Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data as well as drawing valid conclusions and making reasonable decisions on the basis of such analysis.

In a narrower sense the term is used to denote the data themselves or numbers derived from data as, for example, averages. Thus we speak of employment statistics, accident statistics, etc.

It is applicable to a wide variety of academic disciplines from the physical and social sciences to the humanities, as well as to business, government, medicine and industry.

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Portfolio.com: Careers

Building a Career
Mon, 18 Aug 2008 02:00:00 -0000
Job Title: Lego artist Employers: Corporations and individuals Openings: Word of mouth Salary Cap: Six figures Number of Jobs: About 40 Lego master builders Who doesn't remember growing up playing with Legos—the small, colorful bricks that can be combined to create anything from airplanes to zebras? Most kids ultimately pack up their Legos and move on. But Nathan Sawaya never did. The 35-year-old New Yorker makes a six-figure living as a Lego artist, creating large-scale works of art using tens of thousands of the plastic pieces. Among his recent projects are a 10-foot-tall replica of the new Trump Tower being constructed in Dubai for Donald Trump, and a four-foot-tall bumblebee commissioned by Fall Out Boy lead singer Pete Wentz as a gift for his new bride, pop star Ashlee Simpson. He says he receives hundreds of commission inquiries every month. Though he played with Legos like most kids, they were the furthest thing from his mind when he set out in the working world. After graduating with a law degree from New York University in 1998, Sawaya became a Wall Street attorney, earning a comfortable six-figure salary—and working in a high-stress environment. To relax after long hours at the office, he would work on art projects at night, making sculptures using clay at first, then moving into more whimsical media, like candy.One of Sawaya's first hobbyist projects with Legos was an eight-foot-tall pencil. Friends would come over to gawk at it, and Sawaya eventually set up a website, brickartist.com, to post photos of his creations. Visitors to the site sent in requests, such as Lego renderings of portraits of their children. The hobby became the real thing in 2004 after he won a competition sponsored by Lego to find the best builder in the U.S. He quit his job and became one of Lego's "master model builders," creating sculptures for its theme park in San Diego. They paid him just $13 an hour, but it gave him good training for when he returned to New York to create his own Lego works full-time. Sawaya now keeps 1.5 million Lego bricks, meticulously organized by shape and color into clear bins (he buys all his Legos in bulk). He sketches his projects first on something called "brick paper"—essentially, graph paper modified for Lego shapes—and takes anywhere from a few days to a few months to build them. At any given time, he's working on three or four projects, earning anywhere from a couple thousand dollars up to six figures per work, depending on the complexity of the project and how quickly they need to be built. For his own personal fulfillment, he also creates more avant-garde works and has two traveling exhibitions of his work (here's a slideshow of some of his work). Ironically, Sawaya says he now works more hours per week than he ever did as a corporate lawyer, although he also makes more money than he did then. Most important to him, though, is the artistic gratification he gets out of his Lego creations, particularly when he gets feedback from children who are inspired by his projects. "There are 400 million children out there playing with Legos," he says. "Who am I to say that they aren't artists too?"Related LinksDaily Brew: Science Shows What Harvard Students Really Think Of Rednecks360? Maybe Not.Flying Kyte
Wireless Operator
Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:00:00 -0000
Dan Hesse has perhaps the hardest job in the wireless industry right now. In December, he replaced Gary Forsee as president and C.E.O. of Sprint Nextel at one of the lowest points in the company’s history. Sprint lost more than a million customers in 2007 and posted a $30 billion loss in the fourth quarter alone. But Hesse might say that his job offers the most upside: The company is so troubled that he has license to take big chances. When he took over, he promised moves on the scale of “nukes” that would shake up the wireless business. None of his ventures so far have been quite that ambitious, but in February he introduced a single-rate plan ($99.99 a month for unlimited calls, text, and data) that may help slow the mass customer defections plaguing Sprint. Hesse also pulled together an alliance with Google, Intel, Comcast, Bright House Networks, and Time Warner Cable to launch a startup called Clearwire, which will deploy WiMax technology, a kind of WiFi on steroids. WiMax is a high-speed data network that covers a larger area than WiFi—entire cities rather than individual coffee shops. And Sprint is one of only two major carriers so far to support Google’s coming Android operating system, which will make it easier for cell phones to download software or use Web-based services from other companies. Most cell phones today are far more restricted. Hesse, 54, might look familiar from his appearance in Sprint’s television ads. (He offers his email address, which customers can use to register gripes.) He talked with Condé Nast Portfolio contributing editor Kevin Maney at Sprint’s Overland Park, Kansas, headquarters, a sprawling faux college campus that, in more ambitious days, was built for 15,000 employees but currently houses only 10,000. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. I’m a Sprint customer, and it’s no secret that the company has just about the worst customer service on earth. How are you addressing that? Let me put it this way: It’s definitely getting better every month. We measure the hell out of it. Every meeting starts with discussing the customer experience. That said, we have a long way to go, and people have long memories. That’s part of the urgency. We know it’s going to take a while to get customers to actually perceive that service has improved. As a Sprint client, how will I notice what you’re doing? If you went into a Sprint store before and said, “I have this problem on my bill,” they’d tell you to call customer care. Not because they were being jerks—they didn’t have access to the systems to fix a problem like that. Now they do. So even the role of the stores has changed. They sell too, but their No. 1 job is to improve the customer experience.  Maybe that will stop so many people from abandoning Sprint. The company’s churn rate of ­consumer defections is roughly twice the industry average. Our bonuses—my bonus and every employee’s in the company—are based on exactly the same metric, and that’s reducing churn. We recognized that it was the biggest issue facing the company and that we had to fix it. How did it get this bad? For years, the wireless industry was growing so fast you didn’t need to care about it. You could grow your way out of anything. As results started to decline, Sprint looked to reduce costs, and one of the ways was through big cuts in care and service. It cut the number of reps answering the phone calls, and average wait times went way up. Can all that be fixed? A big reason people call customer care and tie up the service reps is because they have questions about their bill. The new flat-rate plan, Simply Every­thing, is all about reducing those. It’s the same amount every month, and customers know exactly what it’s going to be. In your career, you’ve made a habit of creating single-price, all-you-can-eat plans. You did something similar at AT&T Wireless when you worked there in the 1990s. It’s very much like Digital One Rate, AT&T’s plan from 10 years ago. That was all about saying to customers, “Anything the wireless phone can do, just don’t worry about it. Just knock yourself out.” We found that customers will actually pay a premium for simplicity, and we’re finding it also on Simply Everything. It’s not about a discount. Customers who were spending less than $99 a month upgraded to the flat-rate plan because they think it’s a better deal. It’s like walking into Costco. I wasn’t going to buy 144 rolls of toilet paper, but God, it’s a good deal. Did you have a clear picture before you took this job of how grim things were at Sprint? The problems were more significant and deeper than I had expected. I came right at the end of the fourth quarter. As soon as we announced our financial results, the stock went down to five dollars and change. It lost more than half of its value within a very short period of time. How could you not know that was coming? To a certain extent, the board didn’t realize how significant the issues were. They didn’t dupe me. I don’t think they knew either. Let’s talk about WiMax. So far, it’s getting mixed reviews about whether it’s going to work well or be a good business. One tech executive called it “WiMin” on his blog. It’s going to change the industry completely in terms of the capabilities and the applications possible in the mobile world. And it’s not just about phones anymore. It’s about embedded chips that can receive WiMax in your car, in your camera, in your video camera, and everything else. You’ll be able to download movies into the backseat while you’re driving. You can see real-time traffic. We think we have roughly a two-year head start over our competition. This is through the ­Clearwire venture? Yes. Sprint owns 51 percent of that company. The other investors are Intel and Google and the big cable companies. I think we’ll have a terrific board of directors. With all those owners, who’s actually going to end up running it? Craig McCaw, the telecom pioneer, will be a non­executive chairman. Ben Wolff, who has worked with McCaw, will be the C.E.O., and Barry West from Sprint will be the president. It won’t be a joint venture. It’ll be a separate public company once that’s approved, probably near the end of the year.  Sprint is one of the first major U.S. carriers to say that it will use Google’s Android ­operating system, which is currently in the works. What’s your relationship like with the company? Actually, we’re doing a lot with them. We’re working on Android. We’re part of the Open Handset Alliance [an industry group that is working to develop applications for Android]. We believe we’re by far the most open, if you will, of the wireless carriers. We make it very open for applications developers to write software for Sprint wireless products. The relationship with companies like Google will only help that. Since Sprint has to do something radical to reverse its fortunes, opening your network entirely could be an interesting move. Will you go all the way to that point? If we can. The more open we can be, the more we’re going to attract more applications to our platforms, which means we’ll attract more users. It’s a way of differentiating. Does that mean you’ll be like the open internet? Users could ­download anything? Customize their phones in any way? I think we’re going to be ahead of Android. You are? I’m not the expert, but there have been some delays in terms of Android. I don’t know when you’re really going to see that product released. But in this Sprint environment today you can have a variety of operating systems. You’ve got Windows Mobile, Palm, RIM’s BlackBerry. Our customers are going to have just about as much openness as they want. After you bought Nextel, its customers began fleeing. Nextel’s phones use a separate push-to-talk network called iDEN, and critics have said that Sprint should sell Nextel or spin it off. What’s your current thinking? We’re committed to making iDEN very successful, but we’re not wed to a particular business model or structure for any of our divisions. We have a bunch of new handsets on our iDEN network. We’re reinvigorating the brand, but we’re always going to keep all of our options open. How much time do you think you have to turn things around? I don’t know. All I can do is show consistent improvement, and I really can’t predict what’s going to happen. Are you committed to keeping Sprint Nextel in Kansas? Yes. Is that a handicap? Can you get a brilliant engineer out of Stanford University to come here? We’ve had absolutely no problem recruiting. Kansas City is the most difficult city in the United States to get people to leave. It’s true. You can’t get anybody to leave once they’re here because of the quality of life and affordability.   This office is pretty grand. You came from a startup, and your ­office was a lot like this, wasn’t it? Oh yeah. [Rolls his eyes.] I had an unfinished door, and my desk was a slab of wood on poles. One of the advantages of running a startup is you realize how inexpensively you can do things. You put yourself in a Sprint ­commercial. Do you think you can change people’s perceptions of this brand? A lot of people forget that the cur­­rent AT&T brand was created in 1984. It was the Bell System until the break-up, and AT&T had never been associated with any product. So we really created that from scratch. We had to describe every action in terms of either making deposits or withdrawals in the brand bank. And it became a tremendous brand. I believe we can create that at Sprint. Will we see you in any more commercials? The agency and our marketing team are suggesting I do another, so it’s quite possible. Related LinksMcCaw's Next BetWhat's Wrong With the 3-G in iPhone 3G?Sprint's WiFinale
Switch Hitter
Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:00:00 -0000
And for tonight’s act, Peter Guber pre­sents . . . the sixth season of the Class AA Frisco RoughRiders. Yes, that Peter Guber, the movie producer behind blockbusters like Batman and Rain Man. The same Peter Guber who was booted from his job as chairman and C.E.O. of Sony Pictures Entertainment in 1994 for incurring the company’s biggest write-down ever. Since then, Guber has moved on from Hollywood to small-town America, refashioning himself as a mogul of a different kind: one who buys distressed minor-league baseball franchises and transplants them in second-tier cities looking for an economic boost. As he did at Sony, Guber has hooked up with deep-pocketed patrons, only this time around it’s local governments, which will foot the bill for pricey new stadiums. This is a standard yet perennially controversial arrangement, but it hasn’t prevented Guber from becoming one of the biggest owners of minor-league franchises today. He owns five teams, operates one, and is in the process of buying another, the Winston-Salem Warthogs. Owning minor-league teams is not as sexy as moviemaking, he admits. “But there’s a sizable bottom line if you do things right,” he says, showing the same promotional savvy that made him famous a decade and a half ago. Guber got into the minors almost by accident. After leaving Sony, he formed Mandalay Entertainment, a TV-and-film-production company (its most notable release is I Know What You Did Last Summer), and made a few bids on various major-league sports franchises, including the Oakland A’s and the N.B.A.’s Miami Heat. When those failed, Guber instead partnered with a father-son team that owned two successful minor-league franchises to form Mandalay Sports Entertainment. Today, Guber relies on his own scouts to find cities that are in the market for a team. Back in 2002, for example, Frisco, Texas, a fast-growing town north of Dallas, was eager to acquire a club. Tom Hicks, owner of the major-league Texas Rangers, wanted to bring a team to Frisco to anchor a planned real estate development. He contacted Guber, who already had multiple teams in his stable, and they reached an agreement. Frisco would pay for a $22.7 million ballpark, while Hicks and Guber would reel in a team. Their quarry: the struggling Shreveport, Louisiana, Swamp Dragons, which they snapped up for just over $4 million, renamed the RoughRiders, and exported to Texas. Now Mandalay, which bought the bulk of Hicks’ interest in 2003, pays Frisco to lease the city-owned stadium, Dr. Pepper Ballpark. Attendance at RoughRiders games has increased dramatically as players’ on-field performance has improved. The team went from last in the league in 2001 to first in 2004.  The Frisco arrangement is similar to a deal Guber struck in 1999 involving the Rockford, Illinois, Cubbies. According to a person close to the club, Guber scooped up the franchise for $4 million, renamed the team the Dragons, and forged an affiliation with the Cincinnati Reds. An intermediary introduced Mandalay to city executives in Dayton, Ohio, who offered to finance a $23 million downtown ballpark in order to entice a team to move there. As part of that deal, the city of Dayton and Montgomery County issued municipal bonds worth $18 million to pay for most of the stadium’s cost. Mandalay put in $4 million. In return, it secured a 20-year operating lease with an option for an additional 10 years. Mandalay is currently working with the city on a multiuse real estate development surrounding the park. If the deal, worth $250 million, goes through, Mandalay will be an equity partner. At the time Mandalay connected with Dayton, “baseball people thought we were crazy,” Guber says. “They said we were too close to the fan base of the Reds, that depopulated Dayton couldn’t support a team, that I was just another Hollywood guy with a silly jones for baseball.... Well, sure, I’m a fan, but this is not philanthropy for me.” Though Guber is prone to making exaggerated statements, this doesn’t appear to be one. Over the past decade, minor-league teams have become the toy of choice among wealthy businesspeople and are known for performing better financially than their major-league parents. The teams are relatively cheap, costing anywhere from $1 million to $25 million, depending on their class affiliation. There is also a built-in financial advantage, in that major-league affiliates pay minor leaguers’ salaries and injury costs. Minor-league team owners, who don’t get involved in scouting, trading players, or hiring and firing coaches, operate like movie-theater owners: Guber makes money through sponsors, ticket sales, and concessions, which can generate profit margins of 15 to 20 percent. While the rate at which team values were appreciating has recently slowed, the minor leagues retain some advantages. Major-league teams, for example, collect only 6 percent of their minor-league affiliates’ ticket sales. And minor-league owners are allowed to keep all the revenue from concessions and merchandise sales. Tonight, though, Guber’s attention is on the RoughRiders, who are taking on the Midland RockHounds at Dr. Pepper Ballpark. While the Rough­Riders go through their pregame drills, Guber, who is attending the game with his two 14-year-old sons, looks down at the crowd-pleasing Newlywed Game unfolding atop the visiting team’s dugout. The action is broadcast on the stadium’s giant outfield screen, bringing roars and howls from the crowd. Guber cheers right along. “I love this team. I love all our teams, because I love this game,” he says. Just then, the crack of the bat echoes in the stands. All heads turn—except Guber’s. He is counting the house.
Speed Kills
Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:00:00 -0000
One night in February 2007, a technician at Renault crafted a noose in his two-bedroom apartment in the village of Saint-Cyr-l’École, outside Paris, and hanged himself. The technician left behind a wife and young son, who had gone out of town and expected him to meet them the next day. His suicide was unexpected in many ways. He had a loving relationship with his family, and his work should have been equally satisfying. The position at Renault was a dream job—he had been obsessed with cars as a youth and had worked at the company since 1992, and Renault was putting him through graduate school for engineering. His performance reviews were consistently positive, and he was on track to be promoted to engineer. But in the months before he died, the technician, Raymond D., had been sliding into an emotional abyss, largely because of pressures at work. (Under French law, the last names of suicide victims are not disclosed without the approval of family members.) The company was in the midst of a radical turnaround plan implemented by Carlos Ghosn, who had taken over as C.E.O. in 2005. As a result, the workload had steadily increased for all of Renault’s employees, particularly those at the design center where Raymond was employed. Workdays became longer and deadlines more intense. Before he killed himself, Raymond left a note on his son’s blackboard that said, among other things, “Tell Mr. Ghosn I can’t handle the pressure anymore.” (View a pop-up graphic showing notable groups of business-related suicides.) Raymond was not alone. Between October 2006 and February 2008, six employees working at the company’s design complex—a campus called the Technocentre—and one at its nearby test facility tried to kill themselves; five succeeded, three of them during a period of just four months. Particularly gruesome were the two deaths that occurred at the complex itself. It’s possible that this is just a statistical anomaly—Renault is a huge company, with more than 63,000 employees in France and 12,000 at the Technocentre alone. Peugeot Citroën, another French car manufacturer, has also experienced a handful of suicides. But some of the Renault employees who killed themselves blamed workplace pressure as the main cause. And one, Raymond, went a step further and blamed Ghosn, the man brought in to save the company. Renault, the third-largest automaker in Europe, made no immediate public comment on Raymond’s death, or on any of the others. No one from management called his widow to offer condolences. But as news of the suicides at Renault became public and experts posited that such a cluster in one facil­ity was unusual, the questions surrounding the deaths became harder for the company to ignore. Job-related suicides are particularly rare in France, where strict worker protections such as 35-hour workweeks are enforced and labor unions have ample input into plant activities. Yet the turnaround plan at Renault was extremely ambitious and involved releasing 26 new or redesigned cars in less than four years, a pace far faster than most auto companies can sustain.  “I am trying to motivate people to want to do more than they thought they could do,” says Ghosn, 54, in an interview at his office in Boulogne-Billancourt, the Paris suburb where the company is headquartered. He is short and stocky, dark-eyed, and impeccably dressed in a tailored black suit. “That’s the most important role of a manager, and that’s what I appealed to when I began the transformation at Renault. I was certain that everybody in the company would feel that they were doing something extraordinary by helping Renault achieve what we set out to accomplish.” Moments later, though, reflecting on the suicides of Raymond and his colleagues, Ghosn adds, “But if you say people’s motivation is the greatest wealth and asset of the company, scenes like these cannot be ignored.” The events at Renault raise larger questions about how far a company is able to push its workers. At a time when the global economy is sagging, most large corporations are trying to increase their productivity. This involves painful initiatives that can backfire, especially in countries with worker-friendly ­labor laws. Most restructuring efforts follow a predictable pattern: reduced budgets, layoffs among well-trained workers, and new ­operations in cheaper parts of the world. In the process, says Kaj Grichnik, a consultant at Booz & Co., manufacturers are alienating themselves from their most critical asset: their employees. “In ­exchange for working harder and harder, most manufacturers offer their workers static salaries, decreasing benefits, increasing anonymity, and abuse from middle managers,” Grichnik says. “And when workers feel that they ­are not being treated with respect, the company suffers.”  The French Ministry of Health has classified the first two deaths as workplace accidents, a category that few suicides fall under unless they are indisputably linked to job conditions. The designation ensures that the victims’ families receive life insurance payments and a pension from the government. Potentially more problematic is the fact that the company could face charges. French labor inspectors recommended to the government prosecutor in Versailles that Renault be investigated for “moral and institutional harassment of workers,” according to a source in the prosecutor’s office. At the time of the suicides, French employees could not work more than 35 hours a week; that policy has since been overturned. The prosecutor has already begun an inquiry, which will include taking depositions from the director of the Technocentre and the immediate supervisors of the suicide victims, and local police are working to determine whether employees were forced to put in longer hours than legally allowed. Authorities plan to decide in the coming months whether or not to file charges. When Carlos Ghosn became C.E.O. of Renault in 2005, he took over a company with a superb reputation for innovation but little strategic direction. For decades, its engineers designed cars that were mechanically and aesthetically different from virtually everything else on the road. It was the first car manufacturer to put turbochargers and hatchbacks into widespread production, among other innovations. However, under Ghosn’s predecessor, Louis Schweitzer, a former high-ranking official in the French government, Renault swung from one new idea to another with little apparent rationale. The company had long specialized in economical cars for the masses, but beginning in 2001, Schweitzer made an embarrassing foray into upmarket autos by introducing the Avantime, an eccentric three-door coupe-minivan, and a staid model called the Vel Satis, a luxury car that retailed for about $50,000. Neither sold well, in large part because Schweitzer had tried to enter a market that was dominated by models from companies like BMW. And during that period, while Schweitzer was distracted by the launches, the quality of Renault’s less expensive models dropped significantly. “Traditional customers began to question where the brand was going and why the cars they wanted weren’t as good as they used to be,” says Stephen Norman, Renault’s senior vice president of global marketing. It was no surprise, then, that Ghosn inherited distressing numbers. Revenue in 2005 had risen only 2 percent compared with the previous year, and Renault’s market share in Europe had dipped to less than 10 percent for the first time in years. Ghosn had seen this before, or something like it, anyway. The Brazil-born Lebanese executive had first come to Renault in 1996 as an executive vice president. Before that, Ghosn was North American C.E.O. of Michelin, a title he achieved by his late thirties, when he forged a reputation for relentlessly slashing expenses. Renault was the perfect venue for such skills. Schweitzer had set a target of trimming about $600 from the manufacturing cost of each vehicle, but when Ghosn arrived as V.P., he established a plan that would triple the projected savings. Some of his initiatives provoked strong reactions. After he closed a large Renault factory in Belgium, hundreds of workers staged work stoppages and clashed with police. Workers in France also protested, out of solidarity. Political leaders from both countries demanded that the facility remain open, but Ghosn got his way. The factory was shuttered, and by 1998, Renault’s profit margin had recovered to a healthy 5 percent. By 1999, Renault had rebounded to such an extent that it was able to rescue a competitor, Nissan, which was then nearly bankrupt. Renault paid $5 billion for 44 percent of Nissan’s stock, and Ghosn took over the top spot. He quickly restructured the company by slashing budgets and laying off workers. A year after Ghosn took over, Nissan was profitable, and within three years it was virtually debt-free. With its newly streamlined cost structure, the company pushed its operating margins to 10 percent, comparable to those of industry leaders Toyota and Honda. Ghosn had become the auto industry’s best-known high-wire act: the C.E.O. who would publicly proclaim an improbable set of goals for a company and somehow manage to achieve them. A Japanese comic-book series about his exploits, The True Story of Carlos Ghosn, became a bestseller, and business school students, without irony, compared Ghosn to famous historical figures in works like “The Change Efforts of Douglas MacArthur and Carlos Ghosn in Japan.” His press coverage could be hyperbolic; the Detroit News, for example, ran an article with the headline “Nissan C.E.O.: The Making of a Superstar.” Anytime an auto company had a down quarter or two, Ghosn was rumored to be in line to save it.  When Schweitzer stepped down as Renault’s C.E.O. in 2005, the celebrated Ghosn was the obvious choice to replace him. Renault had lost much of its cost-cutting zeal in Ghosn’s six-year absence, but the company was marginally profitable, and there was little sense of urgency about trying to fix it. Ghosn chose to retain his chief-executive posi­tion at Nissan while running Renault—to this day, he spends half of each month in Japan and the other half in France, and keeps a separate briefcase for each of his jobs—and most managers and employees expected that Ghosn’s arrival wouldn’t mean radical upheaval. Schweitzer told the Wall Street Journal that there would be no “sudden changes in strategy.” Yet it took only a year for the perpetually kinetic Ghosn to produce a turnaround plan for Renault that was as radical as anything he had dreamed up before. Presented at a February 2006 news conference, the campaign, called Renault Commitment 2009, would deliver “the strongest period of growth in the history of Renault,” Ghosn proclaimed. To do this, three benchmarks had to be met in a little less than four years: an operating margin of 6 percent, a redesigned sedan called the Laguna 3 that would be ranked among the top three cars in its category, and annual sales of 3.3 million vehicles (up from 2.5 million in 2005). To increase sales by that amount, the company estimated, it would have to launch 26 new or redesigned cars—an average of one every two months. Soon after the announcement, Ghosn toured the company’s facilities, looking to shore up support for his plan, and some of the meetings turned testy. Oliv­ier Rémoleux, director of the Renault factory in Flins-sur-Seine, outside Paris, recalled a plant manager asking whether the company could realistically hope to reach Ghosn’s targets, especially with European sales slowing. “Wrong question,” Rémoleux says. “Mr. Ghosn looked at him like he was crazy. ‘It’s not a target,’ he said. ‘It’s mandatory.’ Commitment 2009 was like shock treatment to our workers.” Ghosn’s management style might be considered a Western version of kaizen, the Japanese continuous-improvement method, in which small, incremental changes gradually make an organization more efficient. In a typical kaizen initiative, for example, the bolts required for a particular step on the assembly line are moved closer to the worker who needs them. Over time, thousands of similar moves combine to speed up production significantly. But in Ghosn’s version of kaizen, you accelerate the process first and force the workers to do whatever is necessary to keep up. “With kaizen, you are going to be a little bit better, a little bit faster, a little bit less wasteful, but in the end you’re just overlaying a little bit of improvement on the things that you’ve always done,” Ghosn says, in the anteroom of his office overlooking the Seine. “That’s not transformation. I want to take Renault into unknown territory, which by definition means we will be stretching ourselves to go beyond little improvements into the untapped area where innovation occurs.” Ghosn counted on the Technocentre to implement this vision. A vast 150-acre complex in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, the $725 million Technocentre is where most of Renault’s new models are born. No manufacturing happens there; instead, the facility houses 12,000 designers, engineers, technicians, and manufacturing gurus in a lablike setting designed to encourage the cross-pollination of ideas from one project to another. The campus is dominated by three buildings, all of them a silvery-white color that in sunlight takes on an antiseptic, bluish tinge, like a city in a science-fiction movie. It features gardens, waterways, and tree-lined paths, along with restaurants, retail outlets, a music room in which workers needing a break can play on company-supplied instruments, and a gym complete with a sauna and fitness classes (at noon and 5 p.m. every day). Since 2006, the Technocentre’s sole priority has been to design the more than two dozen new models that Ghosn promised as part of Commitment 2009. Almost immediately after Ghosn’s plan was announced, conditions at the Technocentre started to deteriorate, as managers began to set unrealistic timetables. As one unnamed worker later told researchers in a government-initiated investigation into the suicides, “I leave at 6 p.m. to pick up my kids, which is an hourlong drive. I start work again at 9 p.m. and go until 11 or 12. This is every day. I have to work every weekend.” Another worker said, “Extra hours without getting anything for it is considered a mark of loyalty.” Some Technocentre employees say they tried to reason with their supervisors, asking for leniency when they couldn’t finish tasks on time, but they were either ignored or told to stop complaining. Christophe Delaine, a Renault electrician for 19 years, says that supervisors became increasingly impatient. “They push people to do more than they’re capable of,” he says. “There’s a culture of blame in the management. It’s deliberate.”  The situation came to a head one morning in October 2006, when Antonio B., a 39-year-old engineer, jumped to his death from an elevated walkway in one of the Technocentre buildings. He fell more than 30 feet onto concrete and died instantly. According to a union delegate who was nearby, people initially thought a chunk of the building had broken free. Several employees saw the body hit, as the engineer had chosen a location people routinely passed and a time, 10 a.m., when they were on break. On Antonio’s computer screen, according to Technocentre employees, was a description of a bitter argument he had just had with his manager. (Neither Renault nor the local police will confirm the contents of the note.) In that description, he said that he felt unappreciated and that no matter how hard he worked, management was never satisfied. Antonio’s death traumatized the Technocentre for weeks. One worker says, “Coming to work each day is like going to a crime scene. I can’t forget the sound of his falling body.” The elevated walkway has since been closed. Three months later, the body of Hervé T., a 44-year-old technician, was found in the artificial pond on the grounds. He had been missing for more than a day; because of the papers on his desk and the fact that his car was still in the parking lot, co-workers assumed he had to be on the campus somewhere. But the property is immense, and by the time his body was finally discovered—in a remote corner of the pond—he had been dead for 36 hours. Hervé left behind a diary of a yearlong battle he had waged against depression, including a short hospital stay to treat anxiety. He described the tension at work and the fear that he didn’t fit in at Renault anymore. “We are always working in a state of emergency,” he wrote. “This has led to a lot of negative stress. I’m afraid to make mistakes in the documentation, and since we generate the engineering data, it can have consequences for purchasing, prototype, logistics, and manufacturing.” Raymond D.’s suicide, less than three weeks later, was perhaps more disturbing, in that people who knew him well had watched him emotionally disintegrate. In October 2006—soon after joining the team producing the Laguna 3 sedan, one of the three components of Ghosn’s turnaround plan—Raymond’s wife says he told her and friends that if he didn’t complete the technical specifications for the car’s undercarriage, which was his direct area of responsibility, the car would not come out in fall 2007 as Ghosn had promised. Worse, the Sandouville plant in northern France, where the model was being built, would be closed. It’s irrational for one technician to assume responsibility for a factory full of workers, but Raymond’s wife maintains that he believed he carried the future of that facility on his shoulders and that his supervisors had encouraged him to think that way. He began to put in up to 15 hours a day on the project, breaking only to eat and sleep erratically for as few as three hours a night. “There were times,” his wife recalls, “when he would wake up at 3 in the morning, after going to sleep very late, and check if I was asleep. If I was, he would sneak out of the house and go back to work at the Technocentre.” Raymond told his brother-in-law, also a Renault worker, that he felt as though he wasn’t good enough for the job and that his supervisors didn’t think he was capable, belying his positive performance reviews. Raymond said, “Next to Carlos Ghosn, I’m nothing,” according to his brother-in-law. And when his wife suggested that he mention his concerns about the Laguna’s falling behind schedule to his supervisors, his face grew ashen. “Then I won’t get my promotion,” he told her. Though Raymond was losing his grip, his family feared that had they forced him to seek help, he would have completely withdrawn from them. So they did little more than gently try to persuade him to seek help at work. (At the time, the company had doctors on staff to counsel employees who needed emotional help, and an enhanced program has since been put in place.) His wife still lives with their young son in the home where Raymond hanged himself. She has a letter written by Raymond’s doctor saying that he had known Raymond for 15 years and that he’d never shown any signs of psychological problems. A tall, well-spoken woman originally from Sarajevo, Raymond’s wife is haunted by the stark goodbye note he left on their child’s blackboard, and the eerie reference to Ghosn. The family’s lawyer says she believes that he left such an explicit signal because he felt that the first two suicides were dismissed by Renault as flukes. “Every day I wake up in an empty bed and think about Carlos Ghosn, how he doesn’t suffer the same pain that I do,” Raymond’s wife says. “All I want is for Carlos Ghosn to say he did something wrong.” That hasn’t happened. Soon after Raymond’s death, Renault issued a statement that there was “no correlation between work conditions and the three suicides” or between the deaths and management strategy. More recently, a Renault publicist emailed Condé Nast Portfolio a response to questions about the suicides that read, “We are profoundly shaken by these events, and took prompt action to assess the situation and address specific points on which improvements could be made. This does not mean that there is a direct link between work and the suicides, the causes of which are highly complex.” The company’s stance is that the multiple deaths were a mere coincidence and, in fact, correlated closely with the annual suicide rate in France, a relatively high 20 per 100,000 people. In the U.S., by comparison, the suicide rate is only about 10 per 100,000 people.  But suicide experts say such reasoning is flawed. Broad averages can’t predict which types of individuals will commit suicide; more specific factors such as age, gender, and occupation must be considered. In France, agricultural workers between the ages of 25 and 49 have the highest suicide rate—about 61 per 100,000 people—compared with only about 12 for every 100,000 people in that age group with jobs in corporations. Given these statistics, the recent wave of three suicides in one year at the Technocentre is actually more than double the national average for its category. Of course, suicides sometimes happen in groups because of the copycat phenomenon. Yet multiple people taking their lives in the workplace is unusual, and two in the space of three months is “exceedingly rare,” says suicide expert Sally Spencer, executive director of the Carson J. Spencer Foundation. Most people who commit suicide leave notes saying that they have relationship, family, or money problems, not that they can’t stand their bosses. The Technocentre deaths, says psychiatrist Christophe Dejours, professor at France’s National Academy of Arts and Trades, “indicate that something is happening at Renault in the way the work is organized that is putting people off balance.” In September 2007, yet another Renault employee killed himself. Few details were reported, other than that the victim was a maintenance technician who worked at the company’s D’Aubevoye facility, which tests the prototype cars coming out of the Technocentre. (The two operations are managed jointly by the same executives.) He committed suicide while out on sick leave. Not long after that, a Renault health-and-safety committee, prodded by the Technocentre unions, brought in the consulting firm Technologia to look into the company’s operations at the campus. The report, which was made public, painted a picture of a troubled facility. Technologia found that 31 percent of Technocentre employees—three times the norm for workers in similar jobs—were under stress and at risk to develop psychological problems. It also said that the problems at the Technocentre can be linked to “the combination of professional passion and ambition and a managerial system that pushes these buttons to meet their increasingly ambitious goals.” The first-person accounts in the report are more specific. As one engineer in the Technocentre study put it, “The workload is such that it is necessary to work every night of the week until about 11 or midnight.” Another added that the extra work, performed without compensation, is taken as proof of an employee’s “devotion to the company.” The comments of a third worker went straight to Ghosn’s management style: “It’s a lot easier to give nonrealistic objectives and to see what comes out than it is to give objectives with some cohesion. From a human standpoint, it’s a catastrophe.” Earlier this year, at the midpoint of his four-year plan, Ghosn had a lot to be proud of. Renault’s operating margin rose to 3.3 percent in 2007, from 2.6 percent the year before, and revenue was up slightly, to $60 billion (or 40.7 billion euros). Renault has expanded its presence in emerging markets, and non-European customers now account for more than a third of all sales. In addition, Renault launched six new models in 2007, with nine more coming out in 2008. But some analysts believe that the company will fall short of its ambitious goals and may have to scale them back in the coming months. In fact, by the most basic measure—how many cars are sold in a given year—Renault’s sales have remained flat since 2005. The new Laguna family sedan (the car Raymond was working on, released with great hype in September 2007) failed to meet expectations. In the wake of the suicides, Renault named Bernard Ollivier, an engineer, to manage the Technocentre and implement new measures to improve morale at the facility. Among these initiatives are weekly meetings to bring supervisors closer to their staffs and the hiring of about 100 new vehicle-development employees to lighten the load of those already there. “We took these steps because we’re concerned,” Ghosn says. But the innovations aren’t enough for some employees at the facility, who dismiss them as window dressing. The amount of work and pressure, they say, remains relatively the same, and many employees still work extremely long hours. The situation was driven home again in February, a year and a half after the first suicide at the Technocentre. Even as Renault’s human resources chief, Gérard Leclercq, was announcing at a press conference that the company was on a “good course” toward improving labor conditions at the facility, the automaker separately confirmed what the local newspapers had reported a few days earlier: Another Technocentre worker had been found dead—the fifth suicide among Renault employees. People close to the victim say that he had worried for some time that his job was in jeopardy because he wasn’t proficient enough in English. Related LinksCarmakers Post Mixed ProgressThe Minimum Wage and EmploymentAre Minimum Wage Hikes More Effective Than Tax Rebates?
School Daze
Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:00:00 -0000
Morgan Stanley spent $2,094,387 on C.F.O. Colm ­Kelleher’s  London assignment in 2007, including an ­unspecified sum on “reimbursement for educational costs in the U.K.” Lehman Brothers paid $13,863 to cover the December  2006 tuition for the dependents of C.F.O.Ian Lowitt in London. Aluminum company Novelis agreed in 2004 to pay the private-school tuition for the kids of Martha Finn Brooks, president and C.O.O., from grades one through 12: a perk that cost $48,741 last year. Former Thomson Financial president and C.E.O. Sharon Rowlands got $166,158 in 2006 for her kids’ tuition, including $79,008 for the tax gross-up. Last year, Elizabeth Arden Inc. spent $59,150 on secondary-school bills for the children of Jacobus A.J. Steffens, the Switzerland-based international ­division’s general manager. Atari spent $51,982 on education bills and tax gross-up for the kids of its former chief technology officer Jean-Marcel Nicolaï. Software services firm DST Systems spent $99,318 last year on tuition at the American School in London for the three children of international C.E.O. Thomas Abraham. Related LinksLondon House Price Datapoint of the DayBringing Back Regulation's Good NameLondon Banks, Falling Down
Saving TV
Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:00:00 -0000
For 20 years, Ted Harbert worked at ABC. He started there right out of college in 1977, when the network, along with CBS and NBC, was the only game in town and was the hit factory responsible for Happy Days; Charlie’s Angels; Rich Man, Poor Man; and Roots. By 1996, when Harbert was running ABC, those glory days were ending. All three networks were still colossal, but Fox had established its beachhead, and cable’s market penetration was almost complete. The '80s had seen the rise of MTV. And CNN was by then a big deal, not just an incinerator for Ted Turner’s extra cash. ESPN was competing aggressively. Individually, none of these channels got much of a rating most of the time, but the damage was starting to add up. “People would say, ‘Oh, they’re nibbling away, they’re nibbling away,’ ” Harbert recalls. “And we would always say, ‘Well, they can nibble, but they’re never gonna really take us.’ And then they took us.” Today, Harbert is president and C.E.O. of the Comcast Entertainment Group. He oversees The Style Network, G4—a six-year-old channel aimed at young men who love videogames—and C.E.G.’s most recognizable offering, E!, which features celebrity news. E! ranks 31st among the most-watched basic-cable channels, which means that, in general, less than 1 percent of America’s 112 million TV households are watching it during prime time. Yet Harbert is probably sleeping better these days than his former colleagues at the broadcast networks. When Harbert talks about television, it’s with the sober clarity of someone who has looked at life from both sides now and has seen that only one business model is working. Cable networks target just those viewers who want what they have to offer. Broadcast networks want everyone. And the business of wanting everyone has never been worse. At the end of last season, ABC, CBS, and NBC reported their smallest combined audience ever, an event that has become a gloomy yearly occurrence. Meanwhile, cable—counting both basic channels and pay services like HBO and Showtime—now receives 55 percent of the total viewership. It may be time to perform an autopsy on network TV, which some have pronounced officially dead at age 60, the victim of a lifetime of big spending, hard living, and bad planning. Here’s the coroner’s report: The evening newscasts have been mowed down by cable’s heat, spin, and round-the-clock immediacy. In prime time, nobody watches reruns anymore—and reruns, along with syndication, used to be the only way comedy and drama series, the heart of a network’s prime-time business, made money. (The way they make money now is...well, the networks will get back to you as soon as they figure that out.) Speaking of old-school, half-hour sitcoms: Once, 50 of them were on the air at a time. Today, they’re all but gone. Suddenly, people just stopped liking them. Prime-time newsmagazines? Barely holding on. “Protected” time slots? Viewers accustomed to Web surfing and channel flipping at hyperspeed aren’t going to watch a new show just because they’re too lazy to change the channel after The Biggest Loser. The audience for daytime soaps, a profitable staple since TV’s infancy, has shrunk so dramatically that the form may vanish within a few years. This is all very bad news for a medium that hasn’t come up with a fresh format since 2000, when CBS launched the gold rush in reality-TV competitions with Survivor. (P.S.: Survivor isn’t what it used to be either.) It’s unlikely that a broadcast network is ever again going to create a megahit like The Cosby Show, which at its mid-’80s peak drew as many as 50 million viewers an episode. For several years now, TV’s top event has been Fox’s American Idol. Last season, it drew 28.8 million viewers a week. Conversations about the future of television tend to vault way past next week or next year into a world where schedules don’t exist and 10,000 programming options are all available at any moment, half of them fully inter­active. (Not enjoying this episode of Law & Order: Moonbase? That’s okay—you can change the plot!)  It sounds like fun. But in reality, the number of cable channels has topped out. And the number of households that subscribe to basic cable—about 65 million—hasn’t budged for a decade. That’s roughly 58 percent of all American TV households and it’s a much higher percentage of the total households that advertisers actually care about. People who have something to sell are attracted to viewers who have already demonstrated their willingness to buy something (like cable TV). The cable business is booming: Annual advertising revenues have jumped from $8.1 billion in 1997 to a projected $28.6 billion this year. So before the death knell tolls, let’s consider some ways broadcast TV might be reborn. 1. Accept the fact that niche is the new normal. The most popular cable networks average fewer than 3 million viewers a night. But add up all those little niches, and how much of an audience is left? Even TNT and USA, the two cable channels whose original programming most closely resembles that of broadcast networks, are carving out distinctive spaces for themselves. Turner Networks president Steve Koonin has successfully promoted TNT as a network for drama and TBS as a home for comedy—two old-school broadcast mainstays. But, he says, “Within the wide berth of comedy and drama as prospective brands, we’re looking at where there are underserved audiences, and we’re finding them in family viewers, African Americans, women, and action lovers.” When groups that vast are being won over by cable, broadcast’s claim that it reaches for everyone starts to ring a little hollow, especially when cable networks are making shows that are just like broadcast series, except a little better. To be fair to the networks, the playing field isn’t level: Small cable channels can impress advertisers simply by growing. Networks can’t—so a show with a viewership of 4 million is a hit on USA and a flop on CBS. But the differences are diminishing. In the spring, Koonin took an aggressive gamble to make this clear: He scheduled Turner Networks’ upfronts cheek-to-cheek with those of the broadcast networks. “Koonin was brilliant,” says Brian Terkelsen, of the brand consultancy MediaVest. “In my opinion, that was the turning point. We’ll all look back and say the one riff that he did onstage that week shifted everything for cable and broadcasting. What he did was, he got up there and said, ‘If I were to tell you the story of two networks, and one had a talking car and a steroid in a unitard who was beating up an average guy in a game show, and the other had an Academy Award-winning actress in her second season and a Golden Globe winner in her fourth season, which would you think was which?’ ” Koonin then unveiled slides of the cheesy shows—NBC’s Knight Rider and American Gladiators—and the classy ones: TNT’s Saving Grace and The Closer. Point made, brutally. “If anybody in the room didn’t think, ‘Holy shit! It's all changed,'" Terkelsen says, “they’re morons.” 2. Know your brand. “There are an awful lot of channels available to people in the average digital home,” says FX president John Landgraf. “So if you don’t stand for something, you stand for nothing.” FX, he says, “appeals to people with a certain taste for edgy, innovative quality.” He has established the brand with material that’s positioned exactly halfway between what the networks and pay cable offer. Its signature shows—Rescue Me, The Shield, Damages, Nip/Tuck—tend to be hard-­driving adult dramas that are one big step raunchier, bloodier, sexier, cooler, and rougher than the broadcast networks’ cop/lawyer/doctor equivalents. It wasn’t a smooth road for the network, which was founded in 1994. “FX toyed, in its earlier incarnations, with various branding strategies,” Landgraf recalls, “from live television—its original motto was ‘TV made fresh daily’—to a time when it was much more explicitly appealing to men.” Back then, it often looked like the Nascar channel. To redefine itself, FX had to make casual viewers expendable in order to build its rep with committed ones. “We want to have somebody’s favorite show,” Landgraf says, “not everybody’s 10th-favorite show.” Rebranding to that degree isn’t without its risks. Several years ago, Bravo became a haven for young, hip, gay-friendly consumers with lots of disposable income. That meant walking away from the (few) viewers who knew it as a poor man’s PBS, a repository for dusty filmed productions of Swan Lake. If the one-two punch of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Project Runway hadn’t succeeded, the channel could well have gone down for the count. Similarly, at Turner, Koonin canceled TNT’s most popular offering—wrestling—in order to make its metamorphosis into a drama-driven cable network credible.   Those gambles paid off because Bravo, FX, and TNT all followed through swiftly to build on their initial hits. Likewise, AMC, which specializes in old movies, didn’t waste a minute after critics acclaimed the first season of its original show Mad Men: It began developing other dramas, knowing its newfound audience needed more reasons to stick around. Without moves like that, a rebranding effort can quickly give rise to skepticism. A&E spent big money to buy reruns of HBO’s The Sopranos because it wanted to be seen as the kind of network that would air a show like The Sopranos. But it’s not; it’s the kind of network that would air reruns of The Sopranos and take out the bad words. In many ways, the networks themselves already have specific brand identities; they just don’t admit it. For decades, CBS has had the most elderly demographic among the major networks. ABC specializes in comedies and light dramas with strong female appeal, from Desperate Housewives to Grey’s Anatomy to Ugly Betty. Fox—with the exception of American Idol—is largely aimed at guys, whether via action dramas like 24 and Prison Break, Sunday-night cartoons, or the never-ending, shaky-cam glimpse of night-shift squalor that is Cops. The fledgling CW is building on Gossip Girl and America’s Next Top Model to chase young women. NBC’s struggles are not unrelated to the fact that it’s still trying to be all things to all people: When you offer programming like 30 Rock to a smart, affluent audience but also rely on diet contests, game shows, and To Catch a Predator to fill prime time, you can’t blame viewers for not knowing what to expect. 3. Don’t count on “flow” ­unless all your programming is aimed at the same audience. Zip through FX’s schedule, and at some point, you will see an episode of Rescue Me, followed by another episode of Rescue Me, and another and another. And when Bravo is hard-selling one of its hits, the word overkill is not in its vocabulary. “The great thing about our shows is, people want to see them again,” says Andy Cohen, Bravo’s senior vice president for original programming. “A lot of times, we’ll premiere an episode of Top Chef and then rerun the episode right when it’s over. And people stay tuned! Some of our shows are really like crack,” he laughs. This practice makes sense in two ways: It’s cost-efficient and it builds loyalty. The tactic used to be dismissed as killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, until people noticed that the goose kept on thriving. Now it’s just a matter, as Cohen puts it, of “feeding the beast.” Since embracing the episode-marathon strategy several years ago—as a way to pump life into Project Runway, which was struggling in its first year—Bravo has seen ratings for its flagship shows grow every season. The fourth cycle of Top Chef, which aired in the spring, outperformed the third, which beat the second, which outdid the first. The broadcast networks used to count on that kind of steady growth in the first few years of one of their hits. But recently, scripted series like Ugly Betty and Heroes have started losing viewers after just one season. Given that alarming turnabout, you’d think the networks would be doing everything in their power to build the equity of a potential new hit. But no. Their schedules, set in stone decades ago, remain inviolable: news and chitchat before noon, soaps and talk shows in the afternoon, local and national evening news and infotainment later in the day, talk shows at bedtime. Some of these programming blocks justify themselves economically, but others aren’t as cost-effective. Daytime soaps occupy a large swath of airtime that could occasionally be used to repurpose a network’s prime-time schedule cheaply and efficiently. 4. Content counts. Discussions at the networks about what’s depleting their viewership tend to focus on familiar culprits: YouTube. The internet. Xbox. The iPod. Too many options. (Capitalism can be so unfair!) This leads to brainstorming sessions about making TV more like the internet, resulting in a lot of overexcited press releases announcing how one-minute “minisodes” of your favorite shows will be exclusively available on a network website, or Twittered to you line by line as they’re being written, or beamed directly into your cerebral cortex via Bluetooth. Enough already. Competition from other media is real, but it’s also a convenient excuse to not focus on programming. You don’t hear American Idol’s producers whining about how the internet is draining their audience, because they know that their audience is on the internet. Viewers go there to talk, read, kvetch, and gossip—about American Idol.  Creating substance-free shows because you think your audience has no attention span is a sucker’s game. And streaming shows for free is, so far, doing a lot more for viewers than it is for a network’s balance sheet. Instead, the networks should try to make TV shows for people who want to watch TV shows. There seems to be no shortage of viewers out there: For all the hand-wringing about how new media are sapping television’s audience, the average viewer of online video in April watched fewer than eight minutes a day. By contrast, the average household has its TV on for eight hours and 14 minutes daily. That’s a record. (One that should make all of us rear back in horror, but that’s another story.) 5. When you say the TV season is 52 weeks, you have to mean it. Madison Avenue is still fond of the old-fashioned idea of fall as a launchpad for a new TV season, and so are many viewers. But does that mean the networks should continue taking summers off? Sure, they run original programming in July and August, but “original” in this context generally means a series so odd that they couldn’t find a place for it in the regular season, or Celebrity Circus, or 85 variations on foreign game shows (this summer’s flavor of the moment). It’s a bind, since a real commitment to top-quality original programming during the summer costs money that the broadcast networks don’t have right now, but a diet of reruns and cut-rate schlock may cost them viewers. According to Comcast’s Harbert, when broadcast execs ask for new shows year-round, “the finance guys say, ‘You’re killing me!’ And the programming guys say, ‘Yeah, but if I put on repeats, they’re going to have terrible ratings, and we’ll have no promo base for fall.’ And everybody’s right.” But investing in shows—and thus in audience building—is a smarter long-term strategy. It’s no accident that cable hits like Lifetime’s Army Wives, USA’s Burn Notice, and TNT’s The Closer all launched in summer, allowing cable to perform its annual raid on broadcast viewers. 6. Don’t break faith with your audience. Broadcast networks routinely spend three months promoting a show that they then cancel after two airings. Or they get a few million viewers hooked on a serialized drama and then drop it midway through a season, leaving fans hanging. This simply never happens on cable, where if a series gets a 13-episode order, those 13 episodes are damn well going to air, even if it’s just because there’s nothing else to take their place. Every time the networks reshuffle their grid in a spasm of quick-fix panic, they disenchant more viewers. 7. If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em. Ben Silverman, NBC’s head programmer, may fret when one of his network’s shows struggles against a basic-cable hit like Bravo’s Top Chef or the Sci Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica. But his boss, NBC Universal C.E.O. Jeff Zucker, will rest easy, because his company also owns Bravo. And the Sci Fi Channel. And a whole lot more. The notion that the “500-channel universe” is a pie being cut into ever-tinier slivers ignores the fact that the vast majority of what we watch fills the coffers of a small handful of megaliths, just as it always has. Take a closer look at that pie: • Besides Bravo and Sci Fi, NBC Universal also owns USA, the highest-rated ad-supported cable channel; MSNBC; CNBC; ShopNBC; Oxygen; Telemundo; and one-third of A&E Television, itself a conglomeration that includes A&E, the History Channel, and the Biography Channel. • Disney owns ABC, ESPN, SoapNet, ABC Family, its own one-third share of A&E, and half of Lifetime. It also, of course, owns the Disney Channel, the top-rated basic-cable outlet of any kind. • Viacom and CBS, though now traded separately on Wall Street, are both controlled by one man, Sumner Redstone. CBS owns Showtime, the Movie Channel, and half of the CW. Viacom’s list of properties includes MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, BET, and Comedy Central.  • Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. owns Fox, Fox News, FX, and, well, everything with the word Fox in it, from Fox College Sports to the Fox Reality Channel. • Time Warner owns the other half of the CW, as well as CNN, TNT, TBS, TCM, HBO, Cinemax, the Cartoon Network, and TruTV (formerly CourtTV). So a half-dozen companies own not only five broadcast networks but also a majority of the cable channels that anyone actually watches—including all 10 of prime time’s highest-rated cable networks, which together accounted for more than 18 million viewers a night last year. To anyone worried about where network viewers have gone: They may have left the building, but they haven’t escaped the compound. 8. Lowered expectations can be your best friend. The current chaos in TV has a silver lining: In an era of on-demand options, streaming video, full-season DVD releases for latecomers, multiple airings of the same show, and the inexorable march of DVRs, the definition of success is more slippery than it used to be. Eventually, a modernized ratings system will capture and aggregate all of these viewers, which will primarily help series that appeal to a young, I-want-it-when-I-want-it audience. By contrast, a show whose viewers could make up an AARP convention isn’t going to benefit much from this brave new world. The ratings for 60 Minutes, for example, grow by only 3 percent when DVR use is factored in. But until that’s all sorted out, there’s plenty of room for spin. In a TV universe without a center, if nothing is really a hit, then everything is. If you can’t crack Nielsen’s top 10, you can tell Madison Avenue that you wildly overperform among viewers with lots of disposable income—and you get as much as a 40 percent jump in audience when you take into account DVR use, as is the case with The Office. AMC’s Mad Men counts as a hit because it’s great, it wins awards and critical raves, and until recently, it was the only show of its kind on the channel, so there was nothing to compare it with. The History Channel’s Ice Road Truckers (a reality series devoted entirely to truckers driving across large expanses of ice) is a hit because it outperformed anything the History Channel had ever aired and demolished the image of the channel as a musty attic full of newsreel footage about Hitler. A show can even claim hit status because of the magazine covers, text-message traffic, and internet buzz it generates: From the amount of attention paid to the CW’s teen soap Gossip Girl last season, one wouldn’t know that it ranked 150th out of 161 shows and drew just 2.4 million viewers a week. So the good news for networks is that it may be possible to stop the bleeding. The bad news is that the patient can’t be cured. For 50 years, pop culture has moved in only one direction—toward more options, fewer mass phenomena, and greater consumer control. And there’s no turning that around, especially with a generation of viewers that sees no meaningful distinction between a broadcast network and a cable channel. What that means isn’t just the end of a few old business models, but the end of TV as we’ve known it. America’s most unifying cultural medium for the past 60 years has now followed music and movies in surrendering its mass appeal in order to cater to a populace organized entirely by self-defining niches. Welcome to the new era of post-popular culture, in which there’s something for anyone, but nothing for everyone. What on earth will we all talk about tomorrow morning?   Related LinksZuckervisionSummertime SlumpCable Television: Enjoying Its Time in the Sun

U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

EEOC Issues Federal Work Force Report for 2007
Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0000
Naomi C. Earp, Chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), today released the Annual Report on the Federal Work Force for Fiscal Year (FY) 2007, covering October 2006 through September 2007. The comprehensive report, which informs and advises the President and the Congress on the state of equal employment opportunity (EEO) government-wide, is available on the agency's web site at www.eeoc.gov/federal/fsp2007/index.html.
Appeals Court Reverses Decision That Boeing's Mesa Plant Did Not Engage In Sex Harassment
Thu, 07 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0000
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) today announced that the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed a decision by a lower court which had concluded that The Boeing Company did not engage in unlawful sexual harassment or retaliation at its plant in Mesa, Ariz. The court of appeals returned the case to Arizona for trial.
Tobacco Superstores, Inc. To Pay $425,000 For Race Discrimination Against Blacks
Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0000
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) today announced that Tobacco Superstores, Inc. (TSS) will pay $425,000 and provide significant remedial relief to settle a race discrimination lawsuit on behalf of qualified black workers who were denied promotion to management.

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