People have been predicting the end of the business card for years. Countless startups have popped up promising to make carrying more than one card, or any at all, obsolete.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has famously made the case that it’s possible for women to both lean in to their careers and have a happy and successful home life. PepsiCo chair and CEO Indra Nooyi acknowledges that’s a real struggle, one in which she enlists her colleagues for help.
Since supermarkets came of age in the 1950s, the American grocery store layout has largely been frozen in time.
Facebook released the results of a study where its data scientists skewed the positive or negative emotional content that appeared in the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users over the course of a week in order to study their reaction. The study found evidence of “emotional contagion,” in other words, that the emotional content of posts bled into user’s subsequent actions.
The central bank for Central Banks just sent out a warning that markets have gotten excessively euphoric in spite of some worrying fundamentals.
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Cash bonuses make up a huge part of overall pay and prestige on Wall Street. An ex-Goldman banker recently sued because his $8.25 million bonus was less than he expected. Credit Suisse and UBS have veered away from tradition in the past year by paying some of their traders’ bonuses partly in a weird kind of bond called contingent capital, or CoCos. And now, Bloomberg reports, those bonds are doing rather well.
It’s not a surprise to anyone who has seen the numbers at other tech companies, but Facebook’s release of employee demographic data has provided more stark evidence that Silicon Valley has a diversity problem.
Facebook just joined the growing wave of Silicon Valley companies voluntarily reporting their diversity data.
Traditional management culture in Korea is rigid and hierarchical. Many companies maintain a structure of five or more distinct ranks of employees, each of which comes with a prescribed title. A few years ago, firms like SK Telecom (paywall) began doing away with this traditional structure in favor of a much flatter hierarchy, where people referred to colleagues simply as “manager”. Others followed suit by degrees, if not in so extreme a fashion.
Green coffee prices have risen rapidly this year, affecting a number of retail brands. US consumers are going to feel it a lot more acutely once Starbucks raises its prices tomorrow. While price rises have already kicked in for other companies, it’s mostly been store products rather than the daily cup of coffee. Starbucks serves many thousands of people on a daily basis, so tomorrow will be the first time many are directly affected by the shortage.
An ex-Google lawyer who’s now general counsel at Pinterest named Michael Yang constantly gets asked by former colleagues if they should leave Google. So he wrote a catch-all guide on Medium to the question. It’s not just the salary that’s a reason to stay, though Yang notes that anyone leaving the Googleplex behind should expect to make substantially less.
The coffee roaster and single-serve coffee machine maker Keurig Green Mountain has been extremely successful over the last few years, becoming one of America’s dominant coffee brands. But it has been challenged by a rising number of K-Cup pirates—private label companies making much cheaper Keurig-compatible single-serving pods, without paying a dime to Keurig for licenses.
The United States’ National Weather Service has been using the same process to get weather forecast data from the atmosphere since the 1930s—by launching weather balloons carrying devices called radiosondes that measure pressure, temperature, and humidity. These balloons, launched twice a day from 69 fixed locations in the continental US, offer a relatively reliable way of gathering data, but the system is fundamentally patchy. And while radiosondes dropping from the sky are harmless, they can produce an alarming noise and sulfuric smell.
It’s a given that your job and education history will be listed on your resume, but former student jocks should also find a way to mention their athletic past when interviewing for jobs, according to two new studies.
Google’s data release on the gender and ethnic makeup of its current employees confirmed something many people suspected: that the technology industry has a serious diversity problem. Google’s transparency has encouraged other companies to follow in its footsteps, and both LinkedIn and Yahoo have recently shared similar figures. The takeaway is that the industry can be pervasively and worryingly homogenous.
Justin Hendrix has a fascinating series on Medium speaking to the chief technology officers of major US digital publishing organizations, most recently Buzzfeed’s Mark Wilkie. These CTOs are dealing with a constantly evolving and increasingly competitive industry where all of the work and consumption happens online.
As companies do more of their hiring online, their human resources departments are spending a lot of time thinking about how to appeal to job seekers across industry and geographic lines.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife and Gates Foundation co-chair Melinda Gates gave the commencement address to Stanford University’s graduating class yesterday.
Many people know the Dutch East India Company as the first modern corporation. But a group of French millers formed the Société des Moulins de Bazacle, a surprisingly sophisticated and modern shareholding company, centuries before the Dutch. (It has the added distinction of not having started or participated in a series of wars in East Asia.)
It’s becoming increasingly common for companies to publicly detail their culture and management ideas, a trend kicked off by Netflix’s famous culture presentation. Lately a presentation from Possible Health, a non-profit health provider that works mostly in rural Nepal, is attracting attention.
When an airline that was once a legend for mismanagement, bad service, and poor safety decides to create a low-cost subsidiary, passengers might well choose to steer clear. But Aeroflot, whose budget subsidiary Dobrolet (pronounced “do-bra-lyot“) yesterday launched its inaugural flight, has come a long way since the Soviet days. And there’s little reason to think that Dobrolet won’t be on a par with similar airlines such as EasyJet, RyanAir, or Spirit Airways—which is to say cramped, skimpy on service, and inclined to add extra charges to everything it can, but nothing worse.
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Stephen Wolfram attended his first-ever high school graduation this week—he never formally finished high school before he got his Ph.D in particle physics at Cal Tech by age 20, and won a MacArthur Genius Grant at age 21. He went on to create Mathematica, an extremely successful computation engine, and the natural language search tool Wolfram Alpha.
