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rachelhouterman | January 21, 2019

Why Microsoft Is Spending $500 Million on Affordable Housing

An affordable-housing crisis has hit many big cities in the U.S., but for tech hubs that have experienced rapid expansion, the shortage has hit much harder. In an almost unprecedented move, Microsoft has stepped up to the problem by pledging $500 million toward affordable-housing development in the place it calls home, the Seattle area. The housing shortage has been a side effect of tech-hub growth from the Bay Area to Brooklyn, where tech companies attract many well-paid workers, who drive up the cost of housing. At the same time, many middle- and low-income workers have seen their income failing to keep pace with the rising cost of living. The crisis has raised expectations that the tech giants need to get involved in responding to it. “This is a big problem. And it’s a problem that is continuing to get worse," wrote Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, and Amy Hood, its chief financial officer, in a corporate blog post last week. "It requires a multifaceted and sustained effort by the entire region to solve. At Microsoft, we’re committed to doing our part to help kick-start new solutions to this crisis.” Microsoft plans to lend $225 million of the total to public and private developers to build middle-class housing, $250 million towards low-incom San Francisco recently passed a bill to tax big employers to help fight homelessness (Photo by Vladimir Kudinov on Unsplash) e housing, and $25 million in philanthropic grants to local organizations that fight homelessness. As the loans are repaid, Microsoft said it would lend it back out again. By spreading the money across many projects, the company hopes that the initiative will produce tens of thousands of units. The new housing isn't intended only for Microsoft workers, but for the community at large. "Of course, we have lots of software engineers, but the reality is that a lot of people work for Microsoft. Cafeteria workers, shuttle drivers. It's is a supply problem, a market failure," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told a meeting of journalists last week. Other tech giants have taken different approaches to the problem, sometimes producing intense public-policy debates. Last year, Seattle-based Amazon successfully lobbied against a proposal to tax large businesses to help pay for homeless services and housing, on the grounds that it would put a damper on job creation. But in November, voters in San Francisco approved a similar measure, an initiative supported by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff but opposed by Twitter chief Jack Dorsey. In getting involved in the housing market, Microsoft is stepping in where government has stepped back in recent years, as uban-policy journalist Emily Badger writes in the New York Times: "...The fact that a tech company has to step in to help ensure the development of affordable housing points to a long-building reality nationwide: The federal government has largely retreated from this role. The government spent about three times as much on housing programs in the 1970s as it does today, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. ... Over this time, federal resources have increasingly shifted away from subsidizing the construction of affordable housing to subsidizing renters who find housing in the private market. And now most new below-market-rate housing is built not by public agencies, but by nonprofit developers leveraging tax credits." As Microsoft's Smith and Hood wrote in their blog post: “If we’re going to make progress, we’ll all need to work together as a community. We recognize that Microsoft is in a unique position to put the size of its balance sheet behind this effort. But we believe that every individual and every business, large and small, has a responsibility to contribute." Rachyl Houterman is a reporting intern at From Day One and attends journalism school at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. In her free time, she enjoys exploring national parks, hiking, and reading

Opinion

Why Social Purpose in Business Will Rise in Importance in 2019

Guest Post As the world celebrated New Year’s recently, I can imagine a resolution on the minds of many business executives: bring greater purpose to work in 2019. Across every dimension of the economy, there is a growing movement to integrate business strategy and social purpose. Investors are now measuring environmental and social impacts alongside financial returns. Companies are developing new products with the simultaneous goals of creating shareholder and societal value. And consumers are increasingly expressing their values through their buying decisions. Indeed, our colleagues at Deloitte recently published a report on the rise of social purpose in business, indicating that 77% of business leaders now see “social impact” as “important or very important” to their company strategy. What is behind this rise in socially conscious business? And how do we accelerate the movement from here? The Rise of Social Purpose in Business Three influences are driving the private sector to do well and do good, together: 1. Top talent is demanding purpose at work. The greatest driver of change in business today is coming from our economy’s most important ingredient: human capital. Top talent is demanding jobs where they can make a difference and make a living. More than nine in ten students in our business schools, according to a survey, now say they want to learn about social and environmental issues as a core part of their education. More than half the students in the survey said they seek to explicitly find a career in the private sector where they can make a difference. Indeed, a majority of students in the poll said they're even willing to take a 15% pay cut to find a company that aligns with their values. Numerous theories exist for why this change in expectations is taking place, but I find the most convincing answer to be that the rising generation of talent is finding a new source of identity and meaning amidst the decline of traditional guideposts. The old saw in the U.S. is that people find their identity in “God, family, and country.” But that norm is quickly changing: one intergenerational survey found that millennials were about half as likely as their elders to rate religion and being American as an important part of their personal identity. At the same time, this generation has a greater connection between their identity and their career than ever before. As professional identity takes greater priority, employees are demanding that what they do every day for their careers aligns with their core values as people. 2. Business is viewed as better positioned to solve social challenges. At the same time that talent wants to find purpose at work, business is emerging as the last best hope for solving urgent social challenges. In the U.S., business is now more “trusted” for information than government sources and news media. And it’s simultaneously viewed as more effective than government in leading change; in the minds of employees and consumers alike, this greater trust and effectiveness comes with a responsibility to take action. Photo by Rawpixie/Unsplash.com 3. Social media is forcing business to take a stand. Alongside changing perceptions of the role of business in society, social media is holding business accountable in new ways. After the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, for example, Twitter lit up with news of which companies would still be sending CEOs to the so-called “Davos in the Dessert” summit in Saudi Arabia and which companies would be withdrawing. Companies could not be neutral; sending a leader to the summit would be seen by employees and customers alike as a failure to stand up to an authoritarian government's civil-rights abuses. In this new social-media environment, many companies are even taking stands on controversial social issues. For decades, the conventional wisdom has been that CEOs and the companies they lead do not enter this territory. But that wisdom is quickly being replaced by a new reality where CEOs and companies are taking stands on issues that matter to their business, to their employees, and to their consumers. Investors are still making sense of whether this new trend is good for the bottom line. In the three months immediately following its Colin Kaepernick ad, Nike saw a sales increase of 10%. Meanwhile, Dick's Sporting Goods saw a 3% decline in same-store sales following its more restricted approach to gun sales after the Parkland school shootings. But the sporting-goods chain's CEO Ed Stack has been unwavering amidst this decline. “I don’t really care what the financial implication is,” he said, because it was the right thing to do. What Comes Next: Changing Business Education All signs point to the rise of social purpose in business accelerating in the years ahead. Early studies of Generation Z indicate even greater commitment to integrating purpose into their careers. Meanwhile, the greatest challenges of our time, from climate change to poverty, require greater business involvement—not less—in designing social solutions. But a key challenge is that businesses do not currently have the talent they need to fully deliver on their social purpose; only half of companies currently say they are “ready or very ready” to execute on their citizenship and social impact vision. At Loyola, where I teach business ethics, we see this gap in talent as a charge to design new educational programs to prepare executives of the future. We aim to equip them with the full toolkit to lead business for good. Last fall, we gathered business school deans from across the U.S. to meet with Chicago’s corporate leaders and collectively identified a need to be even more intentional in business school-curriculum around preparing students to simultaneously solve for business and social value. Energized by that conversation, we are developing new educational programming in our MBA program at Loyola to equip purpose-driven professionals with the skills, values, and networks to do well and do good in their careers. We see this focus on marrying profit and purpose in business education as just the beginning of developing the business leadership of the future. As the private sector continues to move toward a tipping point where purpose is a “must have” for all businesses, we see a future where all business education is about achieving environmental, social, and financial goals, together. Seth Green is the founding director of the Baumhart Center, an interdisciplinary center at Loyola University Chicago that equips executives and students with the business tools to accelerate social impact.

sethgreen | January 17, 2019

rachelhouterman | January 16, 2019

Risk vs. Reward: When a Brand Tackles a Social Issue

Traditionally, most consumer brands have avoided taking positions on hot-button social issues, but several have decided lately that the risk is worth the reward, especially when appealing to a particular demographic. Consumer-brand giant Procter & Gamble Co. decided to be a part of the #MeToo conversation this week when it released its new Gillette razor commercial tackling “toxic masculinity.” The commercial takes a spin on Gillette’s longtime tagline “The Best a Man Can Get” by challenging the old saying “boys will be boys” and asking “Is this the best a man can get? Is it? We can’t hide from it. It’s been going on far too long. We can’t laugh it off, making the same old excuses.” The commercial shows examples of bullying and sexual harassment, along with examples of enlightened men intervening in such behavior. A short-film version of the ad is approaching 12 million views on YouTube. The ad has received both praise and backlash, with some customers saying the ad pathologizes men in general. The TV personality Piers Morgan criticized the ad on Twitter, calling it "pathetic" and "a direct consequence of radical feminists who are "driving a war on masculinity." While the ad may alienate some customers, marketing experts said it may appeal to younger audiences, who are attracted to socially responsible companies. Pankaj Bhalla, Gillette brand director for North America, told the Wall Street Journal: “This is an important conversation happening, and as a company that encourages men to be their best, we feel compelled to both address it and take action of our own. We are taking a realistic look at what’s happening today, and aiming to inspire change by acknowledging that the old saying ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ is not an excuse.” P&G has shown a willingness to wade into social controversy with a positive or progressive message, notably with its "Like a Girl" ad campaign for the feminine-care brand Always. Its brand Gillette has reason to be aggressive in getting attention, since it faces competition from upstart competitors like the Dollar Shave Club. "They are smart people, they do so much research," New York marketing expert Rob Baiocco told NBC News about P&G. "They're making a decision on who they're appealing to. Millennials care if a company does good."

fromdayone | January 11, 2019

Reach beyond your bubble—and four other ways to build a purposeful business

One of the most overlooked opportunities in business today is the idea of reaching beyond your bubble, for example by building unlikely partnerships. One such instance occurred when National Geographic wanted to expand its reach, so it began working with Fox Cable Networks on a new television channel, gaining from Fox's expertise. “Most nonprofits wouldn’t think about approaching a large media entity with an idea like that, but it’s turned out to be a remarkably successful through the years,” author Jean Case told Fast Company's Ben Paynter in a story about her new book, Be Fearless: Five Principles for a Life of Breakthroughs and Purpose. Case is the CEO of the Case Foundation, a funding organization that has given more than $100 million over two decades to businesses and nonprofits that use innovation to make social change. Case is the chairwoman of the National Geographic Society and her husband is Steve Case, the former CEO of AOL. The author based her book in part on research at the foundation into the qualities of entrepreneurs who created transformations or found breakthroughs, she said. Besides reaching beyond one's bubble, she found that success stories had four other ingredients: make a big bet; be bold, take risks; make failure matter; and let urgency conquer fear. Among her examples, writes Paynter: Astro Teller, the head of X, Google’s moonshot factory, learned to openly encourage failure because it provides concrete direction when building things like self-driving cars. Neil Blumenthal, the cofounder and co-CEO of Warby Parker, drew from his own background and experience as director of a nonprofit to build his seemingly risky buy-one, give-one online glasses company. As an MBA student, Shazi Visram, the founder and CEO of organic food company Happy Family, saw friends struggling to find or make their own healthy baby food, so she started her own brand, complete with a larger social initiative to deliver healthy food to more children around the world.

Stephen Koepp | January 09, 2019

How the new Dallas Mavericks CEO is cleaning up a #MeToo mess

NBA team owner Mark Cuban, best known for his swagger and combativeness both court side and on TV's Shark Tank, was in an uncharacteristically vulnerable position early last year. A Sports Illustrated story in February had uncovered a "corrosive" work environment under former CEO Terdema Ussery, including multiple examples of sexual harassment and cover-ups of the behavior. A follow-up report commissioned by the team resulted in a blistering 43-page report about chronic abuses at the company, some of them fostered by Cuban himself. Given the need for urgent changes, the team recruited Cynthia ("Cynt") Marshall, the recently retired head of human resources for AT&T, to become the team's new CEO. Bloomberg Businessweek reports on how she's remaking the corporate culture: Before her first day on the job, Marshall drafted a 100-day turnaround plan. It consisted of four parts: modeling zero tolerance, creating a playbook for women in the organization, transforming the culture, and improving operational effectiveness, to be tackled in that order. After starting she arranged for counselors to help the staff cope with what had happened—both the toxic culture and the public cloud surrounding it. She started a hot line for employees to submit anonymous reports of improper office conduct. ... And she created new jobs and filled open ones, bringing in a new head of human resources and a chief ethics and compliance officer. As part of her plan, the team assembled the Dallas Mavericks Advisory Council, known as D-Mac, a brain trust of 26 local leaders, to give feedback and advice to team management. Are Marshall's efforts paying off? "All I can tell you," Cuban told Bloomberg Businessweek in an email, is "Cynthia has done an amazing job."

Stephen Koepp | December 28, 2018

Why Companies Are Trying a Four-day Workweek

The five-day workweek is so engrained in business tradition that it's hard to imagine it ever changing. But what if those cherished three-day weekends that pop up a few times a year were to become standard practice? According to advocates of a four-day workweek, the results could be lower job stress, less burnout, better employee retention, and even higher productivity. Some companies are giving it a try. "Savvy employers are catching on to the fact that employees are increasingly demanding better work-life balance and the opportunity to get work done at non-traditional places and times. The four-day workweek is a perfect example of that," Jim Link, the chief of HR for North America at global recruitment agency Randstad, told CNBC. Wildbit, a Philadelphia software company that creates tools like Postmark, has been experimenting with a four-day workweek, with Fridays off, for the past year and a half. "When we reviewed our first year of four-day weeks, we realized we launched more features than the previous year," company co-founder Natalie Nagele told Fast Company. "The real value of a four-day week comes from healthy pressure and forced downtime. Since we know we only have four days to get our work done, we work smarter to avoid distractions and cut through the procrastination." Of course, Americans once worked horrendously long hours, with 100-hour weeks common in industrial work in the late 19th Century. Labor unions began demanding shorter hours at the turn of the century, which started to become the norm after Henry Ford established a five-day, 40-hour workweek for his auto plants in 1926. Congress made it the law in 1940. But since then, the American workweek has crept back up, thanks to constant digital connectedness, demanding industries, and the growth of contract work. In a 2014 Gallup poll, workers surveyed said they work an average of 47 hours a week, with many salaried workers saying they put in 60 hours. America's most notorious workaholic, Elon Musk, tweeted last month about his companies SpaceX and Tesla: "There are way easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week," prompting a social-media backlash. (Photo by iStock by Getty Images) Indeed, Musk has become a poster boy for the perils of overwork. Excessive hours are taking a toll on health and family life, according to Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In his book Dying for a Paycheck, published last March, Pfeffer points to work stress as a leading cause of chronic illness, including cardiovascular disease. "I want this to be the Silent Spring of workplace health," said Pfeffer in an interview about his book for the business school's website. "We are harming both company performance and individual well-being, and this needs to be the clarion call for us to stop." Pfeffer cites a term coined by an academic colleague, "social pollution," to describe the effects of excess job stress on life outside the workplace. "The work hours that companies are demanding of their employees are causing the breakup of marriages, burdens on raising children, and general disruption to family life. And the family unit is an important source of social support." Can companies shorten the workweek and stay competitive? The job-search site FlexJobs performed an analysis of 50,000 U.S. companies' job postings to see which ones offered flexible work. Among those fields most likely to be open to a shorter workweek, according to the study: sales, computer and IT, medical and health, customer service, and education and training. Experiments with a shorter workweek have become a global phenomenon. Jan Schulz-Hofen, founder of the Berlin-based project-management software company Planio, introduced a four-day week to the company’s 10-member staff earlier this year. “It is much healthier and we do a better job if we’re not working crazy hours,” he told Reuters. “I didn’t get less work done in four days than in five," Schulz-Hofen said, "because in five days, you think you have more time, you take longer, you allow yourself to have more interruptions, you have your coffee a bit longer or chat with colleagues. I realized with four days, I have to be quick, I have to be focused if I want to have my free Friday.” While a move to the four-day workweek is generally seen as a cutback in hours rather than pay, the ad agency Grey New York reportedly launched a program earlier this year to allow staff to work a four-day week for 85% of their full-time salary. Companies experimenting with a four-day week say that its takes some adjustment, including a reduction in meetings and more advance planning. At Wildbit, the company realized they needed to make some modifications in their schedule, with some workers getting Monday off and others taking off Friday, for consistent coverage. Said co-founder Nagele: "We can't really tell our customers we're closed on Fridays." Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time

Michael Stahl | December 10, 2018

The Search for Fairness in the New Ride-hailing Economy

By Michael Stahl Since app-based, ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft arrived in cities across the U.S., they’ve become wildly popular with users, while creating a whole new class of laborers. Buying into the work-when-you-want benefit, and using their own cars as built-in capital, hundreds of thousands of people have enlisted as drivers. But while both Uber and Lyft now earn billions in annual revenue, many of their drivers have faced financial struggles. The companies classify drivers as independent contractors and, thus, these workers are not subject to many of the same rights as full-time employees, or even part-timers. Minimum-wage laws, for example, don’t apply to independent contractors, and with the influx of ride-sharing cars on city streets, drivers have seen their take-home pay decline. One recent study found that Uber drivers’ wages are, on average, below minimum wage—though the company disputed the study’s findings. Representatives of both Uber and Lyft say they want drivers to make a living wage as company operatives. However, the situation has become a case study in how disruptive technologies and innovative business models are reconciled with real-world fallout. In this case, elected officials in New York City found themselves under intense political pressure to mitigate the impact on low-income workers, even as the ride-hailing services provided new job opportunities. In August, Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law a package of five bills regulating ride-hailing companies. In making New York the first large U.S. city to take such measures, the legislation set a wage floor, ensuring drivers earn at least $17.22 an hour, and capped the number of for-hire vehicles for one year. The latter measure was put in place so that the city’s Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC) could study the impact of ride-sharing services and decide on future prospective regulations. After a vote this month, the TLC approved new pay standards for app-based car services, including Uber, Lyft, Via, and Gett. Previously, app-based vehicle drivers were compensated on the basis of the number of rides with a passenger they completed, and how much time each of those trips took. But among other changes, drivers will now be paid based on a trip’s mileage, length of time, and the average percentage of time a company’s drivers actually have passengers in the car. The TLC says this new pay formula will boost drivers’ annual earnings by $10,000 a year. By raising economic cost of providing the service, the commission also hopes to re-level the playing field in the competition between the new ride-hailing services and legacy taxi and livery-cab companies. Drivers for those organizations have suffered dramatically from that competition, with a number of operators even committing suicide because of their financial woes. Uber says that it wants its drivers to earn a living wage, but says that New York City's new legislation is flawed. (Photo courtesy of Uber) The Independent Drivers Guild (IDG), which represents over 70,000 for-hire vehicle operators in New York City, had organized a campaign calling for a minimum pay rate for app-based drivers. The group praised the TLC’s new rules. “All workers deserve the protection of a fair, livable wage,” said Jim Conigliaro, Jr., founder of the IDG, said in a statement, “and we are proud to be setting the new bar for contractor workers’ rights in America.” Uber and Lyft were critical of the new legislation. Jason Post, director of public affairs for Uber, said the move represented a “poor implementation” of a driver pay-rate formula that “will lead to higher than necessary costs for riders,” according to a statement. “Uber supports efforts to ensure that full-time drivers in NYC—whether driving with taxi, limo or Uber—are able to make a living wage, without harming outer borough riders who have been ignored by yellow taxi and underserved by mass transit,” Post said in the statement. According to Post, the TLC’s rules “do not take into account incentives or bonuses forcing companies to raise rates even higher.” In a statement of its own, Lyft agreed that “all drivers should earn a livable wage,” and that the company is committed to helping drivers “reach their goals.” The company added, “Unfortunately, the TLC’s proposed pay rules will undermine competition by allowing certain companies to pay drivers lower wages," and will discourage drivers "from giving rides to and from areas outside Manhattan." Lyft said that calculating pay on a per-ride basis rather than per-week “incentivizes drivers to take more short rides,” which will lead to increased traffic in already high-volume areas. “These rules would be a step backward for New Yorkers, and we urge the TLC to reconsider them.” The bottom line for consumers is that they are likely to pay a little more for their rides, and maybe wait a little longer for their cars. The tradeoff, elected officials hope, will be a more sustainable for-hire vehicle economy and economic justice for low-income workers. But the legislation raises new questions. Could New York City’s laws set a new nationwide standard? Will the highly-capitalized Uber and Lyft challenge them in court? The legislative experiment will be closely watched, since it's only the first chapter in sorting out the effects of this economic innovation.

fromdayone | November 30, 2018

Founder of Panera Bread: companies wrongly favor shareholders over other constituents

In a time when shareholders expect quick turnarounds on their investments, it can be difficult for CEOs to feel empowered to favor their many other constituents. Panera Bread founder Ron Shaich spoke to the New Yorker’s Sheelah Kolhatkar about what it’s like to deal with those pressures, and why we need to build a business culture that promotes long-term investment. Kolhatkar explained the short-term pressures today’s CEO’s face: Wall Street has embraced the idea that companies exist solely to serve the holders of their stock. Under this way of thinking, managers of companies should focus their actions on driving short-term value for their shareholders, and should pay far less (or no) regard to other constituents who may have a stake in the business, such as employees, customers, or members of the community. Shaich went on to explain some of the reasons why that type of thinking can be dangerous for companies and communities: Stock owners have no public accountability for what the company does, and no responsibility, as executives do, to place the company’s interests above their own. The costs of prioritizing shareholders’ interests are borne by the company, and by society as a whole, which is robbed of innovations, jobs, and tax revenue. After Panera encountered pressure to expedite return on investment (ROI), Shaich took the company private 2017 to protect its constituents, values, and vision. Shaich also stepped down as CEO at that time to focus on promoting long-term investment and value-building in the business world. In order to move forward in business and society, long-term thinking and commitment are essential, Shaich said: We say we want GDP growth, but GDP doesn’t come simply from a sugar high of tax cuts. GDP growth only comes from innovation and productivity increases. And innovation and productivity increases occur because people make commitments and they make transformative events.

Kara Cutruzzula | November 18, 2018

The Secrets to Building a Better, More Purposeful Team

Many companies have a Cyclops problem, often narrow-mindedly seeing only what’s in front of them. So then how do businesses today build diverse, inclusive, purposeful teams? The answers come from a few different sources, according to the lively and informative panel “Building a Purposeful Team” at the From Day One conference, featuring experts with deep knowledge of creating diverse teams. But let’s start with the benefits: not only do inclusive teams bring a greater breadth of knowledge and backgrounds helpful for finding solutions, but for the bean counters among us, diversity also has a significant impact on the bottom line. Khalil Smith, practice lead of diversity and inclusion at the NeuroLeadership Institute, pointed out that diverse teams generate returns inside their organizations, highlighting that a large percentage of patents are developed by immigrants. (Research proves this out: More than one-third of individuals who have contributed to technological innovation in the U.S. are born outside the country, according to Fortune.) Companies that pursue diversity become more attractive to a broader array of job seekers, as well. Job candidates armed with that knowledge embrace businesses that champion diversity and tend to turn their backs on those stuck in the 20th century. “Candidates are doing the research,” said Jennifer Abbondanza, vice president of corporate initiatives for NBCUniversal’s Office of Diversity & Inclusion. “They know who gets it and are doing inclusion,” but it’s still the company’s responsibility to create an environment where people of all types feel comfortable enough to speak their mind. “That’s what is going to curate the best ideas and decision-making,” she said. Attracting a Broad Base of Candidates Increasing the talent pool starts with the job description, said Penda Aiken, president of leading staffing agency Penda Aiken Inc., and this is reinforced by the company mission and description. “The culture also needs to make employees feel like the company has social responsibility. It goes beyond lip service,” she said, pointing out the recent internal crisis at CBS, which saw the ousting of longtime executives. “What is the company culture and how is that being backed by leadership?” How to Communicate Company Culture Projecting this culture—and living by its high standards—is crucial, said David Raper, senior executive of corporate citizenship at IBM, global markets. “It starts at the top with the view of not just the company, but what sort of society are we as a company creating, internally and externally?” The next trick, then? Building processes to carry out the mission. Harnessing Data to Make Decisions Over at NBCUniversal, Abbondanza uses data to inform hiring culture, and works with the talent-acquisition team to research populations they want to better understand and around which they can develop strategies to counter unconscious bias. But data, of course, isn’t the end-all, be-all. As NeuroLeadership’s Smith said, there is bias inherent in AI and technology, which is primarily created by young to middle-aged white males. The people who create AI might not know where their biases are hiding. As machines churn through data sets, even that data is consciously curated by humans. “We can’t assume that artificial intelligence or machine learning is a silver bullet or will solve for all of [these unconscious biases],” he said. Training Against Bias While corporate training has long had a bad reputation for being dull or boring or locking people in a room against their will, unconscious-bias training is gaining traction—and yet still more can be done. Aiken says the diversity-recruiting process can run into a roadblock. Her staffing firm might find the best talent and arrange the interview, but ultimately the hiring manager or team decides who’s getting the gig. If hiring managers fall prey to their own biases, then “everything that’s being done to promote diversity and inclusion is for naught,” she said. The challenge with difference-focused training is that it often backfires. Research shows that it can infuriate the people it’s intended to educate—white men—while highlighting differences rather than bringing people together. The counterpoint, said Smith, is to be deliberate about training and create common goals: What are you working on collectively, and what are you coming together to do? “If you have a brain, you have bias,” he said, but if you’re not aware of your biases, you can’t mitigate them. Keeping Your Employees Happy Moderator Kristen Bellstrom, deputy digital editor at Fortune, posed this question to the group: Even when you hire the right people, why do companies still have trouble keeping women and people of color on their teams, and what can they do to fix it? Companies have to think beyond bean bags and cold-brew coffee, and inclusion goes beyond an open-office floor plan, said Aiken. What matters more is how people are treated. “Communication is critical,” she said. Successful companies emphasize social activity, and ask how they can contribute to the surrounding community. During his experience at IBM and previously at Housing Works, Raper said a culture of inclusion came from the top down. “It really did matter to the CEO. They talked about it all the time, and there were clear values at each company.” Another valuable idea is to hold an open-door policy. Ultimately, it’s about transmitting this diverse thinking into the DNA of the company. “Whether you’re a CEO or a person at the company, it’s about how to bake it into your behaviors,” he said. Abbondanza seconded the importance of communication from the top. At NBCUniversal, they have a skills-building Talent Lab and diversity elements included in their programs: “There are lot of tools in the toolkit,” she said. No one knows exactly which one is working the most, but you need to use them all.” Busting the Old Boys’ Network Where did you go to school? Who do you know? Are you someone I might want to get a drink with later? While traditional job-hiring practices can lean on antiquated questions with inherent biases for wealth and background, diving into the data can take the conversation one step further. NBCUniversal creates a healthy sense of competition toward its diversity goals, said Abbondanza, by stacking up data across teams to see how each fares. But as each panelist elaborated, the broader picture is to think about how we, as individuals, can participate in an expansion of the workforce—and beyond. Aiken noted that the primary elections, occurring the same day as the conference, will see more women of color than ever run for Senate and other political roles. In the end, creating better teams is less about networking with the same groups, and more about creating footholds in a diverse range of other networks. And that’s what they call breaking new ground. Kara Cutruzzula is a writer living in Fort Greene. Her articles, essays, and plays can be found here.

Michael Stahl | November 14, 2018

Where Computer Code Is a Language of Opportunity

Taneyah Jolly, a 16-year-old from the Bronx, knows about the gender gap in technology, but she has already acquired her first tools to overcome it. In a six-week program offered by the non-profit Girls Who Code, Jolly has learned how to write code in more than one language, how to design a website, and even how to program a robot to make its way through a maze—her personal favorite new skill. During the program, hosted in corporate settings such as AT&T’s office at Rockefeller Center, Jolly learned about the real world of the tech industry as well, through field trips and guest speakers. “We’ve had a lot of women speak about their experiences in a male-dominated field,” she said. Such an opportunity “is always helpful,” she continued, “because as girls from Girls Who Code continue these courses in college, and pursue these careers, there’s less people like us.” Changing that picture, however, is what Girls Who Code is all about. The tech industry in the U.S. needs more highly skilled workers, which means drawing on candidates as demographically diverse as possible. The U.S. is lagging behind other countries in terms of educating young people about technology and preparing them for careers. Even if a student doesn’t grow up to be a systems analyst or a web developer, learning technology skills improves problem-solving capabilities and all-around career potential. Encouraged by positive outcomes, AT&T has given Girls Who Code $4.3 million in funding since its launch in 2012 and more than $1 million to All Star Code over the past three years. “AT&T is one of our oldest and largest partners,” Ziccarrelli says. “Not only have they provided space for girls to learn, but they provide in-person role models who really bring to life the idea of what the technology industry is and the people who do it.” All Star Code, for its part, offers coding classes to underserved young men in the African-American and Latino communities, addressing their individual needs as well as society’s gaps in wealth, income and opportunity. The technology industry employs fewer black and Latino workers compared to national workforce averages, and people of ethnic minorities represent a fraction of collegians who study computer science. All Star Code enrolls hundreds of young men each year, giving the teenagers a launching pad for college and beyond. Eric Foster teaching a class at All Star Code. “I tell everyone this is the best gig ever,” he said (Photo by Natalie Keyssar, courtesy of All Star Code) Eric Foster, lead instructor of a cohort of 21 students aged 15 to 18 from the New York metropolitan area, says watching the students grow across this summer’s seven-week intensive program in Manhattan has been extremely rewarding. “I tell everyone this is the best gig ever,” Foster said. The element of the program he appreciates most is its holistic approach. Classes run weekdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with an hour break for lunch, while an additional “office hour” until 5 p.m. allows students to get one-on-one time with teachers and continue working on their individual projects. Not only are the young men learning computer programming languages like JavaScript, along with how to build web and mobile applications, but also the “soft skills” needed for advancing their careers. This includes networking, personal finance, and the college-application process. “It’s unique,” Foster says of the curriculum. “It’s not just learning and regurgitating code, it’s really about creating well-rounded young men.” His observation is borne out in the projects his students have chosen. They’re building “tools for their communities,” he says, citing examples such as an app that connects local mentors to prospective mentees and a website that helps people find others in their area who might be able to help out with particular tasks. “It’s a great introduction into the code world,” said Blake Simpkins, a 17 year old from Montclair, N.J. “It’s also shown me what it’s like to have a work schedule and a job life.” Girls Who Code Clubs Program in Montclair, NJ holds a graduation day and presentation for family and supporters on November 17, 2017. photos/ Carey Wagner Simpkins, who wants to be an entrepreneur after college, is looking forward to “demo day,” when he and his classmates will present the apps they’ve built to representatives from dozens of high-profile companies, an invaluable opportunity. Many guests from the tech world have also shared their inspirational stories of overcoming adversity to rise in the ranks. “It teaches you [that] if you apply yourself, you can actually do this,” Simpkins says of All Star Code. “I think I will carry this experience forever.” Michael Stahl is a freelance writer and editor. A former high school English teacher, he has written for Rolling Stone, Vice, the Village Voice, Narratively, Splitsider, Outside Magazine and other publications.

What Does It Mean for a Company to be ‘Good’?

With the recent stream of investor and employee letters demanding that companies start putting purpose and profit on equal footing, Techonomy’s Jeff Pundyk dove into the central question behind corporate responsibility in his article: “Can Companies be ‘Good’?” The story provides data showing that customers and companies alike see the need for values in business, not only for social good but for employee satisfaction and financial success. But when doing good is good for business, can a company’s good work be taken at face value? For Pundyk, authenticity is key. Corporate authenticity becomes clearer when a company takes a real risk. In March 2018, Citigroup stepped into one of the most contentious issues in American politics: gun control. The bank said it would not do business with retailers that did not restrict the sale of guns to those under 21, with those that sold bump stocks and high-capacity magazines or that did not perform background checks. It was a measured step, yet it had dramatic impact. Citi was a rare corporate brand willing to enter a societal debate fraught with strong opinion. AirBnb’s pledge to house 100,000 refugees and Apple’s opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration policy and data privacy advocacy stand as additional examples of companies taking authentic steps in areas in which they are qualified to speak. Earlier this year, Laurence Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s biggest investment manager, laid down a warning to the world’s CEOs: Make societal progress part of your strategic plan or suffer the consequences. According to business leaders like Fink, there is increasing need for companies to pick up slack left by failing governmental and political institutions. Their failures have left people turning to companies to solve the world’s biggest challenges. The good news is those expectations are relatively clear and easy to rank. According to an annual survey of American attitudes about corporate behavior conducted by Goldman Sachs and JUST Capital,” Techonomy reported, the No. 1 value is how a company treats its workers, followed by how it treats its customers, including its position on privacy issues. Those are followed by, in descending order of importance: how much it builds its products to benefit society; the way it affects the environment; the degree it supports local communities; whether it is creating good jobs; and whether it’s well managed and pays its fair share of taxes. When the companies fail to adhere to their stated values, employees are known to publicly hold their leadership accountable, as when 1,400 Google employees signed a letter that brought to light a secret project to build a censored search engine for China. Employee call-outs and public demand create checks and balances within this new corporate governance that seem to leave Pundyk hopeful. What makes a company good? Employees who demand it. Customers who expect it. Society that requires it.

Can Tech Help Leaders Better Understand Their Employees?

Communication is vital to success in business, but not everybody is great at it. According to LinkedIn’s 2018 Workplace Learning Report, it’s among the most in-demand soft skills in today’s business climate. General wisdom has it that technology is eroding this essential skill, making it harder and harder for people to understand each other, but CorpU CEO Alan Todd believes that it has the power to do just the opposite. Todd, founder of a Philadelphia-based company that has developed a digital leadership-development platform, writes in Entrepreneur.com that companies can—and should—leverage data produced by natural language processing technology to better understand their employees. The process is rooted in the advent of natural language processing technology, also referred to as ‘discourse analysis,’ which is the study of relationships between naturally occurring connected sentences, spoken or written. By assessing patterns in digital traces of peer-to-peer interactions or structured dialogue, executives can spot unintended consequences of new initiatives, gauge employee sentiment, understand leadership dynamics and company culture, and more. This isn't about listening in on private conversations or identifying individuals by name, but over time, patterns emerge, helping executives to spot unintended consequence, and make more informed decisions. It can help executives to unearth sentiment that shows how their communications are perceived by cohorts (e.g., segmented anonymously by role or geography) within their company. And with over 84 percent of companies embracing the importance of ‘people analytics,’ it's more important than ever to understand natural language processing and how it works. One of the key features of natural language process technology is that it mines data from interactions that employees are already having, meaning that it does not absorb valuable employee time. Its use of AI also fosters transparency; the technology creates a transparent feedback loop that gleans information from everyone, including introverts who may otherwise go overlooked in promotion processes. Perhaps more importantly than anything, it eliminates bias. Communications within and across organizations often reflect implicit and structural bias, resulting in processes that are more subjective than they are meritocratic. Leaders often pick who they want to promote based on unconscious biases. By implementing tools that derive insight from the interactions of employees using natural language processing, leaders can generate a blind view of who is contributing the most creative ideas, who casts the largest net of network influence and who has the ability to inspire their teams. The insights gleaned can help them engage and retain the best employees, regardless of gender, race or culture, to avoid lousy morale and expensive turnover

CSR Begins in the C-Suite, Extends Far Beyond

Corporate social responsibility isn’t just a trendy idea or a way to boost company PR; it has become a cornerstone of good business. Responsible and ethical practices foster goodwill and higher profits. And those effects are redoubled when employees adopt what were once C-suite values. While the idea of getting everyone from board members to executives to middle managers and workers on the same page can be daunting, there’s a business case for taking on the challenge. Writing on Entrepreneur.com, Robert Glazer, CEO of the marketing firm Acceleration Partners, makes that case and proposes some simple ideas for how to build values into the core of your company at every level. Getting employees involved can decrease turnover. A study by Benevity has shown that churn can drop by up to 57% when volunteerism and donations are part of the corporate mission. What could be better than a healthy population of engaged employees? One way to get everyone onboard with initiatives that tap hot-button issues is by grounding them in universal ideas. This technique allows companies to take steps in controversial areas without causing undue friction. For example, Jelmar President and CEO Alison Gutterman says she avoids explicitly talking about gun control by focusing on the fact that everyone can agree that children should be safe at school. Rooting work in common ground keeps everyone focused on goals that make sense to them. Glazer also says that sustainability should be as much of a goal as sales. Certainly, it makes sense to strive for profitably as a company. However, it’s critical for businesses to make firm commitments to doing good, which will add meaning for customers who sympathize with your cause. At 2920 Sleep, a direct-to-consumer mattress business, the company donates test products to local shelters to build goodwill within the community and reduce waste, as these products would otherwise end up in the landfill. Karim O’Driscoll, head of product development and operations, notes that the 2920 Sleep team also donates 1% of its revenues to green causes. “It boils down to making the commitment real for your employees and your customers,” O’Driscoll says.” Broadening your approach to include volunteer work through local non-profits helps can help strengthen employee commitment as well, Glazer wrote. A survey from Korngold Consulting reveals how much participants get from the experience. Volunteers reported that serving with people from a variety of backgrounds improved their empathy by 76 percent and their respect for these individuals’ perspectives even more. For a corporation seeking workforce buy-in for its ethical measures, this finding illustrates how important service can be.

Remote Work Saves Money—At the Expense of Collaboration

Remote work has been on the rise for the past several years: it saves money, boosts productivity, and provides flexibility for employees. But what does it do for employee engagement and job satisfaction? Writing for the Harvard Business Review, WorkplaceTrends.com founder Dan Schwabel says that what it does is a lot of harm. According to a study by Schwabel’s firm and Virginia Pulse, a third of employees globally work remote most, if not all of the time. While this cohort praises the flexibility and lack of commute, they also suffer from a sense of isolation and indifference. “After interviewing over 2,000 employees and managers globally, our study discovered two-thirds of remote workers aren’t engaged and over a third never get any face-time with their team — yet over 40% said it would help build deeper relationships. The study also found that remote workers are much less likely to stay at their company long-term. Only 5% always or very often see themselves working at their company for their entire career, compared to almost a third that never work remotely. When you don’t see or hear your colleagues over a long period of time, you can become less committed to your team and organization.” Companies like Yahoo!, Best Buy, HP, Reddit, IBM, and Honeywell have responded to growing remote worker malaise and the communication issues implicit in organizing a remote workforce by rolling back remote work programs. These companies are instead requiring employees to come into the office every day, without exception. Many companies—like Apple, Amazon, and Zurich North America—are taking things one step further. Rather than saving money through remote work policies, they’re investing in well-planned office spaces designed to promote collaboration. “These companies understand that employees’ proximity to each other matters. The closer we sit to our colleagues, the more likely we will interact with them and form the relationships that lead to long-term team commitment. Back in 1977, MIT Professor Thomas J. Allen studied the communication patterns among both scientists and engineers and found that the further apart their desks were, the less likely they were to communicate. If they were 30 meters or further from each other, the likelihood of regular communication was zero.” While extreme measures, like Yahoo! and company’s exception-less on-site policy work for some, Schwabel advocates for a practical mixture of remote and office work. “Give them the flexibility at the office, while an option to work remote part-time based on their position and needs. They need face-time even if they won’t admit it, and companies need an engaged workforce in order to retain talent and compete in the global economy.”

For Responsible Companies, Six Lessons from Facebook’s Crisis

Rarely has a company risen so fast, from startup to globe-straddling giant, and then crashed into such a storm of problems. Launched in 2004, Facebook now has 2.3 billion users around the world and its hugely profitable, with net income of $5 billion in the third quarter. Yet it faces a crisis of trust in both its ethics and its business model, thanks to a series of failures including misstatements to advertisers, a massive leak of consumer data, the use of the site to stir up deadly ethnic unrest, and the Russian disinformation campaign during the 2016 election. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Sept. 5, 2018. Photo by Tom Brenner/The New York Times/Redux Scrutiny of the company intensified after the New York Times published a story Nov. 14 that described in painful detail how Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg responded to its problems with delay, denial and deflection. “Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view,” even employing a Republic opposition-research firm “to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros,” the Times reported. How did the world’s largest social network go astray so fast, to the point where a Washington Post columnist attributed the company’s mess to “astonishing cluelessness and moral rot in the company’s top executive leadership”? And what can other companies, beholding this spectacle, learn about how to avoid such management missteps? We’ve gleaned six main takeaways: Establish Your Values Early in the Game “A crisis really evidences the core values of a company. In this case what they evidenced is further damaging to their brand,” Karen Brenner, clinical professor at New York University Stern School of Business, told From Day One. “Successful companies don’t decide what their values are in the midst of crisis.” The lack of evidence of a moral compass caught the company’s leaders without a sense of direction when the company’s problems began to mount, said Brenner. “I think it has been a very slow response to what is frankly an existential challenge to the company. They were in a period of denial for a long time and that didn’t serve them well.” Don’t Treat a Fundamental Problem as a Political One “This is the story of a company that built a machine they didn’t quite understand, couldn’t control, and tried to hide their problems because it was making them so much money,” said Times journalist Nicholas Confessore, who co-wrote the Nov. 14 story, on MSNBC. Because the company’s leaders failed to look to the root of the problems, they never confronted the contradictions in their business model. “The same thing that makes Facebook so profitable—the fact that they know everything about me and you: what we like, what we respond to, what we share—is precisely what makes it an effective machine, probably the best ever invented, for spreading propaganda and hate. That is the paradox they have right now.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees joint hearing regarding the company’s use and protection of user data, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., April 10, 2018. Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters Listen to Feedback, Wherever It Comes From Facebook’s pattern of dealing with rising criticism has generally been to go into defensive mode rather than taking action. At the Techonomy 18 conference last week in California, a panel of four experts convened to address the question, “Can Facebook Recover?,” but the company declined to send a representative, “essentially evading the dialogue that they’re created a need for,” said founder and moderator David Kirkpatrick. Venture capitalist Roger McNamee, one of the panelists, recalled how he went to meet with Facebook executives in October 2016 to voice his alarm about the epidemic of misinformation on the network as the Presidential election approached. “They were blind to feedback,” he said. Company insiders, too, raised alarms, including security chief Alex Stamos, who left the company earlier this year after his call for a more aggressive policy against misinformation was rebuffed. If Your Focus Is Too Narrow, You’ll Get Blind-sided One of the reasons Facebook grew so dominant so quickly is because it focused narrowly on the metrics of rapid growth, epitomized by the in-house motto “move fast, break things,” with the presumption that Facebook’s overall effect on society was a glowingly positive one. The obsession with growth led Zuckerberg to hyper-focus on his rivals, Eli Pariser, author of the 2011 book The Filter Bubble, told New York Times columnist Jim Rutenberg. “I just think the problems that Facebook was looking at in 2012 and 2104 were, ‘Hey, is Twitter going to each our lunch? Is Snapchat going to eat our lunch?’” Pariser said. Besides missing some of the big threats, Facebook was missing a lot of small things, whether intentionally or not, said Techonomy panelist Brian Wieser, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group. In his research, for example, he discovered the Facebook was claiming more 18-34-year-old U.S. users than the total population of that group in the country, which he called “actively misleading.” Such discoveries inspired him to compile a taxonomy of 13 different kinds of managerial problems at the company. “Sloppiness in one place suggests sloppiness in so many others,” he said. “I’ve come to the realize that the company is simply badly run.” You Need to Be Accountable, for Your Own Good One of Facebook’s core problems, experts say, is one of poor corporate governance. Facebook’s stock structure leaves most of the power in founder Zuckerberg’s hands. While he owns or controls about 15% of total shares, he has 60% of the voting shares. “No matter how poor a job Mark Zuckerberg has done lately running Facebook, he’s almost certainly not going anywhere, because he’s effectively his own boss,” wrote Troy Wolverton in Business Insider. While at least one company director, investor Erskine Bowles, warned Zuckerberg and Sandberg that the fallout from Russian misinformation would be worse than they expected, their lack of quick action underscores the importance of having “people with the courage to address the issues” in a company’s leadership, said Prof. Brenner. “It’s often when companies are successful they miss a lot of these issues, they get complacent and stop asking the hard questions.” When concern was mounting in 2016 about the role of Facebook in the President election, “Clearly, a much broader investigation should have been done, one that meets a standard of independence,” said Brenner. If You Don’t Manage Yourself, Someone Else Will Some experts have suggested that only a change in management will fix Facebook’s problems. Yale University management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld said on CNBC last week that Sandberg “probably should be replaced” and that an outside director like Bowles should replace Zuckerberg as board chairman. But the more long-ranging crackdown may come from Congress, which is growing mistrustful of tech giants in general. “As more and more information comes out about how these guys operate, it’s becoming conventional wisdom among Democrats that there is a serious policy problem here, Matt Stoller, policy director at the Open Markets Institute, told the New York Times. Stoller has called for big tech platforms to be broken up and regulated. The European Union has already made such a move with its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which went into effect this year. Analyst Wieser is betting on more government supervision to come. “If you want to bet Mark Zuckerberg vs. world governments, I am going to guess that until Facebook can acquire nuclear weapons, world governments probably win, and so it does enhance the chances of regulation.” In an hour-long videoconference broadcast to Facebook employees last week, Zuckerberg denied any cover up of the company’s problems but acknowledged that many of the criticisms had been fair and important. While Facebook also says it has redoubled its efforts to address its issues, some observers think the company needs to look even deeper into itself and its role in society. “This business model is extremely dangerous for society,” said McNamee at the Techonomy conference. “I don’t believe [the problems] can be fixed without changes in the business model.”