Sometimes growing a brand means rethinking your leadership style.
Eileen Fisher ran into this problem as her eponymous clothing line approached $300 million in annual revenue. The company grew so big that she recently realized she needed to revise how it's run.
Fisher spoke to The Huffington Post's executive editor for impact and innovation, Jo Confino, at the Sustainable Brands conference in San Diego this week in the video below.
The clothing brand founder talked about the difference between what she called masculine and feminine leadership styles (around the 5:40 mark). Her company has recently become more masculine, she said.
"The feminine is more listening and receptive kind of mode. And I feel like that has sort of helped me hear others, and work with others, and create a collaborative and intuitive kind of environment," she explained.
"I think we've done really well with this sort of feminine model, but we've kind of hit a point where we're too big almost and we need more structure. I never use the word 'structure' -- and 'strategy.' Those are sort of masculine words to me," Fisher said.
By dubbing the two management styles masculine and feminine, Fisher noted that she didn't mean to suggest they align with actual gender: There are masculine and feminine traits in everyone. The masculine side values efficiency, she said.
Lately, Fisher said, the company has brought in more men. One man in particular started talking about the differences between masculine and feminine leadership styles. She said she hadn't thought about management that way before.
"I always saw things moving organically and fluidly and intuitively and all of that. But now we have to be efficient and we have to be effective and we have to be focused and we have to make decisions more clearly," Fisher said. "And we have to have more definition."
A Boston-area family is suing Panera Bread, claiming their highly allergic 5-year-old daughter was given two dollops of peanut butter in her grilled cheese sandwich despite repeated warnings to the restaurant of her allergy.
In a lawsuit filed against the chain last week, John and Elyssa Russo of Natick, Massachusetts, claim their daughter had to be hospitalized overnight after the family ordered a meal online on Jan. 28, The Boston Globe reports.
The Russos say they specifically noted their daughter's peanut allergy on the online order form, and so were mystified as to why the extra ingredient had been added to her meal.
“Is this somebody doing this on purpose?" John Russo later asked a manager at the Natick Panera, in his own telling. "Because it’s two freakin’ tablespoons of peanut butter on this sandwich and it’s a grilled cheese."
The Russos didn't realize there was peanut butter in the sandwich until the girl had already bitten into it. She vomited and broke out in hives later that evening, the family says.
Scott Olson/Getty ImagesA restaurant manager reportedly apologized for the mistake and blamed it on a "language" issue.
Russo said the manager apologized for the mistake and blamed it on a “language” issue.
A Panera spokesman declined to comment directly on the suit when reached by The Huffington Post Monday.
"Panera takes the issue of food allergens, including the reported incident at our franchise bakery-cafe, very seriously,” the spokesman said in an email. “We have procedures in place across the company to minimize exposure and risk for our guests and associates. We do not comment on pending litigation."
The suit was filed in Massachusetts' Middlesex County Superior Court on Thursday.
Customers at the American Diner in Liverpool, New York, know exactly where owner Michael Tassone stands politically.
Even the coffee is stirred to the right.
Fox News has called Tassone's eatery "the most politically incorrect diner in the Empire State -- and possibly the nation." It's not hard to see why: One of the breakfast items is a "Dictator Obama" special. You get eggs and toast for $3.59... plus an additional $27.99 "tax."
There is also the “Anti Michelle Obama, Don’t Tell Me What To Eat or Feed My Kids Burger,” a 16-ounce beef patty with bacon, cheese and a side of fries for $11.99.
The menu includes a list of various statements above the burgers: "Everyone Doesn't Get The Same Size Trophy"; "Defeat socialism and communism"; "Actually, I did build MY business"; "Gov't & Taxes are the problem"; "We don't like Political correctness or special interest."
But Tassone, 48, is facing accusations of hypocrisy after pleading guilty to defrauding the government of more than $23,000 in benefits between May 2009 and April 2011, Syracuse.com reported last week.
Tassone admitted to offering a false instrument for filing, a misdemeanor. He paid $23,354 in restitution to the county.
Tassone was originally charged with welfare fraud and Medicaid fraud in 2011, according to McClatchy News. Prosecutors said Tassone and his wife, Michelle, failed to disclose income on their application and received benefits they weren't eligible for.
For his part, Tassone says the truth is more complicated.
He said he and his wife applied for Medicaid and welfare years ago, before he opened the diner.
"We were between jobs and I needed a safety net for my sick wife," Tassone told The Huffington Post. "I qualified, but there was a technicality. My wife didn't check the right box."
"It wasn't welfare fraud," he said, "which is why it was only a misdemeanor."
Michael Kasmarek, the senior assistant district attorney for Onondaga County, agrees that calling it "welfare fraud" may not be completely accurate, since there is a separate statute for that crime.
"Putting that label on it is problematic, but the conduct did violate those statutes," Kasmarek told HuffPost. "We negotiated down to the misdemeanor because he paid the money back prior to the plea and [because of] a lack of criminal history."
Tassone said he only agreed to the charge because he had no more money for attorney's fees and didn't want to risk being tried by a jury of people who are "not of my peers and risk losing the business and putting seven people out of work."
He accused the district attorney's office of going after him because of his beliefs.
"Guys like me are a target," Tassone told Syracuse.com in March. “Because I speak the truth.”
Kasmarek said that no one in his office was aware of the business or of Tassone's political views until the restaurant received national attention for its quirky menu earlier this year.
The American Diner currently has a three-star rating on Yelp, based on 49 reviews.
One reviewer, who gave the place four stars, said, "I even was shocked by the menu because there was so many political remarks that it made me feel awkward but no denying the food was good."
Tassone said he may make his views clear on the menu, but his diner is a place for open discussion.
"We have a lot of fun here," he said. "A lot of liberals order the Michelle Obama burger."
Just in time for summer comes more evidence that the four-day workweek is good for your work and personal life.
The boss of a Vancouver-based company describes in The Wall Street Journal how he was close to total burnout five years ago. Then he made a decision that changed everything: He would take Friday as a "free day" and not work.
Brian Scudamore, who is chief executive and founder of home services company O2E Brands, also decided to designate Mondays as "think days," when he works from home and takes no meetings.
But taking off on Friday was the most important thing he did, Scudamore writes in the article. "[Fridays are] days where I do what I love -- skiing with my children, cooking, learning languages and biking," the 40-year-old says. "When I’m away from the office, things have time to marinate. Connections bubble up and often turn into big, business-changing ideas."
Scudamore's company encourages employees to set their own schedule, too, O2E brand publicist Sarah Gray told The Huffington Post. "We can pick our own schedule -- come in when we want and leave when we want. It's not a culture of 'clock watchers,' " Gray said in an email. "We're more about setting/achieving our goals than we are about hammering home a 9-5 workweek."
O2ECEO Scudamore out biking and not working.
There's loads of research out there that demonstrates that working longer hours is bad for your health. Working more means that there's less time to exercise, de-stress and sleep, among other things. And that causes real, physical damage. Those who work more than 55 hours per week have an increased risk of stroke compared to those who work less than 40 hours, according to a major analysis of studies that NYMag.com's Science of Us blog cites.
"Overwork and the resulting stress can lead to all sorts of health problems, including impaired sleep, depression, heavy drinking, diabetes, impaired memory, and heart disease," said Sarah Green Carmichael in Harvard Business Review last year.
Long hours are particularly hard on the health of lower-income workers, research shows. They already have more stress just coping with the anxiety of making ends meet and are even more vulnerable to the health risks that overwork brings on.
Overworked, unhealthy employees also cost companies more to insure, are absent more often and their work isn't that hot either.
Though your boss may think that working longer hours is a sign you're working super-hard and productively, the truth is managers don't often haven't a clue about who is really productive. You can't judge someone's performance by how frequently they're spotted at their desk.
The higher-ups at one consulting firm had no idea that some of their best workers were only pretending to put in 80-hour workweeks, according to a widely cited study from Erin Reid, a professor at Boston University's business school.
Scudamore says that taking Fridays off has helped him think more creatively. Anyone who's ever had an amazing idea while in the shower or just taking a walk can surely relate to this.
And it's not just knowledge workers who see benefits from working less. A century ago, Henry Ford cut worker shifts in his automobile plant to eight hours from nine (and doubled their pay) -- and business boomed.
Some companies are already on board with the notion of a shorter week. Basecamp, a Chicago-based software company, does four-day work weeks in the summer. A design firm in Indiana is only open Monday through Thursday because its founder believes his workers are more motivated, according to a piece in CNN Money. The article says that about 14 percent of small companies offer employees a chance to work a compressed four-day week.
If you're at a company who hasn't yet seen the light, feel free to send a link to this piece to your boss. Good luck. (Yes, I wrote this on a Friday, but I do plan to leave early. Baby steps.)
This is an apartment listing San Francisco residents can only dream about: $150 for a brand new, three-room apartment with a “tremendous fireplace.” Yes, it’s real -- or it was in 1961. Today, a one-bedroom at the same address rents for $2,800 a month.
Credit: Eric FischerA 1961 listing for an apartment found in the San Francisco Chronicle.
In recent years, there’s been growing concern about San Francisco’s skyrocketing housing prices, fueled by the tech industry’s boom and too-small supply for the growing population. It’s the most expensive rental market in the country, with the median one-bedroom apartment renting for over $3,500, according to this month’s report from real estate site Zumper. Residents have been beset by evictions and rent hikes (sometimes in the triple digits) -- making offbeat “solutions” like living in a truck, tent or wooden box almost seem reasonable.
But the crisis can be traced back decades, as recently illustrated in a blog post that offers a data-driven perspective on the extent and length of the problem.
Eric Fischer, a developer and data artist at Mapbox, analyzed thousands of apartment listings going back to 1948. Though there have been some deviations, he notes, rents have gone up about 6.6 percent annually since the 1950s, or 2.5 percent when inflation is taken into account.
“Today's outrageous prices are exactly in line with the 6.6 percent trend that began 60 years ago,” Fischer wrote on his blog, Experimental Geography.
Prices began rising when the city ran out of large areas of vacant land, Fischer said.
Fischer’s analysis began with a conversation on Twitter about the number of kitchens allowed in apartments, which sent him to the library to look up an obscure zoning rule. While he was there, he came across other documents about neighborhood revitalization and housing.
“It was just remarkable reading this thing from 1968, basically about gentrification in the Mission,” he told The Huffington Post. “It just became apparent pretty quickly that these trends in housing prices and gentrification and all these issues, we think of them as new issues, but they’ve been going on for decades.”
Fischer used a combination of sources to track rent over the years. He modeled his data after the San Francisco Housing DataBook, which tracked rents advertised in the San Francisco Chronicle on one day each year between 1979 and 2001. He used archives of Craigslist postings for the later years, and, most impressively, scoured microfilm and page scans of the Chronicle from 1948 to 1979, transcribing prices from 12,000 ads. The below image shows a few listings for furnished apartments in a 1961 issue of the Chronicle.
Fischer also used city records to graph housing inventory, as well as federal data on wages and number of employees as a stand-in for the health of the economy and the pool of people who need housing. Comparing supply and employment with rents, his models show that rising housing costs are driven by increasing wages, but increasing housing supply appears to moderate rent growth.
Fischer analyzed how rents could hypothetically go down, based on his model. Assuming you don’t want to lower wages or employment, rolling back to the inflation-adjusted rents of 1995 (half of current costs) would require increasing the housing supply by 30 percent.
But that’s not realistic, he points out, “because the necessary construction rates were never achieved even when planning and zoning were considerably less restrictive than they are now.”
Keeping rents steady would currently require increasing the housing supply by 5,700 units, or 1.5 percent -- more than triple the rate of growth since 1975.
“Whatever the goal ought to be, it is a long way away,” he wrote.
Fischer stresses that his analysis is just a model (see more details on his blog) and that it still doesn’t explain a few outliers, like a 1998 dip in rents. But it’s a valuable look at a problem that has no clear solutions -- one report projects 10.5 percent rent growth by the end of the year -- and he provides the raw data for others to analyze.
While there are many people pushing for easing restrictions on development and for more housing to be built in the Bay Area, others oppose it. Some people believe that a wave of high-rises would transform the character of San Francisco. Other groups worry that new construction caters to the wealthy, and increasing housingdensity will displace lower-income residents.
Fischer said his data predicts that, at the very least, increasing the supply of housing at any price point won’t make rents go up.
"I think that it's getting people talking quantitatively about what the solution might be, which I think is as good of a [result] as I can hope," he said. "I'm just trying to do my part to make information available. Hopefully, if we all pool our thoughts on this, then we can figure it out."
A proposed statewide plan aimed at increasing housing would eliminate some of the hurdles developers have to jump through, with particularly big changes to the process in San Francisco. The city is considering proposals to increase both density and affordability of housing.
Fischer has seen the effect of the housing crisis first-hand since he moved to California in 2000 -- first to San Francisco, then Oakland.
“Housing was shockingly expensive and unavailable in 2000 and feels like it has been getting worse ever since,” he wrote in an email. “I am insulated from the direct problem now myself, except that it's hard to imagine how it would ever be possible to move again.”
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Kate Abbey-Lambertz covers sustainable cities, housing and inequality. Tips? Feedback? Send an email or follow her on Twitter.
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Related stories:
Million-Dollar Homes Are Taking Over These U.S. Cities At An Alarming Pace
How Sky-High Rents Are Radically Changing New York’s Neighborhoods
The Cities Where A Six-Figure Income Is Barely Enough To Get By
New York City Just Took A Huge Step To Tackle Obscenely High Rents
How The Eviction Epidemic Is Trapping Black Women In Poverty
Housing Programs Are So Strapped For Cash That Millions of Families Can’t Even Get On Wait Lists
Renters Are Mostly Screwed, But Here’s One City That’s Actually Affordable
Standing desks. Love 'em or hate 'em, there are plenty of articles to back up whatever opinion you have.
On the one hand, studies have shown that standing desks could help reduce your risk of obesity and diabetes. On the other, experts have said standing desks don’t help with weight loss and could give you back problems, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Now, another study has come out, this one in favor of standing desks. Researchers at the Texas A&M Health Science Center found that standing desks helped employees get more done during the day. Though the results might not translate for all types of work environments, they should give standing desk proponents reason to rejoice.
Published last week in the journal IIE Transactions on Occupational Ergonomics and Human Factors, the study followed 167 employees in a call center over six months. Seventy-four of them used standing desks, and researchers found that they were 46 percent more productive than those who sat at their desks.
The participants' employer, a health services company that's not named in the paper, commissioned the study to better understand the returns on the standing desks it had bought for the office.
Productivity was determined by the number of successful calls to clients that the health and clinical advisors made per hour. The company earned revenue for each successful call, during which an advisor checked in on a client’s progress in an exercise program, for example, or verified to see that a client was taking proper medication.
Employees typically made between 400 and 500 calls a month, and the company wanted them to average around two successful calls each hour. Those who had standing desks met that quota, while those who remained seated averaged 1.5 successful calls per hour, Gregory Garrett, a public health doctoral student and lead author on the study, told The Huffington Post. If an advisor was unable to reach a client over the phone, that was counted as an unsuccessful call.
Interestingly, the people who stood actually made more phone calls than the ones who sat, Garrett said.
The results almost seem too good to be true -- after all, who wouldn’t want a nearly 50 percent boost in productivity just from using a standing desk?
Even the researchers were a little baffled by what they saw.
“My first thought was, ‘This couldn’t be right,’” Mark Benden, who leads the Ergonomics Center at Texas A&M and was a co-author of the study, told HuffPost. “I would expect the public to raise an eyebrow, and that’s okay. But this wasn’t a snapshot. This was every day, every call, every worker for six months.”
While these results might be unique to a call center or other types of offices where employee productivity is easily quantifiable, the researchers say that cognitive performance can still benefit from less sedentary behavior.
“Standing has a positive impact on an individual’s cognition, and that could be transferable” to other types of work environments, Garrett said.
The researchers add that their findings could help give companies more concrete evidence of the value of their investments in standing desks.
“How do you justify ‘this desk makes me feel happier, and I feel better’? That’s not going to pay the bills,” Benden said.
But, he continued, the study shows that standing desks can in fact "affect a company’s bottom line. That’s really significant.”
The rules for dressing for the office are completely different for men and women.
Perhaps no two people better exemplify the double standard than the most well-known executives working at Facebook: cofounder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, known for wearing the same grey T-shirt and jeans every day, and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who is typically seen perched atop towering high heels.
Sandberg is arguably the most influential female executive in Corporate America, inspiring (or pissing off) many women with her book Lean In. Her frank openness about dealing with the sudden death of her husband last year was both heartbreaking and admirable. She's incredibly successful by every measure.
Yet on Wednesday, while watching her talk to Recode's Kara Swisher and Facebook Chief Technology Officer Michael Schroepfer, I caught myself staring at her shoes. Just look at them:
Here's a closer look:
Facebook/Recode
I couldn't help but marvel at the fact that while Zuckerberg slomps around in super-casual clothes every day, Sandberg is smartly decked out in full corporate power garb: towering, patent leather, red peep-toe heels.
Here's a pair of shoes Sandberg wore to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.
Ruben Sprich / Reuters
And another from the power confab:
Ruben Sprich / Reuters
Here's a photo of Mark Zuckerberg's closet:
Here he is speaking at a recent conference in San Francisco:
Stephen Lam / Reuters
You get it.
To be sure, these two are an extreme example. Sandberg, who holds an MBA from Harvard, is a seasoned executive and considered to be the "adult" in the room who brings balance to Zuckerberg's more introverted personality. And of course, nobody is forcing Sandberg to wear her (extremely stylish) stilettos.
Still, their case highlights the fact that even in the tech world, where the concept of dressing down was invented, and even at Facebook, a progressive company run by a guy in jeans, women and men don't quite play by the same rules.
Women can't just roll out of bed, toss on yesterday's jeans, brush their teeth and do well at work. If they do, they'll struggle in the professional world. One woman I spoke with recently, who works at a private equity firm, told me that she wasn't taken seriously at work until she started wearing stilettos.
In fact, women who spend more time grooming -- including efforts like putting on makeup -- are promoted more often and make more money than their bare-faced colleagues, according to one recent study.
“Although appearance and grooming have become increasingly important to men, beauty work continues to be more salient for women because of cultural double standards with very strict prescriptions for women,” the paper says.
So if you're looking to be the next Sheryl Sandberg, better bust out that lipstick and heels. You'll be be spinning your wheels without them.
