Tag: Polity

Marc Benioff’s Push for Change, Failing and Learning, and the Chance of a Human Extinction Event

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Photo: Getty Images

Marc Benioff and the New Era of Corporate Social Activism
 Is Salesforce’s chief executive an inspired activist or a “bully” for pushing companies to speak out against laws he believes to be discriminatory? Regardless what you think (The Wall Street Journal’s coverage gives voice to both opinions), you must acknowledge that Benioff is having an impact. It’s astounding to read the CEO of Bank of America say, on the record, to the Journal: “Our jobs as CEOs now include driving what we think is right. It’s not exactly political activism, but it is action on issues beyond business.” That was unimaginable not too long ago.

Going Clear on the Cult of Failure
 Most of what we read about failure is cheerleading stuff filtered through a subsequent success. Lately there’s been a backlash stating the obvious — success is better than failure, it turns out — but we rarely see a piece that disarms the failure-is-success narrative so conclusively as this Gideon Lichfield take in Quartz. In blessedly few words, it reminds us how failure is an important and inevitable part of life, not a sign of greatness, and we should treat it as an opportunity to learn, not to celebrate. In other words, it replaces magical thinking with the evidence-based kind, like the work of many cult deprogrammers.

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Bitcoin Founder Unveiled (Maybe), Uber Takes Over (Maybe), and Warren Buffett’s Blind Spot

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Photo: Crypto Coins News

I Am Spartacus, Bitcoin Edition
As Wired predicted, today Australian Craig Wright said he’s the real Satoshi Nakamoto (BBC), inventor of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The Bitcoin origin story may now have closure (or maybe not, writes The Economist; there’s still some fishiness in Wright’s story), but even more unclear is what role Bitcoin itself will have in everyday financial life. Maybe Wright’s announcement will make this guy’s life easier.

Uber Takes London
The Guardian offers a fascinating long read that captures many of the complexities associated with Uber’s speedy dominance of transportation in many cities. The secret to understanding the Uber takeover? It’s not about cars.

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Nestle’s Trust, Innovation at the Edges, and Millennials Dis Capitalism

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Nestle’s brand in India goes up in smoke. Photo: Getty Images

Nestle Was a Trusted Brand in India. Then It Wasn’t
 Fortune’s Erika Fry goes deep on a noodle debacle in India that cost Nestle half a billion dollars. After the company’s vastly popular Maggi noodles — one of India’s top brands — were found by state laboratories to include both MSG and lead, Nestle took the product off the market (a step ahead of regulators). But Nestle insisted the product was safe despite government results — and failed to engage with the government in a productive way. Maggi is now back on the market, but the brand is tainted. This is a vivid example of how companies should respect outside concerns even if they think they’ve done nothing wrong — and the tremendous costs when they misstep.

The Innovations at the Edge of NewCoBoston
 NewCo Boston yesterday was outstanding — yet we wrote about innovation along its edges that took place far outside of Boston. Let us introduce you to Design That Matters and MathWorks.

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Lobbyists for Self-Driving Cars, Purposes for Companies, and Rating Agencies Catch Up

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What’s Next: Lobbyist Bots?
 Self-driving cars now have lobbyists (The Verge). Google, Ford, Lyft, Volvo, and Uber are behind the initiative. In keeping with Washington tradition, the new group has an inoffensive, inarguable name (Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets) and follows revolving door hiring practices at its top (it’ll be run by David Strickland, former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration).

What’s a Company Without A Purpose?
 Apparently, the answer is “one of the largest companies in the world.” In his weekly column, NewCo’s editor in chief reviews the purpose of the five largest companies from Fortune’s 2015 500 list, and finds them severely lacking.

Borrowing From Peter to Pay Them All
 Finally, one of the ratings agencies is calling out a Wall Street stalwart, downgrading Exxon’s debt and questioning its core financial strategy. Too bad S&P found its backbone years after our last debt bubble burst. Let’s hope it’s not too late this time.

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Immelt v Sanders, Millennials v Student Debt, and Theme Parks v Earlybirds

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GE Fires Back at Sanders, But It’s No Stranger to Government Help
 Now that the presidential campaign has reached New York, everyone is getting cranky. In their attempt to challenge the Republicans for name-calling, the Democratic candidates are taking turns calling each other unqualified. One of them, Bernie Sanders, has wandered into a back-and-forth with GE chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt. Bernie listed GE as one of the companies ruining the moral fiber of America via tax avoidance. In a Washington Post op-ed, Immelt fires back (“we’ve never been a big hit with socialists”), then gets down to a detailed overview of some of GE’s good works, including a big factory in Sanders’s home state of Vermont. In complicating but related news, it was revealed this week that GE recently got Boston and Massachusetts officials to double promised tax breaks in return for getting the conglomerate to move its headquarters there. Everyone hates government, till they don’t …

Atlas Obscura Celebrates Curiosity With the Weird and Wondrous
 In NewCo’s latest Video Spotlight, Atlas Obscura cofounder Dylan Thuras discusses how his company is creating an online compendium of “the world’s most curious and awe-inspiring places.” Next week is Obscura Day, celebrating weird and wonderful experiences all around the world. And see all our Spotlights here.

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Video Spotlight: Brigade Targets a More Responsive Democracy

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What do your friends think about regulating Airbnb in your city? What’s the most important issue the U.S. faces? Can student protests help end racism on college campuses? Brigade applies the social network model to provide everyone, from neophytes to political junkies, a space to talk politics.

Sean Parker, co-founder and executive chairman of Brigade, discussed the state of politics in the U.S. with Mashable, saying, “Democracy was not designed for a world where we have over 300 million people.” That’s where Brigade’s social approach to politics comes in. Unlike Facebook, which along with political opinions publishes baby pictures and life announcements, Brigade focuses on issue-oriented conversations that it hopes will lead to organization and action. Its app aims to re-energize civic participation in the U.S. by providing a forum to articulate and debate political and civic issues.

Brigade’s office in San Francisco, Calif.

In June 2014, Brigade announced its acquisition of Causes, the world’s largest online campaigning platform and one of the first apps on the Facebook platform, and political advocacy startup Votizen. A year later, Brigade launched in beta. Its small cohort of testers has taken more than 3 million issue-based positions in the first few months.

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Contracting Diversity, The Rise of the Minimum, and Managing Humanity

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One Way Silicon Valley Could Increase Diversity and Reduce Income Inequality
 Silicon Valley is more diverse than you might think — if you count blue-collar subcontracted workers. A report out of UC Santa Cruz (PDF) notes that people employed by subcontractors are paid 30% less than those who contract directly with tech companies. They’re also disproportionately people of color. Big tech companies use subcontractors to keep labor costs down — and to shield themselves from potential labor issues (although WeWork found that doesn’t always pan out). But given the Valley mantra of efficiency, why not cut out the middleman and go direct? These are far from elite white-collar gigs, but they are jobs that would pay better if they were contracted directly. “While 7% of high-tech direct employees are Hispanic or African-American, 26% of white collar potentially contracted workers and 58% of blue-collar potentially contracted workers are Hispanic or African-American,” the report says. That’s a more diverse group of workers available to be hired right now. As lead report author Chris Benner tells the Washington Post, “there is strong occupational segregation by race.” Many prominent tech execs talk the talk about diversity and income inequality; here’s an example of how changing a hiring strategy (from outsourcing with outside firms to contracting directly) could have an immediate positive impact on both fronts.

Rise of the Minimum
 Minimum wages are rising faster than sea levels in California, New York, and the UK. It seems a movement is afoot.

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No More Jobs, Uber Behaves, and a B-Side With Your Waffles

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Our Jobs Are Going Away. Why Isn’t That a Good Thing?
Nearly nine million Americans make their living either as truck drivers or working in that industry — and that doesn’t count supporting industries like truckstops. It’s not hard to see that self-driving trucks are going to hit us like a human-driven truck. Scott Santens’s long, important piece traces the inevitability of self-driving technology and its impact on our economy. We’ve seen massive disruption before (the interstate highway system decimated small towns around the U.S.), so how can we prepare? Santens is an ardent basic income advocate, so that’s his solution for how to reap the benefits from the upcoming technology dividend. He concludes: “No one should be asking what we’re going to do if computers take our jobs. We should all be asking what we get to do once freed from them.” (Also by Santens this week and even more controversial: an extended take on why the recent AI-beats-human Go match shows that jobs are for machines, not people.)

Uber and Lyft: Part of the System​, Not Just Disruptors
More than 20 percent of people surveyed in major American cities sold their cars and didn’t replace them because they rely on a mix of car-hailing services and mass transit. So it follows that Uber and Lyft customers are more likely to use public transportation, according to a study by the trade group American Public Transportation Association. Hoping to increase its public transit ridership, Los Angeles County is considering a partnership with Lyft to connect commuters with the companies and share data. Washington D.C. — along with Boston the U.S. city with the lowest per capita car ownership and highest highest public transportation usage — is considering contracting services to transport people with disabilities via Uber. The UberACCESS pilot program connects disabled people to vehicles that can accommodate a wheelchair. On a wider scale, such a move could save billions of dollars. Becoming a fundamental part of a city’s transportation system is a nice way to position yourself for a driverless car future (see above). In cities where Uber hasn’t been well received, supplying rides to people with disabilities could be a step toward becoming a valued part of an existing system — not just a disruptor.

Uber Not Taking Advantage of D.C. Mess
Also on the Uber-trying-to-be-part-of-the-solution tip: Yesterday’s hastily announced shutdown of the Washington, D.C., Metrorail system caused all sorts of annoyance, but Uber wasn’t the culprit. Yes, surge pricing came into effect, but it was capped at 3.9x (Washington Post). That’s an expensive ride, to be sure, but it’s nowhere near what happened New Year’s Eve, when Uber in some cities surged to 9.9x.

Save Waffle Records
Waffle House is not a NewCo, as far as we know. The snarkiest among us could argue it’s barely a restaurant, although in some parts of the country it’s your only choice at 4 a.m. This week we learned that the chain also has a long history of commissioning and distributing borderline-insane songs about itself (NPR). If only all content marketing was this enjoyable.

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The next smartphone revolution, happy airline passengers, and managing the regulators

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The Next Smartphone Revolution
The smartphone wars are supposed to be in the last round, down to a limited number of platforms globally and carriers in each market. Nope. An Andreessen Horowitz chart we saw via a Benedict Evans tweet predicts that the market for smartphones worldwide will double by 2020. Commenting on it, Fred Wilson opines that this second mobile revolution “may be an opportunity for US-based VCs like me. But more likely it will be an opportunity for VCs and early stage investors who have had the courage and foresight to set up shop in these emerging locations.” We’ve previously identified this as “the biggest business opportunity on the planet.” Local and regional players are uniquely positioned to understand the next generation of services worth building — yet another proof point to our thesis that Silicon Valley won’t always be the epicenter of entrepreneurship.

Turns Out Airline Passengers Don’t Want To be Treated Like Cattle
What happens when companies stop treating their customers poorly? You’re finding out if you fly Ryanair, the European discount carrier with a CEO notorious for calling his customers “stupid” and treating them accordingly. A dramatic turnaround in the company’s fortunes (WSJ) is being attributed to cutting fees, easing restrictions, and “telling staff to be less confrontational.” The company still has a long way to go in treating its employees better (the company chose to leave its Copenhagen base rather than follow local labor laws), but passengers, at least, are responding positively to the changes.

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Bad Urban Planning, Less Risky Innovation, and SXSW Rocks On

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Take Me to the River
Urban planning can do bad things to communities. For example, some New York suburbs feature low bridges intended to keep out busses and the poor people who ride them. And, The Nation reports, the revitalization of Los Angeles’s neglected 51-mile riverfront “has gone from social-justice crusade to money-soaked land grab.” Will the Los Angeles River Become a Playground for the Rich? answers its own question with a resounding “It’s already happening.” Reclaiming the riverfront is a beautiful and beautifying idea, but according to this report, it’s happening in a top-down fashion that threatens to upend communities closest to the gentrifying area. There’s still time to get it right, and the Mayor’s office has already reacted to community pressure by hiring consultants to help them give affected communities “a sense of ownership” in the project, but more than “a sense” is required when projects of this scope are considered.

Managing the Risk of Innovation
If necessity is the mother of invention, could the father be … insurance? The romantic conventional wisdom about innovation is that it’s more likely when you’ve got your back to the wall, but Robert J. Shiller, in How Wage Insurance Could Spur Innovation (NYT), argues that wage insurance, now focused on Americans who have lost their jobs to foreign workers, should be expanded and could help “spur innovation in the economy.” Shiller continues: “Rational people would want to pay for this benefit so that they could take promising but risky employment opportunities.” There are potential downsides (moral hazard, anyone?) but there are many, many people stuck in BigCos who are afraid to take a risk. This might even the playing field and let these people loose. And before you argue, let’s remember that Shiller’s a Nobel Laureate who called two of the last two downturns — and we’re not.

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