Tag George Packer

The week@work – the economy improves, the downside of ‘cultural fit’ & the new Fortune 500

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

The ‘big’ stories in this week@work included the release of the May 2015 US employment report and the 61st version of the Fortune 500. The small stories with potential ‘big’ impact told of the growing concern of the majority of Americans about income inequality and research showing discrimination at work is increasing as hiring managers rely more on ‘cultural fit’ to select employees.

On Friday the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics released the May 2015 employment report.

“Worries about the American economy’s momentum were blunted on Friday by the government’s announcement that employers added a hefty 280,000 jobs in May, well above the monthly average logged over the last year.

The official unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 5.5 percent as more Americans jumped back into the labor pool and began the job hunt. Hourly wages, which have grown fitfully, rose 0.3 percent last month, possibly helping to lure back some discouraged workers who had been staying on the sidelines.” (The New York Times)

Fortune magazine announced it’s annual listing of the largest U.S. companies by revenue.

“This year’s Fortune 500 marks the 61st running of the list. In total, the Fortune 500 companies account for $12.5 trillion in revenues, $945 billion in profits, $17 trillion in market value and employ 26.8 million people worldwide.”

The top ten companies are Walmart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, GM, Phillips 66, GE, Ford Motor Company and CVS Health. Compare that to the  top ten in Forbes Magazines’ list of ‘World’s Most Innovative Companies’ or Fast Company’s ‘Most Innovative Companies 2015’, and there is only one company that appears on two lists, Apple (Fortune and Fast Company). Forbes’ #1 company, Salesforce, the biggest tech company in San Francisco, appeared on the Fortune list for the first time in its’ 16 year history at #483.

Fortune’s number one, Walmart, is the company George Packer described in his book, ‘The Unwinding’, as the model that continues to influence our economy on a much broader scale:

“Over the years, America had become more like Walmart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs, and more part-time jobs as store greeters…The hollowing out of the heartland was good for the company’s bottom line.”

A CBS/New York Times poll released on Wednesday found that the majority of Americans are concerned about the widening income gap that separates the Walmart shoppers from those on Rodeo Drive.

“The poll found that a strong majority say that wealth should be more evenly divided and that it is a problem that should be addressed urgently. Nearly six in 10 Americans said government should do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, but they split sharply along partisan lines. Only one-third of Republicans supported a more active government role, versus eight in 10 of Democrats.

Far from a strictly partisan issue, inequality looms large in the minds of almost half of Republicans and two-thirds of independents, suggesting that it will outlive the presidential primary contests and become a central theme in next year’s general election campaign.”

The last story of the week concerned the downside of ‘cultural fit’. Lauren A. Rivera, a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, shared her research on candidate selection in ‘Guess Who Doesn’t Fit In At Work’.

“When done carefully, selecting new workers this way can make organizations more productive and profitable. But cultural fit has morphed into a far more nebulous and potentially dangerous concept. It has shifted from systematic analysis of who will thrive in a given workplace to snap judgments by managers about who they’d rather hang out with. In the process, fit has become a catchall used to justify hiring people who are similar to decision makers and rejecting people who are not.”

At the end of the week@work we know the economy is improving and folks are becoming increasingly aware of income disparity.

But is anyone concerned that the largest revenue generating companies have no relationship to the most innovative companies in the world? If you are starting out your career or considering a move, do you choose a revenue generating behemoth or a venture capitalized innovative organization?

And for all of us @work – we want to ‘fit in’ to the organization culture, but with our talents, not personal similarities.

The Saturday Read – George Packer ‘The Unwinding’

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

If you need additional convincing that the income gap between the wealthy and the ‘middle class’ is widening, set aside some time to read George Packer‘s ‘The Unwinding: An Inner History Of The New America‘. Originally published in 2013, the book takes us on a pilgrimage with a lead cast of three ‘American dreamers’: Dean Price, Jeff Connaughton and Tammy Thomas.

We meet Dean and Jeff in 1978 and Tammy in 1984. As each of their stories unfold, the author adds a ‘supporting cast’ of politicians, journalists, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and ‘institution men’. It’s this supporting cast that influence decisions that effect the lives of Dean, Jeff and Tammy, but they are fuzzy background noise to the reality of trying to make a living in today’s United States.

“No one can say when the unwinding began – when the bolts that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way. Like any great change, the unwinding began at countless times, in countless ways – and at some moment the country, always the same country, crossed a line of history and became irretrievably different…When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone. The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.”

We encounter our ‘ordinary’ Americans at the beginning of their respective careers.

Dean Price earned a degree in political science and is hired as a pharmaceutical rep for Johnson and Johnson.  “It didn’t take him long to realize that he hated his job…He had bought into a lie: go to college, get a good education, get a job with a Fortune 500 company, and you’d be happy. He had done all that and he was miserable…He decided to start over and do things his own way. He would become an entrepreneur.”

Jeff Connaughton first met Joe Biden in 1979 at a meeting of the National Student Congress in Philadelphia. “Biden was youthful, he was witty, he knew how to talk to college students. Connaughton never forgot the moment.” 

After earning an MBA from The University of Chicago Business school he moved to New York to work for Smith Barney in their public finance department. His next job was at E.F. Hutton where he survived the company’s wire and mail fraud scandal. “He was a twenty-seven-year-od assistant vice president making more than a hundred grand, and yet he went home in the evenings thinking that this was not what he wanted to do with his life.”

“Biden was like a cult figure to me,” Connaughton said much later. “He was the guy I was going to follow because he was my horse.  I was going to ride that horse into the White House. That was going to be my next stop in life. I had done Wall Street, and I was going to do the White House next.”

Tammy Thomas grew up in Youngstown, Ohio as the city began to decline. “Tammy vowed to herself that she would not go on welfare and live in the projects. She didn’t want to have just enough to barely get by but not enough to actually be able to do anything. She didn’t want to get stuck.”

“She finished high school on time, in 1984, and became the first person in her family to get a diploma…She got an associate’s degree at a technical college and worked for two years as a supermarket cashier in the hope that she’d get a management job, but none opened up…But up in Warren, the Packard Electric plants were still operating, with eight thousand workers making wiring harnesses and electrical components for General Motors cars. It was lighter, cleaner work than steelmaking, and two-thirds of the employees were women, a lot of them single mothers like Tammy. She went in to the interview and was hired for the assembly line at $7.30 an hour. So in 1988 she got off welfare and became a factory worker.”

This is a book that will reconnect you with reality. In his review of the book for The New York Times, Dwight Garner concluded:

“At one point in “The Unwinding” we meet a talented reporter in Florida who is writing about the foreclosure mess. This reporter, we read, “believed that there were two kinds of journalists — the ones who told stories, and the ones who uncovered wrongdoing.”

Mr. Packer is both, and he’s written something close to a nonfiction masterpiece.”