Mereja

Author: Gretchen Gavett

  • Being the World’s Largest Ad Agency Might Not Be Something to Brag About

    Google’s All “Who Cares?”

    This week’s merger announcement between Omnicom and Publicis, two ad and marketing agencies with a combined 2012 revenue of $23 billion, involved glasses of champagne. But perhaps a jug of water would have been the more appropriate thirst-quencher for these industry giants’ long road ahead, even as the biggest agency in the world. This commentary from The Economist is both a primer for those who haven’t been keeping up with the news and a witty analysis for those paying attention to only a particular segment of the story. The bottom line, of course, is that the companies merged in an attempt to solve a couple of major problems: the growth of digital advertising that bypasses agencies’ traditional role in placing content and, secondarily, an ongoing succession conundrum at Publicis (Maurice Lévy, who heads the company, is 71). The new agency also promises to cut $500 million in costs, and because it will represent 20% of ad spending and 40% of some publishers’ ad slots, it could be in a great position to help clients get better rates. But there may be more bad news than good. Aside from the whole “We have to get this approved by antitrust authorities in more than 40 countries” issue, the stumbling blocks could include client dissatisfaction (several competing brands are now being represented under the same mammoth umbrella); cross-cultural differences; and the challenge of catching up to the nimble Google, which controls a third of all online ad spending. Perhaps, the article argues, the change is akin to what happened on the Wall Street trading floor when everything became automated: “The move toward buying ads on exchanges will mean that their margins are squeezed and life gets a lot tougher.” Cheers?

    The Limits to Self-Interest

    A Manager’s Moral Obligation to Preserve Capitalism Working Knowledge

    Most people think of capitalism as morality-neutral, at best. Others think of it as downright immoral. Karthik Ramanna of Harvard Business School differs with both views. True, capitalism unleashes people’s self-interest. But in order to let them pursue their goals, it has to enable individual freedom and fairness of opportunity, which are among society’s important moral “goods.” This delicate balance shouldn’t be taken for granted, however. In a new working paper, Ramanna and Rebecca M. Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard, say executives in the financial industry have the capacity to do a lot of harm to capitalism’s moral framework if they give in to the temptation to structure the rules of the game around maximizing their own profits — something that’s fairly easy to do when practically no one understands the esoteric markets and instruments that big banks have been brandishing lately. Pressure from industry groups can help these executives recognize that they have a responsibility to set aside their self-interest “in order to preserve the interests of the system as a whole.” Ramanna believes the executives will eventually get the message and do the right thing. “CEOs are usually not immoral people,” he says. —Andy O’Connell

    Strip-Mining People’s Lives

    The Trouble with Zuckism PandoDaily

    Facebook (finally) traded for over $38 a share this week, the magic number it initially went public for back in 2012. To some extent this shows that fears about the social network’s ability to make money may have been overstated. But it’s the way they make money — mining user data to generate ad revenue — that’s the focus of Kevin Kelleher’s piece. Most users, he says, don’t love the social network, but the cost-benefit proposition of connecting with people easily across the globe is too good to pass up. It’s under this condition that Zuckism flourishes: “Zuckism says that if you can tap a deep enough need at a big enough scale you can strip-mine a billion intimate lives for profit.” The question going forward, Kelleher says, is what will happen when Facebook’s two constituent bases — its users and its investors — grow further and further apart as user enthusiasm wanes and investors make more money.

    You Can’t Eat a Check

    In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity New York Times

    Kaizen, Japanese for “continuous improvement,” is Toyota’s self-described business model. Sure, it can help Toyota make great cars and trucks, but can it also help feed hungry New Yorkers? In a rebuke to the traditional practice of cutting a check to support a charity, Toyota offered the Food Bank for New York City some strategy consulting instead. And despite some initial apprehension, it worked: Toyota engineers were able to cut down the dinner wait time from 90 minutes to 18 minutes. And after Hurricane Sandy, a Food Bank warehouse lowered the time it took to pack boxes of supplies for victims from 3 minutes to 11 seconds. This efficiency gets food to more people, sure. But it also saves the Food Bank time and money. So next time your business is thinking of donating money to a cause, you might want to consider just how far your expertise can go instead.

    Live and Let Die

    How Link “Suicide” Could Save the Web Wired

    A link is a link, right? Nope. There are web links that are relevant, useful, and significant. And then there are all the rest. The relevant-slash-useful-slash-significant ones are great and deserve to live on in perpetuity, but the rest should die, writes Jeff Stibel. In fact, the web should be structured so as to let pointless links disappear automatically after a while. Same with unused sites, for that matter. Summary executions of useless links and sites would prevent the web from becoming ever more cluttered with things no one needs. A cleaned-up web would be more meaningful and, ultimately, more useful. But how to distinguish the good from the bad? A start might be for users to agree that one-way, and thus weaker and less significant, links (I link to you but you don’t link to me) should appear in a different color or font size from two-way, and thus stronger and more significant, links (we both link to each other). “There’s no reason we can’t eventually build this facet into the web’s very fabric,” he writes, making it sound oh so easy to unleash a web-crawling killing machine. —Andy O’Connell

    BONUS BITS:

    Oh No They Didn’t

    A New App Will Let You Share Your Leftovers With Strangers (NPR)
    CEO Mocks Steve Cohen in Bizarre Full-Page Wall Street Journal Ad (Quartz)
    House Party: Working and Living at the Office (Wall Street Journal)

  • An Encore at P&G (Standing Ovation TBD)

    A.G Lafley is back as the CEO of P&G (nothing like the day before an American holiday weekend to announce a leadership change at a major company). There’s a lot we don’t know about this evolving story, but we wanted to give you a few insights. In Bloomberg Businessweek, Justin Bachman points out that one investor in particular has been increasingly irritated by the company’s performance relative to its earning abilities. His colleague Diane Brady notes the very different consumer landscape than the one Lafley presided over four years ago. The Economist positions Lafley’s return against the mixed records of other CEO comebacks, ranging from Howard Shultz’s to Michael Dell’s. Against this background of uncertainty, there’s also a lot we do know about how Lafley thinks about strategy and leadership. A just-published article in Strategy+Business by Lafley outlines the importance he places on intellectual integrity. And our own Rosabeth Moss Kanter explains why brand extensions aren’t Lafley’s challenges this time around.

    Stop With the Apps Already

    The Unexotic Underclass MIT Entrepreneurship Review

    Hear ye, young entrepreneurs: Stop chasing dumb ideas that don’t solve actual problems. This is the message from C.Z. Nnaemeka, who argues that most start-ups have “shifted the malpractice from feeding the money machine to making inane, self-centric apps.” After outlining the many economic problems of what she deems the “unexotic underclass” (e.g. single mothers, veterans whose benefits are blocked by systemic backlog, she says entrepreneurs should be focusing on these groups because, frankly, no one else is. To get things moving in the right direction, we also need a mind-set change from VCs and investors, a shift in focus from the likes of Y Combinator and instructors at top-tier engineering universities, and reform in Washington. Piece of cake, yes?

    “Happy” Shopping?

    Death of the Salesman The Atlantic

    The two most common jobs in America are salesperson and cashier. Should we worry that those jobs are going away? In this month’s Atlantic, Derek Thompson argues that we should. Maybe. There are two prevailing economic theories about low-wage work. The first is that, in a perfect world, these types of jobs grow on trees – we should be more nervous about middle-class employment. The other is a bit scarier: If there are fewer low-wage jobs, a working life is completely out of reach for a larger segment of society. Meanwhile, retailers have responded to changes in their industry by choosing one of two store strategies: Some keep retail employment up (and cater to a higher-paying clientele); others are in “a race to the price bottom” (and cater to people looking for a bargain).

    China’s Tom Joads

    Migrants Continue to Pour into Chinese Cities, Straining Services China Economic Review

    John Steinbeck empathized with migrants but saw their potential to rip apart the social fabric. So does Thomas Friedman, who shows that the roots of Syria’s civil war lie in a migration of small farmers off the land and into towns, where, just like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, they scrounge for work. Now China is facing a continuing mass migration: 160 million people are working outside of the villages where they were born, constituting 22% of China’s urban population. To keep them from growing restive, government agencies will need to spend $32.5 billion per year until 2020 on services. That’s about 15% of the government’s total annual budget. The children of migrants are often left behind in the countryside and don’t have access to quality education, raising the prospect that an educational gap will feed growing inequality, according to China Economic Review. —Andy O’Connell

    From Board to Bars

    Rajat Gupta’s Lust for Zeros New York Times Magazine

    There must be better ways to make billions of dollars to prove yourself a worthy member of the upper echelons of business. But Rajat Gupta, McKinsey’s ex-managing director and a former board member at Goldman Sachs and P&G, went an unfortunate route: insider trading. As he seeks a retrial on his conviction, it’s worth a look back on how a smart and powerful businessman got caught up in one of the biggest insider-trading cases in history. Anita Raghavan, in this excerpt from her upcoming book, traces the relationship between Gupta and the Galleon Group’s Raj Rajaratnam focusing largely on how Rajaratnam was able to get close to Gupta using two key lures: a common Indian heritage (even though Rajaratnam is from Sri Lanka) and the promise of lots and lots of money. Gupta, it seems, fell for both.

    BONUS BITS:

    Your Week in Apple

    Ten Reasons Tim Cook Dominated Congress (Bloomberg Businessweek)
    Here’s the Document that Started Apple’s Hidden Irish Tax Scheme (Valleywag)
    Don’t Blame Apple for America’s Broken Tax Code (HBR)

  • Don’t Blame Apple for America’s Broken Tax Code

    On Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook testified in front of the Congressional Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations as a part of their look into the company’s corporate tax practices — according to Sen. Carl Levin, the chairman of the committee, “Apple successfully sought the holy grail of tax avoidance. It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars while claiming to be tax resident nowhere.” I asked Mihir A. Desai, a professor and dean at Harvard Business School, a professor at Harvard Law School, and the author of a 2012 HBR article on taxing businesses, a few questions about how this investigation fits into a larger debate about the corporate tax code. Our edited conversation is below.

    How big of a deal is the investigation into Apple’s tax practices?

    These days, anything involving Apple is a big deal. But this particular investigation also touches upon a number of current issues. With a backdrop of economic anxiety and fiscal strain, claims that corporations are not paying their fair share can appeal to a wide audience. When those claims are made against what is likely the most admired corporation in the world, that makes for a powerful cocktail. And when the CEO of that company actually steps up to address those claims and offers a powerful defense, this really is a trifecta for a media sensation.

    What is of more lasting significance is the possibility that this spectacle of the CEO of the world’s most admired corporation being hauled up to Capital Hill will lead to a) significant reform of the tax system and b) corporate leaders becoming more vocal about policies and not remaining in the shadows at these junctures.

    Cook testified that the company paid “all the taxes we owe — every single dollar.” And yet legal scholar J. Richard Harvey, in earlier testimony, said that the company managed to avoid about $7.7 billion in taxes. Who is right?

    My sense is that a consensus emerged from the hearings that Apple was not doing anything illegal. Claims of avoidance are tricky. When someone takes their mortgage interest deduction, they have avoided paying taxes. We don’t quarrel with that and legitimate means of reducing taxes are quite acceptable.

    Claims of tax evasion are much more significant as they cross the line, and it appears that a consensus emerged that this was not the case with Apple. From what I can surmise, the vast majority of the taxes paid by Apple are to the U.S. government on the income earned in the U.S. and those payments approximate a significant tax rate. At the same time, they are earning more and more profits overseas and they have ensured that they pay a very low rate, and possibly a zero rate, on that foreign income.

    So the critical question is what is the appropriate policy stance to Apple paying a very low rate on foreign profits? That question hinges on three separable issues: a) should the U.S. tax the worldwide income of its corporations wherever that income is earned (a worldwide system) or should they restrict their taxing authority to income earned within their borders (a territorial system)? b) are the profits that are being reported as being foreign truly foreign or do they actually represent profits that should have been reported as U.S. profits? and c) If the mechanisms by which the foreign tax rate has been lowered involved depriving foreign governments of their tax revenues, should the U.S. care?

    The first question is a design issue — the U.S. is now nearly alone in having a worldwide system and we do it in a particularly poor way as we only ask corporations to pay that tax when they repatriate those profits. Unsurprisingly, American corporations have kept more than a trillion dollars overseas in cash in order to avoid paying that repatriation tax. This is the worst of all worlds as we have a burdensome system on American corporations that distorts their allocation of capital and it raises very little revenue because of the way it is designed. For several reasons, it makes sense to switch to a territorial system, which most comparable countries have figured out. Most importantly, territorial systems ensure that corporations from around the world are competing on the basis of their underlying performance attributes rather than their tax attributes.

    In addition, there is significant scope today for corporations to change their national identity via expatriations and corporate mergers, so if the U.S. is alone in using a worldwide system, our corporations have an incentive to leave. Finally, the typical logic for why taxing foreign income through a worldwide system is appropriate — that investment abroad represents lost investment at home — doesn’t appear to have much empirical traction. So my sense is that if we understand the virtues of a territorial system, we don’t necessarily really care what tax rate they face in foreign jurisdictions. And given that we permit deferral of tax until repatriation in the current worldwide system, we similarly don’t necessarily care about that low rate paid by them on foreign profits.

    The second and third questions raise enforcement and compliance issues — for the second question, things are clear. If corporations are stripping profits out of the U.S. in order to attribute them to low-tax jurisdictions, we should stop that and ensure that profits are not being reallocated away for the U.S. in inappropriate ways. Such activity undercuts the credibility of the tax system and violates many of our norms.

    The third question is tricky. If firms are avoiding paying taxes to foreign jurisdictions by stripping profits from, for example, Germany to Ireland, should we care? I’m not sure why we would. I think those governments can watch out for themselves.

    While the focus has been on Apple, how common is the type of overseas tax maneuvering? And how big of a problem is it, both for U.S. business and the lives of ordinary Americans?

    I think the perverse incentives of the current system, and the behaviors they give rise to, are a significant problem for Americans. These incentives reflect two features.

    First, the worldwide system with a repatriation tax alters the capital allocation process for our firms and locks capital out of the U.S. which hurts all of us. Second, the fact that the U.S. rate is now the highest rate amongst OECD countries means that investment in the U.S. is less attractive and that the incentives to engage in aggressive tax planning are high. Indeed, those tax planning incentives can then make it more attractive real activity abroad.

    So, yes, it is a significant problem — not so much because some tax revenue may be lost because of what looks like maneuvering but because the entire system is enormously complex and gives rise to significant distortions to investment (away from the U.S.) and the allocation of corporate talent and efforts (away from productive uses and toward rent-seeking). And, nothing could be more important to our economy than the efficient allocation of financial, real and human capital.

    Cook squarely placed the blame on a U.S. corporate tax code that “has not kept up with the digital age.” What does he mean when he says “digital,” and what would a digitally-appropriate tax code look like?

    I think he likely meant three things. First, today’s economy is characterized by incredible mobility. In an age of digitization, transport costs are trivial and activity can be relocated anywhere quickly. Consider the ratio of transport costs to product value for a steel bar, an automobile, a semiconductor chip and a piece of software. As digital goods become dominant, that ratio approaches zero and locational decisions are highly sensitive to various costs. In particular, tax rates and systems that are out of step with the rest of the world become increasingly problematic.

    Second, the rise of intangible assets, like patents and widgets, means that transfer pricing issues become central, and so high tax rates become more untenable as they increase the incentives to be aggressive.

    And finally, the importance of intangible assets means that we should be particularly focused on the incentives to undertake R&D in the U.S. Our regime of temporary and uncertain R&D tax benefits has been very disappointing and R&D incentives in a global world are more likely governed by the treatment of cost sharing arrangements than a temporary, expiring R&D tax credit. Countries have become very aggressive in trying to attract R&D activity through the use of patent boxes and otherwise and we are not in the same ballpark on these issues.

    In general, what would an ideal corporate tax code look like that would make the U.S. more competitive and capture more revenue?

    For starters, let me say that it’s hard to be a fan of a corporate tax. It’s a popular tax because of the misconception of who pays it. The usual political rhetoric of corporations paying their fair share is powerful but vacuous. The corporate tax is paid by either shareholders, workers, or consumers as all taxes are borne by people, not legal entities. And, in a world of highly mobile capital and products, the least mobile factor — labor — is the factor that will bear the corporate tax.

    And it is hard to rationalize a tax borne by labor implemented through corporations for either distributional or efficiency reasons. So the irony is that people using the corporate tax to beat up on corporations and extract something from them are likely hurting the people who they think they’re helping. Ultimately, we need to be thinking about consumption taxes much more seriously.

    Given the nature of Washington today, though, we should probably be more modest and consider how to modify the corporate tax rather than abandon it. In my piece in the HBR last year, I argued that a meaningful reform would need to be revenue neutral and could be if a) we cut the rate substantially down to below 20%, b) we moved to a territorial system that exempted foreign income, c) we strengthened enforcement of transfer pricing, d) we raised revenue by placing a small tax on the exploding set of pass-through entities that business income is increasingly organized into, and e) ensured that taxes were levied on the profits that were reported to capital markets according to GAAP, rather than the distinctive reported profits to tax authorities.

    I think I’ve explained a, b and c above, but d and e are really important as well.

    A majority of business income is now organized through pass-through entities which means that capital is being diverted from our public corporations organized as C-Corps and toward business that shoehorn their way into pass-through entities. See, for example, the ongoing REIT-ization and MLP-ization of firms and parts of our economy. A small tax on passthrough entities would level the playing field and smaller tax rates on a broader base of business income are always a good thing.

    FInally, the latitude afforded corporations in reporting profits distinctively to capital markets and tax authorities undercuts the credibility of the tax system and sows confusion and scope for opportunism for our managers. Both tax authorities and shareholders are interested in pretax profits and we should use our most advanced understanding of profitability for taxes and reporting to shareholders. This can raise revenue and, as I’ve argued with co-authors here, here, and here, be good for shareholders too.

    Is this news about Apple a turning point, or are we likely to continue doing business with a corporate tax code that hasn’t been updated since 1986?

    Fortunately, I’m not a political prognosticator. But there are many positive signs. Legislators on both sides of the aisle have advanced meaningful reform ideas. Both Rep. Charlie Rangel and Rep. Dave Camp have floated interesting ideas as there is agreement that the current system is broken. And there is interest worldwide on these issues given the power of sensational show trials such as Apple’s yesterday or Google and Starbucks in the UK.

    I just hope we don’t react to the sensationalism of these issues in an immoderate and wrong-headed way but rather in a way that addresses root causes. Then, again, one can never underestimate inertial tendencies in Washington today (see Columbia Law School fellow Andrew Stern’s comments at a panel beginning at 40:30).

  • The Graduation Advice We Wish We’d Been Given

    In this time of hope and decorative mortarboards, we reached out to some of our favorite writers, asking them: What do graduates really need to know about the world of work? Their answers are below.

    HalvorsonHeidi Grant Halvorson
    Associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School and author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently.

    There will be obstacles, setbacks, challenges. Many things will be more difficult than you thought they’d be. The key to success (scientifically speaking) is perseverance. You’ve just got to hang in there — there’s no other way to win. But how do you do it? A great way to be more resilient is to stop comparing yourself to other people, and compare yourself to your own past performance — last week, last month, last year. Are you improving? That’s the only question that matters.

    GulatiDaniel Gulati
    A tech entrepreneur based in New York, he is a coauthor of the book Passion & Purpose: Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders.

    The tough, thorny problems are the most valuable ones, but most people will shy away from the challenge. Solve these problems.

    ClarkDorie Clark
    A strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, Yale University, and the National Park Service. She is the author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future.

    In a world of layoffs, outsourcing, and industry disruption, the only “career insurance” you can get is through figuring out the answer to one particular question: how can you make yourself truly valuable professionally? Most recent grads assume they’ll do OK if they work hard. But doing the assigned job is table stakes, and not enough to matter very much when other, cheaper options become available for your employer. You need to hone a skill no one teaches you in college, and few people in the workforce understand: the ability to identify problems no one has explicitly articulated, and then solve them.

    How can you make yourself a connector in your company, and share information with those that need it? How can you lend a unique perspective to corporate discussions? What minor task or gruntwork can you take off someone’s plate, thereby earning their gratitude? What leadership position — perhaps that no one else wants — can you leverage to build connections and a solid professional reputation? Answering those questions isn’t easy. But if you can do it, you’re miles ahead of the legions who don’t even grasp they should be asking them.

    WesselMaxwell Wessel
    A member of the Forum for Growth and Innovation, a Harvard Business School think tank developing and refining theory around disruptive innovation.

    There are a thousand paths in front of you. The ones you know about are often safe and unobstructed: work for a big company in a narrow role, get a promotion, get a slightly bigger role, take on a mortgage, buy a house, wait for the next promotion to pay down your debt, etc. Those paths were developed by people who rely on process and rules to tame the chaos that is life. But those paths, the ones you learned about in your career offices aren’t the only ones afforded to you. You can dare to be different. You can break the rules. And while some will scold you for it, others will shower you with outsized reward.

    MerchantNilofer Merchant
    She’s the author of 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era.

    As you go out into the world, ask yourself, “which network do I want to plug myself into?” Today, connected individuals can now do what once only large centralized organizations could. This means that you don’t need to belong to a big firm to create value, but you do need to work alongside talented people. So don’t look at the organizational name or the title you’ll have. Those are relics from the industrial era. In the social era, look to the relationships you’ll have because these people with which you’ll work hold the keys to what you’ll create and achieve.

    JohnsonWhitney Johnson
    She’s is a co-founder of Rose Park Advisors, Clayton Christensen’s investment firm, and the author of Dare-Dream-Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream.

    Take the hardest job you can find in a city where there are lots of smart people. Statistically, you will have changed jobs in less than two years. Maybe even fields. You want your first job to open even more doors than were open upon graduation.

    AllworthJames Allworth
    He is the co-author of How Will You Measure Your Life?. He has worked as a Fellow at the Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard Business School, at Apple, and Booz & Company.

    Understand the way your mind works in relation to motivation. Money, a fancy title, a prestigious firm — these are what are known as extrinsic factors. Your friends and family can see them, you can put them on a resume, or discuss them in a job interview. But these visible, extrinsic factors are not a source of contentment. Rather, the research suggests they’re actually a source of discontentment &#8212 when they’re absent. In other words, having these extrinsic motivators in abundance won’t make you happy; instead, all that abundance will result in is an absence of dissatisfaction. That’s (obviously) not the same thing as being satisfied.

    True motivation relies on a very different set of factors: they’re intrinsic in nature, much harder to measure, and may even be unique to you. Being given the opportunity to shoulder responsibility and work independently. The ability to learn and grow. And, perhaps most important of all, doing something you think is meaningful. Understanding that our minds work in this way &#8212 that there’s not a single spectrum all the way from “love it” to “hate it” &#8212 but rather, two spectrums that are at work completely independent of each other: one which will cause us to be dissatisfied (extrinsic) if absent, and another that will cause us to love what we do (intrinsic) if present… well, learning that has totally changed the way I think about my working life.

    WilkinsAmy Jen Su & Muriel Maignan Wilkins
    They’re the co-founders and managing partners of Isis Associates and authors of Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence.

    Amy Jen Su: Recognize you have the power of choice at every moment available to you: choice in what you do for work, who your friends are, even what your attitude will be for the day. Be conscious, stay awake, and live with your eyes wide open. Own your life and career. Accept the trade-offs inherent in every decision and choice you make. For every “yes” there is an implicit set of “no’s” you are saying so make your choices and commitments wisely.

    Muriel Maignan Wilkins: Embrace your “good enough.” Don’t let others and circumstances dictate what you should be or what you should aspire to. Establish what your “good enough” looks like early on — that wondrous place between settling and perfection where you are content with what you have to offer life and what life offers you.

    PetriglieriGianpiero Petriglieri
    An Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD, where he directs the Management Acceleration Programme, the school’s flagship executive programme for emerging leaders.

    If your graduation speaker calls you a “future leader,” cover your ears. Don’t let that “future” label stick. If you aspire to lead — and have a goal, a dream, a purpose — begin now. Leadership is an activity, not a destination. Pursuing that dream will give you thrill and heartache, hope and frustration. It will give your work meaning and make you feel alive. That pursuit, however, will rarely set you free or make you happy. Those you will only get once you learn to surrender. To life and love. This is why you need to make sure that yours is a real dream and not just an obsession. How can you tell the difference? An obsession owns you. It asks you to surrender life and love to it. A dream holds you, while asking that you surrender to both.

    Fernandez-AraozClaudio Fernández-Aráoz
    The author of Great People Decisions.

    Begin with the end in mind: Who do you want to be? What legacy do you want to leave to our world, you partner, your children? Second, always do what you enjoy. Many times “success” will lead you to promotions which will become the envy of your friends, while leaving you empty and pulling you away from what you really love to do. Periodically assess what you are doing, find out what you don’t like to do, and just stop doing it. Finally, surround yourself with the best by proactively and carefully choosing your partner, your friends, your boss, your colleagues. You can’t do it alone, and in great company even the toughest times magically become glorious journeys.

    MohammedRafi Mohammed
    He’s a pricing strategy consultant and author of The 1% Windfall: How Successful Companies Use Price to Profit and Grow.

    Volunteer for the garbage. Most of you won’t get a prime job or high-profile assignment right out of the chute. Don’t despair; instead cheerfully take on the worst assignment that no one else wants to do and super-excel on it. By making a success of a project that everyone dreaded, it’ll be easier to showcase your talents. This recognition and gratitude will set the platform for you to be selected for the next high profile “we need to execute perfectly” opportunity. Trust me: I’ve seen a lot of people succeed (advancing within an organization or landing a better job) by following this route.

    DillonKaren Dillon
    She’s the former editor of Harvard Business Review and co-author of How Will You Measure Your Life?.

    Be interesting. When you sit in that interview, don’t assume that the lines you can write on your resume will be enough to get your foot in the door to the job of your dreams. We’re going to spend long hours, five days a week working together. I don’t want to work with someone who is narrow and boring. Have opinions — on politics, on pop culture, on favorite writers or thinkers. Have personal interests that may have nothing to do with the job at hand. Have something to say.

  • The Dark Side of Generic Drugs

    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.

    Just Add Training!

    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.

    Curse Words, to Start

    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.)

    Depends on the Professor

    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

    BONUS BITS:

    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)

  • You’re Doing Social Wrong. Your Teenager Does It Right. (The Shortlist)

    It seems that everyone is freaking out about teens abandoning social media sites like Facebook. By “everyone” I mean advertisers. They’re racking their brains trying to figure out why it’s happening. If you’re puzzled too, read this lovely piece in Medium by Cliff Watson, who argues that the number one reason kids don’t need Facebook is that they “literally don’t need Facebook.” After running through a host of theories as to why, including the fact that parents (ew) and even grandparents are on Facebook now, he comes up with a much more reasonable reason: Young people are gravitating toward messaging services such as Kik, and in doing so, they’re recapturing the intended meaning of social: “Making contact with other human beings. Communicating. Back-and-forth, fairly immediate dialogue. Most of it digitally.” In other words, it’s not a post; it’s an exchange. Snapchat anyone?

    Tips and Toes

    Nail Salons Show How Low-Wage Immigrants Stimulate the Economy Quartz

    For a ground-level perspective on the immigration debate, consider Tim Fernholz’s take on the world of U.S. nail salons, which tend to be staffed by low-wage immigrants. Research shows that while workers who are already in place do suffer from the competition when immigrants come to America, the new arrivals also create opportunities that lead to greater investment. Immigrants were responsible for significant innovation in the manicure business: They developed the idea of the stand-alone, inexpensive nail salon, which stimulated demand, which led to wage increases, which led to further economic growth. In fact, as immigration swells, average wages seem to rise, not fall. —Andy O’Connell

    Chicken Piccata With a Side of Networking

    Feed Your Employees’ Minds and Bodies Innovation Excellence

    Changing just one aspect of daily life in an organization can have a powerful effect on innovation. So why not try providing lunch for your employees? Meals build community and networks, writes Tim Kastelle. Idea generation will improve as people problem-solve together at meals. Employee relationships will change. Pretty soon, your company will be completely transformed. Kastelle cites a startup that not only provides meals, it also has an open dinner once a week where people outside the company can hang with employees – yet another way to build networks. Sign me up. —Andy O’Connell

    Please Hire My White Friend

    How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment New York Times

    We know that turning to friends and family during a job search is a good way of getting a foot in the door. But Nancy DiTomaso, a professor at Rutgers Business School, found that many professional networks are still not particularly diverse, with the result that white people tend to recommend other white people for competitive positions. “Just as opportunities are unequally distributed,” she writes, “they are also unequally redistributed.” What’s also concerning is that, based on interviews DiTomaso conducted, people are convinced that skills and hard work are the primary reasons they landed good jobs — only 14% noted that they received help from others. In other words, race and employment are inextricably linked, but many prefer not to see it as discrimination.

    Stocks? No Thanks

    Equity-Market Boom Passes Many Americans By Gallup

    The DJIA’s unprecedented height this week was a matter of mere academic interest to a lot of Americans. Stock ownership among U.S. adults is at its lowest level since 1998, according to Gallup. Just 52% of Americans now say they personally, or jointly with a spouse, own stock outright or as part of a mutual fund or self-directed retirement account. The nation’s 7.5% unemployment rate is probably part of the reason: Back in the early 2000s, when unemployment was more modest than it is today, some 60% of Americans owned stock. Nevertheless, equity ownership is even lower today, by one percentage point, than it was in April 2012, when unemployment stood at 8.1%. Are Americans too poor to own stock, or are they still smarting from what happened to their portfolios in the Great Recession? —Andy O’Connell

    BONUS BITS:

    Now We Will Ponder Advertising

    This Ad Has a Secret Anti-Abuse Message That Only Kids Can See (Gizmodo)
    Advertising and The Future of the Less-Evil Internet (The Awl)
    10 Horrifying Stats About Display Advertising (HubSpot)

  • How GE Uses Data Visualization to Tell Complex Stories

    GE, perhaps more than any other major company, is dedicated to the use of data visualization as a key part of its marketing and communications efforts. Stemming from last month’s Insight Center on visualizing data, I spoke with Linda Boff, GE’s executive director of global brand marketing, about the benefits and challenges of this approach. An edited version of our conversation is below.

    What’s the history of data visualization at GE? How did your strategy around it develop?

    GE specializes in complex challenges in solving the toughest problems in the world: Infrastructure, renewable energy, affordable health care. Things you have really have to get your mind around.

    In trying to do that, the marketing communications brand group is always searching for compelling ways to bring these challenges to life. Five years ago or so, we started using data visualization.

    One of our first was back in 2009, and was about causes of death. We separated them in male versus female, and via age spans. So if you’re 24 to 36 or what have you, these are the three things you were most likely to die of. Now it seems so simple, but it was really compelling:

    We got a tremendous response to it. The media loved it. Our different stakeholders — be it customers, employees — everybody thought, wow, what a great way to tell a story, and it was sort of born from that.

    How do you think about using data visualization when it comes to different audiences and stakeholders, both within your company and outside of it?

    As a large multinational company, we do have many audiences. And they range from employees and retirees to retail investors and thought leaders. Initially we thought about this — and I think to a large degree continue to — as a way to do external storytelling, but we have found that it works on so many different levels.

    As a result, we have used data visualization in places as diverse as our annual reports or our annual report app, which is obviously geared toward investors. We’ve used it with thought leaders. When we released a white paper last fall on the industrial Internet, data visualization was a great way to tell that story.

    It really works across different audiences. That’s one of the things that’s perhaps most exciting about it. …

    How do you staff for digging through all of that data, doing design work, and other digital elements?

    The approach we took — and it’s an approach we often take — is that a couple people inside the brand marketing group spent a lot of time on it, but we also partner with the best of the best externally. And these are folks like Ben Fry, Lisa Strausfeld, Carlo Ratti at MIT, and Jer Thorp, then at The New York Times.

    We didn’t say, OK, we’re just going to work with the design studio Pentagram or we’re just going to work with The New York Times or what have you. And that was a fabulous approach because it gave us the eyes and the sensibilities of folks in a number of different areas.

    Also, we’re GE. We’re involved in everything from transportation to health, curing people to energy to building things. We wanted a diversity of points of view on a diversity of subjects.

    What projects have been the most successful for you? And how do you define success?

    Because we have approached this largely as storytelling, we’re always looking to experiment. …

    We also paid a lot of attention to the kinds of things that content publishers and marketers do for engagement, comments, news coverage. Over the years, we’ve had great pick-up by people at publications, bloggers, all of whom are influential. That’s meant a lot to us because it’s a way for us to tell the GE story, and the amplification of that story is really, really important.

    And it’s also been a way for us to “double click” on certain things. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. We’re an Olympic sponsor, and there are not that many Olympic sponsors. GE’s in there, with Coca-Cola, with McDonald’s, with their marketing machines so to speak.

    I was looking back at what some of what we did for the summer games last year in London. And data vis was a transformative way for us to talk about the data surrounding the game. We made this wonderful visualization that was 100 years of world records for the summer games. And you could sort of click into it obviously and see by country and time, etc.

    So what I mean by double click is that it was another way for GE to talk about the importance of the Olympic games and give a bit of a perspective on them over time, but using a tool that a decade ago we never would have. It’s enabled us to tell deeper, richer stories.

    Another example, one that I really like, starts with the fact that GE generates about a quarter of the world’s electricity. That’s a lot. So we have a visualization right now that shows 713 turbines and the power generated over two weeks:

    I can sit there and say, until the cows come home, “We generate a quarter of the world’s electricity.” But when you see it as a visualization, I think it’s much more memorable.

    What are some data visualization experiments or projects you’re working on now?

    We are working on one that I’m particularly excited about. Not long ago, we did what we called Flight Quest, … an initiative we ran with Kaggle. We released some data from our customers [at airlines], as well as data from the National Airspace System on never-before released flight times, arrival times, flight numbers, origins, arrival cities, all of these different elements.

    We released all of it to the Kaggle community of data scientists globally and said: improve travel.

    There were five winning algorithms that came up with a 40% improvement in flight arrival times. Eventually this could be software that could be incorporated into an airline’s system to improve arrival times. But what we’re working on now is a 3D interactive visualization of those winning algorithms. [Phase two of the project begins in June.]

    What are your biggest challenges as you build new visualizations?

    One of the biggest challenges today is that people expect data is that is very real-time and current. … And then the other piece of it is, how do you make it relevant? I think The New York Times has done a fantastic job [on these fronts]. I think Wired has done a nice job on this.

    But at the same time, if the point is to simplify a story or make whatever the topic is a story well told, if it gets overly complicated it defeats the original purpose. So I think that’s the line we all have to just watch out for a little bit. And we’ve learned this as we’ve gone, whether it’s the topic or the how pleasing the interface on. Some things are just more inherently interesting than others.

    And you just have to experiment to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

    I think so. And I have no regret in experimentation because I think we wouldn’t be where we are if we hadn’t experimented along the way.

    What advice would you have for other companies, be it big companies or small companies, about to why they should take data vis seriously? And what lessons would you impart to them?

    The power of a good story well told in any sort of medium cannot be overstated. Data vis has allowed us to do storytelling at its best. Experimentation is also key, getting in there, understanding a medium and a technique, and not being afraid to experiment with it and be open and collaborative. We have had data marathons with many universities where we’ve brought in students, given them a problem, and said, hey, let’s work over the next couple of days to solve this.

    This is an open space. This fact is incredibly important. Open experimentation is a great way to bring to life challenges through vivid storytelling

  • Why Mickey Mouse Left Bangladesh (The Shortlist)

    Tough Supply-Chain Choices

    It’s been a little more than a week since a garment factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 400 people. Suddenly, companies and consumers across the world are finding themselves in a moral quandary: How can you make (or purchase) clothing cheaply without compromising supply-chain ethics? There’s a lot to read on this topic, from information about companies whose products are made in Bangladesh to companies’ attitudes about gestures of contrition. One company, however, had decided to leave Bangladesh prior to the collapse: Disney. Steven Greenhouse says deadly fires in Bangladesh and Pakistan contributed to Disney’s decision to issue new production rules for thousands of licensees and vendors, and his piece situates Disney’s move within the context of tough supply-chain choices that many global companies are facing. These businesses might consider suggestions from supply-chain scholar Steve New, who advises three radical steps, including the mandatory public disclosure of provenance data.

    I Would Give This Five Stars, But…

    Star Wars Wilson Quarterly

    Thanks to Yelp, Amazon, and a plethora of other sites that feature customer ratings, everyone’s an expert on everything. Sure, based on your extensive experience with artisanal pizzas, you found the sauce at the place down the street lacking. But what’s your (allegedly) superior tomato palate doing to the role of the critic? Will truly knowledgeable, authoritative voices vanish, leaving us to wallow in our own crowd-sourced ignorance? Tom Vanderbilt explores this question through the lens of labor scholarship and philosophy, asking what the “messy, complicated, often hidden dynamics of taste and preference, and the battles over it,” say about how we determine what we buy and value. (Also worth a look: this article about prison Yelp reviews.)

    Geek Diversity

    Why Women Aren’t Interested in Tech Jobs Fortune

    Here’s a classic negative-feedback loop: The lack of female role models in the tech community is seen as the top deterrent keeping women from pursuing science-related careers and becoming — yes — female role models in the tech community. Men and women agree on this, by the way, according to Elance’s survey of nearly 7,000 freelance workers, mainly in the U.S. But what about the claim that the real reason women stay out of tech jobs is that they’re put off by the nerdy culture? Just a myth, apparently. Although a third of male respondents guessed that geek culture is a top tech-career deterrent for women, only 20.6% of female respondents agreed with that assessment. —Andy O’Connell

    But It’s Just Good Management

    If This Was a Pill, You’d Do Anything to Get It Washington Post

    America has done a pretty good job of eradicating infectious diseases that caused early deaths throughout the twentieth century. Now, writes Ezra Klein, people are living longer but are increasingly saddled with chronic illnesses like diabetes and certain cancers. You can live into your seventies or eighties now, but only with proper disease management. This, perhaps, is one of the biggest issues in medicine, and one that Health Quality Partners in Virginia is mastering. With attentive, in-person care, the medical group has reduced hospitalizations by 33% and cut Medicare costs by 22%. So why is Medicare trying to close it down? It’s a story of what happens when business, government, and health care collide.

    You Want Me to Innovate Where?

    From Brazil to Wikipedia Foreign Affairs

    For technologies from the global South, worldwide success usually means shedding local ties and, if all goes well, returning home triumphant. It’s a treacherous road, and most of the benefits of such innovations never make it back to the communities where they started. But the alternative strategy of focusing just on local problems and solutions is even less appealing. Yuri Takhteyev traces the surprising trajectory of the programming language Lua from Rio to San Francisco and thence to the world. —Jeff Kehoe

    BONUS BITS:

    Brought to You By the Letter “M”

    If MBAs Are Useless, We’re All in Big Trouble (Quartz)
    The Mobile Phone in the Future (London Business School)
    If It’s May, It Must Be Scam Month (The Guardian)

  • There’s (Almost) No Escaping Your Terrible Commute

    INDY 5 MPH

    Your route to work too congested? Maybe if there were more alternative roadways through the city, you reason, you could get your Sentra up to a respectable 40 mph. Not so, say researchers at The Wharton School, who argue that creating more ways to get from A to B doesn’t actually make driving more efficient. They tracked nearly 420,000 trips, 102,000 drivers, and 71,000 households in 100 metro areas, finding that “neither additional traffic lanes nor more widely available mass transit alleviated traffic congestion.” When new roads open up, people drive on them until they become as congested as the old roads. As for adding and improving public transit, researchers didn’t find any evidence that it makes a difference. The one thing that might? Congestion taxes, which exist in London, Stockholm, and Singapore, and are unpopular with pretty much every motorist.

    MISMANAGEMENT IN THE MORNING

    Waking Up on the Wrong Side of a Ratings War New York Times

    Morning shows are supposed to be a lighthearted way of embarking on our day, a saccharine combination of news, excessive banter, and cooking demonstrations involving chicken. But what happens behind the cameras isn’t always so delightful, says Brian Stelter, who investigates the power plays and management battles that make the “Today” show seem like the last place you would ever want to work. Central to the story is a secret planto oust Ann Curry as co-host. Some at “Today” worried that firing her would be as devastating to viewers as “killing Bambi.” The plan proceeded anyway, internally dubbed “Operation Bambi.” Nice.

    THE CORNERBACK WITH A START-UP

    Show Yourself the Money GQ

    Aside from those with massive contracts, nine out of 10 NFL players become insolvent within 10 years of retirement. A new executive MBA program at George Washington – Special Talent, Access, and Responsibility, or STAR — aims to teach players how to harness what makes them good at football in order to achieve profitable investments and excel in entrepreneurship; it’s the exact opposite of the NFL’s chosen tactic of trying to temper athletes’ “cocksure belief in their own superiority [and] a fearlessness with risk” when it comes to managing money. Reporter Ben Austin joins the 45 currently enrolled students as they’re asked to “take their collective net worth of $300 million, their $2 to $3 billion networks of corporate sponsors and wealthy boosters, and to suit up for business now, before their stars begin to wane.”

    BUT WE DO ANYWAY

    The Debt We Shouldn’t Pay () New York Review of Books

    With austerity disagreements swirling, largely due to voter outrage in Europe and a recent challenge to the findings of Reinhart and Rogoff, now is a good time to read Robert Kuttner’s analysis of the current IOU debate. Instead of focusing on oft-discussed public debts, Kuttner shows how private debts set off the 2008 financial crisis and continue to hamper the economy, and he argues that both the U.S. and the EU should be helping people refinance and get out of their “metaphoric debtors’ prison.” Still, even after offering solutions, he acknowledges: “The sheer political power of creditors and the momentum of the austerity campaign suggest that more damage to the economy may be done before any large change takes place.” Yay.

    WE’RE NOT TALKING KEYSER SOZE

    Secrets of Companies That Have Figured Out How to Improve Gender Diversity McKinsey

    What’s different about the companies that really get gender diversity right? For one thing, their leaders passionately believe in the business benefits of establishing a caring environment where talent can rise, says McKinsey. For another, they empower HR to be a force for change. And when executive positions need to be filled, these companies look for unusual suspects: women who might not fit the mold and might (gasp!) even change the company’s strategic direction. They also tend to have boards that ask a very simple question, and ask it over and over: “Where are the women?” —Andy O’Connell

    BONUS BITS:

    Seriously, Stop

    10 Worst Management Fads (Financial Times)
    Hiring Experts Reveal Resume Pet Peeves (Mashable)
    10 of the Worst Examples of Management-Speak (The Guardian)

  • "I Mostly Let People Do Their Jobs" (The Shortlist)

    “I MOSTLY LET PEOPLE DO THEIR JOBS”

    It’s been a difficult week here in Boston. As I write this, many are on lockdown due to a manhunt for the remaining bombing suspect. While we still want to highlight excellent reporting in the world of management and business, we also want to acknowledge our current situation, and share some of the thoughtful writing that’s brought us comfort and asked us important questions. For me, Tim Rohan’s “In Grisly Image, a Father Sees His Son” and Amy Davidson’s “The Saudi Marathon Man” stand out. My colleagues have pointed to this Op-Ed from Tom Friedman, several pieces from Atlantic Cities, and our own article on building resilience.

    In “Why Boston’s Hospitals Were Ready,” Atul Gawande points out how doing work — and doing it well — saved many lives. Due to years of medical training and preparation for situations similar to Monday’s bombing, the people in charge at area hospitals didn’t have to do much management on the spot. They merely backed off and let doctors, nurses, and other employees do their jobs. “We’ve learned, and we’ve absorbed,” writes Gawande about the realities of the past decade. “This is not cause for either celebration or satisfaction. That we have come to this state of existence is a great sadness. But it is our great fortune.”

    THE DEVIL’S IN THE LACK OF DETAILS

    The Hell of American Day Care (New Republic)

    “The lack of quality, affordable day care is arguably the most significant barrier to full equality for women in the workplace,” writes The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn. “It makes it more likely that children born in poverty will remain there.” His devastating investigation into day care in the United States delves into the absurd economics — it can cost up to $15,000 per year for a typical family, yet the average annual salary for a care worker doesn’t even crack $20,000 — as well as the complete lack of safety rules and educational regulation for most centers. All told, this means many Americans lack any good option for continuing to work after having children. What’s particularly concerning is that models for a successful system exist — from how France prioritizes child care, to long-ago legislation aimed at working women during WWII, to a successful program in place for members of the military — but they’re not part of a larger policy discussion.

    CHECK OUT MY CHECK

    Younger Workers Open Up About Salary Secrets (Wall Street Journal)

    “There’s a culture of transparency in my generation, [and] to know what your peers are making benefits all parties involved, except maybe the employer,” 25-year-old Dustin Zick tells the Wall Street Journal. That’s why he canvassed his peers about their pay and came up with a successful strategy for achieving his target salary when he applied for a new job at a hospitality company. Accustomed to documenting their lives in real time on social media, Millennials are bringing their penchant for self-disclosure into the workplace, and their openness is undermining companies’ efforts to maintain secrecy about pay. —Andy O’Connell

    WINNERS SOMETIMES QUIT

    I’m For Sale (Elle)

    Should you give up on your dream career in order to become financially stable? Genevieve Smith’s personal essay on this dilemma first tackles it from the perspective of working women, where “the main tension isn’t a two-way tug-of-war between work and family so much as a pile-on of family, money, and ambition.” And even though women are often stretched in more directions than men, she eventually concludes that her father was forced to choose between passion and practicality decades earlier. “Looking at his decision, I realize that the trade-off that women now face isn’t all that new,” she says. “Our own struggle to redefine fulfillment is just another sign that we’re inching further toward equality, just not quite in the way we expected.”

    STAY-AT-HOME LEADERS

    The Rise of the “Global CEO” is a Myth (Mostly) (Fortune)

    Feeling inadequate that you’re not a true citizen of the world, with a CV that lists your years in distant time zones? You can rest easy: The vast majority of CEOs are natives of their companies’ home countries, and, no, they haven’t spent considerable time abroad, Ken Favaro writes in Forbes. What really matters, says Favaro (an American who by the way lived outside the U.S. for 13 years), isn’t where you’ve resided but how much understanding you have of how business is really conducted around the world. —Andy O’Connell

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    Who Are You?

    Dove Hires Criminal Sketch Artist to Draw Women (Adweek)
    How to Become Internet Famous for $68 (Quartz)
    In Iceland, an App to Warn if Your Hookup Is a Relative (Bloomberg Businessweek)

  • You Probably Had a Better Week Than Ron Johnson

    AN APPLE A DAY KEEPS THE CUSTOMERS AWAY

    Tired of the “bad Apple” puns yet? Surely Ron Johnson is. After an epic battle over brand differentiation versus price, Johnson was booted as CEO of JC Penney. Many of the “juicy” details (oh, I couldn’t help myself) be found in this New York Times analysis, which begins with Johnson sweeping into his role “a star” and leaving after alienating what seems like most of the corporation and customers. What went so wrong? Sure, a few anonymous sources described his management style as condescending, but much of the problem comes from the page Johnson took from the successful Apple playbook: not testing any of his new ideas. While this is common at Apple — “customers don’t always know what they want” — the strategy backfired at JC Penney. Shoppers were inundated with the message that they “deserve to look better” — but who (other than Johnson) says they looked bad in the first place? (For a smart, albeit different take, our own Gardiner Morse analyzes “What Ron Johnson Got Right.”)

    MIRROR MIRROR ON THE CUBICLE WALL

    Hirable Like Me (Kellogg Insight)

    Most managers would like to think they base their hiring decisions on candidates’ skill. But new research suggests that once a candidate passes through an initial HR screening, a bigger factor comes into play: how similar the interviewee is to the person doing the hiring. Kellogg School of Business assistant professor Lauren Rivera spent nine months embedded in a professional service organization and noted three key reasons why this takes place: the “Will this person fit in?” question; the fact that people define merit on the basis of their own experiences; and that managers get excited by candidates who have similar passions and interests. Hiring managers forget that “there are other ways people can a) be likeable and b) be socially skilled other than being a mirror image,” Rivera says.

    NOW YOU HAVE MORE TIME TO WORK ON YOUR BENCH PRESS

    Brain Games are Bogus (New Yorker)

    Sad news for anyone who relies on a “Please make me smarter” iPhone app the way a spelling bee contestant relies on flash cards. Two European scientists recently analyzed 23 studies about the effectiveness of such brain training; their conclusion is that playing cognitive games makes you really good at cognitive games, but not necessarily good at anything else. Gareth Cook runs through a host of other studies, which all echo the finding in different ways. While this may not be a huge deal to the casual Luminosity user (aside from the 10 minutes or so you could actually be doing something productive), the stakes are much higher for people who really need memory help: children with learning disabilities, people with brain injuries, and seniors with diminishing memory capacity. The fear is that companies catering to these groups might be peddling much more than a product that doesn’t work very well: discouragement and false hope.

    WHO DO YOU CALL?

    Lonely at the Top: Being a Lady Boss Without Mentors (The Cut)

    You’re a woman. You’re 29. You suddenly have the word “executive” in your title. Who do you turn to for advice on managing others (and, for that matter, yourself)? No one, writes journalist Ann Friedman. “Even though I’d been working with professional women for about a decade,” she writes about becoming a boss two years ago, “I failed to come up with even one mentor-type figure I felt like calling up for advice.” Friedman, in a truly personal way, walks you through exactly what went through her head — from pondering the socioeconomic reasons she didn’t have a mentor to what, exactly, her proper “I’m managing others” attire should be. It’s a reminder that when it comes to women in leadership, the relationships necessary for tackling the “particularly thorny issues” women face are still, for many, sorely lacking.

    GO AHEAD, STRESS YOURSELF OUT

    Putting Things Off Isn’t Always Inefficient or Unproductive (Quartz)

    Turns out it’s possible to harness your tendency to procrastinate and turn it into a productivity tool (really). A study of a cohort of highly intelligent people showed that some of them use procrastination as a way to trigger just the right level of stress needed to ignite positive action. Others use procrastination as a “thought incubator” that allows their brains to process ideas unconsciously, according to Quartz. Some people are even able to use their procrastination time to take care of other responsibilities, such as going through their to-do lists. —Andy O’Connell

    BONUS BITS:

    No Rest for the Dead, Rich, or Powerful

    Margaret Thatcher Got By on Four Hours of Sleep. Should You? (BBC)
    What the Exhausted Will Pay for a Good Night’s Sleep (The Atlantic Wire)
    What Time Do Top CEOs Wake Up? (The Guardian)

  • Morning Advantage: The Myth of the Viral Video

    Remember the Harlem Shake? The viral dance meme you performed with your colleagues or friends to be part of something bigger than yourselves? It doesn’t have much to do with Harlem, according to real people who actually live there, and it doesn’t have much to do with the power of crowdsourced virality either. In this smart takedown of the meme in Quartz, Kevin Ashton recreates the timeline of the dance’s popularity to reveal exactly how, in the wake of Oreo’s Super Bowl “win,” corporations pounced on the video’s potential to make money. The Harlem Shake itself, writes Ashton, “originated with a drunken man named Albert Boyce dancing at Harlem’s Rucker Park basketball court in 1981.” It then inspired an unsuccessful song, until a student named George Miller used it in a video. A few people copied him, and a version found its way onto Reddit, which prompted someone at Maker Studios to recognize its “pre-viral” potential. So began it’s “rapid replication,” which “was driven by media and marketing professionals, led and orchestrated by three companies: Maker Studios, Mad Decent, and IAC.” And as more people clicked, money flowed from Google’s ad structure, “where more searches and more views mean more dollars.”

    If the meme proved successful for these companies, argues Ashton, it wasn’t exactly profitable for the originators of the dance itself. “Boyce, the no-collar black man on the corner who gave world culture a twist, gets a little credit and no reward. George Miller, the originator of the whole thing, gets nothing.” In other words, even though it seems like personal creativity is driving viral content, it probably has more to do with creativity in capitalism.

    IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT YOU

    Reinventing Employee Onboarding (Sloan Management Review)

    We all know the drill: On a new employee’s first few days, you immerse them in the ins and outs of how your company works. Paperwork, floor plans, benefits, etc. But new research suggests that it might be a better idea to target onboarding at their unique skills and how they can use them in their new role. When a business process outsourcing firm in India tested both models, employees were more than 32% less likely to quit their jobs during the first six months at the company if they received identity-focused onboarding. And these workers received customer evaluations that were more positive than their counterparts who received traditional onboarding.

    MEET YOUR MATCH

    Japan’s Answer to Jeff Bezos Sets Sights on Amazon, America (Wired)

    In 1997, Hiroshi Mikitani founded e-commerce company Rakuten right around the time Amazon went public. His vision, however, goes against what he calls the “vending machine” model of sales, focusing instead on digital shops run by the people doing the selling. To put it mildly, Mikitani’s been successful: “Rakuten now handles more than one-quarter of all e-commerce business in Japan — more than twice as much as Amazon’s share in the country.” And with a 2010 acquisition of Buy.com, he’s planning on entering the U.S. marketplace with a focus on the human side of shopping online. “We are a bazaar,” Mikitani emphasizes. “We are not a supermarket.”

    BONUS BITS:

    It’s OK

    The Manager Who Kept a Six-Year Diary of Her Mistakes (Wall Street Journal)
    TED Radio Hour: Making Mistakes (NPR)
    Why Deliberate Mistakes Can Be a Great Career Move (Fast Company)

  • Ten Years of News Corp. Income Data in Less Than a Minute

    We’re posting some of our favorite visualizations as part of this month’s Insight Center on the topic. My colleague Dan McGinn shared his, on Moleskine, last week. Here’s mine:

    At my previous job with the PBS series Frontline, my colleague Sam Bailey and I wanted to answer a couple of questions about Rupert Murdoch’s media empire: How, exactly, does News Corp. make its money? And has this changed over time? The answers, we were hoping, might help our readers better understand how Murdoch’s beloved, hack-riddled broadsheets fit into the rest of his organization.

    So Sam pulled together some pretty dry-looking data from a decade of News Corp. annual reports to create this animated treemap. It tells the story of the company’s financial priorities and evolution better than a few hundred words or pages of tables ever could (click on the rectangles between FY 2002 and 2011 for speedier viewing):

    It’s visual evidence that, indeed, the massive organization had become “a sports and entertainment company with a newspaper problem.” Whether or not this is good business strategy wasn’t necessarily up to us to decide; however, it laid the pure economics of it out in an easy-to-grasp story. What’s more, the simple animated transitions helped bring to life year-over-year fluctuations of the various groups’ performance in a way that static snapshots of the data could not.

    While building this was, for us, a journalistic endeavor, this doesn’t mean you can’t use a treemap to analyze own financial or digital trends over time. Not only can it call attention what you might otherwise have missed; it’s also a powerful narrative device for presenting information to others.

    Visualizing Data
    An HBR Insight Center

  • Morning Advantage: Female Leaders Have Tempers, Too

    It seems as though Christine Quinn, a Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City, likes to yell. According to The New York Times, she once screamed at a city housing advocate, complete with table pounding and a Bambi reference. She is described as “controlling, temperamental and surprisingly volatile, with a habit of hair-trigger eruptions of unchecked, face-to-face wrath.” And Quinn readily admits to it: “I don’t think being pushy or bitchy or tough, or however you want to characterize it, is a bad thing. New Yorkers want somebody who’s going to get things done.”

    OK. So would the Times have covered this story differently if the leader in question was a man? The internet isn’t so sure. The Atlantic Wire has a nice roundup of differing opinions from female writers. The general feeling, at least if all the facts are true, is that Quinn is, well, a politician in the tradition of other scream-y politicians. But does this make her actions acceptable? Not according to The American Prospect’s Paul Waldman, who acknowledges the gender issue, but ultimately says it’s not the important part of the story here. He concludes: “If you treat people around you abusively, especially if they’re people who are lower in the hierarchy than you, then you’re just not a good person.” And, he points out, being a jerk in the business world “invariably produces sub-par performance.”

    STICK TO MATH

    Sorry, CFOs: CEOs Don’t Think You’d Make Good COOs (CFO)

    While CFOs are increasingly a part of running company operations, a new survey of CEOs indicates that they may not be entirely comfortable with this arrangement. More than half of CEOs questioned said that their CFO would not make a good COO, and only 17% said that those already taking on some organizational responsibilities would be good in an official COO position. There are two main reasons for this disconnect: the difficulty in seeing CFOs outside a traditional accounting role; and the feeling (correct or not) that they don’t have the right people skills.

    WHAT INNOVATION FORGOT

    Bill Gates Will Give You $100,000 to Make a Better Condom (Mashable)

    Around 750 million people use condoms, but they’ve pretty much stayed the same for decades. That’s why the Gates Foundation is promising $100,000 in funding, with the potential of up to $1 million in total, to the person or company that can best rethink both the male and female prophylactics. When it comes to male condoms, the foundation is looking for a product that finds “some way to increase sensation as to get men to wear them more often.” For female condoms, simplicity and ease of use are key. For all of the above, “ideas that prove too expensive for widespread use in the developing world, or those that don’t do the job of preventing pregnancy or disease transmission will be dismissed right off the bat.”

    BONUS BITS:

    You Can’t Get There From Here

    The Anatomy of a Parking Sign You Can Actually See (Atlantic Cities)
    Imagine Cities Without Highways (Fast Company)
    Should Heavy Airline Passengers Pay More? (CNN Travel)

  • Morning Advantage: Why Carnival Stays Afloat Amid Scandal

    To be upfront, I doubt I’d enjoy a cruise. I’m not particularly into the lawlessness of international waters, nor do I enjoy being forced to endure poolside activities with hordes of strangers. And like Sen. Jay Rockefeller, I have concerns about who, exactly, cruise lines are beholden to. In the case of Carnival, as outlined nicely by Quartz’s Gwynn Guilford, the answer is pretty much no one. For starters, the company is incorporated in Panama, which means it’s outside the bounds of U.S. wage and safety laws. In addition, its shipping business is exempt from U.S. taxes. This is a big deal when, as Rockefeller points out, the U.S. Coast Guard (aka the U.S. taxpayers) has “responded to 90 incidents with Carnival ships in 5 years.” As for the cruise company, a spokesperson urges caution, saying that all the incidents were quite different in nature, and that the company has a strong overall safety record.

    That said, you kind of have to admire the brilliance of the business model. Except maybe if you’re one of these people.

    MILLENNIALS NEED WINGS, TOO

    The Future of the Business Travel (The Boston Consulting Group)

    Most millennials aren’t quite full-fledged business travelers, according to The Boston Consulting Group, but that’s likely to change in the next 10 years or so. This offers up a great opportunity for airlines and hotels to mine for early brand loyalty — and to eventually increase profits — but only if they understand how very different this generation of flyers is from the last. Some things to consider: While millennials tend to be more brand loyal than non-millennials in most cases, this fact doesn’t yet apply to airlines. And while millennials don’t much mind chaos at the airport, they’re more likely to be annoyed by a complicated booking process and are more likely to turn to aggregators like Kayak or Expedia for their travel needs.

    THE IRAQ WAR: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

    Absolutely $138 Billion (Financial Times)

    Now that we’re done with our brief travel theme, a note about war. Specifically the Iraq War, which began 10 years ago. And even more specifically, the staggering amount of money the U.S. doled out to private contractors: $138 billion. KBR, for example, reaped almost $40 billion during a decade of government contracts, which included preparing and serving “more than 1bn meals” and producing “more than 25bn gallons of drinkable water and 265 tons of ice.” While Sen. Claire McCaskill claims that many of the contractors’ services and projects “did little — sometimes nothing — to further our military mission,” a KBR spokesperson argues that they “performed with honor and sacrifice in a hostile, complex, ambiguous and unpredictable environment.”

    BONUS BITS:

    Habemus Papam

    Vatican’s Bureaucracy Tests Even the Infallible (New York Times)
    A Simple Ritual for Harried Managers (and Popes) (HBR)
    Social Media Lessons from the Vatican — Really (Australian School of Business)

  • Morning Advantage: The Taco that Created 15,000 Jobs

    Admittedly, I haven’t actually experienced one of these culinary wonders. But the Doritos Locos Taco, a faux cheese-caked calorie coffin, is seemingly an innovative job creator. “It has been the biggest launch in Taco Bell history,” said Greg Creed, chief executive officer of Taco Bell, which saw same-store sales rise 8 percent in 2012. “Last year, we added 15,000 people to handle the growth.” You read that right: 15,000 people. The Daily Beast’s Daniel Gross talks with Creed, an Australian who once worked at Unilever, to unwrap the company’s successful strategy. It includes relying on its relationship with Frito Lay (the maker of Doritos) for a competitive advantage; focusing on the treatment of its employees; and marketing a healthier “Cantina Bell” line to adult consumers. And I’m sure the addictive power of junk food doesn’t exactly hurt matters, either.

    LET’S HAVE A ROUND

    A Brief History of Applause, the ‘Big Data’ of the Ancient World (The Atlantic)

    Can you remember the last time you stood and clapped in appreciation or deference (bonus points if you attended the last State of the Union address)? Now, think about the last time you “Liked” something on Facebook, favored something on Twitter, or participated in a Reddit AMA. Finally, read Megan Garber’s fun and incredibly fascinating piece on applause, which brings all of the above together while tracing the history of putting two hands together. She discusses claps as power, claps as freedom, and claps as nuance (and also highlights some of my favorite claps as GIFs). Definitely worth reading in full.

    INNOVATION, I AM YOUR FATHER

    The Myth of the Lone Inventor (Mental Floss)

    There’s something dangerous about romanticizing “the idea of a nerdy, bespectacled guy in seclusion, hammering out a problem that others have yet to crack,” says Matt Novak. Novak, a Smithsonian blogger and BBC columnist, laid out his views on innovation at a SXSW panel last week, arguing that the legendary Tesla v. Edison battle over the light bulb disregards the fact that collaboration and “everyone taking from everyone else” is often the real parent of invention. So why do we love the isolated genius storyline so much? In part because it’s so easy to tell: “[It’s] really good at selling t-shirts, [and] a really good five-minute story squeezed in between TV ads,” says Novak. “But it’s a poor understanding of history.”

    BONUS BITS:

    Past, Present, Future

    The 1962 CIA Paper that Predicts the Big Deal With Big Data (Bloomberg Businessweek)
    Modern Parenthood (Pew Research Center)
    Younger Generations Lag Parents in Wealth-Building (New York Times)

  • Morning Advantage: 50% of People Don’t Feel Valued at Work

    A new American Psychological Association survey outlines this stat among many other findings about stress in the U.S. workforce. The total picture, as reported by Lauren Weber and Sue Shellenbarger in the Wall Street Journal, is concerning. Fifty-four percent of workers say they’re not paid enough for their efforts, and 61% say they don’t have sufficient opportunities to advance. These and other factors, including long workweeks and answering email at all hours of the night, contribute to one-third of U.S. workers reporting chronic stress.

    The biggest shifts from last year (the ASA’s survey is annual) are on the topics of work-life balance and gender. While the number of workers feeling chronic stress has actually decreased from 41% in 2012, fewer people reported feeling satisfied with how their jobs mesh with the rest of their lives. And when it comes to gender, women and men respond to workplace stress differently, with women more likely to internalize stress — a “tend and befriend” response — while men are more prone to a “fight or flight” reaction. And women, more so than men, say their employer doesn’t appreciate their contributions.

    THIS MEANS WAR

    How Economics Can Help You Lose Weight (New York Times Magazine)

    Planet Money’s Adam Davidson wanted to get healthy. But like many people, he kept stumbling, largely because his brain was always able to find a third option that would derail his efforts. So instead of permanently changing his eating and exercise habits, he would buy a diet book or some protein bars. Companies that market these products, he found, base their businesses on this magical third option that often doesn’t work for the consumer. So he turned to a mutually-assured-destruction strategy, which explains how war combatants strengthen their position by limiting choices. Through NYU, he started a diet plan that had one option and one option only — an effective shake that’s only marketed to select clinics. So far he’s lost 60 pounds, and gleaned new insight into the shake-maker’s unique and profitable business model.

    A TALE OF TWO TIRE PLANTS

    It Was the Best of Factories, It Was the Worst of Factories (Reuters)

    The CEO of U.S.-based tire maker Titan International, Maurice Taylor, had considered buying a plant in northern France, but gave up on the idea and then proceeded to infuriate the French by complaining that the workers at the plant spent as much time talking as working. But, according to Reuters, he might have formed a different impression of France had he gone across the street and visited a Dunlop factory where unions have accepted tough labor conditions. Oddly, both plants are units of Goodyear Dunlop. France’s auto industry is struggling with shrinking European demand. — Andy O’Connell

    BONUS BITS:

    Labor Pains

    How Bad Credit Reports Keep People Unemployed (Huffington Post)
    Inside Major League Baseball’s Dominican Sweatshop System (Mother Jones)
    Corporate Profits Are Eating the Economy (The Atlantic)

  • Morning Advantage: Lunchables Are All About Power

    The success of Lunchables derives from a combo of a high-fat food and a message that is “about kids being able to put together what they want to eat, anytime, anywhere.” Oh, and: the optimal crunching pressure of a potato chip for is four pounds per square inch. This New York Times Magazine piece by Michael Moss is packed with such details, which I found just as addictive as a bag of Lays. In it, he traces the intersection of science and marketing that’s made junk food so delicious, so profitable, and so very bad for you. The piece starts at a secret meeting among the CEOs of America’s largest food companies in 1999, at which some execs tried to veer the industry along a healthier path (using the dreaded comparison of Big Tobacco), only to be shut down by the head of General Mills. What comes next is a detailed look at how brands like Dr Pepper, Oscar Mayer, and Frito-Lay hired sought-after experts to make their food taste just so, combining the taste perfection with psychologically effective marketing.

    Cheetos are perhaps “one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure,” while Dr. Pepper launched its successful Cherry Vanilla flavor after a leading expert researched the “bliss point” of the soda, handing over the data in a 135-page report. And a recent New England Journal of Medicine study found that, because of its engineering, the food most likely to cause weight gain is the potato chip. How delicious.

    LATE FOR CLASS?

    Single People Need Work-Life Balance Too (BuzzFeed)

    In a recent study highlighted by BuzzFeed’s Anna North, Jessica Keeney and other researchers at Michigan State designed a survey that asked 3,000 people, almost half with kids, how often work kept them from doing 48 key activities. Turns out that jobs most often got in the way of education — not family time, as you might expect. The range of activities affected also included “health, leisure, household management, friendships, and romantic relationships.” She concludes, “even for parents, thinking about life only as a balance between work and childcare doesn’t tell the whole story. And since about two thirds of American households don’t include children, it makes sense to look at how work is affecting all aspects of life, not just family.”

    CREATIVE COMPENSATION

    What Monetary Rewards Can and Cannot Do (Business Horizons)

    What if you could “pay” your employees in such a way as to not only give them something they valued but simultaneously improve their commitment or job-related knowledge? You can. As a reward for high performance, you can give employees the freedom to redesign their jobs, or you can provide extra training. Or how about giving them a sabbatical? That will get their attention. Herman Aguinis of the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University lays out the options for nonmonetary compensation in Business Horizons. —Andy O’Connell

    BONUS BITS:

    House Call and Response

    Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us, by Steven Brill (Time)
    Steven Brill’s Opus on Health Care (Slate)
    Actually, Mr. Brill, Fixing Health Care Is Kinda Simple (Wired)

  • Is Your Social Media Policy Useless?

    The headline wasn’t exactly subtle: “Even if It Enrages Your Boss, Social Net Speech Is Protected.” This New York Times article, which ran a few weeks ago, outlined a series of recent National Labor Relations Board rulings that analyzed employee firings in the wake of potentially-damaging Facebook posts. Centered around a case involving the nonprofit organization Hispanics United of Buffalo, the Board ruled that the group was unlawful in terminating five workers after another employee alleged harassment.

    So the boundaries are a little clearer now, right?

    Not exactly. You can enrage your boss via social media and be fired legally. In fact, the Times article contains two examples of people — “lone wolves” — who were fairly terminated for statements they made on Facebook.

    “The Board has issued a bunch of the decisions — and in a lot of cases the employer won,” Benjamin Sachs, a Harvard Law professor and faculty co-director of the school’s Labor and Worklife Program, reiterated to me. “It’s not the case that you can just go on social media and scream about whatever you want to.”

    So what’s the difference?

    Organizing. And we’re not necessarily talking about rallying your colleagues for a walkout, or overthrowing a regime. We’re talking about the much more subtle distinction, per Article 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (1935), which stipulates, in full:

    Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, and shall also have the right to refrain from any or all such activities except to the extent that such right may be affected by an agreement requiring membership in a labor organization as a condition of employment as authorized in section 8(a)(3) [section 158(a)(3) of this title].

    The key here is the phrase “concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection.” That, according to the NLRB, is what Mariana Cole-Rivera and her colleagues at Hispanics United of Buffalo were doing when they used Facebook to discuss their coworker’s threat of exposing their alleged poor performance.

    Understanding and employing this line, both for workers and for companies, isn’t easy, and is rife with unknowns and hypotheticals.

    A January 2012 NLRB memo highlights a year’s worth of their decisions involving social media, 14 in all. The cases run the gamut: There are situations where an employee was wrongly fired based on a broad social media policy, as well as cases where employees were fired legally even though their company’s policy was deemed problematic.

    For employees, the message is easier to navigate: You have the right to air concerns based on “concerted activities” and “mutual aid” on social media. But you may still be taking a risk depending on what you say, especially if you’re not engaging with other employees about work conditions. And because your words are launched into the world, or at least into easily mined data clouds, employers can easily find them and try to use them against you.

    It may be trickier for companies. When you’re dealing with concerted activities or mutual aid, your social media policy can’t leave open the possibility that group action could be perceived as banned. So, for example, simply stating that employees can’t make “disparaging comments” could imply that they can’t speak out collectively about a work concern. And if they did — and you fired them — they probably have legal recourse. You should be as specific as possible, like banning employees from putting proprietary information on social media.

    And while employees are taking a risk when posting criticisms out in the world, Sachs pointed out to me that companies have at least as much, if not more, risk because anything that’s said on social media can turn into a PR scandal (does Applebee’s ring a bell?). And, of course, this is why many businesses have blanket social media policies in the first place — but it’s becoming increasingly clear that they’re legally problematic.

    “Workers’ rights to collective action often conflict with owners’ desires to control their corporate image,” argued Josh Eidelson this past July in Slate, prior to the Hispanics United ruling. “But the former is enshrined in law; the latter isn’t. The power of social media to air criticism shouldn’t change that.”

    “One thing this flurry of activity shows,” Sachs adds, “is that even though traditional unions or organizing is on decline, employers can’t ignore the National Labor Relations Act.”

    While we all try and sort out next steps, Sachs recommends that companies “get the best legal expertise they can in this area of law to craft and carry out these [social media] policies.” In the end, he says, “it’s really difficult to say, with 100% assurance, that this policy is legal and this policy is not.”

  • Morning Advantage: Why Working Families Are Stuck

    In a lengthy, research-packed opinion piece for The New York Times, family history professor Stephanie Coontz lays out the conundrum working families face in the United States. One of the major structural problems employees are up against, she argues, begins with the amount of time we’re required to put into our jobs: “As of 2000, the average dual-earner couple worked a combined 82 hours a week,” she writes, “while almost 15% of married couples had a joint workweek of 100 hours or more.” And for lower-income workers, two or more jobs, often with unpredictable hours, can be the norm. Also among the new normal is the fact that 70% of children live in a household where both parents are employed.

    While this set of data is unmanageable enough, things become that much more complicated when the “political gets really personal.” Women still earn less than men across the board, and face more hostility when asking for flexibility in the workplace. Men often say they want an egalitarian system of working and raising children, but tend to fall back on traditional roles if faced with exiting the workforce. So when a man works 50-plus hours a week, for more money, his wife or partner is twice as likely to quit her job; if he works 60-plus hours, she’s three times more likely to stay home. When a sociologist interviewed women who had made this decision, she realized it wasn’t a decision at all — it was actually a compromise of last resort. And when women are faced with the realization that they have to contradict their very basic ideals, marriages and home life can become tense. Couples are forced create a family narrative about who does what and why based on roles no one really wanted in the first place. And only policy changes, says Coontz, can make these choices-that-aren’t-choices irrelevant for everyone.

    MY COMPANY’S MONEY WENT TO LUXEMBOURG AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS BLOG POST

    Four Charts That Show U.S. Companies Hiding Profits Abroad (Quartz)

    Tax season is upon us. And while you’re in your apartment, organizing W-2s and awkwardly navigating free online software (OK, maybe I’m projecting here), many big U.S. companies (or at least their money) are in a much more interesting places. Like Bermuda! Or Switzerland! This handy, anger-inducing blog post from Tim Fernholz uses Congressional Research Service data to systematically dismantle the notion that American companies are simply successful in global markets, arguing instead that they’re financially engineering profits abroad to avoid U.S. corporate income taxes. After walking you through the evidence, Fernholz puts the numbers into perspective: in 2008, the U.S. lost between $57 and $90 billion due to this type of tax avoidance. The amount of money set to be cut from the budget, per the sequester, is $110 billion.

    BUT IT WORKED FOR ODYSSEUS

    Old-Fashioned Personnel Assessments Are Demotivating and Unhelpful (Washington Post On Leadership)

    Medtronic has ditched the old-fashioned performance review, eliminating the dreaded numerical rankings as well as a mountain of paperwork, writes Bob Staake for The Washington Post. Instead, the company has instituted a quarterly “performance acceleration” process that focuses on forward-looking goals. The result: The average merit increase for the company’s truly exceptional performers has doubled. But are managers still making the tough calls about terminating people? Yes: People still get fired, and at the same rate as before. A former chief talent officer for the company says most traditional performance reviews are the equivalent of poking employees in the eye with a sharp stick. — Andy O’Connell

    BONUS BITS:

    Cheers

    Sam Adams Founder’s Quest for the Perfect Can (Boston Globe)
    A Fine Wine: Do Labels Make a Difference? (Stanford Graduate School of Business)
    A Mesmerizing Trip with Half a Million Gallons of Orange Juice (Fast Company)