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Creating Generational Legacies

Friday, June 16, 2017

These are the 25 most attractive employers on earth, according to LinkedIn


 

Job seekers around the world agree on one thing: Google's parent company, Alphabet, seems like an awfully appealing place to work. 

The tech giant places first on LinkedIn's 2017 Top Companies Global List, which highlights the 25 companies whose teams employees everywhere would most like to join. It also reigned atop LinkedIn's ranking of the most attractive employers in the U.S.

To determine this list, LinkedIn's data team analyzed billions of searches by the site's more than 500 million members, considering views of and applications to job postings, engagement with the company on LinkedIn and the number of employees that stay with the company for at least one year.

LinkedIn did not consider itself, or its parent company, Microsoft, for this list.

As usual, a number of tech industry headliners claim spots in the ranking, but the list also represents a broad range of companies from industries including professional services and consumer goods.

Read on for the 25 most attractive employers around the world: 

25. GE

UK GENERAL ELECTRIC
Simon Dawson/Bloomberg | Getty Images

Number of global employees:  350,000

GE offers eight different leadership programs, which provide recent college graduates training in areas ranging from engineering to human resources. Roughly a quarter of the company's current senior management completed one of GE's leadership programs

24. Adobe

ADOBE HEADQUARTERS
Chip Chipman/Bloomberg | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 15,000

Adobe offers job titles as creative as its products, including Principal Artist-in-Residence, People Scientist and Vice President of Creativity. The company emphasizes that to be successful, employees should have a "learn-it-all" attitude.

23. Schneider Electric

FRANCE SCHNEIDER
Marlene Awaad/Bloomberg | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 144,000

Headquartered in France, Schneider Electric wants to increase sharing of skills and knowledge among its employees. Schneider's Global International Mobility Center facilitated 400 employees moving to new countries to work for the company last year. 

22. EY

POLAND ECON
Piotr Malecki/Bloomberg | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 250,000

One of the accounting industry's "big four" firms, London-based EY currently has a quarter of a million employees, and expects its global headcount to reach 300,000 by 2020. In Germany, the country has introduced a refugee internship, offering four months of training to participants, who work with a mentor and are offered full-time employment following the program. 

21. Accenture

Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme
Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg | Getty Images
Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme

Number of global employees: 401,000

The global professional services firm offers 16 weeks of maternity leave and eight weeks of primary care leave. Further, Accenture provides free breast milk shipping for new mothers who travel as part of their role, or the option of as much as one year of local work following maternity leave. 

20. PepsiCo

RUSSIA X5 RETAIL
Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 264,000

PepsiCo brands like Lays, Gatorade and Tropicana are available in upwards of 200 countries around the world. Recently, the company has honed in on creating healthier products, increasing research and development spending 45 percent over the past six years

19. Deloitte

CANADA ECONOMY
Brent Lewin/Bloomberg | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 244,400

Employees of the auditor and consultancy have the opportunity to transfer to 150 countries where Deloitte has offices or teams — more than 6,000 employees took advantage of the option last year. The company's leadership training center, Deloitte University, has campuses in the U.S., Singapore, Belgium, France, India and Canada. 

18. IBM

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David Ramos | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 380,000

IBM uses its own technology, Watson, to enable the hiring process and pair resumes with relevant open positions. 

17. Johnson & Johnson

J&J EARNS
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 126,000

Johnson & Johnson is made up of 275 companies around the planet and has nearly 130,000 employees, but the company's decentralized structure means that each of its subsidiaries has the independence to develop strategies that best serve its market.

16. The Walt Disney Company

55375798MNC001_Disneyland
MN Chan | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 195,000

Disney employees get free passes for themselves and family members to the company's theme parks, and trainers on the Disney English team use stories and characters from the company's movies to teach English to children in China. 

15. Unilever

UNILEVER RAGU
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 169,000

Got a taste for tea? The global consumer goods juggernaut employs a "Tea Expertise Director." The role entails leading employee tours through tea plantations and tasting more than 1,000 cups of the beverage each day. 

14. Siemens

94754269
Sean Gallup | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 350,000

Siemens has cracked the code on employee retention: According to LinkedIn data, Siemens workers stay with the company 8.6 years, longer than the average employee tenure of any other company on this list. 

13. Oracle

ORACLE OPENWORLD
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 135,000

In August, Oracle broke ground on a public charter high school on the campus of its headquarters, and in the most recent fiscal year, the company reused or recycled 99.5 percent of the electronic waste it generated

12. Tesla

ABE TESLA
Bloomberg | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 30,000

Tesla is now the most valuable U.S.-based automaker, with a $62 billion market cap and nearly 2,500 jobs open around the world. The company isn't turning a profit yet, so employees miss out on a lot of the perks often associated with the tech industry. But there's hope: In an email to staff, CEO Elon Musk recently announced that free frozen yogurt and an "electric pod roller coaster" will soon be part of Tesla's office landscape. 

11. Cisco

91921113
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 73,000

Cisco employees receive five days off beyond their vacation time each year to devote to volunteering, an initiative that's clearly been a hit — last year, employees put in 227,000 volunteer hours. 

10. Dell Technologies

52777412RO002_Dell
Ralph Orlowski | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 145,000

Dell offers employees a great deal of flexibility, including working from home, adjustable hours and the option of bringing your dog to work. More than 40 percent of the company's hires are referred by current employees, a strong vote of confidence in Dell's organizational style. 

9. L'Oreal

FRANCE L'OREAL
Balint Porneczi/Bloomberg | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 83,000

L'Oreal has 36 brands in 140 countries and has a strong focus on those at the entry level: Roughly one third of the company's hires last year were recent graduates, and the cosmetics giant's current CEO started as an intern with the company in 1978.

8. LVMH

AUSTRALIA SYDNEY
Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg

Number of global employees: 135,000

Nearly three quarters of management positions at the iconic luxury brand — which spans sectors including fashion, perfume, cosmetics, jewelry and wine — are filled with internal candidates.

7. McKinsey & Company

McKinsey employees gathering during a lunch break
Source: McKinsey
McKinsey employees gathering during a lunch break

Number of global employees: 25,000

About 40 percent of McKinsey consultants take on at least one international assignment each year. The global consultancy offers employees the chance to take as much as 10 weeks off between projects.

6. Salesforce

Bloomberg | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 25,000

Salesforce continuously audits employee pay "to ensure equal compensation across gender, race and ethnicity," and recently introduced six months of parental leave for primary caregivers in the U.S. 

5. Apple

appleshop001
Zhang Peng | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 110,000

Apple offers employee stock grants to all its workers, including part-time and retail employees, and a little more than one-tenth of its retail workforce turns over each year, compared to 80 percent industry-wide. CEO Tim Cook has said that he plans on doubling Apple services like iTunes and Apple Pay over the next four years. 

4. Uber

AFP_MJ543
Anthony Wallace | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 12,000

The ride-hailing company has had its share of negative headlines lately, and CEO Travis Kalanick announced on Tuesday that he'd be taking a leave of absence. Still, though applications dipped slightly after ex-employee Susan Fowler's explosive blog post, year over year, views of postings and applications to open positions on LinkedIn are up 35 percent

3. Facebook

61950270
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 17,000

Facebook boasts 1.9 billion active users every month and is constantly on the hunt for the talent to help it grow its reach. "When you enter our buildings," says CEO Mark Zuckerberg, "we want you to feel how much left there is to be done in our mission to connect the world."

2. Amazon

20150126181227_1437_IMG_3460.JPG_168808
Lisa Werner | Getty Images

Number of global employees: 341,400

"The everything store" collected three Oscar trophies for its programming, introduced Prime video in India and delivered a package in the U.K. via drone — all in the past year. "We take risks and make big bets," Amazon told LinkedIn, "and when we fail, we apply the lessons learned and keep moving."

1. Alphabet

Google Inc. APAC Headquarters, Singapore
Ore Huiying/Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google Inc. APAC Headquarters, Singapore

Number of global employees: 72,000

Google's parent company keeps employees engaged with cutting-edge opportunities: Upwards of 27,000 of the company's employees work in research and development, an area that Alphabet poured almost $14 million into last year. According to LinkedIn, it's "the opportunity and resources employees are given to tackle massive problems, stretching from creating self-driving cars to impeding extremism" that puts Alphabet on top.

What is replacing the restaurant chains?

The Bob Pritchard Column 

Casual dining restaurants such as TGI Fridays, Ruby Tuesday, Olive Garden, Outback Steak House and Applebee's are facing sales slumps and restaurant closures, as casual-dining chains have struggled to attract customers and increase sales.
 
The sit-down restaurants' struggles can be blamed on millennials who are more attracted than Generation X, Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation to cooking at home, ordering delivery from restaurants, and eating quickly in fast-casual or quick-serve restaurants.  There are now many, many options that people are using to replace chains.
 
Many of these options involve cooking at home. Grocery chains are increasingly competing with restaurants, thanks to lower prices, pre prepared meals, free pick-up and delivery and new technology.   Meal-delivery kits like Blue Apron are taking the market by storm.  They are focused on getting millennials on subscription plans to persuade them to stay in and cook a certain number of days a week.
 
Convenience is also a factor, both when it comes to delivery and speed of service. Casual-dining chains are still playing catch-up regarding delivery yet the only part of casual dining that's growing right now is the off-premise side.
 
Cheesecake Factory is expanding delivery to half of its 194 US locations through DoorDash, a third-party service. TGI Fridays, Chili's, and Maggiano's Little Italy are all now on Grubhub, and Buffalo Wild Wings and Red Robin are testing the service. Outback Steakhouse is using third-party services while it builds one of its own.
 
While delivery is a very compelling option, it isn't a simple service for restaurants to add. Customers generally spend less when ordering delivery than they would when eating at casual-dining chains, most of which rely on alcohol orders to drive sales. In-house delivery means added complexities, paying drivers, and additional insurance costs. Using a third party could mean losing control over the food's quality.
 
More convenient chains have also attracted millennial customers away from casual-dining options. The growth of fast-casual chains such as Chipotle and Panera have made a significant impact. These chains offer lower prices to millennial customers, who are less enthused about spending more money just for the experience of sitting in a booth at a casual-dining joint.
 
The fast-casual industry grew by 550% from 1999 to 2014. By 2020, the fast-casual market in the US is expected to reach $66.9 billion. They have more of a healthy perception and quicker service times.   The bottom line is that casual-dining brands just aren't cool anymore. 
 
The alternatives are creating buzz and excitement.
 

Thursday, June 15, 2017

The Automation of the fast food industry

The Bob Pritchard Column 

A secretive robotics startup has raised a new round of venture funding as part of its quest to replace humans with robots in the kitchens of fast-food restaurants. Momentum Machines secured  $18 million in funding to develop its robot that can make 400 made-to-order hamburgers in an hour. It's fully autonomous, meaning the machine can slice toppings, grill a patty, and assemble and bag a burger without any help from humans. A personalizable variety of fresh produce, seasonings, and sauces will be available for each burger.

The company bills itself as the next Industrial Revolution, is on a mission to replace human labor. The founder Alexandros Vardakostas says  “Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient it’s meant to completely obliterate them.”
 
The company has been working on its first retail location since June of last year although there is still no scheduled opening date for the flagship in San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood.
 
In 2015, futuristic food-chain Eatsa opened in downtown San Francisco. The vegetarian restaurant, which specializes in quinoa bowls, automates the ordering and pick-up process. It's since expanded to New York and Washington, DC.  In San Francisco, robots also run food deliveries for Yelp's Eat24 and pour coffee at Cafe X.   Zume Pizza enlists a team of 3 robots named Pepe, Marta, and Bruno to make pizzas without any humans.  Big fast food chains such as McDonald’s have been using self service kiosks for 2 years, and as Carl’s Jr. CEO Andy Puzder says "Robots are always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation." 
 
These changes, along with other evidence that AI could displace huge swaths of workers, have prompted the consideration of a "robot tax" to help offset the economic devastation a robotic workforce might bring.
 
It is estimated that robots put the low-wage food service industry which is one of the US’s biggest job sources, and its 513.000 fast food cooks in jeopardy.
 
But will the burgers taste as good … most likely.  Will they be cheaper … unlikely.


Monday, June 12, 2017

PIONEERS OF INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY

Have just been invited to be part of this conversation in Silicon Valley? 

Who would like to be a fly on the wall? 

Sunrise invites you to step inside the cutting-edge world of A.I.—tomorrow—Tuesday, June 13th, 2017, from 1:00pm to 8:30pm at the Quadrus Conference Center in Menlo Park.

Join the most innovative A.I. companies and smartest A.I. venture investors on the planet at the Silicon Valley AI Summit 2017 for an intimate gathering of networking and deal-making. See below for the complete list of speakers.

I will be personally doing a fireside chat with one of the Valley's bright new VCs, Nicholas Davidov, Cofounder of Cherry Labs and Gagarin Capital—whose portfolio company, MSQRD, was just acquired by Facebook, and his other company, a photo-editing app called Prisma is one of the hottest new apps on the market.

There is no other high-powered, insider event in Silicon Valley that brings together the top private companies, thought leaders and venture capitalists focused on the forefront of artificial intelligence.

PARTICIPANTS

Matthew ZeilerFounder & CEO, Clarifai
Aaref HilalyPartner, Sequoia Capital
Nicholas Davidov, Cofounder of Cherry Labs and Gagarin Capital
Tony Perkinsfounder and editor, Alchemist
Andy ByrneCEO, Clari
Peter LeeCEO, RapidMiner
Upal BasuManaging Director, Nokia Growth Partners
Dr. Qirong HoCo-Founder, Petuum
Adam TaischCo-Founder, Sight Machine
Michal WroczynskiCEO & Co-Founder, Fido A.I
Ben NarasinPartner, Canvas Ventures
Dr. Eitan SharonFounder & CEO, mode.ai
Lauren KolodnyPrincipal, Aspect Ventures
Kanav HasijaCo-Founder, InnovAccer
Ajay SudanPartner, Lightspeed
Dennis MortensenFounder & CEO, x.ai
Rama SekharPartner, Norwest Venture Partners
Vidur ApparaoCTO, Agari
Michael LuddenDirector of Product, IBM Watson Developer Labs & AR/VR Labs
Nikhil R. JainCEO & Co-Founder, ObEN
Oussama KhatibDirector, Artificial Intelligence Lab, Stanford University
Ravi ViswanathanGeneral Partner, NEA
Gaurav TewariManaging Director, Citi Ventures
Dharmesh ThakkerGeneral Partner, Battery Ventures

WHEN
Tuesday June 13, 2017

WHERE
Quadrus Conference Center

Saturday, June 10, 2017

Are accountants at risk of becoming redundant?

 

When the Centre for the Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) wrote a report titled Australia’s Future Workforce?, it was pointing that chilling question mark at you.

IBM has a computer, Watson, that can diagnose your medical condition. It’s already read two million pages of medical textbooks and 25,000 training cases. Associated Press has robots writing sports reports and finance updates. You might have read one in your newspaper without knowing. It’s not just guys on the production line who are losing their jobs to robots and algorithms.

 It’s you.

“By the 2030s there is a high probability that occupations such as accountants, estate agents and even economists will not exist or will be significantly depleted,” says CEDA’s report.

How high? When it comes to accountants, 94 per cent, according to Australia’s Future Workforce?. Distance to 2030? 13 years. How old are your children?

A couple of dozen lines of computer code couldn’t do my job, you want to think. But how many clients you would have if the ATO weren’t doing your marketing for you? Today, businesses need accountants because tax is complicated and, let’s be honest, a little frightening. We’ve liked it that way. But as the ATO gets better at milking raw data from employers, banks and government agencies and churning it into tax data, the need for small businesses to lodge BAS or a tax return is vaporising. When your compliance work goes, what will be left?

Lots.

Compliance will lose all its value, but accountants can still sell considerable value. They can help their clients run their businesses, especially startups—newborn businesses that need wise hands to guide them as they take their first breaths. But there’s a catch. 

The business advice needs to come from people who know how to run a business, not just count its profits and losses.

 It’s not going to be easy money. And it’s going to require some recalibration of the accountant mindset. It’s beyond putting numbers in boxes, and it’s about counselling educated risk (you provide the educated part). The conservative accountant is a generalisation, but there’s a reason accountancy practices haven’t set the BRW Fast 100 on fire.

To take your place as trusted advisor to tomorrow’s businesses, there are three things every accountant needs to do this year:

Accept that change is needed. If you’ve snorted at the suggestion that the computers are coming for your job, you need to think deeper than the fear. Even if you don’t think a computer could ever do your job, it couldn’t hurt to get better at adding value as well as guiding compliance, could it? One suggestion might be to stop emailing your clients to alert them to every change in the law. They want context and advice, not a legal education. Don’t show them the law, show them the money.

Upskill. A horrible word, but call it what you want. You need to be equipped to give business advice, which means eating your own dog food. Take the IPA’s excellent business courses. Apply the lessons to your own business. Look at what you need to change, change it and show others how to do the same.

Look for 2017 on the label. It’s laughable to think that it’s okay in 2017 to be managing clients with the same tools you were using 10 years ago. If you’re still doing something in 2017 that you were doing in 2000, you need to have a hard look at it. Is that a Nokia in your pocket? No, so why are you still managing your clients with Outlook? In just the last couple of months of 2016, we picked up $200,000 in work from clients who came to use because their accountants weren’t replying to emails. That’s why my team responds quickly. And I know they do because we have software that measures response times. You can use technology to help you run a better business, or you can wait till technology replaces your business.

Your new clients are out there waiting for you. They’re waiting for a business advisor who can talk to them in plain, simple English. They’re not looking for someone to talk to them in the language of balance sheets. They’ve had that, and now they can have it in the cloud. They’re looking for someone who can say, “Hey, if you cut down the time your customers take to pay by just five days, you’d put another $20,000 a month in your bank account.”

The practices that thrive in the next five years will be the ones who can give context and advice that clients see moving the bottom line. Let the computers put the numbers in the boxes. Your job is much more exciting.

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

We cannot write about the Future of Work


 The vocabulary to describe the beyond the future of work does not exist yet. 


Abstract words we are currently using in attempt to imagine this foreign landscape include  “unprecedented”, “technological transformation” and “adaptability”.  


Employees have to unlearn their native language surrounding what it means to have their own job, profession and career. They need to relearn how to be resilient, adaptable and open to change.


 

In the past, the predictable timeline began with education, transitioned smoothly to career, concluding in retirement. 


Today, instead of learning to work, we have to work to learn. How else can the average professional worker of this generation experience 17 different jobs across 5 different industries or survive multiple paradigm shifts?

 

Instead of associating our identity with our job, our company, our education, we begin to think of ourselves in a whole new way. 


To conceptualize a job as the skills it requires, rather then the title at hand, is the mindset in which to strive. Employees are empowered to view themselves as a partner as they realize the profound value in a portable skillset and an ability to learn from the tools as well as with them.

 

While the human species is getting smarter and more efficient, the individual has the same cognitive capacity and bandwidth. The individual will need to shift toward utilizing the emotional and imaginative faculty of critical thinking and problem solving as machines replace every possible aspect of manual tasks. To access our cognitive bandwidth is to employ automated technology that will replace non-creative tasks. There is a misconception that high level jobs are safe from automation and low level jobs are at risk.

 

As degrees don’t guarantee jobs, we enter a renaissance period of learning, which values learning agility and mindset as what is needed are highly skilled people who can solve ambiguous and complex problems with creativity and collaboration. 


Spongelike learning and wisdom and knowing have now converged   

  

The domain of the elite is making ones passion productive, which can be done by being open to every industry, as we carve the line between ‘what is human work’ and ‘what is machine work’.  Human work will involve innovative entrepreneurial problem solving. Soft skills. The ability to help others. 

 

Platforms are more valuable then products as they aim first to create value then deliver supply to a market. Thus, to move out of scalable production to scalable learning is a step toward employee empowerment. Employees  will be viewed as partners with the freedom to explore the entire spectrum of industries.

 

Concepts Gleaned 

  1. Reinventing the notion of a firm – alternate value creation not product division. Create value rather then deliver products and services to a market. Supply chains.
  2. Moving out of scalable production to scalable learning 

 

 

 

TED TALKS to watch 

·      the unbicycle - how to unlearn 

·      the importance of why - Simon senior 

·      utopia for realists

·      cognitive bandwidth – creatively contribute (school model to create value)

·      work to learn. 

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