May 12, 2021
Ellen DeGeneres is ending her daytime talk show in 2022 after a 19-year run that included a lot of dancing at first and later was mired in controversy. She says she’s learned at least one important lesson as a result of recent criticisms.
Last year, BuzzFeed News reported allegations that DeGeneres oversaw a toxic workplace on
The Ellen DeGeneres Show, in which employees “were fired after taking medical leave or bereavement days to attend family funerals” and experienced racial discrimination and bullying at the hands of managers. Though the charges were largely directed at senior management rather than DeGeneres herself, critics held her responsible for allowing such problems to flourish under her leadership. A viral Twitter thread in which people shared stories of negative encounters with the comedian did further damage to her reputation.
Finding, attracting, and retaining top talent is a big challenge for tech startups in Africa.
In the early years of Sokowatch, an e-commerce platform for informal retailers in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Uganda, founder and CEO Daniel Yu wanted to find a way around this. A software developer originally from California, he understood the tech ecosystem in Silicon Valley, where he says talented people frequently leave big companies to work for small startups, with employee stock ownership plans serving as a major draw.
“How do we get people to leave jobs at Safaricom or at other big or multinational companies to work for small startups? It’s gotta be because they see something in it for themselves,” he says.
April 26, 2021
Ray Dalio loves personality tests. The billionaire founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund, which doubles as a kind of workplace social experiment, is famously interested in questions of character and self-improvement. His employees use iPads to rate each other on various attributes in real time and are encouraged to confront one another publicly in the name of radical transparency. So it makes sense that he’s long sought insights into staffers’ psyches with a panoply of tests, including Myers-Briggs, Workplace Personality Inventory, Team Dimensions Profile, and Golden Personality Profiler.
Now he’s created what he hopes will be the one personality test to rule them all: PrinciplesYou, a free assessment that Dalio developed in collaboration with psychologists Adam Grant, Brian Little, and John Golden.
April 22, 2021
For decades, infrastructure for coal, oil, and gas was seen as a relatively safe investment delivering strong returns, and renewables barely attracted the private sector’s attention. While banks put up trillions of dollars financing new fossil-fuel assets, from mines to power plants, government funds furnished about 50% of the annual investment (pdf) in America’s solar sector as recently as 2004.
Today, that equation is reversing. The cost to finance new fossil-fuel infrastructure, especially coal, is rising, while the cost for new renewables is falling fast, according to a new study by the Sustainable Finance Programme at Oxford University in the UK.