Today’s Top Stories
The Brexit Hangover: Politicians and markets acknowledge–and deny–the new reality.
Not Everything Needs To Be Disrupted: Silicon Valley has lessons to teach. But it doesn’t know everything.
How Rude Can You Be at Work? And how far are people willing to go to put an end to it?
If They Were Employees, They’d Quit: Uber messes with its drivers. Again.
Hipster & Sons. There’s a reason all new companies seem to have the same name.
The Brexit Hangover. The world continues to roil from Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. The pound is getting beat up as I write this morning, wags are arguing over how broad a downturn might be (Fortune), and some of the most prominent politicians who advocated for Brexit have begun backpedaling over what the measure involves (New York Times). For some thoughtful analysis that will still be relevant in a week, see If Your Argument Is Based on Economics, You’ve Already Lost (HBR), which compares the failure of the Remain team to sell its position with Uber’s inability to make a case for surge pricing. “Appeals to rational economic principles fall flat in the face of intense emotion.” That’s why surge pricing went away, and that’s why Britain appears to be leaving Europe.
Not Everything Needs To Be Disrupted. There’s a tension when it comes to the lessons of Silicon Valley. It has much to teach the world, but its approach isn’t always the correct one. In When Silicon Valley-Style “Disruption” Isn’t The Right Answer (Medium), Ross Baird of Village Capital goes deep on when the approach doesn’t work: when, for example, you shouldn’t ask for forgiveness rather than permission. In particular, he sings the benefits of partnership over disruption (you can read more about that in Steve Case’s recent The Third Wave) and shows how collaboration can be better for everyone.
How Rude Can You Be at Work? We are less pleasant at work than we are on the street. Lucy Kellaway in the Financial Times says the reasons for this “low intensity deviant behaviour” are hard to pin down yet she quickly pins it on email, smartphones, open offices and the “cult of busyness.” Her solution: secretly videotape people so they’ll change behavior, which strikes me as even ruder than the problem she says she’s trying to solve. Maybe companies could, you know, talk about the problem?
If They Were Employees, They’d Quit. BuzzFeed keeps digging into Uber documents and discovering that the situation for its drivers isn’t so sanguine. Last week it revealed that its drivers in Detroit make pennies more than the minimum wage; now we learn that price decreases, which the company claims to increase driver revenue because it increases volume, doesn’t. It’s also unclear whether price cuts are working for the business: Uber keeps experimenting with pricing in ways that are forcing drivers to work more hours to generate the same income. Uber has acknowledged that autonomous vehicles are its endgame; if it continues to treat drivers this way, it had better hope they come soon.
Hipster & Sons. Why do all hipster businesses seem to have the exact same naming structure? Because they do (Quartz). Those made-up words, nostalgic ampersands, and sleek plus signs all add up to a construction that is supposed to make the names more memorable. Of course, if you want to save the money you’d pay a naming firm you can use this webapp to make up your own.
Want to follow the biggest story in business? Get our NewCo Daily and Weekly newsletters.