity in the brain.

Dr. Insel added that the technique works in a human brain that has been in formalin, a preservative, for years, which means that long-saved human brains may be studied. “Frankly,” he said, “that is spectacular.”

Kwanghun Chung, the primary author on the paper, and Dr. Deisseroth worked with a team at Stanford for years to get the technique right. Dr. Deisseroth, known for developing another powerful technique, called optogenetics, that allows the use of light to switch specific brain activity on and off, said Clarity could have a broader impact than optogenetics. “It’s really one of the most exciting things we’ve done,” he said, with potential applications in neuroscience and beyond.

“I think it’s great,” said Dr. Clay Reid, a senior investigator at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, who was not involved in the work. “One of the very difficult challenges has been making the brain, which is opaque, clear enough so that you can see deep into it.” This technique, he said, makes brains “extremely clear” and preserves most of the brain chemistry. “It has it all,” he said.

In the mid-2000s, a team led by Dr. Jeff Lichtman at Harvard developed a process called Brainbow to breed mice that are genetically altered to make their brain neurons fluoresce in many different colors. The new technique would allow whole brains of those mice with their rainbow neurons to be preserved and studied.

“I’m quite excited to try this,” Dr. Lichtman said.

There are several ways to make tissue transparent. The key to the new technique is a substance called a hydrogel, a material that is mostly water held together by larger molecules to give it some solidity.

Dr. Chung said the hydrogel forms a kind of mesh that permeates the brain and connects to most of the molecules, but not to the lipids, which include fats and some other substances. The brain is then put in a soapy solution and an electric current is applied, which drives the solution through the brain, washing out the lipids. Once they are out, the brain is transparent, and its biochemistry is intact, so it may be infused with chemicals, like antibody molecules that also have a dye attached, that show fine details of its structure and previous activity.

Techniques like this, said Dr. Insel, “should give us a much more precise picture of what is happening in the brains of people who have schizophrenia, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder and depression.”

The tricky part was getting the right combination of temperature, electricity and solution. And it was very tricky indeed, said Dr. Chung. Over the course of years spent trying to make it work, he said, “I burned and melted more than a hundred brains.”

But with the paper’s publication, the recipe is now available to anyone who wants to use it, and, he said, “I think it will be relatively easy.”

The technique has its limits, of course. Dr. Chung said more work needed to be done before it could be applied to a whole human brain, because a human’s brain is so much larger than a mouse’s, and has more lipids.

Dr. Chung said he planned to start his own lab soon and to work on refining the technology. But he pointed out that it is already known that it works on all tissue, not just brains, and can be used to look for structures other than nerve cells. On his laboratory bench, he said, “I have a transparent liver, lungs and heart.”

Dr. Reid agreed that Clarity had applications in many fields. “It could permeate biology,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 10, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated Dr. Clay Reid’s work with Dr. Jeff Lichtman of Harvard. Dr. Reid was involved in Dr. Lichtman’s Connectome Project, not on the Brainbow team.

“It’s Clear That The [Paranormal Activity] Franchise Has Jumped The Shark”

Friday, Oct 19, 2012 3:30PM

Written by Cyrus Langhorne

Paranormal Activity 4Kathryn Newton, Matt ShivelyOctober 18, 2012Read More

With Halloween less than two weeks away, eager horror moviegoers aching to get in a few early scares need look no further than Paranormal Activity 4 arriving in theaters today.

Fans of the popular horror flick franchise will be greeted with both familiar storytelling and connections to the fourth edition's predecessors.

The newest film in the found footage horror series, "Paranormal Activity 4" continues that tradition, picking up in story terms where the second film left off (the third movie was set in the 1980s and hinted at the origins of the demon bedeviling an unfortunate family). A brief recap of that film's finale -- in which the possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) disappeared with her infant nephew, Hunter -- opens the proceedings before moving forward five years to introduce a family living in a Nevada suburb: disconnected dad (Stephen Dunham), harried mom (Alexondra Lee), young son Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp), gamin teenage daughter Alex (Kathryn Newton) and her boyfriend (Matt Shively). After a creepy neighbor boy named Robbie (Brady Allen) comes to stay with them for a few days, weird things begin to happen around the house. When Katie suddenly appears it implies that Robbie is, in fact, Hunter, though it seems she has some dark designs on young Wyatt. (Chicago Tribune)

Once again, filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman helm the latest installment.

Mockumentary filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman (Catfish) know a thing or two about misdirecting an audience, as they proved again with 2011's Paranormal Activity 3. Together with returning screenwriter Christopher Landon, this time around they seem short on new ideas, however, relying more on the series' reputation for low-budget thrills to attract audiences. Regardless, by now Paramount's franchise is a brand unto itself, and it's unlikely that anything will stop the first few waves of fans boosting Paranormal Activity 4 up the chart until at least through Halloween. (The Hollywood Reporter)

Most of the footage is caught with modern-day technology including laptops and Skype.

Eschewing a continuation of the open ending of the previous 1988-set prequel, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 recaps the conclusion of 2, in which the possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) was last seen spiriting away her infant nephew Hunter circa 2006. Five years later, an odd little boy is seen watching in the background as teenager Alex (Kathryn Newton) videotapes her little brother Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp) at his soccer game. To effect these movies' signature found-footage style, Alex, like all PARANORMAL protagonists, has a penchant for running her camcorder at all hours of the day, and her Skype chats with boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) are accidentally--he says--recorded on his own laptop. When weird stuff starts happening around Alex's house, Ben is able to set up the computers in every room to send nonstop video feeds back to his machine, where the images can be recorded and perused later. (Fangoria)

Despite some scary adventure, various movie critics found numerous faults with the flick.

Eschewing a continuation of the open ending of the previous 1988-set prequel, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 4 recaps the conclusion of 2, in which the possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) was last seen spiriting away her infant nephew Hunter circa 2006. Five years later, an odd little boy is seen watching in the background as teenager Alex (Kathryn Newton) videotapes her little brother Wyatt (Aiden Lovekamp) at his soccer game. To effect these movies' signature found-footage style, Alex, like all PARANORMAL protagonists, has a penchant for running her camcorder at all hours of the day, and her Skype chats with boyfriend Ben (Matt Shively) are accidentally--he says--recorded on his own laptop. When weird stuff starts happening around Alex's house, Ben is able to set up the computers in every room to send nonstop video feeds back to his machine, where the images can be recorded and perused later. (Hollywood)

As a fan of the Paranormal Activity films, I've ignored the creeping suspicion in the back of my mind that the series has been in a slow creative decline since the first movie, but as solid an example of the found footage style as the latest entry is, it's clear that the franchise has jumped the shark. By the fourth time around, the scares are just not as potent as they once were, in part because the element of surprise has vanished. Audiences have become hip to the series' game, scanning the room in every scene in anticipation of an object moving or a figure materializing, and when it does, it's hardly shocking. (About)