This Week, Big Business Got Religion on Climate Change
BY fromdayone January 17, 2020Corporate leaders have been getting an earful lately from workers, consumers and students around the world: Do something about climate change, the activists have cried out. This week, big companies almost seemed to be taking turns stepping up to the microphone to announce their response. The week began with Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, declaring in his influential, annual letter to CEOs that his company, the world’s largest asset manager with nearly $7 trillion in investments, would start making investment decisions with environmental sustainability as a core goal. “Awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance,” Fink wrote in the letter, which was obtained by the New York Times. “The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance.” Besides creating new funds to avoid fossil fuel-oriented stocks, Fink wrote that BlackRock would vote against corporate-management teams that are not making progress on sustainability. Fink, a lifelong Democrat, told the Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin that the decision was strictly business.“We are fiduciaries,” he said. “Politics isn’t part of this.” As if on cue, a parade of companies made announcements that they, too, were joining the fight against climate change. Visa, PepsiCo and Microsoftannounced that they had made strides toward reducing their carbon footprints or were making new commitments to do so. JetBlue, for its part, said it will become “the first large U.S. airline to offset emissions from all of its domestic flights, aiming to become carbon neutral by July,” Bloomberg reported. “This is part of a long-term commitment we and the industry have to have to reflect the climate reality we are in,” JetBlue CEO Robin Hayes said. “Aviation has a central and important role to play.” The earnest declarations emerged as global business leaders were preparing to head to the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos next week, where climate-change activists have promised to raise a hue and cry about the issue. “To the world leaders and those in power, I would like to say that you have not seen anything yet,” 17-year-old activist Greta Thunberg declared in a speech leading up to the WEF. At this point, however, the activists may finally be preaching to the converted, according toa survey of more than a thousand WEF participants about the biggest global risks facing the world. “For the first time, climate change or climate-related issues occupied the top five spots as the most likely global risks,” Quartz reported.“It’s the first time since the poll began that environmental risk has ranked so highly, up from zero in 2010.”
What ‘Best Companies to Work For’ Have in Common
BY fromdayone January 02, 2020Those lists in business publications about “best companies to work for” are eminently browsable to see who made the cut–and who’s notably absent. But Michael O’Malley and Bill Baker, authors of Organizations for People: Caring Cultures, Basic Needs, and Better Lives, decided to take a much deeper look, putting 21 of the consistent performers on those lists under a microscope. Visiting a diverse selection of companies including Patagonia, The Motley Fool, and Edmunds.com, they interviewed executives, conducted focus groups, and toured facilities. In a recent piece in Harvard Business Review, O’Malley summarized their findings. Here are some of the things the authors believe these companies do differently from their peers–and why they’re successful: Put People First “The best places to work provide people with life satisfaction as opposed to job satisfaction alone. Almost all of the corporate founders and CEOs we spoke with told us that they built their companies with people in mind. To them, a healthy culture is as important as a healthy balance sheet. Their benefits go far beyond minimum wage,” O’Malley wrote. Help Workers Find and Pursue Their Passions “The companies we studied find ways to rejuvenate employees by helping them identify their ‘calling,’ or the area of work that provides them with the greatest fulfillment,” O’Malley wrote. “Doing so not only increases productivity, it makes people feel happy—lucky even—to be at work. … The surest way to improve performance is to give people something they like doing.” Bring People Together on a Personal Level “Before beginning this project, we considered life events, rituals, and rites of passage—such as marriages, birthdays, and anniversaries—as trivial to the work environment. But the companies we visited gave us a new perspective. In fact, they made a big deal out of significant dates. Why? These social extracurriculars may appear contrary to real work, and to some, as senseless wastes of time. But forming meaningful relationships is real work. The best companies realize that personal affinities and deep social bonds are failsafe measures against team breakdowns and are essential for top team performance,” wrote O’Malley. Empower People to Own Their Work “The executives we interviewed repeatedly told us that they want their employees to think and act like owners. Allowing them to control aspects of their work, we learned, is the key to accomplishing this. Employees who have the leeway to rearrange, modify, and improve their assignments feel possession over them, and once this happens, their mindsets begin to change,” wrote O’Malley. “Instead of focusing on what cannot be done, they become preoccupied with what can. As a result, they are more easily able to grow, innovate, and push their companies forward.”
Hallmark’s Impossible Dilemma: How to Embrace Diversity While Avoiding Controversy
BY fromdayone December 19, 2019When caught in the unfamiliar glare of public outcry, Hallmark Cards issued a statement this week that encapsulated the company’s dilemma in two adjacent sentences. On the one hand, “We are an inclusive company and have the track record to prove it,” the company declared. On the other hand, it said, “It is never Hallmark’s intention to be divisive or generate controversy.” Yet in today’s polarized America, is it possible to have it both ways, especially for a company that’s a household name? This week Hallmark unintentionally provided a case study in the quandaries faced by companies being pushed by their stakeholders to take sides on issues ranging from climate change to gun safety. Over a matter of days, Hallmark aggravated a highly publicized fuss by seeming to embrace gay rights, then trying to avoid the issue, and then reasserting its belief in diversity and inclusion while apologizing for “the hurt and disappointment this has caused,” said its CEO, Mike Perry. The result was backlash upon backlash, but perhaps providing some lessons for business leaders navigating a highly politicized public arena. The brouhaha began when the Hallmark Channel, one of three TV channels the company operates in its Crown Media Family Networks division, ran a series of ads for Zola.com, an online wedding registry and planner. At least one of the ads showed a same-sex wedding with two brides kissing. The company had already been getting complaints from viewers about recent comments by Bill Abbott, CEO of the Hallmark networks, saying that the network would be open to LGBTQ-friendly programming, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal’s story was headlined, “In Three Days, the Hallmark Channel Managed to Upset Pretty Much Everyone.” Indeed, much more was to come. One Million Moms, a division of the conservative American Family Association, published a petition urging Hallmark to “please reconsider airing commercials with same-sex couples.” It was a sensitive moment for the Hallmark Channel, which profits over the holiday season from a surge in Christmas-themed programming. Top managers huddled over last weekend and decided to yank the offending ads. The company felt “it was in the best interest of the brand to pull them and not continue to generate controversy,” a spokesman said. LGBTQ-advocacy groups keep an eye out for this kind of cultural censorship, as in a case earlier this year when two Delta Air Lines inflight movies were edited to remove same-sex love scenes. One such advocacy group, Glaad, reached out to Hallmark in recent days and said it would start contacting the channel’s advertisers and asking them to protest by pulling their ads. Glaad compiled a list of 37 advertisers to target and planned to launch a media blitz to announce its protest. Meanwhile, the emerging controversy was providing raw material for mockery of Hallmark by everyone from Ellen DeGeneres to the Weekend Update anchors on Saturday Night Live. Hallmark’s top management huddled again and decided to reverse itself. “The Crown Media team has been agonizing over this decision as we’ve seen the hurt it has unintentionally caused,” said Perry in a press release. “Said simply, they believe this was the wrong decision. Our mission is rooted in helping all people connect, celebrate traditions, and be inspired to capture meaningful moments in their lives. Anything that distracts from this purpose is not who we are.” So who is Hallmark? Founded in 1910 by J.C. Hall, a high-school dropout, the Kansas City-based company has grown into a $4 billion enterprise with 30,000 employees and interests well beyond greeting cards including the TV channels, a chain of 2,000 retail stores, real-estate holdings, and the Crayola crayon company. Hallmark’s embrace of diversity has been fitful. Its website testifies to the company’s “welcoming work environment.” The company has won recognition as one of America’s best employers for women and “featured more actors of color than ever before in the 2018 lineup of original Hallmark Channel holiday movies,” the company said. Even so, “the Hallmark Channel has long been a place of blatant erasure,” wrote Trish Bendix on NBCnews.com. “This year (2019!), for the first time, it attempted to acknowledge Hanukkah (poorly), and the ‘diversity’ of its casts remains laughable (take a look at the Hallmark holiday movie homepage and you'll see it's looking like another straight, white Christmas). The Hallmark Channel has also continually ignored the existence of LGBTQ people. There is no room for queer people in the channel’s fantastical rom-coms and tales of family cheer.” Among the lessons from Hallmark’s holiday hullabaloo: In the business world, the arc of history bends toward diversity. Brands ranging from Tiffany to Walmart have embraced LGBTQ representation in their advertising, as well as support of events aligned with Pride month. Another lesson is that in today’s world of lightning-fast, social-media reaction, you have to move quickly, but also thoughtfully. “It’s hard to keep everyone happy, but flip-flopping doesn’t help,” Allen Adamson, co-founder of the marketing consultancy Metaforce, told the Associated Press. “These are difficult issues to navigate but when you’re going to make a call one way or another, make sure you understand the ramifications. You only want to pull the Band-Aid off once.” Fortunately for Hallmark, the company got back to its original position without further wavering. “It seems they learned a very hard lesson very quickly,” Todd Sears, founder and CEO of Out Leadership, told NBC News. “Its apology was very heartfelt and there was an earnestness, a sincerity in the apology.” Of course, not everyone was pleased. One Million Moms said it was “extremely disappointed” in Hallmark’s reversal, adding, “This is an enormous mistake that will cause a majority of its viewership to turn the channel.”
The Team Builder: Why Fortune Picked Microsoft’s Nadella as Businessperson of the Year
BY fromdayone December 05, 2019This has been a rough year in the public eye for Big Tech, whose digital giants have been pilloried as privacy invaders, monopoly builders and even threats to democracy. Yet one of them has stood out from the pack, basking in a glow of newfound admiration: Microsoft. Affirming that distinction, Fortune recently named Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as its Businessperson of the Year. Fortune attributes his success to having succeeded in assembling the right team. In his ascent to the chief executive role, Nadella had several gaps in his resume, lacking significant experience in sales or finance. So he surrounded himself with complementary players. “I’m wired to be fairly confident in myself and to let others shine,” he told Fortune. Among those executives is president Brad Smith, who runs policy and legal affairs. “Nadella credits Smith, Microsoft’s longtime general counsel and previously an outside lawyer to the company, for leading policy initiatives on areas from cybersecurity to ethics in A.I. and privacy,” writes Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky. “A roving corporate ambassador, Smith has deftly positioned Microsoft, once the scourge of Washington and Brussels, as the most thoughtful and least under attack of its Big Tech cohort.” Microsoft’s reputational success has been matched by the financials. The company earned $39 billion in profits in fiscal 2019 on revenue of $126 billion, with revenues growing at a three-year compound annual rate of 11.%. Its stock-market capitalization, which had lagged for years, topped $1 trillion. Fortune’s declaration was presaged earlier in May by Bloomberg Businessweek, which put Nadella on the cover with the headline: “The Miracle of Microsoft: The greatest tech company of the 1990s is back.” The company that had once drawn comparisons to the Evil Empire of Star Wars was far less of a competitive threat in the 2000s, flailing as it attempted to ride the new waves of mobile phones, search engines and social networking. Businessweek’s sources inside and outside the company attributed the historic turnaround to a change in culture as well as strategy: “Microsoft marketers like to attribute its reemergence as a tech power to a sort of cultural rehab, involving what Nadella calls corporate ‘empathy’ and a shift of his team from a ‘fixed mindset’ to a ‘growth mindset.’ The reality of the company’s turnaround was more painful … Under Nadella, it cut funding to Windows and built an enormous cloud computing business—with about $34 billion in revenue over the past year—putting it ahead of Google and making progress in key areas against the dominant player, Amazon Web Services. ‘I don’t know of any other software company in the history of technology that fell onto hard times and has recovered so well,’ says Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix.” By a different set of performance dimensions, however, Microsoft came in No. 2. On the Wall Street Journal’s annual ranking of the Management Top 250, the winner for 2019 was Amazon, which unseated Apple for the No. 1 spot. “Amazon catapulted to the top of the list this year by earning an off-the-charts ranking in innovation,” wrote the Journal. “Its score in that dimension of performance is more than double that of any other company. Amazon outpaces others in patent applications, trademark registrations and spending on research and development,” reported the Journal, which works with a team of researchers at Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker Institute using dozens of data points to rank companies on five performance dimensions: customer satisfaction, employee engagement and development, innovation, social responsibility and financial strength. The Journal’s rankings also rolled out a new “red flag” designation to highlight companies with particularly weak scores in one dimension of the scorecard. Facebook earned a red flag for customer satisfaction, likely attributable to the controversy over its data-privacy practices, and Walmart drew a red flag in the area of employee engagement and development. In recent years, the company has aimed to improve worker satisfaction with an array of education and development programs.
Discrimination on the Job? Young People See More of It Than Older People Do
BY fromdayone November 05, 2019Which age group sees the most discrimination, including ageism, on the job? Not the older employees or even the middle groups, but the young. In a new poll, American workers under the age of 35 were the ones most likely to see and feel bias on the job. Rather than suggesting that the young are more often the targets, experts said the results indicated “how different generations can view the same behavior,” the Wall Street Journal reported. Three out of every five workers have witnessed discrimination at work based on age, race, sexual orientation or gender, according to a survey from Glassdoor and the Harris Poll of 1,100 employees. “But people between the ages of 18 and 34 were far more likely than other age cohorts to report having witnessed or being subject to each type of discrimination,” said the Journal. The results may be reflective of a generation that is coming of age at a time of heightened awareness of bias, including sexual harassment revealed by the #MeToo movement. Younger people are more likely to see it for what it is and call it out, compared with older people who may be either less clued-in or more resigned to the status quo, according to Carina Cortez, Glassdoor’s chief people officer. Remarkably, young people tended to report more ageism than their elders. Fifty-two percent of younger workers said they saw or felt age-related discrimination, vs. 39% of workers over 55. Why’s that? The perception could be caused the tendency in both the media and the workplace to lump generations together and assign stereotypical traits to them, notably the cohort so often referred to as “those millennials,” Cortez told the Journal.
By Ousting the CEO, McDonald’s Sends a Strong Signal on Workplace Conduct
BY fromdayone November 04, 2019The sudden dismissal of the CEO of McDonald’s over the weekend showed in dramatic fashion that the codes of conduct for top management in Corporate American have risen sharply. The fast-food chain announced on Sunday that its board of directors had fired CEO Steve Easterbrook after he engaged in a consensual relationship with an employee, violating company policy. Other CEOs have been fired for sexual misconduct in recent times, but in the case of CBS CEO Les Moonves, the accusations included harassment and retaliation, and in the case of Mirage Resorts CEO Steve Wynn, charges involved multiple cases of sexual assault. At McDonald’s, company policy forbids managers from having romantic relationships with direct or indirect subordinates. “Other companies don’t always act on that kind of information or fire their CEO for that, and so it seems like they are trying to enforce a pretty strict policy in this situation,” University of Richmond Law Professor Carl Tobias told Fortune. In the case of a CEO, everyone on the payroll is effectively a subordinate. Easterbrook, who is 52 and divorced with three daughters, acknowledged in an email to employees that “this was a mistake. Given the values of the company, I agree with the board that it is time for me to move on,” he wrote. He will be replaced by Chris Kempczinski, most recently the president of McDonald’s USA. The ousted CEO had generally been credited for launching a turnaround at McDonald’s, which had been under competitive pressure from fast-casual restaurants and food-delivery apps. “There’s no question he’s been a very good CEO during his time there,” Jonathan Maze, editor of the trade publication Restaurant Business, told the New York Times. “He really made that organization a lot leaner, they make decisions a lot more quickly,” he said. “They have gone from a company that was well behind on technology to one that is arguably at the forefront of things like artificial intelligence and delivery.” Even so, McDonald’s has faced criticism for low wages for its front-line workers and a failure to address sexual harassment. As the Times reported, “Tanya Harrell, a McDonald’s worker in New Orleans who has helped lead the campaign for a $15 minimum wage, said workers had filed dozens of complaints with McDonald’s demanding that the company take action to address sexual harassment. McDonald’s has ignored the demands, Ms. Harrell said, including requests to sit down with workers to discuss the issue.” The company has lately been offering training programs to U.S. employees in an effort to prevent sexual misconduct, but the extraordinary case of firing the CEO may send a strong signal in its own right. In an email to employees, the new CEO Kempczinski wrote, “Yes, we serve delicious food and offer great experiences, but our brand means so much more. We stand for opportunity and empowerment for everyone.”
What Is It About Wegmans That Makes People Feel All Warm and Fuzzy?
BY fromdayone November 04, 2019In any town big or small, the opening of a new supermarket is typically a welcome event. But nothing was quite like the emotional outpouring that accompanied the debut of a new Wegmans supermarket last week in Brooklyn, NY. The media swarmed. Customers swooned. What is it about Wegmans? The family-owned company, one of the largest privately held corporations in the U.S. (2018 sales: $9.2 billion), has built a reputation on vast product selection, low prices, and excellent customer service at its 100 locations from New York to North Carolina. Yet there’s something more to the story that could be instructive to other companies. Reported the Wall Street Journal in the days leading up to the Brooklyn opening: “More than anything, Wegmaniacs say, the grocery store makes them feel good. ‘There’s an association that becomes ingrained in you as a kid that gives you that warm, fuzzy feeling,’ said Megan Clegg, a product designer who grew up near Syracuse and lives three blocks [from the Brooklyn location]. Ms. Clegg, 31, said she likes how the store forgoes fluorescent bulbs in favor of warmer lighting and uses store signage to celebrate employees’ work anniversaries or college acceptances.” For its coverage, the New York Times tapped a staffer named Jesse Wegman (no relation, but an affinity for the store chain nonetheless), who reported from the scene of the opening: “I had heard about the emotional connection people have to Wegmans, but I had never seen it up close. I can report that it is a real thing,” he wrote. He continued: “So what explains this level of passion for a grocery store? Some of it is the natural loyalty that attaches to a family-owned business, which Wegmans has been for more than a century. Some of it is the fact that Wegmans predated the current trend of massive, well-stocked, high-quality supermarkets. But what struck me most in the end was not the range or quality of the food options …. It was the sense of community, of shopping for food as reaffirmation of a shared civic life in which everyone looks out for one another. This sense seems to exist between the owners and the staff (Wegmans consistently ranks as one of the best workplaces in the country), and between the staff and customers.” Times urban columnist Ginia Bellafante, a Brooklyn resident, weighed in as well on the sources of Wegmania. “Wegmans counters some of our disaffection with retail capitalism,” she wrote. “The business is family run, still after several generations. There is no Jeff Bezos figure at the top holding on to his money as if it were a handgrip that would kill him if he let go.” As a civic matter, Wegmans was welcome in Brooklyn in part because of the location of its new store in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is now a thriving tech hub but is adjacent to a neighborhood that includes many low-income residents who need jobs. The company hired about 200 of its 500 new workers from outreach events at nearby housing-authority buildings. “That is why, nearly a decade ago, when supermarket chains submitted proposals to the city for the chance to open in an area serving both gentrifiers and thousands of public housing residents, Wegmans won,” she wrote. As it turned out, the new Wegmans was delayed years in arriving, but the outpouring of affection indicates that the wait was worth it.
‘The Virtuous Company Is Not an Oxymoron But a Necessity’
BY fromdayone September 24, 2019Many applauded when the elite club of America’s top CEOs, the Business Roundtable, declared last month that corporations should have a sense of purpose beyond just profits—but skepticism abounded too. On the one hand, legal experts pointed out that shareholder primacy is still deeply embedded in corporate law, so companies will be held accountable mostly by their shareholders for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, cynics fueled a debate on whether the business group’s new statement of purpose was just empty rhetoric, a response to growing economic populism. Yet now a leading expert on giant corporations makes a cogent argument that “stakeholder capitalism”—in which big business should consider the interests not just of shareholders but also employees, customers, suppliers and community members—is not only commendable, but a much-needed corrective in today’s winners-take-all economy. “Cynicism in the face of pious corporate proclamations can be healthy. But there is increasing reason to think that the virtuous corporation is not an oxymoron but a necessity,” wrote Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University and author of The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, in the New York Times. Wu argues that priorities in the world of business have become badly skewed, to the point where the sole focus on profits is simply unsustainable because of what it has done to the economic environment around them. Metaphorically, they have polluted the sea in which they swim. “Unfortunately, American corporate leadership, cheered on by Wall Street, has been steeped for several decades in a culture of profit-squeezing,” he writes. “In some cases this culture brought needed discipline to bloated industries. But what began as a campaign for greater management discipline has gone far too far, robbing corporate leaders of their natural social and moral instincts—often with disastrous consequences.” He cites the pharmaceutical industry as an egregious example, whose “narrow metrics of success has led not only to outrageous prices but also to great suffering, addiction and death.” The need for capitalism with a conscience is twofold, Wu argues: because businesses employ the vast majority of America’s workers and steer much of its economic activity, and because government has failed in many respects to build a fairer economy. Stronger laws and regulations will help as far as they go, but their more important impact will be in changing the culture. Concludes Wu: “Most of the men and women who lead corporations are decent people, yet too often they find themselves forced by the prevailing culture to ignore their better instincts.”
Walmart's Dilemma: How to Respond To Calls For Greater Gun Safety
BY fromdayone September 05, 2019“As we’ve seen before, these horrific events occur and then the spotlight fades,” declared Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, America’s largest corporate employer. “We should not allow that to happen. Congress and the administration should act.” McMillon announced several moves that bring the spotlight back again. While big companies have traditionally shied away from politically polarized issues, that’s changing recently, with Walmart taking a more aggressive position on gun control. The company announced this week that it would stop selling ammunition for military-style assault rifles and handguns, it will begin “respectfully requesting” that customers refrain from openly carrying weapons inside the company’s stores, and it will ask Congress to increase background checks and consider bringing back the U.S. assault-weapons ban. McMillon had signaled earlier that the company would be making such moves in the aftermath of the mass shooting a month ago at a Walmart store in El Paso, where a gunman killed 22 people. Walmart is not only the largest U.S. retailer, with 4,000 stores, but also the largest seller of guns and ammo. For years, the company had been narrowing its selection of firearms, ending handgun sales in the 1990s (except for Alaska, where handgun sales will now end as well) and halting sales of assault rifles in 2015. Given the Walmart’s roots in Arkansas and its omnipresence in rural America, the company has moved only gradually on the issue, even as overall public sentiment in the U.S. has increasingly favored greater gun control. But events have pushed the company into a position of leadership, especially given its scale. “Any decision that a company that is that big and that ubiquitous makes is going to please some people and upset others,” Aron Cramer, chief executive of BSR, a nonprofit group that advocates social responsibility in business, told the New York Times. “It is extremely hard not to take action when people are dying at one of your stores.” Walmart will continue to sell more traditional hunting firearms, but it estimates that its share of the U.S. ammunition market will fall to about 6%, down from 20% currently. Despite Walmart’s huge small-town presence, the company has to consider the sentiments of its much more diverse stakeholders, who include urban and coastal customers as well as young people, all of whom tend to advocate stronger rules on gun safety. “The company is also trying to build its online business to compete with Amazon by recruiting younger engineers and developers, who are attracted to companies that profess social values that reflect their own,” the Times reported. One of the trickiest things to enforce of Walmart’s new positions is its request that customers refrain from openly carrying guns in its stores, even in states where doing so is legal. Not long after Walmart’s announcement, Cincinnati-based Kroger, the largest U.S. supermarket chain, asked that its customers stop openly carrying guns into its stores and called for stronger background checks on gun buyers. “The retailer will likely use new signage at entrances asking customers to leave weapons behind, but the retailer did not explain what store associates will do in the event a shopper shows up with a rifle slung over their shoulder or with a gun holstered on their hip,” the Cincinnati Enquirerreported.Thirty-one states allowthe open carrying of handguns without any license or permit, the result of dramatic changes in state laws over the past three decades to make such laws more lenient. Open carrying of long guns is permitted in 44 states. Could the moves by such retail giants embolden other companies? "It's a positive step in the right direction," said Mike Dowling, CEO of of Northwell Health, New York State's largest health-care provider and private employer, told CNN. Dowling, who who has written about gun violence as a "public health crisis," likened Walmart's move to CVS' decision to stop selling tobacco products in 2014 out of a concern for public health.
Can Employees Actually Be Too Engaged in Their Work?
BY fromdayone August 16, 2019“Employee engagement” has become a mantra in Corporate America, for the most part signaling a healthy desire for their employees to feel fulfilled in their work—and thus productive too. But is there a point where this virtue becomes a vice? New academic research suggests that employees who become too devoted to the job can start to exhibit negative qualities. Among them: having unrealistic expectations of their co-workers, showing a disregard for rules and regulations, and having problems in their personal lives, reports journalist Alina Dizik in the Wall Street Journal. “Deeply engaged employees who become more difficult to manage can be overly demanding of superiors and become suspicious of their intentions, says Stuart Bunderson, professor of organizational ethics and governance at Washington University in St. Louis,” writes Dizik. “When Prof. Bunderson first started looking at how zookeepers derived meaning from their work, for example, he learned that many tend to look at their job as a calling. That, in turn, made them tougher to manage than less-engaged employees. They also expected more from those above them. The zookeepers objected to placing a carousel at the zoo, for instance, because they saw it as trivializing the zoo’s mission, until it was repositioned to promote conservation, Prof. Bunderson found.” The issue is relevant at a time when employee burnout has been recognized as a rising problem and hustle culture, particularly among millennial workers in the tech industry, has come under attack as unsustainable. The issue: at what point does having a moral purpose on the job go too far, to the point of workers losing perspective? “There’s no such thing as acceptable compromises or good enough when things are framed in moral terms,” said Prof. Bunderson. What can companies do to foster moderation? Some of the proposed solutions from researchers may raise eyebrows among human-resources executives. Companies have come to believe that corporate social responsibility (CSR) and volunteerism are valuable tools for employee recruiting and retention, but some researchers on employee engagement think companies should lighten up on such programs. Instead, businesses should focus on the less-engaged employees rather than pushing programs across the board, Tomas Chamorro, chief talent scientist at staffing agency ManpowerGroup, told the Journal. “We still want them to be engaged, but moderately engaged,” he said. “A certain degree of dissatisfaction is very positive.”
After a Year of Setbacks, the Ranks of Women CEOs Are Growing Again
BY fromdayone August 15, 2019In Corporate America, the glass ceiling is cracking a bit more this year. The number of Fortune 500 companies with female CEOs had been steadily rising over two decades, until slipping backward last year, to just 24. But now a new record has been set, thanks to the appointment of Heyward Donigan as CEO of Pennsylvania-based Rite Aid, the third-largest U.S. drugstore chain. That brings the total to 36, says Fortune. Donigan, 58, had been CEO of Sapphire Digital, a platform for analyzing the differences in health-care plans. She joins several other women ascending to the top job in recent months. AutoNation, the Florida-based car retailer, last month named Cheryl Miller, 47, as its first-ever female CEO, a promotion from her previous role as CFO. In April, Minnesota-based Best Buy named Corie Barry, 44, to the top spot at the giant retailer; she too had previously served as CFO. However, Donigan’s new gig at Rite Aid “isn’t all popping champagne corks. Indeed, there’s plenty about it that screams ‘glass cliff!,’” wrote Fortune’s Kristen Bellstrom in the publication’s Broad Sheet newsletter, referring to the perception that women are often appointed to leadership roles when the situation is dire and the risk of failure is high. Marissa Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo comes to mind. Heyward Donigan, the new CEO of Rite Aid (Photo courtesy of Rite Aid) “Rite Aid has struggled mightily in recent years, as this Wall Street Journal story details,” wrote Bellstrom. “The company sold roughly half its stores to competitor Walgreens after regulators blocked a 2017 merger between the two. Then a deal to merge with grocery chain Albertsons fell apart, prompting the announcement that [Donigan’s predecessor John Standley] would step down and that the company would cut 400 corporate jobs. Since then, Rite Aid has seen its market share erode and its shares crater—the stock is down more than 50% this year.” But Donigan is undaunted. “I recognized the opportunity to really revitalize Rite Aid,” she told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s not just taking a hammer to the business. I have a strong point of view that pharmacies will continue to be physical,” suggesting that reports of the death of brick-and-mortar stores has been greatly exaggerated.
Facebook Will Pay a $5 Billion Fine, While Big Tech Gets Antitrust Scrutiny
BY fromdayone July 25, 2019At $5 billion, it’s the largest fine in U.S. history for a privacy violation—and it comes with an increased burden of government scrutiny for the next two decades. In the settlement between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Facebook, announced Wednesday after 16 months of investigation, the agency delivered a “stunning rebuke” to the social network as a repeat offender, as the Washington Post described it. “Despite repeated promises to its billions of users worldwide that they could control how their personal information is shared, Facebook undermined consumers’ choices,” FTC chairman Joe Simons said in a statement. Facebook’s general counsel, Colin Stretch, said the settlement would “mark a sharper turn toward privacy, on a different scale than anything we’ve done in the past.” In going after Facebook, the FTC accused the company of violating a consent decree it had struck with the agency in 2011, when Facebook promised to improve its privacy protections. After several more recent mishaps, most notably when the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica obtained personal data on 87 million Facebook users, the FTC renewed its pursuit of tougher consumer safeguards. Even with this new agreement, however, critics of the deal feel that Facebook got off lightly. The company didn’t have to admit guilt, its founder Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t singled out for rebuke in the settlement, and the deal doesn’t really challenge Facebook’s business model for monetizing its users’ information, critics said. The two Democrats on the FTC panel both voted to reject the deal, with member Rebecca Kelly Slaughter arguing that the FTC should have gone to court to pursue tougher fines and conditions, rather than settling. The decision comes at a time when America’s dominant tech platforms—in particular Amazon, Facebook and Google—have gone from being revered as economic superstars to serving as popular political targets. “Only Big Tech could bring together [Attorney General] Bill Barr and Elizabeth Warren,” declared CNBC. The companies are “politically caught in the crosshairs,” Brian Yacktman, founder of YCG Investments, told the network. “What’s bipartisan is that people are concerned about companies having too much power and too much control over data so they want regulation.” In a Presidential campaign season, the debate is broadly over how to curb that power, whether it’s by regulating the companies through new legislation, or by pursuing antitrust action to limit their powers. On the same day the FTC announced its Facebook action, Barr’s Justice Department opened a major antitrust investigation of the big tech companies to find out “whether their online platforms have hurt competition, suppressed innovation or otherwise harmed consumers,” the Associated Press reported. “Without the discipline of meaningful market-based competition, digital platforms may act in ways that are not responsible to consumer demands,” the department’s chief antitrust officer, Makan Delrahim, said in a statement. The backlash against corporate invasion of privacy is happening not only at the federal level, but locally as well. The New York City Council, for example, is considering a bill to ban the sale of cellphone-location data. “The bill, which was introduced on Tuesday, would make it illegal for cellphone companies and mobile app developers to share location data gathered while a customer’s mobile device is within the five boroughs,” the New York Times reported. “Cellphone companies and mobile apps collect detailed geolocation data of their users and then sell that information to legitimate companies such as digital marketers, roadside emergency assistance services, retail advertisers, hedge funds or—in the case of a class-action lawsuit filed against AT&T—bounty hunters.” New York would be the first city to impose such a ban.
Equal Pay Gets Its Due on a World Stage. Is Change Any Closer?
BY fromdayone July 09, 2019Not since NFL players took a knee during the national anthem has a social issue got such a boost from a sporting event. When the U.S. Women’s Nation Team (USWNT) won its record fourth World Cup soccer championship on Sunday, jubilant spectators chanted not only “U-S-A” but also “Equal pay!” The U.S. team’s victory, its second consecutive World Cup, backed up their campaign for equal pay with their male counterparts by presenting another dramatic example of the pay gap having nothing to do with performance. The U.S. men’s team, in contrast, failed even to qualify for the 2018 World Cup tournament and on Sunday lost to its rival Mexico in a regional championship. In March, 28 members of the women’s team filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation for alleged discrimination “for substantially equal work and by denying them at least equal playing, training, and travel conditions; equal promotion of their games; equal support and development for their games; and other terms and conditions of employment equal to the [Men’s National Team].” “Critics of women’s sports have long argued that poor performance and general lack of interest are valid reasons to not pay female athletes the same as their male counterparts, but do those arguments hold up?,” asks writer Lydia Dishman in Fast Company. Not hardly, she reports. The victories speak for themselves. “As for lack of interest, according to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. women’s soccer games have generated more revenue for the USSF than U.S. men’s games over the past three years. And according to FIFA, television ratings for the women’s final shattered records both here and abroad, with 28.1 million viewers worldwide and 6.1 million in the U.S.—despite not being on during prime time.” “U.S. Soccer has welcomed the team’s success,” reported the New York Times, “even as it has challenged the players’ math, arguing that the situation is complicated by a compensation structure negotiated by each team that pays the men and women differently.” Yet the women’s team could credibly argue that they have moved the ball, not only on the playing field and in court, but also in the realm of public opinion. “I think we’re done with: Are we worth it? Should we have equal pay? Is the market the same? Yada yada,” the American midfielder Megan Rapinoe said, adding: “We—all players, every player at this World Cup—put on the most incredible show that you could ever ask for. We can’t do anything more, to impress more, to be better ambassadors, to take on more, to play better, to do anything. It’s time to move that conversation forward to the next step.” Following the World Cup victory, U.S. Soccer and the women’s team are expected to go into mediation for the lawsuit, Dishman reported. “With their win at the World Cup, the [women’s team] is hot right now, and a prompt mediation may be more beneficial for both parties than lengthy legal proceedings,” said Kathleen McLeod Caminiti, an attorney with the Pay Equity Practice Group of Fisher Phillips, a national labor and employment law firm that represents employers, in a statement. The notorious gender-pay gap, of course, isn’t confined to sports. It persists across a wide array of industries and has proven a stubborn problem to fix. “Retaining women and minorities, resolving pay gaps in compensation and increasing equity in the workplace take an unrelenting focus on structural obstacles, unconventional approaches to human resources and an uncompromising commitment to fostering a place where people want to stick around,” observed the Washington Post last month.
These Are the Best Places for Women to Work in 2019
BY fromdayone June 26, 2019This story originally appeared on Fairygodboss and is used with permission. Today, we’re having more impactful conversations than ever about how to make workplaces truly gender equal. In the midst of those conversations, though, it’s important to take a moment to highlight which companies are currently doing right by their female talent. And who better to identify those best-in-class workplaces than the women who work there? For our 2019 Best Companies for Women rankings, released annually by Fairygodboss, companies’ scores were based entirely on women’s employee review data. In order to qualify for the rankings, companies first needed to have received more than 30 reviews on Fairygodboss. Scores were then determined by averaging women’s responses to three standard review questions addressing overall job satisfaction, equal treatment at work, and whether the reviewer would recommend the company to other women. In determining our Best Companies Where CEOs Support Gender Diversity ranking, women’s responses to the review question — “Do you think your CEO supports gender diversity?” — were averaged to determine the companies’ scores. “From our research at Fairygodboss, we know that women's job satisfaction is directly related to the amount of gender equality she experiences at work,” our Fairygodboss Co-founder and CEO, Georgene Huang, said. “We’re excited to showcase these top companies and CEOs as leaders in the movement for gender equality in the workplace and they should be proud that their female employees feel so strongly that they’re great places for women to work.” Outside of the overall Best Companies for Women ranking, additional categories include: Best Technology Companies for Women; Best Finance Companies for Women; Best Companies Where CEOs Support Gender Diversity; and a brand-new category, Best Consulting Companies for Women. See the full list of 2019 winners below: The Best Companies for Women In 2019: Pariveda Solutions Ultimate Software Protiviti ZS Boston Scientific ADP Continental Quicken Loans, Inc. Boston Consulting Group CDW Corporation Hilton E&J Gallo Capital One Financial Corporation Capital Group AppNexus Thomson Reuters United Technologies Terex The Hartford Facebook IBM Johnson & Johnson PepsiCo Southern California Edison Dell Charles Schwab Cisco General Electric Starbucks Corporation Salesforce PwC Best Technology Companies for Women in 2019: Ultimate Software CDW Corporation AppNexus Facebook IBM Dell Cisco Salesforce Intuit Ericsson Apple LinkedIn Seagate Technology Microsoft Google Cognizant Intel Corporation Hewlett Packard Enterprise HP Inc. SAP Oracle Corporation Best Finance Companies for Women in 2019: Quicken Loans Inc. Capital One Financial Corporation Capital Group Charles Schwab Fidelity Investments Vanguard Group American Express Company PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. Goldman Sachs JPMorgan Chase & Co. Best Companies Where CEOs Support Gender Diversity in 2019: Ultimate Software NCC Media Pariveda Solutions Deloitte AppNexus Cisco IBM Protiviti ADP ZS Thomson Reuters Boston Consulting Group PepsiCo Hilton PwC CDW Corporation Boston Scientific Best Consulting Companies for Women in 2019: Pariveda Solutions Protiviti ZS Boston Consulting Group PwC Accenture Deloitte McKinsey & Company EY KPMG Fairygodboss is devoted to improving the workplace for women by increasing transparency — and these lists are designed to support that mission. By highlighting employers who are leading by example, we hope to raise the bar and improve gender equality across all industries.
Wayfair, the Home-furnishings Giant, Is Hit by a Worker Protest
BY fromdayone June 26, 2019In a profile of the online home-goods giant Wayfair in this year’s Fortune 500 issue, writer Jeff O’Brien describes having lunch with co-founder Niraj Shah in the Boston-based company’s cafeteria “in the midst of a near monoculture of twentysomethings.” Turns out the young rank-and-file workers have minds of their own. More than 500 employees have signed a letter to the company’s leadership protesting Wayfair’s sale of $200,000 worth of bedroom furniture to a government contractor that operates shelters for migrant children on the southwestern border. The workers called for Wayfair to halt all business with the nonprofit contractor, BCFS, and to create a code of ethics for dealing with business-to-business customers. Because the company refused to change course, dissident employees plan to walk out of the company’s headquarters this afternoon. Their protest has drawn national attention as well as support from Democratic lawmakers, including U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who tweeted: “This is what solidarity looks like—a reminder that everyday people have real power, as long as we’re brave enough to use it.” While a business is not a democracy, workers have been making their voices heard lately in high-profile actions to protest company policies. At Google, employees walked out last year to object to the company’s handling of sexual-harassment complaints. At Microsoft, workers protested the company’s $480 million contract to sell its Hololens augmented-reality technology to the U.S. Army, saying the company had “crossed the line” into weapons development. The Wayfair protest comes at a time of increased scrutiny of the treatment of migrant children in overcrowded shelters along the U.S.-Mexico border. The publication of a disturbing photo of the bodies of a father and 23-month-old daughter who drowned crossing the Rio Grande heightened the sense of tragedy. “Knowing what’s going on at the southern border and knowing that Wayfair has the potential to profit from it is pretty scary,” Elizabeth Good, a Wayfair manager and one of the walkout’s organizers, told the New York Times. “I want to work at a company where the standards we hold ourselves to are the same standards that we hold our customers and our partners to.” Wayfair executives met with about 500 employees Tuesday afternoon in a town-hall meeting that “was heated at times,” according to a Boston Globe report. Company co-founder Steve Conine told workers he objected to the detention centers but that blocking a lawful customer’s purchase would be heading down a “slippery slope,” he said, according to a recording provided to the Globe. “The level of your citizenship as citizens is really the appropriate channel to try and attack an issue like this. To pull a business into it—we’re not a political entity. We’re not trying to take a political side,” Conine told employees. He did agree, however, to establish a code of ethics for corporate clients. The tech-driven Wayfair has been growing rapidly, entering the Fortune 500 this year at No. 446, with $6.8 billion in revenues and more than 12,000 employees. However, “there’s a black mark on the company. It’s deep in the red,” Fortune reported, with losses of $504 million last year. Fortune quoted a marketing professor who said the company is spending too much, about $88, to bring in every new customer. What remains to be seen is whether a high-profile protest will make it even harder to bring in those new sofa buyers.
Your Chocolate Bar Is Probably the Result of Child Labor
BY fromdayone June 06, 2019The guilty pleasure of having a candy bar just got a little guiltier. “The odds are substantial that a chocolate bar bought in the U.S. is the product of child labor,” the Washington Post reports, based on an 11-day reporting tour through the Ivory Coast’s cocoa farms by a reporter and photographer. The journalists interviewed 12 boys who gave their ages ranging from 13 to 18. “The boys were working on farms harvesting cocoa, clearing brush with machetes and doing other work associated with cocoa production,” their account said. This has been going on awhile, but the big chocolate makers including Mars, Nestlé and Hershey pledged nearly two decades ago to stop using cocoa harvested by children. Yet it continues. In the Ivory Coast, “hundreds of thousands of small farms have been carved out of the forest,” the Post reports, “the setting for an epidemic of child labor.” About two-thirds of the world’s cocoa supply comes from the region, where more than 2 million children are employed in the industry, according to a 2015 U.S. Labor Department report. The big chocolate makers have missed several deadlines for halting the practice. One reason is the murkiness of the supply chain. Chocolate companies can’t identify where much of their cocoa comes from, “let alone whether child labor was used in producing it,” the Post said. If that gives you second thoughts about your chocolate craving, don’t seek refuge in your favorite hazelnut spread. That crop carries a similar taint. Syrian refugees have been toiling on Turkey’s hazelnut farms with little to show for it, according to the New York Times. Turkey produces about 70% of the world’s hazelnut crop on about 600,000 small farms. The harvest supplies the key ingredient for products like Nutella spread made by Ferrero, as well as candy bars from Nestlé and Godiva. “Few consumers know that behind each of these treats is a crop that has long been notorious for its hazards and hardships, as well as the prevalence of child labor,” the Times reported. “Now, a growing number of seasonal hazelnut workers are Syrian refugees, a cohort with a unique set of vulnerabilities. Few have work permits, meaning they lack legal protections.” “In six years of monitoring, we have never found a single hazelnut farm in Turkey in which all decent work principle standards are met,” said Richa Mittal, the director of innovation and research for the Fair Labor Association, which has done fieldwork on Turkey’s hazelnut crop. “Across the board. Not one.” According to the Times, “No buyer is bigger or more secretive than Ferrero. It won’t name a single farm that its suppliers buy from, although simple arithmetic suggests that the answer is ‘most of them.’” While child labor in agriculture is common in the developing world, the U.S. is no exception. “More than half of work-related deaths among children in the U.S. occur in agriculture, according to a new US government report,” Human Rights Watch reported. “This happens despite the fact that farms employ less than 6% of child workers, highlighting the devastating consequences of weak laws and regulations that don’t properly protect child farmworkers.”
Why More CEOs Are Getting Bounced for Ethical Lapses
BY fromdayone May 29, 2019What gets a CEO fired? Traditionally, poor financial performance has been the leading cause of corporate boards dumping their chief executive. But last year was different: 39% of CEOs were dismissed for ethical lapses, vs. 35% for financial reasons, according to a study of the 2,500 largest global public companies by Strategy&, a consulting arm of PwC. It was the first time in the 19-year history of the study that unethical conduct doomed more CEOs than any other reason. “There’s a new call for transparency and accountability, especially with issues regarding the #MeToo movement and other indiscretions for which there is increasingly zero tolerance,” said Martha Turner, a partner with Strategy&. Has CEO behavior gotten worse? More likely, the reason behind the trend is that standards have been raised, wrote Robert Prentice, a professor of business law and ethics at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas. “Formerly, corporate boards were too often inclined to hunker down and ride out a storm of controversy over a misbehaving CEO who was, nonetheless, getting the financial results that the board desired,” notes Prentice. “Today, thanks to the #MeToo movement, that is not a viable strategy for corporate boards. The heat from the headlines is too intense.” The most notorious case in 2018, when the study counted 89 forced CEO departures, was that of CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves, who resigned over sexual-misconduct allegations and didn’t go away quietly. Other CEOs departed from Lululemon, WPP, Intel and Barnes & Noble following charges of sexual misconduct or other ethical lapses. “Boards feel they have to hold their CEOs accountable to the code of conduct in the same way they would with [other] employees,” Bill George, a senior fellow at Harvard Business School and former CEO of Medtronic, told the Washington Post. “There’s a strong feeling from boards they have to do it.” Another factor is increased pressure from employees reacting to misconduct at the top, he added. “That’s a very important factor today that didn’t exist 10 years ago.” The new climate probably will claim quite a few more CEOs, management experts predict. “The first wave of #MeToo took out some of the most high-profile figures," John Paul Rollert, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies the ethics of leadership, told NPR. "What we're beginning to see in this second and now third wave is Corporate America taking responsibility for itself," he said. "There are clearly a lot of bad actors who are still hiding in the shadows that need to be swept out." Is there something about chief executives that makes them step over the line? Well, yes, in many cases. “The population of psychopaths is still overrepresented in the C-Suite,” wrote Prentice, the University of Texas professor. “The professional success corporate CEOs have enjoyed often leads them to be particularly vulnerable to the overconfidence bias and the self-serving bias. They will continue to tend toward having an unrealistic view of how moral they are and how important they are to their firm’s success,” he wrote, adding: “They will continue to be more likely than others to mistakenly believe that others agree with them. And, the science shows, they will be particularly adept at rationalizing their wrongdoing.”
Will Tech Destroy the World (Or Save It)? The Arguments Both Ways
BY fromdayone May 23, 2019“It’s undeniable that our use of technology has outstripped our infrastructure” of legal, ethical and social standards, observed Cathy Bessant, chief operations and technology officer for Bank of America. “We’re using it before we know how to manage it.” Her remarks in an onstage interview aptly captured the sentiment last week at Techonomy NYC 19, a conference that explored bright and dark sides of technology, which right now seem almost as polarized as America’s politics. The organizers titled their conference “Collaborating for Responsible Growth,” they explained, “because unless we get better at working together for society’s benefit, we’re all in trouble.” With an eclectic array of speakers, Techonomy explored such wide-ranging issues as social media’s crisis, women in technology, hackers, Amazon, the internet of things, China, food and podcasts. Several highlights from the first day of the two-day conference: Technologies of Togetherness “We are in the cave-man era of bringing people together,” declared Scott Heiferman, the chairman of Meetup, the community-building startup he co-founded in 2003. In saying that, Heiferman was being optimistic. He believes the current crisis in social media, plagued by propaganda and privacy issues, could be worked out by innovation and public debate. Heiferman, in an interview with Techonomy founder David Kirkpatrick, said he thinks the business model of advertising-driven platforms like Facebook and Google will have to evolve, bemoaning “the fact that the greatest minds of our generation are focused on getting people to click on ads.” Yet he recognized that moving to a new business model, like paid subscriptions, would require an epic change for those companies. “Should the whole world be paying cash money to Facebook? The reality is that if your core business is to get people to stare at a screen, you’re going to get people to stare at a screen,” he said. Digital platforms like Uber, however, which has been accused of exploiting its drivers, could be rivaled in the gig economy by the emergence of so-called platform cooperatives, Heiferman noted. In those organizations, the administrative layer is thinner and more revenue goes to the workers. Meetup, which was bought in 2017 by WeWork, makes money by charging a fee to organizers of groups. The company decided early on to avoid going to an ad-driven model, which made Heiferman nervous at the time about how customers would judge the service, he said. “If we go to a pay model, their expectations are going to be really high,” he told one of his investors, Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. Responded Omidyar: “Exactly!” Creating an Inclusive Tech Industry “Having diversity at the table when solutions are proposed leads to different solutions,” said Kimberly Bryant, founder and CEO of Black Girls Code, a nonprofit that provides young and pre-teen girls of color opportunities to learn skills in tech and computer-programming. Bryant, a technologist with experience at Genentech, Pfizer and Merck, launched Black Girls Code as a pilot project in 2011. It now has programs in 15 cities, partnering with school districts and corporations. Bryant observed that with technology as a tool, girls can address issues that “young women of color face in the community.” Safety, for example. Her daughter, at age 13, worked with her peers at a hackathon to develop a wearable device, called Ohana, that could act as an alarm if they were to feel unsafe in a particular area. A push of a button would notify their key contacts or the authorities. Participants in Black Girls Code can start early and stick with the program for several years, with year-round workshops. While Bryant’s daughter is now studying computer science in college, other participants have used the program as a springboard to other careers. One of them is getting “a full ride” at the University of California, Berkeley, where she’s studying to become a doctor, Bryant said. But does Black Girls Code exclude people by its nature?, a member of the audience asked. “Black Girl’s Code is a term of affirmation, not of segregation,” Bryant said. “It’s OK for these girls to be their full selves.” Kimberly Bryant, right, founder and CEO of Black Girls Code, speaking at the Techonomy conference (Photo by Stephen Koepp) Partnering for Good When corporations launch programs to have a positive social impact, they’re well-advised to leverage their strengths by finding a partner like MedShare. The humanitarian aid organization delivers surplus medical supplies and equipment to communities in need around the world. The group has delivered $220 million worth of gear so far, “things that would have wound up in a landfill,” having outlived their use in the developed world, said Charles Redding, the group’s CEO. One of MedShare’s partners is Philips, the Dutch electronics giant. The company currently focuses heavily on health-care technology, “everything from MRI machines to the Sonicare toothbrush,” said Rob Stevens, the company’s general manager of health-system services. Medical equipment typically becomes surplus when a hospital or other health-care provider upgrades to more modern gear, at which point a company like Philips can find a new home for the still-functional devices. “We don’t just donate the gear, we also provide all the manuals so they can have another useful life,” said Stevens. “It’s important that that the local team knows how to service the product and use it to its full potential.” The second-hand gear can be life-saving in parts of the world where modern health facilities are scarce. “The ultrasounds are literally a godsend for us,” said Redding, referring to the use of the devices for pre-natal monitoring. He told of a situation in Nicaragua where an expectant mother was in physical distress. An ultrasound exam showed the mother to be “very low on amniotic fluid,” a hazardous condition. The mother was rushed to surgery for a C-section, which saved both the mother and child, he said. MedShare is a major logistical operation, having moved 13.5 million lbs. of equipment and supplies, operating three warehouses to handle it all, and coordinating 20,000 volunteers a year to get the job done, Redding said. Hacking a More Secure Society Everyone from credit-card holders to Pentagon generals worries about digital mayhem, with new episodes making headlines constantly. Two weeks ago, hackers seized parts of the computer systems that run Baltimore’s government, demanding ransom. “Here’s the bad news: Nobody wants to be hacked, but everybody gets hacked,” said Mårten Mickos, CEO of the cybersecurity company HackerOne. The good news, he added, is that “the younger generation is fixing it for us.” HackerOne has an unusual business model in the $120 billion cyber-security industry. HackerOne encourages its army of 400,000 freelance hackers to try to infiltrate the systems of its customers, then pays a bounty when the hackers find a bug. “If the good guys can break in, the bad guys can break in too.” HackerOne’s workforce ranges from students to corporate professionals, with half of the hackers age 24 or younger. While some hackers might earn only small amounts, several stars have emerged. One is 19-year-old Santiago Lopez of Buenos Aires, the first HackerOne freelancer to earn $1 million. Lopez has found 1,607 flaws at recent count, having scrutinized the IT systems at companies including Goldman Sachs and Verizon, Mickos said. “Software can be wrong in so many ways,” he said, comparing freelance hacking to the production of open-source software. “It’s the only way to deal with it,” Mickos said of fighting cybercrime, which he called “asymmetrical threat, in that those who do it are very few, who can do huge damage.” HackerOne has worked with the Defense Department to carry out the program Hack the Pentagon, which uses the crowdsourcing method to secure its IT systems. In that case of that program, the Pentagon does background checks on the good-guy hackers, who are required to be law-abiding, U.S. citizens. Asked about the worst digital security threat, Mickos answers: “The problem is you and me. Human beings are not disciplined, they’re vulnerable.” For his part, “I’ve become very disciplined with my own passwords.” Can Anyone Beat Amazon? “The reality is, in the short or medium term, nobody can beat Amazon. If you try to run up against amazon directly, it’s like going up against Usain Bolt in the 100 meters,” said Chieh Huang, CEO of Boxed, the e-commerce company he co-founded in 2013. OK, so how did Boxed become a juggernaut of its own, attracting $244 million of venture-capital funding so far? “We didn’t understand why Amazon didn’t sell really big packages,” said Huang, who started selling wholesale volumes of toilet paper out of a garage in New Jersey. “Timing was everything,” he said. At the time, investors were wary of e-commerce, so the partners did things for themselves, selling $40,000 worth of bulk products in their first year, mainly to business customers. They limited themselves “to selling only the wholesale package and not trying to be the Everything Store,” he said. “There’s a fine line between hubris and being naïve.” Part of Boxed’s current business model is to build its own propriety technology for inventory management and other parts of the business, in which they can incorporate higher-value features. Among e-commerce sites, “We’re the only national retailer that tells you the expiration date of the product you’re buying,” Huang said. “If there’s a recall of beef jerky,” he said, the company knows exactly which customers to notify. While automating his warehouse in New Jersey has replaced people with machines to some extent, Huang said the growth of his revenues has led to a net increase in jobs. Plus, technology has its limits, for now. “It’s hard to simulate the dexterity of the human hand to pick up things,” he said. Asked what keeps him up at night, the entrepreneur said: “The ever-rising bar of the consumer. Consumers don’t care where that innovation comes, but they see it and then they want it across the whole spectrum of retail,” he said, giving the example of two-day shipping leading to one-day shipping and now same-day delivery. The Internet Civil War Techonomy founder Kirkpatrick set the table for this panel discussion with a cover story in the company’s magazine, in which he took stock of divergent powerful interests that could render the term “world wide web” obsolete. Already, the trend has given rise to a new term for the frayed global connections: the “splinternet.” “On the one hand, a small band of huge global technology companies have achieved a scale and influence that dwarfs most countries, even as they have shown insufficient concern for public welfare,” Kirkpatrick wrote. At the same time, “an existential split over the internet has emerged between nations. Is it a vehicle for freedom and the empowerment of individuals?” as the U.S. and Europe have generally believed, “or is it a means for state control, surveillance, and the muzzling of political speech?” as China notably practices, with countries like Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Hungary leaning in that direction. The risk, he concludes, is that the internet becomes balkanized and loses its global potency. In the shadow of the Big Tech companies, “we are living in a commercial zone that lacks any regulatory standards,” said Dipayan Ghosh, a fellow in the platform-accountability project at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “Tradition in this country has always been to put the markets first,” Ghosh said. With the rise of Facebook and Google, we have seen the emergence of a dominant business model involving several insidious factors: “compelling platforms fostering addiction,” the “uninhibited collection of data on users,” and “the creation and refinement of algorithms that are sophisticated and opaque,” he said. With companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon dominating their fields, “you could make the case that in each of these silos is a monopoly and potentially damaging our media ecosystem,” said Ghosh, who said that citizens should call for establishing some borders around those business models “to give the consumer some power back.” Indeed, he predicted “over the next year we’re seeing a tsunami of regulation coming to Silicon Valley, from around the world. I hope the industry can come together with legislators for some improvements in transparency.” In terms of totalitarian countries building walls to separate themselves from the internet, what’s the worst scenario? “The one I’m most worried about is that countries see a security threat,” said Scott Malcomson, director of special projects at the Strategic Insight Group. “They see a threat to their physical safety” from losing control of the web, he said. “Once you get onto that escalator, it’s hard to get off.” Will Tech Unify or Divide? Bank of America’s Bessant, who warns of technology’s tendency to race ahead of our ability to deal with the effects, said, “We have to choose the path of good, but it won’t be the path of least resistance.” Of particular concern, she said, is a worsening of income inequality. “I’m optimistic by nature,” she noted, but “what happens when we’re 5G [wireless] enabled and all of us have five to six devices?” she asked. “What happens in parts of the world that can’t afford it? Rich kids will have it, but poor kids won’t. From the outset, that has to be unacceptable to us.” Banks should care about the widening economic divide because one of their core missions is “democratizing the safety of money. We have to stand for equality and justice,” she said. That’s a practical concern too, since banks do better in societies with economic diversity. “We know that vibrant markets are better for banking.” Bessant said that even bankers worry about the economic fallout of technology. “Whenever you use the word transformation in front of an employee, they think, ‘Yeah, you’re going to transform me out of a job.’” That’s one reason she has a monthly conference call with thousands of employees, during which they can ask questions freely and anonymously.
Best Buy’s New Chief Shows Promising Career Path for Female CEOs
BY fromdayone April 25, 2019When Corie Barry was named the new CEO of Best Buy on April 15, her route to the top drew attention as a promising career path up through the glass ceiling. Barry had been the Minnesota-based company’s chief financial officer (CFO), a post increasingly occupied by women. The number of female CFOs among the S&P 500 and Fortune 500 rose to 84 last year, an all time high, reported Bloomberg, calling Barry’s promotion “a positive sign for the rising number of women who are taking on finance jobs at the largest U.S. companies.” The number of women CEOs among the Fortune 500 has been rising steadily and reached an all-time high of 32 in 2017, but slid back to 24 last year. Barry, 44, takes over from Hubert Joly, 59, who is credited with rescuing the company during his seven-year tenure, a time of massive disruption in the retail industry. Barry, who led the company’s pivot into services, including tech help for consumers, will face the challenge of keeping that momentum going. “There’s no room for mediocrity in retail,” she said in a call with reporters. “Anytime it’s easier to do something digital—whether that’s booking a plane ticket or purchasing a TV—your expectations as a customer are constantly rising.” Not long after Barry’s promotion was announced, the largest U.S. banking company, JPMorgan Chase, announced the elevation of two women to top positions. Marianne Lake, currently the bank’s CFO, was promoted to CEO of the bank’s consumer-lending operations, while Jennifer Piepszak was promoted to CFO. “For years, Lake’s name has come up as a potential successor to the company’s current CEO Jamie Dimon, which would make her the first female chief executive officer of a U.S. bank,” reported Forbes. Piepszak’s promotion, meanwhile, adds another potential contender to that succession race.
Does Your Team Leader Matter More Than Your Corporate Culture?
BY fromdayone April 15, 2019While most self-respecting corporations tout their corporate culture as an important recruiting tool, a new book makes the case that culture can’t be reliably measured across big organizations. For a new, research-driven book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World, from Harvard Business Review Press, authors Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall asked employees at many different companies to evaluate statements like, “At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me,” and, “Do I have the chance to use my strengths every day?” to evaluate the workers’ experience. The authors found that within most companies, the answers varied greatly from department to department. In an interview with HuffPost, Buckingham, who studies people and performance at the ADP Research, said the celebrated rankings of “best companies to work for” serve a valid purpose, but more attention should be paid to Individual leaders, especially by prospective job seekers. “For an individual employee, it means the most important thing for you is your local team. Find out as much as you can, and whenever you get worried that the team leader you’re joining is somebody that you can’t click with or don’t trust, take that really seriously,” said Buckingham. Top executives at a company, and their vision, are important too, since it’s hard to work for an organization where you don’t respect the leadership. However, “your actual experience of working is the day-to-day people who just keep showing up every day, working next to you and bringing their work and bringing themselves,” Buckingham told Huffpost. “The good news is it’s much easier to control the experience on a team than it is to try to shift an entire aircraft carrier of a company.”