Max Nisen

A.G. Lafley’s first stint in charge of Procter & Gamble, from 2000 to 2009, made him something of a legend in business circles. He increased P&G’s value by more than $100 billion, and more than doubled the number of billion-dollar brands in its portfolio. But years of sluggish growth led to the departure of his handpicked successor Robert McDonald, Lafley’s return as CEO, and now, an ambitious plan to cut out as many as 100 fringe brands from the company, according to the Wall Street Journal (paywall).

While plenty of modern conference rooms are outfitted with technology, IBM is imagining a future in which computers figure into office meetings not only as tools but as active participants.

Despite the outsize myth of the college dropout founder in Silicon Valley, top university engineering programs are significant feeders to the companies in the region. A Quora question asks which of the top schools might be best for an extremely talented high school computer scientist.

Coke’s popular Freestyle soda machines, which allow customers to custom mix their fountain drinks, have been a treasure trove of data for the company. For instance, they helped convince the company to release Cherry Fanta in stores (it had previously been a fountain-only soda) based on the Freestyle’s feedback about its popularity. The company is about to tap into another fruitful data set from people’s kitchens and workplaces: Its partner Keurig Green Mountain is launching a new cold drinks machine with similar data collection capabilities.

The numbers: Revenue jumped 47% to $534 million from $364 million in the second quarter last year. The net loss was $1 million, down from a $3.7 million profit in the same period a year earlier after a busy quarter in which the company acquired two companies. LinkedIn’s shares are up more than 8% in after hours trading.

Educational rankings are big business in the US. Attracting talent and maintaining prestige depends largely on where an American university falls in official tallies. Rankings are also a cash cow for the companies that produce them like US News and the recently-acquired Princeton Review.

According to an analysis by research firm Equilar, the idea that CEO pay is linked to performance is mostly mythology. There are few better examples of that than Larry Ellison, the CEO of database giant Oracle.

A short elevator ride from New York City’s humid bustle is Facebook’s brand new office, a raw airy, open-plan space that manages to be luxurious even in a half-finished state. Look around, and there are plenty of signs that you’re in one of those fancy technology spaces that have become part of the appeal for Silicon Valley companies: a big, extremely well-stocked snack kitchen; a cafeteria under construction downstairs that will serve employees free meals; a coffee bar with a bewildering array of brewing apparatus; a cocktail bar overlooking Astor Place.

Over the past 30 years there’s been a shift and polarization of the American workforce. There have been fewer and fewer people employed in middle-wage occupations, mostly because “routine occupations,” jobs that can be performed by following a well-defined set of instructions, have been declining for years, and plummeted after the most recent recession.

Millions of people make a living without ever setting foot in an office. Particularly in technology, companies are moving away from just outsourcing rote tasks to remote workers and toward building entirely distributed teams.

The numbers: Weighed down heavily by the company’s ongoing series of recalls. General Motors had to account for repair costs and one-time charges related to compensating victims hurt or killed in accidents caused by an ignition switch flaw and changed how it measures future recalls expenses, costing it more than a billion dollars in total. That left net income of $190 million, down 85% from the same quarter last year. Without those expenses, net income would have increased. Revenue was $39.6 billion, up $500 million from the same period a year ago.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman laid out a lengthy presentation yesterday arguing that Herbalife is an illegal pyramid scheme. Ackman, who has pursued a 2-year-long campaign against the nutritional drinks maker, accused the company’s leadership, including CEO Michael Johnson, of perpetrating a massive criminal fraud that deliberately targets minorities and the underprivileged, comparing their misdeeds to those of Enron, the mafia, and the Nazis.

Despite a successful quarter that handily beat analyst expectations, Chipotle is not satisfied. In recent earnings calls, the US fast-food chain’s co-CEO, Montgomery Moran, has provided consistent updates on one of the company’s core obsessions—serving as many people as possible during its peak hours, when lines often snake out the door of some restaurants and cause bottlenecks. This quarter, throughput was the fastest ever, with eight more transactions per hour during both the peak lunch and dinner hours compared to last year.

The numbers: Pretty fantastic. Sales jumped 24.6% to $1.05 billion, compared to the second quarter of 2013. Sales at stores open at least 12 months—an important gauge of retail operations—surged 17.3%. Profit rose 25.5% to $110.3 million. The company raised its full-year sales guidance. Shares climbed nearly 10% in after hours trading.

Update 5:40pm ET: With Germany’s 1-0 win over Argentina in the final, Microsoft’s prediction engine had a perfect record in predicting the knockout stages of the World Cup.

In 1991, shortly after they first met, Warren Buffett passed along John Brooks’ Business Adventures to Bill Gates.

The all-to familiar business ritual of setting up a phone call, where it takes a day-long series of emails and calendar checks to even agree in a time, is the worst type of procrastination: the kind that makes you feel as if you’ve done something productive. Scheduled business calls should be eliminated entirely, the internet entrepreneur Philip Kaplan argues in a blog post.

Bill Gates’ favorite business book of all time is nearly half a century old, was out of print until this week, and is entirely different from the how-to-manage guides that top many other lists. It’s Business Adventures, a collection of some of the best of long-time New Yorker writer John Brooks’ wonderfully elegant stories about Wall Street and American business. It’s their age and uniqueness that makes them so valuable, Gates writes in a review in The Wall Street Journal.

At a company’s top ranks, the pay gap and paucity of women is all too well known. Now there’s a third area where women lag behind their male executives: insider trading.

In his recent New York Times musings about the struggles of small business ownership, suburban Philadelphia furniture manufacturer Paul Downs described his firing of an employee who had been with him for 20 years. That provoked a great deal of criticism from readers and fellow business owners, to which Downs responded in a new column (paywall). His staffing troubles are a reminder that, even in the smallest of businesses, new managers need to be well managed themselves.

Banks and private equity firms have always been competitors for talent. But the competition has reached absurd levels, the New York Times recently reported (paywall). Freshly-minted bank analysts on two-year contracts are being offered private-equity jobs up to 18 months before they’re free to take them.

So far in the World Cup knockout stages, Microsoft’s Bing search engine has been perfect in predicting the winners. Since Microsoft added the so-called prediction engine to its Cortana virtual assistant for Windows phones on June 28th, it’s gone 12 for 12, as chronicled by an ebullient series of tweets curated by Cortana program manager Marcus Ash:

Silicon Valley CEOs (and many from farther afield) are constantly complaining that good technical talent is expensive and in short supply. There’s something to their concerns. At every education level, jobs requiring STEM (science, technology, engineering or math) skills in the US take far more time and money to fill than just about anything else, according to a new study from the Brookings Institution.

Facebook made headlines for a recently published study where it modified the emotional content of what appeared in people’s news feeds and studied the after-effect of that change on users—an experiment some condemned as an intrusion and a manipulation of unsuspecting users of the social network. The Wall Street Journal (paywall) reports now that the study was just one of ”hundreds” of tests run by a highly active and not particularly well-supervised group of data scientists.