Many people work happily and effectively from home. Research suggests that these “flexible” workers can be more productive, and that they have higher levels of well being, and much less depleting conflict between work and family.
Leading management consultancy McKinsey joined with a number of other prominent companies to announce an effort to improve employee health this week. But McKinsey is unusual because its employees join and leave the firm young. The average age is 35, and over 80% of the staff are under 40.
There have been no IPOs this year, and few ever that can match Alibaba’s. The e-commerce giant is a mashup of some of Silicon Valley’s best ideas transported to China, its founder is a quirky English teacher turned multi-billionaire, and the cash generated will be essential to the ongoing saga of Marissa Mayer and Yahoo.
Microsoft’s prediction team has moved beyond a successful World Cup and a foray into American football to turn its attention to politics in the United Kingdom, where Scotland will not vote to become independent today, if the team’s first attempt at a UK-specific prediction is correct.
In the United States, companies pick up a great deal of the bill for a healthcare system that spends the most but accomplishes the least among industrialized nations. Getting wise to this, more employers have rolled out wellness programs, where workers are encouraged with either a carrot or a stick to make better healthcare choices.
It’s no secret that Tim Cook is stylistically different from his predecessor, the brilliant but mercurial Steve Jobs. The leadership transition has has had a dramatic effect on the company’s culture and structure, as documented by Bloomberg Businessweek’s latest interview with Cook. He has opened up how the company organizes departments, recruits talent is recruited, and designs products, doing away with Jobs’s more closed, compartmentalized approach.
Luis Suarez’s transfer to Barcelona for more than $110 million and World Cup standout James Rodriguez’s $100 million move to Real Madrid were the biggest of this summer’s moves in European soccer. Spending that much just for the right to pay a player a six-figure weekly salary seems crazy in the context of other sports.
Microsoft formally announced today that it was buying Mojang, the company behind the massively popular, open world game Minecraft, a move that’s come as a shock to fans of the game.
Darden, the restaurant group that owns Olive Garden and Long, is in some pretty serious trouble. Sales have been flat or declining for years, and it just reported a quarterly loss.
Soccer has been one of the slowest sports to adopt change, only adopting goal-line technology in the World Cup this year, despite some real howlers in tournaments past. Now the US Major League Soccer is proposing to push the envelope significantly by testing video-replay challenges of official’s decisions, commissioner Don Garber told Sports Illustrated.
Harvard students know which way the wind is blowing. According to a report from the Harvard Crimson, the school’s introductory computer science class (CS50) has a record 818 undergraduates this fall. Twelve percent of undergraduates are taking the course, making it the most popular Harvard course in at least a decade.
Given the current job environment, it’s unsurprising that schools with a narrow focus on technology or engineering produce the highest-paid graduates. According to new data from career and salary data site PayScale, which lists median salaries for graduates of thousands of US schools, picking an institution that specializes in what you want to do or study has its benefits.
Banks have been guardedly praised for taking steps to rein in their notoriously awful work environment for young employees, insisting on the occasional weekend off and questioning managers that overwork underlings. Barclays is going a step further and will now start cutting the pay of senior bankers who are identified by their underlings as being rotten to deal with, according to The Wall Street Journal (paywall).
Microsoft is reportedly in serious talks (paywall) to buy Mojang, the Swedish game studio behind Minecraft, the enormously popular indie game where gamers can wander and build what they please in an open world. The deal could be worth more than $2 billion and close this week, according to the Wall Street Journal. It’s enough to make anyone say “whaaaaa…?”
Apple’s new watch is a second screen, a fashion piece, and a fitness tracker all in one, but it may not offer the kind of revolutionary fitness data that hardcore athletes are hankering for.
After years of massive growth in the US, Vodka sales are slowing, despite distillers increasingly desperate attempts to make their drink go down easier with customers. Flavored variants, a common marketing ploy for brands under pressure, are losing their appeal.
Much has been made lately of how American work culture can make overwork into a badge of honor, instead of a pathology that ends up diminishing productivity and quality.
Not content with Frappucino obsessives alone, Starbucks is going after intense coffee snobs in Seattle and East Coasters who want a cheap cup of Joe in a New York minute.
Talk of the death of the IPO may be premature.
Microsoft’s Bing predictions team had a pretty great World Cup, perfectly predicting the knockout round of the soccer tournament—unless you think the third-place match matters, which it doesn’t. Now people who use the search engine, or the company’s mobile assistant, Cortana, can get predictions on every National Football League game this season.
As any job-seeker who has stared with dismay at a long list of job specs might suspect, there’s a major disconnect between most job postings and reality. Hiring managers who describe a dream candidate instead of what they actually need, or obsess about screening out all under-qualified applications, often write postings that ask for much more than the company can realistically expect to find.
This post has been corrected
It’s easy to imagine that the well-trodden path from the Ivy League to Wall Street has always existed. But it’s a relatively recent phenomenon, nurtured through deliberate effort and investment in the 1980s. (Before then, medicine and the law were the main attractions.)
One of Chipotle’s biggest obsessions, along with the way it sources food and manages its employees, is constantly increasing throughput, the rate at which it serves customers at peak hours. The company can serve between 100 and 120 people an hour during peak lunch hours, and continues to up its average speed quarter after quarter.
