#because of a problem THE CEO caused by driving us into the ground financially

[tiny-feisty-gay]

jobs will say they're disability friendly until you actually need them to be friendly about your disabilities

jobs will say they're mental health friendly until you actually have to miss work for it

jobs will say they support you taking time off until you actually do it

capitalism is a sham and employers do not and will not ever care about you, and if you're chronically ill, sucks to suck

i have an average of 1.5 absences a month and i'm tardy an average of twice a month, and somehow that's still too much.

18 absences in a year if i go at the current rate. 18. out of the 208 days total that i work (4 on, 3 off, with a 3 hour commute each direction.) 18. days. of absences. and that's too many.

and god forbid i be more than 15 minutes late.

[pandoradeloeste]

Let’s Go Steal A Dystopia: a proposed season 6

(partially inspired by my state being on fire and my country shooting noncombatants in another country with tear gas)

TL;DR: Season 6 is about the actual building of Leverage International. Step 1: do not post the Black Book to the dark web with no context or groundwork. (Guess which step Hardison skipped.)

Season 6 opens with a 30-second recap of the last scene in The Long Goodbye Job: the team gathers around the hard drive containing the Black Book, Hardison talks about putting it on the dark web and building Leverage International, Eliot promises to take care of them until his dying day, and we have the overhead shot of Nate and Sophie leaving with Parker’s line about being OK playing over it.

SMASH CUT to the trio parkouring through a not-quite-dystopian Portland street. Parker is grim and no-nonsense, and has none of the joie de vivre that usually accompanies her skilled physical work. Hardison is holding a tablet and frantically hacking as he runs. Eliot does his best to keep rioters and security mooks from attacking Parker and Hardison. As they reach their destination, Eliot pulls out a gun and methodically shoots the mooks who are about to reach them. Parker and Hardison watch Eliot for a second and share a look that says that this isn’t the first time he’s shot someone on a job since Moreau, and they know what it costs him.

The job for the first two episode is fairly simple, something like “a CEO is holding my husband hostage to make me program a bad thing, help me get him back”. The job takes two episodes and we don't actually see much of it, because we have a lot of worldbuilding to get through. The episodes are structured like an episode of Lost, where a lot of the time is spent in flashback to what happened when the team assumed that Leverage International would just happen on its own when they declared open season on the corporations that caused the financial crisis. 

With no organization, it was every thief and team for themselves, leading to complete chaos. Teams got in each other's way, starting fighting among themselves, some of the more amoral people saw the Black Book as an opportunity to exploit corporations' weaknesses and grab power for themselves - it’s basically Game of Thrones by way of Shadowrunners. Meanwhile corporations, who have various world governments (including our own) in their pockets, complain that they’re under attack, and governments respond by removing constraints on corporations (goodbye antitrust laws and consumer protections) and restricting civil rights in the name of “security” - basically the authoritarian bullshit we’re seeing with Trump but turned up to 11. People protested, which made the government crack down harder, and the cycle continued until the US now has fully militarized police using sonic cannons and live ammunition against anyone they think is antifa, and not even pretending to do actual police work anymore.

(And oh yeah, climate change is still happening, probably not being helped by the Louvre and most of Portland burning down.)

Within the team, things are not looking good. The trio is keenly aware that their weaknesses helped create their current global crisis.

Hardison did what he was warned not to do: he got overconfident and made a mess, and then tried to fix it alone and made it bigger, until it was so big a team of three couldn’t contain it. When he’s not trying to put out fires, he’s paralyzed and obsessing about the body counts in Turkey and Estonia, the arrest rates in NYC, the migrant caravans at multiple countries’ borders being met with tear gas and bullets, etc.

Parker hasn’t learned how to be a leader so much as as the team member that comes up with the plan, but she knows it’s her responsibility to do something about the mess they made, and it turns out that being your romantic partner’s boss is Really Fucking Hard. She’s spent the last year making all the rookie leadership mistakes and swinging back and forth between authoritative and lax, micromanaging and overly hands-off, accidentally favoring Eliot and then Hardison, and stressing herself out until she occasionally has to run off and steal some diamonds solo to chill out.

Eliot. Sweet, loyal, gruff Eliot “I said I would take care of you till my dyin day and dammit Hardison I meant it” Spencer. He’s tried to pull the other two out of their guilt and shame spirals too many times to count, and he’s running himself into the ground trying to keep them safe while they try to fix the world, while also run some more mundane Leverage, Inc. jobs on the side (mostly on his own because the other two are too focused on their global crises and personal failings). A few months ago, after they narrowly escaping one of the police militias, Eliot came to the conclusion that the only way to keep his promise to Nate and Sophie was to start carrying a gun again. The only thing keeping him upright and fighting is his determination not to abandon Parker or Hardison.

During the first job of season 6, something happens to snap them out of it (I’m a fan of the “one team member has a meltdown that triggers catharsis for the whole team” method). Somehow they pull each other back, recommit to holding each other accountable and making each other better ("for better or worse we change together") and start actually building Leverage International.

It's slow going because whoever came up with the phrase about herding cats clearly never tried to get forty of the best criminals in the world, only half of whom speak English, to work together. First there's the logistical problem of finding them and getting them together (Tara and Quinn are gone, nobody knows where Nate and Sophie disappeared to, Archie died before things got really bad, and Hardison can't talk about Cha0s without breaking something), then getting them all to agree to the same principles and values. It’s basically several episodes of The Nigerian Job, but in multiple languages and a lot more in-fighting. The finale is a big ambitious job taking down a large company, maybe Wakefield, that solidifies the international team.

Seasons 7 and 8 are the "let's go steal a capitalism" seasons. This is when the major powers (US, Russia, China, EU, etc) have basically given up all pretense of governing, and it's up to Leverage International to basically perform a dozen coups all at once and rebuilds them as socialist states with better antitrust laws, universal healthcare, strategies to rein in climate change, and free housing. I’m bad at building utopias, though - I’ll let someone else plot that out.

[khalilhumam]

Around the halls: Brookings experts on the new Center for Sustainable Development

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/around-the-halls-brookings-experts-on-the-new-center-for-sustainable-development/

Around the halls: Brookings experts on the new Center for Sustainable Development

By Amar Bhattacharya, Marcela Escobari, George Ingram, Homi Kharas, Anthony F. Pipa Today, the Global Economy and Development program launched the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD). The center will focus on issues pertinent to advancing global sustainable development and implementing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) across all countries. In this post, Brookings experts housed in the newly launched center explain the key priorities and issue areas that the center will undertake.

Defining the challenge: sustainable development economics and empirics

Amar Bhattacharya, Senior Fellow The climate and sustainable development agendas are intricately linked. Failure to act on climate mitigation and adaptation will affect lives and livelihoods everywhere, especially of the poorest and most vulnerable. On the other hand, strong actions to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon climate-resilient economy can pave the way to sustainable, inclusive, and resilient growth and concomitant progress on the SDGs. A new climate economy must be urgently built—one that escapes a 20th century growth model based on fossil fuel dependence and degradation of natural capital and ecosystem services. The world has been transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has highlighted the dangers and fragilities that had been building in the world economy and the planet. The crisis presents an enormous threat but also a one-off, last chance opportunity—to restructure economies at the pace and scale that the climate crisis requires. The center will focus on how to build a better and green recovery that can restore jobs and livelihoods and pave the way for long-term transformation. It will also assess and inform the strategies, investments, policies, and finance that can build a low-carbon climate-resilient economy that serves the needs of people and the planet.

Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow “You treasure what you measure.” This phrase has become overused because it is so important and applicable. We have become very good at measuring GDP, and the economic policy structures and institutions around the world are geared to maximizing GDP growth. But we have been derelict in measuring other elements of sustainable development—most obviously climate change, biodiversity, inclusion, and justice—that enter into people’s well-being. To give one example, a world with fossil fuel subsidies approaching $5 billion (according to the International Monetary Fund), and a heavy dependence of governments on taxes on labor could well produce GDP growth, but in a distorted way that undercuts society’s core objectives of moving toward green energy and encouraging the formation of more jobs. At this time, with trillions of dollars of public money being spent to revive economies, it is critical to orient economic activity toward areas that are sustainable and inclusive, else another shock to the global economic system will surely recur.

Advancing sustainable development at subnational levels

Amar Bhattacharya, Senior Fellow Developing countries need to substantially scale up investments in sustainable infrastructure to meet their climate and development goals including large additional investments for adaptation. These needs encompass investments in renewable energy and the phasing out of dirty energy (especially coal), sustainable cities and transport, water and sanitation, digital infrastructure, and natural infrastructure. Over the next 10 years, infrastructure investment in emerging markets and developing countries other than China will need to more than double from present levels of around $1 trillion per year, and virtually all the increase must be green infrastructure to meet the Paris targets and adapt to climate change. At present, 80 percent of infrastructure investment is public and it’s mostly publicly financed. Private investment in infrastructure in emerging markets and developing countries has stagnated over the past decade and amounts to less than $100 billion annually. Mobilizing additional private finance for sustainable infrastructure investments is therefore the central challenge of climate finance. In addition to tackling the impediments that are holding back the realization of green investments at scale, it will be essential to improve access to long-term finance and reduce the cost of capital—for both emerging markets and developing countries. Managing, reducing, and sharing risk will be critical. Assessing how to unlock investment opportunities in sustainable infrastructure that can serve both climate and development goals, and identifying ways to bolster and utilize the relevant pools of finance more effectively that can meet the scale of the challenge, will be an important element in the work of the Center.

Marcela Escobari, Senior Fellow Even as the pandemic renews skepticism on the virtues of dense living, cities remain the engines of innovation, growth, and prosperity. In all likelihood, they will bounce back. And their recovery will make for welcome news—a return to the status quo almost certainly portends a more sustainable future than would urban outmigration. Nonetheless, the sustainability of urban epicenters prior to the pandemic was questionable. Cities had become hotbeds of poverty and wellsprings of environmental degradation. Moreover, the astronomical rise of cities, brought on by increasing returns to dense economic activity, led to increasing geographical disparities- even within the same country. This spatial divergence makes a subnational lens to the advancement of sustainable development crucial to global sustainability. As the pandemic and its economic ripples continue to spread, impact—whether it comes as shifts in supply chains, less tourism and travel, new purposes for commercial real estate, stark unemployment, or more rapid automation—will ultimately occur at the subnational level, in each region based upon its own unique history and trajectory. Subnational regions across the globe will face similar challenges but their path to sustainable recovery and growth will depend largely on the region’s existing industry and talent as well as its financial and political ability to repurpose production and redeploy workers. New metrics with the flexibility to accommodate these differences, while still allowing regional comparison and benchmarking, will allow greater subnational coordination, an essential task to drive global sustainability.

Anthony F. Pipa, Senior Fellow Cities are places where the lofty aspirations of sustainable development and the ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals must be translated into progress felt by real people living in real communities. As evidenced by their leadership during the COVID-19 crisis, mayors and local leaders form the front lines of response to global issues—from the exigencies of public health and economic vulnerability to migration, climate change, and justice. They consistently earn the highest levels of trust of any level of government and are increasingly perceived to be the problem-solvers as political divisions undermine the response of national leaders. Too often however, subnational leaders have too little of the mandate and too limited resources to translate their priorities at the local level into reality. They are thus faced with developing new models of governance to coordinate leadership and resources that go beyond city government and creating new tools and policy interventions to leverage data, technology, and citizen engagement for social and economic progress. Their success will also depend upon their ability to access new modes of financing, and the international finance system must seek to evolve and expand to be able to directly invest in municipalities and subnational governments. Cities are hotbeds of innovation—not just to launch the industries and companies of the future, but to evolve and elevate new methods and mechanisms of public governance and leadership that will be key to advancing sustainable development. The Trump administration’s “America First” foreign policy and the feeble U.S. response to COVID-19 has significantly changed perceptions of the United States and its interest in global cooperation and global progress. U.S. mayors, CEOs, university presidents, and civil society leaders, with serious commitments to using the SDGs to advance racial justice and equity, public health, economic security, and action on climate change, are exhibiting global leadership and proving to be central players in rebuilding U.S. credibility on development issues of global importance.

Advancing effective financing for sustainable development

Homi Kharas, Senior Fellow Imagine you took the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, and the destruction caused by World War II and wrapped them into a single calamitous event. You would mimic the effects of COVID-19. Not a single sub-Saharan African government has been able to borrow on international capital markets since February of this year. The traditional approach to debt servicing, to roll over debt by funding principal payments to one lender by borrowing from another, has ground to a halt for many developing countries. Ministers of finance are desperately trying to stave off defaults—the messy, expensive, protracted process that led to a lost decade in Latin America—and will be tempted to cut education, nutrition, and agricultural development spending to cope. These have long-lasting, lifetime effects. Absent a concerted plan of financial assistance, the specter of a decade or more of development in reverse awaits, and a generation could be left with little real prospect or opportunities for the future.

Advancing US official and American societal leadership for global sustainable development

George Ingram, Senior Fellow COVID-19’s devastation of human and national well-being, climate change’s disruption of food production, state fragility’s destabilization of nations and uprooting of populations, social and economic inequities within and between nations. These are just a few of the global development challenges that require the U.S. government to elevate its institutions and budget to contribute to the advancement of development by moving from a 20th century maze of programs to a more coherent, unified strategy and structure that is nimble at working with local stakeholders, civil society organizations, the private sector, and the panoply of individuals and entities across America that are contributing to advancing economic, social, and political progress in poor and middle-income countries.

[barpurplewrites]

Not a Normal Christmas

Chapter 1 of a Rumbelled Die Hard. Yup, apparently I am crazy, but hey you all knew that right?

Rated G at the moment, but that will go up pretty quick if I continue this.

-oxo-

“Ladies and gentleman, welcome to New York. I hope you all packed a warm Christmas jumper, because it’s a winter wonderland out there. Thank you for flying with us, and have a happy holiday.”

Belle’s grip on the arm rests had turned her knuckles white. She blew out a shaky breath and relaxed a little now she was back on solid ground. The guy in the seat next to her peered across at her with a concerned look.

“Nervous flyer?”

He’d been a pleasant seatmate, after a polite hello, he’d left her alone. A vast improvement on the man on the flight out to California, who had demanded her attention the whole time, and insulted the book she’d been reading.

Belle chuckled; “What gave it away?”

He glanced at the armrest that bore a shiny trace of how clammy her palms had been with a shrug.

“I’ll give you a tip, when you get where you are going, take your socks and shoes off and make fists with your toes in the carpet.”

He smiled at her disbelieving look; “I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve been flying for ten years and that’s the best thing I found to get rid of flying stress.”

It was perhaps the oddest flying tip she’d ever been given, but sounded harmless enough, unlike Cara’s suggestion of a Valium and a double G and T. Belle fallen asleep in the departures lounge and missed her flight after trying that one. She gave the man a thumbs-up and said; “I’ll try it, thanks.”

She wrestled the giant plush dragon from the overhead compartment and almost bumped into the redhead flight attendant who had been flirting gently during the flight. She smiled back at the woman, and joined the shuffling mass of passengers disembarking the plane.

 -x-x-x-

Gold doubled checked the figures as he strolled down the corridor to his office, everything was looking good. Excalibur Industries would finish the calendar year on target, financially at least. Two workmen dodge past him with muttered apologies. Gold shook his head; Saint Michael’s Tower had been dubbed Camelot by the staff and the name had been taken up by most of the city. Not a bad play on the name of their CEO, Merlin Glendower, and perfectly in keeping with the thematic names of Arthurian legends that the company favoured for projects. Whatever it was called the building was set to be a shining showcase of sustainable energy and ethical building techniques; if they ever got the damn thing finished.

“Gold!”

Gold cringed internally, he couldn’t stand Zelena Greene, but his dislike didn’t stop the woman flirting with him every chance she got, she seamed to think that his wedding ring was just a fashion accessory.

“Zelena.”

She fell into step with him, far to close for his comfort, and smiled; “Have dinner with me tonight?”

He cocked his head at her and frowned; “It’s Christmas Eve. Time to be spent with family, watching Muppets Christmas Carol and the Snowman, hanging stockings and wrapping last minute presents. Any of this sound familiar?”

They had reached the door of his office now and Zelena leaned against the doorframe and batted her eyelashes at him; “I was thinking more along the lines of mulled wine, fine food and perhaps,” – she ran a finger over his tie, - “You could hang my stockings at the end of your bed.”

Gold plucked his tie from her fingers and said firmly; “Go and enjoy the party Zelena.”

He waited until she’d moved away down the hallway and shuddered slightly, before taking a breath and strolling into his office. He gave an affected groan at the sight of his assistant, Ashley, who was still hard at work.

“Go and join the party Ashley, you’re making me feel like Scrooge.”

“Just finished Mr Gold. Think the baby will let me eat some shrimp?”

She heaved herself out of her chair and rubbed a hand over the pregnant curve of her belly. Ashley was seven months along and was carrying twins.

“I reckon if the troublesome twosome can make you crave snickerdoodles and marmite, they can cope with some shrimp.”

Ashley chuckled at him and headed out to the party in the Arboretum. Watching her waddling gait triggered a memory of Belle when she’d been at this stage of her pregnancy with Gideon. He sat down at his desk and looked at the wallpaper on is cell; a photo of the three of them last year on a picnic in the park, before Belle had received the offer to go work at Berkeley, and before he had buggered up massively. Christmas morning would dawn and hopefully a new chapter in their lives. He sighed and punched the contact for home.

“Hello Papa!”

The excited voice at the other end of the phone brought a wine smile to his face.

“Hello Gid, how did you know it was me?”

“I am six and a half, Papa. I can read the caller id, y’know.”

“Of course. Are you being good for Grandpa?”

“Yup. We’ve been building a massive castle out of Lego. Papa? Is Mama coming home with you?”

Gold wanted to say of course, but he’d not heard from Belle yet and didn’t want to promise something he couldn’t deliver.

“Santa and I will see what we can do Gid. Can I talk to Grandpa?”

“Okay, see you later Papa!”

There was a pause and then Belle’s father came on the line; “Evening Gold, before you ask, Belle phone before she got on her flight. Said her phone battery was almost flat and she’s forgotten her charger.”

Gold relaxed for the first time in hours, Belle was coming home for Christmas; “Okay, thanks Moe. We’ll be home in a few hours.”

 -x-x-x-

 In the arrivals hall Belle dodged past the happy reunions. There had been a time when Rum would have been here waiting for her with Gid to welcome her as enthusiastically, but their marriage had strained to breaking point when she was offered the job at Berkeley. For the past six months they’d been in a holding pattern, not daring to deal with their problems for fear of destroying the tentative balance they had found. She hoped they could keep that truce over Christmas for Gid’s sake, but at some point, they were going to have to talk about their future, and that was bound to cause fireworks.

She missed a step and did a double take at a sign held by one of the waiting drivers. Dr Belle Gold. It suddenly hit her that she’d not seen her married name written down like that for six months, at Berkeley she was Dr Belle French. She chewed on her bottom lip, that she’d gone back to using her maiden name for work had been one of the arguments her and Rum had had before she left; he’d accused her of taking the first step out of their marriage, she’d accused him of being possessive. It had been ugly, the only saving grace had been that Gideon was at school when they had yelled at each other.

She walked over to the driver; “I’m Belle Gold.”

He gave her a wide smile; “Good evening. I’m Jefferson, your limo driver.”

His smile faltered a little and Belle got the distinct impression that he was new at this.

“Well, this is my first time in a limo, so what do we do now?”

Jefferson laughed; “This is my first time driving one, so I guess we’ll muddle through together. Shall we?”

He made a flourishing gesture towards the exit and Belle couldn’t help, but chuckle.

 -o-o-o-

 The dark-haired man checked the bags once more and gave a curt nod.

“Time to move out.”

Only one member of the crew gathered around him didn’t hop to and jump into the truck. He stood wringing his hat in his hands. The dark-haired man rolled his eyes and huffed a frustrated sigh.

“Problem?”

“We’ve never done anything this big before.”

He jumped as a hearty arm landed across his shoulder, and he was subjected to a wide smile.

“We have done heists more dangerous than this. I know we can handle a few drunken businessmen and their pretty secretaries. Buck up Smee. By Boxing day we’ll be filthy rich, drink rum on a beach in the Caribbean.”

Greed gleamed in Smee’s eyes, eclipsing the fear. He grinned widely and hurried to the truck. Killian Jones followed Smee and swung himself up into the front seat.

“Gentleman, let’s pay a visit to Camelot.”

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

mo

How to make your firm more diverse and inclusive

Tips for chief executives

Print edition | Business

Nov 7th 2019

To: ceo

cc: pa

Subject: A hard-headed guide to corporate diversity

Dear David,

You face pressure to “do something” about diversity in your company—not only from your wife and woke children. Corporate clients increasingly demand it in your supply chain. Regulators, who use a “stable” or “inclusive” culture as a proxy for low risk, are breathing down your neck. Governments like Britain’s, which now mandates pay-gap reporting, insist on making more of your sensitive data public. And employees, including former ones, can air their complaints on social media.

Small wonder that 87% of your fellow bosses told consultants at pwc that diversity is a business priority. I’m sure you did, too. After all, you recently posted a job opening for a diversity manager. You were not alone; the number of such offers in Britain has doubled in the past year, say analysts at Glassdoor, a recruitment website. Since June 2017 more than 800 American ceos have signed a pledge to “advance diversity and inclusion in the workplace”.

That is where we are: lots of talk, plenty of initiatives, little change on the ground. Between 2015 and 2018 the share of female executives at large (mostly) American and British firms went from 12% to 14%; for ethnic minorities it moved from 12% to 13%. The ftse 100 has fewer female ceos (six) than it does bosses who share your name (seven). In American companies with over 100 employees, the share of black men in management was 3.4% in 2017, half their share in the population as a whole—and virtually unchanged from 3% in 1985. White women make up 25% of executives and senior managers, compared with 60% for white men. Something is clearly amiss.

In the past this letter would have gone straight to your legal department. Since the term “diversity” entered the corporate lexicon in the 1960s it has been code for avoiding lawsuits—especially in America, where companies have coughed up billions in fines for discrimination over the years. The financial sector still treats it mostly as a compliance issue.

Now you are no doubt tempted to forward it to someone in hr, almost certainly a woman with an arts degree, a sound moral compass and too little power. Don’t. This is your problem. Without your leadership it is unlikely to be solved soon.

Keep reading

Deep inside, you may be wondering if anything really needs solving. The short answer is: it does. With that in mind, you should ask yourself three things.

First, why does diversity matter to your firm? Is your reputation in trouble, as it was for Uber, Nike, Lloyd’s of London and others scarred by #MeToo? Do you, like consumer giants such as p&g, hope that more diversity makes for better products? Are you concerned about attracting and retaining bright sparks? You would be in good company: 97% of executives fret about increased competition for talent (according to Mercer’s hr consultants).

Or are you hoping that diversity will boost the bottom line? To be perfectly honest, I have no idea if it does. It is hard to tell if diversity helps firms do well, or if successful firms are also more enlightened on other matters. But variety has been linked to innovation, productivity and, for example in diverse teams of surgeons, fewer mistakes. Lack of it breeds groupthink—which in turn can lead to disasters. The Bay of Pigs invasion and the Lehman Brothers collapse stemmed from narrow-mindedness. And employees who believe their firm cares about gender diversity are 40% more likely to be satisfied at work—and possibly more productive as a result.

Once you have sorted out the why, consider where you want to get to. Some firms, like Facebook, Nike or p&g, say they wish to mirror their customer base. Others are keen not to recruit from an artificially thin talent pool. Goldman Sachs claims its new entry-level recruitment targets—50% female and, in America, 14% Hispanic and 11% black—are based on things like graduation rates. Clear goals make it easier to assess if you are on track. But make them attainable. Qantas’s goal of 40% of its pilot intake to be female by 2028 is as admirable as it looks unrealistic: today just one in 20 pilots worldwide is a woman.

The third question concerns barriers that stop diverse talent from flourishing at your firm. Mapping how it flows through your organisation and where the blockages and leaks happen is a start. A McKinsey study of more than 300 companies identified the second step of the career ladder, from entry level to manager, as the “broken rung”: for every 100 men only 72 women (and just 68 Hispanic and 58 black ones) earned that critical early promotion. When Google was losing women in disproportionate numbers it homed in on maternity as the principal cause; the technology giant increased maternity leave and support for mothers returning to work.

Staff surveys can help, provided they are large and comprehensive enough. After its #MeToo moment, Lloyd’s, an insurance market, found that 45% of staff felt unable to raise concerns about improper conduct. Employees are now encouraged to speak up, including through a bullying-and-harassment helpline. A “culture dashboard” tracking progress on survey metrics will be published with the Lloyd’s annual report.

Now you’ve got your diversity-and-inclusion priorities straight and diagnosed what needs fixing. Good. Before you order a rainbow float for a Pride parade and send staff on a micro-aggression avoidance course, here is what not to do.

American firms spend billions a year on training. Half of large ones have unconscious-bias seminars. Most of these “d&i” programmes are a waste. Or worse: recent research from America shows that diversity statements can put off minorities, possibly because they perceive them as tokenism. Often, firms do d but forget i, which is about ensuring that the workforce is not just diverse, but thriving. Too many try to fix people instead of procedures. Training women to be more assertive in asking for a promotion or pay rise is pointless; they are just as likely to ask for these but also likelier to be seen as pushy when they do. Ushering your managers onto the “Check Your Blind Spots bus”, currently touring America as part of the ceos’ drive, is unlikely to do much. “Days of understanding”, popular in American offices, risk causing “diversity fatigue”. It is hard to beat bias out of individuals—easier to root it out of systems.

The don’ts

Take Silicon Valley. Big Tech has splurged on d&i to little effect. Representation of blacks and Hispanics has been flat (see chart). Girls Who Code, an industry-sponsored ngo, found that a quarter of young women who applied for internships at tech firms said they were asked inappropriate or biased questions. Others reported being flirted with or demeaned. It’s no use hiring diverse coders if the message then is: wear a hoodie and pretend to be a guy, or this is no place for you. They will underperform—or flee, leaving you as undiverse as before. Firms that do not change their ways beyond recruitment see high attrition rates of diverse talent. A lack of diversity is a symptom of deeper problems that a few diversity hires won’t mend.

At this point the how should be relatively clear. In a nutshell, it is all about creating a level playing field. When recruiting, software can mute biases by concealing giveaways to a candidate’s gender or ethnic identity. These include names but also less obvious hints like the sports they play. If only the usual suspects apply, look harder. Specialised recruitment drives, such as visiting “black” colleges or advertising in women’s forums, appear to work. The Bank of England no longer visits the Russell group of top universities, whose graduates apply in spades anyway, and focuses instead on less elite schools. bhp, an Anglo-Australian mining giant, broadened its search for female miners by recruiting from professions, such as nursing, with some similar skills.

In an effort to find trainees from different backgrounds, British law firms are trying “contextual recruitment”. An applicant with Bs from a school where everyone got Cs may be more impressive than one with As from a place full of A* pupils. Rare, a recruitment firm, has developed software which screens candidates for disadvantage and gauges their outperformance against the average for their school.

Once in the workplace, the clearer your criteria for professional advancement, the better. Informality is the enemy of women and minorities. It perpetuates bias. Surveys of American engineers and lawyers found that female workers were nearly twice as likely as their male peers to be saddled with “office housework”, like setting up meetings and conference calls. White men were likelier to be given careerenhancing tasks such as client meetings.

Sponsorship schemes are an effective way to ensure traditionally sidelined groups get a fair shot. PayScale, a pay-comparison site, found that employees with a sponsor made 11.6% more than those without. The Bank of England has offered most of its sponsorship places to ethnic-minority women. Staff surveys, if bite-sized but regular, can bring clarity to fuzzy inclusion metrics. “Psychological safety”, lingo for an environment where people feel free to speak their mind, can be tracked with questions like “are your ideas regularly attributed to someone else?” or “are you regularly interrupted in meetings?” Rotating who chairs a meeting, or a firm word with loudmouths who dominate it, can help.

Many employers—yourself included—would be horrified to learn that they implicitly require employees who want to be considered leadership material to adjust their behaviour. Women shouldn’t need to “act like a man”, gay employees to “act straight” or people with frizzy hair to treat it to “look professional” (ie, white). Let grievances fester and your workers will lose motivation or simply leave.

That is a lot to take in. But unless you do, your most valuable resource—workers—will not be as good as it could be. Best to get ahead of the problem. It isn’t that hard. And it can pay off mightily.

Yours,

Shareholder■

[seatsbythepit]

Hey Anna :) I just listened to Monday's Arsecast and they continued to talk about the silence of the board and the possible search for a sporting director and I was just wondering if in other EPL clubs the higher ups are really more present?

Because in Germany the sporting directors and comparable people are very present in the media. Like they get interviewed after games and are regularly on matchday shows and all. 

And I just got the impression that not only at Arsenal but in the EPL in general they are a lot less present. Or is that really just Arsenal?

Hey Sabrina, thanks for your question(s)! I’d like to start off by saying I am probably not the most educated on this topic, nor am I the worst - so I’ll try my best to give you a satisfying response!

Sporting Directors are very…fluid characters, they can often be referred to as technical directors, can be seen as the all-knowing all-seeing eye of a club’s footballing activities, they can be a guide/guardian for the manager as well as a buffer between fans and manager.

As you mentioned, in Germany they have a strong media presence, including post-match interviews - I would say that based on that information alone it’s definitely not the same for the Premier League as a whole, I cannot recall many times I have seen a sporting director for a club speak regularly and so presently. They tend to pop up at times of importance or interest for a club, maybe during a changing over of managers or during transfer season, but not in the day to day life, they work in the shadows so to speak.

In fact previously it was not at all a common thing for PL clubs to have sporting directors, at least not in that official role.

I know this next bit is probably very extra info, but I took the liberty of checking the bigger clubs (I was initially going to do all of them, but that would make this post even longer than it already is.) in the PL, whether they have such a figure and also how they are described on the club websites and here is what I found:

Chelsea | Michael Emanalo - Technical Director

He has been an important part of the first team management structure since his arrival in October 2007, and now supports the work of the first team manager, leading the club’s international and domestic scouting network, and assists in driving the technical programmes of our Academy and international youth network.

Tottenham | Rebecca Caplehorn - Director of Football Operations

Graduated from Loughborough University with a Joint Honours Degree in Physical Education, Sport Science and Mathematics.  She subsequently qualified as a Chartered Accountant via the NHS Graduate Management Scheme and has worked in senior finance roles within both tennis and football. Rebecca joined the Club in March 2015, after spending over five years at Queens Park Rangers FC.

Manchester City | Txiki Begiristain? Director of Football

Txiki is not listed on Manchester City’s corporate page, but in 2012 he was announced as Manchester City’s Director of Football. And there are recent articles about him, including Pep Guardiola speaking of him. So I presume he does still hold that role.

Liverpool | Michael Edwards - Sporting Director

From Nov 2016: Michael Edwards has today been appointed as Liverpool Football Club’s sporting director.

The 37-year-old is being promoted into a newly-created role as part of a restructuring of the football operations. Edwards will now lead the club’s overall football development, including player identification, acquisitions, sales and retention, as well as taking primary responsibility for reviewing and implementing improvements to the training ground environment and infrastructure.

Manchester United | Not applicable. (Make note of Edward Woodward.)

United do not have an official sporting director, but Edward Woodward, their executive vice-chairman, is probably the closest to it. However, he has been criticised in the past about how he has handled their transfers, and thus it was once thought United would eventually opt to bring someone experienced to take on the Sports Director role - but this was later denied, and it did not happen.

Arsenal | Not applicable.

Of course, we know the answer to this one. Ivan Gazidis has been proud in the past that we currently have no such figure at the club, trying to play the angle of “team effort” among the board, rather than a hierarchy. (Check out this episode of Arsecast Extra that Sabrina referred to hear of previous attitudes towards the club corporate setup.)

We once had David Dein, who came close to being a sporting director before such a title was really given. “Dein built up his shares until he owned 42% of the club in 1991. During his time at the club, he was responsible for football matters taking an active role in the transfer of players and contract negotiations where he was able to use his extensive network of football contacts. Dein was behind the appointment of the then little known Arsène Wenger to the manager’s job in 1996; under Wenger Arsenal have won the Premier League three times and the FA Cup six times, and Dein strongly backed him and his transfer wishes throughout.[3]”

However, as previously mentioned, we may now be seeking an official sporting director after Arsene Wenger leaves, due to the fact that Dick Law may also think about departing with him. The Telegraph wrote recently:

Dick Law has liaised closely with manager Arsene Wenger on player negotiations and contracts since 2009 and, while he would initially work with any appointment, it is understood that he is ready to step away from his current position in the longer-term.

The idea would also be to create a wider football operations role, with possible responsibilities stretching to shaping and fine-tuning the structures around sports science, medicine, scouting and recruitment, the academy and logistics.

Losing the two closest figureheads we have to a sporting director would likely be cause for a serious re-organisation of the club’s higher positions.

Wenger has largely become a one man band, he covers a lot of what a sporting director should. For example, he was the figurehead in the club moving to a bigger stadium, the club was outgrowing its beloved home, and a move was necessary to follow the growth, he was also key to assuring the banks we would pay them back in order to receive more loans. [x] He was also responsible for the state of the art training ground we currently have, he ensured that we invested in health and science to better our players to such a high standard, his success as our manager is proof of how crucial that was.

So remarkable is his influence that our club is actually viewed as a financial anomaly, here is a quote from a financial report I posted about in 2016:

“*Due to the structural issues identified below, our view is Arsenal is not investable for the general public, the fact its ISDX quotation has survived is anomalous.*

In my opinion, the growth of our club since the 90s and early 2000s has meant that this one-man role is even less feasible than it was back then, nor should it even try to be feasible now.

An interesting correlation I make between Arsenal and United is that the two big clubs without a sporting director are the two clubs who have had/still have (in our case) a recent long time serving manager. I feel that the greatness of both Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex allowed the figureheads behind their respective clubs to take a back seat and allow the two managers to be absolutely everything to their clubs - which whilst so very admirable on AF and AW’s behalves proves to be a problem when their tenures come to an end. You only have to look at United and see that there wasn’t really a backup plan for the departure of such a legend, and if there was it hasn’t really worked, and I can only hope that our farewell with AW happens when we have planned meticulously for everything that comes thereafter.

Not to mention the growth of the Premier League, the gap between clubs and their quality is getting smaller, therefore it is not ideal to rely on one person who already has a high position/highly stressful role at the club - I mean he’s the manager for goodness sake. Arsene is our manager, and manage is what he should be expected to do. He should not be under fire for the inner workings of our club, despite the fact that he often is. It is not wholly his responsibility and even if our directors are not sports directors, they still have a duty to manage this club effectively, both in the football we produce and otherwise.

A sporting director is supposed to be the go-between, the adviser, the helper, we need structure and strategy behind Arsene, or whoever is in charge of the team.  Which is why there has been a certain amount of annoyance/anger with the board, because they use that “one man band” role to let Arsene take a lot of the flack for the club’s stagnation, and have not committed to any real responsibility on their part.

Something I particularly find scandalous is when our CEO, Ivan Gazidis, charges such an extortionate amount for his services…none of which we actually get to see with any real transparency. It only aggravates the discontent among fans, and he does no good to act like everything is amazing at things like the AGM meetings and such.

Something else that Arseblog touched on in a regular Arsecast podcast is that he actually out-rightly said the fans would decide AW’s future, the fans. It displays a terrible amount of irresponsibility to place such an important decision on the fans, a lack of judgement and ultimately it has played part in the current situation we have with the protests etc, because through not taking charge, the directors have essentially shown the fans that they are not leading, they are not being clear in their goals and intentions as a board, BUT at the same time they are not listening to fans either, they are not listening to the fans as Gazidis had alluded they would. It’s this inaction that is painful to see, and to see AW take the brunt of the repercussions outside of the football elements is saddening.

And although he is majority shareholder first a foremost, then a director, Stan Kroenke charging for “advisory services” is bizarre. There is no confidence in the man who basically said he didn’t care about trophies, and it’s even more laughable that he should charge for so-called advice. I realise these are more likely to be business orientated services, not football ones, but that’s just it - we don’t all wear our Arsenal shirts seeking to cheer on a well run business, we want our team to thrive and succeed. I am proud of what we do outside of playing football, but we have to aspire to more than what we’ve already achieved, we are already very good but we could be even better. Which is why, after all I have written, I really do hope we get a sporting director.

I am SO sorry for basically answering your question in the first few paragraphs and then going on to write a novel, but I hope this has been useful in some way, it give me clarity to write in detail. I also recognise that I may be talking nonsense, and that I don’t know the ins and outs of other clubs as well as I know my own, so apologies for that, haha.

Thank you again for your question, Sabrina!

[aowanders-blog]

Trump vs Corona Virus

In light of current events and the seeming resurgence of the virus and the complete absence of a coherent national strategy to resolve, execute or implement anything resembling a solution for the NATION.  I’m overwhelmed in a state of confusion. 

Corona Virus Breeds Compassion

Ninety five days ago 330 Million Americans united under a common goal for the benefit of our society.  Some of us needed more convincing than others, but in the end all of us “individuals” agreed to do what was right for the “majority” of humanity.  

It was a wonderful display of unity.  Unfethered kindness and endless generosity.  Even from the government.  Which stepped in and swiftly dispersed money that so many of us desperately needed to carry us through these trying times.  

It was unbelievable!  People were actually doing the right thing, and not just for friends, family and coworkers.  People were extending their kindness and generosity to complete strangers in need.  

The coronavirus was bringing out the best in humanity!  But as the saying goes,”All good things must come to end.”  Which is why I am publicizing today’s journal entry.  Because the generous kind acts we’ve grown accoustomed to over the last couple of months have come to a complete hault.  

Minneapolis Ground Zero

Civil unrest has replaced compassion with unfocused chaos.  Lashing out at any target within arms reach.  Creating symbolism out of trivial brands and products just so theres another log to throw on the fire.  

I understand where the root of this frustration begin with an overzealous power tripping authority abusing police officer.  Who was so detached from reality he couldn’t even comprehend a lifeless body wasn’t a threat to him any more.

Unfocused Protesting

What I don’t understand is what is the end goal here? Race vs race? #civilwar USA becomes 50 individual nations?

Who is actually in charge here? Trump? State governors? The kid who burnt the cop station? The group that wants to change the label on my syrup bottle? Is it the neighborhood that just renamed my rice? Is it the support group that’s going to help me understand why Elmer Fudd cant hunt wabbits anymore? Is it the CEO of Amazon who is now censoring what I can choose to watch? Is it the kids partying in the Seattle barracade?

What’s really confusing is that there are so many blind followers in the herd completely unaware that what they actually want isn’t what they are fighting for.

Defund The Police

Instead of griping over the past why not placate for longterm solutions instead of temporary victories? Why demand police reform when all that is required is a change in the language?

Simple Police Reform

If a federal law was passed that said, “No victim no police interaction,” I would be willing to bet without even looking up the stats that every one of these unarmed riot inciting murders would have never happened!

When you say #defundthepolice do you mean let’s go back to 6 shooters on our hips, or do you mean refocus the police to actually protect and serve while politicians delete outdated laws and start passing laws that are for our benefit and protection?

Do we really need an armed police officer to show up at a traffic accident to oversee driver information exchanges?  Does society really need armed individuals patrolling our streets for cracked windshields?  

How will society endure without having anyone to call for boats causing a wake?  People playing in a public park after sunset?  Hiking off trail with their dog unleashed in a National Park or any other VICTIMLESS REVENUE GENERATING INFRACTION OF THE LAW that nobody dead or alive actually cares about including the police enforcing them!

Coronavirus Raises Minimum Wage

What really needs the focus of unilateral reform is a National Minimum wage that is high enough to meet todays cost of living?

I’ve lived in more places than most people have had the chance to read about in their lives. I’ve seen the best of our country, and the worst of our country.  

I dont actually believe the root of our society’s problems is “systematic racism,” and I dont think you do you either.

The problem that I believe these protestor’s are trying to fight for is not being able to chase down their dreams because the cost of living in todays society is so high that it takes FIVE DECADES of survival skills to navigate your financial responsibilities.

Stop The Struggle

How are you supposed to get ahead in life when you spend majority of life spinning your wheels in neutral?  What are you supposed to do with a full time job that pays less than poverty?

Theres a saying that I’ve heard from locals in every tourist town I go to,”You either have 3 houses or 3 jobs in todays world.”

How is that proportiantely acceptable in todays world?  Being poor shouldn’t be probable cause for police interaction!  Driving a beat up vehicle shouldn’t put you on a police officers radar!  Changing lanes without a blinker shouldn’t warrant an armed person to investigate!

I don’t know the exact number, but I would be willing to bet 90% of all police interaction stem from a traffic infraction in a poor neighborhood!  There is no reason an armed invidividual needs to enforce traffic infractions!

Just like your skin color shouldn’t define your class!  

Which is what I believe the problem is in society.  We have allowed police departments to dictate their existence through melodramatic justifications.  We have allowed police officers to justify their funding through targeted patrols.  Which inevitably leads to poor neighborhoods because its more likely to find traffic infractions in neighborhoods that can’t afford vehicle upkeeps.  Regardless of race.  It’s a simple numbers game, but are we funding the police to protect and serve or to play the odds?  

Do we really need armed police forces patrolling for seat belt violations?  The better question is do we really need double punishment for traffic infractions?  Did you know that 3 speeding tickets in twelve months equals a suspended license?  Are you aware that public transportation doesn’t exist in majority of the towns in America?  

How do you expect people to be a productive member of society in todays world without reliable transportation?  How do you expect them to educate themselves or better themselves if they can’t get to school?  How do you expect them to pay for vehicle registration if they can’t get to work?  

The DMV is the Devil

Before we go to far down this rabbit hole I can tell you from first hand experience that the DMV/DMS literally DESTROYS lives on a daily basis!  Based off of police interaction in poor neighborhoods, and if the federal government would raise the National minimum wage to $25/hour which is what it costs to live in America in 2020 majority of society’s problems would cease to exist!

People wouldn’t be side hustling in illegal activities just to keep roof over their heads.  If a full time job would pay a liveable wage careers wouldn’t be an extinct animal.  There wouldn’t be fraudelent online posting every other ad if people could afford the products and services of America with their paycheck!  The internet wouldn’t be our generations gold rush if companies could be content with millions in profits instead of billions!  

How to Save $20,000 in 90 days

The list of examples is infinite and could sprawl throughout society, but it would all come back to the cost of living in todays world!  If 2 million Americans weren’t given that extra $600/week from the American government how big of a fiascle would this Pandemic have been with 2 million people only making $1,200/month for 3 months?  How desperate would people have gotten with no money in their pocket and no toilet paper in the stores?  How many businesses would be closed for good?  How violent would these protest really have gotten had people been starving before seeing George Floyd’s death?  

Its time to overhaul America, but we need to focus that makeover.  We need to steer the direction of our future towards a longterm solution.  Removing statues and changing food labels isn’t the key to enhancing the quality of life.  From 22 years of travel I belive society’s frustration is based solely on financial responsbilities.   Rent is too high.  Paychecks are too low.  Vacations are for the wealthy!  

If theres not going to be a national leader that’s going to step in to guide society in the right direction. Than its time for a new leader.  A leader thats going to heal the country by forcing every employer to pay a livable wage! So that the bottom half of society can delete their frustrations of desires and chase their dreams.  If this is truly the greatest country on Earth, and you can be anything you want to be than how come after 50 years of working most Americans still have no safety net? 

This is my journal entry for the day.  Which I usually don’t post for public consumption, but the answer is always NO if you never ask.

Take this time to self reflect, game plan and strategize a longterm solution for the change you want to see in the world for yourself and society.  While systemic racism is unacceptable I think society’s current frustrations reside a couple layers deeper!  Let me know what you think in the comments below.  

CoronaVirus/Covid 19 Journal Day 95 – Civil Unrest Recap Trump vs Corona Virus In light of current events and the seeming resurgence of the virus and the complete absence of a coherent national strategy to resolve, execute or implement anything resembling a solution for the NATION. 

[googlenewson]

Boeing Chief Executive Dennis Muilenburg is under pressure to put on a star performance this week, when he testifies before two congressional committees about the design and certification of the company’s 737 MAX. The aerospace giant is under massive amounts of scrutiny for possibly cutting corners in developing the jetliner, decisions that contributed to two crashes that killed a combined 346 people over the past year.

According to Muilenburg’s prepared testimony, which Fortune has obtained, Boeing’s CEO plans to acknowledge that the company made mistakes when he testifies Tuesday before the Senate Commerce Committee and Wednesday before the House Transportation Committee. In addition to the scrutiny from Congress and regulators around the world, the Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation following the crash, a rarity in civil aviation disasters.

“We can and must do better,” Muilenburg’s testimony says. “We have been challenged and changed by these accidents, and we are improving as a company because of them.”

The Boeing hearings are just the latest turn in a months long Odyssey for the aerospace company that began a year ago. Most recently it was revealed that Boeing withheld texts between two company engineers, messages that seemingly show the company knew there was a serious problem with one of the airplane’s flight-control systems.

The messages are “disturbingly consistent with what we’ve seen so far in our ongoing investigation of the 737 MAX, especially with regard to production pressures and a lack of candor with regulators and customers,” Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), the chair of the House committee, said in a statement on Oct. 18. “This is not about one employee; this is about a failure of a safety culture at Boeing in which undue pressure is placed on employees to meet deadlines and ensure profitability at the expense of safety.”

Adding to the hearings’ drama, Tuesday marks one year since Lion Air Flight 610 slammed into the Java Sea, just 13 minutes after takeoff. Muilenburg’s statement acknowledges the anniversary straightaway.

“We carry the memory of these accidents, and of your loved ones, with us every day,” the Boeing CEO plans to say. “They will never be forgotten, and these tragedies will continue to drive us to do everything we can to make our airplanes and our industry safer.”

Plenty of blame to go around

According to the Indonesian investigators’ final report released Friday, design flaws in the MAX, weak regulatory oversight by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, pilot error, and shoddy maintenance work all played a part in the Lion Air crash. Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee issued withering criticism of Boeing, but it also was sharply critical of Lion Air. It also called attention to how the FAA’s sometimes anemic oversight contributed to the disaster.

“If I were Muilenburg, I would repeat that report word for word” on Capitol Hill, aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia tells Fortune.

The report apportions blame all around, and, more importantly for Muilenburg, it does not tell a “story of corporate greed and malice,” the vice president of the Fairfax, Va.-based Teal Group says.

Following the report’s release, Boeing issued a statement Friday saying that the company is addressing the safety concerns and recommendations outlined by investigators. Boeing has spent months developing and testing software changes and new pilot training to prevent the MAX’s flight control system known by the acronym MCAS from causing another crash.

After the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on March 10, the 737 MAX was grounded around the world. It is still unclear when regulators will allow the plane to fly again. Muilenburg told reporters and financial analysts on Wednesday that he still expects FAA approval for the MAX to resume flying by the end of the year.

Getting the plane back in the air, though, has taken months longer than the Chicago-based company first expected. Boeing has thrown cash and resources at solving the problem, something it is well regarded for in the aerospace industry. The MAX crisis has cost the company more than $9.2 billion so far—and likely will cost billions more.

On Thursday, Boeing told white-collar workers and managers they would not receive annual bonuses come February, the Seattle Times reports. Due to how the company structures its incentive programs, Boeing executives will still get bonuses, albeit smaller ones.

Boeing has been sharply criticized for its clumsy, aloof public relations during the crisis. Industry analysts and many rank-and-file Boeing employees tell Fortune that they can’t yet tell if recent high-profile actions by company leadership are real changes or window dressing.

Arrivals and departures

In August, the company’s board of directors created a new safety committee to review how Boeing designs and develops airplanes. On Oct. 11, the board stripped Muilenburg of his role as Boeing’s chairman, replacing him with David Calhoun, a former General Electric executive.

Last week, the head of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, Kevin McAllister, was fired. Company officials have declined to say why. The move was seen by many industry analysts as a sacrificial offering. McAllister, though, joined Boeing at the tail-end of the 737 MAX’s development.

Boeing announced Friday that recently-retired U.S. Navy Adm. John Richardson is joining its board. Richardson was elected to energy giant Exelon Corp.’s board in September, about two weeks after leaving the Navy.

The chairmen of both Boeing and Exelon praised Richardson’s deep experience with nuclear reactors in announcing his appointments. The 59-year-old has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Adding engineering expertise to the board is a step in the right direction, Aboulafia says.

Muilenburg’s prepared remarks do not mention the changes that have occurred in the boardroom or the C-suite.

The MAX crisis has shaken Boeing’s decades-old reputation for safety, says Henry Harteveldt, an airline analyst and president of Atmosphere Research Group. On Capitol Hill, Muilenburg “has to be contrite, he has to be transparent and he has to accept Boeing’s responsibility” in the crashes, he says.

In black-and-white, at least, it appears that Boeing’s chief is prepared to hit those marks, not only acknowledging the criticism of the company and its culture, but also that “we understand and deserve this scrutiny.”

An April survey conducted by Atmosphere Research Group found that U.S. flyers are deeply hesitant about boarding a MAX within six months of its return to service. Muilenberg’s testimony acknowledges that sentiment, saying “Regulators around the world should approve the return of the MAX to the skies only after they have applied the most rigorous scrutiny, and are completely satisfied as to the plane’s safety. The flying public deserves nothing less.”

The MAX crisis has aggravated airlines’ relationship with Boeing, which promised carriers the new airplane was so similar to the previous generation that pilots would not need extensive—and costly—training. But these two MAX crashes show that—at best—that Boeing fatally underestimated just how different the new airplane was from its predecessor. And now, Muilenberg appears poised to say the company knows better.

“When the 737 MAX returns to service, it will be one of the safest airplanes ever to fly,” Muilenberg will tell Congress Tuesday. “We know we made mistakes and got some things wrong.”

More must-read stories from Fortune:

—The wireless industry needs more airwaves, but it’s going to be costly —3 critical takeaways from Microsoft’s latest earnings —What’s next for Google after claiming ‘quantum supremacy’? —Now hiring: people who can translate data into stories and actions —3 things Disney CEO Robert Iger says people can expect from Disney+ Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.

from Fortune https://ift.tt/2JroMXd

[unixcommerce]

Can You Use a Business Bank Account for Personal Use?

A reader asks:

Recently I was hired as a bookkeeper for a small manufacturing business. My boss, the owner, uses the business bank account for personal use — and it’s driving me crazy!  He withdraws money with a debit card for personal expenses. Last week his wife bought a big screen TV for their home using a blank check he signed from the business account. From one day to the next I never know how much money the business will have. I’ve explained that it’s best practice to separate business and personal funds, but he tells me it doesn’t matter since the business is an LLC and he is the sole owner. Who is right? My boss? Or me? And what should I do?       

— Roxanne from New York

Excellent question, Roxanne. You happen to be right in this case.

Business owners should not use a business bank account for personal use. It’s a bad practice that can lead to other issues, including legal, operational and tax problems.

As the company grows, the problems will also grow. That is, if the company is able to grow. Many businesses operated in a fiscally-lax fashion don’t grow the way they should or could.

I suggest you provide the business owner with a copy of this article. It has all the reasons to help you convince him. At the end is a list of best practices to follow.

Why Not to Use a Business Bank Account for Personal

Here are 7 reasons why small business owners should not use a business bank account for personal use. Commingling raises the following dangers:

1. Makes it tougher to manage cash flow

The company’s cash flow situation becomes confusing and harder to predict when commingling business and personal funds.

For example, the business might not have enough funds when an important business bill comes due. Why? Because the owner chooses that precise time to pay personal expenses from the business account.

Some owners look at their bank balance, see there’s money there, and think they can spend it. This could lead to a cash flow crisis.

2. Erodes personal liability protection

An owner of a corporation or limited liability company (LLC) might be held personally liable  for business debts due to commingling personal and business funds.

One of the motivations for owners to set up LLCs or corporations is to limit personal liability for business debts. But if the owner operates the business as if it doesn’t exist separately, such as by paying personal bills out of a business account, that protection could go out the window.

Courts have been known to “pierce the corporate veil”. This means they can hold the owner liable for business debts.

One-owner LLCs and corporations are most at risk of having the corporate veil pierced. Their owners assume separation of funds doesn’t matter because they are the sole owner. They think, ‘Who is going to object if I use my business account for personal use?’  A company creditor, that’s who. If the company closes down leaving business debt behind, an unpaid creditor could pursue the owner under this legal theory.

3. Overstates or understates tax deductions

To qualify as business tax deductions, expenses have to be for a business purpose. When you pay personal bills with a business bank account, it makes it harder to identify business expenses. As a result, you may overlook legitimate deductions. Or you could mistakenly categorize personal expenses as business, leading to penalties and a big tax bill from the IRS if you get audited.

This problem is compounded when owners don’t keep financial records up to date. Too many owners wait until once a year at tax time to categorize expenses.

By the time March or April rolls around, memory fades. They may have to sift through a drawer of receipts only to find that documentation is missing or they’ve forgotten whether something was business or personal. It’s fertile ground for errors.

4. Makes accounting unnecessarily complex

Maintaining accurate accounting records is harder when you commingle.

You have to do extra work to separate personal expenses from business expenses. You can’t just download the bank account transaction history to QuickBooks, Xero or Zoho Books, and know that all expenses are business related.

Instead, someone has to carefully comb through and recategorize expenses. It’s an unnecessary manual step that saps business productivity. Besides, memory fades and makes it all the harder to recategorize if you don’t get to it right away.

5. Leads to objections by other stakeholders

Shareholders, investors and business partners do not want you treating the business like it’s your personal piggy bank.

The founder of WeWork discovered this the hard way. The high-flying company, once valued at $47 billion, filed for an IPO in the summer of 2019. The filing disclosures revealed the founder’s self-dealing, including personal loans he got from the company at below-market rates. In other words, he was diverting company funds to personal purposes.

The company’s biggest investor forced him out as CEO. He had to resign from the company he founded!

WeWork is a high profile example. Remember, though, even in a small business with no plans for an initial public offering, stakeholders could sue for misappropriation of funds, fraud or breach of fiduciary duty. So if there are other owners or investors, paying personal expenses from a business account will eventually catch up with you.

6. Could negate part of the Subchapter S benefit

Commingled accounts can throw a monkey wrench into the best Subchapter S tax plan.

A Subchapter S is an election you make with the IRS to treat taxes as a pass-through and avoid double taxation of both the corporation and the owner.

Another advantage of a Subchapter S is that it can reduce employment taxes (Medicare and Social Security taxes) for the owner. Here is how it works. The owner becomes an employee of the company. As long as he takes a reasonable salary, the owner doesn’t have to pay employment taxes on corporate distributions over and above the salary.

However, if the owner takes non-salary distributions without keeping good track of how much he is spending, he could run afoul of the IRS. How? By taking distributions that far outstrip his salary. Tax law requires that the owner’s salary not be unreasonably low compared to profit distributions.

What can happen is that the owner loses track of how much he is taking out of the company for personal purposes. This is easy to do when you mix personal and business expenses and don’t have good accounting controls.

As Nolo.com states, “If the IRS concludes that an S corporation owner has attempted to evade payroll taxes by disguising employee salary as corporate distributions, it can recharacterize the distributions as salary and require payment of employment taxes and penalties which can include payroll tax penalties of up to 100% plus negligence penalties.”

7. Makes it harder to profit and grow

The more disciplined a business is about finances, the greater the likelihood of success. If you are loosey-goosey handling bank accounts, it can cause your business to lack fiscal discipline in other ways. And that puts an unnecessary impediment in front of you.

Any financial reports may show an inaccurate picture of the business, because they may include personal expenses. How can you run a Profit and Loss statement (P&L) without clean data — or stopping to clean up your data?

Overall, by mixing personal and business funds and not maintaining discipline, it becomes harder to manage the business toward profits and success.

Best Practices for Business and Personal Expenses

Most small businesses start out with the owner using her personal funds to start the business. So, from the owner’s standpoint it may seem perfectly fine keep mixing personal and business. In fact, according to one survey, 27% of business owners admitting using the same account for business and personal.

But it’s not fine to commingle funds once the business is operating. Follow these 8 best practices:

Separate Business and Personal Bank Accounts

A small business owner should always have two checking accounts: a personal account and a business account.

It’s so much easier when you keep your business and your personal life separate and well organized.  Read more from tax expert Barbara Weltman on why you need to separate your business finances.

Take a Salary

The owner should set herself up with a salary. If it’s a corporation or Subchapter S, the owner should be made an employee. For a sole proprietor, she could simply set up a regular withdrawal or transfer every two weeks into a personal account.

This enforces the separation of funds. Taking a salary is the main way to break the habit of dipping into business accounts for personal expenses at irregular intervals.

Take Profit Distributions in Lump Sums

Sole proprietors and LLC owners commonly take profit distributions over and above their salary. This is accepted practice.

But the best way to do this is to take distributions as planned lump sums. Do not take them as irregular ATM withdrawals or by paying personal bills here and there. Doing so makes planning much harder. Plus, the funds are more likely to get frittered away instead of being earmarked for important purposes such as a SIMPLE or 401k retirement plan.

Make distributions a planned event once or a few times a year. Build them into your tax and retirement planning and your growth strategy.

Use Separate Credit Cards

Another poor practice is when the owner uses the same credit card for both personal and business.

This causes accounting confusion and can lead to mistakes when it’s time to claim tax deductions. It also adds extra steps to your bookkeeping. You can’t simply download your monthly transaction history into your accounting software and have all business charges in one place. Just like with bank account records, you have to manually sort through them.

Apply for a business credit card as soon as you have revenue coming in regularly. It will also help establish a separate credit history for the business.

Keep Good Records for Taxes

Keep your tax records up to date throughout the year. The impact of procrastinating can be costly.

Good recordkeeping helps you stay out of tax trouble. Often it isn’t bad intent that gets small business owners into hot water with the IRS and other taxing authorities. Rather, poor  bookkeeping and lack of documentation cause unnecessary problems. It’s a forced error.

Poor recordkeeping can also cause you to pay more in taxes. Good tax planning becomes difficult when you don’t have a clear financial picture. So you’re likely to arrive at tax time only to discover there were strategies you could have employed to reduce taxes.  But because you didn’t have good books and the ability to look ahead before the tax year ended, you missed out.

Manage to a Budget

In business you’re more likely to thrive and be successful if you set goals and a budget.

This includes setting a budget to pay yourself a “salary.” Don’t just pull out money from your bank account in dribs and drabs. You will lack a clear picture of what your monthly expense burn rate is. Your burn rate should be burned into your brain!

Owners lose track of how much they need to generate in sales when they commingle business and personal funds. As an owner, you are much more likely to meet your goals if you always know exactly how much you need to earn and how much you can spend, in order to make a profit each month.

Be sure to run a monthly Profit and Loss statement and other financial reports. They help you stay on track.

Always Pay Obligations Timely

When you don’t pay obligations when they are due, that’s a key time when questions arise over personal use of business funds. Everything may go along fine with no one raising objections UNTIL the business stops paying.

Rule of thumb in business: pay everyone you owe on time. You will avoid a large chunk of legal entanglements this way.

Respect Other Stakeholders

If you have an investor, a business partner, shareholders or members in an LLC — be extra scrupulous in funds handling. Respect that they have a right to know how business funds are being used and a say in it.

By separating business and personal, and following best practices, it keeps everything above board. It helps avoid the appearance of impropriety.

In conclusion, dipping into a business account every time the owner needs a little extra cash is a terrible way to run a business. Be a smarter business owner.

All answers to reader questions come from the Small Business Trends Editorial Board, with more than 50 years of combined business experience. If you would like to submit a question, please submit it here.

Image: DepositPhotos.com

This article, “Can You Use a Business Bank Account for Personal Use?” was first published on Small Business Trends

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Original Post from SC Magazine Author: Bradley Barth

Ransomware is everywhere. It plagues businesses big and small, across the globe, even in the most hidden corners.

Still, over the past year, certain industries have been feeling the pain more than others. A Malwarebytes quarterly report released last August found that detections of ransomware among organizations rose 365 percent from Q2 2018 to Q2 2019, with a particularly high frequency of attacks against cities and municipalities, health care facilities and educational institutions.

Telemetry from Trend Micro’s global threat intelligence network picked up on similar trends. In July, the cybersecurity firm reported that in the first half of 2019, governments were most often targeted by ransomware (27 percent of observed attacks), followed by manufacturing companies (20 percent) and health care organizations (14 percent). Retail and education were neck-in-neck after that.

For this feature, SC Media asked top cyber experts to look at four key business categories – manufacturing/industrial, health care, government/cities and school districts – and provide perspective on why they have become such viable targets.

Manufacturing & heavy industry

In March 2019, Norwegian aluminum producer Norsk Hydro was hit with a crippling cyberattack that, according to early estimates, caused over $40 million in damages due in large part to lost margins and volumes.

The culprit: LockerGoga ransomware, which soon after played a hand in attacks against additional manufacturing and chemical companies including Columbus, Ohio-based Hexion, and Waterford, New York-based MPM Holdings Inc. (aka Momentive). It may also be what sidelined Swiss heavy equipment company Aebi Schmidt.

Phil Neray, VP of industrial cybersecurity at CyberX, says manufacturing companies are an obvious and viable target for ransomware campaigns because “downtime is measured in millions of dollars per day – so CEOs are typically eager to pay up.”

But the potential for damage transcends finances – a ransomware-caused shutdown can also have life-threatening consequences. “If you start shutting down something in a manufacturing facility and it’s not properly augmented or secured, you could possibly release chemicals into the environment and affect the workers on site,” says Tim Bandos, VP of cybersecurity at Digital Guardian. Making matters worse, manufacturing companies often have “archaic security controls in place” that are not easily scalable to adequately protect their large-scale operations, he continues.

From 2011-2015, Bandos served as cybersecurity director, incident response and threat intelligence, at a leading chemical manufacturing company. (He asked SC Media not to reveal its name.) Bandos himself bore witness to ransomware attacks at his former company, although nothing on the scale of Norsk Hydro.

One such attack exploited a hole in a firewall placed between the company’s primary networks and the process control network that runs its operational technology. This allowed the ransomware to sneak right through to PCN-related networks. “That’s when the kinetic effects start happening. Valves start turning, things start opening up that maybe shouldn’t be,” says Bandos. (Fortunately, the company had safeguards in place to prevent a major event leading to injury.)

The LockerGoga ransomware that has wreaked havoc on manufacturers has repeatedly evolved, in some versions acting more like a destructive wiper, threatening to not only encrypt data, but also overwrite disk drives, if victims don’t pay up. Other malware strains exhibiting these dual functionalities include MegaCortex and GermanWiper. This only raises the stakes further.

“Now you have to not only recover the data that you lost, but you have to recover the entire operating system along with that, and that’s a larger effort for a company to work with,” says Christopher Scott, global remediation lead at IBM Security’s X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) team.

IRIS has reported a 200 percent increase in destructive malware incidents over the first half of 2019, compared to the second half of 2018. Many involved ransomware attacks perpetrated against chemical and manufacturing companies. To prevent future attacks, Scott recommends that manufacturers adopt multifactor authentication, execute a defense-in-depth strategy, and practice segmentation of key systems.

“Everyone needs to learn from this… to be more proactive ahead of time, because having to spend the money up front after an attack like this can be much more devastating than deploying a security software that might cost you a half a million dollars or a million bucks to cover your entire enterprise,” says Bandos.

Health care

The landmark February 2016 Locky ransomware attack on Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center wasn’t the first such incident against a medical facility, but it arguably represents a watershed moment for cyber professionals working for health care organizations (HCOs). The reported $3.6 million ransom demand demonstrated that attackers were beginning to recognize the immense wealth they could quickly accumulate by targeting vulnerable organizations dealing in highly sensitive and life-saving data. Since then, major ransomware campaigns against HCOs have continued relatively unabated.

“Hospitals may find themselves without the use of key systems. Without an EHR [electronic health record], patient care will certainly be affected. Some services can continue manually, albeit with delay, but in other situations care may not be possible at all,” says Jason Taule, CISO and VP of standards at HITRUST, the Health Information Trust Alliance. “A physician, for example, can still write a manual prescription, presuming he/she has enough knowledge of possible drug interactions, but radiology units are almost exclusively online and digital now, which means patients would have to be diverted elsewhere for care.”

Such setbacks can be devastating, says Clyde Hewitt, VP of security strategy at CynergisTek. However, “What is less publicized is… the adverse financial impacts to cash flow.”

Hewitt recalls one particular hospital that, despite recovering its network in just two weeks, was forced to manually input massive volumes of downtime forms into the EHR system so that claims could be generated and sent to the insurance companies. “Co-payments also could not be collected until the claims were processed. This resulted in a 60-day gap in receiving payments and put the organization into a $60 million deficit before they started to recover,” says Hewitt.

There’s also the potential of facing major penalties for violating HIPAA regulations, or even investigations by the FBI or the Joint Commission, which accredits more than 21,000 U.S. health care organizations. “But even if loss of accreditation is not a significant concern, HCOs should still be concerned about the higher cost of cyber liability insurance coverage following an incident,” says Taule.

And yet, “health care leadership has historically been slow to recognize the threat and therefore provide adequate resources to address the threat,” adds Hewitt.

The problem is, where to start? Hospitals make for great victims because they have “one the largest attack surfaces of any industry,” due to “all the interfaces needed to provide care,” Hewitt notes. EHR systems aside, there are also connected medical devices, patient wearables, physical environmental controls and more. “Many of these devices operate through the cloud and many are years or even decades old. This makes it very challenging to implement robust defenses,” Hewitt adds.

Furthermore, the health care landscape itself is composed of a diverse array of organizations, with varying levels of commitment to cybersecurity. It’s not just hospitals who are at risk – it’s small doctors’ offices, clinical labs, research facilities and others. Incidents like the May 2017 WannaCry offensive that cost the UK’s massive National Health System £92 million get worldwide attention, but for every NHS, there are many smaller HCOs getting hit, like Bridgewater, Massachusetts-based medical billing company Doctors’ Management Services (DMS) or the Dental Center of Northwest Ohio.

“The mission, regulations, geography, technical environment, management team, information involved, financial resources, culture and personnel vary substantially across each type of organization,” says Taule. “For all the progress HCOs have made in recent years, many still find themselves without a full-time, well-trained, experienced, executive-level person in charge of security” who must lobby management for cyber investments.

Attacker tactics are also constantly changing, and HCOs are generally not nimble enough to keep up. Hewitt says attackers are getting better at targeting specific organizations with spear phishing emails, while Taule says attacks are becoming easier to execute due to the advent of ransomware-as-a-service offerings like GandCrab.

Adversaries are also showing more willingness to exploit vulnerabilities in medical IoT devices, leveraging them to gain a foothold into organizations and later commit a damaging attack. “The next step in this evolution could be ransomware on IoT devices, particularly in health care IoT: pacemakers, insulin pumps, etc.,” said Bogdan Botezatu, director of threat research and reporting at Bitdefender.

Consequently, Taule recommends that HCOs incorporate firmware into their control frameworks and their vulnerability scanning and patching efforts.

Government & municipalities

Last July, more than 225 U.S. mayors stood their ground against ransomware attacks, signing a resolution stating they would reject any extortion demand. The gesture came two months after a Robbinhood ransomware attack shut down the city of Baltimore’s servers, resulting in estimated response and recovery costs of $18 million – well above the original $80,000 ransom demand.

According to the United States Conference of Mayors’ resolution, “at least 170 county, city or state government systems have experienced a ransomware attack since 2013.” Victims have been as large as the city of Atlanta and the Port of San Diego, both struck by SamSam ransomware in 2018. But smaller, provincial targets have been an even more frequent target, including La Porte County, Indiana and the Salisbury, Maryland Police Department just this past year.

“Municipalities make excellent targets for several reasons,” says Sherrod DeGrippo, senior director of threat research and detection at Proofpoint. “They typically have underfunded information security protections, despite running what some would consider critical infrastructure.”

“Due to small IT footprints, they often lack robust security controls and disaster recovery solutions that would allow them to prevent these types of attacks and/or to recover quickly,” DeGrippo continues. “Many municipalities also manage a huge number of interconnections into their network. These interconnections add complexity to the security and management of their networks, allowing simple misconfigurations to be exploited by threat actors.”

Compounding these challenges are a proliferation of third-party vendors, contractors and suppliers that work with government agencies – each with their own set of vulnerabilities. “Threat actors can potentially use them as a backdoor to reach the systems of a local city or state agency,” DeGrippo remarks. For that reason, “We recommend a thorough vetting of the security and access controls of all vendors before connecting them to a network.”

When ransomware successfully infects a government entity, it essentially disrupts day-to-day business operations that allow society to function normally and cities to stay funded. For example, the Baltimore attack reportedly waylaid the collection of water bills, property taxes and parking tickets, along with the distribution of city permits.

This is troublesome enough. However, there is an even greater concern that a future ransomware attack could impact critical infrastructure or emergency services. “If the communication systems utilized by first responders were taken offline, it could cripple their ability to respond to emergency situations – especially considering many are migrating toward Voice over Internet Protocol phone networks, which are more susceptible to a ransomware attack,” warns Michael F.D. Anaya, head of global cyber investigations and government relations at DEVCON, and a former supervisory special agent for the FBI in Atlanta.

One might wonder if the advent of smart cities will only further increase the threat surface. “IoT devices have typically been built for very specific functions without a significant focus on built-in security features. As such, they tend to be vulnerable to attack, provide easy targets for lateral movement within environments, and are sufficiently numerous and distributed to be difficult to secure through means traditionally applied to laptops and other devices,” says DeGrippo.

On the plus side, however, “A key advantage is that any city looking to implement smart technologies will have to undergo a digital transformation that will retire vulnerable, antiqued systems. These new systems will be a fresh start, offering up-to-date security measures that will make them harder to compromise.”

To counter the threat, DeGrippo recommends that municipalities “develop threat profiles that highlight areas of risk, and implement a proactive, people-centric security approach” that includes security awareness training, which even cash-strapped localities should be able to afford.

Schools

Another realm of the public sector that’s also under attack is local educational districts – so much so that in July 2019 New Orleans Governor John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency, which made his jurisdiction’s local districts eligible for government funding to better protect themselves.

“I applaud the Governor of Louisiana for taking decisive action to help school districts respond to the cybersecurity threats they are facing,” says Douglas Levin, president of EdTech Strategies, LLC, which operates the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center. “Most districts have not devoted the necessary resources to managing the cybersecurity risks they are facing today, much less tomorrow. Outside assistance and resources are critical to helping them to respond and recover.”

With that said, however, “the state’s response is akin to giving an aspirin to someone who just broke their arm,” Levin continues. “There are more fundamental issues facing the state of school cybersecurity – in Louisiana and beyond – and it will require a comprehensive and sustained response over time. It will include the passage of education sector-specific cybersecurity compliance policies, more resources for school districts to deploy and monitor cybersecurity controls, and more transparency and information sharing.”

Examples this year of ransomware attacks on school districts include prominent incidents involving school districts in Syracuse, N.Y.; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and likely Houston County Schools in Alabama (the district did not officially confirm ransomware in the last case).

Levin says districts often fall victim to ransomware attacks because academic environments “tend to have large numbers of unsophisticated users, be more trusting of technology, and [be] more open to deploying relatively immature online services and applications. Yet, school district IT infrastructure tends to be quite varied, older and less well-supported than in other sectors.”

And although many school districts are on tight budgets, they have been known on occasion to pay up. “I have heard anecdotally that more recent ransomware payments have been made by school districts at a much higher cost, reaching seven figures,” Levin continues.

Clearly, school districts must continue to get educated fast on the ABCs of ransomware. As must government bodies, HCOs and manufacturers.

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Go to Source Author: Bradley Barth Captives of industry Original Post from SC Magazine Author: Bradley Barth Ransomware is everywhere. It plagues businesses big and small, across the globe, even in…

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230 Investors With USD $16.2 Trillion in AUM Call for Corporate Action on Deforestation, Signaling Support for the Amazon

Today, 230 institutional investors representing USD $16.2 trillion in assets under management are calling on companies to take urgent action in light of the devastating fires in the Amazon, which have been fueled in part because of the deforestation happening at an alarming rate in Brazil and Bolivia.

“It is with deep concern that we follow the escalating crisis of deforestation and forest fires in Brazil and Bolivia,” the investors wrote in a statement released today. “As investors, who have a fiduciary duty to act in the best long-term interests of our beneficiaries, we recognise the crucial role that tropical forests play in tackling climate change, protecting biodiversity and ensuring ecosystem services.”  

The full statement with the list of investor signatories is available here. Among the signatories are some of the largest investment managers and asset owners (30% of signatories) from around the globe, representing more than 30 countries. The statement calls on companies to tackle the financial material deforestation risks, including market and reputational risks, within their operations and global supply chains. It specifically asks companies to:

Publicly disclose and implement a commodity-specific no deforestation policy with quantifiable, time-bound commitments covering the entire supply chain and sourcing geographies

Establish a transparent monitoring and verification system for supplier compliance with the company’s no deforestation policy

Report annually on deforestation risk exposure and management, including progress towards the company’s no deforestation policy

“Deforestation is a global issue for long term investors like CalPERS, who face severe and urgent risks posed by climate change," said Anne Simpson, CalPERS' director of board governance and strategy and Climate Action 100+ steering committee member.  "The fires ranging in the Amazon, Indonesia and beyond, threaten the natural carbon sinks which absorb rapidly escalating greenhouse gas emissions. We are committed to engaging companies to bring down greenhouse gas emissions through Climate Action 100+, and we welcome other multi-stakeholder initiatives around the world, such as the Investor Initiative for Sustainable Forests, the Leticia Pact and the planned Alliance for the Amazon led by France and Chile for UNGA 74. We stand ready to do our part as fiduciary investors to ensure we protect assets, manage risks, and realize sustainable returns for our members.”

“For too long, the discussion on climate change has concentrated on the energy sector. There is an urgent need to focus more on effective management of agricultural supply chains,” said Jan Erik Saugestad, CEO Storebrand Asset Management. “Deforestation and loss of biodiversity are not only environmental problems. There are significant negative economic effects associated with these issues and they represent a risk that we as investors cannot ignore. The adoption of Storebrand's investment policy to curb deforestation, lays out a clear mandate to intensify our work on active ownership, and obliges us to apply maximum pressure to change company behavior. Storebrand’s ambition is to have an investment portfolio that does not contribute to deforestation by 2025, and we will not knowingly finance operations that are illegal, fail to protect high conservation value forests or violate the rights of workers and local people.”

“The escalating crisis in Brazil and Bolivia is a clear indicator of the ongoing risks to the global economy from the combined impacts of climate change, deforestation and land-use changes,” said Lauren Compere, Boston Common Asset Management. “As investors, we have a responsibility to address these threats within our portfolios across the value chain from agricultural producers to the banks that finance them. We can address this through financial mechanisms and solutions that are in the best interests of our clients, the environment, and the communities we affect on the ground.” 

The statement, coordinated by the nonprofit organizations PRI and Ceres, also comes on the heels of a new special report on climate change and land released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shows that 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions are caused by poor forestry and land-use management including commodity-driven deforestation. 

“The gargantuan biodiversity of the Amazon forest calls for innovative solutions to harness its biological assets,” said Professor Carlos Nobre, Senior Researcher with the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Advanced Studies. “The use of modern technologies can help to keep the forest standing, and preserve its vital role storing carbon, protecting species and providing invaluable ecosystems services for the planet. Investors have a critical role to play in developing and harnessing these technologies to help preserve the Amazon forest.”

Many of the investors who have signed the statement are involved in a collaborative investor engagement initiative with global companies exposed directly or indirectly to soy and cattle from South America. The Investor Initiative for Sustainable Forests (IISF), led by PRI and Ceres, aims to transform industry practices to eliminate deforestation from cattle and soy supply chains.

“In signing this statement, investors representing a significant portion of global capital are pledging their support for the Amazon region, which has been devastated by fires and deforestation,” said PRI CEO Fiona Reynolds. “In doing so, investors are recognising the critical role they play to urgently accelerate action to help societies affected by this tragedy, and to prevent environmental disasters of this scale in the future.”

"Institutional investors increasingly recognize that deforestation creates material financial risks, including reputational and regulatory risks for companies, and that it exacerbates systemic risk across portfolios by contributing to climate change," said Ceres CEO and President Mindy Lubber. "Therefore, companies must demonstrate to investors that they can hold their global suppliers accountable for disclosing and eliminating these risks."  

About PRI PRI works with its international network of more than 2,500 signatories, representing over US$86.3 trillion in assets, to put the six Principles for Responsible Investment into practice. Its goals are to understand the investment implications of ESG issues and to support signatories in integrating these issues into investment and ownership decisions. The six Principles were developed by investors and are supported by the United Nations. PRI does not operate for its own profit; it engages with global policymakers but is not associated with any government; it is supported by, but not part of, the United Nations.

About Ceres Ceres is a sustainability nonprofit organization working with the most influential investors and companies to build leadership and drive solutions throughout the economy. Through powerful networks and advocacy, Ceres tackles the world’s biggest sustainability challenges, including climate change, water scarcity and pollution, and equitable workplaces. For more information, visit www.ceres.org and follow @CeresNews.

source: https://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/42611-230-Investors-With-USD-16-2-Trillion-in-AUM-Call-for-Corporate-Action-on-Deforestation-Signaling-Support-for-the-Amazon?tracking_source=rss

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Woodstock 50’s Lack of Lineup, Free Tickets Lead to Low Expectations

After what seemed like an inevitable cancellation, Woodstock 50 is still alive, though it’s moved south and barely has any of its ‘60s glory. The golden-anniversary celebration of the iconic music festival is now scheduled to take place at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., will be a free event, and currently has no confirmed acts, a far cry from what was planned as a star-studded, $400-per-person, 150,000-capacity extravaganza in upstate New York.

Troubles for the festival, produced by original organizer Michael Lang, started in late April, just six weeks after the lineup featuring Jay-Z, the Killers, Dead & Company, Chance the Rapper, and many more, was announced. Dentsu Aegis, the chief financier, pulled out of its deal to back the event and Superfly, the production company that also puts on festivals such as Bonnaroo, followed soon after. The cause of this departure was reportedly over the organizers’ poor planning of the festival’s infrastructure, particularly when it came to water and sanitation, and the lack of permits for the planned event site, Watkins Glen International racetrack.

Things only looked worse for Woodstock 50 after that, with Dentsu saying the festival was canceled while Lang insisted the financier didn’t have the authority to say so and that all of the artists were paid in full and still under contract to perform when the permits were approved. The organizers sued Dentsu for taking nearly $18 million out of the festival’s bank account but a judge ruled in favor of the Japanese company, saying it still had the legal grounds to retrieve its money after Woodstock 50 failed to meet contractually meet production milestones in the leadup to the event. 

Not long after, Watkins Glen announced it would no longer be hosting Woodstock 50 after the organizers failed to pay $150,000 for its use. Lang and co. then attempted to move the event to Vernon Downs, a horse racing track in Vernon, N.Y., but the town denied them a permit and three subsequent appeals in mid-July, leading Virgin Produced, the production arm of Virgin Group that replaced Superfly, to back out as well.

Now, Woodstock 50’s last hope is to somehow attract talent to the outdoor venue in Maryland and its 19,000-person capacity. After the move was announced, Jay-Z and John Fogerty were the first high-profile acts to announce they were no longer appearing at the festival, and Woodstock 50 revealed that it released every artist from their contracts to play the event. This is no surprise, as moving the festival over 200 miles south would constitute a breach of contract on the part of Woodstock 50 anyway, so there would be no way they could force anyone to play it.

With no hope of getting fans to pony up hundreds of dollars for an event without any booked acts, Lang opted to make it a free event, leaving it unclear how any performers will be compensated if this latest attempt falls through. Merriweather Post Pavilion’s operator, Seth Hurwitz has made it clear that the event will only happen if Lang can deliver artists. “Now I’m just a venue waiting to see if the promoter with the hold is going to confirm,” he told Billboard.

So what went wrong? We’ll have to wait for postmortem revelations from those involved, but all along it appeared as though Lang was operating on the notion that the importance of the original Woodstock would win out over all the setbacks. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he lamented the fact that there were so many safety regulations in place for large events now, saying, “A lot of the conditions they look for are a bit overdone. You never want to skimp on safety, but they were drawn up by people who didn’t know anything about this business.”

While speaking to Fortune in early May, Randy Phillips, the head of events producer LiveStyle and former CEO of AEG Live, pointed out a number of reasons that Woodstock 50 was doomed to fail. Chief among them was that events of that size need to be planned at least a year out, so Lang was always well behind schedule. “You’re dealing with government entities, permit processes, medical, structural—all of this stuff takes time, especially during the summer months,” he said. “That’s the biggest touring season. All of the providers, whether it’s sound, lights, scaffolding, they’re all stretched really thin so you need to reserve all of that stuff well in advance.”

At the time, Phillips predicted more artists eventually backing out because “no one wants to be involved in a disaster,” especially following high-profile failures like Fyre Festival and even the horrific violence and destruction that will forever be the legacy of Woodstock ‘99. Phillips also noted that switching venues would spell disaster, as he learned from 2003’s Field Day festival, which was changed from a two-day event in an eastern Long Island park to New Jersey’s Giants Stadium. “We couldn’t sell a ticket. Sales stopped completely. It never ever works to move an event and try to downsize,” he said.

On top of the logistical problems, the nostalgia for the original just wasn’t there, and a mix of younger acts like Miley Cyrus and Imagine Dragons with original Woodstock performers John Sebastian and Country Joe McDonald wasn’t going to inspire tens of thousands of people to drive to a remote part of New York with few lodging options and a campground plagued by lack of planning. 

Instead, it looks like Woodstock’s 50th anniversary is best celebrated at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, a venue on the site of the original festival that has Ringo Starr, Fogerty, Santana, and others booked for the weekend of Aug. 16 to 18. For now, the event at Merriweather Post Pavilion resembles Woodstock ‘89, also known as the “Forgotten Woodstock,” an impromptu free festival on the original farm that counted 1969’s MC, hippie legend Wavy Gravy, as its most notable name. Tens of thousands of people, mostly lured by word of mouth, showed up and, by all accounts, had an unforgettable time that recreated the carefree magic of the 1969 version. 

Given the current summer-festival landscape, with A-list acts sharing bills at well-run events in some part of the country nearly every weekend, emulating the spirit of ‘89 without a flashy, overly ambitious lineup might be Lang’s best bet. Recreating 1969 is impossible, but playing to low expectations and embracing a bit of the chaos that made the original so transcendent is likely the only way for him to make Woodstock 50 get remembered as anything but a massive disappointment. Now he just needs to find a bunch of artists still willing to play it.

More must-read stories from Fortune:

—Once Upon a Time in Hollywood overperforms in its opening weekend, but will the spell last?

—Amazon’s TV bosses want you to know why they’re not Netflix

—Netflix’s cancellation of Tuca & Bertie renews criticism of its algorithm

—HBO explains the Big Little Lies controversy—sort of

—Listen to our new audio briefing, Fortune 500 Daily

Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.

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Woodstock 50’s Lack of Lineup, Free Tickets Lead to Low Expectations

After what seemed like an inevitable cancellation, Woodstock 50 is still alive, though it’s moved south and barely has any of its ‘60s glory. The golden-anniversary celebration of the iconic music festival is now scheduled to take place at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., will be a free event, and currently has no confirmed acts, a far cry from what was planned as a star-studded, $400-per-person, 150,000-capacity extravaganza in upstate New York.

Troubles for the festival, produced by original organizer Michael Lang, started in late April, just six weeks after the lineup featuring Jay-Z, the Killers, Dead & Company, Chance the Rapper, and many more, was announced. Dentsu Aegis, the chief financier, pulled out of its deal to back the event and Superfly, the production company that also puts on festivals such as Bonnaroo, followed soon after. The cause of this departure was reportedly over the organizers’ poor planning of the festival’s infrastructure, particularly when it came to water and sanitation, and the lack of permits for the planned event site, Watkins Glen International racetrack.

Things only looked worse for Woodstock 50 after that, with Dentsu saying the festival was canceled while Lang insisted the financier didn’t have the authority to say so and that all of the artists were paid in full and still under contract to perform when the permits were approved. The organizers sued Dentsu for taking nearly $18 million out of the festival’s bank account but a judge ruled in favor of the Japanese company, saying it still had the legal grounds to retrieve its money after Woodstock 50 failed to meet contractually meet production milestones in the leadup to the event. 

Not long after, Watkins Glen announced it would no longer be hosting Woodstock 50 after the organizers failed to pay $150,000 for its use. Lang and co. then attempted to move the event to Vernon Downs, a horse racing track in Vernon, N.Y., but the town denied them a permit and three subsequent appeals in mid-July, leading Virgin Produced, the production arm of Virgin Group that replaced Superfly, to back out as well.

Now, Woodstock 50’s last hope is to somehow attract talent to the outdoor venue in Maryland and its 19,000-person capacity. After the move was announced, Jay-Z and John Fogerty were the first high-profile acts to announce they were no longer appearing at the festival, and Woodstock 50 revealed that it released every artist from their contracts to play the event. This is no surprise, as moving the festival over 200 miles south would constitute a breach of contract on the part of Woodstock 50 anyway, so there would be no way they could force anyone to play it.

With no hope of getting fans to pony up hundreds of dollars for an event without any booked acts, Lang opted to make it a free event, leaving it unclear how any performers will be compensated if this latest attempt falls through. Merriweather Post Pavilion’s operator, Seth Hurwitz has made it clear that the event will only happen if Lang can deliver artists. “Now I’m just a venue waiting to see if the promoter with the hold is going to confirm,” he told Billboard.

So what went wrong? We’ll have to wait for postmortem revelations from those involved, but all along it appeared as though Lang was operating on the notion that the importance of the original Woodstock would win out over all the setbacks. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he lamented the fact that there were so many safety regulations in place for large events now, saying, “A lot of the conditions they look for are a bit overdone. You never want to skimp on safety, but they were drawn up by people who didn’t know anything about this business.”

While speaking to Fortune in early May, Randy Phillips, the head of events producer LiveStyle and former CEO of AEG Live, pointed out a number of reasons that Woodstock 50 was doomed to fail. Chief among them was that events of that size need to be planned at least a year out, so Lang was always well behind schedule. “You’re dealing with government entities, permit processes, medical, structural—all of this stuff takes time, especially during the summer months,” he said. “That’s the biggest touring season. All of the providers, whether it’s sound, lights, scaffolding, they’re all stretched really thin so you need to reserve all of that stuff well in advance.”

At the time, Phillips predicted more artists eventually backing out because “no one wants to be involved in a disaster,” especially following high-profile failures like Fyre Festival and even the horrific violence and destruction that will forever be the legacy of Woodstock ‘99. Phillips also noted that switching venues would spell disaster, as he learned from 2003’s Field Day festival, which was changed from a two-day event in an eastern Long Island park to New Jersey’s Giants Stadium. “We couldn’t sell a ticket. Sales stopped completely. It never ever works to move an event and try to downsize,” he said.

On top of the logistical problems, the nostalgia for the original just wasn’t there, and a mix of younger acts like Miley Cyrus and Imagine Dragons with original Woodstock performers John Sebastian and Country Joe McDonald wasn’t going to inspire tens of thousands of people to drive to a remote part of New York with few lodging options and a campground plagued by lack of planning. 

Instead, it looks like Woodstock’s 50th anniversary is best celebrated at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, a venue on the site of the original festival that has Ringo Starr, Fogerty, Santana, and others booked for the weekend of Aug. 16 to 18. For now, the event at Merriweather Post Pavilion resembles Woodstock ‘89, also known as the “Forgotten Woodstock,” an impromptu free festival on the original farm that counted 1969’s MC, hippie legend Wavy Gravy, as its most notable name. Tens of thousands of people, mostly lured by word of mouth, showed up and, by all accounts, had an unforgettable time that recreated the carefree magic of the 1969 version. 

Given the current summer-festival landscape, with A-list acts sharing bills at well-run events in some part of the country nearly every weekend, emulating the spirit of ‘89 without a flashy, overly ambitious lineup might be Lang’s best bet. Recreating 1969 is impossible, but playing to low expectations and embracing a bit of the chaos that made the original so transcendent is likely the only way for him to make Woodstock 50 get remembered as anything but a massive disappointment. Now he just needs to find a bunch of artists still willing to play it.

More must-read stories from Fortune:

—Once Upon a Time in Hollywood overperforms in its opening weekend, but will the spell last?

—Amazon’s TV bosses want you to know why they’re not Netflix

—Netflix’s cancellation of Tuca & Bertie renews criticism of its algorithm

—HBO explains the Big Little Lies controversy—sort of

—Listen to our new audio briefing, Fortune 500 Daily

Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.

Credit: Source link

The post Woodstock 50’s Lack of Lineup, Free Tickets Lead to Low Expectations appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/woodstock-50s-lack-of-lineup-free-tickets-lead-to-low-expectations/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=woodstock-50s-lack-of-lineup-free-tickets-lead-to-low-expectations from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.tumblr.com/post/186633778362

[weeklyreviewer]

Woodstock 50’s Lack of Lineup, Free Tickets Lead to Low Expectations

After what seemed like an inevitable cancellation, Woodstock 50 is still alive, though it’s moved south and barely has any of its ‘60s glory. The golden-anniversary celebration of the iconic music festival is now scheduled to take place at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md., will be a free event, and currently has no confirmed acts, a far cry from what was planned as a star-studded, $400-per-person, 150,000-capacity extravaganza in upstate New York.

Troubles for the festival, produced by original organizer Michael Lang, started in late April, just six weeks after the lineup featuring Jay-Z, the Killers, Dead & Company, Chance the Rapper, and many more, was announced. Dentsu Aegis, the chief financier, pulled out of its deal to back the event and Superfly, the production company that also puts on festivals such as Bonnaroo, followed soon after. The cause of this departure was reportedly over the organizers’ poor planning of the festival’s infrastructure, particularly when it came to water and sanitation, and the lack of permits for the planned event site, Watkins Glen International racetrack.

Things only looked worse for Woodstock 50 after that, with Dentsu saying the festival was canceled while Lang insisted the financier didn’t have the authority to say so and that all of the artists were paid in full and still under contract to perform when the permits were approved. The organizers sued Dentsu for taking nearly $18 million out of the festival’s bank account but a judge ruled in favor of the Japanese company, saying it still had the legal grounds to retrieve its money after Woodstock 50 failed to meet contractually meet production milestones in the leadup to the event. 

Not long after, Watkins Glen announced it would no longer be hosting Woodstock 50 after the organizers failed to pay $150,000 for its use. Lang and co. then attempted to move the event to Vernon Downs, a horse racing track in Vernon, N.Y., but the town denied them a permit and three subsequent appeals in mid-July, leading Virgin Produced, the production arm of Virgin Group that replaced Superfly, to back out as well.

Now, Woodstock 50’s last hope is to somehow attract talent to the outdoor venue in Maryland and its 19,000-person capacity. After the move was announced, Jay-Z and John Fogerty were the first high-profile acts to announce they were no longer appearing at the festival, and Woodstock 50 revealed that it released every artist from their contracts to play the event. This is no surprise, as moving the festival over 200 miles south would constitute a breach of contract on the part of Woodstock 50 anyway, so there would be no way they could force anyone to play it.

With no hope of getting fans to pony up hundreds of dollars for an event without any booked acts, Lang opted to make it a free event, leaving it unclear how any performers will be compensated if this latest attempt falls through. Merriweather Post Pavilion’s operator, Seth Hurwitz has made it clear that the event will only happen if Lang can deliver artists. “Now I’m just a venue waiting to see if the promoter with the hold is going to confirm,” he told Billboard.

So what went wrong? We’ll have to wait for postmortem revelations from those involved, but all along it appeared as though Lang was operating on the notion that the importance of the original Woodstock would win out over all the setbacks. In an interview with Rolling Stone, he lamented the fact that there were so many safety regulations in place for large events now, saying, “A lot of the conditions they look for are a bit overdone. You never want to skimp on safety, but they were drawn up by people who didn’t know anything about this business.”

While speaking to Fortune in early May, Randy Phillips, the head of events producer LiveStyle and former CEO of AEG Live, pointed out a number of reasons that Woodstock 50 was doomed to fail. Chief among them was that events of that size need to be planned at least a year out, so Lang was always well behind schedule. “You’re dealing with government entities, permit processes, medical, structural—all of this stuff takes time, especially during the summer months,” he said. “That’s the biggest touring season. All of the providers, whether it’s sound, lights, scaffolding, they’re all stretched really thin so you need to reserve all of that stuff well in advance.”

At the time, Phillips predicted more artists eventually backing out because “no one wants to be involved in a disaster,” especially following high-profile failures like Fyre Festival and even the horrific violence and destruction that will forever be the legacy of Woodstock ‘99. Phillips also noted that switching venues would spell disaster, as he learned from 2003’s Field Day festival, which was changed from a two-day event in an eastern Long Island park to New Jersey’s Giants Stadium. “We couldn’t sell a ticket. Sales stopped completely. It never ever works to move an event and try to downsize,” he said.

On top of the logistical problems, the nostalgia for the original just wasn’t there, and a mix of younger acts like Miley Cyrus and Imagine Dragons with original Woodstock performers John Sebastian and Country Joe McDonald wasn’t going to inspire tens of thousands of people to drive to a remote part of New York with few lodging options and a campground plagued by lack of planning. 

Instead, it looks like Woodstock’s 50th anniversary is best celebrated at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, a venue on the site of the original festival that has Ringo Starr, Fogerty, Santana, and others booked for the weekend of Aug. 16 to 18. For now, the event at Merriweather Post Pavilion resembles Woodstock ‘89, also known as the “Forgotten Woodstock,” an impromptu free festival on the original farm that counted 1969’s MC, hippie legend Wavy Gravy, as its most notable name. Tens of thousands of people, mostly lured by word of mouth, showed up and, by all accounts, had an unforgettable time that recreated the carefree magic of the 1969 version. 

Given the current summer-festival landscape, with A-list acts sharing bills at well-run events in some part of the country nearly every weekend, emulating the spirit of ‘89 without a flashy, overly ambitious lineup might be Lang’s best bet. Recreating 1969 is impossible, but playing to low expectations and embracing a bit of the chaos that made the original so transcendent is likely the only way for him to make Woodstock 50 get remembered as anything but a massive disappointment. Now he just needs to find a bunch of artists still willing to play it.

More must-read stories from Fortune:

—Once Upon a Time in Hollywood overperforms in its opening weekend, but will the spell last?

—Amazon’s TV bosses want you to know why they’re not Netflix

—Netflix’s cancellation of Tuca & Bertie renews criticism of its algorithm

—HBO explains the Big Little Lies controversy—sort of

—Listen to our new audio briefing, Fortune 500 Daily

Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.

Credit: Source link

The post Woodstock 50’s Lack of Lineup, Free Tickets Lead to Low Expectations appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/woodstock-50s-lack-of-lineup-free-tickets-lead-to-low-expectations/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=woodstock-50s-lack-of-lineup-free-tickets-lead-to-low-expectations

[bass-brewers]

Why Dollar General will keep its promise to build 1K stores this year

Just as struggling chains like The Limited, Sears and Macy’s are closing stores, one retailer is gearing up for the largest U.S. expansion program in recent memory.

Dollar General confirmed to Retail Dive it intends to move forward with its plan to build an unprecedented 1,000 new stores in 2017 — or, as a Buckingham Research analyst pointed out, about 2.5 stores per day.

Already in 43 states, this will bring Dollar General into 44 (with the addition of North Dakota) and continues its ongoing initiative to fill in spaces across the country the retailer has identified as fertile ground. A company spokeswoman declined to provide granular detail on where this latest group of stores will be planted.

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To many Americans it may seem the Goodlettsville, TN-based dollar store chain’s black and yellow sign is already a fixture in their neighborhood, and such observations are not without merit. Dollar General has more stores across the country than any other retail nameplate — 13,205 at last count. That compares to Wal-Mart at 5,229, Target at 1,803 and CVS at 9,600. Its toughest rival, Family Dollar, has 7,964 stores, and Family Dollar’s sister Dollar Tree has 6,320. By this time next year there will be about as many Dollar Generals in the U.S. as McDonald’s restaurants.

An aggressive growth plan

As Dollar General forges full speed ahead with its expansion plans, who should be on heightened alert? Pretty much any retailer that sells core, everyday consumable goods. Discounters, drug stores, supermarkets and other dollar store players are all a target for market share.

“The main reason for aggressive unit growth at Dollar General is their belief they have the opportunity to grab specific locations while their biggest competition [Dollar Tree and Family Dollar] is going through a merger, and therefore pulling back on new unit opens,” John Zolidis, retail analyst for Buckingham Research, told Retail Dive. In 2015, Dollar General controlled 56.4% of the dollar store market, followed by Dollar Tree with 21.6% and Family Dollar with 14%, according to Nielsen data.

“[Dollar General is] fantastic at executing,” said Zolidis, remarking on what has been driving the growth. “They do a good job at managing the business and the stores look really good. I visit a lot of dollar stores. They are always bright, clean and well-stocked. And they have a really good assortment in a small space.”

Dollar General’s model, a combination of low prices and convenience, has attracted enough shoppers to produce the cash flow necessary to fuel its rampant growth. A standard 7,300 sq. ft. Dollar General store costs about $250,000 to build, and pays for itself within 1.7 years, according to company reports.

In 2016, Dollar General opened 900 new stores on top of the 730 units opened in 2015. Meanwhile, the company has been retrofitting a bulk of mature stores into its latest DG16 format that features a new checkout area to ease congestion and presents more $1-priced products near the front. Always fine-tuning assortments, it has been expanding profitable departments such as perishables, health and beauty, party and stationery. Stores carry about 10,000 SKUs and Dollar General knows the direct profitability of each. On average, Dollar General’s prices are on par with discounters, 20% less than at grocery stores and 40% less than at drugstores, according to statements from the company.

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A widening customer base has also helped spur Dollar General’s vast development. As CEO Todd Vasos told analysts at its 2016 investor day conference, the current economy “continues to create more of our core consumer each and every year,” according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the event.

“[I]f I was to wager, I would tell you that as we continue to move through the years, this economy is going to continue to create our core consumer and I’m sure we are going to see new and better opportunities start to emerge in our real estate portfolio that we don’t even see today,” Vasos said. Along with its principal budget shoppers, Dollar General has been seeing more millennials and trade-down shoppers come through its doors.

Until the second quarter of 2016, Dollar General has consistently posted same-store sales growth. But it too has hit a slippery spot, with same-store sales softening in the last two quarters, hurt by price deflation in some food categories and a reduction of SNAP benefits among shoppers. To combat that, it has implemented lower prices on 450 key items in 17% of its store base in hopes of building traffic. As it determines what works and what doesn’t it may apply discounts elsewhere.

Still, overall financials remain impressive as net sales grew 5.9% to $15.98 billion for the nine months ended Oct. 28, 2016, with net income of $837 million up from $789 million from the year earlier period. Full-year 2015 net sales grew 7.7% to $20.4 billion, with net income of $1.7 billion, up from $1.07 billion.

Despite the same-store sales hiccup Dollar General is moving right ahead with its massive store build out. Michael Brown, partner in retail practice at global consulting firm A.T. Kearney, is not too concerned with the recent same store sales slump, and understands why Dollar General is pushing ahead. “This is just an impact of the economy. There has been pressure on retailers of all sizes,” he said.

Brown pointed out that retailers like Dollar General need to have a physical space, because selling online isn’t really a financial option. “Having stores is the cheapest way to service their customer. They can’t be shipping products at their low price point,” said Brown. “Rolling out 1,000 new stores is a bold aspiration, but I believe they have the capability to do it.”

At a time when many retailers are closing physical stores and ramping up digital operations, off-price retail offers a healthy environment with room to grow. Robin Lewis, CEO of The Robin Report, a retail strategy publication, has long espoused there is room for more discount retail.

“They have a huge runway for expansion. There is an enormous underclass and they are not being served by traditional retail," Lewis told Retail Dive. "They don’t have any disposable income to speak of. If they are employed, they are marginally employed at best, mostly service jobs — flipping hamburgers. For those that do have jobs they are not participating in the migration to the internet. They can’t do business on the internet without a credit card.”

With increasing Kmart store closures removing shopping options, and the high price of gas causing travel challenges to get to the nearest Wal-Mart, a dollar store popping up in a neighborhood solves a problem, Lewis pointed out. “They can walk there or get there by public transportation.”

While its primary model is its standard 7,300 sq. ft. store, Dollar General earlier this year revealed plans for a smaller more urban format, coined DGX, which will be around 3,400 sq. ft. It has also been learning about perishables categories with its handful of larger and fresh food oriented Dollar General Market and Dollar General Plus stores. Of the 1,000 stores coming in 2017, most will be its core box with 150 to 160 of the new smaller format.

“Our business generates significant cash flow and we are in a position to invest in accelerated store growth as well as mature store base while we continue to return cash to shareholders through consistent share repurchases and anticipated dividends,” Dollar General’s Vasos told analysts in December. “We remain very excited about our business overtime.”

In a simple phrase, that Vasos often repeats, he wraps up why the business model works: “In good times our customers have a little bit more to spend and in tougher times, they need us more.”

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[ggdbshoponline-blog]

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