No Mercy No Malice

Real estate is an awesome gig.

For starters, the supply of fertile land (urban centers) is finite, but the source of demand keeps growing (more people/capital moving to cities). On top of that, we’ve granted real estate development such favorable tax treatment that it is nearly immune from taxation. Even Donald Trump, arguably the worst business person in U.S. history, made money in real estate development, despite the serial failure of the underlying business. As one tax law expert put it, the real estate industry “thinks of the tax code as a basket of goodies to feast on rather than…

The first movie to include coronavirus was, appropriately enough, a horror film. Corona, a Canadian film, unfolds like the stuff of an oft-tweeted pandemic nightmare: Seven neighbors are trapped in an elevator — where it’s impossible to socially distance — and one of them has Covid-19.

Stephen Nichols hasn’t seen the film but he doesn’t need to. Nichols is the associate director of engineering for Farmington, Connecticut-based Otis, the 167-year-old elevator company that operates in more than 200 countries, maintaining some 2 million elevators. …

Everyday Design Icons

Chances are if you’ve spent time in offices, you’ve spent time around whiteboards — and, perhaps, you’ve spent time dreading them. But where did these things come from, and how did they become a physical symbol of the mandatory brainstorming session?

Fittingly, the precise history of the whiteboard is somewhat tentative and subject to revision and correction. Many accounts give inventor credit to a Korean War veteran named Martin Heit, who discovered he could write on film negatives with a Sharpie, then wipe the markings away; in the mid-1950s, he designed the first whiteboard, essentially coated with a similar laminate…

Number Crunch

25%: That’s roughly how many employees in the U.S. are going into the office nowadays, according to data from Kastle Systems, an office security firm, cited by the New York Times.

That said, there are some significant regional differences: More than a third of employees in Texas are back in their offices, while that number is under 20% in the New York, Chicago, and San Francisco areas. As vaccines roll out, and it becomes safer to commute and work in shared spaces, many businesses will expect their employees to return to the office. While technology has made it easier than…

Corporate America keeps plowing ahead. With the stock market hitting a new high early in September and businesses trying to resume normal business hours, it’s not hard to think we are in the midst of a rush to return to “business as usual.”

But nothing about this situation is normal. A global pandemic has killed over 200,000 people in the United States. Millions are living in the path of destructive wildfires which have left dozens of people dead and many more missing. Black people are still reeling from ongoing police brutality and exhausted from having to deal with a system…

For a decade, Carlos Silva has been gluing, nailing, and re-zippering shoes and boots at Stern Shoe Repair, a usually well-trafficked shop just outside the Metro entrance at Union Station in Washington, D.C. On a typical day, he would arrive at 7 a.m. and stay until 8 p.m., serving the crowds of professionals shuttling by on their way to work. But since the near-shutdown of office work and train travel, he has been closing the shop at 4 p.m. “There is no traffic, my friend. The whole station is dead,” says Silva. “Now it’s only a part-time job.”

In the…

Every in-it-to-win-it entrepreneur has had that painful moment when they’re watching an employee handle a task — particularly a customer-facing task — and it’s not going well.

For 10 years, I ran a chain of dumpling shops and food trucks in New York City called Rickshaw Dumpling Bar, which meant training dozens and dozens of workers on all kinds of customer service tasks. …

Near the end of 2017, on a long-haul flight from Auckland to London for a Christmas break with my children, I was catching up on work-related reading when a magazine article caught my eye. The article detailed the results of a study of UK office workers which found that on average they were productive for fewer than three hours a day. My mind turned to my own business, a trust company called Perpetual Guardian that employed about 240 people, and to whether we had real measures of productivity across all aspects of our business.

I realized we did not. In…