hiring and firing

232 results back to index

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by Owen Jones

Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Etonian, facts on the ground, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mass immigration, meritocracy, Neil Kinnock, Occupy movement, pension reform, place-making, plutocrats, post-war consensus, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, rising living standards, social distancing, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, We are the 99%, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

When I discussed the rise of the hire-and-fire service sector with leading Tory MP David Davis, he was soothingly sceptical. 'There's no real reason to believe that, let's say, Sainsbury's would have any less job security than somebody working in Ford. It's the reverse in many ways, because they're growing. So I think the hire-and-fire ideayou've just run past me a piece of 0 ld Labour mythology, frankly. The idea that the only good jobs are ones where you have to lift a half-ton weight every day is unmitigated crap.' But the evidence contradicts him: every passing day sees the further consolidation of a hire-and-fire workforce in Britain.

…

Both Mary and Carl work with a number of part-time and temporary staff. Their numbers have soared over the last thirty years as successive governments have striven to create a 'flexible' workforce. In part, they have made it far easier and cheaper for bosses to hire and fire workers at will. But we have also been witnessing the slow death of the secure, fulltime job. There are up to 1.5 million temporary workers in Britain. A 'temp' can be hired and fired at an hour's notice, be paid less for doing the same job, and lacks rights such as paid holidays and redundancy pay. Agency work is thriving in the service sector, but an incident at a car plant near 0xford in early 2009 illustrates where the rise of the temp has brought us.

…

Service-sector jobs are on the whole cleaner, less physically arduous, and are better at including women (even if they are still disproportionately concentrated in the lowest paid and most insecure work). But such work is often less well paid, lacks the same prestige, and is more likely to be hire-and-fire. Call centres and supermarkets do not form the basis of communities in the same way that the mine, factory, or dock did. I was not, though, calling for young men to be sent down the pits again. Just because I was arguing that what replaced these industries was in some important ways worse doesn't mean that I advocated a return to a vanished world.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

The best boards are continuously striving to put in place a strategy that survives come hell or high water—a strategy that does more than just generate profits but carries the company through the very worst market conditions, winning in all environments. As we will see in the next chapter, executing this strategy requires the very best leadership—not only from the board, but also from the CEO. This is why leadership selection is such a critical task for the board. CHAPTER 2 Hiring (and Firing) the CEO—and the Board CEO SUCCESSION—THE HIRING (AND FIRING, WHEN IT IS WARRANTED) OF the company chief executive—is one of the key responsibilities of the board. Just as important is refreshing the board’s own membership, recruiting those who will oversee the corporation smoothly and competently through the years. The selection of leadership is the one function over which the board has complete control and where management does not set the terms of debate, furnish key information, or drive the process.

…

Classification: LCC HD2745 .M69 2021 | DDC 658.4/22—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020057073 ISBNs: 978-1-5416-1942-5 (hardcover), 978-1-5416-1941-8 (e-book) E3-20210330-JV-NF-ORI Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Preface Introduction CHAPTER 1 Setting the Company Strategy CHAPTER 2 Hiring (and Firing) the CEO—and the Board CHAPTER 3 A Culture Revolution Enters the Boardroom CHAPTER 4 Five Critical Issues No Board Should Ignore CHAPTER 5 Innovate or Die: The Existential Crisis of the Twenty-First-Century Board Acknowledgments Discover More About the Author Bibliography Also By Dambisa Moyo Praise for How Boards Work To current management and employees, so they know what their boards do To investors, so they appreciate boards’ limits and possibilities To policymakers and regulators, so they are more aware of the trade-offs that boards face To current board members, to help guide their reform agenda To future board members, to help them grasp the board role To the general public, so they better understand why successful boards and well-governed corporations are critical for society at large Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

…

Every one of these companies relies on a dozen or so people, sitting at a boardroom table, to oversee a vast and varied enterprise. In my time serving on corporate boards, I have witnessed and helped respond to some of the most extreme and testing situations in the corporate world, including the death of a chairman of the board while he was in office; multiple CEO successions, and hiring and firing of chief executives; buying and selling companies, including the sale of a global corporation for $100 billion, the largest global mergers and acquisitions transaction in 2016; enormous regulatory fines stemming from a crackdown on corporate behavior; activist shareholders seeking to disrupt the company strategy; the unique challenges of having an insider—a large, dominant, usually family member—shareholder on the board; expropriation of company assets by host governments; and massive corporate restructuring prompted by a share-price collapse.

The Big Secret for the Small Investor: A New Route to Long-Term Investment Success by Joel Greenblatt

backtesting, book value, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, hiring and firing, index fund, risk free rate, Sharpe ratio, time value of money, Vanguard fund

Several research studies tracked the investments of these large, “professionally” managed fund allocators (such as foundations, endowments, and pension plans) and analyzed their decisions to hire and fire investment managers. The results weren’t pretty.1 Most managers were hired due to good recent performance. Most managers that were fired had recently underperformed the market averages.2 In short, these “professional” fund allocators would have been better off staying home! In the years following hire and fire decisions, the recently fired managers significantly outperformed the market while the recently hired didn’t show any outperformance at all.

…

Since most clients can only evaluate performance results (rather than the quality of the work that went into each investment decision), there have been a million ways developed over the last few decades to slice and dice these performance data into all kinds of ratios and statistics. The only thing is that evaluating past performance data for even a several-year period may be unhelpful when it comes to predicting future success. Yet almost all hire-and-fire decisions made by clients (both individual and professional) are based on a manager’s performance during the last couple of years. While this is perhaps understandable, it forces most managers to concentrate on short-term performance. As we’ve already discussed, even if a manager has a healthy long-term perspective and is willing to wait out short-term underperformance, most clients are not!

Swimming With Sharks: My Journey into the World of the Bankers by Joris Luyendijk

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, bank run, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, Emanuel Derman, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flash crash, glass ceiling, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, inventory management, job-hopping, Large Hadron Collider, light touch regulation, London Whale, Money creation, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, regulatory arbitrage, Satyajit Das, selection bias, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, too big to fail

One strike and you are out of the circle.’ His impression was that women are bullied more than men when they resign, ‘perhaps because women are believed to be more susceptible’. In his classic book Liar’s Poker, the American writer and former front-office banker Michael Lewis summarises the mentality behind this hire-and-fire system as: ‘You want loyalty? Hire a cocker spaniel.’ And why shouldn’t bankers act like footballers and seek out the most prestigious or best-paying club? Particularly since the financial sector is extremely sensitive to the ups and downs of the economy; the easier banks can get rid of people in bad times, the more likely they are to hire them again when the economy swings back.

…

That is the commonly accepted argument in favour of zero job security. In all the interviews, virtually no front-office bankers made the case for employment rights or any form of job protection. At the same time many spoke extremely negatively about the atmosphere in their banks and, digging deeper into the causes of the ‘toxic culture’, they often hit on the hire-and-fire mentality. People are not appliances; a machine that might be discarded at any point is unaware of this fact and will function exactly like a machine that has a cosy spot reserved in the factory until the end of its days. Humans, however, are influenced by the awareness of their vulnerability and adapt their behaviour accordingly.

…

‘I remember that if I voiced an opinion based on moral considerations, I’d get looked at as if I were an alien,’ said one former investment banker, while a risk and compliance officer recalled being branded a ‘socialist’ for asking about the social purpose of a financial product. Most interviewees, however, seemed to take the logic governing their sector for granted and pointed to the equally amoral hire-and-fire culture: this is simply how it works around here. The pattern of scandals and crashes that had dominated the past few decades began to make more sense in this context. Consider what happened to the financial products developed in the 1970s to deal with increasing swings (‘volatility’) in the value of interest rates and currencies.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

He famously identified the bilateral contract of employment as the secret behind entrepreneurs’ tight control over their workforce: in return for regular wages, employees submit- ted themselves to the employer’s orders.2 Employment and social security law responded to ensure that these powers were exercised responsibly. A contract of employment gives employers the right to control everything from how work is done and paid to hiring and firing employees. It also regulates how these powers might be exercised. An employer cannot force its workers to labour all day long, must pay them a minimum wage, and may not illegally discriminate against particular groups in hiring and firing.3 Employers deduct payroll taxes, and contribute to pensions and insurance payments; independent contractors can set higher rates in return for being responsible for their own tax returns and long-term economic security

…

The solution lies in adopting a more flexible approach to determining who should be responsible. * * * Playing by the Rules 101 A Functional Concept of the Employer In legal terms, we can analyse employers’ powers—and the law’s control over them—as ‘functions of the employer’. In a previous book exploring The Concept of the Employer, I identified five such functions, from hiring and firing to control over work and pay.24 Traditionally, a single party—Coase’s famous ‘entrepreneur-coordinator’— would have exercised all of these functions, controlling her employees through the contract of employment. Independent entrepreneurs, on the other hand, set their own wages, determine which work they are willing to do, and take the risks (and reap the rewards) of engaging in market competition.

…

Oxford Professors Paul Davies and Mark Freedland have long criticized the ‘constant and increasing counter-factuality’ of the traditional approach: Paul Davies and Mark Freedland, ‘The complexities of the employing enterprise’, in Guy Davidov and Brian Langile (eds), Boundaries and Frontiers of Labour Law (Hart 2006), 274. In a world of fissured work, outsourcing agencies, and, now, on-demand platforms, it can be difficult to identify a single employer exercising control over its employees. 24. The five employer functions are: (1) hiring and firing (which category includes all powers of the employer over the very existence of its contract with a worker, from initial vetting to dismissal); (2) work (when working, employees owe duties to their employer, including, in particular, a duty to provide labour and its results); (3) pay (one of the employer’s fundamental obligations, this also includes social security and pension contributions); (4) control (employers tell their workers what to do—and sometimes how to do it); and (5) profits and losses (employers are entrepreneurs—they are in the business of making a profit, whilst also being exposed to any losses that may result from the enterprise).

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

“We invest in quality, comfort and a product that is different from others out there.”90 A final mistake has been to assume that reforms to boost the supply side of the economy in the longer term could substitute for short-term measures to boost demand. Even in good times, most reforms take time to bear fruit. Often, in fact, their initial impact is negative. For example, making it easier to hire and fire workers will lead to a shake-out of unproductive workers, pushing up unemployment, worsening public finances (as tax revenues fall and spending on benefits increases) and depressing the economy, because the newly unemployed workers will spend less. Eventually, those workers will be redeployed to more productive uses – but in a recession when demand is depressed, credit is crunched and barriers to starting new businesses are high, this will take much longer than usual.

…

Adaptable As well as coping with unexpected change and predictable variability, an adaptable economy needs to be able to adjust to changes that seem more enduring: the rise of emerging economies, the spread of new digital technologies, a desire for more eco-friendly products. To do so, people, businesses, organisations and governments need the freedom, the capacity and the willingness to adapt. At least four types of barrier may impede them. Laws and regulations may restrict hiring and firing, prevent businesses from growing or shrinking, or forbid them from deploying a new technology. A lack of competition may also impede adjustment: dominant players may stifle the growth of nimbler upstarts or the deployment of technologies that undermine their core business. The absence of suitable labour, capital and supportive infrastructure is a third barrier: companies may not be able to find people with the right skills locally, attract the investment they need to grow or access the competitively priced high-speed internet (or efficient ports) that they need.

…

In many European countries, the availability of jobs is artificially restricted even in good times by taxes that make it prohibitively expensive to hire people and employment regulations that make it difficult and costly to fire them. Jobseekers may also lack the skills and attributes that employers are looking for – and because hiring and firing is expensive, employers are deterred from taking a chance on them and training them. Last but not least, some are dissuaded from working by welfare rules that penalise work, while others do not want to work and welfare gives them the option of remaining idle. In order to succeed, reforms need to tackle all three aspects of the problem together.

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, antiwork, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, emotional labour, feminist movement, gentrification, hiring and firing, immigration reform, independent contractor, informal economy, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, new economy, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, precariat, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, The Chicago School, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, women in the workforce

It resulted in several key changes to longstanding policy: Local school councils (LSCs), consisting of one principal, six parents, two teachers, and two community members, were created and empowered to hire school principals and make budgetary decisions; principals no longer received tenure; and principals were empowered to hire and fire teachers. Hiring principals, hiring and firing teachers, and setting budgets had previously been centralized functions of the Board of Education. The law explicitly barred teachers from running for the council as either parents or community members, despite the vast number of teachers who were both. Part of what makes teachers and teachers’ unions so interesting in the educational production process is that they are also parents, meaning community members with children of their own.

…

As Edelman tells the story, in his workshop on how to bust teachers’ unions even in Democratically-controlled states: “So in this intervening time, Rahm Emanuel is elected mayor, he won on the first ballot, and he strongly supports our proposal … that was another shoe that dropped on the Chicago Teachers Union because they didn’t support him.”54 The Stand for Children legislative proposal would again strip teachers of the right to collectively bargain over schedules—an item that had been negotiable historically, had been stripped away by the 1995 Amendatory Act, and then reinstated in 2001 as a negotiable item, but under a compliant union that quickly negotiated a deal to lengthen the teaching day. Now, because a less compliant teachers’ union was in power, it was taken off the table again. And the Stand for Children legislation did far more than that: It included a frontal assault on tenure that would empower principals to hire and fire teachers, and mandated that at least one-quarter of the decision to fire be based on student test scores. Each of these measures took aim at unions. The final provision of the proposed legislation attempted to bar teachers from striking. Stand for Children started the bargaining with an outright ban, and counted on “compromising” with a deal that would allow a strike, but dependent on what they believed would be an impossible criterion: 75 percent of all teachers would have to show up at the polls for a strike authorization vote to be valid (a rather amazing criteria given that turn out in typical elections in the United States hovers in the 20 to 30 percent range).

…

By advocacy, as I defined it in Chapter Two, I mean groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, or Greenpeace—groups that merely campaign on behalf of some broad societal goal and/or on behalf of a constituency or constituencies. By contrast, Make the Road’s members are active players in campaigns and have decision-making in such key areas as hiring and firing staff, approving budgets, and deciding on the direction and priorities of the organization. They also understand that mass collective action is a key source of leverage. Another sign that Make the Road goes beyond a pure advoacy approach is that they are not simply trying to win specific legislation or material benefits, but also trying to make long-term, structural changes in the power structure of the wider society, shifting the balance of power toward the organization’s base constituency and away from the forces that oppress them.

No One Succeeds Alone by Robert Reffkin

Albert Einstein, coronavirus, COVID-19, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, market design, pattern recognition, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, young professional

Index A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z B A Better Chance, 17, 43, 63 A abundance mindset, 170 accountability, 38–39, 181–83 adaptability, 9–10, 169–71, 186, 194–96 Adashek, Jeannie, 93 Allon, Ori belonging and community, 195–96 first meeting, 164–66 as mentor, 82, 181 origin of Compass, 104 pivot at Compass, 206–12 recruitment, 176–78 America Needs You, 49, 158–59 See also New York Needs You authentic self, 9, 58, 73–76, 189–92 See also strengths, maximizing balance, work-life, 127–29 be solutions driven (principle of entrepreneurship), 27–30, 40–43, 54–66, 88–90, 109–11, 150–62 being Black and adaptability, 9–10 disowned by grandparents, 24–25 expectations, 122–23 in New York City, 121 professional belonging, 194 in relationship with college girlfriend, 201–2 in school, 13–15, 21, 62, 215–18 See also discrimination; immigrants; privilege and advantage belonging creating your own community, 194–96 defined, 8–9 discrimination and, 215–18 vs. impostor syndrome, 130–31, 189–92 purpose and, 49–50 socioeconomic background, 67–69 Belonging Walls, 196 Benioff, Marc, ix–x Benís (wife) on acceptance of flaws, 73–76 childhood, inequality of, 66–69 as coach, 100 college opportunity, 88–90 coming to New York, 64–66 home and rediscovering herself, 69–73 as inspiration, 160 as life partner, 137–40 society’s unwritten rules, 85–86 work-life balance, 128–29 Berkeley house, 58–61 bias, 166–68 Black executives and mentors, 94–98 bounce back with passion (principle of entrepreneurship), 20, 69–73, 109–11, 197–212 Byard, Eliza, 123 C celebration, of successes, 134–35, 158 change, at Compass, 206–12 Chenault, Ken, 94, 138, 170 coaches, 98–101 Cohn, Gary, 130–31 collaborate without ego (principle of entrepreneurship), 11–13, 46–47, 73–76, 88–90, 98–101, 109–11, 172–83 Columbia University accelerated graduation, 40–43 admission and anticipation, 134–35 application to, 27–29 college application essay, 32–36 communication of change, 209–12 handwritten notes, 93, 166 with mentors, 86–88, 91–93 with new employees, 132–34 observation of facial expressions, 140–42 speaking out for what is right, 118–19, 215–18 Compass change, challenge of, 209–12 coronavirus pandemic, 169–71 culture, 125–27, 151–53, 181–83 early pivot, 206–9 hiring and firing, 173–79 on innovation, 144–45, 147–49 origin of, 97–98, 103–5 welcoming new employees, 132–34 Compass Academy, 171 Compass Concierge, 149 compensation, asking for a raise, 161–62 constructive feedback, 82–85 Contraband (school newspaper), 216–18 Cornell, Henry, 97, 99, 187, 191 coronavirus pandemic, 169–71 Customer Feedback Forum, 145–47 customers (real estate agents) feedback from, 145–47, 207–9 focus on, 23–24, 144–45, 166–68 D decision-making tools for forgiveness, 24–27 hiring and firing tests, 179–81 on life partner, 137–40 networking, 86–88 perspective, long-term, 117–19 for success, 20 DiBiasio, Dolf, 43–44 discrimination adapting oneself to society, 9–10 belonging and community, 194–96, 215–18 dreams and, 121–23 father and, 11–12 in schools, 13–15 skeptics, 29–30 socioeconomic, 67–68 stereotypes and bias, 166–68 unwritten rules, of society, 85–86 See also immigrants DJ business, 23–24, 34–35 Dodge & Cox internship, 63 dream big (principle of entrepreneurship), 2, 17–20, 27–30, 36–39, 54–63, 73–76, 109–11, 113–23 dreams attachment to vs. change, 209–12 of author, 49, 119–21 combining goals, 101–3, 129 energy and, 21 measuring, 125–27 motivation to achieve, 159–61 resilience and, 198–201 for this book, 3–4 E Eduard Lee (father) in college essay, 32–33 ego and fatherhood, 11–13 family life, 7 gratitude, 186 as motivational factor, 160–61 education Benís and, 69, 88–90 discrimination vs. support for, 13–15 Elida and, 65, 68 opportunities for, 16–18 strengths and, 188–89 of whole person, 36–39 ego, 11–13, 110, 138, 144, 145, 173 Elida (mother-in-law), 64–69, 78, 89, 129 empathy, 25 energy for accomplishing dreams, 18–19 dreams and success, 21–22 from negativity, 27–30 from people, 155–59 as test, 180 See also motivation; taking action entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship customers and, 23–24 defined, 63 overview and principles of, 109–11 rules, flexibility of, 40–43 work-life balance, 127–29 exit strategy, 129–32 expectations, 14, 38, 98, 123 F failure as feedback, 147–49 losing when right, 99–100 mothers and, 53 Reffkin on, 2–3 vs. strengths, 185 See also resilience family, importance of, 76–78, 117–19, 160 fear, 146–47, 148, 170 feedback constructive, importance of, 82–85, 99 from customers, 145–47, 206–9 diversity and variety in, 147–49 facial expressions, 140–42 learn from reality, principle of, 136–37 learning from pain, 12–13, 201–6 on life partner, 137–40 listening and humility, 142–45 from mentees in nonprofit, 158–59 recruitment and, 177–79 success and, 20 firing employees, 173–75, 179–81 Floyd, George, 118, 122 forgiveness, 24–27 Foster, Dick, 96, 138–39, 192 G Global Horizons, 62 Goldman Sachs, 44, 97–99, 103, 130–32, 187, 191 grandfather, 24–25, 54–56 gratitude, 77–78, 92–93, 168–69, 186–88 grudges, 24–27 guilt, 73–75 H Haas School of Business, 63 Henry Crown Fellows, 102 hiring tests, 179–81 home, importance of, 69–73 humility, 142–45 hustle, importance of, 48–50 I immigrants, 7, 55, 85–86, 109, 118, 195 impostor syndrome, 130, 189–92 innovation, 143 inspiration, 101–3 invention, 143–44 J Jobs, Steve, 30, 178 Jordan, Vernon, 93, 94–98 Julpan (company), 165 K “Kids in the Conference Room, The” (article), 44 L Lazard, 49, 93, 95, 96, 97, 130, 205 leadership characteristics of, x, 170 coronavirus pandemic, 169–71 employee communication, 132–34 Jordan, Vernon, lessons from, 94–98 listening, 98–101, 142–45 learn from reality (principle of entrepreneurship), 20, 23–24, 81–85, 90–94, 98–103, 109–11, 136–49 Lee, Eduard Rodney.

…

This approach has helped us to recruit fantastic people and propel them forward once they arrive. Ideally, on their first day, every new hire already knows that their journey and our journey are heading in the same direction—and that the more passion they pour into their work, the more progress they’ll make toward their own goals. Five tests for hiring and firing I never did that well on tests in school, but there are a number of simple tests that I’ve found helpful in professional life. They’re valuable because the more we think about something, the more our minds try to play tricks on us. We second-guess, we let doubt and fear creep in, we hesitate, we overthink.

The death and life of the great American school system: how testing and choice are undermining education by Diane Ravitch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, confounding variable, David Brooks, desegregation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, longitudinal study, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Good schools under private management would proliferate, while bad schools would be closed down by market forces (the exit of disgruntled parents) or by a watchful government. Some of the new generation of reformers—mainly Republicans, but not only Republicans—imagined that the schools of the future would function without unions, allowing management to hire and fire personnel at will. With the collapse of Communism and the triumph of market reforms in most parts of the world, it did not seem to be much of a stretch to envision the application of the market model to schooling. Like many others in that era, I was attracted to the idea that the market would unleash innovation and bring greater efficiencies to education.

…

He repeatedly decried the lack of a national curriculum, national testing, and “stakes” attached to schooling; these, he said, were huge problems that would not be solved by letting a thousand flowers bloom or by turning over the schools to entrepreneurs. Ironically, as charter schools evolved, the charter movement became increasingly hostile to unions. Charter operators wanted to be able to hire and fire teachers at will, to set their own salary schedule, to reward teachers according to their performance, to control working conditions, and to require long working hours; with few exceptions, they did not want to be subject to a union contract that interfered with their prerogatives as management.

…

Data-driven education leaders say that academic performance lags because we don’t have enough “effective” teachers, the ones whose students consistently improve their standardized test scores. The major obstacle to getting enough effective teachers and getting rid of ineffective teachers, they say, is the teachers’ unions. Union contracts provide job security that prevents administrators from hiring and firing teachers at will. If there were no unions, no union contracts, and no tenure, then superintendents could get rid of bad teachers and hire only effective teachers. Without the union, teachers’ salaries would be based on the test scores of their students, rather than on their seniority and credentials.

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, business cycle, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, David Brooks, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, school choice, shareholder value, sharing economy, Skype, Steve Jobs, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, working poor, zero day

Given these costs, it isn’t surprising that some object to the expansion of public insurance. At the same time, insurance has economic benefits. Schooling and medical insurance improve productivity via better knowledge, creativity, and health. Bankruptcy protection encourages entrepreneurship. Unemployment compensation reduces efforts to restrict employers’ flexibility in hiring and firing, and it facilitates employees’ skill upgrading and geographic mobility.10 Programs that boost the income of poor households, such as the Child Tax Credit and the EITC, increase the future employment and earnings of children in those households.11 Many insurance programs reduce stress and anxiety, enhancing productivity.

…

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, partners with the Wall Street Journal to score countries on ten dimensions of economic freedom: security of property rights, freedom from corruption, business freedom (the right to establish and run an enterprise without interference from the state), labor freedom (absence of hiring and firing restrictions and other limitations on work conditions), monetary freedom (a stable currency and market-determined prices), trade freedom (absence of regulatory barriers to imports and exports), investment freedom (absence of restrictions on the movement of capital), financial freedom (a transparent and unrestricted financial system), low taxes (“fiscal freedom”), and low government spending.

…

Government spending: total government expenditures as a share of GDP, in 2007. Data source: OECD, stats.oecd.org. The correlation is –.14 (with Italy excluded). “Asl” is Australia; “Aus” is Austria. In other words, a nation can tax and spend quite heavily while still giving economic actors considerable freedom to start and operate a business, allocate capital, hire and fire employees, and engage in all manner of economic activities. This approach is sometimes called “flexicurity.” Government allows individuals and firms substantial freedom, with one exception: they pay a significant share of their earnings to the collectivity. This revenue is used to enhance security and opportunity and to ensure that prosperity is widely shared across the society.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

EMBRACING THE LONG GAME Playing the long game requires moves that don’t map to traditional measures of productivity. Strategy is nourished by patience. Break the long game down into chapters. Just stay alive long enough to become an expert. Do the work regardless of whose work it is. OPTIMIZE OPTIMIZING YOUR TEAM BUILDING, HIRING, AND FIRING Resourcefulness > Resources Initiative > Experience Diversity drives differentiation. Hire people who have endured adversity. Seek people with whom discussions evolve by a step function. If you avoid folks who are polarizing, you avoid bold outcomes. Cultivate your team’s immune system, and occasionally suppress it.

…

If your team is not in a good place or your office culture is lacking, your most valuable resources will not be able to make great products or execute well over time. Your team genuinely needs to be as important to you as what you’re making. I have met many founders who obsess over product and steamroll their team. Most of them have failed. Team comes first. BUILDING, HIRING, AND FIRING Resourcefulness > Resources As your business grows and your plans become more ambitious, you will want to grow your team. When it comes to scaling, the easiest path most leaders default to is to hire. More heads, more hands, more work done. But the best managers know that growing the team is not always the answer.

…

DO THE WORK REGARDLESS OF WHOSE WORK IT IS. “The best way to complain”: James Murphy, “The Best Way to Complain Is to Make Things,” Startup Vitamins, accessed March 22, 2018, http://startupquotes.startupvitamins.com/post/41941517470/the-best-way-to-complain-is-to-make-things-james. OPTIMIZE BUILDING, HIRING, AND FIRING RESOURCEFULNESS > RESOURCES Their first satellite: James Temple, “Everything You Need to Know About Skybox, Google’s Big Satellite Play,” Recode, June 11, 2014, www.recode.net/2014/6/11/11627878/everything-you-need-to-know-about-skybox-googles-big-satellite-play. “I’ve seen many startups shift”: Jessica Livingston, “Subtle Mid-Stage Startup Pitfalls,” Founders at Work, April 29, 2015, http://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/subtle-mid-stage-pitfalls.

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention by Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer

Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, FedEx blackjack story, global village, hiring and firing, job-hopping, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, late fees, loose coupling, loss aversion, out of africa, performance metric, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, super pumped, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, work culture

But if the dilemma is linked to an employee’s personal situation, it’s up to that person to share details if he chooses. QUIZ SCENARIO 4: WHEN YOU SCREW UP You are still the founder of a start-up with one hundred employees. This is a tough job, and despite your best efforts, you make a series of serious mistakes. Most notably you hire and fire five sales directors within five years. You keep thinking you’ve found a good candidate. But each time, as you begin to work together, you realize the new recruit doesn’t have what it takes to do the job. You realize that these mis-hirings are entirely due to your poor judgment. Do you admit this to your workforce?

…

Earlier in my career, in the early days of Pure Software, I was too insecure to talk openly about mistakes with my staff, and I learned an important lesson. I was making a lot of leadership mistakes and it weighed on me heavily. Beyond my general incompetence at people management, I had indeed hired and fired five sales directors in five years. The first two times, I could blame the person I’d hired, but by the fourth and fifth failures, it was clear the problem was me. One thing I have always done is put the company before myself. Certain my own incompetence was bad for the organization, I went to the board and, as if in the confessional, detailed my inadequacies and offered my resignation.

…

Many of these items keep the organization from changing quickly when the environment shifts. Pay-per-performance bonuses, Management by Objective, and Key Performance Indicators motivate employees to stay on a preset path, making it difficult to quickly dump one project and pick up another. Whereas Performance Improvement Plans (along with any hiring and firing processes) make it difficult to swap out and in employees quickly as business needs change. If your goal is to build a more inventive, fast, and flexible organization, develop a culture of freedom and responsibility by establishing the necessary conditions so you can remove these rules and processes too.

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Christensen, Clayton M., Dillon, Karen, Allworth, James

air freight, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Clayton Christensen, disruptive innovation, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, job satisfaction, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, Nick Leeson, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, working poor, young professional

If you recount our discussion of emergent and deliberate strategy—the balance between your plans and unanticipated opportunities—then you’ll know that getting something wrong doesn’t mean you have failed. Instead, you have just learned what does not work. You now know to try something else. It also goes without saying that there are some tools available to businesses that we just can’t use in our personal lives. For example, organizations have the ability to hire and fire employees to shape the culture they want. You can’t hire your kids for cultural fit. You don’t get to choose how they’re wired. And much as you might want to sometimes, you can’t fire them. (Thankfully, they can’t fire you, either.) Nevertheless, what I offer you in the following chapters can help because many of the problems we encounter in the workplace are often fundamentally the same in nature as the problems we encounter at home.

…

Capabilities are dynamic and built over time; no company starts out with its capabilities fully developed. The most tangible of the three factors is resources, which include people, equipment, technology, product designs, brands, information, cash, and relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers. Resources are usually people or things—they can be hired and fired, bought and sold, depreciated or built. Many resources are visible and often are measurable, so managers can readily assess their value. Most people might think that resources are what make a business successful. But resources are only one of three critical factors driving a business. Organizations create value as employees transform resources into products and services of greater worth.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

(Most of the managers at the hospitals with the doctored waiting lists had consistently received thousands of dollars in performance bonuses.) In other words, the civil servants have a moat, too. As with much of what now ails America, protecting government workers with a civil service system began as sensible reform. Since the Revolution, hiring and firing federal workers had been corrupted by politics and cronyism. What had been an unspoken practice was institutionalized by the populist president Andrew Jackson, who openly championed what became known as the spoils system in 1829. Following the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by a former government worker apparently enraged at being the victim of the spoils system, a growing movement for change produced the Civil Service Reform Act of 1883.

…

The law required that workers be hired on the merits after competing in qualifying tests. Initially, only about one in ten jobs were covered, but coverage grew rapidly. A series of statutes and court decisions gradually expanded the hiring protections to include limits on firing workers, too. A reform, initiated by President Carter in 1978, applied more rules to the hiring and firing process through a new Office of Personnel Management and a Merit Systems Protection Board, set up to adjudicate claims of unfair personnel practices. The law also added a “senior executive service” category intended to select and encourage the best workers, and attempted, with no success, to improve the rigor of performance reviews across all job categories.

…

If other potential recruits in priority areas, such as cyber security or fixing the VA’s customer service IT systems, do consider government service, it is likely to involve working for the private contractors that ring the Beltway doing outsourced work for the government at exorbitant rates that are typically based on how many hours of staff time it takes to do the job. The contractors’ performance has been so bad, yet so expensive, that the same Paul Light who attacked the government’s hiring and firing system in 2000 has written that the government also “lacks any system at all for managing the government’s vast, hidden workforce of contractors and consultants who work side-by-side with civil servants.” THRIVING IN THE SWAMP Those contractors have thrived, powered by a network of lobbyists and former or future employees working at the agencies that give them contracts, and by members of Congress pushed by lobbyists to reward them and ignore their failures to produce on prior contracts.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

Maneuvering like this may become much more common as machines take on more power within organizations. In the future, we may all feel much more like YouTubers and Uber drivers—subjects at the mercy of a capricious machine that has the power to make or ruin our careers. Workplace AI will not only hire and fire us, but guide our daily performance, correct us when we slip up, and praise us when we do good work. “Playing office politics” will come to mean “reverse-engineering a piece of workforce management software.” A “hostile work environment” might be the result of a poorly trained machine learning model rather than an abusive boss.

…

In fact, some of these executives are eager to give AI big pieces of their own jobs. In a recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, two executives predicted the rapid rise of “self-driving companies,” businesses in which human managers are few and far between, and most corporate decisions, including hiring and firing, are made by algorithms. Respectfully, these people are out of their minds. In fact, if you talk to the computer scientists working on the front lines of AI and machine learning, they’ll tell you that even the best AI in existence is still far from being worthy of this kind of carelessly placed trust.

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

They have developed “a really thoughtful understanding of what the purpose of the state is in society,” said Zakaria. Today, the state defends free trade and enacts policies to encourage entrepreneurship and private-sector growth. Policy makers shy away from antitrust enforcement and other government interference in the economy. Companies are permitted to hire and fire employees without getting bogged down in excessive regulation or legal battles (though Nordic workers still enjoy more protections than their American counterparts). As we previously discussed, the Nordic countries also have a strong, multitiered organized labor apparatus that negotiates fair pay and benefits for workers across the economy.

…

The comparatively light-touch labor laws in Nordic countries give companies certain advantages over their counterparts in other parts of Europe. They are the reason Helsinki, Stockholm, and Copenhagen boast some of the most vibrant start-up scenes in the world. In Mediterranean countries like Spain, France, and Italy, companies looking to hire and fire workers often find themselves bogged down in bureaucratic processes that make it difficult to impossible to do so. While these countries generally outperform Nordics in traditional industrial sectors, they are not effectively competing with them in high-tech industries and certainly not among start-ups.

…

Today, the state defends free trade: Michael Cembalest, “Lost in Space: The Search for Democratic Socialism in the Real World, and How I Ended Up Halfway around the Globe from Where I Began,” J.P. Morgan, June 24, 2019, https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-wm-aem/global/pb/en/insights/eye-on-the-market/lost-in-space-the-search-for-democratic-socialism-in-the-real-world-and-how-i-ended-up-halfway-around-the-globe-from-where-i-began.pdf. Companies are permitted to hire and fire: Fareed Zakaria, “Bernie Sanders’s Scandinavian Fantasy,” Washington Post, February 27, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bernie-sanderss-scandinavian-fantasy/2020/02/27/ee894d6e-599f-11ea-9b35-def5a027d470_story.html; Matt Bruenig, “Fareed Zakaria Is Completely Ignorant about the Nordics,” People’s Policy Project, March 2, 2020, httxtps://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2020/03/02/fareed-zakaria-is-completely-ignorant-about-the-nordics/.

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website by Matt Blumberg

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Broken windows theory, crowdsourcing, deskilling, fear of failure, financial engineering, high batting average, high net worth, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype

Though it hasn’t been my experience, I see Fred’s point. I’d argue that the same statement is true of founders or management as well. Boards help govern the company and watch out for shareholder interests. Boards give outside perspectives and strategic advice to the company’s leadership. Boards hire and fire the CEO. More and more every day with large public companies, boards keep management honest. How can these critical functions occur when a board has too many members of the management team on it? They can’t. We have had outside directors only, other than me, from Day 1. I’m not advocating that boards meet 100 percent apart from senior management; just that other members of the management team aren’t officially directors.

…

The biggest challenge I’ve had over the years sitting on other boards is trying to figure out the line of proper governance between being a director and being a CEO. My natural instinct is to speak up, to define and solve problems. That’s not necessarily the right role for an outside director who is there to help guide management (and, sure, ultimately hire and fire management). There are lots of different kinds of CEOs and corporate cultures. Some are command-and-control, others are more open, flat and transparent. I like to think I and Return Path are the latter and of course my bias is that that kind of culture leads to a more successful company. I’ve worked in environments that are the former and while less fun and more stressful, they can also produce very successful outcomes for shareholders and for employees as well.

…

As with most things like this, it’s less important what kind of peer group you form or join than it is that you form or join one. PROBLEM SOLVING IN TANDEM The kinds of topics that a peer group can tackle together are extremely varied. My group usually ends up focusing on things that are challenges unique to the CEO job: managing a board or investors or a financing; hiring and firing executives; setting/changing strategy; organizational and cultural challenges; and, in a couple of cases, selling companies. Sometimes we just share best practices on things that are maybe less weighty. It occurs to me that my CEO forum is kind of like a live version of this book—and in fact the members of the group are all represented among the different outside contributors here.

What’s Your Type? by Merve Emre

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, behavioural economics, card file, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, emotional labour, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gabriella Coleman, God and Mammon, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, p-value, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Socratic dialogue, Stanford prison experiment, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce

.), 17–18 childish function (in Personality Paint Box), 46, 47 child psychology, 9–10, 16 child-rearing, see baby-training laboratory Christianity, 1, 3, 23, 84–85, 95, 105 churches, personality testing in, xvi, 208–9, 251 Clark, Rosamond, 73 Clark University, 35, 38 class divisions and individuality, 125–26, 156, 158 Cleveland, Grover, 5 cognitive testing, 202, 203, 204, 214 Cold War, 180, 187, 189, 202, 232 College of Saint Benedict, 247 colleges, see universities, personality testing at Commission of Human Resources, 202 commodification of workers, 179, 248, 253–55, 258–59 “Complaint” (Williams), 195 computers, use of, 195, 208, 213, 233, 249 consultants, personality testing, xix, 120, 251, 252–56 Consulting Psychologists Press (CPP), xv, 186, 241–44, 248–49, 252, 257 Cook, Albert J., 1, 2, 3, 5, 13 Cook, Bert, 1, 2, 3 Cook, Mary, 1, 2, 3 Cordray, Richard, 213–14 corporations: assessment of culture in, 255 hiring and firing in, xvi, 120, 159, 168 job performance in, 121 management of personalities in, 123, 164–65, 253–54 matching of jobs to workers in, 135–36, 160–61, 161–62, 166–67, 264 social control in, 161, 166–67, 170, 264 worker as commodity of, 179, 248, 253–55, 258–59 Country Life, 63 Cox, James M., 31 CPI (California Psychological Inventory), 203, 240–41 CPP (Consulting Psychologists Press), xv, 186, 241–44, 248–49, 252, 257 creativity: Barron’s theory of, 189, 200 as hope for the world and America, 176–78, 187–88 and research on Capote, 190–93 and research on women, 197–98, 199 Crowe, Cindy, 247 Darwin, Charles, 1, 6, 13, 37 Davis, Junius “Jay,” 210, 211, 212, 216–17, 219, 221–23 Death Calls for Margin (Myers), 65–66 Debs, Eugene, 31 “Diary of an Introvert Determined to Extravert, Write, & Have a Lot of Children” (Myers), 51–52, 53, 56, 118 “Diary of an Obedience-Curiosity Mother, The” (Briggs), 11, 13, 16, 18, 62 Dickinson, Emily, 43 discrimination: as consequence of type testing, xx, 122, 125–26, 267 in expectations, 167–68 at IPAR, 182, 194–200 Dissociation of a Personality, The (Prince), 97 domestic institutions, as “laboratories,” xx, 6–7, 8, 24–25, 43, 66, 123, 127–30, 207, 230 see also family, as origin of MBTI “dominant” function (in Isabel’s system), 131 Donovan, William, 141 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 121 dream analysis: on Capote, 191, 193 of Helson, Ravenna, 194, 199 Isabel’s use of, 169–70 on Katharine, 36–37, 90 in Katharine’s dream club, 74, 90–91 on Lyman, 71–73, 72, 74–75 on Mary (Tucky), 77–78, 79 racialized, 78–79, 169–70 “Earning It: Personal Trainers to Buff the Boss’s People Skills” (New York Times), 254–55 educational “experiment,” 15 see also baby-training laboratory Educational Testing Service (ETS), see ETS (Educational Testing Service) Edward N.

…

.: and Briggs-Myers Type Indicator, 134–35, 137, 159, 163–64, 166, 228 Isabel as employee of, 121, 122, 124, 125, 159 personality testing of workers by, 120–21 Helson, Henry, 194, 196, 198, 199 Helson, Ravenna: confusion about name of, 179, 194 family-independence juggling by, 194, 196–97, 198–99 at IPAR as assistant, 179, 194–96, 241 research on creativity in women by, 197–200 Herman Miller (office furniture), 249 hiring and firing of workers by type, xvi, 120, 159, 168 Hitler, Adolf: Adorno on, 125, 155–56 and Jung, Carl, 101–2 Katharine on, 105–6, 110–11, 113, 116–17 Murray on, 105–6, 107–11, 111–15 sexual abnormalities of, 107–8 Home Life Insurance Company, 164 home-schooling, 15 Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 62 Hoover, Herbert, 63, 91 hospitals, personality testing in, xx, 168, 230, 231, 233, 235–36, 252 “house-party” assessment at IPAR, 178, 182–87 How to Win Friends and Influence People (Carnegie), 118 Humm, Doncaster G., 121 Humm-Wadsworth Temperament Scale, 121–22, 124, 125, 127, 135 imagery game (word pairs), 81, 214, 242 images as prompts for stories, 99–100, 265–66 imagination, 4, 5, 10–11, 55, 59 “Improvisations” exercise, 150–53 index cards, 43, 74, 93, 127, 207, 213, 214 indicator, see Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) individuality: assessment for, 127, 156–58 vs. belonging to “type” group, xviii as capitalist fiction, 126, 170, 260 vs. classification, xvi–xvii, 124–26, 260 vs. commodification, 179, 248, 253–55, 258–59 empowerment of, xix, 127 and IPAR’s research, 177–80, 186–88 in marriage, 25 as source of religious experience, 23–24 type as threat to, xvi, xviii, xxii, 124, 125–26, 170, 260 see also personality individuation process (Jungian), 38, 126 industrial modernity, 126–27, 133, 156, 179, 264 see also capitalism inequality of people, Katharine’s views on, 3, 31 “inspection house” (Panopticon), 184–85 insurance companies, MBTI and, 164, 214, 228 intelligence quotient (IQ) test, 167 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 38, 44 Introvert-Extravert Club (New York), 96–97 introvert type: as (I) in MBTI, xiii, 131 examples of, 40, 42, 76, 79, 92, 95, 129, 132, 152, 164, 236 Jung on, 39, 44, 215 in table, rubric, and profile, 47, 138 intuition, Jung on, 46, 48, 49 intuitive type: as (I) then (N) in MBTI, xiii, 131, 205 examples of, 49, 92, 95, 129, 164, 175, 236 Jung on, 40–41, 44, 46, 48 with perception type, 138 vs. sensing type, 40–41, 131, 138 in table, rubric, and profile, 47, 138 IPAR (Institute of Personality Assessment and Research): and creativity, 187–93, 195–200 “house party” surveillance methods, 178, 182–87 mission, 176–80, 181–83, 186–87 questionnaires at, 183–84, 185, 188 test design at, 186 women at, 182, 194–200 Ireland, Mardy, 260 James, William, 22, 23–24, 37, 45, 95 Jastrow, Joseph, 44 Jewish persecution, 106, 109–10, 114, 121, 125–26, 155 jobs, see workers Johnson, Lyndon, 187 judging type: as (J) in MBTI, xiii, 131 examples of, 249, 256, 268 as Isabel’s addition to Jung’s types, 131, 135 in table, 138 with thinking type, 138 Jung, Carl Gustav, 230 vs.

…

., 161, 162, 170–73, 264 Williams, William Carlos, 195 Wilson, Sloan, 171 Wilson, Woodrow, 27 Wisconsin, University of, 248 Wolfe, Dael, 202 Wolff, Toni, 95 Woman’s Home Companion, 18 women: creativity research on, 197–98, 199 as feelers, 67, 89, 128, 136–37 intuition of, 48 at IPAR, 182, 194–200 limitations on, xix, 5, 7 as lovers, 84, 94–95, 101 as man’s empowerer, 68, 98–99 in workforce, 122–23, 168–69 see also family, as origin of MBTI; marriage word pairs, 81, 214, 242 workers: alienation of, 166 and class divisions, 125–26, 156, 158 as commodities, 179, 248, 253–55, 258–59 hiring and firing of, xvi, 120, 159, 168 men vs. women, 29–30, 67–69, 119, 123, 134 motivation of, xx, 135, 161–62, 166–67, 264 and “soft skills,” 253–54 white-collar, 120–21 with good “job match,” see specialization “work-life balance,” 166–67 workplace aptitude tests, 120–21 workplace culture, improving, 255 World War I, 27, 28 World War II, 92, 101–2, 115–17, 119, 141 see also Germany; Hitler, Adolf Zimbardo, Philip, 155 Illustration Credits Page 47 Reproduction of the New Republic (December 22, 1926) Page 72 Courtesy of the Katharine Cook Papers at Michigan State University Page 138 (top and bottom) Courtesy of the Edward N.

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

The board of directors does not run the company. The CEO runs the company. The best entrepreneurs recognize the important and valuable role that the board can play and provide them with the transparency they need to do their job effectively. In their capacity as agents for the shareholders, the board of directors has the power to hire and fire the CEO and approve major transactions that materially affect the value of the company’s equity, such as selling the company, buying another company, or agreeing to a new round of financing. This role has other important areas of oversight, including serving on the audit committee, which liaises with the company’s auditors to confirm the integrity of the financial records and books, or compensation committee, which sets the compensation of the CEO and other senior executives.

…

From the day the CEO first arrives at the company, it is obvious the two will never get along. The founder questions the CEO’s every decision. The CEO wants to change all of the founder’s original processes and blames the company’s poor performance on the founder’s original decisions. The two can’t agree on strategy, organization structure, client management, or whom to hire and fire. The founder thinks the CEO is out to wreck the company and will ruin the culture and “soul” he created. The CEO thinks the company can never grow with the founder on the scene looking over his shoulder, looking backward rather than forward. The board members realize they have to do something, but they’re not sure what.

Waiting for Superman: How We Can Save America's Failing Public Schools by Participant Media, Karl Weber

An Inconvenient Truth, antiwork, collective bargaining, feminist movement, hiring and firing, index card, knowledge economy, Menlo Park, Robert Gordon, school choice, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

Otherwise, problems give rise to finger-pointing and blame-shifting rather than a simple search for solutions. Giving both power and responsibility to school administrators and teachers means a real shift in how we think about school management. It impacts union work rules, performance measurements, and hiring and firing practices. Willingness to experiment and to change is required on the part of everyone involved in school leadership—teachers, union leaders, administrators, school board members, active parents, local political leaders, and citizens’ groups. Change can be challenging, even painful—but the alternative path leads only to continued failure, which is not an acceptable option.

…

I have learned enough in the years since to conclude that Garfield’s success despite a lack of leadership was a fluke. Super schools need super principals. KIPP has shown that a school cannot reach the necessary level of success, at least in inner-city neighborhoods, unless the school leader has been an effective teacher and can identify other effective teachers. That leader must also have the power to hire and fire teachers without interference from unions or headquarters rules. At KIPP schools, even the best principals sometimes discover someone they have hired is unable to keep to KIPP’s standards. Such teachers are given a great deal of help, but if they don’t improve they are dismissed, sometimes as early as Thanksgiving.

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything by Becky Bond, Zack Exley

battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, declining real wages, digital rights, Donald Trump, family office, fixed income, full employment, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, immigration reform, income inequality, Kickstarter, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, plutocrats, randomized controlled trial, Skype, telemarketer, union organizing

I supported the idea of layoffs at that scale and was absolutely okay to be among those getting the ax. In fact, I stayed in touch and continued to volunteer as I was able. The revolution could definitely use more and better management! Changing the world is hard work. And when it’s funded by small-dollar donations, it’s important to make every little bit help. That means hiring and firing quickly when needed but also taking the time you need to do it right. We can be tough competitors, highly accountable managers, and still be humane partners in our shared struggle. No matter what your role is, as a staffer or volunteer, seek mentors and other resources to help make you a better manager and a better member of your team.

…

Every couple of years I would find myself in a taco place in San Francisco, where Becky has lived since graduating from college in 1992, dutifully giving updates about what I’d been doing and my latest wacky plans for projects that only rarely ever happened. As I was chaotically jumping from thing to thing, Becky was staying put at Working Assets/CREDO learning how to make big visions come true by managing, planning, hiring, and firing. Once she was on the Bernie campaign—bringing in an amazing team of people she had worked with or watched in action over the years, giving them clear roles, and managing them toward clear objectives—it all felt a bit providential. I think that part of the reason typical political staffers don’t often work as colleagues alongside volunteers is that the typical progressive staff culture is often close to a monoculture of a very particular subculture.

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor

activist lawyer, banking crisis, corporate governance, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, financial innovation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, kremlinology, land reform, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, one-China policy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pre–internet, reserve currency, risk/return, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Upton Sinclair

With his symbolic southern tour to Shenzhen, a business Eldorado bordering Hong Kong and built from scratch out of rice paddies in just two decades, Deng throttled once and for all the lingering Maoist influences on economic policy. Deng’s formula, boiled down, was simple. The Party would still pursue free-market reforms, but in tandem with recalibrating and tightening political authority in Beijing. Equally, the Party might not own state assets directly, but it would maintain the right to hire and fire the executives who managed them. For the economy to prosper, the huge state firms that communist commissars had once directly managed would have to be turned upside down and the role of party operatives inside them reined in. Instead of simply producing goods to plan and providing cradle-to-grave employment, knowing all along that the Finance Ministry would cover any losses, the state had to make money to survive.

…

The two party committees, both headed by Politburo members, took control of the financial system in the late nineties across the country through a very simple mechanism. The party apparatus in Beijing, in tandem with the Central Organization Department, shunted aside local bigwigs by placing the power to hire and fire senior executives in banks and other state enterprises with the centre, no matter where they were in the country. Any regional bank offices which refused to sign up to the Politburo’s programme were threatened with closure. Put crudely, Zhu’s strategy echoed the saying popularized in the Vietnam war to explain the US military’s programme to pacify Vietcong villages.

…

‘So in addition to caring for their banks, they are responsible for supporting the central government’s economic stimulus policy.’ The Party’s control over personnel was at the heart of its ability to overhaul state companies, without losing leverage over them at the same time. So important does the Party rate its power to hire and fire government officials that it places it on a par with its control over the media and the military. Zhou Tianyong, a relatively liberal political theorist at the Central Party School in Beijing, laid out the Party’s absolute bottom line in a book published in early 2008, Storming the Barricades..

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

Remember that once you become a manager, you’ll stop doing the thing that made you successful in the first place. You’ll no longer be doing the things you do really well—instead you’ll be digging into how others do them, helping them improve. Your job will now be communication, communication, communication, recruiting, hiring and firing, setting budgets, reviews, one-on-one meetings (1:1s), meetings with your team and other teams and leadership, representing your team in those meetings, setting goals and keeping people on track, conflict resolution, helping to find creative solutions to intractable problems, blocking and tackling political BS, mentoring your team, and asking “how can I help you?”

…

Chapter 6.2 The Board Everyone needs a boss to be accountable to and coaches who can help them through difficult times—even a CEO. Especially a CEO. That’s why businesses have a board of directors—typically just called “the board”—where members are directors of the company. A board’s primary responsibility is to hire and fire the CEO. That is the main way they can protect the company and the one and only job they have that really counts. Everything else comes down to giving good advice and respectful, no-bullshit feedback that hopefully steers the CEO in the right direction. Ultimately it’s the CEO who’s responsible for running a company.

…

That’s when you learn your wife leaves dishes in the sink to “soak” for a few days. It’s when you realize your husband always forgets to clean up his toenail trimmings. So the dating phase of any potential acquisition is crucial. You have to check the sink for dirty dishes. You have to spot the toenail on the dining table. Look at the reporting structure and the way they hire and fire employees. Dig into what perks everyone gets. Talk about management philosophy. Make concrete plans for exactly what’s going to happen post-sale. Are you going to integrate or keep your cultures separate? What will you do about overlap? Where will this team go? Who will work on this product? But always know that you won’t be able to predict the future.

Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity by Claudia Goldin

coronavirus, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, financial independence, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, job automation, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, occupational segregation, old-boy network, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, remote working, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Marriage Bars Marriage bars preceded the Great Depression in many occupations, most notably teaching. But they intensified with the enormous rise of unemployment in the early 1930s, long bread lines, and growing economic despair. The decade-long Depression led to an expansion and greater enforcement of existing policies to exclude married women from the best jobs. Marriage bars were the hiring and firing policies of private firms and governmental agencies, most importantly school districts. The bars were of two types. One governed whether married women were hired. These regulations were called hiring bars. The other concerned whether currently employed women who married while in service would be fired.

…

But just prior to the onset of the Depression, there was growing sentiment in various states to overturn existing bars and prevent local school districts from enforcing these rules. The Depression did just the reverse. Information on the extent of marriage bars is surprisingly scarce given their importance. No systematic data exist across firms. The more than 120,000 separate school districts in the 1920s generally made their own policies with regard to the hiring and firing of their teachers. Fortuitously, school districts were surveyed by the National Education Association at various junctures, and these surveys allow us to pinpoint the fraction of teachers covered by the regulations at four critical moments. The first moment, in 1928, immediately before the stock market crash, provides a baseline, since no district would have passed regulations in anticipation of a Great Depression.

…

There was around a 20 percentage point change from age twenty-seven to age forty-two, and there was a 10 percentage point change for either twenty-seven- or forty-two-year-olds. (Data refer to ever-married, white, college-graduate women from the various US census micro data.)   74  Marriage bars were the hiring and firing policies    The marriage-bar policies were not unique to the US and existed for teachers and other professionals in Great Britain, Ireland, and Australia, among other countries.   75  The Depression did just the reverse    Goldin (1991) uses surveys from the 1930s and school district compilations for the early twentieth century to analyze the institution of marriage bars and its expansion during the Great Depression.   76  policy that fired single women    Goldin (1991).

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh

call centre, crowdsourcing, drop ship, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Lao Tzu, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Tony Hsieh, Y2K

They usually sound more like something you’d read in a press release. Maybe you learn about them on day 1 of orientation, but after that it’s just a meaningless plaque on the wall of the lobby. We believe that it’s really important to come up with core values that you can commit to. And by commit, we mean that you’re willing to hire and fire based on them. If you’re willing to do that, then you’re well on your way to building a company culture that is in line with the brand you want to build. You can let all of your employees be your brand ambassadors, not just the marketing or PR department. And they can be brand ambassadors both inside and outside the office.

…

A lot of times, an employee might learn about them on day 1 of orientation, but then the values just end up being part of a meaningless plaque on the wall of the corporate lobby. We wanted to make sure that didn’t happen with our core values. We wanted a list of committable core values that we were willing to hire and fire on. If we weren’t willing to do that, then they weren’t really “values.” We eventually came up with our final list of ten core values, which we still use today: Deliver WOW Through Service Embrace and Drive Change Create Fun and a Little Weirdness Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded Pursue Growth and Learning Build Open and Honest Relationships with Communication Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit Do More with Less Be Passionate and Determined Be Humble Integrity was a value that had been suggested by some employees, but I made a conscious choice to leave it out.

How to Kick Ass on Wall Street by Andy Kessler

Andy Kessler, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, buttonwood tree, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, eat what you kill, family office, fixed income, hiring and firing, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, London Whale, low interest rates, margin call, NetJets, Nick Leeson, pets.com, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, time value of money, too big to fail, value at risk

The flip side is that the price of companies in doing all the wrong things, think General Motors and now Kodak, go down, starving them of capital, a punishment for screwing up until they disappear or do something to turn themselves around. By finding the right price and heaping capital to those it thinks deserve it and starving those that it thinks suck wind, the stock market does the dirty work of forcing the hiring and firing managers and green-lighting or killing projects. Pretty cool. On the street level, of course, Wall Street is a lot nastier. When I think of Wall Street, I think of alpha dogs generating revenue at all cost, getting deals done, fighting for market share against all the other firms, and then at the end of the year, the political knives come out trying to carve up the ever growing bonus pool, though often each other

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

“Trying to prevent this creative destruction from happening is a recipe for less economic growth and less productivity.”6 As economists at the OECD have explained, there is awareness now in countries such as the Netherlands that “strict employment protections reduce labor market fluidity and prolong unemployment.”7 That appreciation has inculcated a culture of labor market experimentation and continual reform in recent decades in northern Europe with names like “flexicurity.” First coined in Scandinavia, flexicurity describes steps to enhance labor market flexibility by pairing an enhanced employer ability to hire and fire with greater unemployment support and incentives for jobless workers to upskill and recycle rapidly back into the labor force.8 Examples include German reforms that made it easier to hire and fire employees beginning in 1998. How deeply are the objectives of flexicurity ingrained in the culture of northern Europe now? Here is how Steffen Kampeter, parliamentary state secretary in the German Ministry of Finance, described the intensity of that culture: “We have learned that reform is not only a 10-year program but an everlasting challenge.”9 That commitment to flexible labor markets explains why the European Central Bank demanded reduced labor market protections in Greece, Portugal, and Spain as a condition for support during the sovereign debt crisis.

…

They fingered the German labor model, which prioritizes worksite performance over wage compression: only the highly skilled need apply.12 Herbert Brucker of the IAB explained the outcome was the consequence of the explicit German rejection (because it hobbles productivity growth) of the American-style “hire-and-fire” labor model. How are nationwide wage increases set by the family capitalist countries? Recall that we reviewed the process in Australia in Chapter 3, including this explanation from that government’s Bureau of Statistics: “In Australia, the 1983 Wage Accord established a centralized wage fixing system that took into account economic policies and the Consumer Price Index.

…

Employees have a stake in striving for wage increases, of course, but not at the expense of firm survival because they have long-term attachments to employers; they covet enterprise success and that moderates wage demands. For their part, keenly sensitive to the urgency of productivity growth, employers have a stake in maintaining an energetic workforce while avoiding strikes. Yet employers also prioritize flexibility to hire and fire workers, to control labor costs while meeting sudden market changes, to optimize low labor turnover, and to be profitable for their shareholders and thereby able to invest in new technology to meet competition.21 Wages do not rise beyond a cost-of-living adjustment if productivity growth is poor: “Salaries in France should be increased only if there is an increase in productivity,” is how Reuters quoted former Economic Minister and now IMF chief Christine Lagarde in March 2011.22 Here is how this system worked in France in 2006.

Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy by Erik Brynjolfsson

Abraham Maslow, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, business cycle, business process, call centre, combinatorial explosion, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, hiring and firing, income inequality, intangible asset, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, minimum wage unemployment, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ray Kurzweil, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, self-driving car, shareholder value, Skype, the long tail, too big to fail, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Increase funding for basic research and for our preeminent government R&D institutions including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with a renewed focus on intangible assets and business innovation. Like other forms of basic research, these investments are often underfunded by private investors because of the spillovers they create. Laws, Regulations, and Taxes 12. Preserve the relative flexibility of American labor markets by resisting efforts to regulate hiring and firing. Banning layoffs paradoxically can lower employment by making it riskier for firms to hire in the first place, especially if they are experimenting with new products or business models. 13. Make it comparatively more attractive to hire a person than to buy more technology. This can be done by, among other things, decreasing employer payroll taxes and providing subsidies or tax breaks for employing people who have been out of work for a long time.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, borderless world, business logic, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, ending welfare as we know it, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent control, Robert Solow, shareholder value, short selling, Skype, structural adjustment programs, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Greater capital mobility is promoted because the main source of the ability for the holders of financial assets to reap higher returns than the holders of other (physical and human) assets is their ability to move around their assets more quickly (see Thing 22). Greater labour market flexibility is demanded because, from the point of view of financial investors, making hiring and firing of the workers easier allows companies to be restructured more quickly, which means that they can be sold and bought more readily with better short-term balance sheets, bringing higher financial returns (see Thing 2). Even if they have increased financial instability and job insecurity, policies aimed at increasing price stability may be partially justified, had they increased investment and thus growth, as the inflation hawks had predicted.

…

Its free enterprise system, according to admirers of the US model, lets people compete without limits and rewards the winners without restrictions imposed by the government or by misguided egalitarian culture. The system therefore creates exceptionally strong incentives for entrepreneurship and innovation. Its free labour market, with easy hiring and firing, allows its enterprises to be agile and thus more competitive, as they can redeploy their workers more quickly than their competitors, in response to changing market conditions. With entrepreneurs richly rewarded and workers having to adapt quickly, the system does create high inequality. However, its proponents argue, even the ‘losers’ in this game willingly accept such outcomes because, given the country’s high social mobility, their own children could be the next Thomas Edison, J.

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It. by James Silver

Airbnb, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, call centre, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, DevOps, family office, flag carrier, fulfillment center, future of work, Google Hangouts, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, pattern recognition, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Scale Coaches Adam Hale; Alex Depledge; Alex Gayer; Amir Kfir; Andrew Crump; Andrew Graham; Anthony Fletcher; Asi Sharabi; Benjamin Grol; Brad Feld; Brent Hoberman; Bryan Tookey; Cian Weeresinghe; Claire Martin; Dan Hynes; Daniel Campion; Dave Shappell; David Norris; Devin Hunt; Divinia Knowles; Doug Monro; George Berkowski; George Bettany; Greg Marsh; Ian Meyers; Ian Sutherland; James Bilefield; James Routledge; Jerry Collona; Jessica Butcher; Jonathon Southam; Julien Callede; Luke Lang; Malcolm Locke; Matt Buckland; Meri Williams; Niklas Zennstrom; Patrick Campbell; Placid Jover; Romain Bertrand; Sarah Wood; Shane Corstorphine; Sian Keane; Simon Wright; Sophie Miller; Steven Dunne; Steven Rose; Thor Mitchell; Toby Moore; Tracy Doree; Verne Harnish; Will McInnes Advisors Andy Young; Davor Hebel; Dominic Jacquesson; Eileen Burbidge; Jamie Coleman; Jon Bradford; Katy Turner; Nic Brisbourne; Reshma Sohoni; Russell Buckley; Simon Calver; Saul Klein; Sitar Teli; Suranga Chandratillake; Tak Lo; Wendy Tan White Tech Nation Ashley Hough; Barbara Peric; Becky Smith; Ben Wackett; Caroline Rae; Davina Yanful; EJ Quinn; Gerard Grech; Jos Smart; MB Christie; Orla Browne; Parveen Dhanda; Reiz Evans; Ryan Proctor; Sinead Daly; Tia Mcphee; Ugne Sapezinskaite; Vicki Shiel; Will Dolby; Zheela Qaiser CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Gerard Grech, CEO Tech Nation. Part One: People CHAPTER 1: ‘Why hiring slow and firing fast is one of the hardest things founders have to do.’ Greg Marsh, co-founder and former CEO of onefinestay, on hiring and firing. CHAPTER 2: ‘There is no such thing as a perfect culture - that’s known as a cult.’ Neil Rimer, co-founder of Index Ventures, alongside key figures from some of the leading VC firm’s portfolio companies, on scaling values and making culture count. CHAPTER 3: ‘The age of one brain holding all a company’s knowledge is over.’

…

The days of having to go to the Valley to stand a chance of success are over; the vision of being able to grow a world-class digital business in the UK is now a reality. Scale-up nation is here to stay. London, October 2018 part one PEOPLE CHAPTER 1 ‘Why hiring slow and firing fast is one of the hardest things founders have to do.’ Greg Marsh, co-founder and former CEO of onefinestay, on hiring and firing. The hardest decision CEOs have to make is who to keep and when to fire, says Greg Marsh, co-founder of high-end hospitality firm onefinestay, which was sold to AccorHotels for a widely reported £117m (€l48m) in April 2016. Speaking to a roomful of entrepreneurs as part of Tech Nation’s Upscale programme at the Goldsmiths’ Centre in Clerkenwell, London, he went on to cite Andy Grove, the late, legendary Intel CEO, to bolster his case.

The Default Line: The Inside Story of People, Banks and Entire Nations on the Edge by Faisal Islam

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, British Empire, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, energy security, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, forensic accounting, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, ghettoisation, global rebalancing, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Chicago School, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two tier labour market, unorthodox policies, uranium enrichment, urban planning, value at risk, WikiLeaks, working-age population, zero-sum game

At this point the boss of the job agency turns up. He looks down at Yi Bin and two of his friends, barking questions about their experience and what wage they would be willing to work for. Here, in nominally Communist China, this is what an extreme free-market labour force looks like. There are very few social protections, and workers are hired and fired at will. Wages are entirely dictated by supply and demand for workers, and for the products they produce. Europe and North America did not just outsource production, they also outsourced the sharpest edges of the free market. It can be no mystery that workers save as much as they can. Despite the cut-throat nature of the labour market, people keep flooding from the fields to the factories.

…

The millions of jobs created in the boom proved to be fleeting. From January 2003 to January 2008, Spain added 3.3 million jobs. By January 2013 it had lost those 3.3 million jobs, returning almost exactly to where it was a decade before. A former minister puts it slightly differently: ‘In Spain we are very good at hiring and firing. We created more jobs than anywhere else in the EU between 2000 and 2007. And then we fired them all.’ The 3.3 million jobs lost over the past half decade also mask a remarkable generational inequity. Almost all the jobs were lost by those aged 34 and under: 8 million of these young people had jobs in 2008, but by 2013 this figure had fallen to 5.1 million, a loss of 2.9 million.

…

The following day the ECB’s then and future presidents, Trichet and Draghi, wrote an extraordinary secret letter, in English, to Berlusconi, outlining steps they required the Italian government to take in order ‘to urgently underpin the standing of its sovereign signature’. Existing budget plans were ‘important steps, but not sufficient’. Large-scale privatisations, reform of wage bargaining, a review of hiring and firing laws, and a speeding up of spending cuts were all specified as ‘essential’ for something – implicitly the ECB’s purchase of Italian bonds – though that was left unsaid. For good measure the letter also specified the legal method through which Berlusconi should make the changes: ‘as soon as possible with decree-laws, followed by parliamentary ratification by end September 2011’.

Milton Friedman: A Biography by Lanny Ebenstein

Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, classic study, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Lao Tzu, liquidity trap, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price stability, public intellectual, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, stem cell, The Chicago School, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, zero-sum game

It just has to give its entrepreneurs a chance. It has to let them make money, hire and fire, and act like entrepreneurs. Instead, what you have as a result of past policies is that German entrepreneurs go outside of Germany for many of their activities. They are investing abroad instead of at home because there isn’t the openness, fluidity and opportunity they find outside their borders. Interviewer: British Prime Minister Tony Blair argues there is a “third way”—for example, flexible labor markets without hire-and-fire American-style. This, he argues, is more suitable to the “European social model” with its enduring concern with social justice.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

Figure 2.8 shows the share of business-sector GDP accounted for by tangible and intangible investment, plotted against an index of what the OECD calls “employment strictness,” where a high value of the index, such as in countries like Italy, means that it is costly to hire and fire workers and a low value, for example, in the United States and the UK, means that it’s relatively cheap. Figure 2.8. Tangible and intangible investment and regulation (shares of sector value added, average 1999–2013). Countries are Austria (AT), Denmark (DK), Finland (FI), France (FR), Germany (DE), Italy (IT), Netherlands (NL), Spain (ES), Sweden (SE), UK (UK), USA (US). Source: authors’ calculations based on INTAN-Invest database (www.intan-invest.net) and OECD data. The figure shows something interesting. Countries with more restrictive hiring and firing invest more in tangibles, but less in intangibles.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

She handles all the work I need done but can’t get to, she anticipates what the business needs and acts accordingly, and she has supported me through some very tough professional (and personal) challenges. I remember saying things like, “Do you remember that guy who…?” and before I said another word, she would respond with, “Yes, John Smith from Acron Systems.” And she would be spot on. But I have made some mistakes in hiring (and firing) and funding too. Over my years as a venture capitalist, I have had to fire quite a few CEOs, founders, employees, and several partners in the DVN. In most cases, I believe that it is important to do it immediately, so that the person who is fired has as much time as possible to find his or her next job, and so that rumors do not circle.

…

Tom became frustrated with Bob, who kept odd hours, made absurd declarations, and wasn’t managing his people. Tom came to the board and asked to replace Bob as CEO and to throw Bob out. It was a tough decision at the time. I was new to the business and deferred to the more senior investors in making the call. The board has one job—to hire and fire the CEO. And given the ultimatum, we went with Tom, the wise Harvard MBA. What we should have done was somehow keep both of them. Bob was the heart of the business and Tom was the mind. Bob left the company with the same passion he came into it with. He was bitter, angry, and although still a large shareholder, he almost didn’t want the company to succeed without him.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

“All the money in the world as payment would not be enough to work for this moron,” another commenter writes. “Someone has a power/ego problem,” says a third. Cranium perceives himself as being skilled at recruiting and hiring, yet turnover in his department is so high that people in other parts of HubSpot refer to the marketing department as “the French Revolution.” People are constantly being hired and fired, or “graduated,” as Cranium says in his emails to the group. I keep making friends, only to have them disappear. These “graduations” sometimes happen suddenly, with no warning. In my second week at HubSpot I have lunch with a woman named Bettina. She’s right out of college, working in her first job, and wants to write a book about marketing to Millennials.

…

Twitter, for example, seems to have survived in spite of its management rather than because of it. The company is valued at $13 billion and not long ago was valued at more than $30 billion. Yet Twitter has never reported an annual profit, and has lost billions of dollars. For nine years Twitter has undergone wave after wave of management upheaval, hiring and firing CEOs, reshuffling, reorganizing, announcing new business plans, making acquisitions. The people responsible for this mess have become incredibly wealthy. Two of Twitter’s co-founders, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey, are billionaires. Dorsey once had blue hair and played music in the street. For a while he went around dressing like Steve Jobs.

The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin

Amazon Mechanical Turk, Atul Gawande, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, commoditize, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Emanuel Derman, fundamental attribution error, Gary Kildall, Gini coefficient, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, income inequality, Innovator's Dilemma, John Bogle, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Menlo Park, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, power law, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, shareholder value, Simon Singh, six sigma, Steven Pinker, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipf's Law

Knittel, and Jeffrey Heisler, CFA, “Absence of Value: An Analysis of Investment Allocation Decisions by Institutional Plan Sponsors,” Financial Analysts Journal 65, no. 6 (November/December 2009): 34–51; Amit Goyal and Sunil Wahal, “The Selection and Termination of Investment Management Firms by Plan Sponsors,” Journal of Finance 63, no. 4 (August 2008): 1805–1847; Jeffrey Heisler, Christopher R. Kittel, John J. Neuman, and Scott D. Stewart, “Why Do Plan Sponsors Hire and Fire Their Investment Managers?” Journal of Business and Economic Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 88–118; Diane Del Guercio and Paula A. Tkac, “The Determinants of the Flow of Funds of Managed Portfolios: Mutual Funds Versus Pension Funds,” Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 37, no. 4 (December 2002): 523–555; and Andrea Frazzini and Owen A.

…

“Limits on the Predictive Power of Domain-Specific Experience and Knowledge in Skilled Performance.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20, no. 5 (October 2011): 275–279. Harford, Tim. Why Success Always Starts with Failure. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Heisler, Jeffrey, Christopher R. Kittel, John J. Neuman, and Scott D. Stewart. “Why Do Plan Sponsors Hire and Fire Their Investment Managers?” Journal of Business and Economic Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 88–118. Henderson, Andrew D., Michael E. Raynor, and Mumtaz Ahmed. “How Long Must a Firm Be Great to Rule Out Luck? Benchmarking Sustained Superior Performance Without Being Fooled By Randomness.” Strategic Management Journal 33, no. 4 (April 2012): 387–406.

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World by Linsey McGoey

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, antiwork, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Clive Stafford Smith, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, income inequality, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, joint-stock company, junk bonds, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Leeson, p-value, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, public intellectual, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

World Bank policies are also a major barrier to improving corporate accountability for poor labour conditions, which is a separate but related problem: the way that companies based in Canada, the US and the UK have for decades successfully argued that workplace deaths at their global subsidiaries are not their legal responsibility. The Bank encourages poor labour standards through reports like Doing Business, first launched in 2003, which included ‘Hiring and Firing Workers’ indicators which gave highest scores to any country that has the lowest minimum wages protections and the highest worker hours.41 Why would the Bank routinely champion labour laws that undermine the health and safety of workers in the world’s poorest nations? The answer is simple even though it bothers people to have it stated blunted: weak labour protections serve the interests of multinational corporations.

…

Through new phrases developed in the book, from ‘useful unknowns’ to ‘oracular power,’ my aim has been to expand the language for understanding the social and political implications of the type of doublespeak that Orwell so evocatively warned about (here’s one that Orwell might appreciate. Facing criticism, the World Bank promptly changed its ‘Hiring and Firing Workers’ index to the ‘EWI,’ the ‘Employing Workers Indicator’). My empirical cases may seem like a scattered grouping, but they are chosen for their very eclecticism, to show the way that patterns of strategic ignorance can be seen in many different areas of social and economic life. The ultimate aim of these varied cases is to demonstrate how the ignorance cycle that I pointed out – the way that micro-ignorance leads to larger macro-ignorance which in turn facilitates micro-ignorance – can be illustrated in practice.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Renzi dropped a casual aside in talking about his labor-market reforms that reflected another aspect of the globalist consensus. He said Italy’s rewriting, the previous year, of its hiring-and-firing laws had finally caught the country up to the standards of Germany and Britain. He added, “Obviously, U.S.A. arrived to this point twenty years ago.” The globalists believed that there were “right answers” in public policy—answers that made a place safe for the foreign investors that Macri had been worried about—and having a very flexible labor market, in which it is easy to hire and fire people, is one of those right answers. The right answer, then, was not arrived at democratically: It was not the answer the people of Italy had chosen, by action or inaction, during those twenty years of “delay.”

Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am by Robert Gandt

airline deregulation, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, flag carrier, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Maui Hawaii, RAND corporation, revenue passenger mile, Tenerife airport disaster, yield management, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

More often than not, Trippe was at odds with his pilots. To Trippe, pilots were pampered specialists who complained too much about work rules and pay and benefits. In the thirties he had to endure the specter of a union on his property—ALPA, the Air Line Pilots Association. As ALPA members, pilots were no longer hired and fired at the company’s whim. Their salaries and working rules were negotiated for them by their union. Their place on the company roster was fixed by a seniority list. Their grievances were adjudicated by union and company mediators. Gradually Trippe distanced himself from the crew room and the cockpit and the seaplane ramp.

…

National’s fly-to-Florida advertising theme, the “Route of the Buccaneers,” had to be changed when Rickenbacker started denouncing Baker as “an old pirate.” Rickenbacker was not alone. Most of Baker’s employees hated his guts too. Baker was a bully who constantly changed his company officers’ titles and salaries, hiring and firing them at whim. At lunchtime he conducted what they called “noon bloodlettings,” at which he verbally pistol-whipped every errant executive who had screwed up in the past twenty-four hours. And he was cheap. Instead of buying shades, Baker covered the windows of his headquarters with wrapping paper and masking tape.

How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes by Peter D. Schiff, Andrew J. Schiff

Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business climate, currency peg, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, low interest rates, offshore financial centre, price stability, Robert Shiller, technology bubble

Desperate to offset the effects of fishflation, many more islanders decided to risk thier savings with Manny Fund, whose promise of oversized returns gave investors the best hope of overcoming these losses. When unemployment reached a crisis level, people demanded that the government do something. In response, the Senate set strict limits on how much companies could pay workers, under what circumstances the workers could be hired and fired, and how much the businesses could charge for their products. The resulting constraints made it more difficult to do business, and limited the ability of businesses to grow. As time passed, a new senator, Lindy B., saw another electoral opportunity…this time to make a Great Society! Lindy promised that if elected not only would he furnish the canoe navy with bigger spears, but he would also help the sagging economy by providing emergency unemployment fish notes to all laid-off workers.

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

The board would enjoy a myriad of powers, among them the ability to hire and fire the CEO and to approve the sale, merger, or initial public offering of the firm. During the first five years of Michel's chairmanship, though, he would have the unilateral right to veto such an event. Under Steve's construct, there was also to have been a nine-member management committee that would meet weekly and be chaired by the CEO. The management committee would make all compensation decisions as well as all decisions regarding promotion, hiring, and firing. The initial officers of the Lazard Group would be Michel, as chairman, Steve, as president and CEO, and Eig, Gullquist, Mezzacappa, Verey, and Braggiotti.

…

The ostensible reason for the change, according to Michel, was the need to legally separate the French partnership from the New York partnership in the event that the Germans took control of Lazard in Paris--which they eventually did--and endeavored to run the New York firm (which they did not). The change in the agreement was designed to prevent such an event. But the main reason for the rewrite was to create a highly authoritarian management and governance structure--found in section 4.1 of the agreement--that would endow one person alone with the absolute power to unilaterally hire and fire partners and other employees and to unilaterally set annual compensation. In investment banking, as in most businesses, there is no more absolute power over employees than the authority to set their compensation and determine if they will still have a job. The December 31, 1938, partnership agreement became the firm's Rosetta stone, and the "partner under section 4.1" became the firm's absolute monarch.

…

Loomis was partial to writing detailed, often passionate memos to Michel and Felix about his ideas for the firm. In an early missive, he made the heretofore-unheard-of argument that Michel needed to appoint one partner to coordinate the assignments for and evaluations of the junior professionals, including the making of all hiring and firing decisions for these bankers. This task, Loomis supposed, would take about half of the chosen partner's time. He volunteered for the job. As he saw it, his mandate would be to coordinate all staffing of associates on M&A deals, requiring partners to go through him--Felix's recommendation--as new assignments came up, as opposed to going directly to their favorite associates, as had been the custom.

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The idea is that by applying a market logic to the public school system, educational entrepreneurs will want to get involved, creative people will get interested in education, and the resulting competition will force all schools to do a better job. As one reformer put it, by treating schools the same way we treat companies we can create a system where “every public school will have a performance contract where [the] people running it will have the freedom … to manage it well, hire and fire based on performance, [and] design their schools in a way that is successful … If they’re not successful, they should be closed.”24 The Race to the Top (RTTT) contest—President Obama’s multibillion-dollar initiative to replace Bush’s No Child Left Behind program—is a central part of this marketization strategy.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent by Douglas Coupland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, Downton Abbey, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, hiring and firing, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marshall McLuhan, messenger bag, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, oil shale / tar sands, pre–internet, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, Turing machine, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban planning, UUNET, Wall-E

When I asked how long he’d been living in the place, he told me eight years. As for Shawn Brennan, we start by discussing the tangledness of the computing universe after five decades of relentless growth. Brennan began with Newbridge in 1989. Since then, he’s seen many rises and many falls and many mass hirings and firings and downsizings, and says that, in the end, whether someone is kept on is based purely on their contribution, reinforcing my perception that the tech universe is as close to a pure capitalist intellectual meritocracy as our species has ever created. Brennan remembers a Nortel recruiting truck showing up at a Newbridge mass termination meeting at the local hockey arena and offers this practical advice: “If all the meeting rooms are booked at the same time, it means something’s up.”

Do You Mind if I Cancel?: (Things That Still Annoy Me) by Gary Janetti

Golden age of television, hiring and firing, index card, rent control, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

It is a dehumanizing experience where the first step is a cursory glance of your looks that results in either moving to the next step or going home. I’m, thank fucking God, directed to the next step (my entire self-worth now hinging on two middle-aged women with clipboards and one vicious gay man), which basically involves a closer scrutiny of your looks and some slight speaking. (This was during a simpler time when you could hire and fire someone based on looks, weight, age, and no one would so much as bat an eye). A few hours later and I’m still there and our numbers have dwindled down to about a dozen and I’m having my final interview. At this point I’m so desperate to be selected I’d let them strip me naked and put me on a revolving turntable until I remember that what I’m competing for is not a modeling contract or a part in a major motion picture but the chance to work behind the front desk of a midtown hotel.

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump by Tom Clark, Anthony Heath

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, full employment, Gini coefficient, Greenspan put, growth hacking, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, income inequality, interest rate swap, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unconventional monetary instruments, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

Across most dimensions, the OECD ranks America close to the bottom of the table of its 34 members (frequently actually bottom); Britain is generally only a place or two higher than the US.34 Reviewing the shielding of permanent staff from being singled out for the sack, the OECD comments: ‘the US stands out as the least regulated country’.35 The relatively minimal rights of this sort enjoyed by British and American workers are in marked contrast to the stronger protections enjoyed in France and Germany.36 Britain and the US offer more typical protection against collective redundancies, but the light-touch (and sometimes non-existent) regulation of fixed-term contractors and agency workers reinforces the caricature of the Anglo-Saxon labour market as a realm where bosses are free to do as they will.37 Of course, flexibility to hire and fire at will does not necessarily mean that workers will end up more insecure. After all, the avowed basis of the flexible labour market agenda is to give employers confidence to take on more workers. Where businesses are rendered unviable by onerous regulation then, in the end, all workers will feel the chill; protection for people in permanent jobs would then come at the expense of those with less-secure work or no job at all.

…

In the US between the 1970s and the 1990s, for example, employers invested far less in kit to raise the output of lowly workers than did their counterparts in West Germany, where institutions pushed up low pay to the point where firms’ minds were focused on how to get more bang for their Mark.63 Across a wider set of countries, too, a free-for-all in hiring and firing has been shown to be associated with diminished productivity.64 A recent reform in Italy underlines the point: the deregulation of traditional restrictions was undertaken with the aim of stimulating a temporary jobs boom; however, the details were botched and the most notable consequence has been reduced capital investment and productivity.65 And if orthodox microeconomic theory is correct, this lower productivity will soon feed back into lower pay and worse terms.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

The only way to stem an epidemic of fake news, digital hate campaigns, and similar detritus is to bring more responsible persons back in to guide the circulation of online media. Whereas Chapter 4 focuses on AI’s failures in judging the value of news, Chapter 5 describes the perils of using AI to judge people. Computation is playing an ever larger role in hiring and firing, as well as in the allocation of credit and the treatment of debt. It is also creeping into security services. I warn against the rapid adoption of robotic policemen and security guards. Even predictive policing, a wholly software-driven affair supervised by officers, has proven controversial thanks to its frequent reliance on old and biased data.

…

See United Kingdom Great Depression, 186, 195 Great Recession, 62 Green, Ben, 179 Green New Deal, 195 Grimmelmann, James, 109 Habermas, Jurgen, 109, 140, 282n85 hacking / hackers, 12, 74, 96, 104, 108, 213; and arms races, 154, 155, 167, 206 Hale, Robert Lee, 176 Hanwang (Chinese tech firm), 60–61 harassment, online, 12, 30, 95 Hartzog, Woodrow, 126 Harvard Business Review, 227 Harvey Mudd College, 85 hate speech, 12, 18, 30, 92, 103, 108, 113, 118, 165 Hawkins, Amy, 126 Head, Simon, 43 health care, 2, 29, 31, 33–34, 188, 189, 190, 199, 202, 208; accountability / liability in, 39–41; and caregiving, 49–55; and diagnostics / pattern recognition, 35–38; the human touch in, 55–59; and “learning health care systems,” 41–45; and medical searches, 34–35; and racial disparities, 38–39; spending on, 43–44, 190–192, 247n45; and symptom-analyzing apps, 4, 120; and therapy apps, 45–49 Her (2013 film), 202, 203–204, 213, 214 higher education. See colleges and universities high frequency trading, 11, 20 Hikvision (Chinese tech firm), 60, 62, 120 Hildebrandt, Mireille, 225, 255n33 hiring and firing, 30, 119–120, 140, 143 Holocaust denial, 108 home schooling, 83, 86 Hong Kong, 132, 159, 160, 281n74 Hoofnagle, Christopher, 238n42 hospice, 50, 190. See also caregiving Howard, Philip N., 90 Hu Jianmiao, 281n72 human intelligence task (HIT), 76 humanities and social sciences, 173, 174, 295n19 human resources, 119 Human Rights Watch, 150–151, 156 human subjects research, 42 Humboldt, Alexander von, 308n84 Hunter, Dan, 123 Hussein, Saddam, 148 IA.

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen, David Soskice

Andrei Shleifer, assortative mating, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, confounding variable, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, first-past-the-post, full employment, general purpose technology, gentrification, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, implied volatility, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, invisible hand, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, means of production, middle-income trap, mirror neurons, mittelstand, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, passive investing, precariat, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Silicon Valley, smart cities, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, urban decay, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

It is often wrongly thought that the knowledge of the company is a technology which can be codified and patented; but technology is almost always cospecific with the tacit skills of the workforce (Teece, 1986). The level of skills and education is relative to the prevailing technology, but management in the advanced sectors has always had to secure the cooperation or motivation of the labor force, because of the significant costs of hiring and firing. This is as true of semiskilled workers under Fordism as of contemporary software engineers: they could easily stop the line, and replacing them involved both strikes and significant retraining costs, especially if training new workers required the tacit cooperation of existing semiskilled workers.

…

As noted, Fordism took more or less skill-intensive forms, and economies of scale were important to different degrees, but in one crucial respect Fordism had the same effect everywhere: it empowered semiskilled workers to hold up production and hence potentially influence relative wages and hiring and firing decisions. This potential gave semiskilled workers a powerful incentive to organize, and it made employers and skilled workers receptive to demands from below. The importance of complementarities in production for wage setting is set out in an overlooked article by Michael Wallerstein (1990) (although he does not explicitly discuss Fordist technology).

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

‘But it also means that you’ve got loads of people who have no independent support or voice within their own workplaces and it’s no surprise to us that in the places where the worst abuses have happened, they’re workplaces where the NUJ has got no meaningful presence.’ It is not just the crushing of the unions that has ensured compliance from within. The workforce has become increasingly casualized, making them easy to hire and fire at a whim. Those who step out of line face being tossed aside with barely a moment’s thought. ‘So sticking your head above the parapet and challenging something you’ve been told to do or speaking out against some ill-thought story or editorial approach the next day is career suicide,’ says Stanistreet.

…

If it is good enough for German workers, it is surely good enough for British workers, and would give them a voice in their supermarkets, call centres, offices and other places of work, instead of treating them as chattels to be exploited. It would need to be complemented by other policies to stop workers being reduced to hire-and-fire fodder to be disposed of at will by employers, such as scrapping zero-hour contracts. An official policy of building full employment is also critical, which has the advantage of best guaranteeing the negotiating power of labour. Bosses would no longer be economic despots in Britain’s workplaces.

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg

Air France Flight 447, Asperger Syndrome, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Black Swan, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, digital map, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, index card, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, meta-analysis, new economy, power law, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

The People Analytics group, part of Google’s human resources division, helped examine if employees were satisfied with their bosses and coworkers, whether they felt overworked, intellectually challenged, and fairly paid, whether their work-life balance was actually balancing out, as well as hundreds of other variables. The division helped with hiring and firing decisions, and its analysts provided insights into who should be promoted and who, perhaps, had risen too fast. In the years before Julia joined the group, People Analytics had determined that Google needed to interview a job applicant only four times to predict, with 86 percent confidence, if they would be a good hire.

…

Over the last two decades, the American workplace has become much more team focused. The average worker today might belong to a sales team, as well as a group of unit managers, a special team planning future products, and the team overseeing the holiday party. Executives belong to groups that oversee compensation and strategy and hiring and firing and approving HR policies and figuring out how to cut costs. These teams might meet every day in person or correspond via email or telecommute from all over the world. Teams are important. Within companies and conglomerates, government agencies and schools, teams are now the fundamental unit of self-organization.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

If you cannot get a job, it must be because you failed to do enough (unpaid) work to acquire the correct skills; if you get that job and it makes you miserable, just get another! Such discourse justifies the constant job-hopping that provides companies with what they want: just-in-time labor, easily hired and fired, easily controlled. 21 There’s another famous Thatcherism for this process, usually paraphrased as “There is no such thing as society,” though what she actually said was: “… who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.” Without a society, with the lines between the family and the workplace blurring, with little time for a personal life anyway, we are even more likely to try to make work more pleasurable, even to seek in it a replacement for the love we lack elsewhere.

…

High turnover became a blessing for employers who wanted to shed their costliest workers—a shift from the decades of welfare capitalism that characterized even the earliest years of retail work. The shift to what sociologist Peter Ikeler called “contingent control” gave retail stores and other service employers a flexible workforce that can be hired and fired at need. Those workers, in other words, are unlikely to be around long enough to question managers’ power. Ann Marie Reinhart’s decades at one retailer, by the 2000s, was a rare experience. 25 By 2013, less than 5 percent of American retail workers were members of unions, down from 11 percent in 1983.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Day of the Dead, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, endogenous growth, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, John Perry Barlow, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, means of production, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, principal–agent problem, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), spice trade, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Before our more secular modern age, the most obvious source of just laws outside the political order was religion. But religiously based laws constrained rulers only if religious authority was constituted independently of political authority. If religious authorities were poorly organized, if the state controlled their property and the hiring and firing of priests, then religious law was more likely to bolster political authority than to limit it. So to understand the development of the rule of law, one must look not to just the source and nature of religious rules themselves but also the specific ways religious authority is organized and institutionalized.

…

One of Samuel Huntington’s criteria for institutional development is autonomy, and no organization can be autonomous if it does not have control over the appointment of its own officials. This is why the controversy over investiture was so central. After the Concordat of Worms, the pope through the church hierarchy became, for the time being, its undisputed chief executive officer, who with the advice of the College of Cardinals could hire and fire bishops as he pleased. The church cleaned up its own act. The celibacy of the priesthood removed the temptations of the patrimonial awarding of lucrative benefices to kinsmen and descendants, and set a new moral tone with regard to the sale of church offices. The church could also collect its own taxes in the form of the tithe, and with the disentangling of the priesthood from local clan politics it was better able to dispose of its own fiscal resources.

…

They were also increasingly characteristic of the church bureaucracy after its liberation from lay investiture and the imposition of celibacy on the priesthood. The church, for example, began to distinguish between officium and beneficium—office and benefice—in the early twelfth century. No longer would officeholders necessarily receive feudal benefices; they could now simply be salaried employees of the church, who could be hired and fired based on their performance in their office. These bureaucrats began to staff new offices like the Papal Chancery that soon became the model for the chanceries of secular rulers.20 LAW AND THE RISE OF THE MODERN STATE The political order in Europe at the time of the Gregorian reform saw the beginnings of a reversal of the extreme decentralization of power that had taken place after the breakup of the Carolingian Empire in the ninth century.

The Left Case Against the EU by Costas Lapavitsas

anti-work, antiwork, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, capital controls, central bank independence, collective bargaining, declining real wages, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, hiring and firing, low interest rates, machine translation, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, post-work, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck

During the last two decades and more, class differences have been sharply exacerbated in Germany, inequality has increased, and precarious employment has swept across the labour force.12 The Schröder government’s so-called ‘Agenda 2010’ promoted deregulation of the labour market, giving enterprises greater freedom to hire and fire. At the same time rules were loosened to permit the increase of part-time and temporary jobs, leading to an extraordinary rise of precarious employment. Even more consequential was the introduction of the so-called ‘Hartz Reforms’, particularly those referring to unemployment benefits (Hartz IV).

Television Is the New Television: The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age by Michael Wolff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Carl Icahn, commoditize, creative destruction, digital divide, disintermediation, Golden age of television, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Joseph Schumpeter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, telemarketer, the medium is the message, vertical integration, zero-sum game

While Denton has rebuffed all offers to buy his profitable business, BuzzFeed searches the market for a greater fool. Gawker, or the Gawker identity, Denton seemed to acknowledge in his memo, is a casualty in the race for traffic: Gawker succeeded because it was a carefully molded product (a small band of young people overseen by Denton—with Denton constantly hiring and firing his editors). But then it morphed into a business with a much larger number of ever-younger people having to produce more and more, and working with less and less editorial vision or leadership. Gawker began to focus on an open area of parallel writing (i.e., free writing) designed to enhance its traffic base—but, too, with the natural effect of diluting quality and confusing purpose.

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World by Robert Lawson, Benjamin Powell

Airbnb, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Kickstarter, means of production, Mont Pelerin Society, profit motive, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Unfortunately, many people did not understand the value of the vouchers and were eager to sell them cheaply, even bartering them for food and booze, and unscrupulous brokers took advantage of them. Private property is essential, but not sufficient, to support a free-market system, which also relies on other economic freedoms—such as the freedom to start a business, produce goods, compete with other businesses, set prices, and hire and fire employees. When Kakha Bendukidze came on the scene, virtually every sphere of the Georgian economy was in desperate need of economic liberalization. Not only did the state own many industries, but taxes were high, and bureaucratic regulation stifled entrepreneurs. Georgia’s post-Soviet income tax and payroll tax systems were designed with the help of the International Monetary Fund and patterned after high-income nations.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

If everybody acts on their own opinion, you’d have a diversity of opinion in the marketplace, whereas this way everybody is following the group. If the group shifts, then everybody shifts.” Following the publication of the Scharfstein and Stein paper, other researchers provided empirical evidence that supported it. After analyzing the hiring and firing of fund managers at mutual fund firms such as Fidelity, Franklin Templeton, and T. Rowe Price, Judith Chevalier, who is now at the Yale School of Management, and Glenn Ellison, of MIT, concluded that young fund managers who followed investment strategies that deviated significantly from their peers were more likely to lose their jobs, regardless of how their funds performed.

…

The threat of being fired gave the fund managers a strong incentive to invest in popular sectors even if they believed they were overvalued, Chevalier and Ellison concluded. In another paper that supported the rational herding model, Harrison Hong, of Princeton, Jeffrey D. Kubik, of Syracuse University, and Amit Solomon, who was then at Salomon Smith Barney, found a similar pattern in the hiring and firing of Wall Street securities analysts—the folks who produce quarterly earnings forecasts that investors rely on. Looking at the period from 1983 to 1996, the researchers found that inexperienced analysts who produced forecasts that differed significantly from the industry consensus tended to lose their jobs at higher rates.

The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry by William K. Black

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business climate, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial deregulation, friendly fire, George Akerlof, hiring and firing, junk bonds, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, The Market for Lemons, transaction costs

Andersen’s resignation letter and Atchison’s letter to the Keating Five were blatant, false advocacy pieces. Auditors are supposed to be independent and objective; they must never become advocates for the client. Here, they became advocates for the individual destroying the client because he was the person who hired and fired them (and in Atchison’s case, quadrupled his salary). Keating bragged to the FHLB-Seattle that he spent $50 million hiring outside professionals to fight the 1986 FHLBSF examination (U.S. House Banking Committee 1989, 3:776). Some of that was for consultants such as Fischel and Benston, but it went overwhelmingly to Arthur Young and to Keating’s top outside law firms: Kaye, Scholer and Jones, Day.

…

Real estate developers who bought S&Ls during 1981–1984 were the CEOs most likely to become control frauds. They had serious conflicts of interest and few institutional or personal loyalties. Whistle-blowers were rare at S&L control frauds. One of the lessons we should have learned from the debacle is that control frauds’ ability to hire and fire personnel makes whistle-blowing an extremely risky act. True whistle-blowers—those who inform the public or the authorities of control fraud—have been rare during the current wave of financial scandals. We cannot rely on whistle-blowers to do the work regulators and the criminal justice system should do against control fraud. 11.

The Streets Were Paved With Gold by Ken Auletta

benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, business logic, clean water, collective bargaining, full employment, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Ronald Reagan, social contagion, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working-age population

That requires sensitivity and leadership, and not just from commissioners and middle managers. If New York is in a wartime-like crisis, only the chief executive can inspire people to “shared sacrifice.” Only the mayor can command people’s attention, define the challenges, set the goals. Only the mayor can hire and fire commissioners. Only the mayor receives a mandate from the electorate. Good management also requires a system of measuring managers. Goaded by the Emergency Financial Control Board and the Management Advisory Board—not to mention the new City Charter passed in 1975—the city initiated a management-by-objectives program.

…

“Civil Service makes it difficult for managers to perform,” said Jacob Ukeles of the Management Advisory Board. “For example, we have thousands of titles in the Civil Service, so it’s difficult to transfer people. The number of steps in the grievance system takes nine or more months. To manage, you need the ability to hire and fire, to redeploy, to change responsibilities. And you don’t have those things.” Commissioner Russo uses saltier language: “You could have the worst possible banana and still not be able to bring him up on charges.” The Mayor’s Management Advisory Board, in 1977, counted more than 3,900 different Civil Service job titles, in 243 occupational groups.

The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams

access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, vertical integration, working-age population, zero-sum game

This was especially true since labour market restrictions that are conventional in continental Europe tend, in a recession, to protect existing jobs at the expense of new entrants to the labour force – which causes the employment burden of recession to be felt much more intensely in youth unemployment. The solution for many unemployed youths in continental Europe was to come to London. English is generally the second language for most of Europe so there isn’t much of a language barrier. Because of the more flexible (read greater hiring and firing) nature of the UK’s labour market, there are many more jobs available there, and especially in London. The city also has a well-deserved reputation as being the party capital of Europe (excluding holiday resorts like Ibiza) – as early as the 1990s once the Eurostar had got into full operation, as many as 50,000 French youths visited London every weekend to go to the clubs, bars and pubs and enjoy the 24 hour weekend city.

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

After being highly critical during the election of the EU’s growth and stability pact limiting the size of deficits, Jospin adhered to it. After taking office in Germany in 1999, Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröeder oversaw an agreement between German unions and management in 1999 to hold down wages. In 2003, Schröeder championed the controversial Hartz laws that made it easier for firms to hire and fire workers. Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair, who took office in 1995, continued Thatcher’s policy of deregulating finance and business. Asked in 2002 what her greatest achievement was, Thatcher replied, “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.” Some of the Socialist, Social Democratic, and Labour parties succeeded in winning office and even reelection, as Blair did, but in abandoning their support for an expanding public sector and for viable manufacturing industries in favor of supporting free trade, deregulated finance, and a globalized capitalism, they began to forfeit the loyalty of their working-class constituents.

The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns by Mohnish Pabrai

asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, Black-Scholes formula, book value, business intelligence, call centre, cuban missile crisis, discounted cash flows, Edward Thorp, Exxon Valdez, fixed income, hiring and firing, index fund, inventory management, John Bogle, Mahatma Gandhi, merger arbitrage, passive investing, price mechanism, Silicon Valley, time value of money, transaction costs, two and twenty, zero-sum game

He now worked from 8:00 AM until 5:00 PM at Cherokee and then from 5:30 PM until 11:00 PM at the gas station. The Persian gas station owner recognized Manilal’s integrity and hard work ethos, and he made him the defacto manager of the gas station. Besides his wages, he gave Manilal 10 percent of the gas station’s net profit. Manilal managed the place like an owner. He hired and fired staff as required and made sure the gas station ran without a hitch. Manilal became intimately familiar with the gas station business, the margins on various items, the overheads, how much money the business made, and so on. By 1998, the Chaudharis’ had bought a condo for his sister’s family and another home in Foothill Ranch for $169,000.

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Etonian, hiring and firing, land reform, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes

Just as a matter of record, then:1. The existence of Orwell’s list of Stalinized intellectuals was not ‘revealed’ in 1996. It appears in Professor Bernard Crick’s biography, which was first published in 1980. 2. A blacklist is a roster of names maintained by those with the power to affect hiring and firing. To be blacklisted is to be denied employment for political reasons unconnected to job-performance. The word does not now, and never has had, any other meaning. 3. Even if the Daily Telegraph says so, and even if it has chosen not to specify the ‘some’ who chose to think it, the Information Research Department was unconnected to any ‘Thought Police’, to say nothing of the Thought Police as they actually feature in the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Rules of Work, Expanded Edition: A Definitive Code for Personal Success (The Rules by Richard Templar) by Richard Templar

double entry bookkeeping, hiring and firing, job satisfaction, supply-chain management

Having a good time at work means not achieving much, talking a lot, winding up colleagues, and drinking champagne all afternoon. There is a difference, I’m sure you will agree. Having a good time at work 20 THE RULES OF WORK RULE 9 is a temporary thing. It lasts while the fun lasts but quickly flags once the excitement, the elation, has worn off. Work being good means enjoying the negotiating, the hiring and firing, the day-to-day challenges, the stresses and disappointments, the uncertain future, the testing of one’s mettle, the new learning curves. A surprising number of people die within a year of retirement—this suggests that work is more important to our existence than we think. If you ain’t enjoying all this and appreciating that it is enjoyable, then you are doomed to be one of the moaners, one of life’s victims.

Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders by Jason L. Riley

affirmative action, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Garrett Hardin, guest worker program, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mass immigration, open borders, open immigration, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

In about half of those cases the separation is voluntary; in the other half, the worker has been shown the door. But either way, this messy churn, which can disrupt lives and even make obsolete entire industries, has positive macroeconomic consequences in the long run. That’s because flexible labor markets, the kind that minimize the costs to a business of hiring and firing employees, enable workers and employers alike to find the employment situation that suits them best. Flexible labor markets make it easier for an employee who doesn’t like a job, is let go, or simply feels underappreciated by his boss to find another position somewhere else. And flexible labor markets make it more likely that an employer will expand his workforce, or take a chance on a job seeker who isn’t very skilled or perhaps has a spotty record.

End the Fed by Ron Paul

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business cycle, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Khyber Pass, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, tulip mania, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K

The economist Michael Boskin estimates that all of this will lead to $163,000 in new taxes for the typical American family—that is, if it is not inflated away. 6 Even mainstream economists like Joseph Stiglitz are calling this a robbery of the American people. And the more bailouts there are, the more government gets involved in running companies like General Motors, firing and hiring CEOs. Does anyone really think that the federal government should be in the business of hiring and firing CEOs of companies? The U.S. debt obligations are unfathomable, approaching $12 trillion. You might say that the entire federal government is one giant toxic asset at the moment. It certainly has no business telling the private sector how to run its affairs. It is in worse financial shape than all the companies in the private sector put together.

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

The biggest investors are generally pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and university endowment funds: so-called asset owners, rather than asset managers. Like retail investors, they are looking for the best professionals to manage their money; unlike retail investors, they have so much money they can hire and fire those fund managers. The largest pension fund in the world, for example, the $1.5tn Government Pension Investment Fund of Japan, raised eyebrows in 2019 when it started shifting tens of millions’ worth of assets to LGIM from one of LGIM’s huge rivals, in a move that was widely interpreted as a lack of confidence in the rival’s voting record on climate change at the companies it invested in.

Angrynomics by Eric Lonergan, Mark Blyth

AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, full employment, gig economy, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low interest rates, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, precariat, price stability, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Skype, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, universal basic income

So, the inequality we see in income and wealth has a mirror in the returns to capital itself. This is relevant to private anger because in highly flexible labour markets, firms with razor-thin margins who are extremely price sensitive will have strong incentives not to raise wages, and their survival will require a strong propensity to hire and fire. That goes someway to explaining low wage growth. As more and more sectors are affected by these forces, many of those stresses will be passed on to workers. We see this in the rise of zero-hours contracts in the UK, the rise in minimum-wage jobs, and the growth of platform driven employment such as Task Rabbit and Amazon Mechanical Turk – the so-called “gig economy”.

Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs, Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.

Alistair Cooke, American ideology, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, declining real wages, endowment effect, fiat currency, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, manufacturing employment, means of production, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, plutocrats, post-industrial society, power law, price discrimination, profit motive, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration

Employment Service and the Selective Service System and granting it authority to regulate the hiring and recruitment of workers in areas it designated as critical. In a related action, on December 5, almost all voluntary enlistments in the armed forces were terminated; henceforward the draft would provide personnel for the Navy and the Marines as well as the Army. Although private employers retained their prerogatives to hire and fire (subject, of course, to any restrictions imposed by collective labor contracts), the WMC could now exert a powerful influence on the allocation of labor. 53 The WMC moved on several fronts. In January 1943 McNutt issued a "work-or-fight" order, threatening men in "nonessential" jobs with conscription.

…

Union leaders knew that national service would put an end to genuine collective bargaining and render them personally superfluous. Philip Murray warned the CIO executive board: destroy collective bargaining "and see how effective you will be with your people back home. You will find out how quick they will tell you to go to hell." Businessmen, of course, wanted to retain control over hiring and firing. They also perceived that drafting civilian labor would lead directly to demands for "conscription of profits"-that is, confiscatory taxation-and governmental takeovers of their production facilities. 57 Stimson and those in his camp had little regard for individual liberty in wartime, but they had at least the virtue of moral (immoral?)

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, business process, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, cognitive load, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial independence, Flynn Effect, George Akerlof, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, impulse control, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, language acquisition, longitudinal study, loss aversion, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, power law, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, six sigma, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Walter Mischel, young professional

Different national cultures, she said, have different motivational systems, different relationships to authority and to capitalism. Germany, for example, has tight interlocking institutions like work councils. It also has labor markets that make it hard to hire and fire people. These arrangements mean that Germany excels at incremental innovation—the sort of steady improvements that are common in metallurgy and manufacturing. The United States, on the other hand, has looser economic networks. It is relatively easy to hire and fire and start new businesses. The United States thus excels at radical innovation, at the sort of rapid paradigm shifts prevalent in software and technology. Harrison dismissed her with a wave of the hand.

Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process by Kenneth S. Rubin

bioinformatics, business cycle, business intelligence, business logic, business process, continuous integration, corporate governance, fail fast, hiring and firing, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, minimum viable product, performance metric, shareholder value, six sigma, tacit knowledge, Y2K, you are the product

In this capacity, the ScrumMaster is empowered to ensure that the Scrum team enacts and adheres to the Scrum values, principles, and practices along with the Scrum team’s specific approaches. The ScrumMaster continuously helps the Scrum team improve the process, whenever possible, to maximize delivered business value. Authority in this context is not the same type of authority that a functional manager or project manager would have. For example, the ScrumMaster doesn’t hire and fire and cannot dictate to the team what tasks it should do or how to do them. The ScrumMaster also is not responsible for making sure the work gets done. Instead, the ScrumMaster helps the team define and adhere to its own process for making sure the work gets done. Interference Shield The ScrumMaster protects the development team from outside interference so that it can remain focused on delivering business value every sprint.

…

If they are unsuccessful, the ScrumMaster, as Scrum team coach, would work with Fred to help him be a more effective team member. If coaching doesn’t work, Fred’s situation would most likely escalate out of the Scrum team to his resource manager (the person to whom Fred reports within the organization), because the ScrumMaster does not have hiring and firing authority. At this point Fred’s resource manager (perhaps in conjunction with someone from human resources) would handle his performance issues in a humane and appropriate manner. The resource manager would certainly want to consult the ScrumMaster and development team members to deepen his understanding of the situation.

Everest the Cruel Way: Climbing Mount Everest at Its Hardest: The 1980 Winter Attempt on the Infamous West Ridge by Joe Tasker, Chris Bonington

hiring and firing

We were completely in the hands of our Base Camp staff, as we could not keep a check on all our equipment all of the time. Fortunately Nepalese generally and the Sherpas in particular have a high reputation for honesty. On Kangchenjunga to we had handed over the money to Ang Phurba, our Sirdar; and he had hired and fired the porters as necessary; presenting us with a detailed, if crudely written, set of accounts from time to time. We therefore struggled against admitting to ourselves the possibility that this time our Base Camp staff might be dishonest. Dawa, who was reputed to be a very capable and experienced Sherpa, arrived with the remaining loads.

Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

hiring and firing, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, means of production, meritocracy, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen

It can, for example, be heard no less clearly, nearly a century and a half after Stendhal’s lament, in Charles Bukowski’s poem “Something for the To uts, the Nuns, the Grocery Clerks and You” (1965), which evokes the lives of wealthy businessmen: with bad breath and big feet, men who look like frogs, hyenas, men who walk as if melody had never been invented, men who think it is intelligent to hire and fire and profit, men with expensive wives they possess like sixty acres of ground to be drilled or shown-off or to be walled away from the incompetent … … men who stand in front of windows thirty feet wide and see nothing, men with luxury yachts who can sail around the world and yet never get out of their vest pockets, men like snails, men like eels, men like slugs, and not as good.

Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, borderless world, business process, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, double entry bookkeeping, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, industrial cluster, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, new economy, North Sea oil, pneumatic tube, race to the bottom, railway mania, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, wage slave, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The 1991 Civil Rights Act, signed by George Bush senior, imposed huge regulatory burdens on businesses. It also created a litigation bonanza by increasing attorneys’ fees and allowing claims for “emotional injury.” American managers were more restricted than ever before in performing one of their most basic functions—hiring and firing. They could not ask about such things as an applicant’s family or his health. Bill Clinton was a still more fervent micromanager. By the end of the century, the cost of meeting social regulations to American firms was $289 billion a year, according to the Office of Management and Budget, a figure that other experts reckon was only a third of the real amount.31 And there were other “costs” to America—particularly the ever-growing amount of time that companies put into political lobbying (both in Washington, D.C., and in various state capitals) to twist this sprawling thicket of rules to their own advantage.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

“By the end of the 1960s,” writes economist Harry Braverman in his study of postwar shifts in the composition of the labor force, “rising rates of unemployment among ‘professionals’ of various kinds once more brought home to them that they were not the free agents they thought they were, who deigned to ‘associate themselves’ with one or another corporation, but truly part of a labor market, hired and fired like those beneath them.”2 The newest inventions and advances were for unused missiles. Making missiles and database systems was, if not morally repugnant, at least boring and pointless. Journalist Steven Levy writes that computers were “loathed by millions of common, patriotic citizens” who saw them as a “dehumanizing factor in society.”i3 The dull technophile engineer with a new stereo became a stereotype, and the Japanese commodity-electronics industry threatened from across the Pacific.

…

Journalist Michael Malone, fellow son of the Bay Area space settlers, described the hypocrisy: “While the company propaganda stressed its community, its democracy, its adherence to the ideals of the Howdy Doody generation, each day an unmarked car picked up blank boards and boxes of chips from Apple’s back door and delivered them to a roomful of Filipino women and housewives in a Saratoga home, who watched soap operas and stuffed boards at piece rates.”42 That network is what really made Apple a desirable partner. At its simplest, Xerox wanted Apple because Apple could make computers without unions, which meant it could develop production efficiencies without worrying about the impact on employees: offshoring, subcontracting, technological speedup, hiring and firing according to the market’s real-time demands.43 Santa Clara County claimed the country’s highest concentration of temp workers.44 Any laborers a company couldn’t easily replace were aligned with ownership via stock options: The professional employees swapped their guaranteed pay for a more direct stake in growth.

…

When a company spokesman smirkingly denied it on Twitter (“You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us”) he opened the door for journalists, and many news outlets found an abundance of evidence, including smoking-gun pictures of amber water bottles.38 Since people quit so often, Amazon uses a semi-automated system for hiring and firing to slake its constant thirst for fresh labor. Warehouse roles aren’t contracted out, but the firm has worked very hard to make all its fulfillment jobs plug-and-play, reducing the training period to less than one week. That investment in divestment allows Amazon to employ relatively vulnerable people, including felons, recent immigrants, and the elderly.

The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Golden age of television, hiring and firing, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, new economy, pre–internet, Skype, social software, Tony Hsieh

And if his handlers or agents had been smart, they would have been watching Twitter while LeBron made his announcement, seen the public reaction, given him a talking-to during a commercial break, and allowed him to express his regret on the spot for upsetting so many people. That would have been news! In any scenario, however, his apology would have to be genuine. There’s never a time when real doesn’t work. Hiring and Firing I value good teamwork more than almost anything. Though I rarely fire anyone, over the years I’ve had to let go of five of the most talented employees that have ever worked at Wine Library, because they just couldn’t play nice with the other boys and girls. That was culturally unacceptable in my company.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

This unpredictability in either direction is a major contributing factor to economic crisis as companies struggle (or fail) to cope with situations of overproduction, having produced much more than they predicted would be demanded and being unable to sell what they have produced above its cost. Insufficient stock can be just as disruptive as overstock, leading to panic buying, reduced trustworthiness by customers, contractual penalties, increased costs resulting from training and layoffs (due to unnecessary hiring and firing), and ultimately loss of contracts, which can sink a company. While there is of course a great deal more to economic crisis than the bullwhip effect, the inefficiencies and failures produced by the bullwhip effect can be key causes, rippling throughout the system and producing instability in other sectors.

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed by Alexis Ohanian

Airbnb, barriers to entry, carbon-based life, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, Hans Rosling, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Occupy movement, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, software is eating the world, Startup school, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, unpaid internship, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Congress had abysmal approval ratings back then—worse than colonoscopies1—yet the Internet public realized that the connected web could give them leverage over even the richest and most entrenched lobbying groups. We had our congressional representatives and senators on speed dial. We would call them to check up on things and correct them when they did something bad—just as a good boss should. We paid their salaries, we hired and fired them—why shouldn’t we know what they’re up to? Social media, which gave us unprecedented access into the mundane lives of strangers, made us feel entitled to know what our elected officials were doing and helped us to hold them accountable. It even looked like we were going to develop better politicians in the process, as their attention became more focused on their voters than on the biggest donors to their campaigns.

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

We talked for hours about the business in between dozens of sales pitches. In our conversations, I tried to bring him up to speed as fast as possible. I didn’t, however, want to destroy the precious window of time when his unknowingness made us revisit basic assumptions. The two best moments to receive high-quality feedback from people are when they are hired and fired. At the start they ask many 90 LIFE AS A ROAD WARRIOR 91 “dumb questions,” which usually have gone foolishly unchecked for years, and at the end, in an exit interview, they can deliver feedback with the most possible candor. This is another mistake I made with our interim CEO: I inundated him with so much information that it probably squelched any fresh creative bursts he might have had after initial exposure to Comcate ideas. >> I learned a lot about Dave and he became someone for whom I developed a great deal of fondness.

Cold Hands by John J. Niven

centre right, Firefox, gentrification, hiring and firing, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii

But in the end the old man begged her, offered her crazy money and the chance to become editor by the time she was thirty. Sammy made a real go of the job though, overcoming the prejudices of a lot of hard-nosed subs and section editors in the process. She upped the circulation by 20 per cent over five years and dragged the paper out of the eighties and into the new technology of the nineties, hiring and firing quite a bit in the process. I met Sammy at the college in Regina, back in 1998, where I was a mature student on the journalism programme. I’d been in Canada maybe five years then, Toronto first, then out here in Saskatchewan. Sammy came to talk to my class. Even though she was only a few years older than me she seemed impossibly sophisticated and assured, a real journalist, someone living the life I was aspiring to.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, butter production in bangladesh, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Edward Thorp, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, information asymmetry, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, money market fund, Murray Gell-Mann, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, presumed consent, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, statistical model, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, vertical integration

But even though industry pros intellectually understand the importance of luck, they consistently fail to incorporate that knowledge into their decisions. Amit Goyal, a finance professor at Emory University, and Sunil Wahal, a finance professor at Arizona State University, analyzed how thirty-four hundred retirement plans, endowments, and foundations (plan sponsors) hired and fired firms that manage investment funds over a ten-year period. The researchers found that plan sponsors tended to hire managers who had performed well in the recent past. And the number one reason to fire a manager was poor performance. Consistent with reversion to the mean, the researchers noted that in subsequent years, many of the managers who were fired went on to outperform the managers who were hired (see figure 8-2).8 Individual investors behave similarly.

A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century by Witold Rybczynski

California gold rush, City Beautiful movement, clean water, cotton gin, David Brooks, fail fast, gentleman farmer, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, joint-stock company, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, New Urbanism, place-making, scientific management, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway, urban planning, urban renewal

The southern half of the park, now largely complete, was unquestionably a success. The problem was that it was expensive—or, at least, more expensive than anyone had expected. Green promised to control costs. And costs, not aesthetics, were uppermost in their minds. Finally, in June, they decided—on Green. Henceforth the comptroller would oversee expenses, hire and fire park employees, and have overall supervision of construction. Olmsted’s three-year tenure as architect-in-chief of Central Park was at an end. The board had called Olmsted’s bluff. For bluff it was: he did not resign. He remained as superintendent, continuing to oversee “finishing, planting and maintenance.”

…

He hated being second-guessed. “If Jenkins or Knapp ask me for instructions, instead of taking hold to answer them, I think, ‘What have the Committee said about that?’ ‘How is that under the rule of the Committee?’ ‘What will the Committee think about it?’ ” The Committee questioned his decisions about hiring and firing. In December it passed a resolution limiting the general secretary’s discretionary spending to one thousand dollars, except in emergencies. This drove Olmsted to consider resigning. Only the exhortation of Bache, the vice president of the board, who had become a close friend, persuaded him to stay.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

BREAK THE BANK AND LIBERATE THE PLATFORM It might be tempting to conclude that, given the domination of private finance in society as a whole, building a cooperative platform would require something like a revolution. But this is not true, and every cooperative in the world proves this every day. Consider a worker-owned factory. In the “standard” investor-owned factory, finance gets pooled together; it buys the labor and materials to build and run the factory, it hires and fires workers, and it keeps whatever profit comes in. In a worker cooperative, however, the workers gather together; they borrow the money to build and operate the factory, they pay it back when they don’t need it, and they keep whatever profit comes in. This worker cooperative turns the platform of finance on its head.

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality by Brink Lindsey

Airbnb, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Build a better mousetrap, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, inventory management, invisible hand, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, patent troll, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, software patent, subscription business, tail risk, tech bro, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce

Foundations have put considerable resources into supporting mayoral control of schools8 (which has pulled decision making away from teacher-controlled venues like school boards) and charter schools (which move the venue of decision making away from school boards).9 Foundations have actively supported litigation, such as the lawsuit Vergara v. California brought by the advocacy group Students Matter to challenge protective rules for hiring and firing teachers, the core of teacher union interests.10 In just the past few years, these same foundations have put millions of dollars into grassroots organizing and lobbying, funding state-based organizations like 50CAN and Stand for Children, parent organizations such as Families for Excellent Schools, leadership pipelines like Leaders for Educational Equity and Students for Education Reform, and the advocacy efforts of charter school operators like Success Academy in New York.11 This broad range of third-party-supported education-reform organizations has at least partially evened the playing field in education policy, to the point that some observers are starting to worry that it is the reformers who have captured the political system.12 Regardless of whether you favor the current approaches to environmental protection or education reform, these examples show that it is possible to create an organized and effective opposition in even deeply entrenched, rent-addled policy areas.

Brave New World of Work by Ulrich Beck

affirmative action, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, full employment, future of work, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, job automation, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, mini-job, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, scientific management, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Roughly 45 per cent of university teachers share Hoeller's fate, twice as many as in the 1950s. The colleges save in several ways at once: the pay is only 40 per cent or so of a regular professor's; the sizeable pension and health contributions do not apply; and part-timers, unlike professors with tenure, can be hired and fired. This makes it possible for colleges to react swiftly and flexibly to changing preferences on the part of their customers, the students. It is a good deal for the universities, but it splits the country's faculties into two classes. Keith Hoeller feels ‘underpaid and overworked’. Only his presence in the lecture room is remunerated.

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

And, like the staff of that supersecret project to develop the atom bomb, only a few are cognizant of the breathtaking potential of their work to transform lives and livelihoods, right down to altering our concept of who we are and our proper place in the universe. It’s one thing to make a cute little robot that reads names and addresses, then tootles down the hall delivering intramural mail, but quite another when incrementally more capable versions of this technology operate our farms, manage our pension funds, hire and fire workers, select which news stories we read, scan all our communications for subversive ideas, and fight our wars. Sure, but that’s science fiction. We’ve seen this kind of stuff in the movies for decades and nothing terrible has happened in real life. So what’s the big deal? Why all the fuss now?

Kelly: More Than My Share of It All by Clarence L. Johnson

Charles Lindbergh, Ford Model T, hiring and firing, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan

Engineers still will be required to design and build our defense systems. But the discipline now that will determine what these are is physics. The Russians are graduating five times as many engineers each year as the United States. There is no unemployment of them. Here, unfortunately, there is little or no stability in our programs. It’s train, hire, and fire. The defense of this country and the Free World requires an operations analysis approach—looking at the entire area from scratch, objectively. What would a war be like? Nuclear? Non-nuclear? What weapons will we really need? Expensive nuclear-powered aircraft carriers which might last two or three days?

A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream by Yuval Levin

affirmative action, Airbnb, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, conceptual framework, David Brooks, demand response, Donald Trump, fake news, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, WeWork

Scholars of our democracy who constantly harp on the ignorance of the individual voter should think about this point: the answer to that ignorance is not to empower experts to rule over us; it’s to allow the structure of our constitutional system—with its checks and balances and overlapping majorities and institutions—to guide our government’s decision-making.6 This is also the case with formalized processes of making consequential decisions in many other kinds of institutions—decisions about hiring and firing, spending, building, and otherwise doing our work throughout society. In this sense, in a functional institution, what is required for good judgment is integrity more than a high IQ. Institutions can allow us to substitute character for calculation. In their absence, we have to substitute calculation for character—which often doesn’t end well.

The Money Tree: A Story About Finding the Fortune in Your Own Backyard by Chris Guillebeau

Bernie Madoff, drop ship, Ethereum, fail fast, financial independence, global village, hiring and firing, housing crisis, independent contractor, messenger bag, passive income, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, Steve Jobs, telemarketer

What about the assessment tool?” Preena asked. “Yeah,” added Sloan. “I thought everything was riding on that secret algorithm.” He shook his head. “We learned, ah, that the algorithm had some quirks. For example, it recommended eliminating our entire HR department, and since they do the hiring and firing, we weren’t sure how to handle that. In the interest of saving time, we decided to move on manually.” Only one person was being let go. That seemed like good news, but who was it? Jake figured the odds were good that it would be him. It could also be Sloan—but given Sloan’s ability to ingratiate himself (at least before the previous day’s transformation), Jake didn’t hold out much hope for his own survival.

Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality by Vito Tanzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Andrew Keen, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial repression, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, libertarian paternalism, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, synthetic biology, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, urban planning, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

In any case it is the government’s protection that contributes to the existence and often to the size of those incomes. Remove that protection and many of these large incomes would vanish. (c) Establishing many market rules in labor markets, such as those that limit the role and the power of unions, as well as rules on the hiring and firing of workers, on minimum wages, on working hours, and on requirements to use unionized workers for public works, national ships for some operations, or national firms for government procurement operations. (d) Perhaps more importantly, establishing rules about the formation and the market power of corporations; about the consequences of bankruptcy; about the limited responsibilities and liabilities of shareholders and managers of corporations; about inheritance of property; about the power of managers to choose members of the executive boards of enterprises; about the operations of corporations; and about the power that banks have acquired in remaining “too big to fail,” power that is allowed by the government and that, in some ways, distorts the operation of the market and creates high incomes for some banks.

…

(f ) Guarantees the availability and the good conditions of essential physical infrastructures (roads, canals, bridges, airports, fresh water, sewer systems, electricity, and others) in the areas where the enterprises operate. (g) Provides basic security for the areas and the social environments in which the enterprises operate, reducing the enterprises’ own costs to protect their assets and their workers from criminal elements. (h) Guarantees to the entrepreneurs the freedom to negotiate the conditions for hiring and firing workers, for buying necessary inputs domestically and internationally, and for getting needed credit and funds from banks, shareholders, and other sources, without the need to get authorizations and permits from government offices or from other organizations, such as labor unions. (i) Guarantees that the entrepreneurs will face and expect to continue to face a stable regulatory and legal framework.

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

Wells’s imaginings. 14 ‘The 1980 classic version is entirely different from the entangled technical versions since 1987, and I hope to make them separately available real soon now’ (Nelson 2012). 15 With characteristic wit, he calls the two sides the ‘fluffies’ and the ‘technoids’, respectively. 16 Nelson now believes the visit was in 1966, according to notes he found while writing Possiplex – notes that have since been lost. 17 Only later did I learn that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates also took a directorial role in software development, but they had the power to hire and fire, thus much more leverage (Nelson 2012). 18 As we will see in the chapter on HES, Nelson still feels angry about this experience; ‘they could at least have treated me like a guest’ (Nelson 2011). 19 Nelson asserts in response, ‘The principles of xu88 and the Ent were secret until 1999 – is that Quite Recent?

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

The only way to get rid of a questionable hire is to fire him. That’s a fraught process. “There’s been gradual erosion over the past 30 years of pure employment-at-will as more and more people have come under employment protection laws” explains Levenson. “It’s become more and more difficult for companies to… hire and fire. Even if 100 people are eligible to sue, only one or two might, but that’s all it takes.” Hiring today is like marriage used to be: for the duration. Despite the concern with false positives, “you can totally bomb an interview,” Carlisle insists, “and that’s not the end of your candidacy.” Google is aware that interviews are a noisy signal.

The Geek Feminist Revolution by Kameron Hurley

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, clean water, commoditize, desegregation, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, Kickstarter, means of production, microaggression, Nelson Mandela, Skype, the long tail, women in the workforce

You can fight all you want for individual wins, and fight to be the “exceptional” woman, but so long as there’s institutionalized oppression, bias, and unregulated, out-of-control capitalism that treats people as disposable objects, you’re an exception, not a rule. So long as the people with the power—to hire and fire you, approve or deny your loan, or write up your speeding ticket—look at you through the lens of institutionalized racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other -ism they’ve learned from stories, videos, media, and other biased individuals, a single win means nothing. We cannot effect true change alone

Glock: The Rise of America's Gun by Paul M. Barrett

airport security, forensic accounting, hiring and firing, interchangeable parts, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing

In her mid-twenties at the time, she knew nothing about guns or the firearm business and was not particularly interested in learning. But she wanted a better life and sensed that Glock was offering her something. “I didn’t know how to say no,” she said. The tour of Glock, Inc., turned into an offer of an administrative job, which Monika accepted. The post evolved into overseeing human resources: hiring and firing lower-level employees and complying with regulatory paperwork. Glock sponsored her work visa, allowing her to remain in the country with her mother, who had become a citizen. The pay was generous compared to hotel and restaurant jobs, and the hours were more reasonable. At first, Bereczky enjoyed being a favorite of the company’s owner.

Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Mark Goulston M. D., Keith Ferrazzi

Abraham Maslow, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, index card, Jeff Bezos, Leonard Kleinrock, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, Ronald Reagan, zero-sum game

The lesson is simple: Bullies come after you because they think you’re easy prey. Refuse to follow their script, and they’ll usually give up and seek an easier target. Sometimes, of course, there’s no good way to stand up to a bully. For instance, if you desperately need your current job and your boss has the power to hire and fire on a whim, your only real options may be to lay low, minimize contact with the person, and look for a less toxic work environment. Even in this case, however, you’ll be a less desirable target if you stop looking vulnerable. When a bully tries to intimidate you by verbally attacking you, do this.

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld, David Cohen

An Inconvenient Truth, augmented reality, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, fail fast, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lolcat, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business

How will decisions get made? This is often tied to the number of shares, but not necessarily. You can have voting and non-voting shares. You can set up a board. You'll need to decide what kinds of decisions the board makes, and which ones it won’t. Common areas to address are decisions around capitalization, executive hiring and firing, share issuance (dilution), and acquisitions. What happens if one of us leaves the company? Although it may seem like a bad idea to be talking about this when you're starting the company—it's not. In the evolution of any startup, there will be good times and bad times and there will likely be times when one or more co-founders are simply not happy and not committed.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, cloud computing, financial independence, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, new economy, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative

This section encapsulates the various parts of those lessons and provides guidance on how to get the important things right. THE MOST DIFFICULT CEO SKILL By far the most difficult skill I learned as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring, and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check. I thought I was tough going into it, but I wasn’t tough. I was soft. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs, all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it and I have never read anything on the topic.

Money Mavericks: Confessions of a Hedge Fund Manager by Lars Kroijer

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, family office, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Long Term Capital Management, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, NetJets, new economy, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Nonetheless, to Lennart and many others with an industrial background, there was something odd about a system that allowed someone like me with no industry experience to find himself in effective control of a company like Bure that employs thousands of people with families and mortgages. And there I was, a guy in his early thirties telling experienced company management what to buy and sell, who to hire and fire, and having the power to back up those demands with action. What we wanted was simple. The company needed to reduce its overheads as much as possible. It was bloated, and future investment was unlikely as long as Bure’s shares were so cheap. The company should then look to reduce or sell its stakes to raise more cash, although with the new financing this was less urgent.

For the Love of Money: A Memoir by Sam Polk

Bear Stearns, carried interest, Credit Default Swap, eat what you kill, fixed income, food desert, hiring and firing, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, Rosa Parks, SimCity

It was widely believed he could have cured cancer, or fixed the situation in the Middle East, if only he’d focused on it. But he didn’t—he focused on investing, and he was a legend. His job was to know everything about everything, and he did. Peter was the CEO of the firm and handled the hiring and firing. He was trim and tan, and his hair looked as if it had been clipped that morning, every day. His ties were worth more than I’d paid in monthly rent down in Charlotte. And then there was Sean. He was ten years younger than the two managing partners, and not yet a billionaire. But with his talent, intensity, and instincts, he would likely ascend to that esteemed rank.

Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Swan, business cycle, commoditize, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, hiring and firing, John Markoff, low cost airline, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, Pepsi Challenge, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

The reason the change happened is simple—they suffered a split and their WHY went fuzzy. The single greatest challenge any organization will face is . . . success. When the company is small, the founder will rely on his gut to make all the major decisions. From marketing to product, from strategy to tactics, hiring and firing, the decisions the founder makes will, if he trusts his gut, feel right. But as the organization grows, as it becomes more successful, it becomes physically impossible for one person to make every major decision. Not only must others be trusted and relied upon to make big decisions, but those people will also start making hiring choices.

Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cost per available seat-mile, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, housing crisis, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Ellison, late fees, legacy carrier, McMansion, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, young professional

Or how I guaranteed a credit card for my first chef and wound up on the hook for $10,000 for what I later learned were hair plugs (even though, as far as I could remember, he had a healthy mane of hair!). Then there was the time another of the five different chefs I went through decided to get into a good old-fashioned fistfight with one of the five different general managers I hired and fired in the place’s three years of existence. Thankfully, the altercation took place after closing, but it didn’t do much for the staff’s already low morale or mine. Neither did the time the overnight cleaning crew set off the building’s sprinkler system. After being called by the fire department at 3 a.m., I watched the sun come up while standing in ankle-deep water in the middle of our dining room.

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies by Charles de Ganahl Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, big-box store, book value, British Empire, business process, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income per capita, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, oil shale / tar sands, personalized medicine, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Solyndra, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing

So I called in the leader of that group to determine how this had happened and how it could be prevented in the future. This leader contended he couldn’t have prevented it since he didn’t even know the manager in question. I asked, “If we can’t hold you accountable, who can we? You control and are responsible for who is hired and fired, and the systems and culture of your group.” Following that exchange we made clear, by cutting—or eliminating—leaders’ bonuses according to their degree of responsibility, that all of them were fully responsible for any compliance, safety, or environmental problem in their organization, and that any such event would—at the very least—result in a major reduction in their incentive compensation.

The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World by William Drozdiak

Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, centre right, cloud computing, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, UNCLOS, working poor

Macron was coming under rising pressure at home, even from his political allies, for investing so much time and effort in trying to convince Germany to support his European reform proposals. The grand bargain that he had pursued so assiduously since coming to power seemed to be slipping away. The handshake deal he had struck with Merkel called for France to show greater discipline over its finances, shrink its bloated public sector, and make it easier to hire and fire workers. In return, Germany would back Macron’s plans to integrate Europe with a Eurozone budget, an EU finance ministry, and more cohesive foreign and defense policies. Within his first year as president, Macron had managed to push through a series of unpopular measures that cut social benefits significantly and reined in France’s finances, yet Germany had responded by giving him next to nothing.

Two and Twenty: How the Masters of Private Equity Always Win by Sachin Khajuria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, bank run, barriers to entry, Big Tech, blockchain, business cycle, buy and hold, carried interest, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, disintermediation, diversification, East Village, financial engineering, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, index fund, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, mass affluent, moral hazard, passive investing, race to the bottom, random walk, risk/return, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, two and twenty, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

The deal team refines this lens several times during the life of an investment, primarily to sharpen the view of the outcome that can be achieved, as it digs further into the operations of the target and generates ideas for how to improve the financials. There are status updates for the investment committee or some subset thereof at least twice a year, and if the investment is challenged or is about to undergo a material event such as disposal of a business unit or the IPO of the company, or the hiring and firing of senior management, these debriefings are likely to be more frequent and conducted in greater depth. Of course, the input from colleagues will help the deal team refocus its lens on the investment and ideally lead to a better outcome for the investors and therefore for the private equity firm as well.

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order by Richard Haass

access to a mobile phone, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, global pandemic, global reserve currency, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, immigration reform, invisible hand, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, no-fly zone, open economy, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

Dealing with this gap between political and economic realities may require a future EU that offers several levels of membership, possibly a version of what already exists in terms of an inner core of countries participating in the Eurozone. Such flexibility could prove essential if the EU is to remain intact. There is a limit to what the EU can do if it is forced to operate in a context of low economic growth. Reforms that promote growth, including increased flexibility for employers when it comes to hiring and firing workers, targeted tax and entitlement reductions, and increased infrastructure spending, are worth exploring and arguably adopting. Politics permitting, one initiative the United States could advance that would help Europe and bolster U.S.-European ties is a transatlantic trade pact. More broadly, there is a compelling case for close U.S.

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

But closet indexing is not ideal for shareholders. The concern about a flightier investor base is well founded. In the 1950s, the average holding period for a mutual fund was over fifteen years. By 2006 the holding period had shrunk to about four years.6 Pension fund administrators, too, are becoming more active in hiring and firing fund managers. For example, in 2001 the state of Florida sacked Alliance Capital in part because of losses in Enron and despite Alliance’s good long-term performance.7 I believe the perceived loss of predictability and control is causing many money managers chronic stress. And the predictable reaction to stress can lead to suboptimal portfolio-management decisions.

The Inequality Puzzle: European and US Leaders Discuss Rising Income Inequality by Roland Berger, David Grusky, Tobias Raffel, Geoffrey Samuels, Chris Wimer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, Caribbean Basin Initiative, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, fear of failure, financial innovation, full employment, Gini coefficient, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, offshore financial centre, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, rent-seeking, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, time value of money, very high income

(Josef Ackermann) Government controls over how businesses compensate management and employees should be limited to preventing discrimination, tax evasion, and other irregularities. Governments already participate extensively in private contracts between corporations and their employees, for example through such measures as setting minimum wages, hiring and firing regulations, and pension plan obligations. Pay scales, which closely reflect market movements, corporate strategy, and priorities, are not a market economy government’s responsibility. Another aspect of compensation, however, deserves much more attention, which is the artificial divide between senior management and the rest of the company with respect to company share ownership and long-term performance incentives.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

In 2014, when Hoffman was touting his book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, he even borrowed McCord’s language when he published an article in the Harvard Business Review titled “Your Company Is Not a Family.” Like McCord, Hoffman has positioned himself as a management oracle who can teach non-techies how to mimic the success of Silicon Valley. He takes the Netflix code and pushes it further, imagining a new compact in which companies can hire and fire at will, and where there are no “careers,” only short-term gigs. Some tech start-ups use job insecurity and the fear of being fired as a management tool. In this effort they have enlisted a powerful weapon: stock options. Most workers forgo part of their salaries in order to get stock options.

Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith

Anthropocene, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, diversified portfolio, failed state, financial innovation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, New Urbanism, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, SimCity, South China Sea, telemarketer, the built environment, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Hiring people can be a fraught and tense process in which employees’ shortcomings may not appear until after they have signed on the dotted line, whereupon their problems become your problems, too. Sometimes people are hired onto your team without your knowledge, and you have to figure out how to integrate them. When the hiring doesn’t go well, and sometimes when it does, you might have to fire the employee, which provides another kind of stress. In between hiring and firing, there are all of the other challenges of management, from absenteeism and slacking to subterfuge and pilfering to abrupt changes of company policy, that you have to defend and implement to those working under your supervision. Yet none of these challenges are new. Compare your experiences of middle management with those of your counterpart four thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, a person named Kibri-Dagan who sent this message to the boss: My lord has sent me an order to get to Mari to appear before the junior ugbabtum-priestess.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

While tax-and-redistribute policies undoubtedly have to be part of this package, they cannot be the only thing, or even the main thing. People’s lives are too tied up with their jobs to allow it. The challenge is ensuring labor flexibility doesn’t mean economic insecurity for workers. What is needed are policies like those in Denmark. The government allows firms to hire and fire freely but then commits to doing whatever it takes to help the displaced workers find new jobs. The good news is that once we make it past the upheaval, the world will be a much nicer place. A MORE HUMAN, MORE LOCAL FUTURE Automation and globalization displaced jobs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

DIY Investor: How to Take Control of Your Investments & Plan for a Financially Secure Future by Andy Bell

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, eurozone crisis, fixed income, high net worth, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, low interest rates, money market fund, Northern Rock, passive investing, place-making, quantitative easing, selection bias, short selling, South Sea Bubble, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

But there are still several quality funds open to emerging market investors. Multi-manager funds If you like the idea of fund investing but do not want to have to work out which fund managers to go for, you can always choose a fund that does all of that for you. Multi-manager funds source what they believe are the very best managers in the market, hiring and firing them whenever they believe their performance merits it. But while multi-manager funds sound a great idea in theory, they introduce a whole new layer of charges into your fund management costs. You end up having to pay the multi-managers’ charges as well as the charges on the funds they select, which in turn can damage your returns.

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

HOW I GOT HERE In 2007 I was part of the founding team of a company that created digital strategies for some of the biggest brands in the world. A few years later I became the CEO. While I thought of myself as progressive, in truth I managed the company in a somewhat traditional way. I weighed in on all the hiring and firing decisions. I gave annual performance reviews and set compensation. I kept the firm’s finances and salaries under lock and key. I told people what to work on, and how to do it well. I designed the organization as I thought it should be. Now, to be fair, our culture was more permissive and flexible than most.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy by Chris Hayes

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, carried interest, circulation of elites, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kenneth Arrow, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, peak oil, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, Vilfredo Pareto, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

To understand the steroids era, you first need to understand Marvin Miller, the man who turned the Major League Baseball Players Association into one of the country’s most effective unions. For the majority of baseball’s history, the players union was a toothless beast. Owners more or less owned players outright; they were able to trade, hire, and fire at will. There was no free agency, and though the league was quite profitable (the only legal monopoly in the country), most players merely scraped by, working odd jobs in the off-season to make ends meet. It was a classic system of exploitation, one the owners were single-mindedly committed to maintaining.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Individual “temps” are nothing new, of course, but the concept now includes groups of temporary workers. Organizations can rent staff on demand from Gigwalk and other companies when a large amount of work needs to be done quickly, relieving them of the traditional, nightmarish practice of serial hiring and firing. In this instance, there is no distinction between “rented” staff and the ExO attribute, Staff on Demand. Be it facilities, equipment, computing or people, the concept of renting rather than owning is a major factor contributing to an ExO’s agility and flexibility, and thus its success. This too can be seen as the culmination of a long-term trend.

Bureaucracy by David Graeber

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, barriers to entry, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, David Graeber, Future Shock, George Gilder, High speed trading, hiring and firing, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, Parkinson's law, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-work, price mechanism, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, technological determinism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, urban planning, zero-sum game

He is much more likely to tell them all to shut up and arbitrarily impose a story that allows instant judgment: i.e., “you, Joe, you wouldn’t have made a mistake like that; you, Mark, you’re the new guy, you must have screwed up—if you do it again, you’re fired.” It’s those who do not have the power to hire and fire who are left with the work of figuring out what actually did go wrong so as to make sure it doesn’t happen again. The same thing usually happens with ongoing relations: everyone knows that servants tend to know a great deal about their employers’ families, but the opposite almost never occurs.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

‘It was clear that the quickest way to add 5 points to your stock price was to lay off 50,000 workers.’177 There is little doubt that the sustained bull run of the 1990s—the Dow Jones index of leading American shares rose from 3000 in April 1991 to 9000 in May 1999—was in part the product of a decade of lay-offs. Under the mantra of shareholder value, labour, instead of being seen as an invaluable asset, became a mere cost of production, an essentially expendable commodity, to be hired and fired according the needs of the companies and the whims of their executives. Business had no intrinsic social dimension. The key to success lay in keeping wages low and workforces small. The weakening of the unions had paved the way for a revolution in workforce size and pay. The policy continued after the millennium and during the 2008-2009 recession.

What's the Matter with White People by Joan Walsh

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, banking crisis, clean water, collective bargaining, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, full employment, General Motors Futurama, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, impulse control, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, mass immigration, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Newsweek declared that on Election Day 1966 “the thousand-day reign of Lyndon I came to an end.” In New York, we watched all of those issues explode the next year in the devastating Ocean Hill/Brownsville conflict, when black parents in that poverty-stricken, heavily black Brooklyn neighborhood demanded community control over their low-achieving schools, including the right to hire and fire teachers. The Jewish-dominated United Federation of Teachers (UFT) fought them, while Lindsay backed the parents, and the battle raged under a national spotlight, through multiple teachers’ strikes, for nearly two years. The teachers believed they were fighting for old liberal values: hiring teachers by seniority and testing, not cronyism, and standing up for the free expression of ideas.

Kill Your Friends by John Niven

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Etonian, gentrification, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, nuclear winter, sensible shoes, Stephen Hawking

I take a seat by the open window, the chill September breeze filling the room as Trellick strides around, simultaneously talking on his mobile, smoking a cigarette and putting on his suit. I’m wearing a suit too, by the way. I flip through Trellick’s copy of Music Week. As has been known for a couple of weeks now, Neil Ferris, recently installed as MD over at EMI, has been hiring and firing people like a madman. He’s made Tris Penna Head of A&R. Incredibly Nick Robinson, the previous Head of A&R, has not been fired. He’s been demoted. He’s going to work under Penna. I mean, where’s your fucking self-respect? Wouldn’t you just top yourself? “What’s your problem, loser?” Trellick asks, hanging up.

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

A shortage of workers will push up real wages. Potential retirees may, as a result, choose to delay their retirement. Other workers may choose to work longer hours. Perhaps policymakers will deliver more flexible labour markets by encouraging more part-time work, increasing the provision of crèches and by adopting a more explicit ‘hire and fire’ mentality (the risk to a company of hiring a worker is reduced if workers can more easily be fired, thereby increasing the demand for workers and, hence, lowering the structural rate of unemployment). Workers in company pension schemes may find themselves having to take on board greater pension risk as defined-benefit pension schemes are shut down.

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

New ideas arise in mysterious and unpredictable ways from free and unstructured interactions. It would be ridiculous to schedule a phone call with a distant colleague to come up with a new idea. My guess is that most researchers share this view. After all, the reason we spend so much time in academia discussing whom to hire and fire is that our colleagues affect our own productivity. Being around smart people tends to make us smarter, more creative, and ultimately more productive. And the smarter the people, the stronger the effect. Pierre Azoulay, Joshua Graff Zivin, and Jialan Wang quantified this by focusing on what happens to medical researchers when they work with an academic superstar.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

In some ways it better incentivizes the accumulation of capital than America does, with lower taxes on capital gains and inheritance (the estate tax is 15% in Denmark and zero in Sweden and Norway). Years ago, I met Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, who enacted many reforms in Denmark as the country’s prime minister in the 1990s, creating what is now called the “flexicurity” model. He emphasized that the first half of the term was key: ensuring employers had the flexibility to hire and fire workers easily, without excessive regulation or litigation, in an economy that’s open to the world and competitive—but all within a system that provides the security of a generous safety net. What distinguishes Northern European countries from the United States are their high levels of general taxation and redistribution.

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor