Shonda Rhimes—creator of the television shows Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, How To Get Away With Murder, and now the media company Shondaland—has built a celebrated career telling the stories of nuanced, compelling characters. She does not care for the term that’s often used to describe such characters when they are anything other than young white men.
I’ve watched YouTube for fun at work. You’ve watched YouTube for fun at work. Let he (or she) who has not sat at a desk and clicked on an SNL sketch—or the video a friend just texted you, or the livefeed of a game—cast the first stone.
The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, a prestigious international competition whose winners are exhibited at London’s National Portrait Gallery, gives artists only a few constraints: the portraits have to be of people.
“So, what can we say now?”
Critics of a $15 per hour minimum wage—as advocated by Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party, and soon to be implemented in California and New York—point to the standard’s unintended consequences: fewer jobs, higher prices, and more workers replaced by robots.
How can a company retain good employees? Paying them more is one obvious answer. There’s also another, more cost-effective option: being honest with people about why they earn the salaries they do.
Society tends to lionize individuals who guide their companies from the idea stage to multibillion valuations. But the likes of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and other famous founder-CEOs is rare, and not only because of the scale of success their companies achieved.
It’s one of the best-established relationships in economics: as women’s education and income levels go up, the number of children they have goes down.
The US is graduating high school students at an all-time record rate. Having coming of age in the metric-focused No Child Left Behind era, these students’ academic and technical skills have been tested more than perhaps any generation before them. Yet employers looking to hire them say too many of today’s graduates lack the basic interpersonal skills to succeed in the workplace, according to a new report from the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation.
On Nov. 12, a coalition of women’s groups will lead a march in Los Angeles opposing sexual harassment and the uneven balance of power between men and women at work.
Some years ago, when I still lived in London, I was sent on a short business trip to Wales. Just before leaving for the train station I opened up a browser window and typed in the hotel’s name for directions.
Before he was a MacArthur Fellow, or a Man Booker Prize recipient, or the person David Foster Wallace named the most exciting writer in America, George Saunders was a technical writer at Radian Corporation, crafting numbingly dull environmental impact statements that nobody read. He wrote his first book, the now-celebrated short story collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, in spare moments snatched over seven years in the company’s Rochester, New York offices. It was the kind of atmosphere that stands in opposition to every conception we have of a creative place: thin, synthetic carpet; cubicles; employees like Saunders toiling at desks wearing, as he wrote in a later edition’s afterword, “sad khakis.”
Shohei Otani is 23 years old, 6-feet-4-inches tall, and baseball’s next great hope. Currently the pride of Japan’s Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters, Otani possesses dual prowess as a pitcher and a hitter at a level unseen since Babe Ruth. He’s expected to move to the US major leagues this winter.
Donating a loved one’s body to science is for many people a comforting and altruistic act that makes meaning of a personal loss. For the many families unable to afford the cost of a funeral or cremation, it’s also a practical one, as the businesses that accept and arrange such donations typically offer to pay for cremation.
In my Pocket lives a well-read person.
After decades as an executive advisor, Mark Lipton was ready to write a book on an ugly subcategory of people he worked with: vindictive leaders who bullied and manipulated underlings, often through angry outbursts in the workplace. That book, Mean Men: The Perversion of America’s Self-Made Man, highlighted several business leaders who fit the profile. (Most are anonymous, but Henry Ford, PR chief Peter Arnell, and American Apparel founder Dov Charney all make cameo appearances.)
Richard Thaler, the University of Chicago professor and recent Nobel laureate in economics, is perhaps best known for his work on mental accounting. This is the human tendency to mentally divide what is essentially one pot of money into different mental accounts with different purposes, values, and rules. If you’ve ever contributed to a savings account while maintaining credit card debt, or spent an unexpected bonus on an indulgence you wouldn’t have bought with your regular paycheck, you have engaged in mental accounting.
As the conventional wisdom goes, rising childcare costs has put a financial squeeze on US families. More than 60% of parents across all income brackets in a 2015 Pew Research Center survey said it was difficult to find affordable, high-quality childcare in their community.
If you manage anyone, at some point you will have to sit down and deliver a piece of uncomfortable news. You may be tempted to cushion this information with an introduction intended to soften the blow. It’s a charitable impulse, but new research suggests that one of the best things you can do for the person on the other side of the table is to get to the point as soon as possible.
In 1952 a young woman from a well-off English family left school at the age of 18 and took a job as a secretary. On a visit to a childhood friend who lived in Kenya, she was introduced to the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who hired her as a secretary and brought her along to an archaeological dig in the Serengeti.
Amazon’s September announcement that it’s taking bids for the site of its second North American headquarters has sparked a fierce competition among US cities eager to land the $5 billion new complex and the 50,000 jobs it’s expected to bring. New Jersey pledged $5 billion in tax breaks. Philadelphia offered 28 million square feet of office space. Tucson, Arizona sent a 21-foot cactus. And there were plenty of other outlandish inducements.
When dealing with a toxic coworker, one of the first lines of defense is to limit your contact and communication as much as possible, Stanford management professor and office bullies expert Robert Sutton says. One of the most effective ways to do that is to put a little physical distance between you, as Sutton explains in his book The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt.
I recently heard of two partners in an investment fund who keep an ongoing record of every disagreement they have, in a document dubbed “the argument journal.” When they can’t reach consensus on a significant decision, they write down each partner’s position, the action taken, and the eventual outcome.
No-Nonsense Management: A Primer for Managers was written in 1977 by Richard S. Sloma, a former executive and the author of a suite of managerial reference books (other titles include No-Nonsense Planning and No-Nonsense Government). Bantam paperback versions of No-Nonsense Management appeared in 1981. Somehow over the next 36 years one of those copies ended up on the crowded shelf of free books at Coffee Cartel in Redondo Beach, California.
