Category: Industry News

Posted on

News You Can Use: 1/9/2019

  • Stanford professor: “The workplace is killing people and nobody cares”

    There is a tremendous amount of epidemiological literature that suggests that diabetes, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome—and many health-relevant individual behaviors such as overeating and underexercising and drug and alcohol abuse–come from stress.

    And third, there is a large amount of data that suggests the biggest source of stress is the workplace. So that’s how Chapman can stand up and make the statement that CEOs are the cause of the health care crisis: You are the source of stress, stress causes chronic disease, and chronic disease is the biggest component of our ongoing and enormous health care costs.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90282735/the-workplace-is-killing-people-and-nobody-cares

  • Amazon, to Win in Booming Rural India, Reinvents Itself

    Amazon’s efforts here face direct competition from Walmart Inc. and local startups, who are all trying to capture customers jumping directly to e-commerce thanks to the recent rollout of 4G mobile internet across India. Amazon expects the number of online shoppers in India to triple in the next few years, most of them from rural areas. More than 80% of its new customers this year are from outside India’s biggest cities, it said.

    The Seattle giant has modified its app to work with inexpensive smartphones and patchy cellular networks. It has added hundreds of thousands of Indian language descriptions of products and videos for those who can’t read, and it has opened physical Amazon stores to walk people through the process of ordering online. It brought on tens of thousands of local distributors to deliver packages, often by bicycle down dirt roads, where it will accept cash or digital payment on delivery.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-win-in-booming-rural-india-reinvents-itself-11546196176

  • Corporations are getting political… and it sucks
  • Amazon Promised Drone Delivery in Five Years… Five Years Ago

    Of course, there’s nothing wrong with dreaming big, especially when it comes to tech that has the potential to help humanity. But this 60 Minutes segment about Amazon’s vaporware delivery drones never should’ve seen the light of day. Drone delivery is certainly a technological possibility today just as it was in 2013, but just like so many other billionaire-led pipedreams (anyone remember the Hyperloop?), the hurdles are more political than technological. As the Associated Press notes, federal rules that would allow drones to be flown outside of an operator’s line of sight are probably at least 10 years away.

    https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/amazon-promised-drone-delivery-in-five-years-five-ye-1830818625

  • Want to Be a Great Leader? Here’s Why Personal Mastery Is the Single Best Place to Start.

    “One of the tragedies of workplace politics and turf wars is that nobody wants them, but we all get caught up in them and feel powerless about it,” says Hughes. “We assign blame to someone else, or the organization as a whole.”

    The goal, according to Hughes, is for executives to learn to recognize ways they’re inadvertently and involuntarily perpetuating this dynamic. By becoming comfortable with self-diagnosing their contribution to the problem and talking about turf wars with their staff and colleagues in a more transparent way, they can begin to reduce the powerlessness people feel over it.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/310795

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 12/26/2018

  • Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success—Until Users Fled

    Snapchat’s popularity among young people and celebrities once helped give its owner a peak valuation of about $31 billion after its March 2017 initial public offering. The messaging app, which lets a person send a friend “snaps”—photos and videos that can disappear seconds after the recipient views them—once looked capable of becoming a viable social-media competitor to Facebook Inc.

    The redesign mess adds to troubles swirling around Snap and raises questions about whether Mr. Spiegel’s management instincts can help it pull through. His style—trust instincts, take control of details, ignore naysayers—paid off during Snap’s meteoric rise after its 2011 founding.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/evan-spiegels-imperious-style-made-snapchat-a-successuntil-users-fled-11545588892

  • Richard Branson Says the 9-5 Workday Grind Is About to Die. Here’s Why.

    Two other ideas that Branson supports are the proliferation of three and four day weekends and job sharing. These would prioritize a work infrastructure that allows employees to have full lives outside of an office, to spend time with friends and family, to devote time to the things they are passionate about, and to focus on being physically and mentally healthy.

    Branson explained how flexible work is a big part of how he leads Virgin Group. “If you trust people and treat them as adults, they will repay you by working effectively and efficiently,” he wrote. “Choice can empower people to make good decisions and feel positive about their workplace, helping to keep great employees and attract new talent. If we all work smarter, we won’t have to work longer.”

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/324969

  • GoFundMe and a broken healthcare system
  • Advice For Employees: There’s a Limit To Your Complaints

    But to all employees — particularly those who are too young to remember what it was like during the 2009 recession — I do have a warning: you may want to zip it, just a little.

    There’s nothing wrong with giving feedback and by all means if your employer is doing something illegal you should be reporting it. Otherwise — and I say this with peace and love — you may be wise to tread carefully with your concerns about how the owners of the company you work at manage their company. Big firms like Google and Amazon that are in the public eye seem to have a higher tolerance for agitation. But smaller companies? Not as much. We don’t need the headaches. If you’re really not happy with how your employer runs his or her company then by all means: take advantage of the strong economy and make a move. That advantage isn’t going to last forever.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/324626

  • Stop Sending Regular Text Messages

    In more granular terms, the FCC has done to text messaging what it did to the internet when it overturned rules protecting net neutrality. The FCC’s latest decision reclassifies both SMS and MMS texts as “information services” under Title I of the Communications Act. Information services, however, aren’t subject to the same level of regulations as Title II-classified “telecommunication services” like phone calls, which is how they were classified before the December 12 decision. If you’re questioning the comparison to net neutrality, it’s literally the same issue: Broadband internet service was classified as Title II, allowing the FCC to enforce net neutrality rules. But the FCC voted to ditch these rules last year and once again classify broadband under Title I.

    Bottom Line:

    Basically, if you were looking for a push to switch to Signal, this is it. It’s secure, it has a desktop app, and it works across iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows.

    https://gizmodo.com/stop-sending-regular-text-messages-1831258324

Photo by Christophe Hautier on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 12/5/2018

  • There’s definitely reason to worry about Brexit, says Accel’s London team

    Though they reiterated that no one can know for certain what Brexit’s impact might be, Botteri raised a handful of things that have the firm worried, beginning with “immigration and hiring talent and the movement of talent,” which could be meaningfully hampered by Brexit. “Even companies that don’t move their headquarters to London will often at some point begin to build a team,” he noted, questioning whether that will continue to happen.

    There’s also the nontrivial issue of what happens to fintech companies, which have been thriving in London as a gateway between the U.S. and Europe and that have easily operated across all of Europe. Asked Botteri, “What about that?” post Brexit.

    https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/30/yes-do-worry-about-brexit-says-accel/

  • Confessions of a procurement director: ‘We don’t want to overpay our agencies’

    It’s procurement’s fault to a degree that agencies have shifted their income model. That’s basically a result of forcing down margins. It shouldn’t be that way. The team I work in is more advertising and marketing-focused than others I’ve worked at, so we’re able to draw up contracts with partners that aren’t always trying to secure the cheapest price and are more about how we get value and better return on investment. We don’t want to overpay our agencies and ad tech vendors, but we really don’t want to do the opposite because we see them as partners and if those businesses aren’t profitable then they will not work with us.

    https://digiday.com/marketing/confessions-procurement-director-dont-want-overpay-agencies/

  • How super rich companies harm us all — and try to cover it up
  • Empower the Employees Who Will Build an Amazing Culture

    Empowerment is often interpreted as giving people control over daily details like what hours they work or what kinds of snacks they find in the break room. While those things certainly make day-to-day living more comfortable, they don’t give employees an overarching sense of ownership over the work they do.

    Empowered employees are given the opportunity to do work they value or work that fuels their growth. Anything less feels like lip service, and companies that want to keep their employees genuinely empowered — and engaged — have to keep this mind. Empowerment isn’t necessarily about making work more enjoyable; it’s about making it more meaningful.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/323575

  • How to Become the Best of the Best

    You can be the best at something, but if no one knows, no one cares. Work on making friends in your field, especially with people more successful than you. That means having people skills, introducing yourself at parties, going to events, and throwing out favors.

    It kind of sucks that just being extremely good isn’t enough, but a lot of skills don’t have a “best of” category. An athlete may consistently win, thus establishing themselves as the best, but most of us do stuff that is much harder to measure. That’s why who you know (and who likes you) matters so much.

    https://lifehacker.com/how-to-become-the-best-of-the-best-1830571441

Photo by Mantas Hesthaven on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 11/28/2018

  • Managers, consider these things before you give someone a promotion

    Moving into a managerial role is usually considered a high point in one’s career. It’s a sign that the company recognizes your leadership potential. In actuality, being a good employee doesn’t automatically translate to being a good leader. That transition requires learning a lot of new skills, sometimes from scratch.

    When new managers struggle, so do their teams. The likelihood of losing employees under a struggling manager is high. And that gets costly when you look at all that goes into replacing employees. Statistics on the cost of replacing a new hire run from tens of thousands of dollars to 1.5 to two times the employee’s annual salary.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90268727/managers-consider-these-things-before-give-you-give-someone-a-promotion

  • You Didn’t Get the Promotion: Now What? 3 Options For Moving On When You Can’t Move Up

    Forget society’s formula. Ask yourself what you want. Do you really want to sink more hours into a job that may or may not have anything to do with your passions and beliefs? Is managing a small chain of stores specializing in Halloween costumes for pets worth the extra twenty-plus hours of your existence you’ll put in? If it is, great – but don’t buy into the notion that you need to constantly curb-stomp your fellow man to chase something you never wanted to begin with.

    https://www.primermagazine.com/2018/earn/didnt-get-promotion

  • The connection paradox: Why are workplaces more isolating than ever? | Dan Schawbel
  • How to Be Wrong Without Losing Face

    When JFK went on national television and took full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs disaster, the nation didn’t throw up their hands in collective horror and ask themselves how they could have possible elected such a moron to high office. The opposite was true. His popularity rose. Far from losing the trust of the citizenry, he gained even more of it. There’s something inspiring about a leader who can come right out and confess their faults.

    The reasons for this aren’t hard to discern. For one, you become relatable, because there isn’t a single person on the planet who hasn’t been in your shoes. Secondly, letting down your guard, showing vulnerability, is attractive and inspiring. Instead of locking the door to your soul, you let folks in.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/321911

  • Half of Jobs at Amazon’s Two New Headquarters Won’t Be Tech Positions

    New York City officials said during a presentation Tuesday night that of the at least 25,000 jobs that the online retailer plans to bring to a new headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, 12,500 will be in tech.

    The other half will be “administrative jobs, custodial staff, HR, all those things,” said Eleni Bourinaris-Suarez, vice president of government and community relations at the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which helped broker the Queens deal with Amazon.

    Virginia officials said they expect the same job breakdown for Amazon’s new headquarters in Northern Virginia. The company has also promised to bring at least 25,000 jobs to that site.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/half-of-queens-amazon-jobs-wont-be-tech-positions-1542829226

Photo by Caleb Frith on Unsplash

Posted on

News You Can Use: 11/21/2018

The Source: Getting Things Done

  • When Acquiring a Company, Don’t Forget About the People

    Goal setting is proven to have a positive impact; according to McKinsey, 91 percent of companies that have effective performance management systems say that employee goals are linked to business priorities. Goals have the power to encourage and motivate people, whether they’re employees, investors or the board of directors. Give your team challenging, yet achievable targets to help push them in the right direction and encourage them to continue performing even when they’re dealing with new people and initially unfamiliar technologies or processes.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/323050

  • 3 Warning Signs Your Mentor Is Not Helping You

    If your mentor doesn’t challenge you to tackle your weaknesses and overcome your fears, your mentor is satisfied with the status quo — which isn’t good enough for you! Building a company requires doing the stuff we love and the stuff we wish we could hire someone else to do. If your mentor is worth her salt, she will push you to grow into your weaknesses and throttle past the challenges that scare you.

    Takeaway: I’ve often heard mentors working with startups in our accelerator respond to questions with questions. Mentors don’t have to have all of the answers — but they do need to know how to ask the right questions. This requires a mentor to slow down, listen and focus on you and your startup.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/322375

  • Why Facebook and news orgs are sworn frenemies
  • That ‘Bad’ Interviewee You Just Talked to May Be the Perfect Match for Your Job Opening

    That afternoon, however, reality set in, in the form of close to ten disappointing phone calls.

    Picking up my phone once more, I made my final call — to the most unlikely candidate of the bunch. And, within two minutes, I was floored: This guy was quizzing me on my knowledge of our business space. Not only that, but he was also asking about my personal relationships with competitors. Huh?

    Calling around to other founders after the interview, I quickly uncovered a strong consensus based on those founders’ individual experiences: This candidate’s comments weren’t weird or unwelcome, they said. In fact, they considered the best salespeople to be the ones who quizzed them.

    https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/322897

  • I want to work in these cubicles of the future

    Rapt’s designers envisioned a concept in which everyone gets a private space to work when they want it. But there’s a catch: Each private cubicle sits on short legs, enabling small warehouse robots to scuttle around underneath them. Then, the robots can pick up the cubes and move them around the office based on what each person and team needs for the day. For instance, if you have a day of heads-down work, you’d get assigned a private cubicle so you can focus. If you have a day full of meetings, and you don’t need private space, your cube combines with other cubes to create a larger space in which to work with your colleagues. The robots shift the office in real time to make this happen.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90262512/i-want-to-work-in-these-cubicles-of-the-future

Photo by Wade Austin Ellis on Unsplash