Generic drugs can be inexpensive and effective alternatives to their branded counterparts. But according to this devastating Fortune investigation, they can also be useless on a good day and deadly on a bad one — that is, if they were manufactured by Ranbaxy, an Indian drug maker. In this epic piece, Katherine Eban uncovers downright fraud in how generics were tested (or, rather, weren’t) and exposes a corporate culture so steeped in greed and dysfunction that fistfights were known to break out during executive meetings. Although concerned employees tried to alert the FDA and other regulatory agencies to the company’s behavior, progress in stopping the distribution of potentially dangerous medications crawled along at a turtle’s pace. Sure, the company was eventually both punished and sold (it’s now one of the fastest-growing pharmaceutical businesses in the U.S.). But when FDA inspectors were asked whether they would be comfortable taking a Ranbaxy-made drug, such as a generic cholesterol medication, “like eight out of eight” said no.
Management Flaws at I.R.S. Cited in Tea Party Scrutiny The New York Times
OK, you know I have to say it: Of course this scandal boils down to a massive management problem. We could argue for days about the political implications of the recent Inspector General’s report, which investigates whether an arm of the I.R.S. was inappropriately targeting groups with “Tea Party” in their names, delaying their paperwork for tax-exempt status in the process. And there’s still a lot that we don’t yet know. But amidst this chaos is a story about who was — and wasn’t — making decisions and communicating them in the Cincinnati field office. The gist is that decisions about applications were being made in a vacuum that lacked leadership, and movement on the applications was further delayed by massive miscommunication between units. And while many of the recommendations by the IG’s office could prove useful, some merely encourage additional training. Could more training really help fix the dynamics of an office that former employees claim was “overworked, understaffed, and lacked a layer of experienced middle managers”? The head of the tax-exempt division is likely technically correct when she blamed lower-level workers, but the absence of leaders all around may, in fact, be the more important story.
Language Clues Tell You Who’s Lying, If You Know What to Listen For Working Knowledge
The conventional wisdom is that you can spot a liar by watching body language and eye movements, but researchers have discovered that liars also give themselves away through the language they use. Liars swear more, on average, probably because the cognitive energy required for telling an untruth makes it harder for them to rein in profanities, say Lyn M. Van Swol of the University of Wisconsin, Deepak Malhotra of Harvard Business School, and Wisconsin doctoral candidate Michael T. Braun. Liars also tend to favor more-complex sentences and third-person pronouns (“they,” “it,” “one”), maybe as a way of distancing themselves from the icky lie. And they’re wordy, unless of course they’re lying by omission, in which case they can be quite tight-lipped. —Andy O’Connell
Should You Get Paid for Instagramming?
The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class Salon
This in-depth interview with computer scientist turned digital critic Jaron Lanier, who has a new book out, is worth reading in its entirety. One of his main arguments is that people should receive micropayments in exchange for data they provide via the likes of Facebook, and he uses two photography companies — Kodak and Instagram — to explain why this is necessary in our new economy. In the predigital era, 140,000 Kodak employees physically manufactured cameras in exchange for wages and benefits and thus earned the protection of a social safety net. With Instagram, just as much, if not more, effort goes into supporting the business — millions of people contribute their photos and data — but only 13 people are actually employed by Instagram and receive its concrete benefits. In other words, there’s as much human activity involved in taking Instagram photos, but with a tiny fraction of economic activity occurring among an even tinier fraction of people. “We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th century that even if jobs were pleasant, people could still get paid for them. Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment,” says Lanier. “And so to my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning that bargain that worked so well?” (In other news, Evgeny Morozov disagrees.)
Will Online Courses Really Improve the Productivity of Higher Ed? New Yorker
In an issue devoted to innovation, The New Yorker explores what’s probably going to be the biggest disrupter of higher education since the invention of the community college: online courses. Nathan Heller finds professors and grad students at elite universities taking a warily optimistic view of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Sure, the experience of sitting through an online course isn’t the same as being on a leafy campus amid brilliant, engaged students, but the vast majority of college enrollees miss out on the ivied experience anyway, slogging through courses taught by bored professors on campuses where students are there to get a diploma and get out. MOOCs would be an improvement over that. In these early days it’s unclear how companies such as Coursera and Udacity, which package courses and offer them to students and other schools, are going to make a profit. The thinking is that somehow they’ll find a way to make money by doing something that traditional universities haven’t been able to do for a century or more: Increase the productivity of professors. —Andy O’Connell
First Impressions
The Huggers Among Us: A Guide to Greetings (The Atlantic Wire)
Design Ascends to the Corporate Heights (Wired)
How to Dress for Success at the Defense Intelligence Agency (U.S. News and World Report)