Most Popular Editorials: Remote Work Is Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy

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Remote Work Is Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy From airlines to Starbucks, a massive part of our economy hinges on white-collar workers returning to the officeFor a decade, Carlos Silva has been gluing, nailing, and re-zippering shoes and boots at Stern Shoe Repair, a usually well-trafficked shop just outside the Metro entrance at Union Station in Washington, D.C. On a typical day, he would arrive at 7 a.m. and stay until 8 p.m., serving the crowds of professionals shuttling by on their way to work. But since the near-shutdown of office work and train travel, he has been closing the shop at 4 p.m. "There is no traffic, my friend. The whole station is dead," says Silva. "Now it's only a part-time job." In the five months since the coronavirus forced a lockdown of U.S. businesses, economists have focused much attention on the devastation of mom-and-pop businesses, brick-and-mortar shops, bars and restaurants, and massive chains. But they have mostly overlooked a looming threat to a vastly larger and more consequential galaxy of businesses, one worth trillions of dollars a year in GDP and revolving around a single, much underappreciated economic actor - the white-collar office worker. Continued here

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How to Blow a Presentation to the C-Suite Divya, a director who leads a large engineering team, was invited to a two-day retreat with the CEO and senior executives of her Fortune 50 company. She and 30 of her high-potential peers were excited to rub shoulders with the leadership team. The purpose of the retreat was to expose up-and-coming leaders to broader challenges, expand their network across silos, and, of course, give them an opportunity to connect personally with C-suite executives. The session kicked off with participants dividing into small teams to tackle company-wide strategic challenges. This was a rare opportunity to present directly in front of the CEO, so Divya and her teammates worked hard to research their assigned topic, frame the specific challenge, and debate different ideas and solutions. Instead of hanging out at the bar after dinner, they worked far into the night finalizing their presentation. Divya was selected as the spokesperson for her group, and the next morning, she made their pitch. The team's idea was met with a lukewarm reaction and what, at best, could be called a polite round of applause. Naturally, they were disappointed in the tepid response. Divya and her team are all smart, do great work in their current jobs, and have promising careers ahead of them. So, what went wrong? Continued here

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Research: Being Nice in a Negotiation Can Backfire Whether you are making a large purchase, working on a joint project, or discussing your next promotion, you\'ll likely need to negotiate. At a very basic level, in fact, nearly every interaction we have is a negotiation - an opportunity to persuade others to agree to an outcome we want. But what is the best way to go about persuading others? Should you be warmer or tougher? Friendlier or more aloof? Our recent research may provide the answer. Negotiation experts have long confirmed the intuition that being warm and friendly pays off at the bargaining table, leading us to gain concessions and capture a larger chunk of the value. A recent Harvard Business Review article entitled "How to Negotiate Nicely without Being a Pushover" made this point, as did legendary sports agent Ronald M. Shapiro\'s book The Power of Nice: How to Negotiate So Everyone Wins - Especially You! Similarly, in our own research, we\'ve found that people tend to believe niceness will buy them better deals. But when put to the test, this prediction turns out to be wrong. Continued here

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This incredible Google experiment lets you time travel to your hometown 200 years ago In the 20 years he\'d lived in New York, Raimondas Kiveris had seen the city change immensely. "It was a completely different place, a different town," says Kiveris, a software engineer at Google Research. This got him wondering what his neighborhood looked like even before that - before he\'d lived there, before he\'d even been born. "There\'s really no easy way to find that information in any organized way," he says. "So I was starting to think, can we somehow enable this kind of virtual time travel?" Three years later, his attempt at virtual time travel is taking shape as an open-source map that can show, in both a bird\'s-eye view and a pedestrian-level view, the changes that happen to city streetscapes over time. With a slider to control the year, the map displays a historically accurate representation of development in almost any U.S. city dating back to 1800. He and his team created it as an open-source project so that people such as librarians and map enthusiasts can contribute their own historical sources to add detail. It can even integrate photographs of buildings, using deep learning to analyze images and augment the blocky 3D models with architectural details. Continued here

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How to waste your career, one comfortable year at a time I recently saw this tweet asking people about their career\'s most expensive mistake. The most common one was people staying too long at their jobs and not switching sooner. I\'ve seen people make this mistake over and over. Hell, I\'ve made this mistake myself. Change can be scary. It requires you to get out of your comfort zone. But, in my experience, staying too long is one of the worst mistakes you can make in your career. Continued here

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To Control Your Life, Control What You Pay Attention To One of the best insights on what true productivity means in the 21st century dates back to 1890. In his book The Principles of Psychology, Vol.1, William James wrote a simple statement that\'s packed with meaning: "My experience is what I agree to attend to." Your attention determines the experiences you have, and the experiences you have determine the life you live. Or said another way: you must control your attention to control your life. Today, in a world where so many experiences are blended together - where we can work from home (or a train or a plane or a beach), watch our kids on a nanny-cam from work, and distraction is always just a thumb-swipe away - has that ever been more true? Continued here

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How to Get Rich By Losing Lots of Money: The WeWork story Adam Neumann is out of his WeWork job, but entrepreneurs will surely imitate him. HBO\'s Silicon Valley aired its final episode last year, the tech world\'s realities having gotten too dystopian to be fictionalized, in good conscience, for laughs. When a reporter asked what material the show had left on the table, the showrunners, Mike Judge and Alec Berg, admitted, "We missed the WeWork guy." That guy - WeWork\'s telegenic co-founder and former CEO, Adam Neumann - had once been known for turning an upscale co-working business into America\'s most valuable private start-up, peddling vague kumbayas like This decade is the decade of "We." But then WeWork filed paperwork to go public, revealing that the company had lost billions of dollars while enriching Neumann. Among other extraordinary disclosures, it turned out that he had bought we-related trademarks, then charged WeWork $5.9 million to buy them. The press soon uncovered other details to fill out the portrait of a terrible little richling: Neumann\'s practice of hotboxing chartered jets, whether his co-passengers liked it or not; his musings about becoming president of the world; his company-wide ban on meat that left executives puzzling over how to implement it. When life transcends art, tell it straight. Continued here

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The Best Investing Books for Every Kind of Investor What kind of investor are you? Do you like to pick stocks or would you rather own index funds? Are you drawn to technical work or do you prefer a great story? Does history excite you or are you obsessed with what is happening right now? Depending on how you answer these questions will affect what kind of investing books you might find most appealing. Unfortunately most articles on the "best investing books" don\'t provide any such differentiation. For this reason, I have compiled a list of the best investing books based on where you are on your investment journey. The list is a starting point for further exploration and should include a little something for everyone to enjoy. Continued here

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What B2B Companies Get Wrong About Volume Discounts I have a favorite client who always eggs me on to tell the "7-Eleven Big Gulp story" in meetings. "C'mon, tell it," he nudges. Often, I do. My friend's fascination with the story is well-founded. 7-Eleven does a fantastic job of employing volume discounts. Fountain drink sizes at the convenience store's Cambridge, MA location range from 16 to 32 ounces (priced from 99 cents to $1.39). While 16 ounces of soda - a Gulp - will satisfy my thirst, I inevitably purchase the 24-ounce Big Gulp because it's only 20 cents more. By lowering the price-per-ounce on larger sizes in a manner that mirrors my reduced willingness to pay for more soda, 7-Eleven entices me to purchase a bigger size. Squeezing me for an extra two dimes may not seem like much, but remember, fountain soda drinks are notorious cash cows. 7-Eleven reports that after introducing the Big Gulp line - which has included sizes as large as 128 ounces (Team Gulp) - profits from fountain drinks increased by close to 100%. Some 7-Eleven operators report that Big Gulp fountain drinks account for almost 10% of their stores' revenues. The moral of this story is clear: When properly implemented, volume discounts can unleash generous new profits and growth. Continued here

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The small-town takeout store worker who won over New Zealand -- and the world It's Friday night in the small town of Morrinsville and a handful of locals are waiting at the Golden Kiwi on the main street for a greasy parcel of fish and chips. It wasn't so long ago that Jacinda Ardern was behind the counter, taking orders at the nautical-themed takeaway joint. Now, the 40-year-old New Zealand Prime Minister is one of the world's most recognizable leaders. Throughout her three-year term, she's attracted headlines -- for being an unusually young Prime Minister, for giving birth while leading a country, for her empathetic handling of the Christchurch mosque attacks, and lately, for her swift, effective action against the coronavirus pandemic. That's given her an outsized profile for the leader of a country of 5 million people. She's graced the covers of Vogue and Time magazine and hosted American TV personality Stephen Colbert at her suburban Auckland home. Last year, she topped a survey of most trustworthy politicians -- in Australia. And, as she heads into this year's New Zealand's election on October 17, polls put her as one of the country's most popular leaders ever. Continued here

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How to build a data-driven company Creating a data culture is one of the keys to building a data-driven organization. The right technology, data literacy, and disrupting the status quo are ways to start. While transformations can be difficult, the value of embracing data is clear - which is why Cindi Howson, the chief data strategy officer at analytics platform provider ThoughtSpot, urges more companies to think about what\'s stopping them from becoming data-driven. Speaking in August at the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium, Howson said data-driven companies enjoy increased revenue, improved customer service, best-in-class operating efficiencies, and improved profitability. "It sounds like what we all want and why we collect data at all," she said. But according to a study from the Harvard Business Review, only 20% of companies are actually empowering frontline workers with data, Howson said. "That is an unacceptable situation for the state of the industry after 25 years. So, what does it take?" Continued here

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A Study of 2.7 Million Startups Found the Ideal Age to Start a Business (and It's Much Older Than You Think) If you\'re in your 30s or 40s (or even 50s) and you believe conventional wisdom, you might think the entrepreneurial train has passed you by and it\'s too late to start your own business. Wrong: A recent study conducted by the Census Bureau and two MIT professors found the most successful entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged--even in the tech sector. The researchers compiled a list of 2.7 million company founders who hired at least one employee between 2007 and 2014. The average startup founder was 45 years old when he or she founded the most successful tech companies. And in general terms, a 50-year-old entrepreneur is almost twice as likely to start an extremely successful company as a 30-year-old. (Or, for that matter, a successful side hustle.) Still not convinced? Check out these stats: Continued here

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Next Big Shift in Economics Takes Shape Under Covid Shadow A rare regime-change in economic policy is under way that's edging central bankers out of the pivotal role they have played for decades. Fiscal policy, which fell out of fashion as an engine of economic growth during the inflationary 1970s, has been front-and-center in the fight against Covid-19. Governments have subsidized wages, mailed checks to households and guaranteed loans for business. They've run up record budget deficits on the way -- an approach that economists have gradually come to support, ever since the last big crash in 2008 ushered in a decade of tepid growth. And the public spending that put a floor under the pandemic slump is increasingly seen as vital for a sustained recovery too. When it looks like drying up, as it did in the U.S. last week, investors start to worry. Continued here

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Forget about the "new normal": Design something different Five principles of service design, adapted for the COVID-19 era.How do you as a company leader design for this different world? When the ground shifts beneath you, the first thing to do is find a solid place to stand - and that is your value proposition. Customers come to you for a reason: because you're innovative or top-quality, because you're a one-stop shop, or because you build deep relationships. Yes, you need to both stress-test that value proposition and do a gut check on it, but in all likelihood, you'll reaffirm it. Now is not the time to change it. What might change, however, is how you deliver the value you promise, and that depends on five principles that translate a value proposition into the experience customers actually have. We first outlined these service design principles several years ago in "The art of customer delight." Today, we use the acronym SPICE, because they involve segments (which customers you serve), promises (the expectations you set), innovation (how you evolve and improve), coherence (how you orchestrate sales channels and ecosystem partners), and efficiency (how you become easy to do business with). When you apply them in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, they may lead you to new and different insights about how to design your customers' experience and employees' activities. Continued here

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Ikea seeks to disrupt itself before it is disrupted World\'s largest furniture retailer rolls out a series of experiments that could uproot its business model Just off Oslo\'s main shopping street lies an experiment at the heart of Ikea\'s attempts to disrupt itself before it is disrupted. Until recently the only way to experience Ikea was to travel to the outskirts of big cities, visit an enormous warehouse and transport the furniture home yourself to then spend hours assembling it. All that is changing, and the Oslo planning studio is just one in a bewildering number of experiments encompassing everything from renting out furniture to students to selling second-hand sofas. While at an early stage, the moves will provide a case study of a large company trying to rediscover the entrepreneurial spirit that brought it success. If scaled up, the experiments would potentially uproot a business model that Ikea has followed faithfully for seven decades. Continued here

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Mastering the building blocks of strategy Left unchecked, market forces continually conspire to deplete profits. Powerful business strategies can counteract those tendencies, but good strategy is difficult to formulate. Indeed, the latest McKinsey research (see "The strategic yardstick you can't afford to ignore.") finds that a very small number of companies create most economic profit. The research also shows that a significant number of good companies outperform even in so-called bad industries, where the average economic profit is less than the market average. How do they do it? In other words, where do powerful strategies come from? Sometimes it's luck, or good timing, or a stroke of inspiration. In our experience, it's also possible to load the dice in favor of developing good strategies by focusing on the core building blocks that often get overlooked. One is the need to gain agreement - before creating strategy - on the essential decisions and the criteria for making them. Another is to ensure that the company is prepared and willing to act on a strategy once it is adopted. Too much of what passes for strategy development, we find, consists of hurried efforts that skip one or more of the essentials. The resulting strategies are often flawed from the start. Continued here

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What's the Best Way to Create Long-Term Value? It\'s a well-known paradox. Most executives are committed to the idea of maximizing long-term shareholder value, but when they want to track and improve performance, they focus on a dizzying variety of short-term measures (and acronyms). ROA. ROC. TSR. EBIT. EBITDA. CAR. EPS. We could go on. Why this focus on short-term measures? In large part, because they\'re easy to obtain, easy to use, and have been widely used in the past. The problem, as studies have long made clear, is that optimizing short-term accounting measures and ratios often doesn\'t maximize long-term value. To think clearly and effectively about long-term value, companies need a better measure - and, as we write in a recently published article in the Strategic Management Journal, we\'ve devised one that we call LIVA, short for Long-term Investor Value Appropriation. The idea behind LIVA is simple: Add up the net present value of all the investments a firm has engaged in over a long period of time. The key insight from our analysis is that this can be done by using publicly available stock-market data. LIVA uses historical share-price data to calculate the value a company has either created or destroyed for its entire investor base over a long time period. Continued here