“…a woman who had been involved in a minor cable car mishap sued the City. The only injury she suffered was a purely psychological one: She claimed that the accident had turned her into a nymphomaniac, for which she wanted half a million dollars in compensation. (…) The jury heard the case, kept a straight face, and awarded the nymphomaniac $50,000.”
Fast forward to Nashville, Tennessee 2013, specifically Chris Sevier, a lawyer (naturally) who, through a typo, logged onto f***kbook.com, instead of Facebook.
Poor Chris was so affected by the images that dire consequences followed.
“His failed marriage caused the Plaintiff to experience emotional distress to the point of hospitalization. The Plaintiff could no longer tell the difference between Internet pornography and tangible intercourse due to the content he accessed through the Apple products, which failed to provide him with warnings of the dangers of online pornography whatsoever.”
Seems to me that he must have spent considerable time viewing those images, but, as he explains in his law suite against Apple, it’s not his fault.
“Apple employees know that a man is born full of harmonies and attacked to by women engaging in sexual acts with the intent to cause vicarious arousal.”
He believes that it’s Apple’s responsibility to “sell all its devices in ‘safe mode,’ with software preset to filter out pornographic content,” as well as warn people regarding “the damage pornography causes.”
Ain’t it grand to live in a world where there’s always someone else (with deep pockets) to hold responsible and, best of all, sue?
I just wish Steve was still around; his response would have moved this to a whole new level.
According to a recent analysis of nearly 300 Fortune 500 companies by the Citizens for Tax Justice, the average company was paying just 18.3 percent in taxes.
280 profitable Fortune 500 companies collectively paid an effective federal income tax rate of 18.5 percent, about half of the statutory 35 percent corporate tax rate, while receiving $223 billion in tax subsidies. These corporations include most of the Fortune 500 companies that were consistently profitable from 2008 through 2010. Collectively they paid $250.8 billion in federal income taxes on a total of $1,352.8 billion in U.S. profits. If they had paid the statutory 35 percent tax on their profits, they would have paid an extra $223 billion.
Stashing cash overseas is a legal ploy that as a shareholder you might be inclined to applaud, but is this form of tax avoidance really better for shareholders and the company, let alone the economy?
Business is vocal about the dangers of the deficit—as long as dealing with it doesn’t impinge on them.
But you have to admit, $223 billion a year would go a long way to paying it off.
Here are four stories that come after the exposés that happen when things go wrong. I find it interesting to learn the aftermath, even if it’s a work-in-progress, especially when it is positive.
Just as Nike and others were in the spotlight in previous years, top electronic companies like Apple and Hewlet-Packard have increasingly come under the gun for the conditions in their overseas contract-manufacturing facilities, such as Foxconn, where just one factory has 164,000 employees and they have dozens. Now Apple is moving to change that—but not as a leader.
But the shifts under way in China may prove as transformative to global manufacturing as the iPhone was to consumer technology, say officials at over a dozen electronics companies, worker advocates and even longtime factory critics. (…) Changing the company’s culture is slow going. But the needed reforms, executives at Apple and Foxconn hope and believe, are falling into place.
What would you do if you woke up one morning at the age of 51 to find that what you had worked your whole career to achieve was gone and you were on the street with no job? That’s what happened to employees Lehman Brothers and many other banking houses in the Fall of 2008. Most were devastated, but Canadian Michael Tory took stock
“How did I feel? I woke up that Monday morning and I had my health, my family, my reputation and energy, I had lost nothing, really. It was a profound revelation to me. I had lost nothing important and, that day, I decided to start my own company.”
and proceeded to start a pure advisory firm focused on its clients (unlike Wall Street).
None of the partners would get stinking rich, but, equally, they would not have to act as shills, eternally pushing services or products because they paid jackpot returns, not necessarily because they were in the best interests of the client.
Anyone at all involved with the tech world, and many who aren’t, heard when Yahoo CEO and ex-president of PayPal Scott Thompson was fired for listing a computer science degree on his resume that he didn’t have. Now Thompson is heading up a tiny startup called ShopRunner and just joined the board of PaySimple, another startup. According to Wedge Partners analyst Martin Pyykkonen Thompson need to prove himself.
“You have to kind of re-earn your stripes and your credibility and do something meaningful,” Pyykkonen said. “If he can pull it off with a small company, maybe that leads to the next tier up.”
but Thompson has a totally different take on what he’s doing.
“The only person I really need to prove anything to is myself. The jury’s still out, but I’m having a great time.”
Brian Lam interned at Wired and spent five years as editor of Gizmodo, Gawker Media’s gadget blog, where he nearly destroyed himself. Now, still on the Net, he’s redeemed his life.
And then, he burned out at age 34. He loved the ocean, but his frantic digital existence meant his surfboard was gathering cobwebs. “I came to hate the Web, hated chasing the next post or rewriting other people’s posts just for the traffic,” he told me. “People shouldn’t live like robots.” (…) And now he actually has time to ride them. In that sense, Mr. Lam is living out that initial dream of the Web: working from home, working with friends, making something that saves others time and money.
In 1914 why did that ultimate capitalist Henry Ford raise worker pay to the unheard-of wage of $5 a day? There is many a corporate titan who would do well to consider Ford’s philosophy today—before developing next year’s executive compensation plan or even deciding on this year’s bonuses.
Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford wrote, but paying high wages was also smart business. When wages are low, uncertainty dogs the marketplace and growth is weak. But when pay is high and steady, Ford asserted, business is more secure because workers earn enough to become good customers. They can afford to buy Model Ts.
These days, innovation is touted as the world’s savior, but is it really the game-changers or their copycats that provide real economic benefit? An excerpt from The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking, by Eli Broad posits the latter. And before you argue keep in mind that Apple didn’t invent computers or MP3 music players.
Who does capture the benefits of new ideas, products, and models? Imitators. They get a free ride, avoid dead ends, capitalize on the shortcomings of early offerings or tweak the originals to better fit shifting consumer tastes. And yet, imitators rarely get the recognition they deserve: When was the last time someone received an Imitator of the Year Award?
Based on descriptions of the new Windows 8 operating system I’ve decided that I will switch a few weeks after I die. If all you use is a smartphone or tablet you’ll probably have more tolerance to it, but if you use multiple applications on a real computer not so much. HBS’ Rosabeth Moss Kanter discusses it in terms of people’s resistance to change and I agree, but I have a much stronger resistance to things that make me feel incompetent and/or stupid.
Technology is good at that and as one commenter said, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat there getting angry trying to figure out how to get something done. I’m not an idiot when it comes to computers, but this OS made me feel like one.” Kanter’s response? “Your software should not make anyone feel like an idiot.”
Common wisdom says “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it,” but there are times when that attitude is shortsighted. The Smithsonian certainly isn’t broke in any way, shape or form, but it has looked to the future and decided it needs to update its brand if it plans to continue for another 166 years and beyond.
Although the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum and research complex, is already a popular and trusted brand, officials there nonetheless decided they needed to raise awareness, particularly among young people, of precisely what they have to offer.
I’ve been planning to do a varied look at compensation, but I didn’t realize that idea started with something I read in January and here it is June. I reviewed all the comp articles I saved and thought I’d share the more unusual ones.
There were actually two January articles within a day of each other.
But as one of the nation’s foremost financial compensation specialists, Mr. Johnson is among a small group of behind-the-scenes information brokers who help determine how Wall Street firms distribute billions of dollars to their workers.
The other was a Wharton look at the effect of excessive frugality on companies’ long-term health. My main reaction reading it was “ya think!?”
When workers feel that “the company is doing fine, but somehow I’m doing worse, at some point there has to be some dissatisfaction with that. It’s not sustainable,” suggests Wharton management professor Adam Cobb, who studies labor, worker benefits and income inequality. “I think there’s a general feeling of: This system is rigged and not in my favor.”
After two straight years of wages remaining nearly flat, tech professionals on average garnered salary increases of more than 2%…
A reminder that the jobs of the truly rich aren’t like ours comes from Rupert Murdoch who got a huge raise, in spite of legal bills from the ongoing hacking scandal being nearly a billion dollars in February; considering the continuing revelations they’ve probably surpassed that by now.
“I don’t believe in them,” says Jens Begemann, the 35-year-old co-founder and chief executive officer of Wooga. “If people are not motivated, you may need bonuses to make sure they work. But I don’t think that’s the right incentive.”
It used to be that people gave up some salary for the opportunity to work on bleeding edge products in companies with little-to-no structure, like-minded people and the chance to hit the jackpot through stock options—but no more.
Going to work for a start-up used to be a gamble and a sacrifice. You’d have to work longer hours for a lot less money than you would at a publicly held company. (…)To compete for talent these days, start-ups can’t skimp too much in salary negotiations.
There is much written about the rising wrath of shareholders with regards to CEO pay, but little written about a potent subgroup—shareholders who are also employees.
One potentially powerful class of shareholders — employees — seems to be rousing, too. And, to the degree that employee-shareholders band together to have their say on the boss’s pay, they can be a formidable force.
Finally, Apple’s Tim Cook raised the bar for all highly compensated CEOs Thursday; not because of a higher paycheck or by taking a symbolic $1 annual salary, but by refusing part of what he is owed.
In a regulatory filing Thursday, Cook stated that he would forgo around $75 million in dividend payments he otherwise would have revived for the 1.125 million stock awards is set to get over the next several years.
“All these new companies — Facebook, Google, Twitter — benefit from this. They grow, but they don’t really need to hire much.” –Jean-Louis Gassée
In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand.”
Then, of course, there is the ongoing debate on the effectiveness of managers; it started around the time the first hunting party organized to go after a wooly mammoth.
“It’s very tough to believe that there are such wide differences in management out there.” –Raffaella Sadun, assistant professor at Harvard Business School.
(Only someone who has never been in the workplace could make that statement with a straight face.)
The list of companies, not to mention executives, that have crashed and burned as a result of their lies is extensive and very public, while the number that are more or less opaque is uncountable. Is there truly a benefit for those that practice candor?
“In fact, the share prices of survey companies in the top quartile of CEO candor outperformed companies in the bottom quartile by 31%. For nine of the past 10 years, top-ranked companies have outperformed bottom-ranked companies on average by 18%.”
Finally, a disturbing look at the meritocracy called Silicon Valley.
“Silicon Valley is indeed a meritocracy for those to whom these criteria are not hurdles. But others—the blacks, women, and Hispanics whom it overlooks—find it an elite private club from which they are excluded.” –Vivek Wadhwa
(Hat tip to Emanio CEO KG Charles-Harris for sending this to me.)
An “expert blogger” at Fast Company wrote a post about what large companies can learn from startups (next month she’s writing the flip side, i.e., what startups can learn from large companies.)
Here is her advice in a nutshell,
Startups are flatter; if you can’t flatten, delegate and empower.
Startups have tighter timelines; a mandatory deadline is a pretty good way to shut up any last-minute hesitations.
Startups value disruption; when a company is setting out to define their corporate culture “risk” should make an appearance right between “honesty” and “respect.”
All well and good, but not exactly new information.
At Davos, John Kao, who advises corporations and governments on innovation, said that training and discipline and improvised creativity are the yin and the yang of innovation and used Google and Apple as examples of the two approaches.
Useful information and stuff you can put to work in your organization, but not particularly electrifying.
One problem is that so much of the talk about innovation cites either startups or technology companies as examples of risk and creativity.
Yes, Esquire; a print magazine in an industry that most experts have written off as dead.
In 2011, a year when the magazine industry was flat to down a bit, Esquire was up 13.5 percent in ad pages from the previous year.
To put that in perspective, consider that in 2009 it lost 24.3% advertising pages as compared with 2008 and the brand was predicted to disappear in 2010.
What happened?
Esquire’s editor in chief, David Granger did lay off 20% of his staff and substantially reduce editorial pages, but what he did not do was fire the big name talent in favor of younger, i.e., cheaper, staffers.
He did not, as they say, throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And the staff responded with an outpouring of creativity.
For its 75th anniversary issue in 2008, right about the time magazines were heading off a cliff, he and his designers put together an “E-Ink” cover that flashed, right there on the newsstand. (See video below.)
On almost any given day there are dozens of articles on how to juice innovation and creativity, but I think the Esquire article stands out.
Not because it gives you a list of what is wrong or spells out what to do, but because it proves that just because the “experts” say that not just you, but also your industry, are dead doesn’t mean they are.
What truly innovative companies have in common is a culture that embraces a willingness to live or die by risking failure.
The last few days have been about the importance of culture, so why change now?
If you’re a long-time reader you know that I’m a culture fanatic. I believe that culture is the root, driver and cure for 99% of business and, as is said today, that culture eats strategy for lunch.
Culture also makes companies a lot of money, think Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Google, Southwest, and Costco. And if that doesn’t convince you look at the dark side and think about what happened when Robert Nardelli trashed Home Depot’s culture.
Next, a Rambus alumni talks about how culture influences innovation in a company that makes its money by inventing and licensing its IP.
I’m a firm believe in using your company’s culture as a screening tool and I’m not the only one. Steve Balzac has some thoughts on the subject, too, including the price you pay for not remembering that people don’t magically change after they’re hired.
Richard’s recent posts (here and here) questioned what happens to culture and people as assets during a tanking economy.
Is culture anything more than lip service? Glib words to throw around during an expansion, but hollow and valueless otherwise?
Yes—and no
Unfortunately, too many executives still see people as an expendable resource—interchangeable and replaceable.
But not all.
The companies with strong, innovative cultures where executive action supports an environment that challenges and encourages growth will come out of this stronger and miles ahead of their lip-synching competitors.
They also know that keeping their people motivated and as happy as possible is the only option if they want to keep their customers happy.
Think Apple, Nucor, IBM and dozens of others, large, medium and small, where the execs practice what they preach.
But no matter how authentic the culture, the economy happens and companies have to deal with it—and even the best may face layoffs.
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,
Speaking of taxes…
Here are four stories that come after the exposés that happen when things go wrong. I find it interesting to learn the aftermath, even if it’s a work-in-progress, especially when it is positive.
Culture also 
