There are only a few people who have worked directly under Steve Jobs, and Allison Johnson is one of those people. The former head of marketing at Apple, Johnson oversaw the launch of the company’s hallmark products like the iPhone and its famous campaigns like “Mac vs. PC” and “There’s an app for that.”
In this interview with Behance’s Scott Belsky, Johnson shares stories from her time at Apple, emphasizes authenticity in business, and reveals how we can find a balance between launching a polished product (like Apple) versus shipping fast for feedback (like Google).

Drummer Clayton Cameron breaks down different genres of music—from R&B to Latin to pop—by their beats. A talk that proves hip hop and jazz aren’t cooler than math—they simply rely on it.

The most dominant companies, no matter the industry, are digital-first. Think Netflix over Blockbuster or iTunes over Tower Records. So how can we take advantage of this trend in our work and with our own projects?

Aaron Dignan walks us through how we can have the right mindset to thrive in the future: We need a purpose, a process to support it, the right people, and (most importantly) these need to combine to make products that serve a community larger than any employee or organization. Dignan shows off plenty of examples and tells us what to adopt for our own work. “When we look at the companies that are really dominating, this is what they are doing.”

Privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian sees the landscape of government surveillance shifting beneath our feet, as an industry grows to support monitoring programs. Through private companies, he says, governments are buying technology with the capacity to break into computers, steal documents and monitor activity — without detection. This TED Fellow gives an unsettling look at what’s to come.

What does the future of business look like? In an informative talk, Philip Evans gives a quick primer on two long-standing theories in strategy — and explains why he thinks they are essentially invalid. (Listen for the absorbing tale of a surveillance program named Nora which was so useful it prompted competing Las Vegas casinos to cooperate with one another.)

In this high-energy talk, Back to the Roots co-founder Nikhil Arora shares his unconventional methods for launching his company from a college experiment to a fully functioning social enterprise. Arora shares how candid transparency (and pictures of ugly fungi) helped his company’s mushroom growing kits become a hit among children and on Facebook. For each kit sold, Back to the Roots also donates one to an elementary school. The good will and social media generated sold more kits, which resulted in more donations.

“Google made headlines by saying they would make money without doing evil,” he says. “That seems like a cop out. In business today, you can make money and do good.”