Last month, United personnel once again stuck their foot in it when they first refused to provide hot food to an autistic teen, although they finally relented.
The girl was fine, but the idiot pilot called for an emergency landing, called the paramedics and the cops.
When the officers started to leave, the captain stepped out of the cockpit and said something to them, Beegle said. They then asked her family to leave, she said.
“He said, ‘The captain has asked us to ask you to step off the plane.'” Beegle said. “I said, ‘She didn’t do anything’ … But the captain said he’s not comfortable flying on to Portland with [Juliette] on the plane.”
All of this with the full support of management.
United said its “crew made the best decision for the safety and comfort of all of our customers and elected to divert to Salt Lake City after the situation became disruptive.”
Passengers who witnessed the whole thing and posted videos said it was total bunk.
Of course, what UAL did to this child was far worse than breaking a guitar, but it goes to show their motto is still “the customer is always wrong, no matter what.”
“I found Pinterest to be a very different sort of culture than I’m used to. One of the most unique things is that the company really values interdisciplinary work across the different functional areas of the team. The notion of empathy is deeply understood here. At other companies there’s a bit more of a competitive or even ruthless perspective, so it was really refreshing to see the level of cooperation here.”
He goes on to say,
“There’s definitely a stereotype of a successful startup that it’s often this aggressive, type A place and that’s just not necessarily true. You can have geniuses that are nice or geniuses that are really egotistical. But they’re both geniuses. So, we really want to work with the geniuses that are nice to each other and have a common level of respect.”
While the founders are male, the culture they developed is one where women thrive.
“It was a revelation to join the team at Pinterest and feel like I was treated like an engineer first, not as a female engineer. In most other places, I felt like people always treated me as a “female engineer,” like I was a novelty. People even called me a unicorn to my face. It was really nice to come here and not have that gender modifier in front of who I am.” –Tracy Chou, Pinterest engineer
Pinterest’s culture fosters creative collaboration and mutual respect because it is the absolute opposite of the typical frat-boy startup culture so common in the Valley.
According to The Information, computer security companies are being brought on to advise other companies about startups they are thinking of acquiring, and VCs are including cybersecurity experts as part of their due diligence when they look to invest in companies.
Security has been an after thought, if that; a feature that the company would get to as soon as [whatever] happened.
The déjà vu hit because that is the same attitude companies had towards quality once-upon-a-time (some still do).
After conception, architecture, design and manufacturing were done the product was sent to QC (quality control) and back up the line if there were problems.
In many cases the quality flaws were actually designed into the product or the manufacturing process itself, which made fixing them very expensive or impossible.
The same problem happens when security is the afterthought.
Any fool knows that if the wrong grade of steel is specified for a bridge or the spec is changed to facilitate speed or budgetary concerns the bridge is likely to fail sooner rather than later.
Zukerberg’s oft repeated “move fast and break it” is proving to be a deal breaker in a more ways than one.
Most of the responses were justifications from VCs, but two provided a refreshing dose of reality.
Not surprising that neither are VCs.
The reason they want warm intros is because they are too lazy to research things themselves and many of them don’t know anything about starting a company or building one. The smart experienced guys at the top who have actually done something are too busy so they have the dime-a–dozen MBAs they hire do grunt work. Since the d-a-d has never actually built anything, and doesn’t really know what you do, they want a “warm” intro. Warm means someone else they can blame if they screw up yet again. —David Feldman, CEO, ZF Micro Solutions, Inc.
Classism. No further to look than that. Let’s not make it complicated by trying to avoid the unpleasant. —Michael O. Church
According to an SEC document filed Tuesday, nearly 47% of the total shareholders voted against Salesforce’s executive compensation packages at its annual shareholders meeting…
Maybe, just maybe, corporate America has finally gone too far and we’re ready to fight back.
“I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.” (…)
“We don’t think you should ever have to trade it for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we’re storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices.”
“We believe the customer should be in control of their own information. You might like these so-called free services, but we don’t think they’re worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data mined and sold off for god knows what advertising purpose. And we think some day, customers will see this for what it is.” –Apple CEO Tim Cook, honored for ‘corporate leadership’ during EPIC’s Champions of Freedom event in Washington.
So the next time you sign in to Facebook, Google, Square, Twitter, etc., keep in mind that they aren’t selling their souls to make a buck, they are selling yours, your family’s and your friends’.
How often are your actions influenced by what someone else says they heard?
I think most of us have a tendency to accept that kind of commentary, especially when other outcomes are unlikely.
The recent experience of Anthony Perosi is a shinning example of just how costly relying on second-hand information can be.
Like millions of others, Perosi plays the NY Lottery.
A few days after the Powerball drawing on March 14, Mr. Perosi, 56, was eating lunch at a restaurant, where someone told him that the 7-Eleven on Page Avenue had sold a Powerball winner.
“I says, ‘I’ve played at Page Avenue 7-Eleven,’ ” Mr. Perosi recalled on Thursday.
“She was like, ‘Forget about it.’ ” She heard a schoolteacher had won. She told Mr. Perosi, “You didn’t win nothing.”
So rather than checking himself he accepted what Sandy had heard as fact.
But his truck breaking down in April gave Perosi the impetus to check himself.
To his total astonishment the winning numbers were his.
His and the IRS, to the tune of 136 million dollars
The lesson here is that the next time you start to accept what someone states as fact, it pays to check for yourself.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
More and more research is showing that real creativity is a more solo function than a team effort.
Susan Cain spells this out in a thoughtful LinkedIn post that is well worth your time, especially if you are a young founder raised on social media, with a penchant for crowdsourcing and Yelp.
Consider the words of Steve Wozniak in his memoir iWoz.
Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by committee. If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.
Then read, digest and tweak Cain’s ideas to fit your situation, then put the concepts to work in your company.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
If you’ve been around long enough you find déjà vu connections everywhere.
First it was Uber drivers, members of the so-called 1099 economy, who 
