In June 1989, Donald Trump picked up a copy of Business Week magazine and read an article. Genesco, a footwear company, was in trouble. The banks had insisted on the appointment of a new chief executive. They had settled on John Hanigan, a turnaround artist best known as an asset stripper. In The Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz describes Hanigan in Donald Trump’s words: “He came to companies...
It should have been a straightforward event. The Israeli embassy in Berlin wanted to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day with a talk by Zvi Herschel, a Holocaust survivor. He’d tell the audience his experiences and keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. It was typical of the kind of work that embassies around the world do. But it was the age of the coronavirus. The ambassador had tested positive and...
In 2019, the Miami Heat NBA team wanted to know which of its services most satisfied its season ticket holders. The franchise believed that if it knew what drove fans to renew their memberships it could boost renewals and increase its income. It had options. The team could have simply handed out a survey and asked its fans to score from one to five a list of the benefits they enjoyed as season...
Employees engage in two kinds of work. There’s the work they do while sitting at their desks: writing lines of code, drawing designs, writing copy, closing deals. And then there’s the time spent talking about work: sitting in meetings, nodding at bosses, trying not to fall asleep, and thinking about lunch. That second type of “work” is growing. According to some studies, executives would spend...
In 2012, the Spanish government changed the way its citizens used time. It passed a new law allowing stores of more than 300 square meters to open for 25 percent longer each week. The aim was to boost consumer spending by encouraging stores to sell during the afternoon break between 2pm and 4pm. The government was trying to kill off the siesta. Four years later, it added the final blow, making...
Paulina Serrato and Joseph Orr met in New York at WeWork 222 Broadway in 2016. They now run a mobile nail salon together that sends manicurists to offices in the city. Jordan Rushie is a lawyer in Fishtown, Philadelphia. He’s written about the ethics of using a shared workspace to run a law firm. He’s also landed at least three clients he met through WeWork events. Krystal Ariel picked up a PR...
Vermont really isn’t a bad place to live. It’s green—except in fall when it’s incredibly colorful. You can ski. It’s filled with craft beers. And if you work remotely, the state will pay you up to $10,000 to move in. In May last year, Vermont’s Republican governor Phil Scott signed a bill to attract technology workers by helping to pay their relocation costs. The money could be used to pay for...
The publication of the Agile Manifesto was meant to solve a specific problem. The speed of software development wasn’t keeping up with changes to customer needs. Decisions would be made at the beginning of the production process that were no longer relevant by the time the software was delivered, sometimes years later. Developers wanted a way of working that could grow with customer requirements...
Few executives would be happy to walk into their conference rooms to find their leading staff playing poker but in software companies, that’s exactly what’s happening. And the boss is playing as well. The players aren’t gambling with their salaries though, or even their options. They’re betting on the amount of time it will take to develop a feature. The practice is known as Planning Poker and...
When Facebook moved into new offices in Menlo Park in 2015, Mashable called the campus “a child’s candy-fueled daydream.” Designed by Frank Gehry, the building has a nine-acre rooftop park, teepee swings and meeting rooms that double as ball pits. Mark Zuckerberg called the mile-long workspace the largest “open floor plan in the world — a single room that fits thousands of people.” The goal, he...
Recent Comments