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Comment from thebrackpipe.com: More fallout from Obama’s poor understanding of how businesses and economies work.
Article below by Sherrie Conroy as it appeared in MedTech Insights:
Now that the medical device tax has been implemented and device makers have already made their first payment to the IRS, the focus has turned to getting this thorn in their side repealed. They have gained some support in that effort, and AdvaMed says that legislation introduced in the US House of Representatives shows the growing bipartisan support for repealing the medical device tax.
“The momentum from the last Congress is carrying over with a broader array of champions working to defeat this terrible tax,” says AdvaMed president and CEO Stephen J. Ubl. “On both sides of the aisle, members of Congress know the device tax hurts our economy, kills jobs, and slows the march of medical progress needed to fight disease and reduce long-term health costs. The medical technology industry is united in its commitment to repeal this tax and appreciates the leadership shown in Congress to continue the effort.”
Reps. Erik Paulsen (R-MN) and Ron Kind (D-WI) reintroduced the House repeal bill with more than 175 co-sponsors, including 20 Democrats. Ubl praised Paulsen and Kind for working together on the repeal effort. “Patients, the healthcare system, and the American economy are winners when legislators work together like this. America’s medical technology industry looks forward to assisting in this important repeal effort,” Ubl says.
According to AdvaMed, the tax has already led to layoffs, reductions in planned facility expansions, and other cost-cutting measures, which the association blames for stunting economic growth, impeding innovation, and affecting patient care. Studies show the tax threatens up to 43,000 jobs nationwide.
The medical technology industry helps employ more than 2 million people in the U.S., and salaries in this sector are 40 percent higher than the national average.
Comment from thebrackpipe.com: More douchebaggery from one of America’s biggest banks. Now, does J.P. Morgan snatch ‘supreme douche’ status from Goldman Sachs? You be the judge.
Article below by Dan Fitzpatrick, Scott Patterson and Gregory Zuckerman of the WSJ:
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. brushed off internal warnings and misled regulators and investors about the scope of losses on its “London whale” trades last year, according to a scathing Senate report.
One risk gauge at the largest U.S. bank projected in February 2012 that the firm could lose $6.3 billion on the trades. But the warning was dismissed by a key risk manager as “garbage,” according to the 301-page report by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The New York company’s trading losses ultimately exceeded $6 billion.
The report, the product of more than 50 interviews and a review of 90,000 documents, found that the bank ignored alarms triggered weeks and in some cases months before Chief Executive James Dimon dismissed concerns about them as a “tempest in a teapot” on an April 13, 2012, earnings conference call. “While we have repeatedly acknowledged mistakes, our senior management acted in good faith and never had any intent to mislead anyone,” J.P. Morgan said Thursday.
The Senate effort is the first comprehensive account of an episode that has hit the company’s reputation for risk management, which once was viewed as the best on Wall Street. J.P. Morgan’s board halved Mr. Dimon’s 2012 pay following the trading losses, even as the company posted a record profit of $21.3 billion.
In an unrelated move, on Thursday the Federal Reserve cited the company for weaknesses in its capital planning and said J.P. Morgan would have to resubmit this year a plan to expand its share buyback and raise its dividend.
Senate investigators “found a trading operation that piled on risk, ignored limits on risk taking, hid losses, dodged oversight and misinformed the public,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.), head of the subcommittee, in a press briefing Thursday.
The panel’s report, which includes 1,654 footnotes, details several episodes previously reported by The Wall Street Journal—including the doubts and reservations of the J.P. Morgan trader nicknamed the “London whale” and pressure exerted on him to boost valuations on the losing positions.
The report shows that traders at the bank’s Chief Investment Office were highly paid. Former Chief Investment Officer Ina Drew was paid a combined $29 million for 2010 and 2011. Achilles Macris, the trader in charge of the unit’s Europe operations, pulled in $31.75 million over the two years, and Bruno Iksil, nicknamed for his large trading positions, made $14.1 million.
On Friday, several J.P. Morgan officials who oversaw the trades, including Ms. Drew, will testify before the Senate panel. While Mr. Dimon won’t testify, Mr. Levin said at the Thursday press briefing that the subcommittee might hold additional hearings.
The panel will also question officials with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the bank’s front-line regulator, including its head, Thomas Curry.
Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), ranking member of the subcommittee, said the firm “misled investors and the American taxpayer,” calling the losses a “massive failure not only by J.P. Morgan but also by the federal government.”
An OCC spokesman said in a statement Thursday that the regulator recognizes “shortcomings” in its supervision and is taking “steps to improve our supervisory process.”
The Chief Investment Office, which manages the bank’s excess cash, was a little known profit center that pulled off winning trades through the financial crisis and into 2011.
But then a group of traders in its London office, which included Mr. Iksil, started building a complicated position in indexes that track the health of a group of companies. That bet morphed into a hard-to-unwind position that led to losses starting in January 2012.
In mid-March 2012, Mr. Iksil called the positions “more and more monstrous” and referred to the values the company had booked them at as “idiotic,” according to recorded conversations released by the panel. Another trader told Mr. Iksil that the outcome of the trading would be “a big fiasco” and “big drama when, in fact, everybody should have…seen it coming a long time ago.”
Later in March, Mr. Iksil became despondent as the losses mounted. “It is over/it is hopeless now…I tell you, they are going to trash/destroy us,” he says in one message to a colleague. Ms. Drew also became alarmed as she learned that the size of the positions was growing. “Ina is freaking,” said one risk manager, referring to Ms. Drew.
Ms. Drew and lawyers for Messrs. Iksil and Macris couldn’t be reached for comment.
J.P. Morgan has acknowledged in its own reports on the trading fiasco that some expressed concerns about the portfolio as early as January 2012 and traders placed inaccurate values on certain positions as they debated the size of the losses in late March and early April.
But the Senate report alleges that traders began hiding these losses as early as January 2012 and the bank didn’t have a problem with how the positions were being treated. A May 10 internal assessment from the bank’s controller concluded that the pricing decisions were “consistent with industry practices.”
J.P. Morgan has acknowledged it didn’t have the necessary limits in place to catch the mounting problems.
But the Senate panel concludes J.P. Morgan disregarded multiple warnings. Of the five big risk measures that are tracked almost continuously at the bank, all five were breached during the first three months of 2012. From Jan. 1 through April 30, the measures were breached more than 330 times.
In February 2012, a warning system known as the Comprehensive Risk Measure showed the portfolio could incur a yearly loss of $6.3 billion, the report said. Peter Weiland, who at the time was a top risk executive called the $6.3 billion estimate “garbage” in an email to one trader. But the head of the bank’s model risk group, C.S. Venkatakrishnan, defended the model and attributed the sizable figure to the additional positions taken in the portfolio. He communicated that in an email to Ms. Drew and chief risk officer John Hogan, among others.
On April 10, when the total losses in the portfolio climbed above $1 billion for the first time due to a one day loss of $412 million, Chief Financial Officer Douglas Braunstein said to Mr. Hogan in an email: “A bit more than we thought.”
Mr. Hogan replied: “Lovely.”
The OCC told the panel that J.P. Morgan provided “material misrepresentations” about the size of the losses and denied the positions had been valued unfairly despite disputes with counterparties about prices assigned to certain positions. Mr. Dimon was aware of the disputes, the panel’s report said.
Dr. Ben Carson seems like a real stand up man with real conviction and real character.
Another post-CPAC interview with Dr. Ben Carson. Discusses Obama, repealing Obamacare, courage, and more.
Comment from thebrackpipe.com: Hmmm, not quite sure what to think about this one. I’m concerned that the insurance companies were so influential in getting this fee added… for employers or beneficiaries to absorb. Thoughts? Please comment.
Article below by Janet Adamy of the Wall Street Journal:
Employers are bracing for a little-noticed fee in the federal health-care law that will charge them $63 for each person they insure next year, one of the clearest cost increases companies face when the law takes full effect.
Companies and other plan providers will together pay $25 billion over three years to create a fund for insurance companies to offset the cost of covering people with high medical bills.
The fees will hit most large U.S. employers, and several have been lobbying to change the program, contending the levy is unfair because it subsidizes individually purchased plans that won’t cover their workers. Boeing Co. and a union health plan covering retirees of General Motors, Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler, among other groups, have asked federal regulators to exclude or shield their insurance recipients from the fee.
Insurance companies, which helped put the fee in the law, say the fee is essential to prevent rates from skyrocketing when insurers get an influx of unhealthy customers next year. The fee is part of a new insurance landscape created by the health law that will forbid insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.
The $63 fee will apply to plans covering millions of Americans in 2014. It applies to employers that assume the risk for workers’ medical bills, and many private plans sold by insurers. The fee will be smaller for 2015 and 2016, though regulators haven’t set those amounts.
Few noticed the fee when the 2010 Affordable Care Act passed. Employers have spent recent months trying to peel it back, but final regulations published Monday in the Federal Register left it largely intact.
“It’s caught most employers, if not all employers, by surprise,” said Steve Wojcik, vice president of public policy at the National Business Group on Health in Washington, which represents large employers. “They’re very upset about it.”
The fee comes on top of other costs employers expect to face. Proponents of the law say it eventually will lower employers’ health costs by expanding insurance coverage to 30 million Americans, meaning employers won’t subsidize their unpaid medical bills.
Administrators for employee health plans have warned federal regulators they could pare insurance benefits to absorb the fee. Some benefits experts expect employers will at least partially pass on the $63 to workers.
Boeing estimates the fee will apply to about 405,000 workers and dependents it insures, costing the Chicago-based plane maker an estimated $25 million in 2014. The company spends $2.5 billion annually on health and insurance-related benefits.
Doug Kight, a Boeing vice president of strategy, compensation and benefits, told Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius in a December letter the aircraft maker was “concerned about the significant cost impact” of the fee. Among other things, he effectively asked her to reduce the levy to account for the fact that Boeing’s workers aren’t part of the insurance system that can tap the reimbursement fund.
The UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust, which covers 806,000 retirees of General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and their dependents, asked HHS to exempt all its beneficiaries from the levy. It argued the trust, which is independent from the auto makers, shouldn’t face the fee because its plans operate under terms set in federal district and bankruptcy courts in 2009.
The top lobbying groups for large employers, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, also voiced concerns about the fee and asked regulators to delay its collection.
In the regulations published Monday, HHS declined to whittle down the levy for firms such as Boeing, citing the law’s requirements. It said the fee wouldn’t apply to the plans of retirees whose primary coverage is Medicare, which would exclude many retired autoworkers, but it declined to categorically exempt workers in court-structured benefits plans.
A Boeing spokesman said the final regulations don’t appear to address the major issues it raised with regulators. A spokeswoman for the UAW trust declined to comment.
Federal regulators say they have heeded employers’ complaints about the fee and tweaked details of the program. They opted to collect the levy nationally instead of through each state, moved the collection date to the end of next year and calculated the fee on a per capita basis instead of as a percentage of premiums.
“We’ve tried to really work with the employers and issuers in trying to make the application of this program as least burdensome as possible,” said Michael Hash, director of the HHS Office of Health Reform.
In 2014, insurers will be able to tap part of the $25 billion to offset medical costs from high-risk individual-market consumers that total between $60,000 and $250,000 a year. Employers and other insurance issuers will pay $63 in 2014 for every worker, spouse, child and certain retirees they cover.
Of the fees collected, $20 billion will go toward paying high medical claims. HHS says the remaining $5 billion will be used to retroactively offset an earlier program that reimbursed employers insuring early retirees through 2011. Under that program, Boeing received $50 million and the UAW trust received $387 million, according to a federal summary of the payouts.
A Boeing spokesman said the retiree program “was not advertised as a program prefunded by the government to be paid back at a later time,” and that the law’s net financial impact on Boeing is negative. The UAW trust declined to comment.
HHS says the high-risk program will lower premiums for people who buy plans through the individual insurance market by between 10% and 15%. For insurance plans overall, the fee is expected to raise premiums next year by about 1%, and less in the subsequent two years of the program.
Insurance companies defend the fees, saying they will indirectly benefit employers. Companies subsidize the cost of caring for the uninsured by paying higher medical and insurance prices for workers. Moving high-risk consumers into insurance policies will minimize that problem, they say.
These uninsured “had been the individuals going to the emergency room,” said Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, an insurer trade group in Washington. “The employers definitely were picking that up.”
Other health plans that tried and failed to win a federal exemption from the fee include so-called multiemployer insurance plans, which are jointly run by unions and employers. About 20 million Americans are covered by such plans. Federal regulators told these plans they lacked the authority to exclude them from the levy.
Those who sought an exemption include several benefit funds covering New York home-care workers, dietary aides and nursing assistants who belong to the Service Employees International Union. The funds, which insure 331,000 people, predict the fee will cost them $21 million next year.
Eliminating life insurance and vision benefits would offset only half the fee, the funds said in a December letter to federal regulators. Trustees would have to eliminate the entire durable-medical-equipment benefit to come close to offsetting the additional cost.
“The funds would be bearing additional costs without gaining any additional protections,” said Mitra Behroozi, executive director of 1199 SEIU Benefit and Pension Funds, in her letter to regulators. Through a spokeswoman, Ms. Behroozi said the fund won’t follow through on cutting benefits, and that regulators addressed some of their concerns.
The benefit fund for 1199 SEIU received $4 million from the health law’s early retiree program. Ms. Behroozi said through the spokeswoman that “the funds will still pay millions of our members’ dedicated health-care dollars in fees to the individual health-insurance market that would otherwise be used for their own coverage.”
Article below by Tony Schwartz from the Harvard Business Review:
For more than a decade now, I’ve struggled to define what fuels the most sustainably productive work environment — not just on behalf of the large corporate clients we serve, but also for my own employees at The Energy Project. Perhaps nothing I’ve uncovered is as important as trust.
Much as employers understandably hunger for one-size-fits-all policies and practices, what motivates human beings remains stubbornly complex, opaque, and difficult to unravel. Perhaps that’s why I felt so viscerally the shortsightedness and futility of Marissa Mayer’s decision to order Yahoo employees who had been working from home to move back to the office, and Hubert Joly’s to do the same at Best Buy.
Here’s the problem: Employees who want to game the system are going to do so inside or outside the office. Supervising them more closely is costly, enervating, and it’s ultimately a losing game. As for highly motivated employees who’ve been working from home, all they’re likely to feel about being called back to the office is resentful — and more inclined to look for new jobs.
At its heart, the problem for Mayer and Joly is lack of trust. For whatever reasons, they’ve lost trust that their employees can make responsible adult decisions for themselves about how to best get their work done and add value to the company. Distrust begets distrust in return. It kills motivation rather than sparking it. Treat employees like children and you increase the odds they’ll act like children. You reap what you sow — for better and for worse.
As an employer, I stay focused on one primary question about each employee: What is going to free, fuel, and inspire this person to bring the best of him or herself to work every day, most sustainably? My goal is to meet those needs in the best ways I can, without undue expense to others.
In the end, I’m much less concerned with where people do their work than with the value they’re able create wherever they happen to do it. The value exchange here is autonomy (grounded in trust) for accountability.
As CEO, I myself work from home for an hour or two in the mornings most days because it’s quiet and free of distractions. I find it’s the best way for me to get writing and other high-focus activities accomplished, and I know that’s true for many other business leaders.
One of the senior members of our team is a 35-year-old woman with three children under the age of nine. She lives 90 minutes from work. I’d love to have her at our offices every day, because I enjoy being able to interact with her around issues as they arise. I also just like having her around as a colleague.
But to make that possible she’d have to invest three withering hours commuting each day — a huge cost, not just in time, but also in energy, for work and for her family. Demanding that she make that trip every day would only prompt progressive fatigue, resentment, and impaired performance.
Instead, we settled from the start on having her come to the office two days a week, which is when we schedule our key meetings. Those days also provide time for spontaneous brainstorming of ideas across the team.
Another one of our team members, a woman with two teenage kids, travels frequently in her role. When she gets back from trips, she typically works from home the next day — both to recover, and to have more time for her family.
Two of our other staffers — one male and one female — work mostly at the office out of personal preference, but also have young kids and work from home on some days when their kids are on vacation, or get sick.
Two younger, married team members recently requested permission to move to Amsterdam for eight months — for no other reason than they wanted to experience another culture. For a moment, I bridled. But since technology makes it possible for them to do their jobs from anywhere, we were able to make it happen. They agreed to work during our regular office hours, and to visit our office for a week every two months. So far it seems to be working seamlessly.
Every one of these people is highly productive. I do have moments when I find myself wishing all of our team members were in the office more, and even wondering what they’re doing when I haven’t heard from them.
When those feelings arise, I take a deep breath and remind myself that my colleagues are adults, capable of making their own decisions about how best to get their work done, and that all good relationships involve some compromise.
It gets back to trust. Give it, and you get it back. In over a decade, no employee has ever chosen to leave our company. The better you meet people’s needs, the better they’ll meet yours.
http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2013/03/treat-employees-with-trust.html
Highlights of article below from thebrackpipe.com: “The last time the Dow hit a high, in 2007, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank were already collaborating on a global economic bailout, and Bear Stearns collapsed six months later. Before that, the high was in January 2000, only about three months before the market started a long, ugly downward slide in the wake of the tech boom. Go back further, in 1987, when the Dow hit a temporary high before the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s hit. In 1966, the Dow hit 1,000 and by 1967 the economy began a long downward slide into the stagflation of the 1970s and the recession of the early 1980s.
None of that, however, beats the Dow’s high in September 1929, just weeks before the giant crash that ushered in the Great Depression. The Dow cannot defy gravity. The higher it rises, the harder it will fall.”
Article below by Heidi Moore in New York:
There is only one thing you need to know about finance: the stock market is not the economy.
This is worth remembering, because the stock market has been turning in some seductive performances, while the economy has been languishing. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hit a new high of 14,222 today; if it remains that lofty throughout the day, it will beat the previous high of 14,164 on 9 October 2007.
Inevitably, seeing numbers like the Dow rise should feel good. Our gross domestic product isn’t going up, having barely scraped out 0.1% last quarter. Our personal income isn’t going up, as wages are stagnating. Our employment numbers aren’t going up, as we’re still short three million jobs lost in the recession. Our 401Ks are dispersed through the stock market and it’s nice to feel a little rich, or at least better off. When many of the major economic indicators provide only a wheezing malaise, the Dow high provides a little spot of irrational exuberance that is a welcome antidote.
But don’t trust the Dow. It doesn’t have your best interests at heart. It lies to you. It’s that narcissist who’s always preening and trying to look powerful when in fact it barely deserves an invitation to the party.
Most Americans know that the Dow is composed of a basket of 30 industrial stocks that are largely impervious to the struggles of ordinary Americans. If you separated these stocks, their rise would not be exciting. It’s hard to picture a family driving back from the food bank – poverty is also at all-time highs in America, by the way – chanting “three cheers for Alcoa! Let’s hear it for Caterpillar!” Americans, no matter how patriotic, don’t pull out the pom-poms when it’s a good quarter for Cisco. We just wait quietly for the riches to trickle down, for the companies to start hiring and for the rest of us to feel rich.
That trickle-down is not happening, and we know it’s not happening. Companies are sitting on $1.4tn of cash, according to the Federal Reserve. “That number, a record high, equates to almost 9% of US GDP,” wrote JP Morgan strategist Michael Hood in December. “The cash stockpile has not risen enormously over the past year but it is roughly double the amount from 10 years earlier.”
Hood explains: it’s not that companies are hoarding money; it’s that they are making so much money there aren’t enough places to spend it. American companies are in a golden age of profitability, even as the unemployment crisis continues and many ordinary Americans find it difficult to either save or borrow money. That hasn’t changed for three years, and there’s no reason to believe it will.
There are other reasons not to get too excited about the Dow. The most important is that the Dow is not “the market”, no matter what you may read. The Dow is composed of 30 stocks; they’re not the biggest or most significant 30, so you won’t see Google or Apple or Amazon there. They’re also picked to give a sickly-sweet picture of health. The Dow stocks are not representative of both good and bad; when they start to stumble or go through big corporate changes, like Kraft, AIG and Citigroup did, they get kicked out of the index.
The stock market is much larger than that, and a better measure of its health is the S&P 500 Index. The S&P 500 doesn’t tell the same story as the Dow. It is struggling a bit more. It is like a tightly coiled spring, in the words of ConvergEx Group chief market strategist Nicholas Colas.
Colas argues that the markets are “sleepwalking”, aided by investors who have been “lured into a quiescent state thus far in 2013”. He worried in a research note this week that the rally in the markets is based on a certain level of delusion, a wilful ignorance of potential shocks from the European crisis as well as the fact that corporate earnings aren’t growing fast enough to justify the huge jumps in stock prices. The fiscal cliff, the Italian elections, and the sequester have all passed with barely more than a sigh from major stock market indices like the S&P 500. That demonstrates that the “market” is not paying attention – and when it does, watch out.
There’s another reason to take the Dow’s move upward with a grain of salt: what goes up, must come down. Historically, just when the Dow looks to have hit its most enthusiastic highs, a crash is around the corner.
The last time the Dow hit a high, in 2007, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank were already collaborating on a global economic bailout, and Bear Stearns collapsed six months later. Before that, the high was in January 2000, only about three months before the market started a long, ugly downward slide in the wake of the tech boom. Go back further, in 1987, when the Dow hit a temporary high before the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s hit. In 1966, the Dow hit 1,000 and by 1967 the economy began a long downward slide into the stagflation of the 1970s and the recession of the early 1980s.
None of that, however, beats the Dow’s high in September 1929, just weeks before the giant crash that ushered in the Great Depression. The Dow cannot defy gravity. The higher it rises, the harder it will fall.
So when the Dow is high, you should smile – briefly. Then duck.
Article below by Penelope Trunk (from her blog http://blog.penelopetrunk.com):
I’m at my son’s cello lesson, thinking about this week’s Time magazine. Sheryl Sandberg’s on the cover.
I never used to write about women on my blog. I wrote for three national magazines about careers before I even acknowledged that I was a woman aside from saying
1. I got the column because I was a woman running tech companies. (Rare back then.)
2. I got a promotion because I leveraged the sexual harassment my boss dished out in order to climb the ladder (around him).
Other than that, I tried very hard to not mention women. I could see that women who had kids got very little respect at the office and I stayed away from them. I only hired men. Even after I had kids, I only worked with men.
Now I’ve downshifted, and I’m home with my kids. I tried to make it not a big deal that I downshifted. I kept saying that I was going to launch a new startup. But then I found myself literally scared to death of going back to 100-hour weeks.
I write that: 100-hour weeks, and I almost don’t believe it. Because it would mean that I was literally never with my kids. But it’s true.
One of the nannies I had during that period still sees my oldest son. She is one of those professional nannies—she always works for women with huge jobs, and she couldn’t stay with me after I cut back to 60 hours a week.
She and my older son are still very close. I was having ice cream with the two of them and she started talking about a family that had a bunny and the bunny was lonely and needed a friend, but they couldn’t just buy another bunny. You have to introduce the new bunny to the old bunny to see if they are friends.
So I said, “Did it work out?”
She said, “What? Don’t you remember? It was your house! The bunny was eating the carpet and right before we brought the second bunny, your bunny died.”
I don’t remember. I do remember that we had a five-bedroom house that I didn’t have time to furnish so we bought animals for each room: the bunny room, the cat room, the ferret room, etc. (You can see why I ended up with a farmer.)
What I am trying to tell you is that you really do not see your kids if you have a very big job.
So I’m sitting in a cello lesson taking notes on measure sixteen even though I don’t read music. And I’m terrified every time my son finishes a song ahead of schedule because it means we’re one day closer to having to make the eight-hour trip to cello lessons three days a week instead of two.
I can’t stop thinking about Time magazine. Sheryl Sandberg is such an incredibly aberrant example of women at work that I just don’t get how she’s on the cover. She is great. Smart. Driven. I get it. I am doing a life that she would hate. I thought I was a high performer, but Sheryl Sandberg has no time for people like me. I spent so many years working hard to get to the top, but the truth is that I’m not even close. I was never in the running. I am nothing like Sheryl Sandberg.
My friend sent a link to me about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Actually, it’s about Jacqueline Reses. Mayer runs products and services at Yahoo. Reses runs everything else. So the edict for no telecommuting came down at Yahoo signed by both of them. Reses lives in New York City with her husband, Matthew Apfel, who has a big job at CORE Media Group, and her three, school-aged kids. And she commutes to Yahoo’s offices in California. Sunday night she goes to California and Friday she flies home. No telecommuting for her.
Which drives home to me that the women at the very top all do not see their kids. We just don’t hear about it. Why would we? Why would they talk about about it? It doesn’t help their career and it doesn’t help their kids.
I can’t get angry about these women. I just need to remember that I am not close to being able to compete with them. The high performers in corporate life are so much more focused than everyone else in the workforce that it’s time we stopped selling a false bill of goods; almost no one can be so singularly focused to get to the top of anything. Including corporate America. Yet we keep talking to kids and each other like anyone can do it.
Most kids cannot have huge jobs. They will be the workplace equivalent of intramural basketball players. When they grow up, they will find work that is fine, just like it’s fine to play on a team with the kid across the hallway even though he misses too many lay-ups.
Sheryl Sandberg gives up her kids like movie stars give up food: she wants a great career more than anything else.
You know all the stuff people write about how really skinny women in magazines makes girls feel anxious and not worthy? Do you know how women lose weight for the Oscars? They want to have a great Hollywood career more than anything else. That’s what seeing Sheryl Sandberg on the cover of Time magazine does to me. Do you know what I want more than anything else? For people to think I’m doing well. In my career.
You can kill me now. Because I hate when I coach women who tell me they want the world to see them as a successful in their career. I tell them, “Well, you’re not doing all that well, because you made choices that did not get you a very good career. But you have other things.”
I tell people this so easily on a coaching call. And many women cry. I understand. Respect is always relative. It’s like money, there’s always someone who gets more. There’s always someone who makes the amount you have look like nothing.
Most women are past the idea that they measure themselves by money. But women are instead using respect as our measuring tool, which is just as dangerous. Because respect is relative, we don’t control it completely, and it doesn’t come along with choosing the job of raising kids.
Comment from thebrackpipe: Are you kidding me? Marissa Mayer built a nursery in her office so she could bring her new son to work but she denied the entire rest of the company the ability to work from home!!! This woman is out of control!
Article below from the Daily Mail:
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer built a nursery in her office so she could bring her baby to work, which has angered some stay-at-home employees following her demand that all remote workers report back to the office.
The former Google Inc. executive took the demanding top job at Yahoo! when she was five months pregnant and stirred up controversy when she took only two weeks of maternity leave after giving birth last fall.
But at her own expense, Mayer built a nursery adjacent to her office to be closer to her son.
‘I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set em up in the cube next door?’ the husband of one remote-working Yahoo employee asked in an interview with AllThingsD‘s Kara Swisher.
Many employees are upset because they don’t have the money or clout to build their own nurseries at work. And many assume Mayer has a whole team of people, from nannies to cooks and cleaners, helping her raise her son – after all, she does have a $5 million penthouse atop the Four Seasons hotel in San Francisco in addition to her $5.2 million 5-bedroom home in Palo Alto.
But Mayer has demanded that all remote employees report to office facilities by June 1.
‘Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,’ read the memo to employees announcing the change. ‘We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.’
The move will only impact a small percentage of the company’s workforce, primarily customer service representatives or staffers who work in cities where Yahoo does not have an office.
The order is described as harsh since it requires employees to ‘either comply without exception or presumably quit.’
‘Many such staffers who wrote me today are angry, because they felt they were initially hired with the assumption that they could work more flexibly. Not so, as it turns out,’ Swisher wrote in a blog posting about the change expected to impact several hundred workers.
Yahoo! declined to comment for this story, saying it won’t discuss personnel matters.
One Yahoo! employee said she worries that Mayer’s actions could set a damaging standard for working mothers across all industries.
‘When a working mother is standing behind this, you know we are a long way from a culture that will honor the thankless sacrifices that women too often make,’ a Yahoo! staffer told Swisher.
Some former Yahoo! employees agree with Mayer’s new policy, however, arguing that some stay-at-home workers were trying to ‘milk’ the system.
‘I agree with what she did,’ a former online editor at Yahoo! told Huffington Post on the condition of anonymity. ‘Many workers were milking the company… There was a ton of flexibility, and I remember several times going to ask my manager a question — and he was nowhere to be found.’
Another former Yahoo! employee recalled a similar situation at the Internet company in an interview with Business Insider.
‘For what it’s worth, I support the “no working from home” rule,’ a former online engineer told the news site. ‘There’s a ton of abuse of that at Yahoo… people slacking off like crazy, not being available, spending a lot of time on non-Yahoo projects.’
The company headquarters is located in Sunnyvale, California, near San Jose. The public corporation employs 11,500 people in more than 20 countries across the globe.
The 37-year-old Silicon Valley whiz kid was appointed the head of Yahoo in July 2012.
She was brought to the internet giant to re-energize the tech company founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in 1995.
Though Yahoo!, which stands for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle, is one of the most visited websites on the Internet, it had started to lose its way as a company before she was brought on the team.
The upbeat blonde was seen as a breath of fresh air and morale booster.
She instituted free lunches at the company headquarters and started giving out smartphones to employees.
‘I want Yahoo to be the absolute best place to work, to have a fantastic culture. We’re working really hard right now to remind people about all the opportunities that are there,’ she said shortly after she was hired at a Fortune magazine event in November.
With all the hype over her hiring, it came as a bit of a shock when she revealed that she was pregnant the day she was appointed head of Yahoo.
Much in the vein of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Mayer has unabashedly said that her job is not her number one priority in life.
She boldly revealed that her most significant concerns were ‘God, family, and Yahoo! – in that order.’
Given that she has stated she personally prioritizes her faith and family before her job, some see it as hypocritical that she has pulled the plug on flexible working arrangements which provides work-life balance for many.
Tech companies are noted for offering creative work arrangements and were pioneers in offering the option for staff to check in remotely.
Richard Branson, head of Virgin Group, said the move by Yahoo! undermined the trust that staff would get their work done wherever, without supervision, as working is no longer 9-5.
‘This seems a backwards step in an age when remote working is easier and more effective than ever,’ Branson wrote in a blog on the Virgin website.
‘If you provide the right technology to keep in touch, maintain regular communication and get the right balance between remote and office working, people will be motivated to work responsibly, quickly and with high quality.’
Britain’s BT Group, one of the first UK companies to adopt teleworking, said about 69,000 of its 89,000 staff were equipped to work flexibly of which about 9,400 are home workers.
The company said this led to benefits like accommodation savings, increased productivity and reduced sick absence, adding 99 per cent of women returned to BT after maternity leave.
‘Our flexible working policies can also achieve a better balance between work and family commitments, which can be especially important for those with young families or caring responsibilities,’ a BT spokesman said.
Now some wonder if Yahoo! has learned a lesson and that the work from home option was too good to be true.
It remains to be seen if other tech firms will similarly yank the flexible work arrangement, which may leave many employees in the lurch who have grown accustomed to that lifestyle.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2284828/Yahoo-boss-Marissa-Mayer-angers-employees-building-nursery-baby-office.html#ixzz2N42gNbwW
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