The 25 Big Cities Where Your Paycheck Will Go The Furthest

Finding a job with a decent salary is a goal for many people, but maybe even more important is finding a place to live where your entire paycheck won’t be eaten up by housing costs.

An analysis from jobs site Glassdoor looked at the 50 biggest metro areas to see where your paycheck will go the furthest. To do so, the team compared local median salaries to local median home prices to come up with a cost of living ratio for each city. The higher the ratio, the better off you’d be financially.

If you want to get the most bang for your buck, you should consider looking for jobs in the Detroit area, according to Glassdoor, and you won’t have any luck on the West Coast. Here are the other 24 metro areas where your paycheck goes the furthest:

Glassdoor’s analysis doesn’t account for other living costs, such as transportation ― definitely a big one in Detroit, which has the highest rates for car insurance in the country.

“Though there are certainly other financial factors to consider when taking into account total cost of living, this data reinforces that pay typically goes further in mid-sized cities versus big metropolitan areas where there is often tighter competition for housing,” Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor chief economist, said in a statement.  

Read More:

• Here's How Much $100 Is Worth In Each State
• Here's How Much Money You Need To Make To Buy A Home
• Here’s How Much Income You Need To Afford Rent In Every State

Glassdoor determined the typical salary from reports users shared on the website from April 2015 to April 2016 ― at least 1,000 for each metro area. The median home prices come from the Zillow Home Value Index.

Nationwide, the biggest expenditure for families is housing, the Glassdoor report notes. About a third of Americans spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs, according to Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Spending 30 percent or less of your income is the amount typically deemed affordable, meaning a third of the country is struggling to afford housing.

Now you know a few places where it might be less of a struggle.  

How Entrepreneurship Can Literally Save the World

These questions originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.

Answers by Steven Koltai, Author of Peace Through Entrepreneurship and former Senior Advisor for Entrepreneurship to Secretary Hillary Clinton, on Quora:

Q: How can entrepreneurship affect emerging markets?

A: In my book I have a chapter called "A Million Reasons Entrepreneurship is Good for You"; I won't list a million (and so as not to scare you, in fact, there are just thirteen in the book), but some of the top effects are:

1. Jobs: Entrepreneurship is the single best proven way to create jobs.
2. Wide and total access: For any member of society, including those otherwise excluded for many sectors (women and, for example, or those not born to privilege).
3. Connection to other segments of society: Entrepreneurs are the great "bridging class" of society, both internally and across national borders.
4. Respect for the importance of education.
5. Emphasis on good governance: Including regulatory reform, protection intellectual property rights protection.
6. Bringing innovation: Including, by the way, "no tech" and "low tech" to market.

Entrepreneurs are the essential "bridge" between innovation and commercialization. Without entrepreneurs, innovation often stays in the laboratory or the academic journal. These are a few of the key benefits of entrepreneurship promotion.

Peace Through Entrepreneurship | Brookings Institution

...

Q: How can we save the world using entrepreneurship?

A: Of course, there are many issues here, some of which are seemingly intractable: religious and minority hatred, inter-ethnic violence, disputes over resources like land and water, age-old conflicts where the root is often obscured by history. However, my view is that one of the key problems is political unrest and that is what can very often be solved by job creation.

You will note that there are very few countries with low unemployment that suffer high political unrest and violence. Further, many of the world's biggest problems (like climate change) can actually only be solved by entrepreneurs.

Overall, however, the thesis of my book is that if one had to identify the single most important factor in preventing failed societies, violence and despair, it is jobs. And job creation is best achieved through bolstering entrepreneurship.

...

Q: Would more startup culture and activity in third world countries dramatically affect life there?

A: Yes! At least I think so. Not only would it create jobs (the single most important benefit), but it would do all the other things I talk about in my book. It provides a way up for women, girls, and those not born to privilege. It focuses everyone (including the government) on improving education. It drives regulatory reform and fights corruption (high levels of corruption are one of the primary motivations that drive entrepreneurs to leave one country and go to another).

These questions originally appeared on Quora. - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

More questions:​

• International Relations: What role does entrepreneurship play in foreign policy?
• Entrepreneurship: How can entrepreneurship be used to counter violence?
• Hillary Clinton: What kinds of things did you advise Sec. Clinton about during your tenure?

The 'Chilling' Moment This Father Realized Where His Kids' Clothes Come From

This article is part of HuffPost’s “Reclaim” campaign, an ongoing project spotlighting the world’s waste crisis and how we can begin to solve it.

Andrew Morgan never gave a second thought to the hidden cost of the clothes he bought well into adulthood.

The Los Angeles filmmaker and father of four made a habit of often shopping for cheap garments. When the items he bought wore out or fell apart after a year, he bought more. Morgan admits he simply didn’t take into account the possibility that his choices at the cash register might have unseen or unintended consequences.

“I very much grew up as a product of a modern world where I was taught to not think much about where the stuff that came into my life came from,” Morgan told The Huffington Post.

All that changed on the day he walked into a Starbucks store in Culver City, California, in 2013. As Morgan waited in line for his coffee, he glanced down at the newspaper rack. Eight thousand miles away in Bangladesh, a garment factory that produced clothes for Western brands had collapsed, killing more than 1,100 people. The photo on the cover of The New York Times showed two young boys, close in age to Morgan’s own sons, beside a wall plastered with missing persons signs.

“It did something to me instantly,” he said. “It was that chilling feeling where you realize you’ve been a part of something that you’ve never stopped to consider, and there are actually real people on the other end of it.”

Morgan had finished his latest film the day before the tragedy. He was on the lookout for a new project. Haunted by the image of the Rana Plaza building collapse, and appalled at his complicity in a system that had made it possible, he began contacting people around the world to learn more. He wanted to find out what was happening and to understand the stakes. Most of all, he wanted an answer to “why it was a story I had never been confronted with.”

Last year Morgan released “The True Cost,” a documentary about the fashion industry’s disastrous human and environmental consequences, including the staggering waste that results from an industry increasingly bent on producing cheap, low-quality, disposable clothes.

Courtesy of Andrew Morgan

Filmmaker Andrew Morgan in Shenzhen, China, during the production of "The True Cost" in summer 2014.

Fashion is a trillion-dollar global industry and the reasons for its wastefulness are varied and complex. But by any measure, the situation has reached crisis levels.

Each year, 80 billion pieces of clothing are bought around the world. Fifteen percent of fabric is wasted during the manufacturing process, before clothes even make their way to consumers. In the United States, where 97 percent of clothing sold is manufactured overseas, the average person throws away at least 60 pounds of clothing every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, though other estimates put this figure closer to 80 pounds. Eighty-five percent of that ends up in landfills, where chemically processed textiles can contaminate groundwater if not properly contained.

In June, HuffPost launched Reclaim, a campaign to raise awareness around America’s waste problem and highlight potential solutions, beginning with a focus on food waste. Now, we’re adding fashion waste to the mix. In the coming months, we’ll explore the issue from many angles. We’ll spotlight the efforts of upstart designers and established companies as they strive to improve their practices and reporting on what impact, if any, those efforts are having on the global fashion waste crisis. We’ll also share tips on how to reduce clothing waste in our own lives and open up the conversation using the hashtag #ReclaimFashion.”

Critics of the clothing industry’s wastefulness point to “fast fashion,” a retail method of constantly updating a store’s inventory. Fast fashion brands like H&M, Zara and Forever 21 are not only outpacing competitors, but also redefining fashion cycles, as more and more retailers aim to satisfy customers who expect an ever-replenishing selection of cheap, trendy clothes. Elizabeth L. Cline notes in her 2012 book Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion that new shipments arrive daily at Forever 21 and H&M, for example, and 400 new styles debut online every week at Topshop, the London-based retailer with more than 500 locations worldwide.

With so much cheap clothing available, so much more eventually gets thrown away. “The relationship between fast fashion and increasing textile waste is now unmistakable,” according to the International Journal of Consumer Studies.

Still, within the fashion industry, a certain amount of waste has long been accepted as the cost of doing business.

“There’s waste at every stage of the textile supply chain,” Sass Brown, interim dean of the Fashion Institute of Technology’s School of Art and Design in New York, told HuffPost. “And part of the problem is the textile supply chain is a very complex logistical nightmare.”  

We have these faster cycles, we have more disposable fashion. But we don’t have a sense of where all that is going.

As food campaigns like farm-to-table and Slow Food gain traction, public awareness lags when it comes to the origins and consequences of what we wear, activists say. Sure, we know most of our clothes are no longer made in America. Even GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump gets it – sort of. But as Brown put it, “the average consumer has no idea” about the bigger picture: the chemicals in the fabrics we wear on our skin each day, the waste, the pollution, the lives of those actually making our clothes.

If clothing, like cigarettes, came with a warning label alerting us to these effects, Brown said, “I think we’d end fast fashion in an instant.”

Fashion is built on the idea of planned obsolescence. Much of what’s exciting about a piece of clothing being in style is knowing it may someday go out of style. But fast fashion’s critics say the breakneck speed of production and low prices have blinded us to the consequences of our purchases. The other side of the equation, as Morgan’s film shows, is an ugly mess of environmental damage, low-wage work and waste.

Tasha Lewis, an assistant professor of fashion design management at Cornell University, explained how fast fashion brings more clothes into our lives in a way that often leads to future waste.

“We have these faster cycles,” Lewis told HuffPost. “We have more disposable fashion. But we don’t have a sense of where all that is going. And a lot of consumers may tend to throw this clothing away because they don’t think anyone else would want to wear it. Because it just wasn’t made in the best way.”

The deadly Rana Plaza factory collapse, along with other similar tragedies in a short span, served as a wakeup call of sorts, for Morgan and countless others. To the delight and relief of activists who have worked for years to bring more attention to waste, injustice and abuse in the system, these issues are at last getting a more public airing.

In addition to “The True Cost,” which can be viewed on Netflix, there’s “Slowing Down Fast Fashion,” a documentary out later this year from the British musician Alex James. “It’s staggering how little most of us know about what our clothes are made from, where they come from or who made them,” James told WWD.

Fashion waste has found its way into the cultural conversation in other ways. A segment last year on “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver took aim at fast fashion. “Saturday Night Live” has skewered H&M’s low prices and disposability. From Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter to Anne Hathaway’s Instagram account, celebrities have shared tips for socially responsible shopping in a world ruled by fast fashion. Reformed shopaholics who once boasted of their extravagant “hauls” now preach conscious consumption inYouTube videos known as “haulternatives.”

More tangibly, businesses and designers are experimenting with take-back programs and other methods to give clothes a second life. Cities are introducing curbside textile recycling programs that take the time, effort and mystery out of donating used clothing. 

Fast fashion companies themselves are taking steps to reduce waste, with varying degrees of commitment and success, activists say. H&M, for example, touts a range of sustainability efforts, from the waste reduction campaign World Recycle Week to an annual Conscious Exclusive collection that features eco-friendly pieces. “Our ambition is to have a circular approach in how our products are made and used, to utilize only recycled or other sustainably sourced materials and to implement only renewable energy in our value chain,” an H&M spokesperson told HuffPost. “To achieve this goal we know we need innovation.” The spokesperson cited the company’s annual award encouraging participants to reinvent the fashion industry and a recent pledge to develop new recycling technology. Forever 21 and Zara likewise outline their own sustainability policies, but they did not respond to requests for comment.

Cline, the author of Overdressed, told HuffPost she’s now at work on a documentary about clothing waste and other impacts of fast fashion. She also works in the secondhand clothing industry, which has deepened her understanding of America’s clothing waste problem. She is amazed by the number of clothes that are donated, and wonders where they can all possibly go. Meanwhile, fast fashion brands are churning out more, more, more ― “far in excess,” Cline says, “of what could ever be worn to the end of its useful life.”

But she sees at least one reason to be hopeful. The idea of fashion being more sustainable and thoughtful isn’t yet mainstream, she says. “But the conversation is at least happening now.”

ITT Tech Closes: What It Means For Current And Past Students With Loans To Pay

John Baughman was pursuing a career in information technology in the Systems and Cybersecurity program at ITT Technical Institute in Boise, ID. With just six months left to go, Baughman was looking forward to graduating and getting a job.

But on September 6, 2016, after spending more than three years in the program, he was notified that ITT Educational Services was closing all of its ITT Technical Institutes. He and thousands of others across the country will be impacted.

See the full list of for-profit schools that have been shut down.

“It’s definitely a precarious situation to be in,” said Baughman. “I was enlisted in the U.S. Navy prior to attending ITT Tech so I was using the GI Bill. So financially I am not as impacted as other students without that opportunity. But I can never get back what I’ve used from the GI Bill so that is a loss.”

Moving forward, Baughman plans to enroll in a program at another school that accepts ITT Tech credits. However, the program is more intensive and may take more time than Baughman originally planned. The added length may also mean that the rest of his educational costs will not be covered.

“I think students need to act quickly,” said Baughman. “They need to find a new school if they want to mitigate the impact of this fiasco.”

ITT Tech shuts its doors for good

After more than 50 years of operation, ITT Tech will permanently shut down. The closure is the result of increased regulation and sanctions from the U.S. Department of Education.

ITT Tech offered students an alternative to the traditional college track. As a for-profit institution, the school provided specializing training in targeted fields. Last year alone, it had over 45,000 students and $850 million in revenue.

However, in recent years, questions arose about the institution’s credibility, recruitment and accounting methods.

In August, the U.S. Department of Education took action, instituting a ban on ITT Tech. It prevented them from enrolling new students who relied on federal aid to pay for their education with them.

ITT Educational Services, Inc. issued a press release on their website that blamed the government for the closure and the impact on students.

“We believe the government’s action was inappropriate and unconstitutional,” the statement said. “However, with the ITT Technical Institutes ceasing operations, it will now likely rest on other parties to understand these reprehensible actions and to take action to prevent this from happening again.”

Overall impact on ITT Tech students

The closure leaves 35,000 students without an educational path forward.

And with many students and graduates paying student loans from a now non-existent school, many are confused and concerned about how their debt will be handled.

Education Secretary John B. King wrote an open letter to ITT Tech students explaining the concerns the Department of Education had about ITT Tech. It also details its plans to help students and recent graduates moving forward.

“Ultimately, we made a difficult choice to pursue additional oversight in order to protect you, other students, and taxpayers from potentially worse educational and financial damage in the future if ITT was allowed to continue operating without increased oversight and assurances to better serve students,” wrote King.

How ITT Tech students can move forward

Current ITT students, recent graduates, and students who withdrew in the past 120 days will be offered two options by the U.S. Department of Education:

1. Credits transfer: For those who wish to continue their education, the U.S. Department of Education is connecting them with community colleges who will transfer over ITT Tech credits. However, if students opt for this option, they may not be eligible for a closed school discharge on their student loans.
2. Student loan forgiveness: Current or recent students may be eligible to have their federal—not private—student loans discharged as a result of the closure. All federal debt will be forgiven so students have the opportunity to pursue their education or career goals elsewhere. Information on qualifications and how to apply for loan forgiveness will be posted on the Federal Student Aid website when available.

For an ITT Tech alumnus who graduated several years ago, there may be ways to have loans forgiven, too. Many alumni have alleged that ITT Tech recruited them aggressively and misled them about costs and job opportunities.

ITT Tech alumni may be eligible for borrower defense to repayment claims. That’s when federal loans are discharged if the school committed fraud, misrepresented its services or violated applicable laws.

The U.S. Department of Education has also set up a telephone line to answer questions from ITT Tech students. A team is available at 800-4FEDAID, and a series of webinars is planned for the future to help students transition to next steps.

ITT Tech Closes: What It Means for Current and Past Students With Loans to Pay originally appeared on Student Loan Hero

The Battle For The Future Of Transportation Seems Imminent

Pay no attention to the cordial press releases. Google ― sorry, Alphabet ― sure looks like it’s thinking about taking on Uber.

Earlier this week, Google announced that its popular Waze app, which offers crowd-sourced navigation and has 65 million active users, plans to explore a carpooling feature in the Bay Area sometime this fall.

At around the same time, David Drummond ― chief legal officer at Alphabet, the parent company of Google ― announced his resignation from Uber’s board of directors. Drummond’s departure ends a three-year stint with the company that began in 2013, when Google invested $360 million in Uber.

Both companies released statements attesting to their continued collaborative spirit. “I wish David and Alphabet the best, and look forward to continued cooperation and partnership,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said. Drummond said that Google Ventures “remains an enthusiastic investor and Google will continue to partner with Uber.”

Still, it’s hard not to read this week’s events as signs that Google is planning to get into the ride-hailing game in a big way.

Not mentioned in the official company statements: Uber had intentionally shut both Drummond and Google Ventures CEO David Krane out of board meetings for “a significant amount of time” prior, reports The Information.

Also not mentioned: Earlier this month, Uber announced that it had acquired Otto, a self-driving truck company that counts among its co-founders ― who else? ― Anthony Levandowski, one of the minds behind Google’s self-driving research, and Lior Ron, an alumnus of Google Maps.

With the announcement of the new Waze carpooling feature, charmingly called “WazeRider,” it seems things are coming to a head.

“Considering that Waze reportedly has more than 50 million users, Google is arguably more knowledgeable — and has more insight — towards driving habits than any other company on the planet,” Kelley Blue Book analyst Michael Harley told NBC, adding that this is likely just “the tip of this emerging iceberg [in the] rapidly evolving ride-sharing wave.”

From a financial perspective, if Google is indeed planning to storm the ride-hailing world, it’s doing so at an opportune time. Uber announced last week that it’s already lost over $1 billion this year in its unsuccessful battle for Chinese market share, and it needs to clean up its balance sheet ahead of a potential IPO. And rumors persist that Lyft is shopping itself around for a corporate buyer (Lyft denies these.)

Google’s pockets are sufficiently deep to make a grand entrance into this space if it wants. Perhaps even more importantly, it has the detailed mapping data necessary to actually put self-driving cars on the road ― an ultimate goal for Uber, Lyft and many other companies.

“Nominally, you can do autonomous driving without high-definition maps,” Sam Abuelsamid, senior research analyst at Navigant Research, told Popular Mechanics earlier this summer. “But if you get into challenging situations like rainy or snowy conditions, or can’t see the curbs or lane markings, it’s almost like putting a blind person behind the wheel.”

Big Companies Backing Obama's Climate Agenda Also Fund Its Enemies

Many of the corporate giants touting their support for President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda are also backing that agenda’s biggest opponents. 

Companies including DuPont, Google and PepsiCo donated to droves of U.S. lawmakers who refuse to accept the scientific consensus on humanity’s role in climate change, according to a new analysis of public records by Reuters.

The report, published Tuesday, sheds new light on what is often a disconnect between the policies that large companies advocate for and the candidates behind whom they put their money. 

Reuters reviewed donations made during the 2016 election cycle by political action committees of the 30 biggest publicly traded U.S. companies that signed Obama’s “American Business Action on Climate Change Pledge.” The 2015 commitment, signed by 154 companies, served as a public promise by large businesses to push for environmentally friendly policies and to support strong climate action like the historic accord reached in Paris last December.

During the period reviewed by Reuters, two companies ― PepsiCo and the chemical giant DuPont ― doled out half or more of their political spending to the campaigns of more than 130 congressional lawmakers listed as “climate deniers” by Organizing For Action, a Democratic-leaning nonprofit founded by former Obama staffers. 

Google, AT&T, General Electric, Verizon and Mondelez gave more than a third of their political donations to candidates, almost all of them Republicans, on that list, Reuters found. (Verizon owns AOL, The Huffington Post’s parent company.)

A GE spokeswoman said in a statement that the company backs “elected officials based on a wide range of issues, but we have consistently been outspoken about the need to address climate change and have invested over $17 billion in cleaner technology R&D over the last 11 years.”

None of the other companies named above responded immediately to The Huffington Post’s requests for comment.

The Republican Party has long been the more business-friendly of America’s two parties, advocating for tax and employment policies that are favorable to companies’ bottom lines. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, members of the party ― particularly those with backing from the fossil fuel industries, like coal and oil ― have denied the role of human activity in causing global temperatures to rise. Obama has slammed Republicans for being “the only major party that I can think of in the advanced world that effectively denies climate change.” 

That has produced a schism between some big businesses and the party that claims to represent their interests.

Last September, an unlikely coalition of companies ― including Goldman Sachs, Starbucks, Johnson & Johnson and Walmart ― committed to using 100 percent renewable energy within a decade.

Corporate purchases of clean energy skyrocketed last year ahead of the Paris treaty, which was formally ratified last week by China’s parliament. This was particularly true among companies that had never bought renewable power before. Of the more than 20 corporate giants that inked major renewable energy deals last year, 15 of them were first-time buyers, accounting for 67 percent of the market, according to a report by the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute.

Rocky Mountain Institute

First-time corporate purchases of renewable energy for this year already top those in 2011 and 2012 combined.

Still, the tension between certain companies’ political spending and their stated environmental values is sometimes hard to ignore. In June, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) wrote an op-ed lambasting companies for failing to lobby on behalf of climate-friendly policies. He criticized firms like PepsiCo for remaining part of trade associations that fail to acknowledge climate change, or that even deny its risks outright.

“Washington’s dirty secret is that even the American companies that are really good on sustainability put net zero effort into lobbying Congress on climate change,” he wrote in Forbes. “We are far closer to getting something big done on climate in Congress than most people think, but the good guys in the corporate sector have to start showing up.”

But there may be cause for optimism, according to Anne Kelly, a senior program director at the nonprofit Ceres, which pushes investors and companies to take environmental risk and sustainability seriously.

By backing candidates who question the science behind climate change, some companies could gain influence over those candidates and sway them to more climate-friendly positions, Kelly said.

“Our hope is that by funding certain lawmakers whose positions on climate and energy do not match the companies’ positions, they’re actually encouraging those lawmakers to evolve and giving them cover,” Kelly told HuffPost on Tuesday. “We understand that lawmaking is complicated and [companies] may need the support of those people for other issues that may have nothing to do with climate or energy, though that’s not an excuse.”

Agile Innovation for Jobs of The Future

Across countries in various offices many employees are developing more agile outputs in their workplace.

Agile approach in project management entails that every aspect of project can be continuously iterated and revisited during the project lifecycle. With this strategy, the waiting gets shortened and the sequential development is optimized: there is no need to complete every phase of the project before the next phase can begin.

What does it mean to be agile now?

Thanks to Dr Winston Royce who wrote a paper "Managing the Development of Large Software Systems" in 1970 knowledge workers in various industries have started to realize that projects and software could not be developed like automobiles on an assembly line.

The most wide-spread version of Agile, called Scrum focuses on obtaining empirical team feedback, creating incremental innovation in real-time as well as testing products or services with iterations that can be adapted easily.

When you compete globally and when you look at the time as your most valuable resource, your main metric for success becomes to get things done. In other words, you strive to produce tangible and measurable results every single day.

But in order to get things done we need to get down to work. How do we start working?

If we react to every single stimulus we receive, we will never get anything done.

For example, studies have indicated that on average three minutes pass by before an employee gets interrupted or switches to a new task. And usually after interruption it takes us around 23 minutes to get back to the state of flow and performance we had before the interruption.

Gloria Mark, professor at the University of California, Irvine elaborated on the aforementioned research results with the thought, ''We don't have work days - we have work minutes that last all day.''

This may sound grim, but it is a starting point to figure out where we are right now and where we are heading to. So many times per day we interrupt ourselves when we switch tasks and so many times we receive external interruptions as we made ourselves available to others.

Although task switching is unavoidable and everyday emergencies will continue to pop up, the focus is created when we pair similar tasks in advance and we organize priorities around three to five items that we must accomplish in a day. Also, it helps us to identify one of our activities that we will try to do better today than yesterday.

Now that I figured out how to laser focus and mitigate interruptions, how can I delegate non-core activities to others?

Yes, you need to learn how to empower your teammates to make decisions for two very simple reasons. First of all, you cannot be everywhere at the same time and you need to create the organization where people expand their knowledge by widening their comfort zone. On a daily basis we make around 227 decisions according to 2007 Cornell University research.

Therefore, it should be clear which teammate is responsible for the each project task. It would be ludicrous that the leader becomes the bottleneck in communication without whom not a single decision can be made.

Let's look how agile methodology can be implemented in three different industries: textile, law and healthcare.

No longer should management experts and futurists tell us which industries got disrupted. We just need to look at the way how we consumed information before social media boost in 2008 and nowadays that Snapchat targets marketing segments with minute precision and within a minute.

Twenty years ago it was difficult to predict in advance such a massive upheaval in retail, travel and ICT sectors we witness nowadays but in retrospect those incremental changes seem quite reasonable.

In textile industry you may adopt the entrepreneurial, agile approach both as you grow big or decide to stay small.

The towel company Southern textiles has optimized its production process since their technicians handle every single step from customers' perspective. Their system behind manufacturing, dying, printing, processing and packaging led them to produce up to 60,000 towels per day. Brands can also get personalized representation on towels thanks to advice and customized solutions of the company team.

How could you test a small retail business before launching it full upfront?

You should get agile in your approach again. You make an item of clothing by sewing and cutting; you post a photo of your creation on social media and you boost it to a pre-determined audience; then you test the demand and tweak the promotion. Go where the market is and instead of getting into the saturated area, create your own niche on marketplaces such as Etsy, Ebay or Amazon.

The first step in harnessing your fashionista entrepreneurial juices is to decide about the serger machine you will need to make items of clothes or accessories. Go to this serger comparison chart and decide what machine will satisfy your needs at best. Tech tools also become an agile ace up your sleeve because you can figure out how to push demand, decrease waiting times and engage those who may not have previously thought about buying from you.

Move beyond healthcare as we know it.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are on agenda of all committed individuals, institutions and businesses, thus reminding us that fundamental healthcare needs to be provided for all people on our planet by 2030 latest.

If we apply agile principles in our work, we realize that there are several roads to take in meeting this lofty goal. The first one is to educate more medical staff for the higher demand not only because of the SDGs for the impoverished ones who lack basic medical amenities at the moment, but also for the aging population that wants to invest in prosperous and healthy longevity.

In order to coordinate the increased workforce, the new generation of experts with knowledge of medicine and project management needs to be trained. The profession of a healthcare administrator is on the rise since the ones who can supervise the medical staff with their flexibility and reliability get to mentor their colleagues and receive higher salaries.

Finally, medical services on demand and remotely will become the new standard since the virtual and augmented reality are developing at a steady pace. In the world where 2.2 million surgeons, aestheticians, and obstetricians are required for 143 million operations, the impeccably focused and coordinated staff which communicates remotely via VR and AR solutions may bridge the gap between the demand and supply in medicine.

Law services get also more agile and disrupted.

By now we have learned that agile teams which work side by side, especially in software industry, get to produce new products or features and to test them within several weeks.

When it comes to legal offices, the incredibly successful ones focus on the niche service they can provide better than anyone else. They both acknowledge possible glitches which may occur along the process and continue to expand on the expectations of their users.

Legal project management is different than industrial project management because the focus is not on creating uniformed products, but on personalized outcomes for clients.

For example, Mastriani Law Firm has identified eliminating debt for their clients as primary value proposition. Their process of protecting clients' interests focused on the results and for more than 95% of clients they have managed to completely eliminate interest or reduce the principle, without debt consolidation or bankruptcy.

Attorneys that want to adopt Scrum in their work will need to face the music like professionals in other industries. They will get exposed to a steep learning curve as they realize exactly in which segments their firm has not been managed completely efficiently. Likewise they will implement IT tools and new procedures in their own legal field, but with a new perspective.

Because agile project methodology focuses on rapid team feedback and fierce collaboration, it can be implemented in law offices fantastically because high demands of this job may require ''fighting in trenches''. Californian-based attorneys at Mova Law Group have specialized at helping clients experiencing traffic accidents and their value proposition is not to charge any fees upfront unless they win in the court. This strategy takes the pressure off clients and embodies greater trust in the legal team who can focus on their best performance.

It was noticeable in legal companies which became more agile that there was an overlap in responsibilities among staff, so once they re-organized a task list so that one key person was required to deliver results, the efficiency increased significantly.

Sometimes law experts create innovative compensation schemes so as to incentivize their staff or contractors. Air miles may be the perfect gift for driven people fond of travel. That is why The Smith Investigation Agency has decided to award those who engage in activities such as Private Investigator Training course, Investigative Research Services or Reward Milles for Surveillance. Apparently, for those interested to contribute to investigation niche the sky is the limit.

Hopefully, now you feel more at ease to question your work methodology until now and to use processes so as to deliver more successful, efficient projects.

Agile method and Scrum in particular will increase your productivity, but you need to spark creativity in your life occasionally, which is measured by a gut feeling and intuition rather than different charts and bars. From this week onward start question yourself more often not only what you do during your working hours, but also how you do it.

Photo credits: Daily Burn, Stroke Interiors, Setster