Category: Management

Jeff Bezos Prefers ‘Entrepreneur Jeff Bezos’ over ‘Richest Person in the World Jeff Bezos’

(p. B3) Mr. Bezos said his primary job each day as a senior executive is to make a small number of high-quality decisions.
. . .
The insight into Mr. Bezos’ philosophy on time management came as the Amazon founder Thursday [September 13, 2018] addressed a crowd of roughly 1,400 at an event held by the Economic Club of Washington, D.C.
He reminisced on the early days of Amazon and the lessons he has learned during decades of rapid change as he went from founding the online bookstore in his garage to overseeing a massive company with several business lines and offices around the world.
That explosive growth helped push Amazon last week to briefly become the second U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market value, after Apple Inc., and has made Mr. Bezos the richest person in the world.
It is a title Mr. Bezos said he has never sought. “I would much rather if they said like, ‘inventor Jeff Bezos’ or ‘entrepreneur Jeff Bezos’ or ‘father Jeff Bezos.’ Those kinds of things are much more meaningful to me,” he told the audience.

For the full story, see:
Laura Stevens. “A Few Life Lessons from Bezos.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018): B3.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 14, 2018, and has the title “Leadership and Life Lessons from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.”)

Union Slows UPS Automation

(p. B1) As UPS tries to satisfy America’s 21st-century shopping-and-shipping mania, parts of its network are stuck in the 20th century. The company still relies on some outdated equipment and manual processes of the type rival FedEx Corp. discarded or that newer entrants, including Amazon.com Inc., never had.
UPS says about half its packages are processed through automated facilities today. At FedEx, 96% of ground packages move through automated sites. UPS workers are unionized; FedEx’s ground-operations workers aren’t.
. . .
(p. B2) UPS is negotiating with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to renew a five-year contract, which expires July 31. Representing 260,000 UPS drivers, sorters and other workers, the union wants UPS to hire more full-time workers to help handle the surge in packages. It has opposed technology such as autonomous vehicles and drones and is wary of projects that do work with fewer employees.
“The problem with technology is that it does ultimately streamline jobs,” says Sean O’Brien, a Teamsters leader in Boston. “It does eliminate jobs. And once they’re replaced, it’s pretty tough to get them back.”
FedEx, with no unionized workforce in its ground network, doesn’t have to worry as much about labor strife. And because it built its ground network more recently, it hasn’t had to retrofit older facilities with automation. “For an older hub, automating is like heart surgery,” says Ted Dengel, FedEx Ground’s managing director of operations technology. “We can drop automation in before a package hits a facility.”

For the full story, see:
Paul Ziobro. “UPS is Running Late.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 16, 2018): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 15, 2018, and has the title “UPS’s $20 Billion Problem: Operations Stuck in the 20th Century.”)

Widely-Used HireVue Algorithm Can Lock-In Hiring Biases

(p. A23) The products of a company called HireVue, which are used by over 600 companies including Nike, Unilever and even Atlanta Public Schools, allow employers to interview job applicants on camera, using A.I. to rate videos of each candidate according to verbal and nonverbal cues. The company’s aim is to reduce bias in hiring.
But there’s a catch: The system’s ratings, according to a Business Insider reporter who tested the software and discussed the results with HireVue’s chief technology officer, reflect the previous preferences of hiring managers. So if more white males with generally homogeneous mannerisms have been hired in the past, it’s possible that algorithms will be trained to favorably rate predominantly fair-skinned, male candidates while penalizing women and people of color who do not exhibit the same verbal and nonverbal cues.

For the full story, see:

Joy Buolamwini. “The Hidden Dangers Of Facial Analysis.” The New York Times (Friday, June 22, 2018): A23.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 21, 2018, and has the title “When the Robot Doesn’t See Dark Skin.”)

“Meditation Is Demotivating”

(p. 6) . . . on the face of it, mindfulness might seem counterproductive in a workplace setting. A central technique of mindfulness meditation, after all, is to accept things as they are. Yet companies want their employees to be motivated. And the very notion of motivation — striving to obtain a more desirable future — implies some degree of discontentment with the present, which seems at odds with a psychological exercise that instills equanimity and a sense of calm.
To test this hunch, we recently conducted five studies, involving hundreds of people, to see whether there was a tension between mindfulness and motivation. As we report in a forthcoming article in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, we found strong evidence that meditation is demotivating.

For the full commentary, see:
Kathleen D. Vohs and Andrew C. Hafenbrack. “GRAY MATTER; Don’t Meditate at Work.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sunday, June 17, 2018): 6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 14, 2018, and has the title “GRAY MATTER; Hey Boss, You Don’t Want Your Employees to Meditate.”)

The article by Hafenbrack and Vohs, mentioned above, is:
Hafenbrack, Andrew C., and Kathleen D. Vohs. “Mindfulness Meditation Impairs Task Motivation but Not Performance.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 147 (July 2018): 1-15.

The Diversity That Matters Most Is Diversity of Thought

(p. A15) If you want anyone to pay attention to you in meetings, don’t ever preface your opposition to a proposal by saying: “Just to play devil’s advocate . . .” If you disagree with something, just say it and hold your ground until you’re convinced otherwise. There are many such useful ideas in Charlan Nemeth’s “In Defense of Troublemakers,” her study of dissent in life and the workplace. But if this one alone takes hold, it could transform millions of meetings, doing away with all those mushy, consensus-driven hours wasted by people too scared of disagreement or power to speak truth to gibberish. Not only would better decisions get made, but the process of making them would vastly improve.
. . .
In the latter part of her book, Ms. Nemeth explores in more detail how dissent improves the way in which groups think. She is ruthless toward conventional “brainstorming,” which tends toward the uncritical accumulation of bad ideas rather than the argumentative heat that forges better ideas. It’s only through criticism that concepts receive proper scrutiny. “Repeatedly we find that dissent has value, even when it is wrong, even when we don’t like the dissenter, and even when we are not convinced of his position,” she writes. “Dissent . . . enables us to think more independently” and “also stimulates thought that is open, divergent, flexible, and original.”
. . .
Ms. Nemeth’s punchy book also has an invaluable section on diversity in groups. All too often, she writes, in pursuit of diversity we focus on everything but the way people think. We look at a group’s gender, color or experience, and once the palette looks right declare it diverse. But you can have all of that and still have a group that thinks the same and reinforces a wrong-headed consensus.
By contrast, you can have a group that is demographically homogeneous yet violently heterogeneous in the way it thinks. The kind of diversity that leads to well-informed decisions is not necessarily the kind of diversity that gives the appearance of social justice. That will be a hard message for many organizations to swallow. But as with many of the arguments that Ms. Nemeth makes in her book, it is one that she gamely delivers and that all managers interested in the quality and integrity of their decision-making would do well to heed.

For the full review, see:
Philip Delves Broughton. “BOOKSHELF; Rocking The Boat.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, May 9, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipsis internal to a paragraph, in original; ellipses between paragraphs, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 10, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘In Defense of Troublemakers’ Review: Rocking the Boat.”)

The book under review, is:
Nemeth, Charlan. In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business. New York: Basic Books, 2018.

More Firms Educate In-House

(p. B5) . . . Atlanta-based aluminum-products maker Novelis started a school within the company to impart lessons pulled from the factory floor with a faculty and nine “deans” to oversee it.
Federal policy for decades has pushed more people to go to four-year colleges, promoting a college-preparatory high-school curriculum and easing access to student loans. But technology is changing faster than colleges can keep up and employers say too many schools aren’t teaching students the skills they need–or even basic critical thinking.
With the labor market the tightest it has been in a generation, this misalignment is causing big–and expensive–headaches for employers. So companies are increasingly taking matters into their own hands. Major employers like CVS Health Corp., Novelis, International Business Machines Corp., Aon PLC and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are hiring workers because of what they can do, or what the company believes they can teach them, instead of the degrees they hold.

For the full story, see:
Douglas Belkin. “‘Education Is Moving to the Factory Floor.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, March 23, 2018): B5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 22, 2018.)

“Puttin’ On the Ritz”

(p. C9) The Savoy, which opened in 1889, was glamorous and cosmopolitan, an antidote to Victorian stuffiness. Its owner, Richard D’Oyly Carte, the backer of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operas, had a theater next door, and his ambition was to create a modern luxury hotel the likes of which had never been seen. To fulfill his vision, in 1890 he turned to Escoffier and the Swiss hotelier Ritz, a man known for his impeccable taste, and in short order the two men, who’d had a previous success at the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, made the Savoy into the most famous and profitable hotel and restaurant in the world.
“Ritz & Escoffier,” Luke Barr’s entertaining narrative history, reads like a novel (complete with cliff hangers and descriptions of the characters’ private thoughts). Both of its subjects had grown up poor, but were opposites temperamentally.
. . .
Neither man had to use the stairs at the Savoy, since the hotel had six elevators, the largest ever seen in Europe, which D’Oyly Carte called “ascending rooms.” There were 400 guestrooms and an unheard-of number of bathrooms–67 all told, many en suite and at no extra charge. (The recently opened Hotel Victoria provided just four for 500 guests.) The Savoy also had electric light that you could switch on or off in your room without getting out of bed, also at no extra charge.
. . .
. . ., D’Oyly Carte gave Escoffier and Ritz free rein from the start. The restaurant became enormously popular, a gathering place open to all who could afford it: aristocrats, the nouveau riche, royalty, Jewish bankers and fur traders (Jews weren’t freely accepted in society at the time), and stars of the theater and opera. Formal evening dress was de rigueur in the dining room and women were admitted–except those of “doubtful reputation and uncertain revenue,” who arrived unaccompanied, wearing makeup and large hats. Mr. Barr writes, “An extravagant hat worn in the evening, Ritz had discovered, was a sign of trouble.” But Ritz not only gave ladies’ banquets, he also successfully campaigned to change the laws against eating out on Sundays. Soon those formerly grim at-home evenings of “cold joint and gloom” became the most fashionable times of the week to dine at the Savoy.
. . .
Ritz had opened the hotel’s doors to anyone with money wearing the right clothes. The old social rules were broken. Mr. Barr comments, “Indeed, there was an element of decadence in the Savoy’s brand of luxury–it was this decadence that made it modern, the sense that pleasure was to be celebrated.”

For the full review, see:
Moira Hodgson. “‘Modern Hospitality.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 31, 2018): C9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 30, 2018, and has the title “‘Ritz & Escoffier’ Review: Modern Hospitality.”)

The book under review, is:
Barr, Luke. Ritz and Escoffier: The Hotelier, the Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class. New York: Clarkson Potter, 2018.

“Searing Portrait” of Uber Entrepreneur Travis Kalanick

(p. B3) Mr. Lashinsky’s book gives readers an inside view of the ride-hailing giant’s creation and what created the broken corporate culture that yielded so many negative news stories this year.
“Wild Ride” offers a searing portrait of Uber’s former chief executive, Travis Kalanick, whom Mr. Lashinsky shows to be both a genius and wildly headstrong (and not in a good way). Because of when it was published, the book does not include many of the episodes that consumed Uber in 2017, including Susan Fowler’s viral blog post about the company’s misogynistic culture and the ouster of Mr. Kalanick. But until that book is written — and it surely will be — “Wild Ride” is a good primer.

For the full commentary, see:
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. “DEALBOOK For a Year Filled With News, A List of Books Worth a Look.” The New York Times (Tuesday, DEC. 26, 2017): B1 & B3.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 25, 2017, and has the title “DEALBOOK; In a Year of Nonstop News, a Batch of Business Books Worth Reading.”)

The Lashinsky book mentioned above, is:
Lashinsky, Adam. Wild Ride: Inside Uber’s Quest for World Domination. New York: Portfolio, 2017.

Xerox Will Cease to Exist as Independent Firm

(p. A1) When Xerox introduced its popular copying machines in 1959, their wizardry was considered as high tech as the iPhone when Steve Jobs presented it to the world almost 50 years later.
But just as Xerox made carbon paper obsolete, the iPhone, Google Docs and the cloud made Xerox a company of the past.
On Wednesday [January 31, 2018], Xerox said that, after 115 years as an independent business, it would combine operations with Fujifilm Holdings of Japan. The deal signaled the end of a company that was once an American corporate powerhouse.
“Xerox is the poster child for monopoly technology businesses that cannot make the transition to a new generation of technology,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School.
The move offers a stark reminder that no matter how high a company may fly, it is still vulnerable to the next big breakthrough. Xerox joins once formidable tech companies like Kodak and BlackBerry that lost the innovation footrace.
Under the deal, Fujifilm will own just over 50 percent of the Xerox business. There are plans to cut $1.7 billion in costs in coming (p. A11) years. Fujifilm said its joint venture with Xerox would cut its payroll by 10,000 workers worldwide.
How Xerox fell so far is a case study in what management experts call the “competency trap” — an organization becomes so good at one thing, it can’t learn to do anything new.
Xerox traces its origins to the founding in 1903 of the M. H. Kuhn Company. But it was an invention dreamed up in a makeshift Queens lab in the 1930s — a forerunner of the Silicon Valley garages used by the likes of Mr. Jobs — that changed Xerox’s trajectory.
That invention, by Chester Carlson, a patent lawyer, led to the creation of the modern copy machine. He even came up with a term for the process: “xerography.” In 1959, Xerox, which had won the right to explore the technology, offered the office copier that went mainstream.

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR and CARLOS TEJADA, “Xerox, Tech Icon That Became a Verb, Is Suddenly Past Tense.” The New York Times (Thursday, Feb. 1, 2018): A1 & A11.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date JAN. 31, 2018, and has the title “After Era That Made It a Verb, Xerox, in a Sale, Is Past Tense.” The online version says that the New York edition also had title “After Era That Made It a Verb, Xerox, in a Sale, Is Past Tense.” My copy was the “National Edition.”)

Over-Regulated, Quasi-Governmental Health Sector Is Often Slow in Face of Crisis

The nurse interviewed in the passages quoted below, also appeared at about the same period, on Anderson Cooper’s CNN 360 show. On that she had a wonderful riff on how the hospital was irresponsible in taking so long to get the right protective gear. She says that they could, and should, have gotten it overnight through Amazon Prime.

(p. B4) DALLAS — A nurse who observed and participated in the care of Ebola patients at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital spoke out publicly on Thursday about what she characterized as inadequate training and infection control there.
. . .
Ms. Aguirre said she and other nurses were “horrified” at the protocols used to care for Ms. Pham. She said they received instruction only once about the proper use of personal protective equipment — gloves, masks, gowns, hoods and shields — before entering Ms. Pham’s room, and then were shown how to remove the potentially contaminated gear while in the room. The garb left a triangle of skin exposed on the front of her neck.
“The very first time I was being instructed to put the stuff on I immediately voiced my concerns,” Ms. Aguirre said. “Why would I be wearing two pairs of gloves, three pairs of bootees, have my entire body covered in plastic, have two hoods on and have an area so close to my mouth and my nose exposed? And they said, ‘We know, we’ve addressed it and basically our verdict on that at this time is we’re taping that area closed.’ “

For the full story, see:
KEVIN SACK. “Controls Poor at Hospital, Nurse Says.” The New York Times (Fri., October 17, 2014): A14.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 16, 2014, and has the title “WHEELS; The Internal Combustion Engine Is Not Dead Yet.” The online version says that the New York print version was on p. A14. My paper, probably the midwest version, was on p. A18.)