Business

Millenium-old mochi shop in Japan

In the year 794, Naomi Hasegawa's family started Ichiwa, a mochi shop, next to the Imamiya Shrine in Kyoto to feed pilgrims who had traveled to pray for pandemic relief. Over a millenium later, the shop still sells mochi to people struggling with a pandemic. How has it survived so long, through pandemics, wars, natural disasters, and the rise and fall of empires? By putting tradition and stability over profit and growth. 

The emphasis at Ichiwa is not growth. Profit is not the point. The point is to do one thing, and do it well. They focus on serving people and passing on the business to the next generation. Although it's not a dynamic business model, it obviously works. Known as shinise, these old businesses are a source of pride for Japanese.

Toyota's struggles with EVs

Toyota was the leader in eco-friendly hybrid vehicles for many years, according to ArsTechnica. The automotive company had a fuel-efficiency edge over its competition. However, it has recently struggled to compete with companies that sell electric vehicles such as Tesla, Nissan and Volkswagen.

Toyota has made two critical choices. First, it tethered itself to hybrids. Second, it bet its future on hydrogen. But now governments around the world are moving to ban fossil-fuel vehicles of any kind.

Workers struggling and burning out

Bloomberg News reports that according to Microsoft's Work Trend Index, which polled 30,000 people from a variety of companies in 31 countries and used trillions of data points, the majority of workers feel they are struggling or just surviving in pandemic work conditions and a large percentage are considering leaving their employer this year.

Nearly half of respondents said they are planning to move to a new location this year, which reflects the greater flexibility of working from home. Also, 41% of those surveyed said they're mulling leaving their jobs. The data found that burnout is widespread: 54% of workers said they are overworked and 39% said they are exhausted. 

The ego's effect on leadership

According to the Harvard Business Review, the higher leaders rise in the ranks, the more they are at risk of getting an inflated ego. The bigger their ego grows, the more they are at risk of ending up in an insulated bubble, losing touch with their colleagues, the culture and ultimately their clients.

An unchecked ego can warp our perspective, twist our values and corrupt our behavior. When we believe we’re the sole architects of our success, we tend to be ruder, more selfish and more likely to interrupt others. An inflated ego also narrows our vision. The ego always looks for information that confirms what it wants to believe. Basically, a big ego makes us have a strong confirmation bias.

The mission of the century

CNN reports that according to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), providing a single dose of a future coronavirus vaccine to all 7.8 billion people in the world will require the use of 8,000 Boeing 747 cargo aircraft, and that planning needs to begin now.

IATA's director general and CEO, Alexandre de Juniac, said in a public statement that "safely delivering Covid-19 vaccines will be the mission of the century for the global air cargo industry."

There are multiple vaccines being tested in human trials simultaneously around the world. Once a vaccine is approved for use, licensing and large-scale manufacturing will take place. However, without proper planning, these vaccines won't be able to fly the skies.

Venture capitalism and online games

Unable to hold face-to-face meetings with potential investors, venture capitalists are seeking new ways to meet start-ups, including a service which arranges virtual meetings inside the video game, Fortnite.

Matchbox.vc matches technology investors with start-up executives through video game sessions in the hopes that companies will find their dream investment.

“Games are an incredible way for people in tech to connect,” said the site's co-founder, Alex Walsh. “It's a lot less stressful since both parties are doing something they enjoy, making it perfect for a first meeting. It's just like any other activity that's been tangential to business for years, like golf, getting coffee, or going for a walk.”

No stars for Sukiyabashi Jiro

For many restaurants, receiving a Michelin star (or two, or three) is one of the best ways to gain world-class status in the culinary world. It is also guaranteed to attract international media attention and bring in new business.

Although it is extremely difficult to earn Michelin stars, the Japanese restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro has earned the maximum three stars every year since 2007. But things are about to change. It was recently announced that the restaurant will be left out of the 2020 Michelin Guide because it no longer accepts public reservations. Since Michelin’s aim is to introduce top-notch restaurants to the general public, Sukiyabashi Jiro no longer falls within their rating criteria.

Goldman Sachs addresses diversity

Goldman Sachs has instituted a new diversity program based not on quotas but on hard data trends that uncovered why even progressive recruitment out of college hasn’t solved the problem. Women and minorities, it turned out, even when hired at the same rates as their white male counterparts, kept falling out of the pipeline. Attrition was enormous.

According to the data, both populations were more likely to quit than their white male peers and were simultaneously more likely to be replaced by white men moving laterally from another company. Additionally, they were less likely to be promoted and less likely to even be considered for promotion.

Fast Fashion: Is it worth the cost?

It comes in red, mustard and black, in sizes 6 up to 16; the Boohoo minidress is, according to the online retailer, "perfect for transitioning from day to play". It is not so much the styling and colour, but the price of the £5 dress which attracts thousands of the thriving retailer's U.K. customers to buy it.

The £5 dress epitomises a fast fashion industry that pumps hundreds of new collections onto the market in a short time at pocket money prices. On average, such dresses and other products are discarded by consumers after five weeks. 

But behind the price tag, there is an environmental and social cost not contained on the label of such products. The textile industry creates more CO² a year than international aviation and shipping combined. It also creates chemical and plastic pollution—as much as 35% of micro-plastics found in the ocean come from synthetic clothing, not to mention the scrapped clothing piling up in landfills. 

Food collective you can trust

Seikatsu Club is a huge food cooperative, founded in 1965 by a group of women in Japan, which has exacting standards on everything from radioactivity levels to the number of additives in food.

Their initial focus was on bringing down the price of milk for households by securing bulk-purchase discounts. Fast-forward five decades and Seikatsu is now a sprawling operation of nearly 400,000 members (90% women) that runs its own milk factory and has food supply agreements with about 200 outside producers. In addition, some of the production is now done by workers collectives that are part of the cooperative.

One key tool for inclusion at work

The key to inclusion is understanding who your employees really are, particularly those in underrepresented groups. One of the best practices for this is to segment employee engagement survey results by minority groups.

Many organizations conduct employee engagement surveys, but most neglect to segment the data they collect by criteria such as gender, ethnicity, generation, geography, and role in the organization. By only looking at the total numbers, employers miss out on opportunities to identify issues among smaller groups that could be leading to employee turnover, as the views of the majority overpower those of minorities.

Tired? Maybe you're actually lonely

More and more people are feeling both tired and lonely at work. In analyzing the General Social Survey of 2016, close to 50% of people say they are often or always exhausted due to work.

What’s more, there is a significant correlation between feeling lonely and work exhaustion: the more exhausted people are, the lonelier they feel.

This loneliness is not a result of social isolation, but rather is due to the emotional exhaustion of workplace burnout. The problem seems to be pervasive across professions and up and down corporate hierarchies.

Loneliness, whether it results from social isolation or exhaustion, has serious consequences for individuals. Research by Sarah Pressman, of the University of California, Irvine, demonstrates that while obesity reduces longevity by 20%, drinking by 30%, and smoking by 50%, loneliness reduces it by a whopping 70%.

Big Four firms stop consulting

PwC and EY told a panel of British lawmakers they would mirror a change already underway at another Big Four accounting firm, KPMG, in a bid to end a “perception” of conflict between selling audit and consulting work to the same customer.

Consulting is better paid than audit work, raising concerns that an accountant won’t challenge a company’s management properly regarding an audit for fear of losing more lucrative advisory work.

KPMG said last November it would phase out advisory work for its British accounting clients as the Big Four faced calls from lawmakers to be broken up after the collapse of construction firm Carillion, which KPMG audited.

“We will do a ban on anything for audit clients other than audit related services,” Kevin Ellis, chairman and senior partner of PwC UK told parliament’s business committee.

Business for social change

Imagine the impact individual organizations could make if they teamed up to solve the world's most intractable societal problems.

That new mindset took center stage in Copenhagen at the inaugural global innovation lab, UNLEASH. There, a thousand carefully chosen, young social entrepreneurs came together from across the world to develop innovative approaches to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Multiple surveys show that public trust and confidence in government, business, NGOs and media is at an all-time low. Business, however, is considered the most likely of these groups to have a positive impact on the world’s most difficult challenges.

Some of the ideas for solutions to global problems at the first UNLEASH were:

7 Blockchain questions for the boss

Blockchain technology is still in its infancy but is growing at a rapid pace. It is hard to be an expert in the field, but you should at least know the basics. 

At the core, Blockchain uses a shared ledger managed by multiple computers that are networked. This is much different from current systems that rely on one central system with a database.

Leading companies advocating for and working on blockchain projects are IBM, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Intel. This will likely continue to grow to include smaller businesses as well.