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Since 2010, Northrop Grumman Corporation "has spent on average more than $1.5 million each year to protect Wes Bush, the chief executive." Also: "Between 2010 and 2012, Northrop also paid a total of $12.2 million in protection for Lewis Coleman, a non-executive chairman."
Many large corporations, especially defense contractors, pay for home security, drivers and private air travel.
Just posted: Michael E. Raynor on making personal management decisions.
In the wake of one helluva tumble skiing in Lake Tahoe that left me with a ruptured ACL (knee ligament) and a long road back to my former semi-athletic self, I continue to try to make lemonade by looking for connections between my rehabilitation and the challenges that face managers.
Nadya Zhexembayeva: If “green” has become synonymous "with overpriced, overhyped, half-baked products, that kind of green deserves to die." Check out our excerpt from Berrett-Koehler Publishers' "Overfished Ocean Strategy."
Rethinking “going green.”
The latest from Sydney Finkelstein: "Intelligence is one of those characteristics where there is a minimum level needed to be in the game. Once past that, too much intelligence can be a drawback or worse."
When hiring, promoting, even just putting together your team, you should look for the smartest people in the room, right? Not so fast.
This is a tough one.
In this week's video, Prudie counsels a man who has reservations about recommending his ex-colleague at his new job.
How the power balance within a company can make things better—or worse.
How to increase the total quantity of power in the organization so that the power given to some does not comes at the expense of the power of others.
The latest from Sydney Finkelstein: "Conventional wisdom becomes conventional because it has an inherent truth to it—or at least it once did. In our rush to adopt the shorthand of business, we can easily miss the subtleties and nuances that should give pause, and thought, to what we are doing."
“Get on the bus!” How many times have we heard that one from managers exhorting their team to buy into the project or strategy they are spearheading?
If you’re not on the bus, you’re not a team player, or even worse, you’re a negative influence. And we know what happens to people branded as “negative” in an organization, don’t we?
Terrific new Marshall Goldsmith video about how leaders play favorites and inadvertently encourage managing up: "If everyone in the world hates suck-ups so much, why does so much sucking up go on?"
Marshall Goldsmith talks about the most important habits that leaders need to STOP. Subscribe to Marshall's YouTube Page for more videos Like him on Facebook...
In today's The Kansas City Star, Diane Stafford discusses Vadim Liberman's Spring cover story.
The spring 2014 cover story in The Conference Board Review, headlined "Performance Anxiety," addresses a theme I hear often from workers.
!["[W]hile more employers say they are offering flexible work arrangements—like working from home, starting and ending the...](https://img5.medioq.com/358/334/697966743583347.jpg)
"[W]hile more employers say they are offering flexible work arrangements—like working from home, starting and ending the days a bit earlier or later—they are still typically offered only to certain employees, and are often informally negotiated with a sympathetic manager."
Many employers say they offer telecommuting and flexible work hours to employees, but in fact are cutting back on time for child leave or to care for an ill parent.
!["[T]he best third-party support a Big Company can ask for comes in the form of all the little guys who are on its side. ...](https://img3.medioq.com/050/398/695427010503987.jpg)
"[T]he best third-party support a Big Company can ask for comes in the form of all the little guys who are on its side. Since that's as common as four-leaf clovers in the Utah Salt Flats, most companies try to organize their own bands of little guys."
According to The Wall Street Journal, technology companies are "considering mobilizing a grassroots campaign to rally public opinion around the idea that the Internet's pipes should be equally open for all." I'm shocked. Next, you'll tell me there's gambling in Nevada.
Check out our new excerpt from Deborrah Himsel's Beauty Queen: Inside the Reign of Avon's Andrea Jung!
...It is impossible to imagine a man leading Avon to such astonishing success as Andrea did. Her strategic insight and ability to motivate and inspire staff and female representatives around the world was extraordinary. It is also difficult to see a male CEO’s failings played out in the public and prolonged in the way that Andrea’s were.
!["[W]e’ve built a whole system on unrealistic expectations.… The economy has come to rely on this Darwinian process to dr...](https://img3.medioq.com/061/613/694305520616136.jpg)
"[W]e’ve built a whole system on unrealistic expectations.… The economy has come to rely on this Darwinian process to drive innovation."
It’s never been easier to build a product, raise money, and start a company. But there’s a catch: fierce competition means that the life of a startup is often brutish and short. Why are so many people gambling on ventures that are likely to end badly?
Worse, the percentage of people walking to work has dropped by half in the last three decades. No wonder everyone is obese.
Today the Census Bureau released the results of a big survey of how Americans commute to work, broken down by age/region/race/income/etc. The report's self-attested top highlight: The number of U.S. workers who traveled to work by bicycle increased from about 488,000 in 2000 to about 786,000 in 2008…
Surprises us that Walmart selling inexpensive organic food is cutting into Whole Foods sales—none of the WF shoppers we know would ever shop at Walmart no matter what the price. Seems like two completely separate consumer categories.
Whole Foods is facing new demons: cheap bags of organic quinoa. The longtime leader in health foods is bleeding sales as the craze for natural has increased competition and made organic groceries—gulp—more affordable. Pricey, high-end brands that were once available only on the shelves of Whole Food…
!["[M]any Chinese will only spend on things that they can show off to other people. Nobody knows when you travel to Americ...](https://img5.medioq.com/095/450/690921800954508.jpg)
"[M]any Chinese will only spend on things that they can show off to other people. Nobody knows when you travel to America and stay at a Motel 6, so what’s the point of spending thousands of dollars to stay at the St. Regis? Nobody will ever see that. However, things like luxury goods are very visible to other Chinese friends, so people will spend a lot on them. That’s why a company like Victoria’s Secret probably wouldn’t do well in China. People won’t spend that kind of money to buy underwear that almost no one will see."
Savio Chan takes a close look at buying behaviors in the Far East.
Your customers don't all want the same products. Neither do your workers.
How do you define your people? Through the economic expansions and contractions of the past twenty years, executives have struggled to define and redefine the employer-employee relationship, using various analogies, metaphors, and sound bites to explain the complex, shifting connection.
Everyone hates patent trolls, right? This is good news, then.
A new ruling makes it easier for patent-troll victims to reclaim legal costs.
Marvin Ammori: "The proposal would drive a knife in the heart of American innovation because startups can’t afford to pay Verizon (and then AT&T, then Cox, etc.) for fast lanes to compete with existing Web giants."
A few years ago, Internet users, democracy activists, and entrepreneurs got wind of a proposed law, SOPA, that would have changed the Web’s basic architecture to the benefit of a few media giants. So they organized protests for several months to oppose the law. Faced with this opposition, some senat…
!["[W]hy, five years into an economic recovery, are American firms investing so little money in new capacity, new equipmen...](https://img3.medioq.com/783/076/688825947830760.jpg)
"[W]hy, five years into an economic recovery, are American firms investing so little money in new capacity, new equipment, and new buildings?"
Kerplunk! That was the sound of the Commerce Department reporting that the U.S. economy almost came to a dead stop in the first three months of the year. Between January and March, G.D.P. grew at a rate of just 0.1 per cent. And that’s an annualized figure. From January to March, the economy expanded by just 0.025 per cent, or thereabouts. That’s virtually no growth at all.
New at TCB Review: Michael E. Raynor writes about skiing, TEDx, his latest book, and the unpredictability of planning for ROI.
When "The Three Rules" came out last May, I had high hopes for the book I co-authored. I’d like to think my level of expectation was born of the excellence of the work, but in truth, having spent five years on the project, wanting, hoping for (maybe even expecting!) success was inevitable. As you might have heard, we love most those things for which we suffer most (that’s why we all love our kids so much), and boy, did I suffer for this book.
![Jordan Weissmann: "[I]n short, Chahal’s story is that he only 'lost his temper'—whatever the hell that means—because his...](https://img5.medioq.com/129/332/687533681293320.jpg)
Jordan Weissmann: "[I]n short, Chahal’s story is that he only 'lost his temper'—whatever the hell that means—because his girlfriend was (allegedly) sleeping around. Oh, and Thomas Jefferson. Take note, PR pros. This guy has moves."
Score one for human decency: Silicon Valley ad-tech firm RadiumOne has fired its founder, CEO, and chairman, Gurbaksh Chahal, thanks to the uproar over his recent domestic abuse case. The company’s board of directors voted to terminate him in a meeting last night, according to an official statement.…
"What and how we teach is changing to meet the demands of a changing world." Because employers of the future won't need workers who wasted time fingerpainting at age 5, right?
"The reason for eliminating the Kindergarten show is simple. We are responsible for preparing children for college and career with valuable lifelong skills and know that we can best do that by having them become strong readers, writers, coworkers and problem solvers. Please do not fault us for making professional decisions that we know will never be able to please everyone."
"Chief Justice John Roberts questioned whether the technology used by the company had any purpose other than skirting copyright law. 'I'm just saying your technological model is based solely on circumventing legal prohibitions that you don't want to comply with.'"
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Supreme Court justices on Tuesday appeared skeptical over online TV startup Aereo Inc's position in a copyright fight with major media companies, but several raised concerns
New Yorkers arrive at work later than employees in any other U.S. metro area—not a surprise considering how long the commutes, and that it's in EST. But still: An average of 8:24 a.m. doesn't sound all that late, really.
I’m not a morning person, so I appreciate living in New York. The workday here starts later than in any other American city, and about half an hour later than in the U.S. as a whole. A decade or so...
Do you have responsibility for hiring? Try for color-blind evaluations.
In an experimental context, when reviewers were told the author of a legal brief was black they consistently rated identical pieces lower in quality and identified more spelling, grammar, factual, or analytical errors. It's evidence that, even if the days of overt bigotry and explicit discrimination are mostly past, the United States still struggles with a deep problem of implicit racism.
"The long-term welfare of garment workers and their families will ultimately depend on the follow-through of foreign brands whose buying power shapes the industry. If the past is any indication, for all the pledges and codes of conduct, profit-driven companies will get away with what they can when left to their own devices. Media coverage and consumer outrage in the wake of tragedy are a hedge against this."
What hasn’t changed since the Bangladesh factory collapsed.
TCB Review uses a Norelco electric so doesn't understand: Why would men, as Kevin Roose predicts, pay so much extra for such an obvious gimmick?
We don't need pivot-ball razors. We need moonshots.
But most critics of exorbitant CEO pay don't argue that it should be redistributed—the issue is that above a certain level, extra money does close to zero work in the economy. It doesn't get spent; it doesn't create jobs. It just becomes numbers that get shuffled around.
Last weekend the New York Times published its annual list of executive compensation, with Oracle’s Larry Ellison topping the charts at $78.4 million (and Disney’s Bob Iger in a distant second, at $34.3 million). Pay packages have increased by an average of 9 percent since 2012, continuing a steady a…
![Joe Nocera: "It’s a rigged game. When the company’s stock goes up, says [Graef] Crystal, the chief executive views himse...](https://img3.medioq.com/519/273/681872865192735.jpg)
Joe Nocera: "It’s a rigged game. When the company’s stock goes up, says [Graef] Crystal, the chief executive views himself as a hero. And when it goes down, 'it’s Janet Yellen’s or Barack Obama’s fault.'"
So much for getting executive compensation under control.
A treat for aficionados of poorly conceived charts, courtesy of Matthew Yglesias.
There's no doubt that the ethnic composition of the United States is changing rapidly. Here's a chart that won't clarify it for you.
Truly startled to see that eGullet co-founder Steven Shaw died last week, at just 44. We interviewed Shaw back in 2005, on his book "Turning the Tables."
For at least several years, conventional wisdom has said that retail is thriving only at the very top and very bottom—luxury and discount. How does this news fit in?
Family Dollar plans to cut some jobs and close about 370 underperforming stores as it tries to reverse sagging sales and earnings. The discount store operator will also lower prices on about 1,000 basic items. Family Dollar did not provide details on how many jobs were expected to be...
Would be great to see Hollywood lionize actual Wall Street reformers rather than its colorful antiheroes.
…Michael Lewis’ nonfiction work is about a group of Wall Street guys who grew frustrated by a loophole that gave traders the opportunity to game the stock market. They banded together to reform the financial markets by creating an exchange that rendered impotent the act of high-frequency trading, a ...
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