Business

Amazon.com Inc. spent its first day as the owner of a brick-and-mortar grocery chain cutting prices at Whole Foods Market as much as 43 percent.

In a sign of how the retailer is changing, the Amazon Echo, a voice-activated electronic assistant, was also for sale, for $99.99—a sharp pivot into electronics for a company known for kale and quinoa. The Echo Dot, a smaller version, was advertised for $44.99.

Uniqlo has made the most of inexpensive labor in Asia to become a leading global SPA player. But making goods overseas is not necessarily compatible with responding quickly to customer needs. That is why the company is rethinking the typical approach of churning out products in emerging economies.

To more swiftly respond to customer needs, the company is working on a system for sending out goods in as few as 10 days. To achieve that, airplanes will be essential, although costly.

Not every product needs to be delivered by air. But how to decide which item, and how many, should be shipped via plane? That is what the Ariake office is working on. It has established a system that suggests the best course of action after factoring in such variables as production status, inventory level, shipping time, shipping capacity for surface and air options, and delivery to the store.

At SoftBank Group's annual shareholders meeting in Tokyo on Wednesday, founder and chief executive Masayoshi Son said: "Some say SoftBank is a mobile phone company, but that's wrong [...] We are an information revolution company. A cellphone is just a device. From now on, we will be in an age where all infrastructure will be connected by information networks."

Son has about 30 targets lined up in emerging sectors such as artificial intelligence, robotics and the internet of things. SoftBank, he made it clear, intends to be at the forefront of all these fields.

Amazon Japan aims to build a team of 10,000 independent couriers in the Tokyo region by 2020 to continue offering same-day delivery service without relying on major parcel delivery companies.

In Tokyo, the epicenter of demand, private couriers will be organized by logistics company Maruwa Unyu Kikan, which handles deliveries for such clients as online grocers. The company will take on Amazon's same-day delivery by organizing a team of independent couriers and outsourcing the work. It has already begun the same-day service in some parts of Tokyo's 23 wards.

Maruwa aims to fence in private couriers by strictly regulating work hours while guaranteeing steady work and revenue. It will also offer worker dormitories, fuel discounts and training. When necessary, it will also rent out mini-trucks that are easy to drive even in metropolitan areas and will encourage new drivers to sign on.

A growing number of companies are combining vacation and sick time into one bucket called "paid time off", or PTO.  Employees will decide whether they're going to use the days for vacation, when they or a relative are ill, or for family events.

According to a report from World at Work, an association of human resources professionals, 51 per cent of private companies, including small and mid-size businesses, offered PTO last year.

One of the biggest pluses about PTO for small business owners is eliminating the administrative chore of tracking how many sick days versus vacation days their employees have used. That can be particularly helpful in the growing number of states, counties and cities where employers are required to allow staffers to accrue sick time, usually up to 40 hours a year depending on how many hours they work. With PTO, there's no need to track hours worked or accrued.

In April 2017, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here's what they said: "We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance."

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined,and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.