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The sustainability boom has transferred trillions of dollars to environmental, social and governance funds, bringing new stakeholder-led agendas to corporate executive offices.
Today, the Big Four accounting firms are on the cusp of offering two fascinating opportunities. It’s an opportunity to expand what companies have to explain and rebrand their scandal-stricken professions as experts on climate change, diversity and consumer confidence. READ MORE
When Cowbell, a comfort food restaurant in New Orleans, started requiring proof of vaccination for indoor dining, some customers were less than thrilled.
Cowbell put the rule in place starting July 29, advertising the requirement with a sign on its door and a post to its website. A few weeks later, on August 16, New Orleans began requiring indoor diners to show proof of vaccination or a recent negative Covid-19 test. READ MORE
A delay in the delivery of Intel Corporation's exascale supercomputer to the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory has created a new opportunity for chipmaker rivals NVIDIA Corporation and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
On Wednesday, Argonne unveiled Polaris, a testbed supercomputer made up of 280 of Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Apollo Gen10 Plus systems and powered by 2,240 of NVIDIA's A100 Tensor Core graphics processing units and 560 of AMD's second- and third-generation EPYC processors. READ MORE
The US Department of Justice and the SEC on Wednesday charged the former CEO and co-founder of mobile development testing biz HeadSpin with defrauding investors.
The government's complaint [PDF], filed in a federal district court in San Jose, California, contends that Manish Lachwani, who helped found HeadSpin in nearby Palo Alto in 2015 and served as its CEO until May 2020, raised money by overstating the company's financial performance. READ MORE
Nearly 20 years after she founded Silicon Valley blood-testing company Theranos — which soared to a $9 billion valuation on claims that its machines could conduct a full array of tests on just a few drops of blood — Elizabeth Holmes’ meteoric rise and dramatic fall will be laid bare in federal court, exposing Silicon Valley’s most infamous startup failure.
Nationwide interest in the proceedings, one of the highest-profile criminal cases in Bay Area history, has been primed by two documentaries, a best-selling book and news that Jennifer Lawrence will star as Holmes in an upcoming movie. READ MORE
The debate over remote work, office culture, how to manage teams of distributed staff and the like continues. With the delta variant of COVID-19 pushing back office return dates for many companies, there’s still a healthy argument over what the future of work will look like.
But while large companies hem and haw their way through the present, it’s my view that the debate is largely over and that startups have won it. READ MORE
Facebook critics have cheered as the Biden administration trained its sights on the company for practices that federal regulators say invade people's privacy, unfairly squash rivals and more generally maintain its stranglehold on the social media world. The recently expanded lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission openly characterizes co-founder Mark Zuckerberg as an old-school monopolist, raising the hopes of detractors and rivals alike that the government may even push to smash his brainchild into pieces. READ MORE
It's time to stop forcing the vaccinated majority of Americans to accommodate those who refuse to take this simple step -- especially now that at least one Covid-19 vaccine has been fully approved.
The surge in infections caused by the coronavirus' highly contagious Delta variant has made it clear that the unvaccinated pose a deadly risk to others and themselves. Vaccinated workers, students, airline passengers and others who go out in public should not have to bear the risks and huge financial costs that the unvaccinated are imposing on society. READ MORE
Face masks are required again in major US auto factories and, according to Ford CEO Jim Farley, that has some workers deciding not to show up for work. In some factories, absentee rates can exceed 20%, he said in an interview with CNN Business.
"When a fifth of your workforce isn't coming in, in a manufacturing operation where everyone has their job and you don't know who's going to be missing every day, man, it's really challenging," Farley said. READ MORE
When Tim Cook took over as chief executive of Apple, it was a corporate transition unlike any other. He stepped out from the shadow of one of the best-known American CEOs and took the reins of one of the world's biggest tech companies facing some uncertainty about how much more successful it could be.
Ten years into the job, Cook now leads the most valuable company in the world — technology or otherwise — and it remains among the most influential. More than a billion people worldwide use its devices and tens of millions of developers have built businesses on its software platforms. READ MORE
The reopening of the world's third busiest container port in China is great news for global trade.
What's happening: The Meishan terminal at the Ningbo-Zhoushan Port in eastern China resumed operations Wednesday, ending a two-week long suspension after a dock worker tested positive for Covid-19. The closure was stressing tangled supply chains, as companies face sky-high costs and delivery delays 18 months into the pandemic. READ MORE
President Biden on Wednesday afternoon will host a White House meeting focusing on cybersecurity with the leaders of several industries.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy will be among the executives representing the tech sector.
Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, will represent he financial community. READ MORE
Tired of having to gaze at a screen for anything from a pub quiz to work calls, Anna Redman and her boyfriend headed to a wooden cabin outside London, locked their phones in a sealed envelope and spent three days off-grid earlier this year.
"It felt really appealing to not have access at all for a few days," said Redman, 29, who works in public relations and started to crave a "digital detox" as almost all her social contact shifted online during COVID-19 lockdowns. READ MORE
Gopuff, a startup that originally launched to offer hookah deliveries for college students and later food deliveries to help satisfy the munchies, is rapidly establishing itself as the future of the on-demand industry.
The Philadelphia-based company has announced raising billions of dollars from investors to grow its on-demand delivery business this year alone amid a pandemic-driven boom for online shopping. But it's also raising a familiar set of labor concerns in the process. READ MORE
The vast network of ports, container vessels and trucking companies that moves goods around the world is badly tangled, and the cost of shipping is skyrocketing. That's troubling news for retailers and holiday shoppers.
More than 18 months into the pandemic, the disruption to global supply chains is getting worse, spurring shortages of consumer products and making it more expensive for companies to ship goods where they're needed. READ MORE
Older Americans were more likely to retire during the coronavirus pandemic, which forced millions of workers out of the labor force during its peak.
At least 1.7 million more older workers than expected retired due to the pandemic as of the second quarter of 2021, according to a report released by the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. READ MORE
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, the way the sales function operates has looked very different, and sales teams have been forced to find new ways to connect with customers.
Organizations have responded by redoubling their investment in the salesforce: expanding the number of inside sales and hybrid roles, increasing financial controls such as performance thresholds and incentive pay gaps, and investing in technology and sales skill training, for example. READ MORE
Planning for the return to the office, Angi, the parent company of home-improvement brands Angi, HomeAdvisor and Handy, reduced the footprint of two of its three offices in the U.S. In doing so, it did away with all executive offices — including that of CEO Oisin Hanrahan — opting for an open plan, more space for collaboration and additional conference rooms.
As Hanrahan explained, the plan “lends itself to a flatter organization — it feels more approachable and breaks down barriers between the leadership and the folks who run the business.” READ MORE
With the latest wave of return-to-office delays from Covid-19, some companies are considering a new possibility: Offices may be closed for nearly two years.
That is raising concerns among executives that the longer people stay at home, the harder or more disruptive it could be to eventually bring them back. READ MORE
A majority of economists believe U.S. companies should require their employees to be vaccinated in order to keep their jobs or return to the workplace, according to a new survey released early Monday.
Conducted by the National Association for Business Economics, the survey shows that most of the group's members are in favor of requiring employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 before they return to the workplace, with 79% in favor of such a policy. Just 14% of respondents said they did not support mandated vaccines. READ MORE