With an aging population and shrinking workforce, Japanese companies are struggling to hire for open positions. And it appears their efforts have been complicated by overly formal procedures that can raise the bar too high for applicants. Companies in the country make even applicants for relatively low-paying jobs jump through hoops that would seem ridiculous elsewhere.
Later this week, the 20th World Cup begins, and millions of people around the world can’t wait. But the comedian John Oliver offered a timely reminder that behind the spectacle is FIFA, an organization that he calls “comically grotesque,” and “cartoonishly evil,” a body that he argues is extraordinarily corrupt, values profit over people, and is more of a burden than a boost to host countries.
General Motors’ report on its ignition switch recall is an extensive and disturbing document on a corporate and engineering culture that failed. It’s also a chronicle of a management structure gone terribly wrong, which allowed the errors of a few people to have massive repercussions.
This morning, General Motors CEO Mary Barra laid out the results of an independent investigation into the company’s deadly ignition switch defect and recall. But her real focus was “a pattern of incompetence and neglect” at GM that allowed a potentially dangerous defect to endure, without making it to managers that could have addressed it.
This post has been updated
Today, Microsoft is playing catch-up on trends from the shift to mobile to the cloud. But for decades it was pretty universally acknowledged as a global leader in technology. And indeed, the 1999 video above (originally highlighted by Gizmodo), where Microsoft lays out the company’s vision for a “smart home” is remarkably prescient. The video and technology mockups are very much of their time, and the occasional appearance of Windows ’98 can be jarring, but it predicts with some accuracy a lot of technology that we use—or are developing—today.
It’s not just companies that compete for bright new graduates. Cities and countries also vie for them. Young people spend a lot, start companies, and draw big employers. After looking at its massive data set of job applicants and user profiles, LinkedIn picked out the cities that new graduates are the most likely to move to.
One of the signature components of US health care reform, sometimes overshadowed by fights over Medicare expansion and the individual mandate, is an increased emphasis on data and transparency. And one of things the data show is how strange hospital pricing is.
In just a few short years, Keurig Green Mountain has gone from a tiny brand to near-ubiquity. It’s the largest coffee brand in the United States by retail sales, and its single-serving machines are wildly popular. But a major issue facing the company, which makes most of its money selling K-cup pods, is copycats that make pods without its license or participation. Pods that aren’t licensed by the company currently make up about 14% of the market.
Late last year, Harvard’s prestigious business school announced that it was making a foray into online education. Its approach, called HBX, is dramatically different from that of Wharton and other universities, which have used platforms like Coursera to reach millions of students. Harvard’s is a proprietary platform that will start out by offering a series of classes teaching business fundamentals to recent undergraduates, complete with case studies. A nine-week set of three courses will cost $1,500.
It has become relatively common, even unremarkable, for young people to spend a time after they’ve graduated college waiting tables, doing clerical work, or working retail. Nearly half of a group of four-year-degree graduates surveyed by McKinsey last year said they had a job that didn’t require a degree. And many are advised to take any job they can find, even if it’s one that doesn’t require a degree, to build their resumes and skills.
The Waffle Taco is by far the most prominent and talked-about offering in Taco Bell’s efforts to crack McDonald’s long standing dominance of the US fast-food breakfast market.
The decline of the DVD in favor of streaming video services has been great for consumers, but unexpectedly good for the planet too. In 2011, if all of the video watched on DVD had instead been streamed, it would have saved 30 petajoules (30 million billion joules) of energy, enough to power 200,000 American homes for a year, and would have reduced CO2 emissions by around 2 billion kilograms, according to a new paper from researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Northwestern University.
The technology industry is frequently thought of as a place that’s heavily white and male, and often unfriendly, if not hostile, to women. Google took a look at its own diversity record and released the data to NewsHour and in a blog post, and it confirms many fears.
You probably assume Google and Facebook know everything about you. You may not have heard of a group of companies who possibly know even more. They’re called data brokers, and their business is collecting and selling personal data—typically without your knowledge or consent—that are used to verify identity, help marketers, detect fraud and help perform detailed “people searches.”
Nowadays, job postings are—at best—something of a formality. At worst, they’re actually counterproductive, both for recruiters and applicants. They can bring a high volume of applications with relatively low quality, and candidates that come in that way have a significant stigma (paywall) in the HR world. The ease of applying online means that more resumes come in than ever before, but less get any kind of real attention or hearing, often for reasons that don’t have much to do with the candidate.
The Mizkan Group has its origins in the early 1800s, when the son of a family of sake makers figured out a cheap way to make rice vinegar from the liquor’s leftovers. Though it’s since expanded in the centuries since into seasonings and other condiments, Mizkan just made its boldest expansion to date: its $2.15 billion purchase of Unilever’s Ragú and Bertolli brands, making it the new global leader in a very different category—pasta sauce.
Cruising is mostly an American phenomenon, with more than half of the world’s cruise ship passengers from the US. (The UK is a distant second, with 8% of the market.) But as the cruise giant Royal Caribbean International rolls out the first of its newest and most advanced ships, a crucial test of cruise economics, it won’t be docking it in New York. The home port will be Shanghai, China after an inaugural winter season in the US.
Sears reported earnings today, and it wasn’t pretty. The US-based retailer posted a loss of $402 million. This particular loss was driven by a poorly performing electronic-goods division—which the company hopes to turn around by focusing on “empowering connected living,” whatever that means—but it’s another chapter in an ongoing decline.
The enterprise software company Asana manages to serve multi-billion-dollar startups such as Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox and Pinterest with only 65 employees. That’s because streamlining workflow is what the company, whose motto is “Teamwork without email,” is designed to do.
Meetings, and recurring meetings in particular, are the bane of the corporate world. They take up a surprisingly massive amount of a company’s time and energy.
One of the biggest ways companies motivate people is the threat of losing their jobs. Some do it explicitly through forced ranking and threats of layoffs. Others create insecurity when managers give infrequent feedback or incomplete information.
When the Mexican food chain Chipotle announced on its most recent earnings call that it will raise prices companywide for the first time in three years due to rising beef, dairy, and avocado prices, the company was somewhat vague about the increases, saying only that they would start in the second quarter. But the price increases are happening at a faster clip than expected, and may be larger than initially thought, according to an analyst note from Credit Suisse.
Chipotle is doing well. Really well.
