Author: Andrea Ovans

Among the select few to address the 6,000 faithful with tales from the leading edge of data analytics at this June’s Hadoop conference will be Netflix, Yahoo — and Sears. For three years, AdAge reports, Sears has been using Hadoop to get a handle on the 100 million customers in its databases. And apparently the 130-year-old retailer has become so adept that it’s stopped giving away advice over the phone and started selling data management services under the B2B brand MetaScale.

MetaScale’s profile is so high among the Hadoop community that Sears now declines to give out the names of the people who work there since a couple of them were poached by competitors. But with a $1.7 billion drop in revenue leading to losses of $930 million (after 2011’s $1.1 billion revenue drop resulted in a $3.1 billion loss), it’s hard not to wonder when those data-analytic smarts will turn into business riches.

GAIN WITHOUT PAIN

Should Your Team Have a Good Fight? (Occupational Digest)

Do teams benefit from conflict? Clever research from Bret Bradley and a trio of colleagues at Pepperdine and the Universities of Oklahoma and Iowa suggests the answer is “it depends.” That is, it depends on how emotionally stable and how open to new experience team members are. The researchers correlated the personalities of undergraduate business students working in 117 teams on a 13-week group project with the quality of the output each team produced. They found, as one might expect, that the teams with the most mature and open-minded members used conflict most productively. But teams with the least stable and least open-minded students who displayed the least amount of conflict were equally effective.

I’LL SETTLE FOR THE PARKING SPACE

Self-Driving Cars Are Further Away Than You’d Think (Technology Review)

Drive up to the Audi demonstration garage in Ingolstadt, Germany, get out of the car, and watch as it drives into the facility and finds its own space. Then, tap your smartphone and be amazed as the car smoothly drives itself back to you at the entrance. So cool. But don’t expect to see those cars driving themselves down the road anytime soon, says Audi engineer Annie Lien. “People are surprised when I tell them that you’re not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.” As dramatic as these proofs of concept are, they are a long way from viable businesses. For that, she says, the technologies need to become far cheaper, more compact, more intuitive, easier to use, more secure — and far more reliable.

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Contrarian Corner

How Chapter 11 Saved the Economy (HBS Working Knowledge)

Mexico Makes It (Foreign Affairs)

The Pleasures and Perils of the Open-Plan Office (BBC NEWS)

Time after time, three issues continue to bedevil global flood relief efforts — lack of advance preparation, lack of attention to floods too small to grab the international spotlight, and lack of economic recovery efforts after the waters abate. Here in the Guardian, two business professors offer a practical solution to all three problems using developing nations’ supply chains.

The consumer-goods supply chain typically moves from large Western or indigenous manufacturers to distributors to wholesalers to family-owned shops and finally to micro-retailers selling from carts or by the roadside. The professors suggest that social enterprises can short-circuit the process if before floods occur, they work with local governments to earmark spaces — parks, playgrounds, etc. — for temporary warehouse sites. When disaster strikes, the NGO would set up pop-up warehouses in those locations to channel relief directly from the manufacturers to the myriad micro sites. More goods get where they need to go and micro sellers remain in business, ready to resume normal operations when the flood is over and the NGOs fold up their tents.

HAVE I GOT A DEAL FOR YOU

Should You Buy That Used Start-Up? (BCG)

Once a private equity firm is ready to cash out of a start-up, it’s been thought, not much more could be done to increase its value before going public. But that’s not what HHL Leipzig management school and BCG found when they looked at 225 start-ups that PE firms bought from one another between 2006 and 2012. While on average the initial PE firm increased a start-up’s value by 20%, the second firm found plenty of room for improvement, increasing the average value another 24%. Both the primary and secondary buyers added value in the same way — increasing EBITDA through operational improvements (an average of 14% in the first round, 13% the next) and growing revenue by increasing compound annual sales (both by 10%).

THE $86 BAKED BEAN

Heinz Goes Upscale (Dezeen)

Heinz is partnering with designers Bompas & Parr to create a “flavour experience” for its new lines of baked beans. Each of the five new varieties — cheddar cheese, curry, barbecue, fiery chili, and garlic and herbs — gets its own handmade bowl plus a spoon embedded with an MP3 player to provide a “flavour-enhancing” soundtrack as you chew. (Think Punjabi bhangra for the curry, Latin samba for the chili.) The limited edition boxed sets will sell for £57 at Fortum & Mason. As HBR blogger Bill Taylor has noted, there’s value in appealing to all five of your customers’ senses. But I’ll admit I did check the date here to see if this was an April Fool’s joke. — Alison Beard

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Tech Talk

Ahoy, Hello, and How Digital Devices Change the Rules of Etiquette (Smithsonian)

Here’s Where They Make China’s Cheap Android Smartphones (Technology Review)

Why Don’t We Have Food Replacement Pills? (Popular Mechanics)

Will Holllywood figure out how to use the Internet to generate the big bucks? You have to go way, way down this Fast Company article to find much revenue to speak of. As comedians like Ben Stiller, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Cera start production companies to develop and sell original content to digital distributors like Yahoo!, Hulu, and Netflix, they’re finding (as any publisher could tell you) that buyers in this new medium just don’t pay that much.

Stiller’s Red Hour Digital is making money, but so far almost all of it is coming from product placements. Unless he sells his equity stake to some digital behemoth, Stiller will hardly get anything like the $20 million he commands for a single movie anytime soon. And when he does, it’ll likely come the old-fashioned way, as Paramount’s InSurge division, which has a first-look deal with Red Hour, plans to sell the first three seasons of Stiller’s on-line series Burning Love to international TV markets.

A LIGHT IN THE FOREST

Good News from the Sustainability Front (Foreign Affairs)

Some 153,000 square miles of the Brazilian Amazon has disappeared since 1988 — an area larger than Germany. But deforestation rates have slowed dramatically, in part because of a controversial international climate-change prevention strategy known as REDD, short for “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation.” REDD puts a monetary value on the carbon stored in forests and then has developed countries offset their emissions by paying developing countries to protect their own forests. Preliminary results suggest the REDD model can be a cheap way to produce quick results. Brazil has used the funds (well, at least some of them) to enforce land-use regulations, create new protected areas, and maintain the rule of law — reducing its rate of deforestation by 83% since 2004.

ARE THESE THE ONLY CHOICES

More Bang for the Health Insurance Buck (Stanford)

A new study from a trio of Stanford researchers argues that people with chronic illnesses should be charged more than healthier people for health insurance. Why? To steer them toward the less-expensive HMO option. People with chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease, the study found, were the least likely to opt for HMOs, in the belief that what they needed was control over their choice of doctors. But they’re the people most likely to benefit from HMOs, which provide the kind of coordinated care their conditions require. Not only does that care cost less, it produces better results since HMO doctors are less likely to work at cross-purposes and more likely to provide a well-thought-out course of treatment.

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Inquiring Minds

How Millennial Are You? Take the Quiz (Pew Research Center)

Who Really Invented the Smiley Face? (Smithsonian)

The Case Against Reviving Extinct Species (National Geographic)

A San Francisco start-up called Gild has created a program that evaluates and scores software developers on the work they’ve publicly released on the web, Technology Review reports. It’s happening unbeknownst to the programmers and without their permission. This is a boon to recruiters, clearly, who can see if top-tier degrees and LinkedIn recommendations jibe with this Guild score. Or, they can perhaps find some résumé-less college student who’s been building apps since she was 16.

Of course, how useful the score is depends on how accurately the algorithm works and how easily it can be gamed. That question looms large as Gild CEO Sheeroy Dasai envisions developing similar tests for other professionals whose work appears online — like, say, a teacher’s online courses, a scientist’s research, or a journalist’s articles.

WHATEVER

How Moods Shape Your Moral Reasoning (Scientific American)

Would you throw a man under a bus to keep it from mowing down five pedestrians directly in its path? Clever research sheds new light on how mood affects your response to this classic moral conundrum. Subjects induced through music into a good or a bad mood and confronted with this Hobson’s choice were asked either “Do you think it is appropriate to be active and push the man?” or “Do you think it is appropriate to be passive and not push the man?” Turns out the mellow people tended to answer “yes” while the sour people tended to answer “no,” no matter which option was presented. In other words, the researchers suggest, your mood makes you feel better or worse about the choice at hand, rather than affecting your view of what choice to make.

WORTH THE BIG BUCKS

Should Solar Roads Be the Future of Transportation? (Fast Company)

Rather than driverless cars, Glen Hiemstra suggests, we should be paying more attention to the roads themselves, if we want to think expansively about the future of transportation. It’s not that hard to seal solar cells between layers of glass and construct a roadway that can turn sunlight into power while it’s just sitting there all day long. The tricky part is developing a glass clear enough to allow sunlight, opaque enough not to create too much glare, and durable enough to last for years. But the payoff would be enormous: Operating at just 15% efficiency, such a U.S. road system would generate all the electricity the whole world currently uses. Companies like Solar Roadways are on the case; the Idaho-based startup plans plan to test its first road panels in a parking lot this spring.

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Unintended Consequences

Is the Running Industry Slowing Marathoners Down? (The Guardian)
America’s Dirtiest Air Is Not Where You Think (Smithsonian)

Why Google Is Wooing Small Businesses in India (Business Today)

In 2010, the U.N. estimates, some $1.5 trillion in bribes wiped out more than 5% of global GDP. And by 2015, this Foreign Affairs article predicts, the total value of goods lost to counterfeiting and piracy will balloon from 2008’s $650 billion to $1.77 trillion.

But businesses could fight back in the same way they’ve promoted fair labor practices worldwide — that is, by adding anti-corruption policies to their generalized standards of conduct (as Toshiba has already done); detailing behavior expectations for employees, contractors, and other value-chain partners; and instituting management systems covering training, proper contracting practices, supplier due diligence, security strategies, and the like. These would all be geared to answering how-do-you-know questions like “How do you know that one of your suppliers is not illegally obtaining intellectual property that’s ending up in your product?”

The return on this investment could be very high: The U.S International Trade Commission estimates that if protection for intellectual property rights in China (the worst offender) could be made as strong as they are in the States, the U.S. economy could add as many as 2.1 million full-time workers, $21 billion in exports, and $88 billion in sales to U.S. majority-owned affiliate firms in China.

ALL GLOBALIZATION IS LOCAL

Outsourcing Gets Personal (Harpers)

In 1996, then-Honeywell chairman Larry Bossidy held up an Autolite spark plug to argue for passage of NAFTA. When the 15% tariffs came down between Mexico and the U.S., he said, orders would pour into the Fostoria, Ohio, factory that made the spark plug, swelling the ranks of its 1,100+ employees. In reality, all but 86 jobs were shipped to Mexico, turning Fostoria into a ghost town, as a shrinking tax base led to a failing school system and a sea of for-sale signs. You can see what happened in this 10-minute film that eloquently chronicles the human side of globalization.

WHAT GOES AROUND

A Succession System Geared Toward Growth (The Globe and Mail)

B+H grew from two employees to one of the largest privately held architecture firms in Canada through a clever succession system, which its far-sighted founders put in place in 1980. When new principals buy into the firm, their retirement date is set. When they reach it, the only way they can get their capital back is to sell their ownership units to younger principals. If revenues stay flat, and they can’t bring in new blood, there’ll be no one to sell to. This has spurred principals to find, nurture, and promote the new talent that has grown the business, expanding from 10 principals four years ago to 32, supported by a robust pool of bright planners and designers who can see opportunities to move up.

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Worth a Thousand Words for Sure

Wealth Distribution in America in One Mind-Blowing Video (Politizane)

The First Org Chart (McKinsey Quarterly)

Using the New Sim City, Six Urban Planners Build the Perfect City (Sort of) (Fast Company)

For years, environmental activists had been making little headway in their efforts to stop Asia Pulp and Paper from destroying the habitats of the orangutans and Sumatran tigers, reports the Christian Science Monitor. But that all changed when they switched tack and targeted, not the company itself but its customers. Kick-starting the effort in truly retro fashion, they hired actors to dress up as Minnie and Mickey Mouse, lock themselves to Walt Disney’s headquarters building, and fly a banner reading “Disney is destroying Indonesia’s rain forests.”

Eighteen months of negotiations later, Disney issued new standards requiring that all paper the company, its suppliers, and its licensees use be sustainably sourced — a policy so far-reaching it had to be translated into 35 languages. Dozens of major paper-consuming firms followed suit, effectively freezing APP out of much of the European and U.S. markets. Suddenly APP announced it, too, is going green. “I think this will stand as one of the biggest market-based campaign successes that we’ve seen in a long time,” says Laurel Sutherlin of the Rainforest Action Network. “We’re still a little bit stunned.”

YOU, TOO, CAN BE AN ACTION FIGURE

The Manufacturing Disruption Arrives (Technology Review)

Check out the video of this gadget that looks like a colored-glue gun and decide for yourself if it’s the gateway to the 3-D manufacturing revolution. It certainly has the hallmarks—not that good (yet) but cheap and really easy to use. For my money, though, the real disruption is coming from start-up Mancti, which, as NPR demonstrates here, has developed software that turns a Kinect video game controller and $2,000 scanner into a crazy-cheap personal 3-D copy machine. With it, you can scan and reproduce real objects — like, say, your favorite Star Wars figurine — in pretty much the same way you can now replicate music, magazine articles, and any other stream of digits. Will copyright law stand up to the coming onslaught? Stay tuned.

COMIN’ BACK AT YA

Is Fix-It the Next New Thing? (San Jose Mercury News)

Starting last weekend in Palo Alto, a loose confederation of fix-it fanatics began holding a series of repair clinics to fix broken coffee makers, jewelry, toys, furniture – anything small enough to carry. The vanguard of a counterrevolution against planned obsolescence, these MIT- and Stanford-trained engineers and other skilled volunteers will stand at the ready in Albany in March, in Santa Cruz in May, and then across the nation to resuscitate your faithful household helpers. The clinic in Albany will open like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (“Hi, my name is Ted, and this is my toaster oven”) and then make available the tools, coaching and moral support needed to teach you how to save your stuff yourself.

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Really?

Highlights from Guardian Readers’ Worst Jobs Ever (The Guardian)

Automating Hard or Hardly Automating? George Jetson and the Manual Labor of Tomorrow (Smithsonian)

Stop Requiring College Degrees (HBR)

“Watching today’s generals discuss how to improve leadership development is a little like watching dinosaurs discuss how to evolve,” complains veteran Washington Post and WSJ military correspondent Thomas Ricks, in this withering commentary in Foreign Policy. Essentially, he says, the report boils down to “”Everybody turn left and be creative.” With no suggestions as to how, exactly.

Ricks himself has an answer, though. “In a peacetime force, which is what the Army is about to become, you preserve your seed corn by emphasizing professional military education.” Real education, that is, with high standards, good teachers, tough grades, and at least a 10% failure rate. “Not the slacker sort-of sabbatical that it has become in many places. (I’m looking at you, Air War College.)” he warns. “One reason our senior leaders were better in World War II than in World War I,” he argues, “was that during the interwar period, the military education system was rigorous and respected.” By switching its focus from training to truly strenuous education, the Army might have a chance of developing officers capable of creative thinking.

SCORE ONE FOR THE EARLY BIRDS

Why You Don’t Want To Be the Last Interview of the Day (Knowledge @ Wharton)

When Wharton’s Uri Simonsohn and HBS’s Francesca Gino examined MBA admissions data (from neither Wharton nor Harvard), they found that candidates interviewed last consistently got lower scores. Why? They suggest that interviewers are unconsciously applying a daily quota, rather than comparing each candidate to the entire pool. That is, say they knew that only 50% of applicants could be accepted. If by the end of the day they’d already given more than half the people a high rating, they unconsciously gave the last unfortunate soul a lower score to avoid adding another person to the pot. This dynamic can play out anytime people spread decisions out over multiple days, Simonsohn warns, such as when considering bank loan applications or interviewing job candidates

EVERYONE’S A LABEL SNOB

What “Made in the USA” Is Worth (BCG Perspectives)

In a clever experiment, BCG researchers asked consumers about their willingness to pay a premium for products like baby food, cell phones, and furniture that they thought were made in the U.S. over similar (in reality, the exact same) products thought to be made in China. Fully two-thirds of U.S. respondents were willing to pay more for the made-in-the-USA-label for every product in every category. More surprising perhaps is that over 60% of Chinese consumers likewise said they’d pay more for the presumably U.S.-made products. And nearly half said they’d buy American even when they thought the price — and the quality — of the China-made version was exactly the same.

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Not What I Would Have Thought

The Jobs with the Biggest and Smallest Pay Gaps Between Men and Women (Planet Money)

Does the Language You Speak Affect How Much You Save? (Marketplace)

Senate Minority Leader Fooled by Report in Military Version of The Onion (Wired Danger Room)

It was only a matter of time before someone would wonder: Can rock music be a metaphor for business? That time came in 2010, reports The Guardian, when two aging Swedish financiers attended Freak Guitar summer camp in bucolic Härsjösand outside Gothenburg. The result, Heavy Metal Management, was Sweden’s best-selling book this past Christmas season, racking up 10,000 electronic downloads in the first two weeks of January alone.

As often happens with extended metaphors, many of the insights seem vaguely prosaic (like the main one, its “pentagram of six” — “Be epic. Be a master. Be instinctive. Be sensory. Be forever. Be total.”). Still, its message — that intense passion and connecting to your audience (and backers) via storytelling will carry you further than a focus on shareholder value creation — has (dare we say it) struck a chord among the Swedish start-up community. But why take their word for it? The English translation will be out in March.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Four Ideas to Moderninze the Labor Movement (WBUR Cognoscenti)

Union membership fell in 2012 to its lowest level since 1916, even in the wake of 30 years of wage stagnation, growing income inequality, and cutbacks in pensions and insurance coverage. Thomas Kochan offers unions four suggestions for restoring their relevance: 1) Develop a national on-line survey that workers can use to rate workplaces, and publish the results widely on a smart phone app. 2) Offer lifetime union membership, so workers who move from job to job and industry to industry can get access to union-sponsored education and retraining. 3) Expose employers who exploit low-wage workers using social media. 4) Focus more on collaborative models of labor-management relations aimed at increasing employee engagement.

THERE GOES THAT EXCUSE

What Really Happens When You Miss that Earnings Mark (McKinsey Quarterly)

Leaders of public companies often cite the pressure to meet or beat consensus earnings estimates as justification for a focus on the short term. But McKinsey’s analysis of hundreds of large U.S. companies over the last seven years shows those fears are unfounded. “In the near term, falling short of consensus-earnings estimates is seldom catastrophic,” McKinsey says, pointing out that more than 40% of the companies did at some time generate earnings below consensus estimates. But missing by 1% led to an average share price decrease of only 0.2% in the ensuing five days. Nor is consistently beating estimates rewarded. In fact, 40% of companies saw their share price move the opposite way they missed their estimates. The only thing that did matter was when a company consistently missed estimates all year in at least four of the seven years.

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It’s Not Too Late

Ten Valentine’s Day Gifts for Awkward Love Stages (Your Tango)
Do Siri and Google Now Mean the End of the App? (Technology Review)
Why and How Silicon Valley Thrives — From One of its Founding Fathers (Stanford Business)

Manu Chandaria, CEO of Comcrat, the multibillion-dollar Kenyan steel, plastics, and aluminum company, is a longtime observer of the African business landscape. His views in this Wharton interview are well worth reading in their entirely. He’s bullish, for instance, on Nigeria, and thinks Western companies entering African markets should focus less on establishing political ties and more on winning hearts, as the Chinese do, by building roads, airports, and sports stadiums.

But when asked about his greatest leadership challenge, Chandaria turns personal. “I used to have a lot of conflicts with my older brother about managing our businesses,” he says. “I had to ask myself…’Am I going to win this man over, or am I going to fight him?’ What he did was carry out his brother’s ideas — with a vengeance. His brother started realizing, “My God, he’s doing exactly what I wanted him to do — but even better.” Many people face this kind of choice — to step into the mold or break it, Chandaria says. “But if you don’t get inside that mold, you won’t break it.”

NEVER, EVER GIVE IN

How One Company Saved On-Line Retail for Everyone (Ars Technica)

Through a constant stream of lawsuits in defense of patents 5,715,314, and 5,909,492, Soverain Software was making excellent progress on its goal of extracting a 1% toll on the revenues of every company on the planet using e-commerce shopping-cart technologies. It settled lucratively with Amazon and beat Victoria’s Secret and Avon in court. But it overextended when it pursued computer retailer Newegg, which went to trial and lost, but would not give up. On appeal, Newegg argued that Soverain was trying to patent something obvious that had already existed since the time of CompuServe Mail. Its policy of never, ever settling with patent trolls was vindicated when the appeals court agreed that Soverain’s patents were not valid (nullifying previous judgements in Soverain’s favor).

WHAT MAKES TEAMS TICK

Conjuring Up the Perfect Team (McKinsey Quarterly)

Two McKinsey researchers asked 5,000 executives to conduct a thought experiment in which they envisioned the conditions necessary for peak team performance. Turns out there are a lot of them. People needed to be clear about their roles and objectives. They required sufficient resources. They had to like one another, laugh together, and trust and respect team members enough to have constructive disagreements. What’s more, to really get in the groove, they needed a sense of excitement, and a feeling that what each person does will matter and what the group is doing will make a difference — and hasn’t been done before. Is that all?

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Wicked Cool and Just Plain Wicked, Maybe

Meet Truth Teller, An Automated Political Fact-Checking App (ReadWrite)

Is AdWords Prone to Racial Profiling? (Technology Review)

You Won’t Believe What KFC-Japan Has Come Up With Now (The Globe and Mail)

The mobile phone made the wristwatch redundant, but now the smartphone is set to give it new life. The just-released Pebble smartwatch, which you can see here, can do some cool things, like e-mail and text message notification, and will do many more as apps are developed. But that’s just the beginning. Five trends are converging to form the coming “smartphone revolution,” Datamation contends.

First, products like Apple’s AirPlay Mirroring, Microsoft’s SmartGlass, and Nintendo Wii U are getting people used to the idea that two devices should work together. At the same time, Bluetooth technology is radically decreasing the amount of power connected devices need. Advances in e-ink are making usable screens far smaller. Adapting wearable technologies like Google Glass from dorky goggles to watches will propel them into the mainstream. And voice-interaction technologies, like Siri, are even more accessible on your wrist than in your pocket. (And that’s not even counting how much easier it is to sneak a look at the time on your wrist than on your phone.)

IN CINEMA VERITAS

Does Watching Batman Movies Make You a Better Person? (Smithsonian)

“Why is every superhero movie an origin story?” complained critic Adam Markovitz, after seeing a trailer for Man of Steel. Not because they show us how to be super, suggests clinical psychologist Robin Rosenberg, but because they teach us how to be heroes. That is, we go not to see how ordinary joes (like us!) end up with superpowers, but to see what makes people chose altruism over the pursuit of wealth and power. As such, she says, they offer three basic answers: a way to overcome trauma (that’s Batman); an acknowledgement of the responsibilities that come with power (that’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer); or recognition of the obligations that come with good luck (that seems to be Spiderman).

“A HAPPY SHIP IS YOUR ONLY GOOD FIGHTING SHIP”

Leadership Lessons from the Royal Navy (McKinsey Quarterly)

Training in the Royal Navy is predicated on the notion that when two groups with equal resources attempt the same thing, the successful group will be the one whose leaders make better use of soft skills to maintain effort and motivate, says Aberystwyth management professor Andrew St. George. And for officers leading small teams in constrained quarters, there are no better soft skills than cheerfulness and storytelling. Storytelling makes such a difference, his analysis shows, because the stories explain — in detail — what individuals actually did to meet challenges. Cheerfulness matters because, as the saying goes “No one follows a pessimist.”

BONUS BITS:

Quick, Before They Start Charging

Learn to Code for Free (Business Without Borders)

Battling Big Oil: How Four Nigerian Villagers Took Shell to Court (Spiegel International)

Warner Bros.: When CEO Succession Is a Horse Race (LA Times)

A nine-year-old in Irvine, California, frustrated with the quality of videogame virtual-reality goggles, began tinkering with VR helmets he’d bought cheap from government auctions and hospital supply shops. Eventually, he succeeded in producing a glitch-free device that, with smooth perfection, can serve up a game’s visuals in any direction you look. Called Oculus Rift, it caused a sensation at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.

Reporters and gamers are clamoring for it. But Palmer Luckey, now 20, is taking his own sweet time to market — which he’s free to do since his funding comes strings-free from Kickstarter. Right now, he’s releasing it only as a developers’ kit. “It would be irresponsible for me to say when we’ll have consumer products,” he tells this enthusiast from Popular Mechanics, since the device still lacks sound — and who knows what else? If the developers say it needs some new functions, he insists (in an approach more reminiscent of the old mainframe makers than a 21st century start-up), he won’t release it until he’s perfected those functions, too.

WE’LL LEAVE THE LIGHTS ON FOR YOU

Would Coworking Give Your Business an Edge? (Fast Company)

Denizens of incubators well know the benefits of working in the same building with other aspiring entrepreneurs, who share their passions, frustrations, odd hours, advice, and companionship. In Deskmag’s Annual Global Coworking Survey, Lydia Dishman sees data suggesting that established businesses try the approach, as the staffs from Gawker, Foursquare, Tumblr, and Vimeo did temporarily in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Fully 71% of study participants reported a boost in creativity since joining a coworking space, and 62% said their standard of work had improved. Only 30% use the space during normal working hours, which Dishman sees as a sign of go-the-extra-mile engagement, but might also indicate a lot of people moonlighting.

DISPATCHES FROM THE GLOBAL VILLAGE

Where Two Parents Aren’t Better than One (Foreign Policy)

The benefits of two-parent families in helping their children get ahead, as success in school translates into higher incomes in life, has been well-documented in the developed world (though the statistics here are well worth a look — they’re pretty dramatic). But researchers are not finding that the same holds true in the developing world, where data show children from single-parent households do as well, and often even better. Why? Investigator W. Brad Wilcox offers up three reasons. Extended families are more common, fathers are less engaged in any event, and the disparity of school quality is so great it matters far more than family structure.

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Food for Thought

Why You Truly Never Leave High School (New York Magazine)

Describing Difficult Stuff in Simple Words (The Guardian)

How Humans Keep Time (Smithsonian)