Author: Morning Advantage

If you shop at Walmart, you may soon be able to add “courier” to your resume. In an effort to compete with Amazon, Walmart is considering a plan to have store customers deliver packages to online customers. While the company currently uses carriers such as FedEx for online deliveries, Joel Andersen, chief executive of Walmart.com, told Reuters that he sees “a path to where this is crowd-sourced.” How would it work? Walmart shoppers could sign up to drop off packages to online customers who live along their route back home, in exchange for “a discount on the customers’ shopping bill, effectively covering the cost of their gas in return for the delivery of packages” (which Katie J.M. Baker over at Jezebel points out is “a lot cheaper than paying workers a livable wage (plus benefits) for the same job”).

Reuters reporters Alistair Barr and Jessica Wohl touch on several obstacles that Walmart would have to overcome to implement the plan, such as theft, fraud, and licensing and insurance hurdles, to name a few. Matt Nemer, a retail analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, told them that the likelihood of this plan being adopted across Walmart’s 4,000 U.S. stores is low. But, Jeff McAllister, senior vice president of Walmart U.S. innovations, says that “it’s possible in a year or two.”

SHERYL SANDBERG’S CRUSADE AGAINST NOT-WORK

Feminism’s Tipping Point: Who Wins from Leaning in? (Dissent Magazine)

Yes, yes, we’ve all seen enough responses already to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. But this one from Dissent, by Facebook veteran Kate Losse, whose final job at the company was as Mark Zuckerberg’s speechwriter, is different. Losse writes that the overriding theme of the book is that “work will save us.” But from what? “By taking note of the forms of human activity that do not appear in Lean In, we see that what work will save us from is not-work: pleasure and other nonproductive pastimes.” The debate the book should be unleashing is less about feminism, Losse argues, than whether work truly should be as all-consuming as Sandberg apparently thinks it should be. “The loser in the Lean In vision of work isn’t one version of feminism or another … but uncapitalized, unmonetized life itself.” Notably, when Losse published her critical review of Lean In, she received a nastygram from Sandberg spokeswoman and former Facebook executive Brandee Barker, who told her: “There’s a special place in hell for you.” — Justin Fox

BACK TO THE LAB AGAIN

Present at the Creation: Putting Creativity Tips to the Test (Boston Magazine)

Beth Altringer, a lecturer at Harvard, wrote this delightful feature for Boston Magazine in which she attempts to be creative by following the advice of a plethora of studies on how to be creative. She tries drinking beer in the shower and working in a blue room (she coins the term “bluetiful” in the process but doesn’t actually get anything done), among other tactics. It’s a fun romp through the creativity industry, and is actually more inspiring than it is disparaging. Enjoy. — Gretchen Gavett

BONUS BITS:

A Penny Saved…

Your 401K Is Out to Get You (The Atlantic)
Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven (Bloomberg Businessweek)
The (86,000) Budget-Cutting Ideas That Got Away (The Washington Post)

Meet the Metropoulos brothers. They just bought a portion of near-dead Hostess for $410 million, and plan on revitalizing everyone’s favorite snack cakes, Twinkies. In this Q and A with Time writer Josh Sanburn, the brothers — Evan and Daren — offer some insights into the brand’s future.

Don’t worry: the brothers don’t plan on messing with the Twinkies recipe, but they do plan on making some changes. For the health-conscious out there, 100 calorie options are in the offing. The brothers also want to tap into the dollar-store market, which should expand the reach of its Ho-Hos and Zingers. Research and development will also be a priority. First on the agenda? Increasing the shelf life of its snack cakes, which — contrary to popular opinion — don’t last forever.

FREE INTERNET

The Free Network Foundation takes on Google in Kansas City (The Stream)

There’s a Wi-Fi battle going on in Kansas City, Missouri. Google cut a deal with K.C. lawmakers to build a high-speed, fiber-optic network in the city. This is good news for most residents. But the Internet costs money to access, and some people are worried that the poor won’t be able to afford it. Enter The Free Network Foundation, whose workers built a free network for the 400 plus residents of a housing project. A local nonprofit pays the bills. Here’s Isaac Wilder, the co-founder of FNP, on the org’s philosophy: “The one clear rule is that the Internet should be treated as a commons, the same way that we treat our sidewalks or our air or our water. Everybody’s got a right to use it on the same terms.”

CLICHE ALERT

A Satiric Look at Finding One’s Passion (The Onion)

This Onion piece is pure satire, but it should strike a nerve with readers who have ever been stuck in a career rut. Here’s the advice most people offer: “Just follow your passion.” If only life were so easy. Learning a new skill — on your own time — can be difficult, especially if your day job is stressful and time-consuming. And whose job isn’t? Sure, life is short. But remember: it’s hard to truly “follow your passion” when work and family commitments take up most of your time. Sad, but true: it’s hard to go all-in when you can only give 10% of yourself to something.

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Get a New Job?

A Few Tricks to Fix Your Dysfunctional Boss (Inc.)

Are Accountants and CFOs Killing Innovation? (INSEAD Knowledge)
How to Collaborate Better (Kellogg Insight)

Want to send a message from the great beyond? There’s an app for that. Lizzy Duffy at NPR reports on several services that will maintain your online presence for you long after you’re dead and gone. DeadSoci.al, which launched at SXSW last week, is a service that will stash away future-dated Facebook or Twitter posts for after your death, so you can continue to send well-wishes for special occasions, or keep some long-running joke running even longer. _LivesOn (your social afterlife) is a service that learns your social media habits, and then predicts what you would like or tweet if you were alive — and does it for you. Their tag line? “When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting.” A Facebook app called if i die lets you create a video or text message (your last words, a long-kept secret, an old score you wanted to settle, or some valuable advice, for example) that will only be published after you die. Duffy offers readers her condolences in advance: May you tweet in peace.

TIME FOR TIME BUDGETS?

Executive Time Isn’t the Infinite Resource That Companies Assume It Is (McKinsey Quarterly)

Just 52% of executives surveyed worldwide say the way they spend their time fits well with their organizations’ strategic priorities. What’s more, nearly half of these leaders acknowledge that they aren’t concentrating sufficiently on guiding the strategic direction of the business, write McKinsey’s Frankki Bevins and Aaron De Smet. This suggests that time challenges aren’t just a major hassle for executives but are hurting business performance too. The problem, Bevins and De Smet say, is that companies don’t treat executive time as the precious resource it really is. Too often, new projects are heaped on “day jobs.” Companies should establish “time budgets” for priority initiatives, the writers say. — Andy O’Connell

SEEING INTO THE FUTURE

A 1936 Insight About Technology Was Prescient (Nature)

Before there was Moore’s Law predicting the exponential fall in the cost of manufacturing a transistor, there was Wright’s Law: Aeronautical engineer Theodore Wright, having noticed that the cost of airplanes fell as the number of planes manufactured rose, proposed in 1936 that the cost of making planes was proportional to the inverse of the number of planes manufactured raised to some power. Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and MIT recently tested Wright’s Law and found that it described the trajectories of numerous modern technologies over a span of decades. Moore’s Law did almost as well, they found, implying that Moore’s Law applies to many industries, not just computers. What does all this prove? That the more we make stuff, the better and more efficient we get at making it. — Andy O’Connell

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Airing of the Grievances

How Frustrated Are Small Business Owners With Washington? (Bloomberg Businessweek)
When People Write for Free, Who Pays? (Gawker)
Google Is Working on a Talking Shoe (Business Insider)