The Roots of the Rage Against the Healthcare Machine
BY Bill Saporito December 14, 2024Most of us, sad to say, realized last week that we can comprehend the anger that drove 26-year-old Luigi Mangione—a privileged Penn grad and tech whiz—to allegedly murder Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, as the executive walked alone to an annual investors meeting in Manhattan.UnitedHealthcare, part of United Healthcare Group, which ranks No. 4 on the Fortune 500, is what’s known in the industry as a payer. That’s a term that might enrage a lot of people, especially anyone whose claim has been turned down for any of seemingly a million reasons and therefore is on the hook for medical costs. The payers are even using AI to process claims and make denials, taking humanity out of the process of caring for humans. Doctors say they are fed up with fighting insurance companies about providing needed medical treatments to their patients. In a manifesto found in his backpack after he was arrested, Mangione proclaimed: “These parasites had it coming.”The source of the shooter’s motivation is complicated. A product of a wealthy, well-connected Maryland family, a computer-engineering graduate with a master’s from Penn, he was social, and loved playing computer games and designing them. But he also suffered from spinal problems and severe pain that had led to spinal-fusion surgery. His reading list included anti-corporate tomes, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s screed. Six months prior to the shooting, he cut himself off from family and friends. They begged him to get in touch but he apparently went someplace very dark instead. He emerged a murderer, police say.The coldblooded killing of a corporate executive triggered a similarly coldblooded wave of public vitriol directed toward Thompson and his company. Yelp reviews from hell itself. Wanted posters with pictures of health-insurance executives began popping up on Manhattan lamp posts.We know the drivers of this heartlessness toward Thompson and his peers. Healthcare bills are a leading cause of personal bankruptcy. And our money does not buy healthiness, which Mangione noted in papers found in his backpack. The U.S. spends more per capita on healthcare than any other nation, yet in medical outcomes we are not even in the top 10. In a recent Gallup poll, the segment of Americans who rated healthcare quality as “good” or “excellent” dropped 10 percentage points since 2020, to 44%. Not surprisingly, respondents rated healthcare insurance coverage even worse: 28% rate coverage as excellent or good as opposed to 41% in 2012, the high point, says Gallup.One winner in all of this: UHG, which earned a net profit of about $6 billion. That was in the third quarter alone.The vicious response to Mangione’s alleged actions reflects both the state of social media and the state of corporate America. The former allows anonymous individuals to display the most vile aspects of human nature—and then amplifies them. The latter reflects industry concentration that leaves consumers with fewer choices, and to some degree, powerless and voiceless. And angry about it.That’s true whether you are buying eggs or chickens in the supermarket—and remember that food-price inflation helped drive voters to Donald Trump—cell-phone service or health insurance. The McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., where Mangione was arrested after an employee called the cops on him was flooded with negative reviews, as if a fast-food chain was part of the corporate conspiracy to suppress consumer discontent. Et tu, Mickie D?The UnitedHealthcare headquarters in Minnetonka, Minn., lowered its flags to half-staff last week honor of CEO Brian Thompson, who was fatally shot outside a hotel in Manhattan. (Kerem Yücel/Minnesota Public Radio via AP)Mangione spoke for many of these disenfranchised consumers, and in the worst possible way. You know this feeling of being seemingly without options. I’ve witnessed it at airports, when an angry, disgruntled—and clueless—passenger loudly informs a gate agent that “I’ll never fly this airline again.” Fat chance. You will, in fact, fly this airline again or you can drive across the country because Delta, United, American and Southwest control 80% of domestic airline traffic.This frustration is one reason that assaults on airline employees skyrocketed in the “revenge travel” period that followed the Covid pandemic. People were jammed into full flights, hit with multiple charges for seat selection, checked bags, early boarding, or whatever else the carriers could dream up. Is it any wonder that a number of them lost their shit? The problem, once limited to an occasional belligerent drunk, became so acute that the Federal Aviation Administration had to crack down on the growing number of miscreants, in some cases fining passengers $36,000 for attacking airline personnel.The frustration is everywhere and employees are feeling it. Recently I showed up at my local Hertz station in Manhattan to pick up my rental reservation; there were no cars. So I started getting agitated—and I am now practiced at this because this wasn’t the first time Hertz came up short. I was in mid-harangue when the agent pleaded: “I’m just a minion; it’s not my fault.” Fair enough. “But who else am I going to yell at?” I asked her. We’d both been through this before. Hertz had hung us both out to dry. The shooting is also a grim new chapter in our heavily armed society. We’re all too familiar with workplace shootings—going postal–in which a disgruntled employee or former employees take lethal umbrage on his boss and co-workers for whatever bad treatment or perceived slights they might have endured. But now it is seemingly the customers who are raging for revenge.This corporate assassination is raising the risks for everyone, from customer-facing employees to the big boss. But the CEOs will be able double down on their security; the front-line people will be more or less on their own. UHG’s employees, who number about 440,000, tend to like the company they work for. Until last week, the headquarters team labored in relative anonymity in Minnetonka, Minn. Now many of them feel they are under siege, likened to criminal accomplices working for a nefarious company. As one employee said. “[W]e all do the best we can to do a good job in the system we are in.”UnitedHealth, and other health insurers, have argued for years that consumers are well-served, and satisfied, by the current system. They probably have customer surveys that endorse this view. So do airlines. So what? Clearly the status quo is unsustainable. The anger that UHG’s system has generated has done what few issues in America can do: united Democrats and Republicans. Bipartisan legislation was introduced this week to break up some of the largest healthcare conglomerates by selling off their highly profitable pharmacy-benefit managers (PBMs), the drug middlemen often blamed for high prescription prices. The three biggest ones—CVS Health’s Caremark, Cigna’s Express Scripts and UnitedHealth’s Optum Rx—control 80% of prescriptions in the U.S. “Critics complain that the conglomerates use their size and leverage to steer patients toward their own pharmacies, increasing costs for employers and government programs while driving independent pharmacies out of business,” the New York Times pointed out. Consider that the first round.This week I happened to have a lunch scheduled with the CEO of a healthcare-related tech startup, the source for a story I’m working on. He showed up without any security, and he didn’t plan to engage any. His company isn’t a “payer.” In fact, it helps corporate clients push back against the payers to lower their employee healthcare-insurance costs. Payers such as UHG hate me, the CEO told me, because he was attacking their profit machine. And Americans, as we now know, hate the payers even more.Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine whose work has also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions, the myth of the “woke” corporation, and the perils of getting technology and people misaligned.Featured photo, top: alleged murderer Luigi Mangione is escorted into a Pennsylvania courthouse this week (AP Photo/Gary M. Baranec)
If the Boss Wants You Back in the Office Five Days a Week, They Should Think Twice
BY Bill Saporito October 23, 2024In its heyday as the proto–Silicon Valley tech company, Hewlett-Packard innovated by what became known as the “next bench” syndrome. H-P was a company founded by engineers (Bill and Dave) for engineers and new products happened when one engineer asked a fellow practitioner sitting nearby if there might be something else the company could make that could be useful to him.While this ask-your-office buddy ideation might seem quaint—after all, innovation can and does come from anywhere—corporate America is now demanding a return of sorts to the days of white shirts and pocket protectors. After a long, pandemic-induced experiment with remote and then hybrid work, the people in the C-Suites are apparently lonely.More and more of them want your butt back in the office five days a week, and they are going to get their way, leaving some very unhappy employees to stew about it. According to a recent poll by KPMG, 79% of CEOs see all the professionals back at their office posts in the next three years–that’s up from 34% last year. This will be distressing news to people who moved away from corporate cities like Seattle to places such as Omaha, which tried to position itself as a low-cost haven for remote employees. At least companies are providing some perks for your five-day-a week return: unlimited amounts of hand sanitizer, for instance, and cleaning wipes. Maybe some more free food.Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is among the latest to announce that sitting in front of your laptop at home with your dog and your three year old no longer qualifies as getting it done. Some Amazon employees voiced outrage, even threatening to quit. “Go right ahead,” seems to be the response from HQ in what some have labeled a layoff by another name. Long before that, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon decreed that bankers and traders, who tend to operate in packs anyway, had to decamp from their Manhattan apartments and Manhasset manses to reoccupy the company’s pricey office buildings, especially its new HQ. Dimon’s argument is basically, “I’m not spending $100 a square foot to look at empty desks.” Nor does he believe that managers can lead effectively from home.Other financial industry bosses apparently concur. In Manhattan, where I work, office “busyness” rates reached 73.4% in August, a figure that compares occupancy to pre-pandemic levels of 2019. Nationwide, the rate is 60.4%, according to Avison Young, a real-estate advisory firm.What the Research ShowsFrom a productivity viewpoint, there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to mandate a return to the office, at least not based on academic research. The data, for the most part, points the other way. In the largest study yet of working-from-home professionals, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom found that employees who work from home two days a week are “just as productive, likely to get promoted, and far less prone to quit.” According to the job-finding site FlexJobs, employees who work at home at least part-time can save up to $6,000 annually on commuting and other costs—a back-door raise they are loath to give up.True, Bloom’s study was limited to an experiment on 1,600 employees at Trip.com, a Chinese travel agency. And an earlier study, of which Bloom was a co-author, determined that fully remote employees were 10% less productive than their office-dwelling counterparts. Meanwhile, yet another study from the University of Essex in England notes that, while remote workers there put in more hours–including 18% more after normal business hours—their average output didn’t change much. “Therefore,” the study concluded “productivity fell by about 20%.”What Most Workers WantAny survey of employees, however, will deliver the consensus that, while they enjoy being with their colleagues, they love a workplace that can be molded to their needs. Parents with kids need the hybrid flexibility, and Gen Z kids may need the socialization of the office. They both want a little of both.The kind of CEOs who get driven to work and have large private offices don’t necessarily see it that way. Nor do they seem particularly interested in the workplace data that supports the benefits of hybrid work. They’re focused on another data set: current economic data, which is now turning in management’s favor. That data shows that layoffs are up, quits are down, and the unemployment rate is ticking up, if ever so slightly. (Recent hurricanes will boost unemployment, temporarily.) The pending election might also be causing people to lower their appetite for risk and stay put.There could be more than executive ego at work here, too. If you’re the big boss, you want to be able to see and hear, in person, all the people you are bossing, even if you recede to your office sanctuary for most of the day.Which means that job holders and job seekers are no longer calling the shots the way they did in the roll-your-own days of the pandemic. In my shop, our CEO just upped the ante to three days a week in the office from two, citing the need for enhanced collaboration to tackle these particularly perilous times in the publishing industry. I get that need for collaborating on site, having worked as a print magazine editor for a couple of decades. But surrendering the now comfy confines of my home office for an additional day at the office feels like a loss.And for the germaphobically inclined, it’s not as though the pandemic is in the past; companies have just chosen to treat it that way. When I pointed out to a colleague that Covid-19 cases are rising rapidly nationwide, the response was on the order of: Yeah, but the latest wave isn’t as severe as past versions and there are now vaccines and remedies such as Paxlovid. In other words, suck it up, cowboy.The 13 million Americans employed in manufacturing might find all this contretemps about office work a bit amusing. It might be possible to say, build a transmission in your living room, but the machining noise tends to be loud. Likewise for the people working in service industries from restaurants to retail to healthcare. Sure, you can consult with a teledoc, but that’s not going to help you when you need to be pried out of your wrecked car by firefighters and EMTs. You want a first responder, not a chatbot. Nor will your garbage be picking itself up anytime soon.The Upsides of the OfficePart of me sides with the bosses. What the productivity studies can’t measure is that a significant benefit of going to the office is being at the office. Being social. Being part of a company’s culture, which is a living breathing thing, as opposed to being merely part of its labor pool. Sharing not just the work but the human interaction that attaches. Going to lunch with office friends. And yes, the water cooler gossip, even if water coolers have been displaced by kombucha or cold-brew coffee dispensers. Need we mention, too, that office romances can hardly be undertaken sans office?(One thing that isn’t coming back to the office is any semblance of a dress code. Want to show up for that meeting in shorts, a T-shirt and Crocs? Go right ahead, and I’ll try to take you seriously.)As for the office work itself, we’ve all experienced those moments when a bunch of people thrown together suddenly connect on a breakthrough idea or solve a vexing operational problem. Indeed, the power of in-person collaboration has been likened to having a free electron floating around the room, just waiting to give the particle of a fabulous idea the positive charge that gives it energy. That spark could come from a sideways glance, a brief, post-meeting chat, or simply by running into a colleague in the elevator or parking lot.There’s also a reason why companies brag about being a great place to work. Yes, you can be employed remotely, but that’s not remotely the same experience.Why We Need to Find a Creative SolutionThis current faceoff leaves office managers and HR in a bit of a quandary when top management demands to see butts in seats. Perhaps looking at the question from an either/or perspective is the wrong way to do it. What the studies on office vs. remote work can’t control for is an individual’s performance. A high-performing employee is likely to be high performing whether they are working from home, at the office or at the beach. The most successful employers will figure out the geography that suits them best.Some companies, such as the HR platform Workday, have tried to appease bosses and workers with a sort of hybrid-hybrid. The company’s “work from anywhere” approach allows workers to spend 30 calendar days in a 12-month period working from just about anywhere. They may be on to something. Think about benefits. In most firms, there’s a benefits “menu” that allows employees to select from, say, several health insurers and within those insurers a variety of plans.Maybe we need to offer menu options with remote and hybrid work–a variety of packages to people in different life stages. The parent package could offer maximum flexibility in return for extended work hours. Take your kid to soccer, but give us those two hours back when we need them. The Gen Z package could include an exercise program near the office or lunch at Chipotle; the older workers package could include a more private workspace or a wellness program. Or something called chronowork, based on a person’s’ own body rhythms, which suits someone like me, attuned to working vampire hours. Running through all of them is the option to demand that all of the people show up at the office some of the time—on demand, even.People worked in offices for centuries because a central location was the best way to organize and run a business. The advent of computer networks altered that universe, making a central location less relevant; the pandemic then completely severed the historic relationship between work and geography. Some CEOs are now trying to redraw the management map to match the 1985 version. It’s sort of like going back to fax machines. Yes, they still function, but new technology has rendered them obsolete. The hybrid model, which is inclusive of the vast variety of people and work styles today, is the new tech of business organization. It’s work that can work for everyone.Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine whose work has also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions, the myth of the “woke” corporation, and the perils of getting technology and people misaligned.(Photo by Sam Edwards/iStock by Getty Images)
Why a Software Glitch Sent Delta into a Tailspin: The Perils of Getting Technology and People Misaligned
BY Bill Saporito August 22, 2024Customer-facing airline employees are some of the most remarkable people in business. How can they not be? The workers on the ground face the annoyed, the demanding, the delayed, the furious, the not-going-anywhere-today, and the inebriated. Then they get a lunch break. Those on the jets face the entitled in the front and the cramped-and-cranky in coach.My admiration for these folks has only increased over the last decade as their ranks have been thinned by technology (with a push from the pandemic) while their tasks have been made increasingly fraught by the air-travel system in which they now toil. And in which we frequently roil.We got to see this combination of imperfect technology meeting overwhelmed staffing earlier this summer during the great CrowdStrike meltdown. Until its cybersecurity upgrade blew up, CrowdStrike was a company known mostly to sys-op jockeys and hackers. Then the company introduced a wonky software update that within hours crippled millions of servers that used Microsoft Windows and all hell broke loose.Around the world, operating systems gagged, including those of major U.S. airlines, bringing traffic to a near standstill. In the U.S., only Southwest, which seemingly still uses floppy discs to run its data systems, escaped the meltdown. With the CrowdStrike collapse, the scene soon became all too familiar: lines of people desperately trying to get somewhere, their options narrowing, their frustration widening as the hours passed. Some would be stuck for days.And among those carriers, Delta stood out for coming apart like a cheap suitcase tossed down a baggage ramp. The carrier canceled more than 5,500 flights, and at one point refused to board unaccompanied minors, creating major angst for lots of parents. Meanwhile, word got out that CEO Ed Bastian had jetted off—Ted Cruz-style—to Paris for the Olympics while his airline was frozen in place. Delta blamed CrowdStrike and Microsoft, and has threatened to sue to recover some $500 million in losses. Microsoft, in turn, blamed Delta’s outmoded technology. During the depths of the outage, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Bastian to offer assistance—talk about the ultimate Help Desk—but Microsoft says Bastian apparently didn’t respond. The carrier seemingly turned on its passengers, some of whom reported difficulty in getting hotels from Delta where they were stranded, as well as being low-balled by the refund offers being made to compensate them for lost flights and spoiled vacations. Delta’s service swoon seemed all that more severe given that the airline had reached cruising altitude in the post pandemic years, while rivals such as United and Southwest grappled more often with system freeze-ups.Using Technology to Supplant LaborYet Delta, as well as the other carriers, have been rolling the dice for years when it comes to matching people and technology. During the pandemic the carriers had to cut schedules (40% in Delta’s case) and jobs. As the nation and air travel recovered, they either didn’t—or couldn’t—rehire enough people who had left or were let go to match surging demand. (Remember “revenge travel”?) Increasingly, they relied heavily on technology to supplant labor. And they made us, the passengers, part of the labor force: encouraging carry on baggage by charging for checked bags, then introducing self-ticketing, self-check-in and self-bag-checks. Frontier even tried to eliminate its customer phone support.This latest air travel meltdown magnified an everyday incongruity that exists in the industry in that airlines are carefully configured to cope with the unpredictable—often to no avail. They try to plan for everything, from the catastrophic—a fatal crash—to the complex, such as a hurricane that threatens to spin the entire network into disarray. Then there are wars, revolutions, volcanoes, pandemics, strikes and assorted other calamities that are a regular threat to any global business, but to airlines in particular.At their vast flight operations centers, the carriers have teams ready for everything from a medical emergency on board to a rivet (or a door) coming loose on a 737 Max or a warning light on an Airbus 321 that won’t turn off. There are doctors, pilots, mechanics, meteorologists, Airbus specialists, Boeing specialists, avionics specialists, crew wranglers, airport and operations managers working 24/7 at the ops centers, and yes, people figuring out just who among us is going to get screwed when flights get delayed or canceled.Yet all of that preparation is no match for the way airlines are actually scheduled. They remain vulnerable to the phenomenon known as tight coupling, in which one unit in a system is highly dependent on the next. Cascading failure is almost a guarantee once the first fault is unleashed. Why can’t airlines prevent this from happening? The answer is that, despite the contingency planning, airlines are scheduled for optimum conditions, as though it’s always going to be sunny in Philadelphia, or Panama City or Paris. Which is not the case, of course. Worse, with load factors north of 85%, there’s little excess capacity, and little hope of a quick recovery once the system begins to implode.The contingency planning that airlines do can be undone by what they regularly come up against. Weather is by definition chaotic; technology is capable of catastrophic failure. Try building a service culture around that.Where’s the Service in the Service Economy?Although airlines are the most conspicuous examples of failing to balance people and tech, it seems to be creeping into all parts of the economy, as algorithms try to bring ever more precision to businesses. Especially in retail. The goal is to never have excess labor being employed for a single minute anywhere. In this frictionless world, there is always precisely enough help available to help you make your purchase or to get served.You know how that goes. We seem to live in a nation where there is always one fewer checkout lane open than needed (and don’t get us started on self checkout, which normally requires more than one self to operate). If you’re waiting in one of these lines, this understaffing can seem deliberate.Not too long ago, I was discussing airline operations with David Neeleman, founder of the highly successful new airline Breeze Airways (not to mention JetBlue, Azul, and WestJet) when he mentioned that he routinely passed by long lines of customers—or potential customers—at airport Starbucks. This frustrating level of service drove him to distraction—and this is a man who does not drink coffee. His point was that in an airport terminal, with scheduled flights, you can pretty much know how many people are going to be around your location at any given time. How can they not figure this out?, he asked, incredulously.Perhaps because they don’t want to: the obvious conclusion is that it’s better to be slightly understaffed than overstaffed, especially in businesses that ebb and flow during a day. In my nabe, the usual culprit is our CVS pharmacy, where the line gets 10 deep about the same time every day. Or at Chipotle, where 7 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. becomes a crap shoot as to whether your online order will be ready as the app promises. The problem? There are two hospitals nearby, and shifts are changing about then, something Chipotle’s scheduling software hasn’t seemed to have mastered. One more person-hour would do wonders, the difficulty being that you can’t schedule one person for one hour. So we wait.At Sephora, meanwhile, I seethed in a line on a Saturday afternoon with my wife as checkout terminals remained unpersoned even as the queue expanded. Spotting a manager, I asked, “Can’t you pull people off the sales floor? Isn’t everyone cross-trained?” She, of Gen Z, gave me that “okay, boomer” look before moving on. I’m still not sure whether she lacked the authority to shift salespeople to the front end, or the interest.Dissatisfied shoppers in brick-and-mortar stores are free to leave and not return, or to buy online. Dissatisfied fliers don’t have that option. How many times have I heard an angry passenger screaming, “I’m never going to fly this airline again,” at an agent and thought: Oh yes you are. And that includes Delta. The carrier may have burned some goodwill this summer, but there’s a still deep reservoir it can still draw on—at least for now.That includes its talent pool. As we have again experienced, when the technology chokes, the front-line workers bear the burden for the company, because software doesn’t hear you when you scream at it. The airlines, and many other companies, either need to invest in more dependable technology—or they need to stretch their people a little bit less.Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine, whose work has also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions and the myth of the “woke” corporation. (Photo by Panama7/iStock by Getty Images)
The Power Gap Among Labor Unions: Why Some Have New Strength–and Others Don’t
BY Bill Saporito September 19, 2023As the United Auto Workers set up picket lines last week outside of plants for General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (maker of Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge), there was a sense of familiarity, of economic history repeating itself. In times past, the UAW would roll up to a contract negotiation with all eight cylinders of its union engine roaring. There were work stoppages, but when the Big Three controlled 80% of the market, the car companies had a lot of sales to lose in enduring a long strike, so they had some willingness to compromise.Since the 1980s, though, the UAW–not to mention the United Steelworkers and other large industrial unions–have been squeezed by the global labor arbitrage that shifted work to Asia. They’ve become fewer in number, less powerful politically and forced into waves of givebacks to keep their jobs. Most galling, for the UAW, was the adoption of a two-tiered wage system—a lower rate for new hires, vs. legacy workers. The scoresheet has not been kind to labor; its share of national income has been in a long decline, one that has accelerated in this century.This year, the wealth and power pendulum has started moving the other way. The post-pandemic reordering of the global supply chain that enriched some U.S. industries–think greedflation–has given the UAW, and a few other unions the chance to muscle up again. They’re seizing the moment to demand a share of that new wealth. This is a workforce that has done everything asked of it during the pandemic to meet the needs of corporations and their customers.Which is making labor more militant, more willing to hit the bricks for better pay and benefits. We're going to see this soon in Las Vegas, where the Culinary Workers Union, 50,000 of them, may strike the major hotels and casinos if there’s no new contract. Las Vegas has been recording record month after record month of revenues since the end of the pandemic, and the unions quite reasonably expect to get a piece of those winnings. Some corporations have acknowledged as much, with the Teamsters winning a big contract with UPS. Likewise, American Airlines just settled with its pilots on a new contract in August, providing a 46% increase in compensation, as “revenge travel” hasn’t slowed. Why wouldn’t you settle with workers if your airline is filling every seat, and facing a pilot shortage over the next decade? Pilots are United and Delta have also settled. That’s the benefit of a healthy economy, when labor and management each have more to gain than lose.The economy can’t solve every labor issue. In Hollywood, both the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild have been on strike for months against the movie studios and the streaming companies. And in warehouses and coffeeshops nationwide, Amazon and Starbucks are fighting bitterly against determined unionization efforts. Every labor negotiation rests on the extent of the common interests among the two parties. In the UPS negotiation, each side had too much to lose to take a strike. Shippers had already been moving their UPS business to other carriers as talks dragged on. And with drivers now earning more than $100,000 annually in some places, the urge to walk rather than deliver wasn’t strong. So UPS and the Teamsters settled and each can claim victory. This is the same Teamsters union that refused yet more givebacks with foundering Yellow Freight, and allowed the company to go under. Yellow had been in the red for years and the union could not see a way forward. With demand for truckers still high, and Yellow’s assets going on the block, there will still options for its drivers.For the auto companies, business is great but business is also changing rapidly–and that’s where the mutual interests are parting. Detroit has been able to sell every pickup truck it can build, for instance. These are the industry’s most profitable vehicles. How much of that business is worth risking? But the switch from internal combustion engines to EVs has introduced a host of new technologies that is reordering the workplace, and the unions are wary. Transmission plants get replaced by battery plants, for example, and the automakers are placing some of those plant in less union-friendly geographies in the South. The UAW has seen this movie before, when robotics came on the scene and eventually displaced a wide swath of jobs.Yet neither side is playing hardball, it seems. The unions are picketing at three selected plants–one from each automaker, a switch from the days when it would focus attention on one company. That includes a Stellantis factory in Ohio, for instance, that makes the ever-popular Jeep. The union calls it a “standup strike.” The idea is to get the message across without crippling the entire industry. GM CEO Mary Barra, a lifelong GMer and the daughter of a GM engineer, has tried to keep the temperature low: “If you’re asking for more than the company made, I think that’s not a good position,” Barra said, but added, “I think we’re in a good position to get this done.” The gap remains wide, but that was also the case with UPS and the Teamsters.Technology is also a feature in the Hollywood strike by creatives against the studios and streamers. The actors and writers see AI technology being used to deprive them of earnings and intellectual property. Talks stalled, but there is still talk. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav tried to spread optimism, telling analysts: “We are just hopeful as a company, and I am very hopeful, that we can get that resolved. If we can get it resolved soon, then the long-term impact will be minimized.” But that optimism sounded a bit scripted, given that Warner has been willing to take a $500 million hit to earnings during the strike, and Zazlov’s lavish pay packet, $285 million over the last two years, has further impassioned workers over lavish media CEO pay.The dissonance could not be any greater in the case of Starbucks and Amazon, whose founders still exert a powerful influence on labor relations, leading to conflict. For Starbucks former CEO and chairman Howard Schultz, the battle with unions has been particularly difficult. Schultz, who grew up working class in Brooklyn, is a progressive. Starbucks pays well and has good benefits. He cares about the workforce, so he can’t understand why workers would want a union. He believes that he’s in the right position to know what they need, moreso than a union. But his view is from the top down. From that vantage point, understanding the workers’ point is view is difficult–very few business owners can do it. Henry Ford had the same stance–and his hired goons’ violent confrontation with union organizers was a turning point in UAW history.At Amazon, founder Jeff Bezos built a company by being a control freak over costs and operations and trained his senior managers that way. Unions represent a threat to that control mantra. And threatens to bring higher costs. Workers, for their part, see themselves as dehumanized labor inputs within Amazon’s system, not people. So the fight goes on, in both companies.The capital vs. labor issues this year are unique to their time–an economic situation unlike we’ve ever experienced and rapid technological developments that are rearranging traditional conflicts. The path to labor peace in the auto industry, then, may require these two old adversaries to bring more imagination and innovation to the negotiating table. Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine. Previously, worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune.(Featured photo: United Auto Workers members walk the picket line at the Ford Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich., on Sept. 18, 2023. AP Photo/Paul Sancya)
The Myth of the ‘Woke’ Corporation
BY Bill Saporito June 12, 2022“Whatever you do, lead with your values,” Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told the graduating class at Gallaudet University. Well, that leaves it wide open, doesn’t it? In Apple’s case, what values allow it to manufacture in China, a country that has crushed democracy in Hong Kong and violated the rights of millions of Uighurs on the mainland? Yet iPhones today are allowing citizens and soldiers of Ukraine to use technology to fend off the invading Russian hordes. Or consider McDonald’s, which closed some 850 stores in Russia, laying off 62,000 people. This is the same McDonald’s that is being accused by investor Carl Icahn of being complicit in ruthless treatment of pigs by vendors who supply meat for McRib sandwiches. Then there’s Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who claimed to eschew politics before tweeting, disingenuously, that he was becoming a Republican because the Democrats are the party of hate, notwithstanding the GOP affiliation with the clearly hateful and racist “replacement theory” that motivated an 18-year old domestic terrorist in Buffalo, NY, to murder 10 people. That’s not going to play well among California’s liberal Tesla owners—who now have many more EV models to choose from. And there’s no more emotional and potentially divisive topic than abortion rights. The issue is so fraught that the public relations firm Zeno advised its corporate clients to do zero–to run and hide. No, you don’t. Businesses that don’t confront such issues face the possibility that a relatively small group of white, male, you-don’t-even-have-to-say conservative legislators and regulators in states such as Texas and Oklahoma are going to dictate national policy. Which is why companies as diverse as Citigroup and Chobani quickly revised their benefits programs to include travel for out-of-state abortion services. If young people today want to work for a company that has a purpose, then defining that purpose in all its forms–political, social, environmental, racial and even local–has never been more complex for corporate America. Likewise for investors and investment companies. BlackRock has drawn fire from both conservatives for its stance on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, and from liberals for its investments in China. In Florida, the Walt Disney Co. first tried to escape the debate over that state’s so called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. But Mouse House employees, particularly its creatives, were having none of it. The company then broadcasted its dissent against the gay-bashing legislation. Disney’s support of its own LGBTQ community, in turn, made it a target for Florida’s reactionary governor Ron DeSantis, who orchestrated legislation that stripped Disney of its special tax and government status in the two Florida counties where Disney World operates. (Also potentially leaving the state on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars of bond payments.) Then DeSantis vetoed funding for a training facility for the Tampa Bay Rays in part because the team spoke up against gun violence. Apparently, the governor favors it. But Disney’s customers voted Mickey over Ron—that is, they continue to flock to the Orlando resort and watch Disney movies. Those include the thousands of LGBTQ customers who show up, and are welcomed, for unofficial Gay Days at the resorts. A Dick’s Sporting Goods store in Michigan, one of more than 700 in the U.S. In 2018, the company halted sales of assault weapons in all of its stores (Photo by RiverNorthPhotography/iStock by Getty Images) The fact that a Republican governor would try to harm a Fortune 100 company that employs more than 70,000 Floridians underscores how divisive the politics have become. The fact that consumers have largely ignored DeSantis shows that they respect thoughtful corporate decisionmaking about controversial issues. And well they should. Yet another mass shooting event in Texas, in Uvalde, once again focused attention on assault rifles. But it was following a mass shooting at Parkland high school in Florida, in 2018, when Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO Ed Stack pulled assault rifles from the company’s stores and halted gun sales to anyone under 21 years of age. That decision would cost the company some $250 million in sales initially. But Stack, a gun owner, had had enough. He told me: “After Parkland, I said, ‘We’re done. We’re not selling these guns, we’re not selling high-capacity magazines, we’re not going to sell any guns to anyone who’s under 21.’ That was it. We’re never going to change our mind on any of that.” Sales would eventually rebound because most Americans want to ban assault rifles, too. Walmart, no paragon of wokeness, made a similar call on behalf of its customers. This is a company that is now making a big investment in health care, because it can see the great need, and opportunity, among its customers and employees. To that end, Walmart recently banned cigarette sales in many of its stores even though the company, via a subsidiary, was once the largest tobacco wholesaler in the country. Selling death while at the same time trying to prevent death is a mixed marketing message at best, so Walmart made a choice: your health matters. We’ve already watched the Trump Administration play divide and conquer with corporate America in its defenestration of the Environmental Protection Agency and the trashing of pollution regulations. In clashing with the state of California over its stringent automobile standards—Trump demanded lower fuel efficiency—the administration forced automakers to choose sides. GM, Fiat Chrysler and Toyota, conservative by nature, backed into Trump’s garage. Honda, Volkswagen, BMW and Ford (with the support of executive chair Bill Ford), boldly backed California. These firms were already moving swiftly to expand their EV offerings; siding with California enhances their EV cred and offers a market advantage by doing so. Ford’s F-150 Lighting EV pickup, for instance, is already a breakout star. Corporations need to look a decade ahead to stay ahead. Any company that wants to be aligned with the future can’t avoid addressing human rights, animal rights, government actors, health care, sustainability and the environment. Not that the path is straightforward or even logical. Consider that Texas (once again) bars state retirement and pension funds from investing in companies that want to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Also consider that Texas is the nation’s leading producer of wind energy. If you build wind turbines, doesn’t that make you anti-fossil fuel by definition? Texas pols can deny climate change, but those denials will provide little protection when a monster hurricane–one of the consequences–wipes out Galveston. (Again. In 1900, more than 6,000 people died in such a storm.) And even if Galveston is spared, homeowners in coastal areas that haven’t prepared for extreme weather tied to a warming climate are already seeing sharp increases in flood insurance, if they can buy it at all. Which is to say that even if the free market doesn’t have a conscience, it tends to be rational. The defeat of two ExxonMobil board nominees last year by an activist hedge fund that criticized its strategy around climate change didn’t suddenly transform a hydrocarbon giant into an alternative-energy outfit. But that outcome did demonstrate that ExxonMobil wasn’t as focused on the future of clean energy as it might be—and that’s a market risk shareholders don’t care to face. ExxonMobil’s investors were indeed following their own values–while at the same time addressing shareholder value. That shouldn’t be such a rare event in corporate America. And if the graduates at Gallaudet follow the advice of Apple CEO Cook, it won’t be. Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine.
Don't Give up on Teaching About Unconscious Bias
BY Jonathan Yeo September 13, 2021Employee education about unconscious bias seems to have fallen out of fashion lately, with questions about its worth and impact. For many organizations over the last decade or so, anti-bias training had been a foundational pillar in addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). As a result of increasing critiques, however, some companies have now abandoned it, while others see continue to see value in it. The debate is covered well in this BBC story. Which way should employers go? There’s a wealth of research that unconscious bias exists, and that it can have significant detrimental impacts at work. So we shouldn’t just give up on the effort. I believe that adjusting the approach to the messaging and education in a few key areas can help keep unconscious bias education relevant and impactful. Having delivered varying approaches to unconscious bias through training and workshops across different industries and organizations, I’ve seen where it has made a positive impact and where it can fall short. From those experiences, I’ve identified some key challenges and the opportunities to improve. Avoiding the Backlash I have often wished for a replacement word for bias, because I see the resistance in people’s faces as soon as it is mentioned. For most of us, bias is a word with strongly negative connotations, so it takes more than just an assertion of “don’t worry, we’re all biased” for there to be a willingness to explore our individual propensity for it. Explaining that everyone has it–that it’s essential to how our brains operate efficiently–still doesn’t overcome our innate resistance to the word and its associations. Any successful learning and behavior change needs us to be open and committed, and anything that raises our resistance is immediately working against that goal. Telling people they’re biased creates a significant pushback, no matter how true it may be. Opportunity: Bias as a word and concept is already out there, and many people know something about it, so it’s not practical to avoid or replace it. However, in many scenarios, what bias creates is assumptions, and this concept is less threatening for people to wrestle with, because they can extrapolate from what they’ve likely learned previously–the importance of uncovering assumptions in decisions and strategy—to uncovering assumptions when it comes to people. Why the Ask Is Paradoxical Our biases stem, in the simplest terms, from our brain being wired to process the masses of information we receive, by relying on broad assumptions. This is a survival mechanism because we don’t have the conscious-thought capacity to analyze every input and make a fully considered and calculated decision. But while on one hand we’re highlighting the limits of conscious-thought capacity, we’re also asking people to bring these assumptions out of their unconscious into that limited capacity. How do we do that? Can we expand conscious capacity? Do we displace existing conscious processes? Instead it’s implicitly positioned in the way many tasks are often assigned in the workplace: just add to an already-full plate and hope it works out. Opportunity: Acknowledge that our capacity is limited and ask participants to identify one situation where they recognize their own bias can have a negative impact for others, one where they are willing to put conscious effort into their own behavior change. To go the extra mile, they could also commit to providing feedback when they see others acting from the same bias. Too Much Threat, Too Little Reward There is plenty of research on what motivates adults to change behaviors, and it’s pretty clear that it’s not by being scolded or threatened. While examples of the negative impacts of bias can open our eyes to what can go wrong, and perhaps build perspective or empathy, those impacts are usually fleeting and don’t lead to behavior change. What’s so often missing is getting to the positive motivation that will fuel the effort that behavior change requires. Examples and exercises can show us how we might be biased, but unconscious-bias training rarely underscores the benefits of mitigating those biases—the benefits to others, and the benefits to ourselves. Jonathan Yeo, founder of The Potential Space (Photo courtesy of the author) Think about one of the most oft-cited examples of unconscious bias: identical resumes submitted, but with names of varying racial or ethnic associations. In one widely noted U.S.-focused research paper, the “white-sounding names” received 50% more callbacks than those with “African-American sounding names.” That finding is shared to show that bias exists, that it has negative consequences, and to hopefully prompt a reaction of “Wow, that’s bad!” It does indeed do that for many, but without any proposed mitigation it can leave people feeling shame, disappointment, disempowerment, cynicism, or despair. In other words, helpless rather than motivated. Opportunity: Contrast negative impacts of bias with their positive alternatives. In the resume example above, complete the emotional journey for participants by sharing examples of mitigating actions (for example, removing names from resumes) and their positive impacts (an increased qualified-candidate pool, more diverse teams). Don’t just leave the participants with what’s wrong–lead them to the benefits of getting things more right. People Want Growth For some reason, unconscious bias is often put in its own special place: a standalone training disconnected from everything else. That positioning, combined with some of the less effective approaches outlined above, can make it feel much more like compliance training than growth and development. At the least it should be part of broader learning on inclusion and inclusive behaviors. Better still, it should be embedded, recognized, or reinforced in programs on leadership, effective communication, career development, and growth mindset. Whatever you choose to call it, there’s still an important place for unconscious bias in organizations: integrated as a part of a development curriculum, embedded in programs to foster inclusion, and positioned as an opportunity for individual and organizational growth and success. It shouldn’t just sit out on its own. Jonathan Yeo is the founder of The Potential Space, a learning, development, and inclusion-focused consultancy. Previously, he worked at Apple for a decade in the fields of leadership development and inclusion and diversity. He will be speaking this Wed., Sept. 15, at From Day One's virtual conference on diversity recruiting. You can register here.
How Juneteenth Finally Became a National Holiday
BY Michelle Jackson June 18, 2021When President Biden signed legislation this week making Juneteenth a national holiday, it marked the swift rise in recognition of the day commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S. After decades of delay, the movement gained momentum last summer during the protests following the murder of George Floyd, when U.S. corporations began honoring the day as part of their commitments on behalf of racial justice. Why should it matter for all Americans? “African Americans should not have to bear the burden of this history alone. Nor should Black achievement be something that only African Americans celebrate,” wrote Kevin Young, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. A year ago, From Day One published this story on Juneteenth's history and meaning: Spring 2020 will be remembered in corporate circles as a whirlwind of change, with exhausting and exciting pivots by big business. Difficult conversations connected to brand identity and race were being held in the boardrooms of many corporations as weeks of Black Lives Matter protests unfolded. One of the most intriguing outcomes from those conversations is the embracing of Juneteenth, which commemorates a unique moment in American history that many citizens may not have heard about before. Many people are familiar with the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on Jan. 1, 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln decreed that enslaved persons would now be free. Juneteenth specifically commemorates a day two and a half years later, June 19, 1865, when Gordon Granger, a U.S. Army general, relayed the emancipation orders in Texas, the last state where slaves were liberated. Landing by ship in the city of Galveston, Granger read the order: “The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired laborer.” The order, which affected the lives of about 250,000 people, is based on a document that was re-discovered just this week, according to the Washington Post. The National Archives on Thursday located what appears to be the original “Juneteenth” military order, written “in the ornate handwriting of a general’s aide,” the Post reported. Given current interest in the subject, the Archives staff went looking for the original order, which had not previously surfaced, and found it. David Ferriero, head of the Archives, said of the find: “I think it’s terrific. I think the timing is just amazing.” Over the years, emancipation day has been celebrated across the U.S., initially according to the date each state was liberated, but many historians track the modern, national version to a celebration at the conclusion of the Poor People’s Campaign, held in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. Since then, recognition has steadily grown, with Texas in 1980 becoming the first state to recognize Juneteenth as a holiday. Since then, 45 other states and the District of Columbia have officially recognized the day. With that in mind, it’s fascinating to observe how a small but growing number of corporations have responded by adding Juneteenth to the list of holidays and cultural observations that their organizations will observe. The timing of the uprising in favor of racial justice was fortuitous in presenting companies with an opportunity to give employees something symbolic yet tangible: a paid day off. Among the organizations who’ve said “yes” to observing Juneteenth: the National Football League, Nike, Lyft, Target, Twitter and Square. There are a number of reasons why companies have decided to embrace Juneteenth: Companies do not want to be perceived as tone deaf during tumultuous times. It’s highly likely that these organizations already had employees focused on facilitating diversity and inclusion initiatives within the company and that Juneteenth was already a part of the conversation. Staff members may have discussed ways to show Black Americans and other employees of color that the company is interested in learning more about their cultures. Corporate commemorations of Juneteenth may be a part of rebranding culturally insensitive language, visuals, or charactersassociated with the products that the company sells. The corporate response to Black Lives Matter is probably influenced by the lessons learned only a few weeks earlier during the onset of the pandemic, when companies were challenged in their responses to put people first. When asked about how companies would be affected if they failed to respond to the COVID-19 crisis in an empathetic way, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, made the following observation: “Their brand is going to get destroyed. I mean, how you treat your employees today will have more impact on your brand in future years than any amount of advertising, any amount of anything you literally could do. Because, again, we're all suffering from this. Every single person is looking to see how their company is treating them, how their employers are treating family members and friends.” One could make the same argument that companies will be forever branded by how they did (or did not) respond to the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, brands are already dealing with swift positive and negative reactions related to the stance that they take specific to the Black Lives Matter movement and any ancillary conversations associated with the movement. Those conversations need to go beyond the recognition of one day to encompass the daily lives of Black Americans on the other 364. Statistically, blacks earn significantly less than other cohorts. After organizations recognize Juneteenth, will that spur further dialog connected to employee well-being? While Juneteenth is important, ultimately many organizations may find that most employees care just as much about the following issues: Earning more and wage transparency. Employee mobility within the organization. Being treated in a respectful manner at work. Microaggressions and how they affect employee morale. Creating safe spaces to work in and having the ability to speak up without fear of retaliation. In hastily rolling out Juneteenth holidays, corporations may be unintentionally making the mistake of focusing on creating a cultural fix within the company that might not be needed or wanted. As the flurry of companies observing Juneteenth continues, one is left to wonder who was in the room when making the decision to include Juneteenth in the company’s corporate culture. Regardless of the intention, companies need to find ways to facilitate difficult conversations related to race and their corporate culture. Many organizations may find themselves ill-equipped to handle revelations they weren’t expecting related to how their employees experience their workplaces. Ultimately by making Juneteenth a holiday, companies must also embrace the responsibility and reality that their employees will expect more from them and will want the organization to do better moving forward. While it’s wonderful watching people discover what Juneteenth is, the reality of Juneteenth is that it’s a bittersweet moment to commemorate. Don’t forget that for an additional two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in Texas remained enslaved. That’s something to consider when you’re thinking about having your company observe Juneteenth. There’s a bigger conversation that has to be had about race and equality in the workplace. Will you be willing to have it? Finally, there is this point to consider. In a note to colleagues, a senior global payroll manager of color had this to say about her company rolling out a Juneteenth observation: "This is an incredibly generous display of thoughtful leadership. I know that as a start-up there is an immense cost associated with this and I am keenly aware that we are in a cost-saving environment. It is also incredibly difficult to navigate the environment in which we now find ourselves. I just wanted to lend my voice to say that with or without observing this particular day, this company has been incredibly gracious and effective in its acknowledgement of the struggles and issues that employees of color may be facing. I have had many discussions with my peers and what things boil down to for many of us is how history will record and remember our actions. Even more, how will we remember our actions when our grandchildren ask us about it. I know that you will be able to look back at your leadership in a positive light.” Your employees are watching and paying attention to the actions that you take. What will you decide to do? Michelle Jackson is mission-driven to help her readers and listeners empower themselves financially, whether it’s by improving their personal finances or learning how to sell what they already know. Michelle runs the website and podcast Michelle Is Money Hungry and is the founder of the Money on the Mountain retreat focused on empowering financially single women, one conversation at a time. When she's not geeking out about personal finance, you can find her hiking in the mountains of Colorado.
A Year of Crisis–and Reinvention
BY Stephen Koepp March 11, 2021Do you remember what you were doing a year ago, when the world changed? I remember vividly. Our team at From Day One had just returned from our conference in Atlanta, where we hosted hundreds of business leaders at the Georgia Aquarium. Everyone was far more transfixed by a whale shark swimming lazily in its tank than the invisible threat circulating in the community. Back in our hometown of Brooklyn, we were planning to depart soon for our next destination, Chicago, when we heard disturbing news about a phenomenon we had never really considered: a super-spreader event, a conference in Boston eventually responsible for more than 100 new cases of the novel coronavirus. We didn’t want that happening to us and our From Day One community, so we scrubbed our live events. That was the responsible thing to do, but it raised a painful question: for a conference company with no conferences, does this mean we’re out of business? I’ll tell you how our story turned out in a moment, but the theme here is reinvention amid the crisis. In a pandemic year of death, suffering and economic devastation, it was also a time of transformation in the way we work, raise our kids, and think about the roles of government and business. We had no way of seeing last March 11, when the global pandemic was officially upon us, how many old ideas would be turned upside down. But lots of thoughtful people are striving to help put the pandemic year into perspective, including how we frame its place in the trajectory of our lives. In a sense, the past year was its own time, not like what went before, or what comes next. For a recent piece in the New York Times, writer Casey Schwartz was interviewing Sherry Turkle, the renowned thinker on human-technology interaction, about her new book when the topic turned to the meaning of the pandemic year, Schwartz wrote. “In many ways, Turkle believes that the pandemic is a ‘liminal’ time, in the phrasing of the writer and anthropologist Victor Turner, a time in which we are ‘betwixt and between,’ a catastrophe with a built-in opportunity to reinvent. ‘In these liminal periods are these possibilities for change,’ she said. ‘I think we are living through a time, both in our social lives but also in how we deal with our technology, where we are willing to think of very different ways of behaving.’” While many of our transformations have been well-documented–we learned to work from home, we absorbed a better understanding of racial and social injustice, we gained a new appreciation for mental-health care, we adopted more pets, and we learned to bake bread–some of the transformations were more subtle or unheralded. To find out more about those, we asked some of the people who’ve spoken at our events to tell us about their own experiences in their businesses and life. Striking Out on Her Own: Myla Skinner, who has moderated several of our events and has worked for organizations including the education-advocacy group OneGoal, decided to heed the advice of a mentor and friend who advised: “What you want to do doesn't exist, so build it yourself.” So that's what she did, launching her own consulting firm. “I wanted to do work that focuses on navigating complex and consequential change with care for people at its core. I wanted to do work that leveraged my experience to support businesses as they do really big things. And I wanted to do work that puts love at the center and foundation. So I built a business to do that. It's called Quarter Five (Q5), whose name represents an extra quarter in the year to focus on the things that most matter to your business related to change. The pandemic forced me to spend real time with myself examining how I wanted to both live and work. I had to sit in the still and silence that this awful virus created. I had to dig deep to find what would bring my life joy. I recognize my privilege in having the opportunity and I'm hopeful that this work will create opportunities for others to do their best work and be their whole selves.” Saving Young People from a Missed Opportunity: For more than two decades, the EXP internship program in Southern California has been the on-the-ground partner to schools and industries, helping young people gain experience, unlock doors to opportunity, and build confidence. During the 2019-20 school year, the program served nearly 6,350 students at ten high schools. But at the onset of the pandemic, “when those classrooms and companies shut down, we were terrified,” says Amy Grat, EXP’s CEO. “We had lost both halves of the circle that we seek to complete–youth and volunteers.” Yet in a dramatic shift, EXP’s team let go of its previous assumptions of what an internship should look like, distilled it down to the essentials, and created a virtual experience. Earlier this month, more than 350 high-school girls from across Southern California, along with nearly 100 industry professionals, logged into a virtual conference space for EXP’s fifth-annual Women in STEM career day. The pandemic crisis, says Grat, turned out to be “a huge catalyst for growth and innovation,” especially in expanding EXP’s reach. Discovering the True Nature of a Vacation: Deep Mahajan, senior director and head of people development at the tech firm Nutanix, said the year 2020 inspired her to reinvent what vacation means to her. “Earlier it meant finding and booking a fancy location, packing our suitcases, travelling by air or by road, clicking a ton of pictures, checking off all sight-seeing places–even if it meant cramming the schedule and heading back to wrestle with Monday blues and an inbox exploding with two weeks’ worth of emails,” Mahajan said. “Today it is different. Vacation to me today can be something as simple as taking a weekly hike with a loved one to a place that was always just a few miles away but was undiscovered till now. I consider taking a mindful walk after work in the evening too as my daily ‘vacation.’ It has helped me admire the change of seasons in the color scheme of my neighborhood. It amazes me how all those trees bursting with the season’s shade and the flower gardens in my neighborhood went unnoticed all these years. Perhaps because I drove past them thinking about a million other things. Walking has changed my understanding and awareness of where I live. You know the best part? After any of the above ‘vacations,’ I never have the dull feeling of ‘going back to work.’ I do not even have to take PTO for this!” Taking a Meeting Outside: Lisa Nichols, an SVP in HR at Citigroup, is a firm believer in being productive without having to sit at a desk for hours on end. “I think one thing that has stayed with me is trying to care for yourself and building movement into your day. One way many of our managers have accomplished this is by doing walking, one-on-one phone meetings where we are simply providing updates or reviewing strategies,” Nichols said. “It has allowed us to get a little exercise while also completing a meeting that did not require that we needed to be in front or our computer or a Zoom meeting. This has been a good way to break up the day and get some movement to clear our minds.” Building a Matchmaking System for Jobless Workers: “As we all were sent home a year ago, the enormity of the implications on jobs started to set in. If businesses are shut down, they can only carry their employees for so long,” said Kamal Ahluwalia, president of Eightfold.ai, which produces software for talent management and acquisition. “So we did what we usually do: organized a hackathon to repurpose our technology for the citizens.” The result was the Eightfold Talent Exchange, created in partnership with McKinsey & Company, which uses artificial intelligence to match unemployed workers to jobs. Ahluwalia shares the story of a Starbucks barista in Philadelphia named Joshua, whose hours were reduced because of the pandemic. As it happened, Starbucks was offering its workers some resources like the Talent Exchange, which Joshua used to land a manager position at a local Walgreens. “There are tons of stories like that, small but meaningful,” said Ahluwalia. “Makes me appreciate what we have a lot more, and try not to take things for granted.” Learning to Let Some Problems Solve Themselves: Rob Smith, executive editor of Seattle and Seattle Business, embraced a new time-management technique. “I found it easier to obsess around perceived issues and problems because of the inability to communicate spontaneously with colleagues. So I started writing down things I wanted to tackle, and if they weren’t major, I stuck them in a drawer and revisited them later. I initially did this every day, but then started looking at them Friday afternoons. I was pleasantly surprised that most had either resolved themselves or I had misjudged how important they really were. I will continue this new tool post-pandemic.” Getting to Know Each Other Better Remotely: Matt Orozco, organizational change consultant for the employee-engagement platform Peakon, said his company has committed to strengthening the ties among remote employees. As an example, “We improved the use of internal comms tools (in our case, Slack) by adding fields to ‘profiles’ so we can be more inclusive and share more about ourselves. Some fields we added were pronouns, name pronunciation (we operate in five countries worldwide), and a link to a ‘ways of working’ doc so each employee can share how best to work with them.” He described it as kind of a user manual, but for human colleagues. On the personal side, he said that, “as a film student by education, I finally started to channel my passion for writing and film into a creative outlet by contributing to a film website,” as well as coming to grips with “the manufactured pressure to be more productive with respect to personal goals and side hustles during lockdowns.” Keeping Employee Careers on Track: One of the biggest concerns among employees working remotely is that their career development suffers from being out-of-sight, out-of-mind at HQ. Larry McAlister, VP of global talent for the cloud-computing company NetApp, said the company launched a new, AI-enabled tool for setting goals and career paths. “We want everyone at NetApp to feel you can do the best work of your career from your kitchen table. We had a ‘career week’ a few months before launching the tool and we are now the vendor gold standard for adoption of the tool,” McAlister said, adding that the company keeps employee well-being in mind too: “We implemented Wellness Days, where the whole company has a day off each quarter. We have also implemented ‘No Zoom Fridays’ every month.” (Photo by Tolgart/iStock by Getty Images) Taking Control of the Calendar: Deep Mahajan, the executive who reinvented her idea of vacation, made changes in her schedule as well. “Unlike earlier, when all ‘house stuff’ used to happen strictly after and before office hours, today our schedules have become truly integrated. So you may be emptying the dishwasher between meetings and taking a meeting after office hours. It requires planning, without which it can be a mess. I re-invented the art of calendar-and-meeting management as I integrated my life into my work. Every Sunday I look at my calendar to mark the meetings that can be done walking, eliminate meetings which are redundant, add meetings for social interactions as needed, and eliminate those 30-minute ‘unproductive’ slots between meetings to be more efficient with my time. Family and house time has also come onto the calendar. Overall, I feel a better sense of control by organizing my time mindfully.” Learning to Say No, When Possible: Erin Hicks, a senior director of HR at Applied Materials, realized that the lack of work boundaries at home was unsustainable. “For me, 12- to 14-hour days are just a norm I have learned to live with over the last four to five years,” she said, attributing the trend to “increased responsibilities, while there are still only 24 hours in a day, and something in my DNA that requires me to never let anyone down. This past year began with the same unhealthy pattern. That is, until I came to the personal realization that that kind of ‘work ethic’ was not only unhealthy, but it was depriving me of valuable time with my family that I could never get back. So I have worked hard to reinvent the way I work. I stop working when my teenager comes to check in with me on a school break, or when my husband comes in to do the same. The payoff is a lot more laughter during my day. I have reinvented my approach by modulating the work I agree to take on–and setting realistic expectations.” Hicks added a broader observation on the issue: “From a work-culture perspective, I have really enjoyed seeing managers spending more time thinking about their employees’ physical and emotional well-being. The empathy factor has gone up exponentially. Teams have reinvented the way they interact, and not just from the use of new online collaboration tools. Leaders are finding myriad ways to bring their groups together on a human, social level that has been fun to watch. This forced reinvention of how teams interact as co-workers–and as people–in a virtual world will have a lasting positive impact, regardless of that the new normal or future of work looks like.” Testing the Limits of Personal Handiwork: Like many remote workers, Mikeisha Anderson Jones, VP of global inclusion & diversity in the Colleague Experience Group at American Express, decided to do some redecorating. “In addition to adjusting to the new ways of working from home, I also fancied myself a weekend and late-night creative by endeavoring to wallpaper my office. Clearly, I’d spent insufficient hours watching the experts on Property Brothers and Love It or List It. When I started on my wallpapering journey, I hadn’t realized that I’d see my handiwork daily for the next 365+ days via videoconference. Thankfully, I love the print and despite my novice-level wallpapering skills, the result is quite lovely. I also learned something about myself: I will never, ever wallpaper another room by myself.” While some of us may feel like this was a lost year, that might not be true in the long run. In a piece for Time, author and editor Joanne Lipman shared the wisdom of dozens of experts she has consulted for a book she’s writing on reinvention. “The types of transformations they study vary. Yet I’ve been struck by the one step that every type of reinvention has in common: it’s preceded by an in-between time, a seemingly fallow period much like the one we find ourselves in now,” Lipman writes. “The prolonged shutdown, by throwing us off-kilter, may help us reimagine our futures,” Lipman continues, citing the work of a psychologist who has studied survivors of trauma. After time, these survivors tend to “have a sense of fresh possibilities in life, an openness to following new pathways.” In the midst of all this reinvention, one of our speakers offers a reality check. Daniel Roberts, who did some of his own reinvention recently–he left his job as editor-at-large at Yahoo Finance to become editor-in-chief of the crypto-news site Decrypt–predicts that some workplace transformations will revert to the old ways because they had obvious benefits. “We've all certainly adapted for a year and in many cases I think some workplaces have been shocked to learn how well WFH worked. The news media, I believe, rose to the occasion of covering every aspect of the pandemic–from home or in a mask–and has been extremely resilient,” he said. But don’t assume work-from-home will be for everyone, forever, he said. “I think there are a number of companies that see advantages to having their people in person, and are going to tell people when the coast is clear, OK, come back now. I fear some people will be in for a rude awakening when that happens.” As for journalism, he said, “I am a big believer in the power of the newsroom, and in being able to bat around ideas in person in a lively room with your colleagues.” Finally, what about the From Day One team? On the personal front, two of our families reinvented themselves by having their first children. Babies can certainly be transformative. As for me, I took up yoga, faithfully attending my niece’s classes twice a week. And as you might have been expecting by now, From Day One reinvented itself. Considering the alternatives, we were left with one possible way to survive: We would go all-virtual. Three weeks after making that decision in March, we produced our first webinar, titled “Smart Ways to Manage a Newly Remote Work Team.” Since then, we have hosted nearly 60 webinars and virtual conferences. Thanks to the intrepid spirit of our speakers, sponsors, audience members, and our extraordinary staff, we are still very much in business–just not the way we were before. The experience has broadened our reach and taught us how to think outside the conference room. But we look forward to seeing you again in person just as soon as we can. 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
The Future of Work, 2021: What We've Learned
BY Bryan Walsh January 05, 2021In 2020, in every conversation I had about the impact the pandemic would have on work, I heard a version of this statement: “COVID-19 is going to accelerate the future of work.” But with the year ending—and the pandemic still sadly out of control—here’s what we still don’t know: Exactly what will that future be? What is clear is that work–or at least what we used to think of as office-based, white-collar work–underwent an astounding and sudden transformation as the first shelter-in-place orders came down in mid-March. Before the pandemic, perhaps 5% of American workers could be classified as remote. By May, according to the Economist, that figure had risen to 62%, and even as late as October, nearly half of American workers were still putting in their hours in spare bedrooms and on kitchen tables, connecting with their colleagues through the digital lifelines of Slack and Zoom. What did we learn? That the sudden absence of the workplace did not mean the absence of work being done. One survey from the employee-visibility software company Prodoscore found that productivity between May and August of 2020 was actually 5% higher than the same period in 2019. Orders were fulfilled, timesheets were filled, emails were sent—more emails, almost certainly, according to research that found that the average workday grew by nearly an hour during the pandemic. Because those of us who used to work in offices lived through the transition, adjusting to the realities on the fly (often painfully), it can be difficult to comprehend just how radical this forced experiment and its conclusions have been. There are a lot of reasons why, until a 200-nanometer virus from China showed up, that white-collar workers gathered in offices each day. Among them: the sunk costs of real estate, a sense that innovation and creativity required physical proximity, and the ingrained belief that this was simply how things were supposed to be done. But the unstated assumption that work simply wouldn’t be done as much (or as productively) at home—and away from the eyes of managers—was probably the biggest reason why offices remained sacrosanct workspaces. We now know that this isn’t true, and likely hasn’t been true for some time, thanks to applications that can make work and collaboration doable at home. A recent study by two researchers at Harvard of call-center workers between January 2018 and August 2020 found that while remote workers were less productive initially than those in offices, by the end of the study—when nearly every worker being surveyed had been forced home by the pandemic—those who switched to working from home became more productive than they had been in the workplace. The takeaway here is that while workers are individuals with different productivity levels, where the work takes place isn’t the deciding factor, and indeed good workers may become even better when they’re allowed to work from home. Bryan Walsh of Axios (photo courtesy of the author) And many of them have made it clear they want to keep doing so, even when vaccines finally take COVID-19 off the table. A recent report from Glassdoor found that 26% of workers surveyed wanted to continue working at home, 70% favored a hybrid combination of office and remote work, and just 4%–yes, 4%!–desired a full-time return to the office. Workers are also voting with their feet. A survey by Upwork from October found that as many as 23 million Americans, or more than 10% of the adult population, are planning to pack up and move thanks in part to the freedoms of remote work. They’re migrating mostly from dense, costly cities to cheaper places that might be far from the office. Another report from Upwork found that those working from home because of COVID-19 were saving an average of nearly 50 minutes a day that they used to spend commuting to work. That matters, given that a number of studies have confirmed what most people know from grueling experience–that commuting is among the least enjoyable activities people regularly do. Give workers the option of not sitting in traffic or a crowded train every workday, and being able to move to a place where they can get more house for the same amount of money–which in turn makes remote work easier, since satisfaction with working from home is linked to having a dedicated home office–they will take companies up on it. Firms that can get over the need to have eyes on their employees will benefit from a much broader shift to remote work as well. One study found that companies can save as much as $10,000 per employee annually in real estate costs by switching to full-time remote work. Many top tech companies, including some that until recently were touting the creativity-enhancing benefits of their sumptuous Silicon Valley campuses, have announced their openness to much wider remote work. And companies that embrace remote work may be able to get away with paying employees less if they move to cheaper cities, which many workers are willing to do, even as they’re able to expand their hiring pool to the entire world. So what will the future of work look like, once it’s no longer being dictated by a new virus or old assumptions? Pay attention to that 70% of workers in the Glassdoor survey who say they’d prefer a hybrid future: freedom to work at home sometimes and in an office-like environment at other times. Some kinds of collaboration really do require workers being eyeball to eyeball, and sometimes you just need to get out of the house. It doesn’t make financial sense for companies to maintain large corporate offices in expensive downtowns if they’re rarely more than half full, which they won’t be, especially if workers have fled to cheaper cities hours away. But working outside of the home doesn’t have to mean working in a central office. Satellite offices, co-working spaces, even cafes–all of them will be a better and more efficient option for when collaborative work is needed. The bigger challenge may be for managers. As McKinsey & Company managing partner Kausik Rajgopal told me in August in a From Day One webinar, there’s a risk that a company’s culture could splinter if one group of workers remains in the office while another works from home. That’s why it’s important for a manager “to be thoughtful and think about each member of the team as an individual, and figure out what may be most helpful that they stay motivated and operate in a sustainable way.” That includes figuring out effective and fair ways to evaluate employees who work remotely and onboard workers who might never see the inside of an office. No one would want to re-experience 2020, but if we’re fortunate, it could help give birth to a white-collar working world that is more humane to employees and more productive for employers. Provided, of course, we’re all willing to shell out for a decent chair. Bryan Walsh is the Future Correspondent for Axios, covering emerging tech and future trends, as well as the author of End Times, a 2019 book about existential risk (including pandemics). He previously worked as a foreign correspondent, reporter, and editor for TIME for more than 15 years. You can read his new piece for Axios about the coming tech-driven productivity leap here.
Why the Facebook Lawsuit Should Be Celebrated, Even If It's Flawed
BY davidkirkpatrick December 12, 2020Editor's Note: This commentary was originally published on Techonomy.com. There is one unalloyed benefit from the vast antitrust assault unleashed against Facebook this week by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 46 states, plus Guam and the District of Columbia: the company will have to finally start being more careful. Facebook has been heedless, and society has been harmed. This has been true over many years but is becoming more and more apparent, especially to government regulators and officials all over the world. Along with many others, they are concerned not just about its failures to compete fairly, but also to protect user privacy and safety, restrain hate speech, fairly govern the flow of information and especially to ensure its services do not harm democracy. For all that, the two antitrust lawsuits filed this week–one by the Federal Trade Commission and one by the states–are relatively narrow in their purpose. They aim to show that the company has taken a predatory approach to competition and has engaged in a pattern of harming competitors, in several key cases buying them to eliminate threats. The plaintiffs want to force Facebook to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, two major parts of its social-media empire. The cases are compelling in enumerating examples of predatory behavior, and there is no question Facebook has acted improperly in numerous instances. However, it is highly unlikely that in the end government lawyers will succeed in prying Instagram and WhatsApp away from Facebook. And that may be OK. I am not convinced that for all the different kinds of damage this company causes society, its continued ownership of these two properties should be at the top of the list. I am also not convinced that its ownership of these services is the most important way Facebook harms consumers, protecting whom is ostensibly the purpose of American antitrust law. And finally, I am not convinced that consumers–or call them here “voters”–want their government officials breaking apart a company that more than half of all Americans use every day. This doesn’t even address how legally viable is the suit, which many question, or how hard Facebook will fight it—which will be unbendingly. Here’s one reason: eMarketer calculates that this year Instagram will account for almost 49% of Facebook’s total U.S. ad revenues, a percentage that has almost doubled in just the last two years. In some ways Instagram may BE the future of Facebook. (WhatsApp, by contrast, generates essentially no revenue.) Yet other good things could come from this effort, for example new rules about what rights different services, apps, and websites have when they interact on the net. The Wall Street Journal examines that promising possibility. So is this the right lawsuit? Possibly not. Does there need to be massive government pushback against the company? Absolutely. I welcome this lawsuit because Facebook must be forced to pay more attention to the needs and concerns of society. The scrutiny that will now be directed at Facebook for a prolonged period will undoubtedly cause it to move more carefully and deliberately in a variety of realms, not just in its approach to mergers and competitors. While the company ostensibly retired the slogan “move fast and break things,” in reality that psychology remains alive and well at the company, and in the head of its unchallengeable leader. (Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash) CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s arrogance and hubris is the primary reason for the company’s heedlessness, and he is able to think and act that way because he has absolute control of the company. His personal voting control over the company’s stock allows him literally to do whatever he wants. When several members of the company’s board of directors in the last two years questioned his judgement on key matters, he simply removed them. The Facebook board today is essentially a rubber-stamp body. If internal governance has failed at Facebook, government governance may be required. In other words, if Zuckerberg won’t sufficiently improve Facebook on his own, he needs to be forced. One of Facebook’s central problems is that Zuckerberg refuses to accept any analysis suggesting his company has made fundamental errors in its public posture or social role. And of course, if there aren’t errors there isn’t need for fundamental corrections. He is completely convinced that the world, including government regulators and legislators in every country, fail to understand the macro benefits of Facebook’s ability to bring people together. He believes that even though there may be shortcomings in Facebook’s behavior or social impact, those shortcomings are far far outweighed by the virtues it brings to the world. Government needs to assert its primacy over Facebook because Facebook risks overpowering government. Facebook, along with several other well-known companies, has an influence, power, and even authority in society that threatens governments’ own capacity to oversee the systems of countries and the safety, security, and health of their citizens. One way this is manifest is Facebook’s disproportionately large impact on the conduct of elections in every country in which it operates. The decisions Facebook makes about what constitutes appropriate campaigning online are often more influential on the outcomes of those elections than decisions of the governments themselves. That has to change. As a major article in the new issue of Foreign Affairs puts it: “Internet platforms cause political harms that are far more alarming than any economic damage they create. Their real danger is not that they distort markets; it is that they threaten democracy.” Does this lawsuit address that? Not really. Setting parameters, though, and even simply slowing the relentless expansion of Facebook, has virtues in itself. The main thing I hope and expect will come from this and other like actions around the world is a more responsible and cooperative stance from the company when it comes to modulating the negative impacts it has on society. This is the first big step in forcing Facebook to operate in a world of rules. So I applaud New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who led the coalition of states, and the FTC. They may not get exactly what they want, but they will slow Facebook down. The fact that government in Facebook’s home country has finally put it on notice, finally stood up in a substantial way to its unreasonable power, is in itself a cause for celebration. David Kirkpatrick, the founder of the conference and media company Techonomy, has covered Facebook extensively since October 2006. He wrote The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World way back in 2010. His views of the company and its founder have hardened considerably since then.
Is Facebook a Media Company? That's Not Up to Mark Zuckerberg
BY davidkirkpatrick June 26, 2020Editor's note: this story was originally published on Techonomy.com Facebook is facing, finally, the historic moment that many of its critics, including me, have long expected. Its true customers–advertisers–are saying Facebook cannot continue to pretend to be “neutral” about dishonest and hateful speech. The resulting societal harm is too great. That opinion had already become something of a consensus for many influential societal actors, including government leaders in most democratic countries, human rights advocates, journalists who cover the company, and much of the public. Even many Facebook employees have come to agree. But up until now, the most important and influential group had mostly kept silent. Facebook is a near-miraculous environment for advertisers large and small. Its ability to target users based on fine-grained information about their personality and preferences often yields extraordinary results for companies. That is the primary reason the company’s revenues have grown so quickly—in 2019 they exceeded $70 billion. That, unbelievably, is almost 10X what revenues were in 2013. And Facebook’s net margin last year was over 33%–meaning that for every dollar of revenue it kept 33 cents, after all expenses and taxes. Very few large companies have ever been so profitable. That profit is because of Facebook’s success selling advertising. So if collective dissatisfaction among advertisers were to grow, the company’s response would inevitably be unlike its reaction to pushback from any other quarter. Since it has generally ignored all its other critics, those of us who feel it is genuinely harming society have reason to hope this time is different. And a major movement has emerged. In mid-June a coalition of U.S. civil rights groups including the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, and Color of Change called for advertisers to boycott the company for the month of July, in protest. A newspaper ad they purchased said Facebook “allowed incitement to violence against protesters fighting for racial justice in America in the wake of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbert, Rayshard Brooks and so many others. They amplified white nationalists…[and] they turned a blind eye to blatant voter suppression on their platform.” The ad concluded with a message for Facebook: “Your profits will never be worth promoting hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and violence.” In a statement, Color of Change President Rashad Robinson said, “Facebook’s failure of leadership has actively stoked the racial hatred we see in our country and even profits off its proliferation.” That is a powerful and uniquely resonant accusation in this fraught moment. Outrage has been growing in recent months and weeks as Facebook gave favorable treatment to incendiary posts from President Trump, and seemed generally to bend over backwards to accommodate rightwing speech, even if it contained falsehoods. Twitter, by contrast, attached warnings to several posts by the president, statements Facebook left unchanged. And the company has drawn widespread opprobrium by adopting an active policy, repeatedly defended by Mark Zuckerberg, that politicians are explicitly allowed to lie in paid advertising purchased on the platform. A group of outraged ex-employees wrote a protest letter to Zuckerberg, saying that Facebook “claims that providing warnings about a politician’s speech is inappropriate, but removing content from citizens is acceptable, even if both are saying the same thing. That is not a noble stand for freedom. It is incoherent, and worse, it is cowardly.” At first, a number of important but generally smaller advertisers announced they would join the ad protest–including The North Face and REI, owned by VF Corp., as well as other youth-oriented outdoor goods brands including Patagonia, Eddie Bauer, and Arc’teryx, plus freelance platform Upwork, Magnolia Pictures, and, significantly, Ben & Jerry’s. The ice-cream maker is a subsidiary of global consumer goods giant Unilever. A digital ad agency for Unilever, 360i, part of global ad giant Dentsu, publicly endorsed the boycott, saying “Any social platform that earns profits by amplifying the voices of their community must have a zero tolerance policy for hate.” Then the breakout happened. On June 26, Unilever itself, the 33rd-largest advertiser on Facebook in the first quarter, had pulled ads for all its brands indefinitely, and not just from Facebook and Instagram but from Twitter, too. “Continuing to advertise on these platforms at this time would not add value to people and society,” the company said in a statement. Meanwhile, telecoms giant Verizon, too, had joined. Unilever said its move would last at least through the end of the year, and Verizon said it was stopping “until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable.” The chief executive of the World Federation of Advertisers told the New York Timesthat this appears to be an “inflection point” for Facebook. Pressure appears to be growing on really big advertisers like Amazon, Samsung, and Procter & Gamble. It is a big deal. Mark Zuckerberg has insisted forever that Facebook was not a “media company.” But media companies like newspapers or television stations, for example, need to ensure that everything they carry reflects well on the company’s environment and brand. A key reason media companies do that is to maintain a safe environment for advertising. Zuckerberg instead says Facebook is a “neutral platform” that is committed to amplifying all voices, and thus bears no responsibility except in narrow cases mostly involving violation of the law. But ultimately, a company that puts viewers in front of advertising to make money is unequivocally a media company. And those advertisers are finally, in this case, telling Facebook that yes, it really is that kind of media company, with the responsibilities that go with it. We ordinary people, the users of Facebook, are often properly described as “the product.” We are what attracts the real customers, the advertisers. For any company, paying customers are ones who can most effectively demand change. Facebook loves to say, as it did in this instance, that it still has “work to do,” to deal with hate speech and socially harmful behavior on its platform. Predictably, communications chief Nick Clegg told journalists this week “we need to do more,” and as usual bragged about “significant progress.” Facebook ad chief Carolyn Everson issued a statement saying “Our conversations with marketers and civil rights organizations are about how, together, we can be a force for good.” But to truly become a force for good, Facebook has to take a stand. There can be no truly neutral platform for speech. So what are its real values? Is it big enough to live up to this historic moment? Is it for protecting people, whatever the cost? If this so-public company cannot answer that question sufficiently during today’s historic awakening regarding racial justice, many may begin to see companies that advertise on Facebook as tantamount to ones with a statue of Robert E. Lee on their front steps. David Kirkpatrick is the founder and editor in chief of Techonomy, a conference series and journalism platform focused on the intersection of technology and the global economy. Kirkpatrick is also the author of the bestselling book “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World.” He spent 25 years at Fortune, and founded and hosted its Brainstorm and Brainstorm Tech conferences
To Promote True Advocacy, Don’t Be an Ally: Be an Accomplice
BY Willie Jackson December 10, 2019This essay was first published on Forge, Medium's new channel on personal development. I sometimes introduce myself as a “professional African American” when I travel the country to give ally skills workshops — often while looking out at a sea of white faces. It’s a joke, of course, but the point is serious. I’m using humor to disarm my audience, and to make some difficult and personal topics more accessible. I recognize that every person walks into the room with a different set of experiences and point of view. Many folks have had uncomfortable and even traumatizing experiences talking about race, gender, sexuality, and other forms of marginalization. And many of the companies I work with have had conversations about bias go sideways. So a part of the learning experience in my workshops is making it safe for people to be present, both physically and emotionally. Of course, most of the people who sign up for an ally skills workshop already consider themselves an “ally.” Which is what exactly? An ally, in this context, is simply someone who isn’t part of a marginalized group but who supports that group actively. Given the pervasive experiences of bias that many numerically underrepresented minorities report at work, the impulse toward allyship by majority group folks is encouraging. But putting this impulse into action can get tricky. As I caution folks, the very notion of allyship is rejected on its face by some folks who have been harmed by the ham-fisted efforts of well-intentioned, self-proclaimed “allies.” The ally skills framework that I developed in partnership with Dr. Kim Tran, and I teach as a consultant at the diversity strategy firm ReadySet, asks a provocative question: It’s great that you see yourself as an ally, but what does putting that into action look like? Be an accomplice, not an ally It comes as a surprise to some of my ally skills workshop attendees, but I encourage folks to move from the frame of “ally” to “accomplice.” Here’s why I prefer this term. Without context, most folks would consider “ally” to be positive and “accomplice” to be negative. But bringing history into focus means recognizing that many of the liberties we now enjoy — civil rights for black folks and gay marriage, for example — were but a dream not long ago, and required major disruption of the status quo to happen. Disruption isn’t easy or polite. What I’m hoping to impress upon folks is that this work — the work of being an accomplice — might cost you something. Perhaps your comfort or social standing, or maybe even your safety. Real advocacy and comfort rarely go hand in hand. Accomplices try to “care more” For some people, the growth opportunity might involve slowing down, taking up less space in conversations across difference, and becoming a more active listener. For others, it might mean admitting when they’ve made a mistake and offering a genuine apology to the person harmed. For others still, growth might look like having the courage to speak up and communicate the impact of an unfortunate altercation. Willie Jackson will be speaking at From Day One's conferences in Los Angeles on Dec. 11 and Seattle on Jan. 28 I once had a boss advise me, “It’s okay to care more.” I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, but the phrase and invitation has stuck with me over the years. In my experience, many audiences exist on a continuum of caring, from withdrawn skepticism to card-carrying social justice warrior. But caring is personal, and doesn’t need to conform to accepted tropes. Some of the most committed agents of institutional change decline to publicly advertise their commitment. They just do the work. I often cite as an example the actress Jessica Chastain, whose pledge to her fellow movie star, Octavia Spencer, to negotiate for pay as a unit leveraged her privilege as a successful white Hollywood star to demand equity. I can’t tell you what to care about or how to express it, but I’m confident that everyone — regardless of identity — can put their caring into action a bit more. Accomplices understand that marginalization isn’t always obvious or visible My way of being in the world and my anchor in this work is deeply grounded in my identity as an African American man: the descendant of enslaved folks and the grandson of sharecroppers. I’m not shy about bringing this identity into the room and naming it. But this stance doesn’t require anyone to make themselves smaller in my presence. In fact, I invite others to bring more of themselves into the room as well. One of the greatest shortcomings of our cultural discourse is the refusal to explore our complicated shared history in America. I don’t mean simply dwelling on the brutality inflicted on indigenous and enslaved folks, although we shouldn’t be shy to acknowledge historical truths. What I mean is that our shared history is more complicated and interdependent than we tend to discuss. That sea of white faces I encounter in a workshop might well include more diversity and marginalized identities than it appears to at first: Many attendees have told me that while they pass for white, they identify ethnically in a multiplicity of ways. Many white-passing folks find themselves in conversations that “other” them or make them feel conflicted, invisible, and resentful. Many people of Italian, Irish, and Jewish heritage have ancestors who suffered from and fled persecution. And of course there are other less obvious identities in these rooms: LGBTQ+, differently abled, and neuroatypical folks, to name just a few. In rooms of visible ethnic and racial minorities, expression of those experiences is often muted. It can be seen as insensitive and disingenuous for white and white-passing folks to claim a marginalized historical identity. As a black-white binary pushes important nuance into the shadows, I’m passionate about creating spaces where all this can be discussed more expansively. I don’t think it serves us to expect people we think of as white to take up less space, and for the people we think of as black to take up more space, based solely on our perception of their proximity to oppression. Similarly, it’s important to acknowledge privilege that may coexist with marginalization. Despite my historically and systemically marginalized racial identity, for example, the privileges afforded me by dint of being an educated, straight, able-bodied male are significant. We all contain multitudes, and the space to bear witness to someone else's story can be sacred and affirming. Accomplices don’t have all the answers Admitting (and, frankly, learning) what we don’t know is a crucial starting point. I haven’t always had the analysis I now hold around race and identity in the United States. In fact, the whitewashed formal education I received was woefully deficient in preparing me for the realities of moving through the world with the identity I have. I learned my history — and in many ways what it means to be a black man in America — as an adult. Despite our best intentions, our liberal enclaves, our high-minded ideals, we all have more learning to do. There’s something comforting in this universal growth opportunity: None of us have it all figured out. As an accomplice, the goal isn’t to avoid stressful conversations or situations where we risk saying or doing the wrong thing; we actually need to spend more time in them, and learn to lean into our values when we feel emotionally triggered. That’s not easy: The physiological impact of conflict and stress prompts the brain to release cortisol and adrenaline into the bloodstream, putting the body into a fight, flight, or freeze response. In this state, we are biologically primed to respond to imminent danger — not to do complex thinking or bring our social graces to bear. Put another way: We don’t rise to the level of our hopes and values, and we sink to the level of our basest instincts and our training. This is why it’s vital to train ourselves — to practice how we’ll intervene where necessary, and how we’ll respond when we’re embarrassed, ashamed, or called out. And it’s why we need to breathe and reflect as we do the work of preparation — and when we can, maybe even laugh. Willie Jackson is a diversity, equity, & inclusion (DEI) speaker, consultant and facilitator who makes waves at the intersection of event production, behavior change, and leadership development. He’s the founder of an online magazine for black men called Abernathy, and an advisor to authors, startups, and executives across a range of industries.
The Real Victims of WeWork Are Its Employees. Is Capitalism Broken?
BY danlyons October 04, 2019The catastrophic collapse of WeWork’s initial public offering (IPO) has been in the news a lot lately. Most of the coverage has focused on venture capitalists, valuations and juicy details about self-dealing that were revealed in the company’s SEC filing. But as I read articles about the company I started wondering about something else: Can you imagine how awful it must be to work there? WeWork, which recently renamed itself The We Co., presents itself not just as a company that rents out office space but also (and more important) as a visionary thought leader with lots of innovative ideas about the nature of work and how to run companies in the digital age. The We Co. holds itself up as a model that others can imitate and learn from. That’s odd, because We sounds like a special ring of hell, a place run by posers who have no idea what they’re doing, with loads of inspirational rubbish and rules about not eating meat. I’m a survivor of startup life and wrote about my own nightmare experience in a memoir, Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble. The place where I worked had a kooky, peppy, cult-like atmosphere, coupled with stress, mind games, and heartlessness that I’d never experienced in any workplace. The We Co. seems a hundred times worse than my former employer. But there are lots of similarities, most notably the weird mix of silliness and cruelty. As bosses, co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann and his wife Rebekah were touchy-feely hippie types who talked about wellness, spirituality, and ending world hunger. But at the same time they were heartless, ruthless people. Adam told his managers to fire 20% of the staff every year, to get rid of “B” players, and Rebekah, the company’s “chief brand and impact officer,” sometimes fired people after meeting them for just a few minutes, deciding she didn’t like their energy, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Neumanns have been booted, but their wacko dysfunctional culture won’t be easily erased. High turnover is one of the biggest hallmarks of the new economy, and probably the most toxic. These companies, the disruptor class, don’t see high turnover as something to be embarrassed about. Quite the opposite–they’re proud of it. They believe high turnover signals that they’ve created a “high-performance” culture where only the best of the best can survive. This lunacy began at Netflix which in 2009 published a “culture deck” that included this slogan: “We’re a team, not a family.” The HR gurus behind this mantra say Netflix is like a pro sports team, where players get cut all the time. At Netflix you should expect to be fired, and probably sooner rather than later. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman echoes this sentiment, telling people to think of a new job as a short-term “tour of duty.” Columnist Dan Lyons In my own 20-month tour of duty at a fast-growing software startup, I saw more firings than in all of my previous jobs combined. People got fired all the time, often with no warning and sometimes for no real reason. They walked out crying–or stunned. The company tried to put a happy face on these firings, describing them as “graduations,” which of course only made it worse–and super weird. Living with constant fear of losing your job makes you nuts. And that’s just one form of the crazy-making management practices endemic to new economy workplaces. Noisy, open offices and constant change initiatives cause you to have higher levels of epinephrine, a stress hormone. Elevated epinephrine is linked to psychological problems and even physical ailments like heart disease. Worse is that if or when you start feeling miserable in one of these places, it doesn’t square with the shiny, happy image that the company projects to the outside world. You start to believe that there must be something wrong with you. If you’re really unlucky, you get a boss like mine, who got off on gaslighting me and telling me that nobody at the company liked me. I knew it was all some kind of weird psychological game for him. Nevertheless, I slid into depression, and left with my self-esteem in tatters. The damage lasted a long time. After I published Disrupted I heard from countless other people who had endured similar experiences and had felt messed up for months or even years afterward. We’re constantly hearing stories about nightmare work environments at new economy companies. Zenefits, Zillow, Uber–the list goes on. Why are so many new companies such uniquely awful employers? A lot of it has to do with the business model they use. I call it “Grow fast, lose money, go public, and cash out.” The We Co. has been doubling in size from year to year, but last year lost $1.6 billion and in the first half of 2019 lost another $700 million. Venture capitalists pumped huge amounts of money into the company–We has raised nearly $12 billion–and then pressed management to deliver astronomical growth. For workers, life becomes a constant sprint. You never slow down. The company has no incentive to care about worker health and happiness or work-life balance. Workers get abused, overworked, shortchanged, and treated like disposable widgets. The company burns them out and churns them out. In fact, that’s exactly what’s going to happen at the We Co. The company’s new leaders, slamming the brakes on its growth strategy, are planning to lay off 10% to 25% of its staff, or 1,000 to 3,000 people. Gig-economy companies like Uber and Lyft adopt an even more exploitative model and treat workers as contractors instead of actual employees, to avoid providing benefits. Most drivers last less than a year. Who cares? You just find more to take their place. The collapse of the We Co.’s IPO should be a wake-up call, a signal that this model isn’t working. We’re not producing any great companies this way, and worse, in our mad rush to generate money for VCs we’re making hundreds of thousands of people sick and miserable. How can we fix it? Capitalism itself needs a reboot. We need to dump toxic “shareholder capitalism” with its notion of running companies solely to benefit of investors and replace it with a healthier version of capitalism in which companies put employees ahead of investors. Focus on making workers happy, and let workers focus on making customers happy. For now I’m worried about what will happen to the 12,500 employees at We. It’s not just that many have been compensated with stock options that now are worthless. The bigger problem is that We might go bankrupt, putting thousands of people out of work–all because of a reckless, incompetent, self-dealing CEO and a board of directors who were willing to look the other way. The two co-CEOs who replaced Neumann have already announced plans to sell off several companies that Neumann acquired, which means at least a few thousand employees definitely will have their lives tipped upside down. Those workers will spend the next few months living with even more stress and uncertainty. Most have not even finished recovering from the disruption of being merged into We and then going for the crazy roller-coaster ride of the past two months. This crazy, high-turnover approach to work is not sustainable. Human beings simply cannot endure the kind of workplace that the new economy has created. Entrepreneurs and investors need to rethink the way they build and operate companies. One model might be a company that competes with We, called International Workplace Group, which the New York Times just wrote about. UK-based IWG is 30 years old and generates roughly as much revenue as We does–but instead of losing billions of dollars, IWG actually turns a profit. I suppose to the brilliant, forward-looking VCs in Silicon Valley that sounds kind of old-fashioned. Insisting that companies turn a profit won’t cure every problem. But it would at least make it possible for companies to treat employees better. That would be a good start. Dan Lyons is an author, screenwriter, and journalist. He is the author of two books about workplace culture in the digital age. His most recent book is Lab Rats: Tech Gurus, Junk Science and Management Fads—My Quest to Make Work Less Miserable. His previous book was Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble, which became a New York Times bestseller. Dan was also a writer on HBO’s hit comedy series Silicon Valley
In Davos, Business Leaders Say They're Tackling Climate Change
BY davidkirkpatrick February 01, 2019Editor's note: this story was originally published on Techonomy.com Christiana Figueres wants to thank Donald Trump. She’s the one who, more than any other person, drove the process that led to the Paris Climate Agreement, as executive secretary for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Now she’s confident the pact’s aggressive carbon-reduction goals will be met, she said at a lunch panel hosted by Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos in late January. And surprise–she largely credits Trump. “Every time we see some inexplicable attack on someone or some idea, it leads others to double down,” she said. As a result, nations, cities, and citizens around the world are working harder to reduce carbon emissions, she says. Optimism about our ability to beat back climate change was my big takeaway from Davos. But I also got a sense there that for at least some in business, fighting climate change and working to improve the planet was finally becoming not just a hollow “responsibility.” “Decarbonizing is a business opportunity,” said Johan Rockstrom, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, also on the lunch program. He was not the only one making that point. At the lunch, Börje Ekholm, CEO of Ericsson, said digital technologies, especially the enhanced internet of things made possible by 5G wireless infrastructure, will assist humankind in meeting fully 1/3 of the climate goals for 2030. “The business community is way ahead of the political leadership,” climate expert Rockstrom continued. “We are doubling renewable energy produced by solar and wind every 4.5 years. That’s exponential, and means 50% of the world’s energy will be produced from renewable sources by 2030, even with business as usual.” That same evening, I went to a reception hosted by Unilever’s departing CEO, Paul Polman. As much as any big business leader, he has made a conscious commitment to global betterment a central element of doing business. The reception, attended by hundreds of his friends and fans, was focused on how business can help achieve the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. Like Rockstrom, Polman sees working towards the goals not as a burden for business, but as an opportunity, along with an obligation. He said 1800 CEOs have already committed to integrating the SDGs into their companies’ work, and that achieving them would create at least 380 million jobs. Our theme here at Techonomy in 2019 is Collaborating for Responsible Growth, so I was heartened to hear Polman call for companies to stop talking about corporate social responsibility, and instead begin pursuing “responsible social collaborations.” Working across boundaries between industries and between business, civil society, and government is the only path to addressing the scale of the world’s problems. My final day in Davos, I attended the annual lunch hosted by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a giant white geodesic dome in the center of town. This year the lunch, too, was focused on combatting climate change. Benioff moderated a panel including Figueres, the primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall, Will.i.am, Bono, and Kengo Sakurada, CEO of Japanese insurance company Sompo Holdings. In his inimitable earnest fashion, Benioff asked the panelists a very non-corporate question: “How can we bring our light into the next five years? Look into your heart.” Figueres proclaimed “This is the moment of choice on climate, and on everything.” Goodall said business must ask how it can perform for the good of the planet. Will.i.am, much of whose focus these days is on entrepreneurship around AI and speech, said we need to pair our efforts at creating smarter machines with parallel efforts to insure people are better educated. Bono was in fine form, as if composing lyrics: “We have to decide if we’re firefighters or arsonists…Businesses, like species, will become extinct if they don’t evolve to changing environments… Consumers are waking up to the power they have in their pockets. They realize it’s political power.” The idea that consumers are voting as much with their wallets as in the ballot booth was a nice corollary, or even an explanation, for Rockstrom’s point that business is ahead of politicians on climate change. But the coup de grace was delivered by a 16-year-old climate activist named Greta Thunberg. Benioff, presumably knowing what he was doing, handed her the mike. What we heard was not typical Davos fare. Thunberg quietly thundered: “Some people say that the climate crisis is something that we all have created, but that is not true, because if everyone is guilty then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame. Some people, some companies, some decision-makers in particular, have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing, to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. And I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.” Facing that accusation, the audience first gasped, then applauded. “The future is in your hands,” Thunberg proclaimed in conclusion. Former Trump economic advisor Gary Cohn, sitting in my line of sight, who had been fidgeting and focusing on his phone during most of the panel, did not applaud. That night, at a dinner in a restaurant back room hosted by my friend Matthew Bishop, the author who is now a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation, a debate broke out among the assembled journalists, activists, and businesspeople. Several said the World Economic Forum was just a bunch of plutocrats scheming to maintain their wealth. Yes, partly, it is, as Thunberg had pointedly noted. But there were also plenty of more productive threads to this tapestry, I insisted. I left Davos inspired to help continue those at our own Techonomy conferences in 2019. Join us May 14-15 in New York to hear some of those same voices, which I am more determined than ever to assemble here. David Kirkpatrick is the founder and editor in chief of Techonomy, a conference series and journalism platform focused on the intersection of technology and the global economy. Kirkpatrick is also the author of the bestselling book “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World.” He spent 25 years at Fortune, and founded and hosted its Brainstorm and Brainstorm Tech conferences
Why Social Purpose in Business Will Rise in Importance in 2019
BY sethgreen January 17, 2019Guest 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.