How to Best Use Data to Meet Your DE&I Goals

In 2014, several large tech companies including Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft started releasing annual diversity reports detailing their workforce composition. The data themselves were not cause for celebration: The reports showed that women made up approximately 30% of the overall workforce and between 15% and 20% of the technical workforce of these companies. Blacks and Hispanics were represented in the low single digits, on average. READ MORE

The Future of ESG Is … Accounting?

While sustainability has become a central concern of many managers, investors, and consumers, a major sticking point remains for the ESG movement: There are still no universally adopted standards for how companies can measure and report on their sustainability performance. Instead, we have a large number of NGOs working independently to develop standards for sustainability reporting, which is creating complexity and confusion for companies and investors. But this might be about to change, thanks to a quiet revolution in the accounting community. READ MORE

Amazon to roll out tools to monitor factory workers and machines

Amazon is rolling out cheap new tools that will allow factories everywhere to monitor their workers and machines, as the tech giant looks to boost its presence in the industrial sector.

Launched by Amazon’s cloud arm AWS, the new machine-learning-based services include hardware to monitor the health of heavy machinery and computer vision capable of detecting whether workers are complying with social distancing. READ MORE

Elon Musk warns employees Tesla's stock could 'get crushed like a soufflé under a sledgehammer'

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is telling his employees they need to cut costs or they can kiss its lofty stock price goodbye.

Tesla (TSLA) shares have been among the best performers in 2020, rising nearly 600% through Tuesday trading, making it among the most valuable stocks in the country, worth more than any major automaker. After years of losses Tesla has now reported five straight quarters of positive net income. READ MORE

Will California ever get fed up with losing to Texas?

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the California firm that literally kickstarted Silicon Valley in a garage in 1939, is moving to Texas. The low-key announcement was made via an SEC filing on Dec. 1.

If California’s anti-jobs policies, its high taxes, capricious regulatory enforcement, and blackout-inducing energy policy can chase out the company that launched Silicon Valley, is any business, large or small, immune from pressure to move? Unless a company must directly serve the California market, such as a fast-food chain, the answer is a resounding “No!” READ MORE

‘Good riddance’: Tech’s flight from San Francisco is a relief to some advocates

When Chirag Bhakta saw a headline recently that said tech workers were fleeing San Francisco, he had a quick reaction: “Good riddance.”

Bhakta, a San Francisco native and tenant organizer for affordable housing nonprofit Mission Housing, is well-versed in the seismic impact that the growth of the tech industry has had on the city. As software companies expanded over the past decade, they drew thousands of well-off newcomers who bid up rents and remade the city’s economy and culture. READ MORE

Whole Foods CEO slams socialism as 'trickle-up poverty': 'It doesn't work’

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey slammed socialism as “the path to poverty” and defended capitalism as the “greatest thing humanity’s ever done” during a recent interview.

Mackey, who is worth an estimated $75 million, made the remarks last week to the American Enterprise Institute while discussing the culture of business leadership and how he believes it needs to change to help better elevate humanity through business. READ MORE

Jeff Bezos Says There Are 2 Kinds of Failure and You Should Only Tolerate 1

If there's one thing just about every super successful entrepreneur out there can agree on (besides a love of books), it's that failure is a necessary part of creating anything new and worthwhile. From Richard Branson to Elon Musk to Sara Blakely, just about every billionaire you admire has offered advice on how to get more comfortable with failure so you can achieve more. READ MORE

America’s unique brand of entrepreneurism is, and always has been, a source of hope for the future

Many of us started the new decade with high hopes and renewed aspirations, and instead, this year delivered a devastating blow. For all the setbacks and losses we’ve experienced, a brighter future remains. We can still look forward to a thriving entrepreneurial environment and fruitful innovations that can continue to improve lives and open new opportunities and horizons. READ MORE

A Guide to the performance management revolution

Forward-thinking companies understand the true potential of performance management, which cannot be achieved by a once-a-year appraisal and a rating created from the top down. By shifting traditional performance management to continuous performance management—built on a foundation of regular check-ins, ongoing feedback, and frequent recognition moments—companies can optimize performance by enabling employees to achieve more with the support of their peers and manager. READ MORE

Anyone Can Learn to Be a Better Leader

When you’re an individual contributor, your ability to use your technical expertise to deliver results is paramount. Once you’ve advanced into a leadership role, however, the toolkit that you relied on to deliver individual results rarely equips you to succeed through others. Beware of falling into the logical trap of “if I can do this work well, I should be able to lead a team of people who do this work.” This would be true if leading others were akin to operating a more powerful version of the same machinery you operated previously. But it’s not; machinery doesn’t perform better or worse based on what it thinks about you and how you make it feel, while humans do. READ MORE