Netflix is offering its employees unlimited paid time off in the first year of the birth or adoption of a child.
Federal law requires many companies in the U.S. to offer at least 12 weeks of unpaid maternity leave, and 21 percent of U.S. organizations offer paid maternity leave, according to the Society of Human Resource Management. But only 2 percent of U.S. organizations offer unlimited paid leave, SHRM says.
"The policy itself is very encouraging for employees. The question is what else are they going to do?" says Peter Cappelli, professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania. "As soon as you see one of the top executives of the company using the policy, then it's for real."
"In practice, what's going to happen is that folks who decide to take longer [time off] are probably going to wind up working from home," says Karen Cates, who teaches about executive leadership at Northwestern University.
let me summarize this for you (not a TLDR): if it doesnt happen in 2017, effective 2018, its not happening until 2022. too many different interests.
It’s that time in the election cycle when candidates start trotting out their plans to fix the tax code. Most everybody would agree U.S. tax laws are complicated, and the handful of candidate plans' released so far promise to streamline and minimize taxes, but are otherwise light on details.
Presidential campaigns love calling for tax reform, but those promises haven’t often translated in to policy changes. If you are losing revenue by lowering taxes, it’s got to come from somewhere — or someone.
“Behind every provision and loophole and deduction in the tax code," said Scott Hodge, the president of the Tax Foundation, "there’s a pretty substantial constituency of people and businesses that live on those things.”
Not to mention the people who live off explaining those things. Troy Lewis, a CPA in Draper, Utah, said even his parents called asking about candidate’s plans. They and his other clients want to know, "Can you boil this down for me? Which one is going to reduce my taxes and put more after-tax spending ability in my wallet?”
Lewis says that’s why tax reform resonates so well on the campaign trail. Unlike many other policy issues, just about everyone can relate to it directly.
“Every presidential candidate always makes some noise about reforming the tax code," said Veronique De Rugy, a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center. "But," she added, "I think there is something quite different this time around.”
She said she was encouraged by the fact so many candidates are talking about tax reform early in the process. But she and Hodge of the Tax Foundation both warn that with a Congress divided by partisanship and powerful special interests, the next president will have to show great "political courage" to actually achieve tax reform.
Promises of tax reform come with every presidential campaign. So why no reform?
The grand champion of sports TV is losing millions of subscribers, even while it is on the hook to pay billions to sports leagues for the rights to air games. That math doesn't cut it on Wall Street, giving rise to recent talk that the network, owned by Disney, is gearing up to lay off hundreds of employees to trim costs.
Those cuts would come on the heels of a talent drain at the network. In recent months, ESPN has lost some of its pricey, high-profile sportscasters, including Bill Simmons and Keith Olbermann.
John Brillhart knows a lot about ESPN's problems. He runs his own business outside Minneapolis.
"I'm a cord-cutting consultant," Brillhart said. "And what I do is I help people get rid of cable or satellite and use other options to watch television."
The idea that cable uninstaller is a hot new career track says a lot about why ESPN's corporate overlords are tightening belts. Cord-cutting customers are devastating.
"Consumers are looking for content in other places," said Brett Sappington, who directs research at Parks Associates. "So if your revenues are based significantly off of cable TV, then you get hit pretty hard by that."
Even if you hate sports and don't even know what channel ESPN is on, the network gets your money if you have cable.
"All of them are paying over $6 a month to get the network," said Brad Adgate, with Horizon Media.
That's a hefty number compared to what other channels charge cable companies. But big rates don't help if cable subscribers keep disappearing. ESPN has astounding bills to pay the NFL, NBA and others.
"They have contractual obligations to meet these rising sports rights, and so the only way to cut cost is they have to cut other costs that aren't the sports-rights costs, so they're cutting people," said Laura Martin, a senior analyst at Needham & Company.
Things will only get nastier for ESPN's legacy cable business. It's a company built on collecting six bucks a month from every cable-subscribing household, sports fans and non-fans alike. That's a selling point for Brillhart, the cord-cutting entrepreneur.
"A primary consumer of mine is customers that don't necessarily watch sports," he said.
Caught between cord-cutters and rising licensing fees, the network is in a bind.
This Boston home’s dining room provides the only access to a roof deck, and its original heavy iron staircase made the room feel more like a thoroughfare than a destination. Designer Jean Verbridge replaced the stairs with a glassed-in double helix that maintains access to the roof while providing...
2 That's the number of positions that Bank of America CEO and Chairman Brian Moynihan holds at the company. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Bank of America shareholders voted Tuesday to keep Brian Moynihan in both roles, a decision that some critics argue is problematic given that one of the chairman's main responsibilities is to oversee the CEO.
$7 million That's how much NASA spends to monitor the amount of junk humans have left floating in outer space. The U.S. government is closely monitoring the matter to prevent collisions, which could interfere with critical Department of Defense and telecommunications equipment.
1/4 That's the portion of Apple's global revenue derived from sales in China. Apple's CEO Tim Cook will be among the many business leaders meeting with President Xi Jinping in Seattle today for his first visit to the US as his country's leader.
28 That's the number of years former Peanut Corp. of America CEO Stewart Parnell was sentenced to jail for conspiracy to ship peanuts contaminated with salmonella. The company's tainted products were linked to the deaths of nine people according to Bloomberg.
Here are the numbers we're reading and watching for Tuesday.
As state and local governments across the country continue to grapple with more than a trillion dollars in unfunded pension obligations, they might want to take note of what's happening in Chicago.
The city has one of the worst pension problems in the nation.
In an address to the city council on Tuesday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed, among other measures, an historic property tax increase of $544 million phased in over four years, and additional fees for garbage collection and for ride-sharing services, such as Uber.
"This is a historic moment," says Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation in Chicago. "This is the first time ... any mayor has ... told the city council that there was no magic to balancing the city's budget."
The proposed $544 million property tax hike would pay for pension shortfalls.
Here’s a social network that promises to be way more fun than Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any of them will ever be.
The rapper Snoop Dogg announced at a tech conference Monday that he’s starting a social network based around cannabis. It’s gonna be called “Merry Jane.”
It’s in beta testing now — only 420 people will be allowed in at first. Clever, huh?
Snoop says he uses pot medicinally, and ‘cause it’s a peace thing for him.
The Fed's decision Thursday not to raise interest rates is good news for borrowers who still want to take advantage of the historically low rates, but not for one group that may have been hoping for the hike: banks. They've been warning investors about a decline in third quarter revenue. Now, they can't count on an immediate rate hike to improve results.
The logic might seem a bit counter-intuitive when you consider that raising rates can mean fewer people borrowing, as well the fact that while banks earn interest on loans, they also pay it to depositors.
When interest rates do rise, banks may not increase the rates the charge and pay equally, said Gerard Cassidy, who covers bank stocks for RBC Capital Markets.
"A rise in short-term interest rates would enable U.S. banks to reprice their loans to corporations and companies, due to the fact that they're variable rate loans," he said. But when it comes to deposits, "banks are traditionally very slow to raise those rates relative to how quickly they raise the rates for loans."
He said banks aren't really worried about irking customers, as their deposit levels are at very high levels right now.
"Banks have a lot of deposits," said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at Wells Capital Management. "They have an abnormally large amount of deposits, even by historic standards."
That's another reason banks would like to see rates rise: They're not earning much interest on those deposits.
Finally, there's stock price. After the Fed announcement, investors sold off bank shares. Paulsen said they had been hoping a rate hike would boost banks' profits.
"It's a double whammy when you think about it," he said. "Not only do they not get additional income flow of their deposit balances, but they also have their stocks take a hit at the same time."
With revenues under pressure, commercial lenders had been hoping for a rate hike.
Founding a startup today has become the stuff of TV and movies around the world. There's even a startup podcast about, you guessed it, startups, that can provide twenty-somethings who were not too long ago eating Cheetos in their dorm rooms while guzzling red bull, the opportunity to brush the crumbs off their hoodies, break out their best Vans and ask billionaires for millions. But in Japan today, founding a tech company is not what you might call super popular.
Silicon Valley appreciates a good failure. The Japanese — not so much.
“People have the mentality of failure as not being an option. And if you fail, they will face social rejection,” says Toshi Yamamoto, CEO and founder of software company ChatWork.
When he was launching his company while still in college, says Yamamoto, he was constantly questioned. "All the time. They call me crazy – why do you do that? Why don’t you go to a large corporation? Or, why don't you work for the company?" he says.
And while Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe is pushing hard to reverse the country’s economic slump, when it comes to tech and innovation, Japan is still behind — Especially reluctant, it would seem, to embrace the culture of start-ups.
Imagine, says William Saito, special adviser to the cabinet of Japan and its prime minister, two moms of recent college grads. One from Stanford, and one from Tokyo University. The Stanford mom would be proud to say her kid was going to work at a startup. But if the Tokyo University mom found out her young grad was going to work at a startup, the attitude would be more along the lines of "Oh no, poor guy. He couldn't get in to Mitsubishi."
Says Saito, "Factories are still humming ... the government works relatively well. Crime is relatively low." What's changed, he says, is "kind of a disease." The country has lost confidence, leading to less risk taking, fear of failure and ultimately, a lack of innovation.
The Japanese place high stock on what's called enryo, or restraint and reserve, says Heather Russell, the American-born founder of Rinkya, a website that provides online auction services for Japanese sellers on Yahoo auctions which has trumped eBay to become the go to auction site for Japan.
“The reason why we even exist," she says, "is because Japanese sellers refuse, most of them, to ship outside of Japan.”
Instead, Russell’s company, Rinkya does it for them.
“You don’t understand it – right? You cannot comprehend why they would not ship outside of Japan," she says. "In another country, it’s about, 'Ok, well, if you have the money we’ll go ahead and we’ll ship anywhere, we’ll do anything,'" she says. But not in Japan. "You could offer them one hundred times the cost of an auction, which we have done before. And they’ll be like, 'Oh sorry, I don’t want my item leaving the country.'" She continues, "They might have a confrontation, or they might have a problem, and so they just would rather not enter the realm of that being a possibility than, ship outside of the country."
Even teenagers in Tokyo, cultivating sulky looks and dyed hair, only smoke their cigarettes in designated smoking areas. Jaywalking is not cool. Trains are mostly silent — many riders are far too polite to talk on their cell phones. In Japan, you just want to fit in and avoid conflict. And that means not starting a company that could tank.
whatever
Smokers in Tokyo using a designated smoking area for cigarette breaks. Whether it's lining up politely for the subway or waiting for street lights to change (no jaywalking please!), the Japanese, at least in public, tend to be rule followers. (Sally Herships/Marketplace)
The cultural divide is so sharp that even new tech companies that do manage to make it off the ground can have trouble gaining traction with business partners more comfortable with Japan's traditional ways of working. Says Arnab Gupta, an independent consultant for healthcare and social infrastructure, who's spent much of his working life traveling between Asia and the United States, "There's a difference in commitment, and there's a difference in how fast things get done."
Take the traditional Japanese business email. "It starts off talking about the season," says Gupta. "It goes on about all these other things," and after meandering on for quite a bit more, "Finally there's like one line that is topical, which is like the reason why the mail has been written." But, he notes, that lengthy electronic mail is a much less successful strategy in the startup workplace where preferred communication is much likely to be trimmer. And more akin in style to something along the lines, or line of, "Like yo, let's get this done fast."
Then there's the issue of the level of dedication to the company expected from employees. Traditional companies, notes Gupta, will have dinner, or drinks in the evening, as well as other events and personnel will most likely be expected to attend. But again, different corporate strokes, for different folks. "I've seen cases where startup founders don't want to go to them," he says. "They feel that it's perfectly fine to just call them up and say, 'I'm sorry, but I've got other things to do so I can't make it.' And the shacho, the president, will be like, 'Is that like a form of a dis?'"
But, says Allan Bird, a professor of global business at Northeastern's D'Amore McKim School of Business, despite all of this, it's important to note that Japan is highly entrepreneurial, just in its own way.
“Within the context of a group,” he says.
The Japanese, says Bird, like consensus — working together. So Japanese startups are more likely to occur from within the warm embrace of a big company with resources to share. Sharp Electronics began in 1912 with a snap belt buckle, then, in 1915, introduced the Ever-Sharp, a mechanical pencil. Nissan was spun off from a mining company. All thanks to the power of the group.
"People misconceive — they think they do it as teams, but they're groups," says William Saito. "The Japanese are bad at team work," he says. "In team work, everyone is equal." Whereas in groups, "the communication and messaging is one way, very top down."
You can see the problem right at the source. Or, really, the source code. When programmers, working on those hot new apps, crunch out lines of text they include comments — sort of digital post-it notes meant to help team members navigate their way through all that Java or C++. Even genius programmers from Stanford need collaboration in order to succeed. But in Japan, the willingness to do just that can be very tough to find. Instead of helpful messages, says Saito, comments left by a Japanese programmer, accustomed to working solo, may be more likely to send a message like "Do not touch this code or I will kill you." Notes Saito, "source code is very telling. You can the tell personality of a country this way. This is the one thing that is really holding back Japan."
If you're a company and you know all this, instead, take advantage and make an entrepreneurial pivot. Change your strategy to adapt to the culture. If you can teach the Japanese to work in teams, he says, the Japanese will outdo you.
But be prepared. There's kotoba no kabe, the language barrier. And then of course, there's venture capital; another problem that translates in any language. Notes Bird, starting a startup in Japan can be four times as expensive as in the U.S.
And all of this culture and cash, or lack of it, leaves the country stuck in a kind of perpetual cyber-catch-22.
"In part, there aren’t more startups because there isn’t more venture capital," says Bird. "And if you ask why isn’t there more venture capital, it’s because there aren’t more startups. You can see how that gets to be a problem."
Silicon Valley appreciates a good failure. The Japanese...not so much.
400 scripted shows By some estimates, that's how many shows there will be by the end of the year. Great news for TV fans, bad news for critics. We took a look at what it's like to be a professional TV watcher at a time when there's so much to, well ... watch.
50 percent By Gary Hufbauer's estimate, that's at least how many of the Fortune 500 companies have experienced cyber attacks by China. He's an expert on China at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Chinese President Xi Jinping begins his visit to the U.S. next week in Seattle, but one thing you're unlikely to hear in official statements: anyone talking about the allegations against China.
7-2 That's the breakdown of a vote successfully won by a group of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to form a microunion within Target Corp's store in Brooklyn, New York. As Reuters reports, it's the first store to unionize in Target's history.
36 hours That's how long the Peace, an ad-blocking app, was the No. 1 app in the U.S. App Store ... that is, until its creator pulled it. In a blog post, Marco Arment, the app's creator, said he pulled the app because it blocked all ads indiscriminately, and he didn't feel good about "being the arbiter of what’s blocked." This following Apple's release of iOS9, which caused an uptick in interest in ad-blocking apps.
Here are the numbers we're reading and watching for Friday.
It’s one of those crazy J. Crew sales again where every pair of Alden and Alfred Sargent footwear works with a promo code. I know there are no exclusions because, well, I’m weird and decided to check every single model in stock.
Fun fact: total balance before I applied the promo code was over $11,000. J Crew warned me that my cart exceeded the international order limit of $10,000.
While this is a very rare discount on premium footwear, the shoes are still quite pricey after applying the promo code, ranging from $392 to $518. If that range gives you pause, it may be worth considering J. Crew’s in-house Ludlow shoes.
It’s already on sale, so it’s eligible for the 30% off tier, bringing it to $210. Do note that they’re final sale, so no returns.
There have been favorable comparisons to Alden (*skeptical eyebrow*), and a rumor that J. Crew’s person overseeing production in China used to work for Alden (*double skeptical eyebrow*). Whether or not one takes stock in that, I think $210 still sounds like a fair price to given the provenance of the suede uppers (well-regarded UK tannery Charles F. Stead) and generally positive online reviews of the boot.
For everyone just interested in Alden and Alfred Sargent, I’ve got direct links to all 21 models available on jcrew.com after the jump.
